The Idle Class

Arriving on the back of his first great film The Kid, Charlie Chaplin’s The Idle Class feels weak and thin in comparison. The writer in Chaplin was struggling for ideas before he got the spark for The Kid and it almost feels as though he is back to square one while writing the two reel The Idle Class. A Tramp (Chaplin) gets off a train, and not how you’d expect him to, before heading for a day at the golf course. Meanwhile a wealthy wife (Edna Purviance) also disembarks expecting her well to do husband (also Chaplin) to meet her at the station but he is drunk at home. Following some hi jinks at the golf course there is a case of mistaken identity at a ball at which Edna takes the Tramp for her husband.

For me The Idle Class lacks the depth which made The Kid great and also lacks the direction and laughs that are found in the likes of A Dog's Life or Shoulder Arms. It occasionally takes a more dramatic route but this often fails to match even Sunnyside for dramatic narrative. The film is saved by a middle act on the golf course which is brilliantly inventive and funny but is unfortunately bookended by a beginning and end which did little for me.  

The Impossible

Man, I wish I was a heart string salesman. Sales will be going through the roof after the two hours of tugging and eventual breaking of heart strings due to the release of The Impossible. A Spanish production and based on a real life Spanish family’s experiences, The Impossible stars Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor as the husband and wife of a family caught up in the Boxing Day Tsunami that struck South East Asia in 2004. While on holiday the Tsunami hits the Thai beach resort that the family are staying at, separating Wife Maria (Watts) and eldest son Lucas (Tom Holland) from Husband Henry (McGregor) and youngest sons Thomas and Simon (Samuel Joslin and Oaklee Pendergast). With Maria seriously injured and little help at hand, the family struggle to survive in the most unimaginable conditions.

I have mixed feelings about The Impossible. On the one hand it is an expertly made film which brings a terrible tragedy to the big screen but on the other hand that tragedy is still fresh in the memory and the lengths to which the movie tugs at the audience’s emotions feel cheap and unnecessary. Although I’m sure it will be well received by critics, I have my reservations and my girlfriend downright disliked it.

The Girl

The Girl is a TV movie about the three year working relationship between Alfred Hitchcock (Toby Jones) and his two time leading lady Tippi Hedren (Sienna Miller) star of TheBirds and Marnie. The plot, which has been widely criticised by people who knew the great Director, focuses on his attraction towards his starlet and her rebuff of his advances. Much like a great Hitchcock thriller the film takes a dark turn as Hitch forces Hedren to go through arduous scenes over and over again and puts her in compromising positions sexually.

I’m a fairly new convert to Hitchcock having seen seven of his films in the last year, all for the first time. The Birds is one of the few Hitchcock movies I had seen before I began blogging but not for a long time. It’s been on my list to watch for a few months but I hadn’t got around to it yet and this put me in a quandary; what to watch first? I decided to watch The Girl before re-watching The Birds but now I’m slightly fearful that its portrayal of the Director may put me off the film and perhaps Hitchcock in general.

Rescued by Rover

Rescued by Rover is a 1905 film which along with the likes of The Great Train Robbery (1903) helped to bridge the gap between films that were a mere curiosity or fairground attraction towards the narrative structure which dominated the following century and continues today. The film makes use of the recent invention of the cut or edit to slice together the action surrounding a baby which is kidnapped by a beggar woman. It mostly follows a dog as it seeks out the missing child to alert its owner, the baby’s father. Although by today’s standards the plot is fairly predictable and quite repetitive, for the time it was groundbreaking. Just five years earlier the Hepworth Manufacturing Company was producing films which although interesting were single shot amusements, now in 1905 they had produced a proper narrative film which is much more coherent than any contemporary film I’ve seen so far.

There are several areas in which this film is inventive or pioneering. The first is perhaps the most important. Rescued by Rover was the first film to ever feature paid actors. Before this time roles were filled by the crew, friends or sometimes passers by. Here though two actors, one of which was May Clark, are employed in a cast which also features Director Cecil Hepworth’s wife, child, dog as well as himself. The film is also noted as being the first to create an animal star. The dog, Blair, became famous for several years following the film’s release and is also one of the best trained I’ve seen on screen.

Pitch Perfect

AAAHHHH! Pitch Perfect is a teen comedy(?) about a ‘alternative girl’ called Beca (Anna Kendrick) who goes to college despite wanting to go straight to L.A. to try and make it as a record producer. She struggles to make friends in her first few weeks so her Dad (who happens to work at the college) tells her if she joins a social group and still hates her first year, he will pay for her to drop out of college and go to L.A. Beca chooses or rather is chosen for an all girl a cappella group called the Bellas. Beca finds that her free spirit and creativity is choked by the fellow Bellas but slowly begins to enjoy her time with the group. Also there’s some boy stuff, a radio station and room mate who is written in an incredibly racist way.

I went into the film with an open mind and thought that the trailer showed potential. There was a funny gag about the fat girl calling herself fat and an awkward scene in the shower. I also think that Anna Kendrick is showing promise as a great actress. Unfortunately the film is less of a let down and more a steaming pile of popularity pandering and obvious conclusions featuring a soundtrack which for a good hour made me hate music.

La Vie en Rose

La Vie en Rose is a 2007 French biopic about the singer Edith Piaf who rose from a street urchin early in the twentieth century to become one of France’s most renowned singers by the mid point of the century. The film charts her battles against stage fright, mafia control, arthritis, morphine addiction and snobbery as she slowly rises to prominence.

I have to admit that I didn’t like the film. I thought it was muddled, over-long and confusing but in amongst the mess was one of the best acting performances I’ve seen in a long time. Marion Cotillard delivers a spell binding performance as the troubled singer and deserves a much better vehicle for her talents. She transforms effortlessly from the young waif to her height in the fifties and on to the broken woman of 1960. Without her stunning performance the film wouldn’t be worth watching, because of it, it is a must see.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

A couple of Christmases ago I took a punt on a film I knew very little about on a trip to our local, and excellent, Art House Cinema; Cornerhouse in Manchester. The film was Rare Exports and the gamble paid off. Rare Exports is the sort of oddly engaging and original film which only comes around a couple of times a year. The story was daring and unique and the acting, cinematography and direction were all excellent too. Fast forward almost exactly two years and I watched the film for a second time and while I still enjoyed the unusual Fairy tail like story and darkly comic script, some of the shock and awe which accompanied my first viewing had dissipated.

On the Finnish side of the Finland-Russia border, high in the Arctic Circle, a team of foreign scientists and excavators are carrying out experiments on top of a mountain which overlooks a small village home to Pietari (Onni Tommila) and his father Rauno (Jorma Tommila). The head of the excavation one day announces that they have unearthed the largest burial mound on the planet, something which Pietari believes may be the final resting place of Santa Claus, and not the Americanised Coca-cola Santa but the original, child eating Santa. Pietari’s suspicions begin to take further shape when first all the Reindeer are found slaughtered and then the local children begin disappearing.

The Hunter

The Hunter was a film I began to hear good things about late last spring but was unfortunately unable to find a screening anywhere close to my local area (which happens to be the third largest city in the UK). In the end I probably saved myself a needless trip to the local Art House Cinema as although featuring some decent moments and a good central performance, The Hunter isn’t a film worth writing home about.

A mercenary/hunter (Willem Defoe) is employed by a shady European biotech company to travel to Tasmania and track the illusive, presumed extinct Tasmanian Tiger. The animal, which hasn’t been seen in the wild since 1930 is believed to have had a venom in its bite which was capable of paralysing its prey. The company, Red Leaf, wish to extract that venom for use in their biotechnology business. When he arrives in Tasmania, the hunter stays with a family who have recently experienced loss and attracts the unwanted attention of local loggers who are fearful for their jobs.

Rebecca

Based on a 1938 novel of the same name and Alfred Hitchcock’s first American production, Rebecca also won the famed Director his only Best Picture Oscar. A young woman (Joan Fontaine) meets an aristocratic widower (Laurence Olivier) in Monte Carlo and following a brief romance the two are wed. The woman returns to England and to her husband’s Cornish Estate where she discovers that the spectre of her husband’s late wife still looms large.

It took me a long time to get into Rebecca (that came out wrong). It took me a long time to get into the film (that’s better) and it wasn’t until the last half hour or so that it was able to hold my attention. I found that I had little interest in the plot which unravelled at a fairly measured pace. The final few scenes though were quite spectacular and helped me to forget the unfortunate boredom which I encountered during the first ninety minutes.

Top Ten 'New to me Films' of 2012

2012 has been a good year for me film wise. As I sit here three days before the end of the year I've seen over 365 films, a few poor, many good and some excellent. Before I write my Top 10 of 2012 List (which will appear on my blog's one year anniversary on January 25th 2013) I thought I'd make a list of the best films which were new to me this year. These are the films which I've seen for the first time this year and were released in 2011 or before. So without further delay, here is the Top Ten. Click the title for a full review.