(Editor’s note: Cool themes. But from the accents, all the Asians and Anglos come from San Francisco and the Indians from Michigan. Whenever the Water Master speaks, mentally add the word “Dude” to the end of his sentences.)
Marigolds: Maggie Smith, Ronald Pickup, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton (Yes, We Know Who You Are), Celia Imrie, Judi Dench, Tom WilkinsonLife holds no more promise for you, if you’re named “John Madden” and you’re given an all-star Brit ensemble cast to direct that includes Judi Dench and Maggie Smith.
Can anything with both Judi Dench and Maggie Smith ever be really bad? The answer is, “No,” and that knowledge will sustain you through the rather drab and formulaic first forty minutes or so of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. I can’t promise you’ll have the deepest cinema experience of your life, but there’s a quiet gentle touch to the movie that I loved: it doesn’t rip you wide open. It suggests feelings, like memories, rather than pounding you with them.
An outstanding interview by The Economist of Terry Gilliam.
Everybody says that the studio system is bad for movies. But Gilliam makes the point that production-line movies that value “safety” are gradually changing audiences. (He’s also got some pretty scathing and funny things to say about Bush and Cheney infringing his copyright on Brazil.)
He’s got the film rights to Pratchett and Gaiman’s joint novel Good Omens (and if you haven’t read it yet, you’re depriving yourself… it’s the book that put forward the hypothesis that cassette tapes left in a car for a certain period of time morph into The Best of Queen, a hypothesis I tested back in the ‘80’s when you made mix-tapes on cassette for people you had crushes on, but could only find The Best of Queen or Boston’s first album or Journey’s Greatest Hits when you were looking for your amazingly cool mixes). There’s nobody I’d rather see direct that one.
Crazy old hippy.
Gives me a Monty Python frisson that I haven’t had since John Cleese gave Graham Chapman’s eulogy, and became the first person at a British memorial service to say “fuck.”
I was dreading an encomium of some sort. But there’s a conscience in this film thats both political and personal that’s missing in a lot of political biopics. My only political gripe was the oversimplification of so many of Thatcher’s acts, any one of which could have been a film of its own: her breaking of the mining strikes and the Falklands action.
But the weaving of hubris and strength is as strong as it ever needed to be for such a complex character.
Waiting on:
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. My daughter, The Nightmare Child, and I have to go see that together.
Our version of Big Brother, unlike Orwell’s, is the product of the free choice of both its viewers and participants. It wasn’t created by corporate monsters or the military-industrial complex to keep us in our place. If, as The Hunger Games seems to imply, reality TV is an evil opiate for the masses, we’re eagerly doping ourselves. Panem’s problem is straightforward compared with our own: sadly, the failings of our free society are our own fault, and can only be addressed on that basis.
Nonetheless, the film sticks to the comforting message that misery stems from the actions of the authorities. Its protagonists are the innocent victims of a system that they’re powerless to influence. Its target audience, the young, are invited to pride themselves on the blameless nobility of their age-group, but not expected to interrogate the realities of their world, or question their own passion for The X Factor.
The anonymous blogger here points out an artistic / philosophical weakness in the film (and the book, I think): the picture of tyranny in it is vastly oversimplified.
“Only I keep wishing I could think of a way to…to show the Capitol they don’t own me. That I’m more than just a piece in their Games,” says Peeta Mellamark. This is the struggle of the victim against the system, truly enough.
But the blogger doesn’t go far enough:
“It says here that ‘religion is the opiate of the masses.’ What do you suppose that means?” ‘it means that Karl Marx hadn’t seen anything yet.”If you reflect for any time at all on entertainment in history, there’s a complex relationship between tyranny and victims. We collude with authorities, yes…. but are we really growing unaware that the authorities have a vested interest in keeping the population passive?
Did anybody fail to notice that our collusion in our own inactivity serves somebody very powerful?
We’ve all had that experience when we’ve been watching a nunsploitation film and wondered, “What collision between a religious conscience and libertinism does this genre represent? How does it relate to the individual and collective conscience about sex, and what does it have to do with the fact that this allegedly medieval nun is wearing nail-polish and sporting a navel-piercing?”
Reflections on the nunsploitation genre, sex, Catholicism, guilt, French literature, Freud, and conscience.
Bob Anderson in the Vader costume, but without the dark helmet. He almost didn't get credit for his work as saber-Vader, as George Lucas didn't want to take credit from David Prowse. But you can't keep a great artist behind the plastic mask forever.While trawling the Charlotte Observer this morning, I read that Hollywood swordmaster Bob Anderson has died on New Year's Day.
He was an Olympic fencer for Great Britain in the 1950's who went on to work in movies as a swordmaster: you can see him fencing as Darth Vader in the first Star Wars movies.
He made onscreen sword-fighting a ballet, an art, something worth watching that contributed to both characterization and the story. He was inventive at finding ways to make sword fights comedic, spirited, or adventuresome, and used style to say something about the characters: consider Darth Vaders' heavy hammering of Luke Skywalker on the bridge of Cloud City, or old Obi-Wan Kenobi's elegant, elusive spin away from Vader's jabs. Or Aragorn's instinctive awareness of enemies behind him. These small moves in fight sequences say things about each character. Anderson really understood that you can't divorce a fighting style from the personality, at least not in art.
He staged sword (and light-saber) fights and trained the actors for the in the Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Highlander, James Bond, and Zorro franchises, as well as choreographing and training the actors for the brilliantly comedic fencing scene in The Princess Bride, which I think may be his best work.
Notice in the video below the sword-play's casual, effortless elegance forming an ironic dramatic bedrock for the funny dialogue and a shift in the relationship between two major characters. Momentum shifts between them several times as they advance and retreat from one another, fighting through one another's secrets and building towards mutual recognition. They begin as unknown quantities to one another, but learn to know one another through the fencing, and gradually develop a mutual respect that carries the story forward:
If you didn't notice the first time through, watch again how The Man In Black wrongfoots Inigo by maintaining his fencing discipline and calm as well as his secret identity. When Inigo, the drunken and emotionally turbulent Spaniard, does lose, it's because of a series of wild, emotional cuts with his blade that show his recognition that he is outclassed by a man he cannot truly understand. And yet they share in common deep love of different kinds, and they are (as The Man In Black recognizes) peers of a kind.
Bob Anderson's art will be missed.
Some of his last work will be seen in Peter Jackson's The Hobbit.
Sunday, May 20, 2012 at 5:00AM | by 
