James and Isey

 Seen at the Alice Cinema, Christchurch, New Zealand

Cecil alone again for this trip!

Cecil says: After 6 days in New Zealand, I thought it was time to see a bit of Maori culture, so chose James & Isey as my Sunday morning film fix.

It’s a documentary just covering the lead-up to Isey’s 100th birthday in April 2019. Her son James says at one point that he wanted to mark the occasion with something special, and he reckoned nobody had done a documentary about a mother and son like this before.

Isey is a feisty lady, brought up by Maori parents who believed that speaking English would give her more of a chance in life, so she actually speaks very little of her family’s native tongue: “Kia ora,” she giggles at one point, like a British tourist might after arriving on a cruise ship and having a ring of flowers draped round their neck.

James, in contrast is a shaman, in touch with the spirits, connecting higher up than just the God we read about in the Bible (he is also Christian by the way, so this does not come across as blasphemous). He knew he had the ‘gift’ at age 5 but the powers only came through in his 40s.

He used to be a rock star, and we see video clips of him singing and gyrating to his 1980s hits; he was transitioning to a career on the stage and screen when he had a stroke, which left him paralysed for 6 months.

I’m not sure of the timeline, but he returned to his parents when his father was diagnosed with cancer, and he has lived there ever since, not really ‘caring for’ his Mum, but living with her ‘in harmony,’ as he describes it.

We are shown scenes of him doing shamanic things on a cow about to the slaughtered, on waters before a fishing trip, and towards the end sitting at the northern tip of New Zealand, his spirits’ home, where the Pacific and Tasman oceans meet.

He says he gets laughed at by mates of his brother and he probably comes across as weird to a 21st century urban and westernised community (in Auckland?), but at the actual 100th birthday party, he looks totally at ease at a ceremony of welcome by local haka performers, male and female.

His Mum Isey has a powerful voice, still. She can (usually) blow out her birthday candles, and right at the end we hear her rendition of ‘Que sera, sera.’ Pretty impressive for a centenarian. The only slightly tense moment I felt - for James especially, though he did well to hide it if he was annoyed - was when one of the older guests, a 92 year old gent, briefly stole the limelight from Isey. This was just after James had said Isey will give us a song, but we ended up hearing the 92 year old giving a song instead, and Isey never got to do her number in front of all her guests…

I feel drawn to shamanism in indigenous culture - Native American also - not that I have fully tapped into any gift I may have, even with my ‘healing hands.’ I have never yet felt any connection to Maori culture, probably because it seems based so totally on prowess in fighting or showing off strength (all those hakas leave me cold I’m afraid), but maybe James and Isey has helped me get a sense of where I’d fit in if Bea and I ever do decide to live long term in New Zealand…

***

Six Minutes to Midnight

 Seen at the Lumiere Cinema in Christchurch, New Zealand

Cecil went it alone for this one (and the next 3).

Cecil says: Great opening scene to this movie set just days before the start of the Second World War along the south coast of England.

The mood of that scene is very Graham Greene, as a man searches desperately for something hidden behind a row of books - is it money or something more concrete? Whatever it is makes him scarper on his push bike and into the local town where the next scene has him taking a deck-chair on the pier, and before you know it his hat is floating up into the air beyond the pier.

It’s a great scene-setter for this spy story starring the ever-brilliant Judi Dench, the increasingly visible Eddie Izzard (who co-wrote the screenplay - is he trying to be a new Kenneth Branagh, producing material he can feature in?), and the rather wonderful Carla Juri, who reminded me terribly of a close friend now gone, though it was good to remember her in every scene involving Ilse.

The story holds up well in classic spy-style, keeping us guessing always who the baddies and who the goodies are. My only question mark was over one of the school girls, Astrid - we aren’t really shown where her change of heart emerges from at the end.

I’m still not 100% convinced by Eddie Izzard. I felt he was more at ease playing a character probably nearer to the real him in Boy Choir. In this one he almost carried it off as the half-German spy taking a job as English teacher in a school where the girls are all linked to the Nazi regime back in Germany.

But there was something missing somehow and I can’t tell if it was in the writing or in the acting, or is it me? I mean, I should be able to relate, as the role he plays is very much the kind of role I might have been called on to play if I had lived in those tense times, but somehow I didn’t feel immersed totally in the action or the storyline (unlike for example in Remains of the Day); I was conscious throughout of watching a film and observing from the outside.

It made me wonder what Judi Dench made of the script. She was fantastic as always, as the slightly naive principal of the college, but could she see the slight weakness in the screenplay when she first saw it?

How could we have learned more about Mr Miller and Ilse’s past or their relationship? Would that have helped?

It’s an intriguing tale, based apparently on true events, though the credits at the very end claim the characters are all fictitious. I enjoyed it, and loved seeing it on my first real holiday break since Covid started almost 18 months ago.

***

Dead Letter Office

 Seen at the Star Cinema, Eaglehawk, VIC

Bea says: I left Australia originally in 1995, just around the cusp of the buzz around Death in Brunswick, and completely missed Dead Letter Office's release in 1998.

We saw this at the Star in Eaglehawk as well, as part of the Australian Film Festival weekend and it was enhanced by a Q&A with the director.

It is a charming film, with the office of the title being a subdivision of the post office service which tries to track down impossible addresses and addresees. Our heroine Alice (Miranda Otto) is compelled to work there in order to track down her absent father, who she has written to since she was a child - and her letters have been going to the Dead Letter Office.

It was a lovely, nostalgic step back to the simpler 1990s. People were lonely, sad, and down on their luck, but were also kind, funny, thoughtful and warm.  Absolute standout performance from George DelHoyo as Frank Lopez. The ending made me so happy. Highly recommended if you see it anywhere.
****

 Cecil says: Dead Letter Office brought back so many memories of past lives.

I too, worked in a postal sorting office in 1986. It was the kind of old-fashioned place that probably changed enormously in the years after that: it was not just the manual labour of lugging sacks of parcels off conveyor belts onto vans to delivery but the whole culture of the workplace then, with its men in brown coats supervising things, the canteen where I went for meals, including custard with my fruit pies (no canteen in this film, mind), and the slightly awkward relationships between colleagues whose only connection really is the workplace.

The ‘Dead Letter Office’ also reminded me of all the filing I used to do in my first office job, starting in 1987. And just like in this film, which was made in 1998, but has much more the feel of a late 80s atmosphere, I imagine at some point the equivalent of the JCB Bob-Cat moved in to shovel away to the tip all those carefully filed sheets and copies made for the seven years I did that job (computers were just starting to appear as I left that office in 1994).

And then the whole Chilean connection resonated so strongly for me. I worked with many Chileans in the late 80s and early 90s, mainly in London, but the atmosphere of the social gatherings in suburban Melbourne could just as easily have been the places I went to in Peckham or Finsbury Park.

The star of this film is George DelHoyo, who plays Frank, the head of department for the Dead Letter Office, who can snap into action and trace lost people in a matter of minutes if he decides to, but is also languishing in the tragic memories of his past in Chile. We were lucky enough to have a Q&A with the Director (John Ruane), who revealed they had tracked DelHoyo down via the small ads of a local Latino newspaper in LA, and had to deal with DelHoyo being 6’1” and therefore much taller than any Chilean any of them had ever met. But his acting was superb and he held the film together single-handedly.

Miranda Otto (who later played the Elfine Queen Eowyn in Lord of the Rings) was OK as the young woman desperately looking for her father, and using the Dead Letter Office as a means to track him down. She was endearing, if slightly wooden, or was that just the awkwardness of young adulthood?

Her accommodation reminded me so much of friends’ house shares in Brighton in the 1980s also, so that was very genuine, and her flatmates also came across as the types I moved around in my university days (and those unemployed times after uni).

So, as a drop back into my lives that are now long gone, this was a delightful film. We didn’t really get the impression the Director really had much connection to the film, though I guess he has probably done a lot in the subsequent 23 years, so who can blame him. I enjoyed it, though.

Oh, and spot the Dad from Strictly Ballroom, a few years older than when he danced in that classic, but very recognisable…

***

 

 

Wild Mountain Thyme

 Seen at the Star Cinema in Eaglehawk, VIC

Cecil says: Bea and I have been discussing options for where we should live in the long term, given our aversion for all things Brexit and for the current trends in Australian society, which seem little better than Britain in the current climate. New Zealand has been mooted if we decide to stay South, but Ireland is also a possibility, should we wish to stay nearer folk in Europe.

The opening scenes of Wild Mountain Thyme almost made my mind up for me: the beautiful, rugged, ocean coast of the west of Ireland, and I’ve never even been there yet (mind you, nor have I ever visited New Zealand yet..).

Rather as with Kiwis, I will have to get used to the accent, though, and I did struggle for a few scenes of this film (that might have been due to the sound system which isn’t always crystal clear in the Star, Eaglehawk). I couldn’t help wondering, though, if my problem with understanding also might have come from the fact that two of the lead actors – Emily Blunt and Christopher Walken – are not natural Irish brogue speakers.

The film also reminded me of just how important family is in Ireland – who marries who; who leaves what to who taking up more importance in a lot of people’s lives than the more global political issues I usually cast my vote on. And with absolutely no family ties to Ireland, we might have to choose carefully a part of Ireland which might be willing to accept two wandering cinema buffs looking for a safe haven.

This is basically a charming love story, although it was always only heading in one direction, but that didn’t matter, because the way it got there kept us entertained along the way. They even managed to have Don Draper from Mad Men (actor: John Hamm) playing the American cousin who almost got the inheritance himself after a father/son spat early on.

And it did take me back to past trips to Ireland, where an awful lot of time seemed to be spent in little pubs drinking Guinness and listening to folk music on a fiddle, so we might also have to get used to that unless we opt for one of Ireland’s metropolises like Dublin or Cork (but even there, I reckon the pub figures quite high in the list of recreational activities).

Actually my favourite part of the film was the brief dancing scene: not the little girl’s attempts at ballet, but Emily Blunt’s adult leap into ballet moves, outside her cottage wearing farming boots and sinking into the gravel. There was an elegance to those scenes which beat any other for me in this film.

***    

Bea says: Rather nice Irish pastoral love story of two young people growing up on adjacent farms in rural Ireland who slowly find each other. The title is taken from the traditional song of the same name, and naturally the course of true love does not run smoothly but all is ultimately well. Much beautiful scenery and some nice music too, including performances of the title track. A lovely few hours of pure escape, particularly as we saw this on the sofas of the wonderful Star cinema in Eaglehawk, on a Sunday afternoon, cup of tea in hand.
***1/2

 

Penguin Bloom

 Seen at the Capitol Cinema, Warrnambool, VIC

Bea says: One positive about the corona virus situation is that it might have helped more Australian film make it to major release in the absence of larger international studio releases through 2020-21. Penguin Bloom is one such film, although with quite an international cast it is likely destined for greater things anyway.

The film chronicles the story of the Bloom family - a middle class, slightly Bohemian, busy and chaotic Sydney family who experience a life changing event when mother Sam (Naomi Watts) falls from a balcony lookout while on holiday in Thailand. Sam experiences a spinal cord injury, and the film explores the family's grief, guilt and adjustment to their new life. Key to the adjustment are an adopted baby magpie called Penguin, and a wise Kiwi kayaking coach, Gaye (Rachel House).

Based on a true story, it's a lovely film and overall quite uplifting in a gentle way (not in a traditional wheelie, or moralistic way). It gave me pause for thought as to how I would cope in a similar situation.  One minor professional point though, which I am sure Cecil will raise too – Sam’s wheelchair and home assistive technology appeared to be dated circa about 1950, and it is extremely unusual not to need any home modifications in that situation - but perhaps these and similar details were glossed over as unimportant.
***1/2

Cecil says: I love Australian magpies (obviously not when they swoop me, but their song is one of the wonders of living in this country, and a delight in the early morning especially). But the idea of a film where a family adopts an injured magpie didn’t immediately appeal to me. The thing is sometimes we choose the cinema not the film, an on this day in Warrnambool, Penguin Bloom was the only option that looked like it might suit us.

In the end, I was glad we did.

There was a lot to relate to for us as a couple.

I have always loved Sydney’s northern beaches, and I truly love swimming in their amazing rock pools – it is probably the thing I miss most about living within reach of Sydney, but interestingly, given the subject matter of the film (basically about dealing with life-changing injury and working out how to move on to a different life), I can watch films set there these days and not be hankering after a life that has now passed. They are fond memories but there is no tug of the heart anymore.

The injury suffered by Sam, the main character in this film – played by Naomi Watts – leads to reassessment not only of Sam’s day-to-day life, but also her relationships and her family. I think COVID must have done this to many couples across the world, and for many it has seen the end of relationships that couldn’t survive the scrutiny, but for Bea and I it has actually led us to reflect on our lives and brought us closer if anything. Adversity and challenges have a habit of doing that, I find; they can make or break.

Cameron (played by Andrew Lincoln – I remember him mostly as playing the northern English lawyer in This Life so so long ago) does his best to deal with the anger and frustrations going through Sam’s mind and body. And then there is the main child, the one who feels that it is his fault that his Mum fell off the balcony, and the trauma he goes through, and how he tried to deal with it via video diaries – fortunately I never had a trauma like that as a child, but I can well imagine my younger self taking a similar approach.

There were a few odd things that made me question why certain directions weren’t taken (and this is based on a true story, don’t forget). If this was a Northern Beaches family, living fairly comfortably by the look of things, why did they not seek professional help for Sam in the form of counselling or psychotherapy? They could surely afford it? Or has that become less of a go-to in middle-class Australia?

And then Sam’s past career in nursing. Fairly glossed over, apart from one old photograph, and I know it’s easier to be on the other side of the treatment table, but I couldn’t help wondering why she didn’t turn to alternative life-style activities earlier. Surely it’s the very thing as a nurse she’d have been encouraging patients to do, so there would have been one moment surely, where she’d think of people she had helped in hospital in that earlier life of hers.

It all ends up OK, of course, and the real Sam ends up competing in the Olympics for Australia, so it is a wonderful portrayal of how to come back from adversity in your life.

Interesting choices to cast the two main characters with English actors, though. I’m not sure who else I’d have gone for, and they did a good job, plus Naomi Watts looks as if she actually belongs totally in both countries (so a bit like me, really), but it did feel slightly strange once I’d worked out where I’d seen them both before.

***

High Ground

 Seen at the Paramount Theatre, Maryborough, VIC

Cecil says: Beautifully-filmed in Northern Territory, much of it in the fantastic Kakadu National Park, which I haven’t visited for almost 30 years, but which holds a fascination as somehow at the heart and soul of the true Australia. After watching 90 minutes of bloodshed as white settlers battle with local communities about 100 years ago, my overall feeling was: “What the fuck are we doing here?” Why don’t we whites just quit the red centre and the Northern Territory and let the indigenous peoples have their land back, and develop their own culture?

I don’t want to write a spoiler review, but like in the settler novel I just read (“The Secret River” by Kate Grenville), nearly everyone gets killed in ‘High Ground’, so if you’re wary of gory killings or of gunfire, you’ll need to be looking away a fair bit as you watch on the big screen.

But the panoramic filming, the extraordinary wildlife, and the observation of Aboriginal rituals and practices make this an epic experience. The soundtrack, whether the Aboriginal music, the birds screeching, or the cracks and rustles of the undergrowth, is captivating without much, if any, scored orchestrated pieces to it.

Wityana Marika was majestic as the family elder; Jacob Junior Nayinggul superb as the main character Gutjuk (interesting to see that the Nayinggul family are so central to this film in all the credits, and I noticed also that there seem to be no photos of Jacob in any of the cast lists for ‘High Ground’ – I wonder if he’ll be back on our screens any time in the future?).

Among the white characters, Simon Baker does a great job as the attempted conciliator Travis; Jack Thompson is gritty as ever as the chief white personage; and Caren Pistorius has a good go at the missionary’s sister, though she didn’t age much in the 12 or so years of the film and she came through it all pretty unscathed for such a rough, outdoor life as she must have led.

Although both Australian films we have seen this month don’t make me feel great about living here, I did enjoy High Ground a lot more than The Dry. There is hope if the indigenous culture can be allowed to flourish again; if we do listen to the wind, the sky and the earth, to paraphrase what the elder says at one point.

****

 

Bea says:  One benefit of Covid seems to be that the Australian film industry has been able to continue, and so the last two films we have seen are both locally made.  High Ground is one of them. 

 The film has been compared to the John Ford-style Westerns, and having seen it I agree; with a white settler vs Indigenous population theme, and lots of riding though canyons (albeit canyons with lots of tropical plant as the film takes place in Kakadu) with eerie feelings of being watched. 

 The title of the film is taken from this; taking the high ground is important - it gives a view of all oncomers and incomers.  Possibly it also operates at a metaphorical level (before I saw the film I thought it would refer more to this - taking the high ground morally and all the contradictions that entails) but actually that is not explicit in the film, though it was perhaps something they were trying to do; perhaps with the missionary characters who instead are portrayed quite sympathetically.

 To some degree I was disappointed with the Western aspect of the film.  That bit of it felt quite derivative, exclusively male, and not very contemporary.  The Indigenous people in the film do have a fairly strong role and are relatively well explored in terms of the knowledge of tradition, language, customs, food and medicine (although perhaps there could have been more of this). 

 Massacres are a key part of the action, but the more insidious erosion of culture through missionary work, settlement and government policy is really only lightly touched upon.  The missionary sister Claire looks far too modern, and doesn't age at all over a 20-30 year period (very hard to believe when living in a wooden shed in a harsh, hot and very remote tropical climate, particularly as she is rarely shot wearing any kind of hat or sun protection). 

 It is not a feel-good film at all, although worth seeing as there are just so few films that give any airspace at all to Australia's Indigenous people and their stories.  I just wish it hadn't tried to be a Western - that is such a problematic genre in terms of Indigenous relations and portrayals. 

** .5

The Dry

 Seen at the Bay Cinema, Brighton, VIC

Bea says:  I was keen to see this as I had read the much-lauded book a few years ago.  I had a few reservations about the book at the time, but always enjoy a bit of a crime/mystery story and this one is set more or less in the part of the world I find myself living in at the moment.

 The plot revolves around a high-level police officer (Aaron Falk, played by Eric Bana), now working in Melbourne in a desk position who returns to his home town in country Victoria to attend a funeral of a peer.  The death is considered to be a murder-suicide (and now having lived in Australia for a few years I am newly struck how common this is on remote properties), but Aaron begins to dig around, which is at first welcomed by the local police, but as suspicion starts to fall on him, it is less well received. 

 Aaron has some skeletons in his own closet, which start to come out, and although he goes on to solve the murder and be lauded by the town, the film has a strong element of noir and as a result an air of darkness which in fact pretty accurately reflects life in country Australia. 

 I left Australia prior to the Millennium drought, and the long years of Howard's conservative government, and have been struck since I returned by the change in country towns which now look hard-up and depressed, particularly when compared to the glittering boom town cities on the coast.  Both the film and the book capture this despair and the emptiness left by it in people's lives and the culture of Australia well, but it is not uplifting viewing at all.

 My main concern with the film, and with the book, is that it felt like two stories in one.  I'm fairly sure this author had two different novels drafted out and combined them to make the book and film - there are, for example, two endings (one where the modern murder is solved, and one where the historical one is).  The two sit a bit awkwardly for me (and if the two stories were intentional it isn't particularly well done in my view), but it is a relatively minor point and Cecil for example didn't really notice this aspect of the story at all.

 Definitely worth a watch, but not if you need cheering up! 

***

 

 Cecil says: The storyline of The Dry was compelling enough to keep me interested for the duration of the film, though there was something of a sense of foreboding over the whole thing, it left me thinking life in country Victoria can be pretty grim at times, and as Bea and I discussed it on our way home afterwards, I realised that everything I was saying about it sounded negative.

So where does leave us?

Well, there’s the plot, first. Experienced Melbourne-based detective comes back to his home town after an apparent murder-suicide case took place there AND he received a note from someone in the town about having lied, and needing to tell the truth. He gets involved in helping the local cop investigate the killings, but meantime there is a fair bit of hostility to him from some of the town’s residents because of his own involvement with a teenage girl who died in the local river when he was still at school.

And basically you need to keep an eye on both stories – about both sets of deaths – as the film develops, with quite a lot of flashback footage of the river bank frolics of the teenagers which ended in disaster. The flashback phenomenon in story-telling is something I tend to find rather annoying, and definitely a 21^st century fashion in both novel-writing and film-making (look at the dreadful re-make of Little Women for how NOT to do it). It’s OK in The Dry once you work out which of the teenage girls is the one who died and which is still living in the town some 20 years on…

The town is full of pretty bogan rednecks, and there is a lot of violence and drinking down at the pub. It’d be enough to put me off living in country Victoria if I wasn’t already doing so…

One of these aggressive blokes, Grant, has a go at our hero Melbourne-cop, but then gets roughed up himself soon after as the suspicion falls briefly on him. But I don’t believe an experienced detective from Melbourne would immediately assume that a note saying “Grant?” had to refer to the bloke who had it in for him. Grant, after all, is also a noun, which could quite plausibly have been the reference in the note and a decent cop would have picked that up.

So, as well as the violence, the drinking, one of the newer arrivals in town is struggling with racist attitudes, so again this really doesn’t paint a brilliant picture of small town Australia…

And then it’s dry, and that’s the whole point. The river in which the teenager drowned all those years ago is just a dry, muddy track now, and although we have had a fair dowsing of rain since we saw the film, this is the time of year when I almost lose the will to live myself, as the barren brown dryness seems interminable after weeks and weeks without rain.

So, no, The Dry didn’t leave me in good spirits, but maybe that says as much about my current feelings on country Australia as it does about The Dry itself.

But, as another local to me who saw the film and loved it said, it was refreshing to see a film set exclusively in country Victoria, and it felt like the camera was on our lives here for the first time. She also thought the character of the local cop, doing his best to find a way through, managing local sentiment whole doing his job as a cop, was the most sympathetic of all of them. I guess maybe she was right…

***