Prisoners: morally ambiguous

Prisoners is a disturbing movie, less for its subject matter - the abduction of two little girls - than its moral ambiguity. Are we really supposed to believe that a father who prays the Lord's Prayer before he allows his teenage son to shoot a deer, and who much later prays the same prayer with a great more difficulty, would become such a vigilante character as to beat a suspect almost to a pulp? And I mean 'pulp'.

Another character, supposedly once a Christian, also goes on about doing her now evil work in order to make people stop believing in God. At least I think that's what she said. Sorry, run that by me again? It sounded like a last minute motivation pulled up out of the hat.

There are also some rather iffy plot-holes by the end of the movie, and quite honestly I almost lost my own plot when late in the piece there was lots of stuff about mazes and snakes, neither of which, as far as I could tell, had much to do with the overall mystery.

Okay, gripes over and done. Hugh Jackman is terrific in his role of the ambiguous father. I couldn't much believe in him as a Christian, but I could understand a great deal of his pain and frustration as a father. Jake Gyllenhaal (whatever happened to movie stars having pronounceable names?) is his opposite number: just as determined to solve the case but only through legal means, and frustrated that those legal means can sometimes cause unintended dire effects. Gyllenhaal always seems to bring great integrity to his roles, and here, even though he plays someone who mostly keeps his anger at bay, he's extremely effective. In fact I thought he was the star of the movie; it's actually Jackman who gets top billing.

The rest of the cast are excellent in their own quirky ways. The black couple who also lose a daughter aren't made of such tough metal as Jackman's character; you long for them to bring integrity and honesty to the brutality that Jackman is imposing on the suspect. When they continually wimp away from this I found it frustrating: why don't they speak out against what Jackman is doing? He's obviously not the friend they'd thought him, and worse, he's likely to get them all put away in jail.

The production values are terrific in every way. Some have complained about the music score; personally it never intruded at any level for me, so it obviously did its job well. I think the movie is overlong. Over half an hour before it finished I was beginning to wonder: how long is this going to go on? There were plenty of places where judicious cuts could have been made, which would have made an already suspenseful movie into an even tauter one. But, this is the movie as it stands, at nearly two hours. There are plenty of great moments along the way.

Couple of DVDs

Caught up with a movie from 2007 called Rendition, the other night. The word 'rendition' means, in the US anyway, the practice of sending a foreign criminal or terrorist suspect covertly to be interrogated (read 'tortured') in a country with less rigorous regulations for the humane treatment of prisoners. 

Which is what happens, except that the man sent to the foreign country, is more likely an innocent victim of some phone-tapping, and has nothing to do with any plots or terror activities. At least that's how it seems. We have our doubts at times, as we should in such a movie. But there are no doubts about the horrific treatment to which he's subjected, much of which unfolds before our eyes. 

That's only part of the story. In the same foreign country (it's never named, but it's inhabited by Arab citizens) a group of real terrorists have just attempted to kill the man who does the interrogating. The local CIA agent is killed in the blast, and his job falls into the lap of an inexperienced pen-pusher played by Jake Gyllenhaal), a man who gradually begins to feel more than a little queasy about what is happening.

Meanwhile at home the suspect's wife (Reese Witherspoon) is frantically trying to find out where he's vanished to - he was supposed to be flying home from Africa but she's been told he wasn't on the flight. Via an old boyfriend, now working for the Government, she confronts Meryl Streep, the stony-faced woman who's in charge of such counter-terrorist operations. You don't want to have to confront Meryl Streep in one of these roles.

And then there's a third story: that of the young people involved in the actual terrorism. Thankfully all these threads are clearly laid out and easy to follow. At least you think so, until you find towards the end of the movie that one of the stories is actually a flashback. This seemed a bit unnecessary, though it made a sort of dramatic sense. But it confuses the viewer initially, and at that stage of the movie that's probably not what you want to happen.

Otherwise this is an excellent movie, with sharp performances from a top-quality cast. It won't endear you to the CIA or to American foreign policy; but maybe you were not endeared to that already.

We also caught up with a three part British murder mystery called Place of Execution. This was for the most part a watchable piece, with lots of good performances in it, including Juliet Stevenson and Lee Ingleby. The ending was a surprise, certainly, but perhaps a little unlikely.

In the story a youngish girl living in a village some forty years ago goes missing while out walking her dog. The local police - with Lee Ingleby as the relatively new, but very earnest detective - get onto it fairly quickly, but to no avail. The girl isn't found. Other unpleasant things come to the surface however, and in due course what seemed to be a straightforward murder case turns out to have a very nasty bent to it. Meanwhile Juliet Stevenson in the present day is a TV journalist trying to complete a story which includes re-investigating the murder and interviewing the now aged detective. Something goes awry with the last interview, and Stevenson's character discovers more about her past than she wants, and that her childhood was entwined with the original event.

For the most part the actors managed to overlook the occasional bit of tosh in the script, and to give the scenes the level of intensity they required. It probably could have played out over two episodes, in fact, but...

Off-screen, on-screen

Out this morning to watch part of my grandson's soccer game (he scored a goal, obligingly, while I was watching) and to walk the dog from Chingford Park to the Gardens shopping centre and back.   We'd been out with my son and his family last night - they shouted us a meal (paid for it, in case you're not familiar with the term 'shouted') - and he was saying that it seemed all we do was sit in front of computers and screens and hand-held devices and we never seemed to get out into the real world.  So I did some real world stuff this morning and walked the dog for nearly an hour, and watched 14 boys and a couple of girls play soccer.  The real world proved itself fit and well and able to provide a chill factor of I-don't-know-what, but it was pretty cold if you were standing still...which I wasn't because I was walking the dog, at least initially.  

Curiously enough there's a review of a book in the ODT this morning saying the same sort of thing as my son. The book is called iDisorder: understanding our obsession with technology and overcoming its hold on us.  Personally, if the book's anything like its subtitle, I suspect it's slightly overstating its case.  Yes, we do spend a lot of time in front of screens - for some of us that's our job (or has been) - but the real humans in our lives seem perfectly capable of getting our attention when they want to, and we theirs.  The real world is fit and well, I think.  I've had lunch with two guys this week, and coffee with a third, along with the meal we had out last night at which there were eight of us (and two iPads, and three iPhones).  I also spent two plus hours at the Dental School this week with real patients and real dentists (and was reading a non-Kindle book as well).  Last Monday I played at a concert for people in the Stroke Club.  We're going to see the Nuggets play tonight, and heading off to church tomorrow (where we'll assist with a very interactive church lunch) and then in the late afternoon I'm going to sing at Sunny Side Up's practice.   And if you'd asked me I would have thought I spend quite a bit of time in front of screens.  Perhaps I'm not so technology-obsessed as it seems. 

Seems like I have plenty of real life pedestrian bridges to the outside world.

Anyway, that wasn't really what I was going to talk about.  I was going to mention a couple more movies that I've watched this week - yup, both on screens (!)  The first of these was a fairly recent sci-fi style movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal (pronounced jill-en-hall, according to imdb.com).  It's called Source Code, and involves some real flimflam science (told us at considerable speed so that we don't have time to think too hard) about the brain having eight minutes of leftover information that can be accessed after a person has died.  Considering that the brain can't even retain more than seven numbers in its short term memory, on average, retaining eight minutes of not especially important stuff seems unlikely.  But the filmmakers manage to get away with this by having poor old Jake repeatedly going through the same sequence of events over and over in order to find out where a bomb has been planted on a train.  There's more to it than that, but I won't spoil it for you.  This is a movie worth watching, because it has some nice surprises.  And no bad language (it occurred to me after I'd been watching The Social Network the other day, that no one swore in it, or if they did it was fairly mild.  Which just goes to show that scriptwriters don't have to include endless foul language just because people in real life use it.)

Jake's supporting cast includes the delightful Michelle Monaghan, the versatile Vera Farmiga, and Jeffrey Wright, who manages to overcome the fact that the scriptwriters keep on avoiding having him telling the truth about what's going on, and who is saddled with a walking stick and glasses that seem to serve no functional purpose except to show he's a (slightly mad) scientist.  

The other movie was The Searchers, the old John Wayne/John Ford combo that had a depth and sensitivity in it that wasn't always a feature of Wayne movies.  He plays himself, as always, succinct in speech, mostly unemotional when others are losing their cool, obstinate and determined.  But he's in a story that's mostly strongly written, and is surrounded by a superb cast of Ford regulars and sundry others who do a great job.  I saw The Searchers years ago, but so strong is the long opening sequence that most of it remained in my mind.  In this section, Ethan (Wayne) returns home to his brother (and his brother's family) after years of being away in the American Civil War.  He's enthusiastically greeted by all the family: his sister-in-law, his two young nieces (one a teenager, the other around ten), his teenage nephew, and Martin Pawley, a part-Indian youth who's been adopted by the family (he's played very well by Jeffrey Hunter - who would one day play Jesus Christ in King of Kings).  This group of people are beautifully drawn and we become fond of them in the short time we get to know them.  There's a brief interruption as Ward Bond and his Texas Rangers come for a coffee.  Bond is loud and shatters the quiet of the family with enthusiastic ease, and each of his Rangers is a character in his own right. We become more familiar with them as the film goes on. They've come to report that Lars Jorgenson's cattle has been rustled by a group of Comanche, and Bond co-opts Ethan and Pawley into his Texas Rangers posse to get the cattle back. They leave, but by evening there's something ominous in the air.  A murdering bunch of Comanche come to the isolated farm and wipe out all but the two daughters, whom they capture.  The leader of these Indians is actually played by a German-born actor, known by this time as Henry Brandon, but born as Heinrich von Kleinbach.  (He played an Indian in another Ford movie as well.)

The rest of the film relates, for the most part, to the long search that Ethan and Pawley undertake in order to bring back the two girls.  At first they're accompanied by the older girl's boyfriend (played by Harry Carey Jr - he turned up as an 'old timer' in the last of the Back to the Future movies); he's the son of Lars Jorgenson.  When finding out that his beloved has been killed by the Indians he races madly into the Indian camp and is killed.  There's an interlude in which the two men come to the Jorgenson farm some time later and we learn that Pawley has been the long-time boyfriend of the Jorgenson daughter (played by Vera Miles, with great energy and gusto).  She almost persuades him to stay and become a farmer in partnership with Jorgenson, but the call of the search draws him away again.  By the time he returns she's just about to marry another fellow played by Ken Curtis with an over-the-top 'gosh gee' manner.  The wedding that doesn't happen is one of the less tense and more hilarious scenes in the movie.  

Eventually they find the Comanche again, and eventually (after five years!) they rescue the girl, who's now a teenager.  There's some debate about whether she'll survive the actual rescue, given Ethan's rather ambiguous attitude to her, but she does.  (She's played by a young Natalie Wood, and in the only moment of real inauthenticity in the movie, she appears with lipstick and plucked eyebrows and mascara, in spite of having been part of the Indian tribe for several years.)

It's a long movie, with plenty of time for detail, particularly from the excellent cast.  (There's even a late addition to the characters, a young Cavalry lieutenant, played delightfully by one of Wayne's own sons, Patrick Wayne.)  The scenery is magnificent, much of it in Monument Valley, the place that frequently appeared in Ford movies.  The photography is superb and the colour is as up to date as a modern movie.  And it's full of humour, with Ethan's 'That'll be the day' being the laconic answer to several angry outbursts from other characters.  

The five-year search might seem a bit over the top as an idea, but somehow it's made to work.  Wayne's attitude of stuff-everything-else is a great part of that workability.  And there's no doubt, in the light of this movie, that he was one of the great Hollywood stars.  

Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang

My wife and I sat watching the first ten minutes or so of Nanny McPhee's second outing with a feeling of embarrassment. Everything is so over the top, you feel a major sense of cringe coming on. The farm children are forever fighting at the beginning for no particular reason (which is odd, since they don't have any problem cooperating later in the movie - even given Nanny's big sort-out early in the piece), and their mother screams and yells and acts like a child herself. Presumably she's at her wits' end. So, I suspect, were most of the audience at that point. What the heck is wrong with her, they must have been saying...

And then we're introduced to the snobby cousins from London, at which point director Susanna White spends far too long having everyone falling over in the mud (more than once, usually) or chasing each other around the poo-filled farm, or going indoors and beating each other up. If we hadn't paid $16 apiece we might have left this noisy brood to it. Even the stormy-night arrival of Nanny McPhee doesn't much help - at first. And then suddenly everything (well, almost everything) comes right, the film mostly settles down into a tone that works for it, there are some wonderful laugh-out-loud moments, plenty of absurdities, and room for the kids to show that they can actually act.

Susanna White has done plenty of television work, but here seems somehow overwhelmed by the amount of room she's got to play with. In spite of my positive comments in the last paragraph, she forces Rhys Ifans (usually a wonderfully subtle comic actor - compare this performance to the one we saw on TV last night in Once Upon a Time in the Midlands) and Maggie Gyllenhaal to go over the same material almost endlessly, until you want to scream, 'For goodness' sake, get on with it!' Some scenes are just padded out beyond their ability to survive.

Emma Thompson, however, saves the scenes she's in, which have both that wonderful calm and gentle humour she brings to this particular role, and Ralph Fiennes as the Uncle in the War Office, seethes with some terrifying passion beneath his steely exterior, as though he was actually Voldemort in disguise, and had somehow got into the wrong movie. Maggie Smith, however, is not only woefully underused, but also made to do something in one scene which is extraordinarily undignified. (It's also interesting how our view of a character with a degree of dementia has now changed. In earlier movies they were often seen - as also here - as comic characters to be played for all the possible laughs. Now, with the excessive numbers of people with dementia or Alzheimer's in the world, such humour is being increasingly seen as out of place. )

So, a bit of a mixed bag. Not a film that Ifans or Gyllenhaal might look back on with much endearment, and possibly a steep learning curve for White. Excellent CGI (when isn't it excellent these days?) and some good performances.

Stranger than Fiction

Watched the movie, Stranger than Fiction, last night. I didn't realise my son had recorded it onto our hard drive recently, and was pleased to catch up with it.

Will Ferrell does a great job as the very uptight hero, Harold Crick, who would have got on with his exceptionally boring life if it hadn't been for the fact that he's occasionally begun to hear a detailed narration of his life. Somehow he communicates boring without being boring; he's quite endearing, in fact. His narrator is the ever-wonderful Emma Thompson, here playing a famous writer so stricken with writer's block that she's gaunt, drawn and haggard, and as uptight in her own way as Harold is in his his.

Queen Latifah and Dustin Hoffman round out the main roles, and the somewhat surprised romantic female lead is played by Maggie Gyllenhaal (whatever happened to the days when film stars had names that rolled off your tongue?)

Zach Helm, the scriptwriter, has carefully avoiding explaining too much: we have no idea why an apparently real person should suddenly find himself to be a character in someone's book, and no idea how this all works at the end, when 'character' and author eventually meet. By sidestepping that possible complication, Helm is able to focus on the people in the story, and give us a few comments on life and death and the fact that like it or not, we all face death at some time - even if, as Harold remarks rather tearfully, it's just not convenient at the moment. It's also slightly unlikely that someone as wild as Gyllenhaal's character would really fall so readily for someone so boring/oddball as Harold, but somehow it works in the context of the movie. Only Ferrell, perhaps, could make the line, 'I want you' sound both romantic and physical.

Looking back at the list of quotes on imdb.com I realise again that the dialogue - and narration - in this movie is a lot sharper than you first think. And the humour is subtle; very little of it has that TV sitcom style of: person A makes an odd remark, person B caps it with a laugh line. And there's quite a lot of fun had with the idea of what a story is, how it works, whether it's a comedy or tragedy, and whether all of us have this kind of sense of being part of a story written by someone else.

In the trivia section related to this film, there's this interesting paragraph: The last names of all the characters (and the bus line and publishing firm names) are the names of mathematicians, scientists, engineers, artists, etc. (Harold) Francis Crick: with Watson and Wilkins found the structure of DNA; (Ana) Blaise Pascal: French mathematician and philosopher; (Karen) Gustave Eiffel: engineer and designer of the Eiffel Tower; (Penny) M.C. Escher: Dutch graphic artist; (Dr.) Magnus Gustaf Mittag-Leffler: Swedish mathematician; (Professor Jules) David Hilbert: German mathematician; (Doctor) Gerardus Mercator: 16th century Flemish cartographer; (Kronecker Bus Line) Leopold Kronecker: German-born mathematician and logician; (Banneker Press) Benjamin Banneker: free African American mathematician, astronomer, clockmaker, and publisher; (Dr. Cayly) Arthur Cayley, 19th century British mathematician. Even Dave (no last name) seems to be a reference to the main character from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

It's hard to know how people pick these things up, but it's interesting that they do! (Even harder to know what sort of people pick up the goofs on movies....are they totally focused on looking for inconsistencies?)