The Favourite diabolical but convoluted

Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite (at the Main Art Theatre), tied for 10 Oscar nods along with Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (post Jan. 22), is a strange brew of a picture. Sure, it’s dramatic, intriguing, features some of the best actresses around, and puts a diabolical combined sexual and political twist on the royal court of Britain’s Queen Anne in the early 18th century. But, just to be warned, straight history this is not. Yes, there were apparently two women in the neurotic or psychotic and physically ill monarch’s palace who may have vied for her attentions. But, any research at all about this movie will tell you that perhaps 80 per cent of it is fully made up. The director and writers are unapologetic, and I guess that’s probably fine. How many other movies take great liberties with historic facts? And when you get right down to it, who the hell really cares? From today’s perspective this is a rather obscure historical period (despite the ongoing English-French wars). Said actor Joe Alwyn (Samuel Masham) of the director, “Yorgos (The Lobster, 2015) made it quite clear early on that there wasn't going to be much consideration for historical accuracy to a degree. He wasn't too caught up with or concerned about that. He just wanted us to have fun as people and as a cast and to explore the relationships between us, which is what we did.” In reality, the film is less about history than imprinting a perhaps modern-day lesbian triangle and power struggle on three historical figures. Meanwhile, I’m surprised Olivia Colman was nominated for Best Actress since her role in the script is subsidiary to the struggle between Abigail Masham (Emma Stone) and Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz). Both Weisz and Stone are nominated for Best Supporting Actress. Both are excellent but I think Stone edges out Weisz. Stone burns with a ferocity in this picture. And, as an actress, the 30-year-old is coming into her own and developing the aura of a grand Hollywood dame. As for the story, well, okay, the palace intrigue is there with a vengeance. But the plot is somewhat convoluted though if you pay enough attention it’s enjoyable enough. On the plus side, great costumes, great sets (how could they not be since they were filmed at two British palaces?) and it’s hard to resist a fable combining sex and politics at the higher echelons of power, isn’t it?

The critics are correct, Roma is a masterpiece

I had been kind of avoiding Roma, the much-acclaimed semi-autobiographical flic about director’s Alfonso Cuarón’s boyhood growing up in early 1970s Mexico City. Too much acclaim, and this film had snobbish film critic imprimatur written all over it (a 96 rating on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic). And it has garnered a truckload of awards and nominations including two Golden Globes, four Critics’ Choice awards, and now 10 nominations including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress for the Feb. 24 Oscars…… But I broke down last night and watched it (on Netflix despite a limited late fall theatre release). At first my thought watching the film was that despite its realism (it’s also filmed in black and white), Roma was simply a nondescript narrative of life circa 1970-71. But the more I watched the more I was convinced of the film’s brilliance - like a shining orb becoming brighter and brighter - indeed conceding that this picture was entering masterpiece territory……The story is indeed rather pedestrian, about a middle class family growing up in Mexico City’s Colonia Roma neighborhood but particularly centered on one of their servants, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio, who had no acting experience previous to this). Roma basically is a series of meditative scenes from family life, whether dining at the breakfast table, going on vacation, furniture shopping, watching military parades or martial arts demonstrations. Mexico, to those who’ve never been there, is also shown to be remarkably similar to Canada and the United States, whether it be the then huge Fords and Chevys people drove or the same Western cultural values, from World War II films to debating whether Creedence or the Beatles was the better group or discussing the 1971 Super Bowl in which Baltimore beat Dallas. But the movie’s brilliance isn’t in the straightforward narrative but in the effortless acting (including from numerous children) and its exceeding realism – it’s transfixing the degree to which Cuarón is able to recreate the era. Everything has the look and feel of the period, from the way people dressed (platform shoes and miniskirts on the beach!) to detailed store merchandise. Usually, period films don’t capture this reality in such scope and in scene after scene after scene, large or small. Indeed, there are expansive backdrops of downtown streets where the cars, buses and trucks look like they’re digitized in from the era – they’re not – and a political rally where hundreds of students clash with police……The way to watch this film, despite any initial doubts you may have after it gets underway, is to let it continue to unfold, and get caught up in the picture's almost palpable verisimilitude.

More Coen brilliance, only slightly marred

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2018), on Netflix, is a set of six stories from the “Old West,” at once super authentic and great parodies…… The first is the story of Buster Scruggs itself, the singing cowboy (Trim Blake Nelson) who is as neat and trim and wholesome as a good cowboy can be. But be packs a deadly punch. Mocked as a featherweight Buster has all kinds of tricks up his sleeve and under his white hat and decimates his enemies to a pulp, all with an ah shucks smile on his face. The sketch is entirely hilarious..… In the second story, Near Algodones, a bad guy (James Franco) robs an isolated bank on the lonesome prairie. But he has no idea of the skills of retribution by the straight-laced teller (Stephen Root). The best line is when Franco is strung up on a gallows for a second time (having been cut down by a sympathizer earlier), turns to another thief facing his maker and quips “first time?”…..The third story Meal Ticket features a travelling impresario (Liam Neeson) and his legless performer (Harry Melling), who roll from town to town where the actor spouts soliloquies to befuddled if transfixed audiences. But the impresario runs across a technically advanced form of entertainment that will save the hassle of transporting a deformed human. Melling is especially good as the otherwise deaf and dumb performer but the story is a hackneyed treatise on capitalist mechanization…..As with the fourth story, All Gold Canyon, which is as brilliant a narrative as it is boring eco-cliché. Tom Waits is an aging prospector who enters a bucolic valley, seemingly untouched by man. The animals, living in bliss, decide to vanish and the prospector begins digging test holes, eventually locating a gold seam. He’s attacked – get it, man’s violence against man, continuing nature’s disruption? All turns out well, especially as Corrupt Man leaves and the valley returns to bliss…..The Gal Who Got Rattled, about characters on a wagon train heading to Oregon,  is the most complex and best acted of the stories and comes with a startling and unsettling ending……Finally, The Mortal Remains is the most opaque. Several characters of wildly different personalities ride a stagecoach with a ghost-like driver as they speed into darkness, with a series of arguments peppered by tall tales and outrageous witticisms…..Like the Coen’s others films, these six stories are marked by perfectionist detailing in costume and setting, and dialogues marked by the kind of formalized arcane speech common in the late 19th century. Kudos to the Coens but two of the sketches are unfortunately marred by political messages.

Orson Welles' last "classic?"

Watching the unfinished – and now finished (kind of) - late Orson Welles’ film The Other Side of the Wind simply by itself might be, shall we say, confusing. Or, less charitably, two hours of one’s life (you know the rest). The film should come with a notice stating you should also watch a companion documentary. It’s the also newly released Morgan Neville’s (20 Feet from Stardom, 2013) They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, about the making of this last film of the late great filmmaker, dramatist and all-around media disrupter, Orson Welles. Both films are on Netflix. The documentary puts everything in context, or almost does, at least enough so that you can start making up your own mind about what you just saw in the Welles’ film……The Other Side of the Wind was made in the early 1970s, after Welles returned from a second “exile” in Europe and in the aftermath of a long falling out with Hollywood after his 1958 classic – though Hollywood didn’t think so – Touch of Evil. According to Neville’s doc, Welles' return was made possible by the schism that developed in Hollywood by the late 1960s, when the embers of the old studio system were almost snuffed out and the hip - even hippieish – directors and films (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Godfather, The Last Picture Show) of the New Hollywood were taking over. This was auteur cinema, not the dastardly old corporate world run by a few old studio moguls. This New Hollywood, so the story goes, was now receptive to someone as disruptive as Welles, who after all terrorized most of America with his 1938 War of the Worlds and of course who has been considered an all-time genius with his 1941 Citizen Kane, perhaps the greatest movie ever made - layered, nuanced and iconoclastic in breaking new cinematic ground. So, upon his return, Welles secured financing, gathered a group of Hollywood types together, and started shooting the picture. But The Other Side of the Wind was a much different kind of film, even for Welles. It incorporated hand held camera work, had improvised dialogue, and spontaneity, lots of spontaneity.....So what’s it about? Well,

no one interviewed in the Neville documentary seemed to agree or know for sure, but it certainly seemed like it was creating caricatures of certain Hollywood types -producers, actors, studio crews, assorted hangers-on - and a send up of Hollywood in general. Could this at last have been Welles’ revenge?.....The plot, such as it is, is about a filmmaker, "Jake" Hannaford, perhaps based on Welles himself and played by no less a larger than life director than John Huston. He’s making a film, perhaps an “art” film, similar to the “atmospheric” films of European directors like Bergman or Antonioni, where one character follows another (Welles’ lover Oja Kodar) as she traipses around studio backlots and other bleak landscapes. “You either hate it or loathe it,” says one character wryly of the film within the film. Kodar, in the documentary, says the title is actually about Welles, who personifies the wind, but “I knew the other side” of it/him. Welles’ acolyte in real life, director Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show, 1971), plays a similar role, and even comedian Rich Little makes an appearance. And there are many Hollywood personalities who play their real selves – George Jessel, Paul Mazursky, Dennis Hopper, Henry Jaglom, Claude Chabrol. The film is kind of a Hollywood version of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, with the tribe ending up at a ribald party in the Hollywood Hills. The story itself is very much of its time, with the characters trying to out hip one another (the only thing missing are Nehru jackets) and there’s even someone based on the famed New Yorker critic Pauline Kael (Susan Strasberg as Juliette Riche)……So, again, what does it all mean? Your guess is as good as mine, or even the people who played the characters. Said Rich Little in the documentary: “I’m not sure he (Welles) knew where this movie was going, I’m not sure any of us did.” Because of financial and legal problems, The Other Side of the Wind was kept in a vault in France and only released very recently. Says one commentator in the doc, “it’s the greatest movie that was never released.” Says a bemused Welles, quoted at the time, “maybe it’s just talking about making a picture.”

Death, despite humour, doesn't become them

It seems films and television shows have a problem with death. I draw your attention to the much-hyped new Netflix series, The Kominsky Method, starring two of my favorite actors, Alan Arkin and Michael Douglas. I so much wanted to like this show and to most extent, I do. Still, it was a disappointment. The concept was to create a comedy, with a little drama thrown in, about the toughness of aging. Douglas plays a famous actor who runs an acting school, hence the title’s “Method.” And Arkin as Norman Newlander is a beyond rich and famous Hollywood agent, so on in his years he hardly makes an appearance at his sprawling offices. These are two comic actors. The problem is the series is more a downer than uplifting. Sure, there are many funny lines, most at each characters’ expense as they trade barbs back and forth. The problem is that the series relies too much on, well, aging, clichés. There’s Norman’s wife’s death from cancer. And Kominsky dates with a student (Nancy Travis) where they first rendezvous at a hospital and then funeral. Then there’s Kominsky’s doctor’s visit in a genuinely funny scene with Danny DeVito as a urologist diagnosing his prostate issues. Much of the next episodes are devoted to Kominsky trying to successfully relieve himself. Yes, this is supposed to be funny, but it ends up being tiresome and gross. And the comedy that does exist isn’t enough to counter a general mood of melancholy. How about some new plot lines about aging that generally aren't explored? Like how condescending service people can be and how younger people incessantly address you as "sir" or "ma'am"………. Then there’s the British film, also on Netflix, called Burn Burn Burn (Chanya Button, 2015). It’s about three friends – Seph (Laura Carmichael – Lady Edith Crawley on Downton Abbey), Alex (Chloe Pirrie) and Dan (Jack Farthing). The story’s an inventive concept and again aims at humor with a poignant underpinning. Dan is dying from cancer and wants his friends Seph and Alex to take a road trip and visit some of the seminal places that had great meaning in his life. He instructs them where to go in a video released after his death. He virtually anticipates their every reaction to the places they visit, while reflecting on his commentary about what they mean to him and how life events have been shaped by all their lives, with some truths less than pleasant. The problem is that the plot becomes predictable and that when you dwell on death as much as Dan – and this story – it’s kind of a downer and not resurrected by the levities along the way.

Marnie the opera: a taut close-up look at a sociopath

If there’s one thing seeing the new opera Marnie made me appreciate, it’s watching opera on the big silver screen at your local cinema. What a way to immerse yourself close-up – as only televised viewers can see it – in the operatic dramatic action and performers’ voices, much more so than being in the New York Lincoln Center concert hall at the same time. Moreover, you get two bangs for the price of one. People who watch the Metropolitan Opera Live in HD, as I did Saturday at Windsor’s Cineplex Silver City, get a unique behind-the-scenes look at how the stage is set - the crew working feverishly to meet the opening curtain - and live interviews with the cast after they’ve just walked off the stage! This is the second time I’ve seen opera on the big screen, the last time was a Met production of Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers (2017)…...But Marnie, as an opera, is tantalizing indeed. It’s the same story that Alfred Hitchcock conjured up in his 1964 film of the same character (starring Tippi Hedren), based on the novel by Winston Graham. But this opera by Nico Muhly, with libretto by Nicholas Wright (Michael Mayer, director), hews closer to the book, and drills deep into the central character’s psyche to reveal a confused, indeed sociopathic, young woman.  Isabel Leonard (mezzo-soprano) is in the starring role. And she’s magnificent, not just in singing but in depicting the psychological inflections of Marnie, an office girl of the late 1950s who also happens to be a serial thief. Her fellow cast members such as Christopher Maltman as her boss and eventual husband Mark Rutland, and Iestyn Davies as his brother Terry Rutland, her sexual pursuer, round out boldly and strikingly the three key characters. But this can’t-take-your-eyes-off-it production is enhanced by a couple of things. There are two acts, as opposed to opera’s often three. And the production is tautly produced, with fantastic stage backdrops, quick scene resets and two small groups of characters. These are women who look almost exactly as Marnie, dressed in identically cut but different colored dresses – her alter egos or enablers, call them what you will. And then there’s the group of male figures, all in fedoras and looking like detectives, who shadowy stalk or spy on the damaged protagonist…...At least one more repeat performance is schedule for January 26. Treat yourself and check it out.

WIFF 14th edition - that's a wrap

The 14th edition of the Windsor International Film Festival wrapped Sunday and director Vincent Georgie announced, in honor of WIFF’s 15th edition, the festival will expand to a total of 10 days. This will bring it in line with major city festivals like Toronto and Montreal. Not bad for a smallish city of 200,000-plus. Here are some observations about this year’s event.

Intentional or not – and I can’t believe it’s not intentional – WIFF does an excellent job of marketing the festival. This is by tying in business sponsors – and therefore certain audiences – to films. For example, the documentary Big Time about Danish architecture Bjarke Ingels was introduced by the head of the local architectural society, and notably present in the audience were staff from several architectural firms. These may have been people who’d never been to the festival before and discovering it, might come back for more films this year and next. It’s called building audience. (Festival director Georgie is a marketing professor after all.)

The festival may be run by volunteers but it has a professional sheen. Every one of the 20 films I attended started on time with exception of Friday’s 4 pm screening of Tea with the Dames, where there was a technical glitch. But even at that the film was delayed only about 10 minutes, less time than what was announced.

I had no problem with the theatres at the four venues. The addition of the Armouries “stadium seating” classroom drew a few complaints from people who found the seats hard and the lower tiers positioned far below the screen and therefore forced them to crank up their necks. I always got an upper level seat so didn’t have that problem! Overall, though, I’d have to say this is a better venue than the Capitol Theatre’s Joy room’s temporary one level seating which it replaced.

The song audio playlist before films should constantly be changed. How about a fresh rotation of four or five new songs each day? I still have ear worms of Frank Sinatra’s Summer Wind and The Police’s Every Little Thing She Does is Magic.