(Patrick Compton)
Four films strongly recommended to punctuate festive
revels. (Review by Patrick Compton)
If you’ve decided not to put your life in other people’s
hands on our roads over the Christmas season, chances are that you’ll stay
within range of Durban’s movie houses.
Here are four films currently being screened that I would
strongly recommend to punctuate your revels.
FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM (9/10)
Marvellous fantasy film and you don’t have to be a Harry
Potter-head to enjoy it although it won’t harm your prospects. I went to see
the movie this week and was deeply impressed by JK Rowling’s script, Potter
veteran David Yates’s direction, a great cast led by Eddie Redmayne and some
special effects to remember.
Redmayne, the standout performer, plays the central
character, a shy, donnish magician named Newt Scamander – who you can trace
back to Harry Potter and the
Philosopher’s Stone – who arrives in prohibition-era New York looking for
some exotic species of animals. He’s got a few of his own as well, tentatively
locked inside a shabby suitcase with worryingly insecure clasps.
Much play is made of Newt’s particular “fantastic beasts”
who are a varied and wondrous lot, but the film has a darker strain that
features a dark, poltergeist-like whirlwind – called an Obscurial – that
ravages the Big Apple from time to time.
Newt, being English, still refers to mere human beings as
“muggles”, but the New York magic set prefer the term “no-maj”. The tensions
within the magic community about their relationship to the human world are
palpable and Newt’s arrival sparks a crisis.
There are fine performances from Katherine Waterston as a
kind of agent for the magic community, Samantha Morton as a creepy anti-witch
activist, Dan Fogler as an amiable no-maj we can all identify with who gets
caught up with Newt and Alison Sudol as a sexy mind-reader. Colin Farrell is
also excellent as a sinister, darkly ambitious member of the magic community.
Director Yates has a veritable army of talented technical
folk behind him looking after the stunning production design, special and
visual effects and animation. I was suitably goggle-eyed. There are four more
movies planned which is an exciting prospect. Meanwhile, take the family to see
this first, splendiferous start to the series.
The movie is showing at Gateway (3D), Musgrave, Shelly
Beach, Boardwalk Inkwazi, Watercrest Mall, Suncoast (3D), Pavilion (3D) and
Galleria (3D).
HELL OR HIGH WATER (10/10)
This is the real deal: a muscular, modern-day Western
with great performances, a brilliant script, ravishing images and a soundtrack
to die for. So far, it’s my film of the year.
Set in sunbaked, depressed West Texas, it may be a
surprise that the movie is directed by a Scotsman, David Mackenzie, who first
made his name with the 2003 Ewan McGregor drama, Young Adam.
But Mackenzie does a great job of insinuating himself into
the authentic Texas bubble created by scriptwriter Taylor Sheridan (who wrote
the Tex-Mex drug thriller Sicario). A
native Texan himself, Sheridan knows his terrain – physical, economic and
cultural – down to the last wrinkle and sardonic drawl.
The film is structured in a similar way to the Coen
brothers’ No Country for Old Men with
which it shares certain similarities. On the one hand we get to know the Howard
brothers, Toby (Chris Pine) and Tanner (Ben Foster), who are engaged in the sly
enterprise of robbing minor branches of the Texas Midland Bank, the very same
corporate entity that is threatening to foreclose on the mortgage for their
family farm where oil has just been discovered.
Strolling, or so it seems, in the wake of the brothers is
laconic Texas ranger Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges in outstanding form) and his
Indian-American sidekick Alberto Parker (Gil Hamilton). Their leisurely pursuit
is punctuated by reflections on Hamilton’s impending (and unwished-for)
retirement and his joshing relationship with his partner that shines a sharp
light on the history of the region which was once owned by the Indians, then
the whites ... and now the banks (who are the movie’s real bad guys).
The two brothers are very different. Pine, best known for
his work as Kirk in the Star Trek series, is unrecognisable as the softly-spoken
brother who is masterminding the robberies largely for the sake of his two sons
from a former marriage. His wild-spirited brother Tanner, just out of jail, is
played with scene-chewing abandon by Ben Foster.
What is particularly impressive about this film, which
also contains echoes of Bonny and Clyde, is that it manages to be a heist
thriller, with all that entails, as well as a full-bodied character study of
both the pursued and their pursuers, not to mention a cogent portrait of the
particular world that contains them.
The movie is also very funny in its bleak way, with tonal
colours ranging from dark to black.
Mackenzie’s director of photography, Giles Nuttgens,
vividly captures the visual tone of depressed West Texas, ranging from
one-horse towns to the semi-desert plains and the open roads that bisect them.
The soundtrack is brilliantly complementary, composed by Nick Cave and Warren
Ellis, that includes songs from the likes of Townes van Zandt, Gillian Welch
and Ray Wylie Hubbard.
Mackenzie has remarked that he “looks forward to the day
when people get sick of superheroes”. There are no heroes of any ilk in this
movie, just ordinary people pushed to the limits by corporate forces beyond
their comprehension.
Hell or High Water is
showing at Cinema Nouveau, Gateway, and at The Pavilion.
MAGGIE’S PLAN (9/10)
A few years ago, I became aware of Greta Gerwig. Not
everyone will adore her lovable ditziness, but I was immediately captured by
her charmingly idiosyncratic ways, as if she was Annie Hall’s daughter. Now the
blonde actress has made two films in quick succession which successfully
display her talents.
Both movies, fortunately, have been screened at Cinema
Nouveau. The first, Mistress America,
was directed by Ms Gerwig’s boyfriend, Noah Baumbach. Sadly, that movie has
been and gone. The second opened last weekend and is a smart metropolitan (read
New York) comedy of the screwball variety that is written and directed by
Rebecca Miller.
Ms Miller, to put it mildly, has an interesting artistic
DNA, being the daughter of that towering American playwright Arthur Miller and
the wife of actor Daniel Day-Lewis who is himself the son of Cecil, Britain’s
former Poet Laureate. In fact, if
Miller was ever invited to meet the Queen, she would be introduced as “The Lady
Day-Lewis”. So there you go.
Of course, none of the above would remotely matter if she
has made a stinker, but thankfully Maggie’s
Plan is a witty, sophisticated rom-com of the sort that almost never gets
made these days.
Gerwig is perfectly cast as Maggie, a woman whose
relationships never seem to last longer than six months. She describes herself
as “able”, perhaps her friends would say “controlling”, but she always seems to
end up with too much on her plate. She’s keen to have a baby, but not with a
man, so she’s on the lookout for a sperm donor. She settles on Guy (Travis
Fimmel), blue-eyed and bearded, who makes the best pickles in Brooklyn.
So far so good, but Maggie’s carefully laid plan is –
naturally – subverted by Eros in the shape of John, a “ficto-critical
anthropologist” (do such creatures exist?) who is rather inconveniently married
to a formidable Danish academic, Georgette, brilliantly played by Julianne
Moore, complete with accent.
As John (Ethan Hawke) observes, in every relationship
someone is the gardener and someone the rose. We learn that his marriage to
Georgette foundered over the fact that both wanted to play the same role (the
rose). Maggie, on the other hand, is happy to play the gardener, bringing up
their daughter as well as cultivating and admiring her husband’s academic work
and his (interminable) first novel.
Paradise is soon lost, however, as Maggie begins to
realise, hilariously, that perhaps John would be better off with his ex after
all.
No more spoilers, but suffice it to say that the movie’s
comic force radiates from Maggie’s fragile efforts to manage and anticipate the
unruly logic of her own desires ... and everybody else’s.
Aside from Gerwig, who carries the movie, Moore is
wonderful as the outwardly chilly academic who nurtures an inner fire, while
Maggie’s best friends are a delightfully abrasive couple played by Bill Hader
and Maya Rudolph, both veterans from Saturday
Night Live.
Maggie’s Plan is not a
“laugh-out-loud” comedy, but it’s full of potent lines and rich chuckles and
you’ll have a satisfied smile plastered on your face as you walk out.
Maggie’s Plan is
showing at Cinema Nouveau, Gateway
A United Kingdom (8/10),
which I reviewed on artSMart last week (http://news.artsmart.co.za/2016/12/a-united-kingdom.html)
, is the final movie of the quartet. It’s showing at Cinema Nouveau. – Patrick Compton
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