John Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," Nice Guys Come Last

American senators are generally played for laughs in Hollywood films, with character actors putting on their most obsequious, corrupt and slimy expressions.  Think Senator Stern in The Avengers or Senator Finistirre in Thank You For Smoking.  Not so when James Stewart plays the part, as in Valance.  Then it’s right back to what American schoolkids learn about in their books – honest, decent men, a living embodiment of the Declaration.

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Talking of the Declaration, one of the best lines comes from Stewart’s character.  He is teaching the token black character in the film, Pompey, how to read and Pompey has just fluffed the bit about all men being created equal.  ‘That’s okay, Pompey.  A lot of people forget that part,’ quips Stwart.

There is a Dickensian compression of society into single roles: the doctor, the lawyer, the press, the cowboy, the law etc.  And then each man’s role feels like it carries a greater weight as the events plays out, since between them they somehow represent all human life.

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John Wayne has a largely subdued part, spending more time getting out of people’s way than acting for himself.  He is the muscle that allows Stewart’s narrative to exist in a town full of toughs.  No sentimental allowance is made for Stewart’s bravery.  Without muscle and gunpower to back him up, he would be snuffed out in a moment.  And even his eventual beating of the bully comes with a twist.




Deep-crust-apple-pie America needs good men with guns ready to back it up, seems to be the message.  Of course if the bad guys didn’t have guns themselves… whoa! I’m not getting into that one…

Personal Score: 7/10

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This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Julian Schnabel's "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" – French Cheese

I saw the last ten minutes of Jean-Jacques Beineix's Betty Blue on a hotel television recently. It was a grim mixture of complex French interiors, iconic French views, a sweet cat, a lonely man. Every scene had some striking light effect, whether full-on magic hour sunlight or mysterious side lighting. It was too much for me, like those High Dynamic Range photographs you see all over the internet, every pixel bumped up to super saturation so that the end result is like a gaudy painting, nothing like anything a human eye has seen.

Janusz Kaminski's cinematography in Diving Bell shows how this sort of thing should be done. It's emotional shooting, verging on sentimental; it still chases the light, but the colours are real, the beauty of things revealed.

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Mathieu Amalric plays the real-life character of Elle editor, Jean-Do, based on his book, which is dictated by blinking his eye as a list of letters is read to him, one by one. He suffers from Locked-in Syndrome, where he can hear, think and remember things as he used to but due to his paralysis eye blinks are his only possible interaction with the outside world.

Now you might think that the first and only sentence Jean-Do would dictate using this method would be, "Morse Code, FFS," but the letter technique seems to be the way they really did it.

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"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book"  Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson 

Most films based on real-life stories seem paradoxically less realistic, as screenplay writers insist on tidying up events. Perhaps because it is based on Jean-Do's book and he didn't have anything to lose, the messiness of real life comes across. He wants to see his mistress even after his ex-partner and mother of his children has spent hours with him. People come out with crass things. His ill father can't say much but manages to say what matters.

Filmed in the hospital where Jean-Do was treated, the film has shots of a Magritte-like quality, especially on the platform that looks out to the sea. There are flashbacks real and made-up as his imagination takes off.




It's interesting to see what a better job Diving Bell makes of the scenes with Jean-Do's sick father than Tim Burton's Big Fish that I recently reviewed. For one thing the father doesn't die. There is a scene where Jean-Do shaves his father that could have been used in Big Fish but where Tim Burton would have had him wielding a cut-throat razor, Julian Schnabel has Jean-Do using a regular men's safety blade. 
These moments of good judgement lift Diving Bell. Similarly in the excruciating scene where his ex-partner must speak his message to his mistress over the telephone she doesn't give into the temptation to lie about what he has said.

We hear passages from his book. The sentences are full of adjectives and adverbs. If there was ever a writer who would've benefited from cutting out the adjectives and adverbs, it was Jean-Do. Hey ho...

Personal Score: 7/10

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This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

Tim Burton's "Big Fish" – Magic Tedium

It's a sign of Danny Boyle's talent as a director that in Trainspotting he managed to get a watchable performance out of Ewan McGregor. In Big Fish, directed by Tim Burton, McGregor resorts to his tiresome short cuts: the mirror-perfected grin, the falsely modest aw-shucks body language when stepping up to do some impressive task, the suddenly intense gaze. Save it for the wine bar, McGregor. That's not acting, it's gurning. Let's face it, the widely hated Star Wars prequels wouldn't have been half as bad if they hadn't had McGregor sleepwalking through them, gurning.

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I've seen Big Fish a few times and it does absolutely nothing for me. I hate its corny feel-good fantasy, its parental deathbed sentimentality, its quirky French characters, its period character shots. Yet, it is completely successful on its own terms. Every shot looks like it took ages to set up. The light is always intense and the composition of the shot is always like a picture. Trouble is, it's always like a picture I hate. This isn't art, it's design. Each shot is a ponytail's idea of what a great painting should look like. Style over substance is the feeling I generally take away from Tim Burton films and this one is no exception. Stylistically it plays like a two hour TV ad.

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Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks.  Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

      

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book"  Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson 

The idea of a son's resentment at his father's lifetime of telling tall tales, of hogging all the attention is so specific, so not a part of most people's experience, that you wonder what was the spark for the film (or rather the novel on which the film was based). Was it some personal experience of the author's? I can't relate to it. It's too specific. It doesn't have the wider resonance that the driving idea of a novel or a film should have.

True there are some nice touches, such as the more prosaic but still wacky nature of the characters who turn up to the funeral. It turns out that the giant was just a bit tall and that the conjoined twins were just twins. The stage show for Asian troops (the exact country is left deliberately vague) is entertaining (although it suffers from a POV fail since the young Ed Bloom couldn't have seen it). And the premonitions of death seen in a witch's glass eye are impressively spooky.

It's just that all the way through it I was thinking, 'so what.' It becomes less magic realism and more magic tedium.

Personal Score: 1/10

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This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

"The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi" Two Mini-reviews for the Price of One

The received wisdom about the original Star Wars trilogy is that Empire is the best, followed by Star Wars with Return of the Jedi a distant third, and this is reflected in the relative positions of the films in the IMDB 250 list (currently #12, 20, 74 respectively). This is probably largely to do with the Ewoks and their implausible attacks on the Empire war machine. Even after the real-life events of the Arab Spring and the successes of a peaceful majority against a violent ruling elite, the Ewok battle scenes stretch credibility.

My view of the trilogy is a little different. I prefer the first one, a simple story told in a rich and often unexplained alien universe. And I rate the other two at about the same level -- both are entertaining and full of ideas and wonder.

Plus, Jedi has the line that inspired my favourite Star Wars joke:

Luke: I know what you got me for Christmas. A globe, a teddy bear and a toy car.
Vader: Impossible! How did you find out, Luke?
Luke: I felt your presence.

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'The Empire Strikes Back'

Any writer will recognize that the title 'Star Wars' didn't come about by accident.  It has that magic ring to it, and it only seems like an obvious pairing of words because it has become such an iconic phrase.  Titles like 'Star Wars' come from a lot of brain power and iterations of rejected ideas.  'The Empire Strikes Back' and 'Return of the Jedi' on the other hand are among the most dismal, prosaic titles ever used for films.  It's as though Lucas sat back after coming up with 'Star Wars' and said, 'My title-creating work is done.'

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Inspire your baby with the Visual Baby series of picture ebooks.  Original patterns and art designed for young eyes. Try them today by clicking the covers below.

      

"It's the only thing that stops her crying" Katie Alison

"All three of my children love this book"  Janice Peterson

"Moons, trees, leaves... fabulous!" Linda Matson 

I believe the secret to the mythic quality of the original Star Wars trilogy comes down to one thing: incest. All the best myths have a bit of incest: Cronus and Rhea, Zeus and Hera, not to mention Oedipus, of course. And theorists like Roland Barthes have focused on the role of incest in myths, for example as a mechanism for echoing other mythic themes.

The Star Wars trilogy has plenty of brother & sister flirting/kissing, and plenty of son & father fighting. There's nothing like a bit of incest to up the stakes and to get the pulse going.

While the original Star Wars had a tight plot but gave us glimpses of an alien universe and its constructed mythology, The Empire Strikes Back is more expansive and spells out a lot more of those backdrop ideas we glimpsed in the first film. While this is perhaps necessary in a trilogy of films, for me it makes the film slightly less satisfying, but it's still a decidedly above average piece of film making.




'The Return of the Jedi'
There aren't many films that can say they created an original sexy Halloween costume. Films often showcase Halloween outfits that originated elsewhere such as Superman/girl, Batgirl, Lara Croft etc. With its Slave Leia gold outfit, 'Return of the Jedi' bucked the trend and came up with a costume all of its own.

From a feminist point of view it's rather disappointing. It turns out that the only reason Princess Leia was bigged up as a feisty independent-thinking female royal in the first two films (remember all those sarcastic, 'your highness's from Han Solo) was so that she could be seen chained in a gold bikini as a sex slave to a loathsome slug-like alien in the third.

Personal Score for Both Films: 6/10

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This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.