Films you've seen lately

[Dave2002]

On Boxing Day we were staying at our daughter's and she suggested going to a mid-day preview of Alexander Payne's new movie The Holdovers at the Ritzy in Brixton, about which she had heard very good reports. A dozen other audience members were in attendance. We really enjoyed it. Fine script, rewarding narrative full of subtle detail and great performances from the three main characters. Working in schools I came come across many a schoolmaster similar to Paul Giamatti's Ancient History teacher at a New England prep school. Plenty to discuss over a pint in the Trinity Arms afterwards. In the evening we watched Maestro on Netflix. Well worth watching but we agreed that we had got more from Holdovers. I'm delighted to see that Giamatti has just won a Golden Globe.

The Holdovers is a decent enough film - and available on some aircraft entertainment systems. The 'subtle details' mentioned lead to the characters involved changing their actions in unexpected ways - so indeed there are quite a few issues to discuss after watching.

[Belgrove]

Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’, has become something of a cliché, one which is realised in totality in The Zone of Interest, but in so doing Jonathan Glazer has made something intrinsically banal. Despite that, the film features prominently in this year’s awards season. It shares its title and location with Martin Amis’ novel (which is anything but banal), but nothing else. We are in the family home of the commandant of Auschwitz, a spacious villa with gardens on the other side of the camp’s wall. We see none of what happens behind those walls, but we do hear it. The sound design is the most effective part of the film, a mechanised rumbling and grinding, punctuated by shunting trains, gun shots, barking dogs, shouts and screams, forming a continuous muted backdrop to the family’s everyday banalities. The colour palette is muted too, that metallic wanness of old home movies.

So we get the point that a hell on Earth can be normalised by its creators, and this itself causes and manifests perturbations in them, but that’s it. It’s an audacious but not entirely novel take on a subject that has been treated by cinema elsewhere. But what would someone who knows little or nothing of the holocaust make of it? The holocaust is part of the national curriculum, taught in Key Stage 3 - I wonder how pupils confronted with the topic for the first time would react to this film. What I fear is that it would bore them.

The inmates of the camp are only obliquely seen and, other than their offscreen screams, are given no voice. I think this film robs them of the suffering they endured.

[richardfinegold]

The Holdovers is a decent enough film - and available on some aircraft entertainment systems. The 'subtle details' mentioned lead to the characters involved changing their actions in unexpected ways - so indeed there are quite a few issues to discuss after watching.

I liked the ending which avoids the typical Hollywood cliches that the film seems like it is hurtling towards

[Dave2002]

The inmates of the camp are only obliquely seen and, other than their offscreen screams, are given no voice. I think this film robs them of the suffering they endured.

I think this is one film which I will take steps to avoid. The trailer was sufficient.

[johncorrigan]

At last, we managed to get to see 'Poor Things' this week. I had had mixed messages from friends from 'unmissable', 'alright', 'too long', to 'best film in ages'. I thought it was a terrific couple of hours and a bit. The sets were beautiful, unusual at all times. Willem Dafoe's face did not lose its effect throughout the film - he was wonderful, though his accent was exceedingly dodgy. I don't think I had seen Emma Stone in anything before - her performance as Bella Baxter was astounding from the word go, as we journeyed with her through this alien world and polite society and the horrors of society. Mark Grufallo played the extraordinary cad, bewitched by Bella. The film was funny, sometimes uncomfortably so, and always interesting. The bordello madame looked like Keef Richards, which I found hilarious. I didn't find it too long at all, but the film reached a natural conclusion for me, if that is the right word.
A huge highlight for me was the surprise appearance, for me anyway, of Hanna Schygulla, whom Bella meets on the ship and who is pivotal in Bella's journey towards freedom. It was so good to see her after so many years. Back in the seventies I used to go to Fassbinder films in the hope of seeing her - she's aged well.

[Belgrove]

A bit late for Valentine’s Day, but The Taste of Things is an exquisite and hugely romantic treat. It stars former real-life partners Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel as Eugenie, who cooks for epicurean gourmet Dodin and his appreciative friends. It epitomises the ‘slow-movement’, we basically watch the radiant Binoche prepare, with unfussy precision, classic cuisine française with consummate care and love, and this is touchingly reciprocated (along the way, what was reputedly President Mitterrand’s final meal is discretely consumed beneath a veil). Director Anh Hung Tran uses long gliding shots, beautifully and luminously lit, to show Eugenie at her unrushed art, whilst the gentle sounds of the kitchen are larded with those of peacocks, woodpeckers and bumbling bees from beyond the kitchen door. It’s a serene, touching and sensual delight that brings a smile to the lips. Mme Belgrove was won over, and suggested a glass of champagne when we got home… .

[vinteuil]

The Taste of Things is an exquisite and hugely romantic treat...

... very tempting : I still recall with delight the 1987 film Babette's Feast based on the story by Isak Dinesen / Karen Blixen, which would seem to resemble this

.

[johncorrigan]

A bit late for Valentine’s Day, but The Taste of Things is an exquisite and hugely romantic treat. It stars former real-life partners Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel as Eugenie, who cooks for epicurean gourmet Dodin and his appreciative friends. It epitomises the ‘slow-movement’, we basically watch the radiant Binoche prepare, with unfussy precision, classic cuisine française with consummate care and love, and this is touchingly reciprocated (along the way, what was reputedly President Mitterrand’s final meal is discretely consumed beneath a veil). Director Anh Hung Tran uses long gliding shots, beautifully and luminously lit, to show Eugenie at her unrushed art, whilst the gentle sounds of the kitchen are larded with those of peacocks, woodpeckers and bumbling bees from beyond the kitchen door. It’s a serene, touching and sensual delight that brings a smile to the lips. Mme Belgrove was won over, and suggested a glass of champagne when we got home… .

Thanks, Belgrove. I've just noticed it's on in Dunders this weekend. I think I'll be suggesting that to Mrs C for an evening out.

We took in 'All of us Strangers' this past week. A very sad wee film, I thought - in some ways more like a piece of theatre than a movie. Intense performance from the always excellent Andrew Scott, very well supported by Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell and Claire Foy - but it's Scott's film. Marred somewhat for me by a dodgy eighties' soundtrack.

[richardfinegold]

We watched a half hour documentary on You Tube last night called The Last Repair Shop. It’s about a shop in Los Angeles that fixes instruments that are supplied to the public school students, most of whom would would not be able to rent or pay to fix them. The movie mostly focuses on the broken lives of the technicians and the students, analogizing the repair of instruments to the healing effects of music. Well done and I think it would be of particular interest to Forumites

[johncorrigan]

The Taste of Things is an exquisite and hugely romantic treat. .

Thanks, Belgrove. Mrs C and I loved it - so beautiful to look at. The sound was exquisite whether the sound of cooking, or the sounds of the garden, or the sounds of eating. It was also funny - the scene where the gourmands covered their heads in white sheets to enjoy, I suppose, the tastes and smells of a meal. The scene where everyone is eating outdoors looked like a Manet painting, with all the various hats and chairs. Probably my favourite scenes was when Dodin cooks for Eugenie. The setting was so beautiful, with Eugenie beautifully dressed, as Dodin continues to try to woo her. He produces a dish with a pear, which is replicated in the next scene as he walks into her room - a feast for the eyes and the ears. Beautifully French. Thanks for the recommendation.

[Roger Webb]

I finally saw Shoot the Piano Player yesterday. I had been curious about it ever since the early seventies when Elton John released Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only The Piano Player. I think the only Truffaut film that I had previously seen was The Last Metro, and that was so long ago that I barely remember it. I fell in love with Marie Dubois-what a beauty. And a great flic with a determinedly non Hollywood vibe

Excuse me for going back a bit, but as a lifelong Truffaut fan, I'd like to suggest something you may find equally absorbing.

There is a series of five films, really an autobiography of Truffaut's life and his disturbed and unstable childhood. The first film 'Quatre sans Coups' (The 400 blows) tells the story of Antoine Doinel (Truffaut's alter ego) and his Paris upbringing, school, his love of literature, his descent into delinquency, his time at borstal from which he escapes and discovers freedom in the form of the sea - one of the greatest and most moving scenes in all films - shot near Honfleur on the Normandy coast.

The second in the series, a short made for a commission featuring the leading 'New Wave' directors with the overall title of 'Love at 20' catches up with Antoine as he falls in love for the first time,
with Colette (the title is 'Antoine et Colette'). Now this is particularly interesting because Antoine works at the Philips LP pressing plant in Paris and spends his evenings at the Salle Pleyel where he first encounters Colette - this scene, actually shot at the Salle Pleyel during a perf of Berlioz's Sym. Fantastique gets my vote for the best cutting-to-music ever!.

Truffaut's love of music comes across in all his films, no more than 'A and C). Antoine is played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, who became director of the National Theatre in Paris, and is to it what Olivier was to ours!

I'll leave you to discover the rest, they are all wonderful!

[Belgrove]

Glad you enjoyed it john. I think it’s the most romantic and beautiful film I’ve seen since The English Patient, which also featured the radiant Juliette Binoche. (The gourmet’s covered their heads to devour ortolan - now illegal). Tran’s earlier film The Scent of Green Papaya is set in early ‘60’s Saigon and has a similar pace, sensibility and quiet beauty.

[Ein Heldenleben]

This looks good . The chances of it coming to my culturally benighted neck of the woods are minimal but I’d be interested to hear others’ thoughts, Lars Eidinger is a very good actor and does derangement and general wide eyed hysteria well. Perfect for a conductor really.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/feb/18/sterben-dying-review-the-biggest-conductor-meltdown-since-cate-blanchetts-tar

[johncorrigan]

Glad you enjoyed it john. I think it’s the most romantic and beautiful film I’ve seen since The English Patient, which also featured the radiant Juliette Binoche. (The gourmet’s covered their heads to devour ortolan - now illegal). Tran’s earlier film The Scent of Green Papaya is set in early ‘60’s Saigon and has a similar pace, sensibility and quiet beauty.

Thanks for the added information, Belgrove. I had no idea about the ritualistic consumption of ortolan...just added another element to the fascination of the film. By the way, did you hear Juliette Binoche with John Wilson on This Cultural Life' a couple of weeks ago?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001vzm5

[kernelbogey]

The gourmet’s covered their heads to devour ortolan - now illegal.

I had absolutely no idea what ortolan meant: so I looked it up.