Marilyn & Mumble frail and humble

Two films that couldn’t be more unalike, one aimed at adults and the other at a younger audience although adults will also enjoy it, currently playing in theatres are in fact very similar in many respects. My Week with Marilyn and Happy Feet 2 are both feel-good films about frail insecure characters that struggle with and eventually manage to conquer their fears and doubts about their abilities, and both are satisfying holiday films that will not disappoint. The films are visually breathtaking, emotionally engaging with star studded casts of beautiful characters.

The new film My Week with Marilyn is a true story about the struggles and a clash of personalities between the American film icon Marilyn Monroe and the British master of the stage Sir Laurence Olivier during the filming of a movie they did together, The Prince and the Showgirl in 1957. It shows the marked differences in acting styles between the unpredictable natural instincts of Marilyn and the polished classically trained stage conventions of Laurence Olivier.

It’s an excellent heartwarming story of first love on a movie set with some of the greatest entertainment personalities of the 20^th century and it all happens to be true. Based on the diaries of the third assistant director, Colin Clark, who was then a young man eager to work in the film industry and got his first job on this film through a family connection where he met and inadvertently became Marilyn’s confidant; helping her through the struggles and conflicts with her director and co-stars and with her insecurities.

Having experienced life behind the curtain of the Theatre and on the set of a movie production myself, this film felt very accurate and realistic with fabulous performances from Michelle Williams as Marilyn, and Kenneth Branagh as Sir Laurence Olivier. The mostly British cast also includes the well-known Dame Judy Dench, Emma Watson, best known as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films, Dominic Cooper, recently from The Devil’s Double, and Derek Jacobi one of the greatest Theatre and film actors in England.

Happy Feet 2 is the computer animated sequel to the Oscar winning film Happy Feet (2006) starring singing Penguins, elephant seals, a pair of krill and a Puffin. The film is voiced by a star studded cast of well-known American actors including Elijah Wood, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Robin Williams, Hank Azaria and Sofía Vergara from the hit TV sitcom Modern Family.

Mumble must battle his insecurities as a new father when he tries to be the supportive and inspirational dad for his son, a role that his own father could not provide for him in the first film. But he has some serious competition and major obstacles to overcome as his son’s ambitions may be unattainable.

If you loved the first Happy Feet as I did, you will not be disappointed. As with the first film, the Penguins and the rest of the creatures, apart from the fact that they sing and dance, are all rendered as realistically as possible and with incredible detail. The Music is fabulous as usual and the story has a poignant environmental message as in the first. All the elements that made Happy Feet such a memorable hit are in this sequel. Enjoy and feel free to bring the kids. 

This holiday movie season has something for everyone and an even greater line up is on the way including two Steven Spielberg films The Adventures of Tintin (Dec. 21), and War Horse (Dec. 25). 

Also watch for Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows on Dec. 16, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Dec. 21) and We Bought a Zoo (Dec. 23).

JP

Incendies

A jaw dropping experience! That was my first reaction after seeing this film recently on Blu-ray. It’s as powerful as a Greek tragedy, biblical in its imagery, and as shocking as the ending of the award winning Korean film Oldboy (2003) but doubly so. I don’t want to give anything away because the mystery of the story takes you on a journey that keeps you in suspense until the very end and the disturbing revelations are so startling that you won’t believe it.

A mother of twins living in Canada leaves behind a cryptic will request that sends her two children back to a village somewhere in the Middle East to learn about their mother’s turbulent life and the circumstances under which they were born. This film will leave you stunned and reveals some gruesome war atrocities committed by both Muslims and Christians. I saw this after the Arab revolution that saw Moammar Gadhafi killed by his own people and his son captured and it brought to mind some similar images of that conflict.

Directed by French Canadian Denis Villeneuve, who also directed Politechnique (2009), about the 1989 massacre of 14 female Engineering students in Montreal, Incendies (2010), which was released early this year, is also about the violent destruction of anger but this film is set against the extremism of a religious civil war and was shot with a raw documentary style, giving it a devastatingly realistic feel. It fully deserved the Oscar nomination it got for best foreign film last year and was a favorite to win. 

It’s a realistic depiction that can be a little disorienting at times when the story moves back and forth between the young Nawal Marwan, a Muslim girl who falls in love with a Christian boy, and her daughter who is retracing her steps years later to find out what happened to their mother and a missing brother. The mystery is carefully and slowly revealed to us just as the twins are also uncovering it.

Based on an acclaimed Canadian play of the same name by a Lebanese Canadian actor and play write, Wajdi Mouawad, Incendies was filmed in Jordan using Iraqi refugees and is set in an unknown Middle Eastern Country and a fictional city that could easily be Beirut, Lebanon in the 70s.

It took me a while to get around to seeing this film; I actually walked out of a theatre once at the beginning of this film because I was not happy with the picture quality that was being projected but I had heard many good things about it throughout the year, including all the Genie awards it received (Canadian Oscars), and l was definitely not disappointed when I finally did see it. Don’t miss it. It’s a must see you won’t soon forget.

JP

Lars and the Real Girl

This movie is a hilarious but touching comedy that takes a very unusual but real situation and treats it with charm and respect. The comedy comes out of the fact that everyone is stunned by the strangeness of what is happening, but they never play it for laughs. The situation is always treated as realistically as possible. It’s a disarmingly moving gem that hits all the right notes and will steal your heart.

Lars and the Real Girl (2007) is about an introverted, sensitive man battling his fear of people and human contact. To get over this, he buys a plastic female sex doll on the internet and has a relationship with it as if she were real. His family and the rest of the small town they live in find this behavior odd to say the least but try to help him with comic and charming results.  There are natural funny moments in the film, but it’s all played with sincerity because the problem Lars has is quite debilitating. 

The central character of Lars, who tries to keep himself isolated, is played by Canadian actor Ryan Gosling, who grew up in Cornwall, Ontario and is currently the 'it guy' for leading man roles with recent hits like Drive (2011), The Ides of March, (2011), Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011), Blue Valentine (2010) Half-Nelson (2006) and The Notebook (2004) and in this movie you can see why his appeal is so infectious.

He has one of those very special faces that are mostly expressionless and neutral onto which the audience can easily project their emotions. To explain what I mean by this, I will compare him to another actor and a character that also possess this unique ability. One of which is the great silent era comedian Buster Keaton, who was nicknamed ‘the great stone face’ for his hilarious deadpan and blank looking expressions in the most audacious situations. All the comedy and expression comes from his body language. 

A character for whom this is also true is C-3PO from the Star Wars saga. He is a robot with a blank, expressionless, neutral face and we project our emotions on him according to the situations he finds himself in and his physical body movements. There is an amazing example of this in a scene from the first Star Wars movie A New Hope (1977) where Luke Skywalker is being consoled by princess Leia after the death of Obi-wan Kenobi. Sitting opposite him is the robot C-3PO with his head downcast in sadness. The robot has no expression on his face but he looks so sad simply because of the situation and his body language. 

This is of course not the only reason for Ryan’s recent success as an ‘in demand’ actor; he is obviously very dedicated and great at what he does and this movie is an indication of just how talented he is. Ryan will also be starring in the long awaited remake of Logan’s Run (1976) which is scheduled for release sometime in 2014 and starts shooting before the end of this year.

If you want to see what all the fuss is about, catch him in this excellent and one of my favorite films, Lars and the Real Girl, which is available on DVD, and then watch some of his more recent films currently in cinemas like the political drama The Ides of March and the crime drama Drive, where he puts his signature stoic stone face to effective use. 

JP

Remembering Days of Glory

With Remembrance Day upon us I thought it would be a good opportunity to talk about one of my favorite genres; the war film. During this time we are usually shown some of the best examples of these movies on TV to remind us of the sacrifices that were made by soldiers all over the world.

Most of the war films we associate with Remembrance Day are those depicting WW II, a truly international war involving many nations and cultures and one we are in many ways still recovering from. There is probably no one in the world whose family was not affected in some way by that war.

We have today a great selection of war films from many different countries that tell the WW II story from different perspectives.

The Holocaust: Schindler’s List (1993), Fateless (2006), The Counterfeiters (2008).

The Russian perspective: Ivan’s Childhood (1962), Commissar (Komissar) (1967), Come and See (1985), Enemy at the Gates (2001), and The Cuckoo (2003).

The Allied soldier’s perspective: Overlord (1975), Memphis Belle (1990), Saving Private Ryan (1998), U-571 (2000), and Days of Glory (2007).

Resistance movements in France: Army of Shadows (1969), Lacombe Lucien (1974), Inglourious Basterds (2009).

Resistance movements in Holland: Soldier of Orange (1979), Black Book (2007), and Winter in Wartime (2011).

Resistance movements in Poland: The Pianist (2002), In Darkness (2011).

Resistance movements Russia: Defiance (2009).

The war in the Pacific: Objective, Burma! (1945), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), The Thin Red Line (1999).

The Japanese perspective: The Burmese Harp (1956), Fires on the Plain (1959), and Letters from Iwo Jima (2007). 

Even Germany’s perspective: Das Boot (1981), Mephisto (1981), The Ogre (1996), Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (2006), Downfall (2005), and Valkyrie (2008). 

One of the newer war perspectives comes from films dealing with ethnic soldiers under colonial rule fighting for the motherland and the prejudices they face from their own army while at the same time sacrificing their lives for the country that discriminates against them.

Days of Glory (2007) is one of these powerful films I recently watched again on Blu-ray from France and Algeria, which is a true story about Arab Muslim soldiers, recruited from the French colonies of Morocco and Algeria to fight for France. But they were heavily discriminated against and not treated with the same respect that French soldiers enjoyed and were basically used as canon fodder for the Germans, before sending in the French troops and never treated as French citizens as they were promised, even 60 years later.

Early next year we will see another film, Red Tails (2012), from Lucasfilm with a similar perspective about African American pilots fighting in the U.S. army during WW II and the discrimination they faced from their own army while dying for their country. Watch for it on January 20, 2012.

JP

Circumstance

Circumstance is a fascinating drama that looks at how a loving family in Iran falls apart under a repressive Islamic fundamentalist regime. The story is a mix of Deepa Mehta’s Fire (1996) and the German film The Lives of Others (2006) by Florian Hanckel von Donnersmarck.

Told through the eyes of the young free spirited, fun loving daughter of a liberal, well-educated family of professors living in Tehran, Iran, it tells the story of a budding romance between the daughter and her best friend, and how Islamic fundamentalists infiltrate the family through an East German style Stasi spy system.

I liked everything about this film; the beautiful poetic, dreamy visual style and pace of the film, the realistically well drawn characters, the excellent cast who are natural and totally believable and the eerie Orwellian big brother feeling that pervades the film with surveillance camera footage.

This film really opened my eyes to the oppression of not only women and youth but also how everyone in a radical Islamic state is affected by the restrictions placed on people’s freedoms. A young girl’s coming of age and love for her beautiful girl friend is shattered when her older brother, a recovering addict, lost and unable to find work as a musician, is indoctrinated into the fundamentalist Islamic faith and joins the morality police. Betraying his friends and family by spying on them, he turns them into the police to serve his own purposes, destroying the family’s liberal haven in a repressive totalitarian state.

This Sundance Audience Choice award winning film is at times very sensual and gives us a look into the underground youth culture in Iran. I thought this was a very engaging, mesmerizing and thought provoking film that touched on many issues. 

First time director Maryam Keshavarz has based the film on her own real experiences while living in Iran and has powerfully recreated the oppressive atmosphere of people living in fear of the state.

Other excellent films that deal with this subject matter in Iran include Persepolis (2007) by Marjane Satrapi and Ten (2002) by Abbas Kiarostami.

JP