Blue Jasmine - Comedy? Tragedy?

With the world cup happening at the moment there isn't a lot of film watching going on.  Not by me or the rest of the nation either according to taking at UK cinemas.  Takings at cinemas are apparently down over 50% from the same weekend last year.  Well they need not panic, it's the world cup clearly.

Watched Blue Jasmine last week.  Though it's billed as a comedy I don't remember it being all that funny.  It's the story of Jasmine (Cate Blachett), a New York socialite who has a nervous breakdown when her husband's illegal trading activities are found out and he kills himself.  She travels to San Francisco to stay with her half-sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins) to try to get back on her feet and rebuild her life.  Though it's meant to be a comedy that isn't particularly funny, I think it's been labelled a comedy for want of a better genre to put it in.  And possibly because films directed by Woody Allen are expected to be comedies.  In reality it's about family ties, mental illness and class.  Not class in the intrinsic British sense that many of us would understand, but class in the American sense of being pretentious, throwing lavish parties and having an expensive dental plan.

I know that Cate Blanchett won an Oscar for her performance here, and though it is probably deserved I would say that Sally Hawkins is the better actress in the film.  I guess Blanchett benefited from the classic syndrome in which playing someone with a mental illness gets you a bunch of extra votes in Hollywood.  Hawkins plays Ginger as a character suffering from her own sort of mental illness though, one in which she doesn't seem sure if she should beat Jasmine or join her in her quest to scale the social ladder and escape from their down-to-earth upbringings.

It's an interesting story, though somewhat inorganically told with its externalised conversations and the opening scene in which Jasmine introduces herself to the audience by talking to a stranger on a plane and telling her about her life up to this moment.  I think Blue Jasmine is meant to be about class, family and being true to yourself as much as it is a drama about mental health.  The trouble is that for me - as a British person - the concept of social class means something totally different to me than what I assume it means to director Woody Allen.  So I think it's going over my head a little.  Regardless, Blue Jasmine is a superbly acted film that's a good watch.  I would give it an 80% recommendation.

Incendies - an unlikely history lesson

It's Friday afternoon, work is dull, therefore a film review!

I learned a lot about Lebanese history and politics the other day when I watched Incendies, a film that's mainly in French and set in Canada and Lebanon across two different time frames.  This is the story of Jeanne and Simon, a Canadian brother and sister whose mother Narwal has recently died.  In order to fulfil their mother's last wishes, they travel to Lebanon where their mother was born to search for their mysterious brother, a man about whom their mother talks in her will, but who she never mentioned when she was alive.  As they travel through Lebanon searching for lost records, the film cuts back to the Lebanese civil war, in which their mother was initially a peaceful objector, but then after witnessing several acts of carnage becomes a willing participant.

This is an extremely well acted film that tells a compelling story about the tragedy that befell the Lebanese people.  If nothing else, it serves to highlight a portion of history that I feel has been largely forgotten in the west 25 years on from the ceasefire and amnesty agreements.  The film's depiction of brutal acts of terror against ordinary people is realistic and horrifying.  These acts were largely performed by ordinary people against their neighbours, friends and family members, and often simply because you were wearing the wrong sort of religious symbol around your neck.  It reminds us all that nationalism and the politics of division can very quickly result in one or other group becoming dehumanised in the eyes of wider society.  It's something that in the modern age of austerity we need to be vigilant against more than ever.

Incendies does have a major flaw though, which is that it contains something of a plot twist that felt a bit unnecessary.  As if the horrors of war weren't enough for the viewer, there's a twist to events that I think are meant to make things more horrible still.  Though in the end the reaction of Jeanne and Simon to their discovery gives hope, perhaps saying that forgiveness is possible, and that the passage of time can heal even the deepest wounds.

Though it's a very unbelievable story, it highlights the dehumanising nature of war and warns against religious intolerance, and from a cinematic and acting point of view the film is outstanding.  Definitely one to check out.

Godzilla - suitably epic, but flawed

Wednesday night buy get free night is still running courtesy of EE, and so it was that last week a bunch of us went to go and see one of the first of this summer's blockbusters - Godzilla!  The original Gojira is the seminal Japanese monster movie that riffs off that nation's post-world atomic paranoia and tells a story of an ancient sea-borne monster that rises from the depths to punish humanity for its experiments with nuclear power.  As the monster destroys the cities of Japan, scientists realise the they only way to kill it is worse even than atomic weapons, and so they wrestle with a moral dilemma - to act and risk future destruction, or stand idle and allow nature to take its terrible course.

Ever since Gojira there have been numerous adaptations of the monster theme, though none have really touched on the theme of morality of science and warfare or been as strongly anti-atomic.  Mostly they're just interested in having a monster or several monsters fight Gojira.  There was even a cartoon series.  This latest incarnation of Godzilla does little different, and though it makes nods towards the nuclear paranoia of the original, but it couldn't really be accused of making any sort of political statement about the nuclear age.  Instead the makers have opted to go for more of a straight-forward monster movie in which a paranoid ex-scientist played by Bryan Cranston believes the government is covering up what happened in the nuclear accident that resulted in the death of his wife - little does he know the truth though.

Any movie calling itself Godzilla needs to get one thing right - monster fights.  Despite several failings this is one thing that the film gets absolutely right.  Godzilla himself looks suitably huge as he battles the ridiculous metallic giant bird-like creatures.  The sound and feel of each sequence where this happens is truly spectacular and feels genuinely apocalyptic, it's a true cinematic spectacle.  This new Godzilla movie also takes time to build to the final fight, cutting away from a lot of the preliminaries or only showing us what's happening via the medium of news reports.  A bit like Cloverfield did.  Unlike Coverfield though, here we eventually have a pay-off worth waiting for, as monsters stomp around San Francisco obliterating all around them while humanity stands back in awe and terror.

The film does have failings though.  The main one is the woeful under-use of its cast.  Ken Wattanabe seems to only be there to say "Gojira" in a Japanese accent, Sally Hawkins explains the plot, Juliete Binoche gets killed in the opening scene and Bryan Cranston isn't in it anywhere near as much as you'd want.  In their place you have Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen as the annoyingly bland military family who run around just happening to be places where Godzilla does his stomping.  Is this a clever comment on the helplessness of humanity against natural disasters / Godzilla?  Unlikely.  More likely it's a script-writer having to pander to Hollywood sensibilities.  It's a shame, but what can you expect from Hollywood?

Overall, Godzilla is a pretty good monster movie with a number of flaws.  Thankfully the actual realisation of Godzilla himself is extraordinarily good, which puts criticism of the plot and character flaws into the realm of nit-picking.  You should be watching this for the visual spectacle, try to ignore the rest and you'll be fine.