Moving On: new releases

For the first time in what is now quite a long life, there’s nothing running in the movie theaters that I want to see. I was inclined to put this down to what you might call the suck it up Gran'pa syndrome, a movie goer’s Seventh Age. I do still have my teeth but I register current films as made by people younger than I am to attract people younger than I am.

However, I discover that Marty Scorsese has stirred a substantial controversy with a manifesto that puts a similar argument, decrying the fact that super hero movies have edged out the kind of films which some of us valued all our lives. His defenders claim that he’s not knocking the current movies or their fans but the fact that they are taking the space and attention that cinema proper used to fill.

Well, the westerns and musicals which  once brightened my day have all but vanished. (Scorsese says the new films lack danger)  However the current shift is more a change of business model than esthetics and the idea that the streamed mini series are a fair swap doesn’t seem to be getting traction. Outside of Game of Thrones, these don’t appear to be part of the on-going conversation. What’s the last time you heard someone reference Lonesome Dove or Winds of War?

I was all set to write off current releases with Top Gun - Maverick as the best of a bad lot. I didn’t like the first one all that much but Joseph Kosinski’s team do manage a few stirring moments - un-manned flight supporter General Ed Harris not displaced by the down draft while the van next to him shakes and the impossible stunt flying through the bridge arches, while superannuated pilot Tom Cruise zaps the Uranium Enrichment plant of an anonymous foreign power. 

I’d enjoyed the Jurassic Park cycle much more but their new Jurassic World Dominion, directed by Colin Trevorrow, didn’t grab me. They jammed all the leads from the previous movies in and struggled to give them space (I must have blinked while Omar Sy got eaten) and the once dazzling effects work is now familiar. I notice the film departed the cinemas much faster than the Top Gun movie.

Ma Dong-seok, Gwi-hwa Choi Beomjoidosi 2/ The Round Up

After these my, hopes centered on Sang-yong Lee’s The Roundup, a follow up to Yoon-Seong Kang’s 2017 Korean thick ear piece Beomjoidosi / Outlaws and it again fronts bulky Don Lee / Ma Dong seok, who got attention since the first film from his appearance in Train to Busan. He’s a “Beast Cop” character who gets our attention by brute force. He opens his innings by pulling the lock straight out of a door rather than putting his shoulder to it.

The premise is interesting. Korean cops set off for Vietnam to collect a wanted man who has turned himself in at the embassy. Vietnamese cameramen shot the material located there and the look is different but it’s not long before this one settles into a another dim punch up movie, centering on nasties who target Korean visitors. Complications arrive when a kidnapped man’s father (Nam Mun-cheol) refuses to be extorted.

Don Lee’s character is imposing and there is a possible twist in the way he runs the show though his superior from the first film, Inspector Captain Gwi-hwa Choi is along on the extradition. Unfortunately all this subsides into a succession of punch-ups with our bulky hero smashing stuntmen through whatever obstacles are on hand.

On its home turf, this one is the biggest hit since Covid appeared and a sequel is already in production.

Ben Lewin occupies a curious zone between TV & film in Britain. His new Falling for Figaro kicks off with a mouth singing opera in close up and chubby Danielle Macdonald in the audience rapt while her significant other Shazad Latif dozes on her sholder. She decides to dump her lauded spot as a City Fund Manager, determined to see if she can make it as an opera singer. The only chance is training with veteran Joanna Lumley in a remote farming village where the accommodation is Gary Lewis’ Stinking Pig Inn with the wooden porker tab key to the Bridal Suite (“all that’s available”) and we get cutaways to highland cattle doubling as audience. Rehearsals play over feeding the chooks and McDonald gets to do Mozart’s setting of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” impressively.

Climax at the Singers of Renown contest, where MacDonald goes on after the girl who has barfed but still sings a treat. Speedy finale about no short cuts and a predictable three years later happy ending pleasantly delivered.

It’s very British to mix high culture with the quaint regionals of A Cuckoo in the Nest, Whiskey Galore and (better) I Know Where I’m Going but this one has something that they don’t, in the way it makes the characters’ communicate their obsession with singing opera. It’s easy to understand wanting to do what they want and easy to see why Palace offered this to their public. Feel good stuff with unexceptional ‘scope production and strong leads. Anticipate an after life on subsidised TV.

So far familiarity is breeding contempt and I’m happier prizing Jean Arthur movies out of You Tube.

However old habits die hard and I was finally rewarded with something that resonated, Craig Roberts’ BBC piece Phantom of the Open.

It is the dreaded Great British Ugly again, like Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool or Peaky Blinders and it labors the issue of class one more time but this one does manage to be involving through a lovable loser protagonist and strong performances particularly by Mark Rylance and Sally Hawkins. The ending with his son caddying for Rylance is irresistible.

We fear the worst with more dim, grainy colour coverage of  Bacon Furnace crane driver Maurice Flitcroft / Rylance (cf. Albert Prjéan in Metropolitan) and a small screen B&W montage of WW2 getting in the way of his dreams. He’s told by his, now suit-wearing deputy manager, son that he’s facing redundancy when the mill is Nationalised and leaks the information to his work mates - classic British working class drama set up, complete with shot of the cloth cap wearing, unsmiling shift piling through the dim, brick walled street.

However Mark is into follow your dream philosophy - quick clip of Billy Liar on the tele, where he sees a golf champion competing in the British Open and decides that that’s for him. He starts reading up on the game.

Despite his total lack of skill, he takes advantage of paper work at the snooty golf club, where members won’t let him make up a four and the secretary won’t let him join, and enters for the 1976 Open, getting to run up double figures in the sand trap, with his disco dancing twin sons along swapping the one yellow caddie vest between them. He clocks up up the all time worst score, ignoring the secretary’s advice that he’s not their type. The TV coverage (they don’t actually have this for trials) makes him a media joke.

After practicing slugging golf balls into a dust bin, he comes back as a French player in a false mustache. (we’ve already seen him manage broken Spanish meeting Seve Balesterous in the dressing room) Even the birdie he looks like scoring eludes him. Failure is repeated with the twins' Disco Dancing tour when the craze evaporates. The manager son is told to disown his family “You can’t be both!” However Hawkins gives him a stiff talk. This is the point where the piece pulls away from all those other British accounts of proletarian hardship.

We get a daffy happy ending when Mark discovers he has inspired an American Maurice Flitcroft tournament and they want to fly him out for the tenth anniversary. In a perverse way he has provided Sally the travel, champagne, caviar and a diamond (From his mate down at the market) he promised. The son’s Chinese clients are delighted to meet the heir to the only man who plays golf worse than their boss.

Nice finale where a title lists the three subsequent Opens Flitcroft/Rylance entered in disguises. Lots of media montages and a balance between showing him as a pesky simpleton and someone who managed to have a better life than the worn down class around him,  inverts the miserablist expectation it sets up. 

Taken with Phantom of the Open, this pair of films actually do have something interesting to say. The thing that makes them stand out is that they document the most winning aspect of British society, the way so many people reject the grim life allotted them and find outlets for their frustrations. That's where the Film Societies come in.

So what is the message? I’m a bit off put to find that I’m actually repeating what the old wise heads were saying when I began, counseling that the work of Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson was more worthy than all those thick ear American films with Humphrey Bogart and Marlon Brando. I never swallowed that one and I’d expect the new readers who are starting here to regard my advice with suspicion. It will take a long time to decide if the awareness actually has matured or whether it’s making a misjudged attempt at following the money.

Meanwhile I note with interest that a few front runners are still talking to my generation. Chuck (Two and a Half Men, Roseanne) Lorre’s The Kominsky Method has Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin fronting half hour episodes about a Hollywood acting teacher modeled on Lee Strasburg and an agent friend, full of ferocious bad taste gags delivered impeccably by it’s great cast. The dead wife wanted Barbara Streisand to sing at her funeral (Michael cautions “I don’t think Streisand does funerals”) and they recruit a drag queen imitator. After the daughter falls down drunk, Nancy Travis, Douglas’ date for the event, says it’s the best time she’s ever had.

 

Arkin & Douglas - The Kominsky Method.

 And ... after a long dry spell I have found a new release that did catch my attention. I've enthused before about Aamir Kahn, the lead from Lagaan, and his subsequent output. His new Laal Singh Chaddha has got another week in the George St. Center and presumably other locations. You may not get another stab at it, so make the effort to see it now. I'll do this one at length later.

 

 

Barrie Pattison 2022