Movies at Home: The Beat My Heart Skipped, Margin Call, Johnny English Strikes Again and BlacKkKlansman

 

Winner of the BAFTA in 2005 for Best Film not in the English Language, The Beat My Heart Skipped is a little disappointing French movie. Romain Duris is caught between living the lives of his low level real estate criminal father and dead concert pianist mother. He is, at first, wholly responsible to his criminal partners until a chance meeting with his mother's manager leads him to a renewed passion for the piano. Chaos ensues. But all a little predictable. I did notice, however, a tiny role for Melanie Laurent, always remembered for her role in Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds. 

I first saw Margin Call at the cinema in 2012 when I reported: Sometimes a small film pops up that I find far superior to those with big budgets. Margin Call is one of those. It is written and directed by J. C. Chandor, his first ever feature film. It certainly will not be his last. He previously worked on commercials and documentaries and wrote and directed one short movie. His taut screenplay is amazing, well plotted, excellent dialogue and  filled with tension. I am so pleased it has been nominated for an Oscar. And I think he should win it. The movie takes place in just over 24 hours at an investment bank in Manhattan, teetering on the brink of the financial crisis. The cast are top notch. Kevin Spacey, Stanley Tucci and Paul Bettany are first rate, but even they cannot match up to Jeremy Irons as the boss. Best thing he has done for years. Even Demi Moore puts in a performance of which I never thought she was capable.

It was just as good a second time round. I liked it when Paul Bettany has to visit Stanley Tucci and says "I hate Brooklyn". And when Jeremy Irons describes money as "pieces of paper with pictures on it".

I hadn't seen this in the cinema as I waited to watch it with Alison when it was shown on TV. There were enough funny bits to keep me interested, mostly of the physical kind. But mostly frivolous and predictable. 

I couldn't watch the whole film, I found the constant set pieces quite boring. So I only include it here for one of the funniest moments I have ever seen. When John David Washington is placed in intelligence, the first phone call he makes in cut glass English is hysterical, especially when Adam Driver slowly turns around in straight faced surprise. Well I found it funny at the time.

Vaccination

 

Stowe in March

 

It was during that lovely last week of March that we visited the National Trust property at Stowe, our first outing of the year. So I'm quite late in posting this on a bitterly cold day in mid April. I'm so glad we took the opportunity to get out while it was warm.

We didn't arrive until mid afternoon and it was funny to see so many people leaving as we walked down the lane to the entrance to the gardens. So it was very quiet for our long walk taking in most of the paths. Our only stop was late on when, right in front of the house above,  we talked to one of the security men. Or rather, he talked to us. We did find out that the golf course in the middle of the park had closed, we had noticed the start of new landscaping last year, Apparently a new course has been laid out outside the National Trust property.

Movies at Home: I Got Life, Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa and The Witch part1. Subversion

The title in French is "Aurore" which is the name of the lead character. So not the best translation. "I Got Life" is the song by Nina Simone to which Aurore dances on her own. There were other moments that reminded me of Sebastian Lelio's superior film "Gloria". Director Blandine Lenoir has conjured up the odd heart warming moment, but overall not a big success.

I originally saw this film in 2013 (where does the time go?) when I wrote What a surprise was Alan Partidge: Alpha Papa. This was the funniest film I have seen for ages. When I think back, the writing is not particularly witty, but the context and delivery was superb. Recorded to watch with Alison, I still found it very funny even though she didn't. This time round I thought the screenplay was excellent, there were times that the lines were delivered so fast but still caught every word. No doubt the contribution to the script by Armando  Iannuci certianly helped.

Halfway though "The Witch part1. Subversion" I had to start again. I was a little confused about the characters and some of the plot. I believe I was not the only one. But apart from the last half hour of mainly gratuitous violence ( glad i could skip it on the TV), this was interesting drama wth some fabulous photography. Will we ever get par 2? I think the first Korean movie I saw was "The Host" and this is still the best of all, surpassing even "Parasite" and "Oldboy". 

Where the Crawdads Sing, Dead Lions and Back When We Were Grownups

Reading the first half, I thought I was on the way to a five star book. I was enthralled by the description of the North Carolina coast, the marsh, swamp, lagoon, bogs and woods. Even Fen is described, not like the Fens of Lincolnshire, but more like bogs but with greater water exchange and less acidic, but that over time can become bog like. The writing about nature is a passion that shines through, a passage about the mating rituals of fireflies is amazing.

I liked how the story follows Kya through time, left alone at a young age to fend for herself in this (to us) inhospitable lonely place, that becomes to Kya a source of freedom. I liked how Kya gets older and wiser as she copes with the years of solitude. But the story is also a mystery as we occasionally jump forward from 1952, and succeeding years, to 1969 where a death has come someone Kya knows. She does have the odd communication with people in the nearby town, and as she reaches her teens, older boys do find her fascinating.

However, at this halfway stage, the book becomes something different, more like a romantic melodrama. Fortunately, this is over quite quickly and the short seven page Chapter 31 is incredibly emotional. The chapters do actually come thick and fast towards the end, with another change in direction, to an unfortunately predictable conclusion. But that cannot spoil a memorable story.

Although there are six Jackson Lamb spy thrillers by Mick Herron, I had read the first and then the last two. So having jumped back to book two, I vaguely remembered the main characters from before. Although I did have to write them down so as not to get lost. There should be a list at the beginning. I think that the books work best when it concentrate on the dialogue, especially the dry, sarcastic and witty humour.

For example, River's grandfather was big in intelligence but "Thought to be something big in the Ministry of Transport. Naturally he took the blame for the deficiencies in the local bus service". His elderly grandfather thought "he'd sleep like the dead for an hour, then lie wide-eyed until morning. If there was anything he missed about being young, it was that careless ability to fall into oblivion like a bucket dropped down a well, then pulled up slowly replenished".

Less my kind of book when the action takes over, the last part is all gripping plot. So why am I glad when it's all over?

The first dozen pages in I thought this is not the book for me. Only the author kept me going, and I'm so glad I did. The book is all about Rebecca, in fact the title could easily have been "Finding Rebecca". She feels at times as if she is on a quest to find her old self, this new woman seeming completely different. Having lost her first husband "It occurred to her, so far, the only step she'd taken toward retrieving that old Rebecca was to try and reconnect with the old Rebecca's boyfriend". But her new life is so full and busy, too much at everyone's beck and call? Trying to entertain a new man on her own at home she complains "Another family melee with an extra person added".

There is a lot of humour in the book, a discussion about getting a dog is an unlikely source of fun. Rebecca lives in a big mansion with Poppy, a forgetful great uncle who, at 99, is a good source of amusement. There are in fact, large chunks of typical Anne Tyler dialogue. There is also the odd section about bereavement dealt with sympathetically by the author. But more than anything the reader is asked to think about their lives and how they have changed. Maybe the old Rebecca was not worth finding.

How the Garden has Changed

 Having scanned in lots of photos from the first years in our house, there were some that showed the garden as it was then. This was before the far half of the lawn was turfed.

Then after the lawn was laid.

This is how it is now.

This was the main border twenty years ago.

And now.

Here is the side patio when we first moved in.

Almost unrecognisable in this photo.

Another border in the early days.

As it is today.

Tring Book Club- The Dig by John Preston

 

There seemed to me to be two sides to this novel. The first was the actual archaeological dig in all it's fascinating initial explorations and meticulous excavation and the second, less successful was the personal relationships between the various characters involved. I felt that the description of the dig itself to be surprisingly exciting, and the methods of exposing the ship to be exceedingly well explained. I liked the way that Brown found the hard crust in the sand where the wooden ribs of the hull had been.

However, the character driven drama is pretty average literary writing. But there are the odd moments of humour, Ellen the maid is described as "not a gossip, but a natural curiosity about people". The author seemed as if he wanted to build up a fractious relationship between the original team, that included Basil Brown and Reid Moir of Ipswich Museum, and Charles Phillips of Cambridge University who hijacks control of the dig on behalf of the British Museum.

I did think that the story told by the three narrators was clever, especially as I did feel they conveyed something of their different characters, especially in the way they wrote their story. So much so, that the narration by Peggy Piggott was superb. There is also a great feature on the National Trust website: "Digging the dirt: The True story behind The Dig" and a Netflix preview on YouTube also called "The True story behind The Dig".