Sweet Country

Seen at Castlemaine's wonderful Theatre Royal

Bea says: About half an hour in, I had an urge to run away from this film.  I had a sense of foreboding an absolutely nothing, nothing good was going to happen, I knew it.  But I told myself, I had to sit it out, and see it through.  It is my country's history, and it's shame.

So I stayed with it, and watched it, and it was bad (in terms of my sense of foreboding, not the film), but not all bad.  Sam and his wife evade the party hunting them down, and could have continued to if circumstances had been different.  Justice is served, and Sam is found to have been acting in self defence, with no case to answer.  I won't say any more about the plot as even this spoils enough.

Sam Neill is back to getting some good parts these days, and is fantastic as the good egg religious landowner.  Bryan Brown plays a complex character (the sergeant) well.  Great performances from all others; and the "Western" style filming and beautiful country are well done.  I am not enough of a student of the Western genre (although I have seen many of them) to have picked all the references.  The Johny Cash song over the closing credits I am sure is one of them. 

A  must-see.  The closing line from Sam Neill gives pause for thought.

****

Cecil says: Not a film I'd recommend if you need your spirits lifting. The sense of foreboding doesn't take long to take hold; in fact already in the opening scene, which just shows us some boiling water on a campfire, and a guy adding coffee (?) and sugar, while in the background you hear the noise of someone being beaten up by a nasty racist.

Sam Neill and Bryan Brown, those old stalwarts of Australian cinema, are brilliant as ever: Neill as the gentle, religious farmer who treats Aboriginals as equals; Brown as the obsessive sergeant determined to track down the fugitive Sam Kelly, who has shot the awful March.

It's something of a relief when March does get his comeuppance fairly early in the film, though by then the viewer has been put through some of the horrifying deeds and attitudes of 'white fellahs' that must have been so common back then.

Sam Neill's last line in the film does make you reflect on where Australia is at today. The judge is clearly a new generation urban type, probably up from Sydney or Melbourne. And to some extent Australia is still divided between city and country, though the country town we have chosen to live in is probably among the more progressive in Australia. But those attitudes we see from the white fellahs through most of 'Sweet Country' have probably not changed that much in some of the more remote outback towns even today.

Hamilton Morris as Sam Kelly shows great wisdom throughout plus a fantastic ability to survive in the tough outback. Archie reminded me of those Native American trackers who helped the whites in America catch up with Injuns. And Philomac is an interesting character: I quickly suspected that he might be Kennedy's son, but his survival instinct is also extraordinary, with a scary last line from him at the end of the movie. (clever casting, too, with maybe two brothers playing him as he gets older, or in flashback scenes?)

Funny coincidence that Philomac might be the son of someone called Kennedy. Because the shooting at the end, with the blood spurting over the wife in the carriage, is surely a reminder of what happened to JFK some 50 years later (though it's also a bit hard to know when the film was set, or which British Army action March and the Sergeant are supposed to have fought in).

Beautifully filmed, you could almost touch the sand and dust, and I almost began waving those flies away from my face even though there were none in the lovely old Theatre Royal in Castlemaine.

***

The 15:17 to Paris

Seen at the beautiful Regent Theatre in Ballarat, VIC

Bea says: I enjoyed this much more than I thought I would - Cecil and I often have a (long) short-list of current films we want to see, and as our free time is limited, if we have time to see a film we see whatever we can from the list. 

Going in, I feared an action film but I have to say, I found it very, very interesting.  Partly this was because the film spends a long time on the backstory, and as I am narrative-driven in films, I preferred this to lots of time on the action sequence of the actual event on the train.  Others may not enjoy the focus on the backstory as much as I did. 

The backstory takes us right back to the middle school/early high school years of the three friends who end up on the Paris train, playing war games in the open country around where they grew up, and military fatigues to school.  Later, high school separated them, and they all ended up trying to find their individual paths; our hero Spencer Stone is actually a bit lost, not making it in the military into the role he wants, and not excelling in the role he ended up in. 

They all take a bit of time out and holiday in Europe, backpacking the familiar trail of Venice, to Amsterdam, to Paris (I think I did almost exactly the same route 25 years ago).  Amsterdam was a wild night for them (I heard the older couple near us whisper to each other "we didn't do that in Amsterdam!") and hung over, they board the Paris train the next day. 

In fact, they only go ahead because Spencer feels he must; and that is a loop in the film's plot I found really interesting, and which Cecil also refers to - Spencer feels like he was born to do something important, of value to others.  Many years ago I read the John Irving book A Prayer for Owen Meany, and was put in mind of that book when watching this film - "the shot"; although in Owen Meany's case, he knew what it was he would be doing, many years later.  But like Stone, he had to convince friends  that there was something important to come, and to practise and prepare. 

Irving's novel was written years before this event (I read the book in the 1990s) - a case of life imitating art....If you enjoyed this film, I would definitely recommend reading it, and in fact I might re-read it again now.

My research post-film, in a relaxed lunch spot in Ballarat was interesting, as Cecil mentions - Stone had left the military, his main aim in life as a child/young person, now he had done the thing he always felt he had to do, perhaps there was no reason to be in it anymore, but was studying.  His two friends did not seem to be progressing quite so well; relying a little bit on their fame...I couldn't quite tell.

Nice direction from Clint Eastwood.
***1/2

Cecil says: I hadn't realised Clint Eastwood directed this film until I watched the credits roll at the end. And the interesting thing he chose to do was to cast the actual people involved in the Thalys incident to play the parts as themselves through most of the movie.

Actually they did pretty well, considering they are not actors. It's probably easier to play yourself, if you are not a trained actor, but still even playing yourself can become really wooden when you try too hard to act, so congrats to them for carrying this off.

The only weakness for me in this portrayal of three 'ordinary' American dudes acting the heroes when a terrorist tries to massacre passengers on an Amsterdam to Paris train was in the black character (Sal). As a child, he is portrayed as quirky, questioning and cheeky; as an adult, he seems to have lost all of that curiosity and lateral thinking spirit his school boy character showed. I don't honesty believe such a creative child would end up as 'ordinary' as an adult, but who knows.

The main character of the three, Spencer Stone, is interesting. It's all very well, both for dramatic licence or for some sort of higher-level spiritual reason, to have a youngster say he senses he is on the path to do something extraordinary. But what happens if you are barely 20 and you have done your extraordinary act? What do you do for the rest of your life?

And it was interesting when Bea did some delving to find out that Spencer Stone is now studying International Relations at uni. What a fantastic next chapter for a guy like this. Good luck to him as he finds the next direction to take, and hopefully channels his passion and curiosity further. \

I was struck at the end how they had footage of the French President pinning the Legion d'Honneur onto these guys' lapels (I thought at first it was clever CGI work to have Pres Hollande footage and to have superimposed the actors we had seen into the scene - though at that stage I didn't realise Eastwood had used the actual characters). I wondered how they could possibly know just what an enormous thing that was for a French president to give three Americans that honour - and maybe doing an international relations degree might just help Spencer realise what a massive moment that was.

Bea and I discussed briefly the 'what would we have done?' question after the film. I know for sure I'd have been one of the passengers cowering behind a seat. I have acted in the past in minor incidents on London streets, but I know I don't have the skills necessary to prevent something as major as this. But these guys knew they did have the training, and hats off to them for acting.

Nobody actually knows how they'll act until confronted with a scenario for real. And for me such questions were first raised when I read a Simone de Beauvoir novel set during the Nazi occupation of Paris. That somehow would be a harder dilemma: dealing with 4 years of constant occupation would be very different from a sudden mad terror incident.\

The film itself was pretty slow-paced.

We spend far too long at the gelato stand in Venice, I'm not sure the point of the German exchange student interlude, and we have long moments lingering on minutiae of life, which made me wonder what else Eastwood could have done with his film time? Surely taking the story on beyond the incident might have been interesting, though possibly challenging also?

It was a delight to have our first time at the beautiful 1920s Regent Theatre in Ballarat, and the movie was fairly well-attended for a Sunday morning slot. Not a bad way to spend a quiet Sunday

***

I, Tonya

Seen at the beautiful Midland Theatre or Astor Theatre, Ararat, VIC

Cecil says:  I only vaguely remember the Tonya Harding ‘incident’. I

think at that time, I was in a kind of anti-American bubble

where an apparent squabble between two US ice skaters didn’t much matter to

me, and I was pleased neither of them got gold at the Winter Olympics. So it was

quite interesting to see the story told 20 odd years later. 

Harding is a self-confessed redneck (spoken via the

contemporary ‘interviews’ which flick on and off as the

story from the 1990s unfolds), and at one point we are shown a bedroom poster of

Ronald Reagan, suggesting these were working class Republicans. So it felt

like no coincidence that this is precisely the kind of family that would have

voted in Trump in 2016, which felt like the reason anyone would make this film

now.

None of the characters we focus on are attractive or evoke

sympathy in any way, really. The only mitigating theme

running through the film, and certainly Harding’s obsession (understandably), was that of the

snobby judges in US ice-skating preferring the middle class

clean-cut girls Harding was competing against, however talented Harding

herself was. Again, this is the kind of ‘rigged’ system, that led to Trump

being elected,

The domestic violence was graphic, and continued on from

maternal violence in Harding’s youth. It was hardly a

comfy upbringing, and no doubt made her the creature she was.Right at

the end, there is footage of the real people being

interviewed, and you can see how well cast this film was,

with Allyson Janney especially good as Harding’s Mum (I loved the gasps from

the mainly middle-aged audience in our country cinema when Janney first utters the ‘C’ word…).

Funnily enough, having also seen a documentary on Tonya

Harding just a day after seeing the film (again, no coincidence surely), I

would say if anybody was badly-cast it was *** in the role

of Harding herself. In real footage of Harding at the time, she comes across

much more as a little teenage brat than in the film. ** is almost too well-built

and robust in face and body to match the real Harding.

But overall, this was an interesting film to see in the

context of 2018 America. Not a film to enjoy as such or to feel much

identification with the characters – not for me, anyway– but worth seeing

nonetheless.

***

Bea says:  

Coming from a family of keen ice skating watchers (my mother was a fan of Peggy Fleming and at home we always watched any kind of ice skating, both on TV and when we could get to them, live events), I do remember the Tonya Harding incident; and both Tonya and Nancy are about my age, so I was vaguely interested, at the time and now, as they are my contemporaries.  Tonya didn't come out of this very well at the time, and the film doesn't really change that perspective, other than the insight that she didn't really fit the mould of the perfect, middle class, well behaved, thin, (white) girl who wins figure skating championships; although the film shies away from using this as an excuse; Nancy Kerrigan was, after all, from working class stock herself.

More of an insight into Tonya's behaviour is (if true) the abuse she suffered at the hand of her mother and then her boyfriend/husband, although again the film shies away from portraying either of them as all bad.  The real poignancy is the talent Tonya possessed; the excitement of her triple is palpable in the film - what a shame she (allegedly) threw it all away.  Her talent and commitment - that she trains hard and well is in no doubt - was well presented in the film; as was the fact that this particular sport does not place a visible value on this and instead values presentation.  

The film is a great example of the docu-drama genre; I enjoyed the interview/events sequences, and particularly the "real" footage at the end.  Allyson Janney did a star turn as Harding's mother, showing her own talent, and versatility - Cecil and I have been a fan of her for a long time now (since our West Wing viewing days).  Without her though, I am not sure how strong the cast would have been.  The costume designer also did a very good job of recreating the kinds of styles (both clothes and hair) actually worn by ordinary people in the 1980s/90s, and avoided my pet hate - stylised (rather than real life) 80s or 90s clothes with hair and makeup clearly of the current time.

An interesting watch, particularly if you like documentary style films, family drama, Allyson Janney - you don't necessarily need to like (or be interested in) ice skating to take something from this film.

***1/2

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The Post

Seen at the wonderful Glasgow Film Theatre

Bea says:  We managed to get to this much-hyped, latest Spielberg outing on its day of release in the UK, at the wonderful Glasgow Film Theatre, along with a nearly full house on a sleety Friday afternoon.

Well, it is a good story, strongly-written with good pace and two excellent actors holding the fort effortlessly (Streep and Hanks).  It’s nicely shot, and there are some great scenes of how newspapers used to be – hard copy papers, typewriters, printing presses, the papers manually bundled together, thrown into trucks, driven to delivery points. Just that made me realise how different things are in the world of work today. 

Of course, much is made of Graham’s gender and her invisibility in the otherwise all-male boardroom, and after the Supreme Court win.  I was more interested in her personal story of entering the workforce after her husband’s suicide; and Cecil and I discussed later – we would both have been loth to take the risk of going to print; was it the fact that she hadn’t worked until she was 45, and so was more naïve of potential work problems that helped her take that risk, or was it really that she was a born editor? 

I also think that this is the more interesting of the gender issues presented in the film; that middle and upper class women did not routinely work at this time (not very long ago) and so if a time came when they had to, it was difficult and traumatic.  The film does not really look that much either at how things were changing for younger women entering the workforce, or the experience of working class or poorer women, who did have to work.  There was also an audible groan in the audience at the dinner party when the women retired to the lounge room and the men stayed around the table discussing politics…But in reality this aspect of the film felt a bit tacked on, as a response to the womens’ marches and #metoo campaign over the past year.  

Perhaps I’m just being cynical, but there was only one really key female character in the film, and lots of men….it's still “his”tory I’m afraid.

The film’s other and more central theme was that of freedom of the press, and is impossible to miss, perhaps if anything (although I agree with it) a bit heavy handed….there are quite a few speeches to camera about it, thinly veiled in the plot.

But, it is in its own way a must-see, and a comment on our times which only a bit more than a year ago I could not really have foreseen.  Spielberg’s technique is excellent, my only comment would be to deliver the message with a lighter touch.

Watch out for the young hippy girl delivering the package to the Washington Post – Spielberg’s daughter who is an actor in her own right.

***1/2

Cecil says: I liked The Post for the way it took me back to days when newspaper really did go to press. I remember the smell and the din of the printing presses turning on the Hull Daily Mail as a child; Murdoch and The Times dispute of the 1980s largely did for all the old type-setting and printing work done before I got into media myself.

But I was struck by the scene where the journalists' copy arrives on the desk of the sub-editors, and he immediately strikes out most of the first sentence, replacing it with just a word or two. It reminded me how vital the role of sub-editors used to be, and just how many mistakes, repetitions and poorly constructed sentences get through to print these days since that stage of the production process is now done (or not done, in fact) by journalists themselves.

I actually didn't know about the Pentagon Papers story so that was interesting, though the whole way it was portrayed made you know that Watergate was just around the corner, with Nixon shouting orders down the phone about suppressing press freedoms, covert phone calls to sensitive sources (the famous 'Deep Throat' in Watergate) and the fact that the Washington Post was in the game of such revelations over that period.

I was in the Post offices in 2010, and the offices themselves looked much as they were shown to be in the 1960s-70s of this film. It was also nice to see the Jefferson Hotel, where we had one of our final drinks before leaving Washington.

But the film only gets three stars from me for reasons Bea has already alluded to. Spielberg was being almost as full-on about his 'message' as directors like Ken Loach or Michael Moore can be. I didn't need the First Amendment rammed down my throat or the really obvious references to gender equality, but clearly Donald Trump does need that, as do the voters who supported the current President, and probably sadly some of them DO need the message ramming down their throat, as both Trump and many of his supporters seem to have changed little in the 365 days since he took office.

Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep were wonderful, though. Great to watch them on the screen together.

***

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Seen at the Studio Cinema in Dunoon

Cecil says:  The strangest thing about the timing of watching this film is that only the night before we had watched a DVD of a classic film made 50 years ago, and immediately there were so many parallels. In fact, some might say that Sidney Poitier's In the Heat of the Night inspired Three Billboards so much that you could argue the new film is virtually a remake of the old.

It's the setting of a small town police station, though in Missouri now rather than Mississippi; there are the bumbling idiot cops with their racism and sexism (the latter is new in the 2017 film, mind); the Chief who means well and is trying to do the right thing by the disadvantaged; and the black hero, who in both films is a senior police officer, though Poitier is the main man right from the start in the Heat, whereas Clarke Peters only comes in at the end to sort out the mess in Three Billboards...

There's a lot of violence in Three Billboards, some so bad that I had to look away. There isn't a lot of joy, either, but since we're dealing with a middle-aged woman coming to terms with her anger and grief over her teenage daughter being raped and murdered, as well as the anger and internal confusion in many of the small-town folk she has to deal with, I guess laughs were never likely to be aplenty here.

It was hard to empathise with any single character in the film, too, which meant I never felt emotionally engaged or too bothered about which way events turned. Funnily enough, the only moment of being moved came from a relatively minor character, the wife of Willoughby, the police chief (Woody Harrelson), played by Abbie Cornish. Her emotion at the sudden suicide of her husband is raw and well-played, though her accent is a bit bizarre throughout, and we wondered if she was even meant to be an English woman or Aussie (she is actually from NSW).

Overall, Three Billboards was a gripping watch, though not the masterpiece some I know have claimed it to be. Coming for us so soon after watching In the Heat of the Night meant we had lots to talk about afterwards about how much (or in many ways, little) America has changed in 50 years.

***.5

Bea says: 
Watching this film made me wonder how age affects our ability to tolerate graphic depictions of violence.  Back in my 20s when Tarantino was all the rage, I saw all of them and don't remember it bothering me too much.  I haven't revisited them though - perhaps it was how it was presented?  I too had to cover my eyes and turn away from the screen a lot during this film.  It's also not one for those who don't like bad language as there is a lot of it.

The story is strong; a woman with a lot of personal issues attempts to take on a local police force and in doing so most of the small town who support them, who she feels are dragging their feet in solving her daughter's rape and murder.  It is a bleak story, and a complex one as the film uncovers themes of connection, understanding, and forgiveness.

There are many very moving movements - her memory of the argument she and her daughter had the last time they saw each other; her son's intervention when her violent ex-husband pays a call; the moment the billboard advertising salesman offers the violent cop Dickson a glass of orange juice; the letters left by the chief of police after his suicide and read out by various characters, at times turning their lives in different directions.

All was not what it seemed in terms of characters in this film, which gave it much depth; I found it hard to dislike Dickson despite his violence and racism; and in fact his character improves with guidance and experience; the new chief of police I thought I should like made me question his trustworthiness as I wondered if his response to the new evidence Dickson brought him was a cover up.

The ending  -I won't spoil it was equally disturbing and uplifting

It's good - it's not often that a film attains the depth of a novel, but this one does.  Good performances all round.  A little bit too realistically shot for me.  Well directed.
****

All the Money in the World

Seen at the Studio Cinema, Dunoon

Cecil says: The kidnapping of John Paul Getty's grandson happened when I was just 12 years old and in my stark view of the world at the time, I probably just saw it as a young rich kid in a rough country a long way away and a stingy family that made matters worse by not paying the ransom.

Of course, real life is much more complex than that, and the saga portrayed in All the Money in the World shows the different levels of psychology going on both within the Getty clan and among the gangsters involved.

The strange thing for us, though, was that the cinema in Dunoon had left the preview for this film on the footage to be screened before this film, so we got a fairly lengthy extract of the film which made us wonder if we had walked into the wrong room. Even more interesting was that the preview still featured Kevin Spacey in the role of Getty himself, even though the film itself has become a talking point for he fact that Spacey was air-brushed out after the scandals against his name, and Christopher Plummer took on the Getty role in the final version.

Plummer (Christopher - rather than the other unrelated actor Plummer who played the grandson) was actually magnificent, and it's a credit to him that he played the role so well at such short notice.

Getty may have been a pretty despicable character, but for me the more alarming aspect was the portrayal of 1970s Italy, particularly in the south, where it must have been hard to know who you could trust, and I can remember a politician called Aldo Moro being kidnapped and his body ending up in the boot of a car.

The film dragged on a bit longer than it maybe should have, but otherwise was a good watch. I can't say I identified with anyone portrayed, mind you, and was at no point actually moved, though I had to turn away when the rather graphic scene was shown of young Getty getting his ear cut off...

I can't help wondering how good Spacey might have been, but then having seen Plummer at his best, I can't help also wondering why he wasn't cast in the role in the first place.

***.5

Bea says:  An interesting story which I knew nothing about before seeing the film (I was a toddler when the story would have been in the news).  However the questions the film brought up for me were in a way much more interesting than the film itself - firstly, based on that unexpected preview was this actually the film that had edited Spacey out (I had heard that there was one that had done so)?  And secondly, what happened to Paul Getty after that highly traumatic kidnapping episode at the vulnerable age of 16?  With alcohol and drug abuse in the family, did he turn to those in order to cope?

Well, the answer to both questions is yes.  Ridley Scott re-shot all of Spacey's scenes in a very short period of time; with Mark Wahlberg allegedly doing better out of that financially than Michelle Williams, according to the internet.  And Paul Getty - already a drug user prior to the kidnapping, a fact rather glossed over in the film - did develop a major problem with drugs and alcohol after the kidnapping, and followed a rather hippy and arthouse 1970s.lifestyle, if again the internet is to be  believed.  Such a major problem in fact that he experienced a stroke following an overdose in the 1980s, with life changing consequences.

The film is good - it is well-written, well-shot, and well-directed as I would have expected from Ridley Scott.  It is perhaps a little overlong; I did want to cut to the chase about 3/4 of the way through and see the resolution of the kidnapping and what happened after - this was brief actually and prompted my research into the life of Paul Getty.

Plummer was a surprisingly inspired choice and was excellent, as were Wahlberg and Williams.  They had a lot to work with and did so with understated flair.

***.5

The Man Who Invented Christmas

Seen at the wonderful Star Cinema in Eaglehawk near Bendigo.  This cinema is struggling financially, so we participated in their “bums on seats” campaign, bringing ourselves and a friend.

Bea says: This was a great insight into Dickens, who, I realised I knew very little about despite having studied his works exhaustively in my days as a student of English literature. 

I didn’t know that A Christmas Carol was written in only 6 weeks, under tremendous financial pressure following several flops, and that the concern in all his books about the working conditions of children in the Victorian era stemmed from his own childhood in a boot-blacking factory after his family fell on hard times.  I knew that Christmas trees were something of a transplant from Germany, brought over by Prince Albert, but not that Christmas as we know it today didn’t really exist prior to this era.

A Christmas Carol is rather overdone these days in terms of faithful reproductions of the story; this was a fresh new take as it showed the story developing and growing and Dickens' always wonderful characters coming to be – a small exchange in the film also shows how Dickens apparently got some of his characters’ names.

Above all – and we saw this on the 23^rd December – it was an uplifting reminder to (and no apologies for sounding cliched here) follow one’s own dreams and path, and do good by others where and when you can.  A great message to take into 2018 in these somewhat dark times.

****

Cecil says: Like Bea, I was bowled over as much by the setting as the film itself, with it being so close to Christmas and in an old hall that has been converted into one of those cinemas with only sofas to sit in.

I also hadn’t realised that Dickens went through such a tough patch, but had that almost Mozartian tendency to live above his means, only to turn out another classic and get things back on an even keel – only Dickens, we learnt, didn’t always produce best sellers and he was short of a bob or two while writing a Christmas Carol.

I also enjoyed seeing how he picked up names for characters along the way, though I already knew that from my tour of UK cathedrals, where Portsmouth and Southwark gave him a few good names.

I kind of enjoyed the Thackeray character, who keeps popping up like a bad penny to gloat over Dickens’ failings, having had lots of success himself in America. I can’t help wondering if he was thrown in mainly for an American audience since he is so much more popular and well-known over there. It’d be nice to know what made the film producers bring him in – were there diary entries they sourced from either Thackeray or Dickens himself?

I can’t quite give this film the four stars Bea has, though the occasion overall – close to Christmas and in an independent cinema we hadn’t been to before – is worth four. But for me, it’s

***.5