At the beginning of October, the antirhynums were still in flower. Some of the only bits of colour left in the garden. But by the end of the month they were all over, and the border cleared.
This is the hydrangea macrophila, which has been a success in its first year. The blooms are fading now, and it will need some protection before the frosts arrive.
The lawn was in a pretty awful state in August, with two months without rain. The grass had completely stopped growing.
Fortunately, September and particularly October have been quite wet, and today the lawns are surprisingly green. The odd bare patch, but even these show signs of regrowth. Hurrah!
The first in this new series of Classic Movies on Sky Arts was a film that was so familiar. Apart from my review on "Movies at Home" on 21st May 2021, it was discussed in "The Films of Powell and Pressburger" (post of 17th December 2024) and on other programmes. So I did wonder if this episode was worth watching. In the end it most definitely was. For the new series, we have the five presenters sitting round a table instead of being filmed separately. At the head, and in the lead, is Ian Nathan. He is accompanied by Neil Norman, Steven Armstrong, Christina Newland and Bonnie Greer. Missing from the first series was the now-deceased and missed Derek Malcolm.
We are told that this is "a very original love story". Amongst the clips from the movie, the best was when the two stars in the poster above met for the first time. "You're June ....... You're Peter." The film is so clever when the scenes in heaven are in black and white whilst the rest is in a vivid colour. Neil Norman liked how this was so unusual. Heaven is missing a dead pilot; these scenes are funny and strange.
Steven Armstrong talks about the 1946 film and how it relates to the cold war that followed world war 2, and how it portrays the UK and USA getting together. There is so much about America in the film and hjow, in heaven, they bring out all these foreigners to complain about Britain. (It's actually very funny but American audiences would love it). Ian Nathan says the film is a "magisterial poetic work with groundbreaking special effects.
Steven Armstrong talks about David Niven and how he gave up acting at the outbreak of the war and was six years away, so his comeback was quite symbolic. Kim Hunter was an American stage actress, and when she met Powell and Pressburger, they knew instantly she was the one. Roger Livesy, who played the doctor, was a P&P regular. (See post on Colonel Blimp). We are told about the cinematography and the production design and about how there has been no other film like it before or since. Neil Norman said it was "completely unique" and Ian Nathan was "so moved by it". I must watch it again.
Editorial
Mike Williams has his pick of the London Film Festival: Clio Barnard's I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning. How different lives "are written most clearly into the buildings they occupy." There is a building site where there is the financier, the builder's director, the site manager, and all the way down to the labourer. But why does he then have to compare this film with Ken Russell's The Devils? Only because this is the main feature this month. But back to Barnard's film, where the characters do sound interesting.
Opening Scenes
David Thomson's obituary of Jeremy Thomas, who had a long career as a producer, notably for The Last Emperor (1987), which won nine Oscars. With director Bernard Bertolucci, their visit to China resulted in permission to film in the Forbidden City. And how they secured thousands of extras. That is what top producers do. Thomas also produced the controversial film Crash. He was chairman of the BFI 1992-1997 and was awarded a CBE. I had never heard of him.
Editor's Choice
Recommendations for the London Film Festival include The Blood Countess, starring Isabelle Hupert, one of my favourite actresses. Also on my list is All of a Sudden, Hamaguchi Ryusuche's new film, as well as the must-see (for me) The History of Concrete from John Wilson.
In Conversation
B Ruby Rich talks to Marie Kreutzer about her new film Gentle Monster, her next after the wonderful Corsage. But what a change to a film about a paedophile ring. Lea Seydoux, as the wife "doesn't want to believe the police woman who shows up at her door with a warrant" to arrest her husband.
In Production
Hope Rangaswani talks about Tom Hanks playing Abraham Lincoln in an adaptation of the Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo. Also Renate Reinsve (another favourite actress) is playing Mary Wollstonecraft in the film If Love Should Die that also stars Vicky Krieps and Johnny Flyn.
News in Brief
Nothing of interest.
Restoration: The Curse of the Censor
The re-release in UK cinemas and a definitive 4K Blu-Ray box set of ....... Dracula (1958). Made by the same team that made The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). Jimmy Sangster (writer), Terence Fisher (director) and Jack Asher (cinematography), as well as the stars Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. We hear a lot about the so-familiar plot. But far more interesting is the sequence about the various prints found in unlikely places and their meticulous restoration. "Presenting Jack Asher's cinematography with a clarity, a richness and a detail that proves a revelation". Hope I can get to see it.
Festival
J A Hopkin has attended the annual Krzysztof Kieslowski Festival in Poland. He of the brilliant Three Colours trilogy. The 30th anniversary of his death. This is the 15th annual "Homage a Kieslowski Festival"
Mean Sheets
Four posters about rebellious nuns. The main poster was for Benedetta (2021), but it seemed to be a foreign one. It said the director was Paula Verhoven and not Paul. Thanks to cinematerial.com, I found one similar there, clicked on the image, and brought up nineteen of the same poster but in different languages. The magazine had the one from the Czech Republic. How great is the internet.
The Long Take
Pamela Hutchinson describes Jeanie Finlay's new documentary, All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea. She compares it to John Grierson's 1929 film Drifters. Both are ultimately about people. Some shots were underwater. A hard life is not getting any easier.
Flick Lit
Nicole Flattery considers the fantasy childhoods created by Steven Spielberg, such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET. She thinks these are obvious inspirations for summer blockbusters such as David Robert Mitchell's The End of Oak Street, "that feels genuinely odd and unsettling." In fact, "nostalgia is big business." Then a comparison to Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (see my review) that is also into nostalgia, "enthralled by the past." But Nicole is worried about the message "we live in turbulent times."
TV Eye
When I realised that Andrew Male's introduction was about an Apple TV series of Cape Fear, I almost stopped reading. Nick Antosca's adaptation has apparently made so many changes.
The Venice Bulletin
Sam Wigley starts with the fact that of the twenty-one films on show, only two were directed by women. Jury President Maggie Gylenall was not impressed. Especially as those two actually won prizes and some of the others did not even deserve to be shown. However, there were award-winning features from Danny Boyle (Ink) and Martin McDonagh (Wild Horse Nine). But these were shown and gone in the first couple of days.
But it's Werner Herzog's Bucking Fastard that gets the longest review about two identical Yorkshire sisters (not twins). Among the many others was Florian Zeller's Bunker, following his successful The Father (2020). Here are Javier Barden and Penelope Cruz in a "London based family drama". I was going to skip the part on documentaries until I found that one was seven hours long, one five and a half hours and another six hours. But mostly it's about the four-hour Musk.
The Devil You Don't Know
Mark Kermode looks at the story behind Ken Russell's 1971 film The Devils. It has a new restoration and is being shown in cinemas. The article includes pictures from the BFI National Archive. There is a very long review of everything that went on with the making and the cuts it needed before it was shown. The editor of the film was Michael Bradsell, and he tells us he was "being guided by an unseen hand". We also hear about the alarm felt by those actresses who played the nuns and found themselves haunted by the production and becoming upset with the frenzy.
My One Political Film
Ken Russell describes the background to the movie to Mark Kermode in 1995. His inspiration was from Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun, which made a huge impression. Ken had made three films for United Artists, but this one they turned down. It was Warner Bros who picked it up. Ken said he had great respect for John Trevelyan, the chief sensor at the BBFC. But it was not surprising that there were scenes that he could not tolerate or went on too long. We hear about the reception at the Venice Film Festival. There were upsets over the torture, nudity, hanging, etc., but Ken says they were all in the book. The studio had no idea what they had taken on, and the American censors cut out so much, it left it "disjointed and inconprehensible".
Sick and Kinky Linda Ruth Williams tells us more about what happened with The Devils at the BBFC (The British Board of Film Censors) and the long list of cuts they required. On and on, the story of the cuts seems never-ending. Even after it was awarded its "X" certificate, a Christian fundamentalist organisation attacked local licensing authorities, and the film was still banned in certain towns. But now, on its new release, it "has a stark new relevance for our times".
The Devils in (the) Detail
Subtitled "A view from the set, with exclusive imagery" (the relics in the BFI National Archive). Ann Skinner, who was The Devils continuity supervisor, talks to Isabel Stevens about her experience. This article told me a lot more about what a continuity supervisor does. Ann says, "I would always be there with my script so Ken would have access to it." She goes on, "I was at the centre of everything, but with less clout". There was one particular scene she felt was too much, and she told Ken, "If you need me while doing this shot, I'm in the unit office."
The Devils Advocate
Guillermo del Toro on the film's darkness and light. "In his best films, Russell's exuberance is always tampered with by a key, more subdued collaborator." He continues, "The camera work has a dizzy intoxication." About the new restoration, he says, "Prepare yourself for a full frontal punch in the mouth."
The Descent of Mann
In his new film Fatherland, Pavel Pawlikowski explores the writer Thomas Mann. Jonathan Romney compares Mann's very long novels, 752 pages for Doctor Faustus, to that of Death in Venice (1912) and that film's brief 82 minutes. Director Hanns Zischler has cleverly set the film over just five days as the Nobel prize-winner travels for yet another award. Best of all is his daughter, Erika, played by Sandra Huller.
I Come Here with a Mission
The new film I Love Boosters is by Boots Riley. He is interviewed by Arjun Sajip. Apparently based on a track from the director's hip hop outfit about "law breaking rapscallians". Does he not mean criminals? Not my kind of stuff.
Faust Reformed – "The Faust Bible: The Making of F W Murau's masterpiece"
This new book is the subject of Robert Hanks' article about the film Faust from exactly a hundred years ago. There is a Murnau retrospective at the BFI Southbank. The article included drawings by Robert Herith and Walter Rohrig. All a bit scary.
Reviews
I skipped through the documentary Remake, the South Korean film Possible Love, and Boots Riley's I Love Boosters.
The Dog Stars
Kim Newman says, "The star performances are easy and charming." And Ridley Scott at eighty-eight "is still regularly tackling large-scale projects". Kim goes on, "Action sequences are well staged," but he tells us too much of the plot. (See my review).
Sense and Sensibility
I had to look up what the title meant in Jane Austen's 1811 novel. It's the rational Elinor Dashwood (Daisy Edgar-Jones) compared with her emotional sister Marianne (Esme Creed-Miles). Both were very good. Francis Bradbury Rance reviews and compares this new film with that from Ang Lee in 1995. She thinks the new film is "at it's best when it celebrates their sorority" and that it's "thoughful and moving". Fiona Shaw "is irresistable" as the matchmaking Mrs Jennings. (See my review).
Heart of the Beast
Jonathon Romney reviews. But it's nearly all Brad Pitt and a dog in several near-death experiences. "With touches of aesthetic rapture." But not a drama. Maybe not.
The Portuguese House
Megan Feeney reviews Avelina Pratt's film which is "a lovely place to pass the time". It is about "migrantions of the 20th and 21st century that are shaping the Iberian soul2.
The Yellow Tie
Leigh Singer reviews a film about the famous conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, Sergiu Celibidache from Romania. He is played by John Malkovic. "A perfectionist who denied any recording of his concerts". This interesting biopic "skips backwards and forwards through his life". "Thers a nostalgic sense of old school filmaking here". But at two and a half hours it might seem a little repetitve. Sean Bean and Miranda Richardson co star.
I skipped past Animal (sounded brutal) and Shadows of Beirut (childhood trauma). Also skipped past Kate Stables review of Gentle Monster about child pornography, even though it did star Lea Seydoux as the wife.
Fatherland
Nicolas Rpaolo reviews this eightyone minute movie "casually demonstrating intelligence in cinematic beauty". Although it is in black and white. Hans Zischler plays Thomas Mann (keeps his cards close) and Sandra Huller is the daughter, translater and manager. She "brings clipped brilliance" to the role. There is a good comparison between West and East germany in 1949 as the two travel for that prize giving. Guess which country had "intimidating checkpoints, deserted squares and cafes".
Case 137
This French movie is reviewed by Ginette Vincendau as a "police proceedural with a social consience". We are in Paris in 2018/19 and the riots. Dominic Moll writes and directs. There is a shooting and police inspector Stephanie Bertrand (Lea Drucker winning a Cesar best actress award) investigates. "A superb performance". It's about the "gilets jaunes" movement and "an investigation of police malpractice".
Hope
(See my review). Kim newman talks about "the relentless action" with "an epic running time". I thought the second half was far less succesful on the "forested mountains and rural roads).
I passed on Marama and Cotton Queen, and also the documentaries Boorman and the Devil and The Lost Children of Tuam. Also passed All Rivers Spill their Stories to the Sea and Idiots.
Winter of the Crow
Alex ramon reviews this Polish drama that stars Lesley Manville. She arrives in a freezing Warsaw in December 1981 for a conference. But thiungs do not go as planned. The communist regime is the subject of a student protest and martial law is imposed. She is a physchiatry professor who is out of her depth as "the resistance is bruttaly clamped down", The film is directed by Kasia Adamik and she also contrubuted to the screenplay. But how can it be "an entertaining film", although it does have powerful message.
DVD and Blu-Ray
Reap the Whirlwind
Four films by Angela Mao, A Hong Kong studio making martial arts films in the 1970's.
Sexy Beast
Now on 4K UHD but too familiar for me.
Little Odessa
James grey's film from 1994 in a "superb 4K restoration". New York in one of their coldest ever winters. Tim Roth as hitman and also starring Maximillian Schell and Vanessa Redgrave. Looks interesting.
Then six more releases of old films now restored, but none I would want to see.
Wider Screen
An exhibition at Tate Britain features an Algerian artist Zineb Sedira.
Books
Just a Shot Away is mark Minelli's biography of Martin Scorcese who he calls "our greatest living film maker". Well he would. Catherine Wheatley in a long review tells us how the book is structured around his movies. well it would.
From the Archive
Billy Wilder X Saul Bass. Back in Sight and Sounds June 1995's Edition, Pat Kirkham interviewed these two Hollywood stalwarts over a liesurely lunch. The former was eighty eight and the latter seventy four who was known for his title sequences of the 1950's and 60's. We see pictures of four of them: The Seven Year Itch (1955), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) and Phsycho (1960). They reminice over five pages.
This Month in ...... 1993
Mike Leigh is on the cover for his controversial film Naked. Reviews included John Woo's Hard Target, Jane Campion's The Piano and Kristov Kizlowski's Three Colours Blue. This received a poor review but deservedly won many prizes.
We are in a coastal community called Hope near the Korean Demilitarised Zone. The first hour goes in a flash as all we see is the devastation caused by what? We don't see a monster for 45 minutes. We are at first following the chief of police of Hope Harbour as clueless as we are as to what is going on. It's when we meet a rookie female officer that things get interesting as she bursts onto the screen, a dab hand with her multiple firearms that brings down the creature. This first part of the movie is incredible, as we see the battered township, worth seeing just for the set.
So the first half is great, but then it changes into three separate plots set in a forest and on a mountain road. I know we needed a rest after the chaos of the first hour, but the search for any other monsters is not so good. There is a lot of CGI, and I was disappointed by the final part. But I was impressed by the huge widescreen at the Hemel Hempstead Cineworld to accommodate the 2.35:1 ratio. The look of the film was spectacular.
I was thinking about leaving during the first half of Sense and Sensibility; it was all pretty boring. But I'm glad I stayed as the story begins to get better and better. I didn't know the story from the book, but there is no guessing what is going to happen. Georgia Oakley has made a decent attempt at giving Jane Austen's 1811 novel a modern interpretation. The two sisters are well played by Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esme Creed-Miles, but the star of the show is Fiona Shaw as Mrs Jennings. Her performance deserves an Oscar nomination at the very least. She was the only one of the actors whose speech I could clearly hear. The rest may be only fifty per cent. Obviously, the costumes and sets are fine, but I just hate these films that veer towards arthouse movies with shots of wildlife and fauna punctuatiing important scenes.
Hadley Freeman in the Sunday Times was not impressed; she thought it looked too dark, as the sun never shone. I found that there was a lot of sunshine and blue skies. It was just the way it was shot, with a natural look rather than cinematic lighting. Apparently it was all shot on film (not digital) with "an emphasis on natural lighting, candlelit scenes, and on location shhooting". So nothing in the studio. Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian refers to Ang Lee's "celebrated 1995 movie" with that all-star cast. Emma Thomson and Kate Winslett played Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. Here is "a more downbeat, ruminative version".
Where do I start with Digger? I haven't seen all of Alejandro Inarritu's films, but these are all memorable: Ameros Peros, 21 Grams, Babel (my favourite), Birdman and The Revenant. We have been asked not to reveal any details of the plot, and I can understand why. There are lots of spoilers in many online reviews, but I won't join them. Someone said, "You can't talk about it without spoiling what makes it, in my eyes, a masterpiece. Or completely terrible". Take your pick.
Let's talk about the cast. I guess it has to start with Tom Cruise in the title role. He has the most to say, but it seems like one long rant, for one reason or another. A better actor would have made more of the script. So Tom, leave drama to the grown-ups. Like Riz Ahmed as Ganesh, his chief scientist. A shoe-in for at least an Oscar nomination. John Goodman is fine as the president; better is Sandra Huller as Digger's sister. Almost a quieter counterpoint to Cruise's Digger, but not quite. And a shout-out for Jesse Plumons as the producer, and he does well with his big speech at the end.
Back to the story, it isn't that far in when we understand why the first part seems so weird. However, this is, in its own way, an interesting take on the climate crisis. There are also elements of Dr Strangelove. I thought I might be the only one who thought that, but no. There is a feeling of an attack on America and its love of oil. Are you watching Donald? The film itself has, apparently, bombed at the box office, but maybe in the future it could be recognised as an important film. But yes, it's too loud and too long, and the speech is too fast. But there is a method in all of that, even if it's not an easy watch. I found it gripping, as it won't let you go. But I thought that it could have been cut by twenty minutes.
The director has said, "It's a disaster movie where the disaster is us." One review said it had "an insidiously clever method to the madness". But Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian called it "labourious" in his two-star review. Hadley Freeman in the Sunday Times said, "It takes cojones to make an environmental disaster comedy, but the constant jumps between storylines are irksome rather than illuminating."
We are in 1963 (and I'm just finishing sixth form), and here again is Gabriel Dax. We met him first in Gabriel's Moon, which I thought was the writer-on-top form. Gabriel is now a double agent, which seems very tiring, given that he is trying to finish writing his book on Rivers. He has not only to listen to instructions from his boss, Faith Green, but also the Russian agents that seem to monitor his every move.
However, in The Predicament, Gabriel is off to Guatemala (typical of the writer, exploring all these different countries). Apparently, the possible new leader will only talk to him. But things do not go to plan, and Gabrile is soon back home before leaving for Berlin. The story moves along at a decent pace; all the cities are very well described in their sixties setting. The book is entirely written from the view of Gabriel, the closest to the first person that you can get. In Berlin, it's all about a visit by President Kennedy (note 1963), and Gabriel is on the task force to make sure it all goes to plan. MI6 are on the trail of possible assassins, but they have all disappeared. Should we be worried?
A few years ago I read Elizabeth Day's novel "The Party" and was quite impressed. But her latest book, Paradise City, was a disappointment. I had hoped it would include a lot more about London, but it concentrated instead on the stories of the four main characters. I guess the writer didn't properly research the locations. It's Sir Howard Pink (formerly Fink), who is central to the story, a self-made man maybe loosely based on Sir Philip Green. In the first chapters he comes across as pretty obnoxious.
The second character is Esme, who lives in a Shepherd's Bush that I barely recognize. Although it was sixty odd years ago when I changed buses on my way to school. Esme works on Kensington High Street (where my father managed the one large grocer's shop) and passes Kensington Church Street, where my brother went to school. Older Carol and immigrant Beatrice have shorter introductions.
Obviously we start to find out about connections between the four, starting, obviously, between journalist Esme and Sir Howard. What could have been a fraught meeting they instead bond over her father's death and his daughter's disappearance. Their interview is, for me, the best part of the book; their conversation is so well written. Sir Howard then comes across Beatrice, a cleaner in his hotel room, and there is an unsavory occurrence where there are obviously repercussions.
Carol, a solitary widow, is visited by her daughter and grandson, and they are off to Barnes Wetlands Center. (We used to go to Barnes Common most Sundays in the fifties, but things do change). Carol has strange Alan as a neighbour. Their story is central to the second half of the book, which turns into a mystery as Alan disappears and Carol discovers something that puts her into the limelight. There is quite an emotional ending as it all comes to a satisfactory conclusion.
It's 2119, and Tom Metcalfe, our narrator, is at the Bodleian, now in Snowdonia, looking through the journals of Vivienne Blundy. She was married to the famous poet Francis Blundy, and Tom is interested in finding the missing corona of fifteen sonnets that Francis could recite from memory. But that was over a hundred years ago, and a lot has changed in the landscape since then. In What We Can Know, the UK is now just a series of islands. It all happened in the 2030s following the warnings of global warming.
Vivienne's journals include a dinner party where she does all the work, not grudgingly but "irritated by his (Francis) certainty, his entitlement, and his capacity for repetition. A brilliant man, but such a fool". Back to Tom, and there are hints about the state of the environment (not good) and that life expectancy is now sixty-two. There is a discussion about the merits and preference of poetry or prose. It's time I mentioned that this is a pretty highbrow novel; for example, in Chapter 9 there are three pages of highly intellectual stuff, a précis of all that has happened in the intervening years.
We hear from Vivienne's journal all about her first husband, Percy, a genius at making violins, but his descent into Alzheimer's is such a strain on his wife. But in 2120, to find that missing corona involves an expedition to the Cotswolds that involves travelling across inland seas and results in an unexpected find. Then Part 2 is a massive change of direction; saying anything would be too much. But its prose is far easier than what went before.
The Sunday Times Magazine included an extract from David Kynaston's book Deep into the Sixties: Britain 1965-66. I believe this is the seventh in his series of books (Tales of New Jerusalem) that chronicles life in Britain from the end of the Second World War. He raids memoirs, newspapers, and diaries to recall key moments in British life. These four pages concentrate on one day, Saturday, 30th July 1966, when England won the World Cup.
He starts with some predictions from various newspapers and then the coverage of the game on TV. There is a selection of what people were doing on the day. "At 2.48pm a sharp burst of rain at Hampstead Cricket Club has the players gratefully racing for the pavilion and the TV there." He includes who is not watching: "Dennis Law (Scottish football legend) opts to play golf. "And Max Wall is starting his matinee performance of Ubu Roi." While "Sir Stanley Mathews in hospital recovering from an operation falls asleep."
As for the match, Kenneth Wolstenholme for the BBC describes the "torrential rain as England start the second half." (I was undercover in the top tier behind that controversial goal). I was amazed that only fifteen minutes after the final whistle, the next programme on the BBC starts: Juke Box Jury. Then all the regular Saturday evening programmes.
"On a busy evening, the police find time to arrest the gangster Charlie Richardson and his accomplices some four months after the murder of their associate George Cornell by Ronnie Kray at the Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapell". But people found it difficult to get inside any pub for a celebration drink. (I went down to the Royal Garden Hotel, but the team had already been out on the balcony). We hear lots about what was happening in London, Union Jacks everywhere on the streets.
There were highlights of the match on BBC at 10.20pm. There is so much more about what people were doing on the day, but I must include the final paragraph. The Kinks were due to be playing at an outdoor event at Pinhoe in Devon. "But having delayed leaving London until after the afternoon's drama is over, they fail to arrive until 11.45pm, two hours late. The show has to end at midnight, so they play for just ten minutes to a visibly angry crowd of some 6000, booing them loudly."
The author was fifteen. I was twenty-one.
Dear David (if I may). Many apologies for such a delayed response, but I did want to drop a line to say that I much enjoyed reading ‘The Lost Tickets.'
And of course, I envy you being there!
Best wishes,
David (Kynaston)
