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~ Posted by Nicholas Barber, April 11th 2012

British cinema-goers can currently choose between two films about the Titanic disaster, one from 1958 (“A Night To Remember”) and one from 1997 (“Titanic”). The difference between the two titles tells us a lot about the difference between the two films. The first is understated, ambiguous and ironic. The second, well, isn’t. But as tempting as it might be to scoff at James Cameron’s aversion to subtlety at this point, the fact is that he had no choice but to name his film “Titanic”. Even Julian Fellowes, who knows a thing or two about English restraint, went the same way for his recent television mini-series.

Today’s film titles have to be brand names: easy to read, easy to remember, easy to Google, easy to tweet. No studio would accept anything as oblique as  “A Night to Remember” now. To give another example, a 1942 film about German troops occupying a British village was called “Went the Day Well”. In 2011, a film with the same premise was called “Resistance”.

Still, it could be worse. In the past couple of years, we’ve seen the rise of film titles which are barely titles at all, but functional placeholders which ensure that even the thickest members of the audience know what to expect. “Bad Teacher”, “Horrible Bosses” and “Tower Heist” all came out in 2011. In each case, you can imagine an executive saying to a screenwriter, “I’m busy. If you can’t pitch it to me in two words, I don’t want to know.”  read more »

 ~ Posted by Simon Willis, April 4th 2012 

A couple of days ago, I went to a preview of "Two Years at Sea", a new documentary by the artist and film-maker Ben Rivers. It follows the life of Jake Williams, a middle-aged man who lives alone in a modest and ramshackle house in a Scottish forest. He spends his days chopping wood, reading, sleeping and hanging bird perches made from old milk bottles. To look at, he's the classic hermit—lean, grey-bearded and melancholy. He sounds like a hermit too, which is to say he hardly speaks. I caught two snatches of comprehensible speech in the whole 88 minutes, mumbled to nobody in particular, one about cough mixture and the other about socks. That makes it sound like a long 88 minutes, but the power of the film comes from Williams's eccentricity, and the privileged glimpses you get of his very private world. The thing about recluses is that you don't tend to meet them often.

After seeing that, I came across "This is My Land", a 14-minute documentary Rivers made in 2006 which is also about Williams (excerpt here). In the earlier film, Williams talks directly to camera about the best way to build hedges, and smiles and laughs. "Two Years at Sea", made using 16mm film and old cameras, is darker. The Scottish landscape is grainy, the cloud charcoal and Rivers intersperses footage of Jake with photographs—a woman, two children, a couple baling hay—whose identity is never made clear, but whom we assume are Jake's family. The photos raise questions about the costs of Jake's life: whether he's escaping or searching; whether he's lonely as well as solitary, and if so, whether that's a blessing or a curse.  read more »

~ Posted by Maggie Fergusson, April 3rd 2012

Thanks to “The King’s Speech”, and particularly to Geoffrey Rush, we’re all familiar with Lionel Logue—the tough-minded but compassionate Australian speech therapist who helped George VI to overcome his stammer. But when did Colin Firth (aka George VI) first acquire that stammer, and who taught him? Interviewed after the release of the film in 2010, he paid tribute to voice coach Neil Swain. But actually Firth was stammering confidently years before “The King’s Speech” was ever conceived.

Recently, I watched the DVD of “A Month in the Country”, the 1987 adaptation of J.L. Carr’s novel about a shell-shocked soldier returning from the Western Front to spend a long, hot summer in the Yorkshire village of Oxgodby. Directed by Pat O’Connor—who’s just completed a film of Michael Morpurgo’s “Private Peaceful”, to be released later this year—it seems to have slipped from most people’s consciousness. 

I’d remembered only the barest outlines of the plot: that the veteran, Tom Birkin (Firth), sets to work restoring a medieval mural in the village church, and that in doing so he reaches a psychological truce with the horrors he’s witnessed. I’d half forgotten that he befriends another veteran, played by Kenneth Branagh (almost absurdly youthful-looking, fair and fresh-faced as a choir boy); and I’d completely forgotten that Birkin’s shell shock manifests itself in a crippling stammer.   read more »

~ Posted by Simon Willis, March 29th 2012

There aren't many plays that work better as movies, but perhaps "The King's Speech" is one of them. David Seidler wrote the story for the stage and then it found fame—and a hatful of Oscars—as a movie. All this happened by chance. The film's British director, Tom Hooper, has explained how his mother, who is Australian, was invited by friends to a rehearsed reading at a small theatre in north London of an unproduced play about an Australian speech therapist and the King. Afterwards she rang her son and told him she had found his next project.

This week the stage version received its premiere in London, directed by Adrian Noble, the one-time head of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Even as a movie, it had felt quite stagey: the most important scenes take place in a single room, where George VI, aka Bertie, is treated for his stammer by his unconventional Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue. This was a good old-fashioned two-hander. Psychologically, it felt theatrical too: here was a piece about a man constricted by power he doesn't want and a disability he cannot shake.

And yet seeing it last night at the Wyndham's, I still felt that I wanted the focus to be even narrower. This was no fault of the actors. Where Geoffrey Rush's Logue had an edge of eccentricity, Jonathan Hyde's is dry, hollowed out, much more the insecure colonial. And Charles Edwards' Bertie is gawkier than Colin Firth's, wearing a crown but emotionally still in shorts. Anyone who's seen the movie will remember how certain lines are said, but Edwards and Hyde make each line their own.  read more »

~ Posted by Robert Butler, February 27th 2012  read more »

~ Posted by Nicholas Barber, February 23rd 2012  read more »

~ Posted by Robert Butler, February 21st 2012  read more »

~ Posted by Tim de Lisle, February 17th 2012

The new edition of Intelligent Life is on the streets now in Britain and across Europe. It’s our 20th issue, and the first to feature something that is commonplace, verging on compulsory, at many magazines: a cover photo shoot with an actress—Cate Blanchett, probably the first leading lady to turn her back on Hollywood to run a theatre company.

When other magazines photograph actresses, they routinely end up running heavily Photoshopped images, with every last wrinkle expunged. Their skin is rendered so improbably smooth that, with the biggest stars, you wonder why the photographer didn’t just do a shoot with their waxwork.

It’s a supreme example of having it both ways. Publishers want a recognisable person on the cover, with a real career; but they also want an empty vessel—for clothes and jewellery and make-up, which often seem to be supplied by the advertisers with the most muscle. (One cover shoot we spotted this week even had a credit for a fragrance. You would hope that the readers smelt a rat.) The actresses end up playing two conflicting roles: both modern women and throwbacks, both something to aspire to and something to negate.

Cate Blanchett, by contrast, appears on our cover in her working clothes, with the odd line on her face and faint bags under her eyes. She looks like what she is—a woman of 42, spending her days in an office, her evenings on stage and the rest of her time looking after three young children. We can’t be too self-righteous about it, because, like anyone else who puts her on a cover, we are benefiting from her beauty and distinction. But the shot is at least trying to reflect real life. It’s a curious sign of the times that this has become something to shout about.  read more »

~ Posted by Simon Willis, February 1st 2012

The Economist recently published a three-page briefing about Mongolia, which sits on vast reserves of copper and gold. "Mongolia has a chance," the paper wrote, "of becoming a Qatar or a Brunei: a country that has only a small population, but almost all of it, in global terms, loaded." Money is flowing into Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia's capital, and people are following. Part of this huge cultural change is that city dwellers no longer feel the pull of the nomadic herding traditions. Twenty years ago, the paper says, it was hard to meet anyone in Ulaanbaatar "who identified with the city".

There aren't many movies that you can buy on Amazon that give you a flavour of Mongolian life, but one that does was released 20 years ago. The mismatch between the city and the country is its main theme. "Urga", released in Britain and America as "Close to Eden", won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film. Directed by the Russian filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov, it's the story of Gombo, who lives with his wife, three children and a grandmother in a yurt on the steppe.

Their traditional life of herding and horse-riding on the grasslands is observed with documentary patience and the camera lingers, nostalgically, on the domestic details—the grandmother cuts fatty slices of mutton into her mouth; a daughter plays ditties on a giant accordion; Gombo’s wife Pagma gets her children to sleep, three to a bed.  read more »

~ Posted by Simon Willis, January 26th 2012

When I left the office the other afternoon for a screening of a new documentary, the sky was grey and overcast: good weather for watching any movie, perfect for one about W.G. Sebald. His book "The Rings of Saturn" (1995 in German, 1998 in English) records a walk he took around East Anglia in 1992, during which the author meditates on everything from herring fishing to the Holocaust. Darkness is always falling in Sebald's books, or clouds casting a shadow or "veils of mist" drifting in from the sea.

Grant Gee's excellent new film, "Patience (After Sebald)", which is released in Britain tomorrow, retraces the journey. The film combines grainy and blustery footage of Covehithe, Southwold, Dunwich and Somerleyton with voice-overs from writers and artists interpreting the book's web of associations. There are also audio recordings of Sebald himself. At one point he talks about fog and mist, and how much he admires the ability of Victorian novelists "to make of one phenomenon a thread which runs through a whole text." 

That applies to Sebald's work too. Weather in "The Rings of Saturn" is more than mood. It's also a method of blurring what he sees, and a metaphor for the unbidden path the book takes. In the film, the author and academic Robert Macfarlane describes Sebald's work as "a vanishing of stabilities". It's not unlike a phrase Macfarlane used in a recent piece about mist for Intelligent Life. Mist, he wrote,  is “trickster weather…it turns familiar landscapes strange, dampens sounds, blurs vision".  read more »