Total Recall and Star Wars

We watched the remake of Total Recall a couple of nights ago. Colin Farrell does an excellent job, not just as an action hero, but as a man with  depth to his personality. I think I've seen the Arnold Schwarzenegger version, but can't remember anything about it. My gut feeling is that Farrell presents a much more interesting character than Schwarzenegger would have. The two women in the story, Kate Beckingsale, who plays Farrell's seemingly indestructible and villainous 'wife,' and Jessica Biel as his true love, are both equally good. Apart from the excellent acting and the tense action scenes, it's the design of the movie that stands out most: the hemmed-in feeling of an overcrowded city, the washed-out colours, the extraordinary structures and much more. 

In the end they whole thing is far-fetched to the max, but surprisingly survives its innumerable plot holes. By all accounts fans of the original movie were highly offended by this one; be that as it may, I think it stands up well as a decent action movie on its own. 

Last night we went and saw the latest Star Wars. Don't ask me what it's subtitle is: I long ago gave up trying to remember these, since they all seem similar. Wait, it's The Force Awakens. Okay. Spoilers follow...

Well, the first thing that can be said is that it's back to the original, almost faultless style. Gone is the super seriousness of the middle three prequels; the humour, action and storytelling are all on a par with the first episode. (Number IV, I think that actually means. Good grief.) Many of the original characters turn up (not until the very last scene in Hamill's case) but there are plenty of newcomers, not least a wonderful new droid, BB8. His name doesn't have quite the catchiness of R2D2, or CP3O, but he's full of charm, and beautifully presented, both vocally and in terms of his movement. Harrison Ford gets into his stride within a few moments of appearing, and Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca actually gets some decent moments for a change. Carrie Fisher plays a much matured Leia; she has a warmth that wasn't quite so evident in the early movies. 

But these actors are supporting artists really, in this movie, in spite of the fact that three of them get top billing. Bit odd, when you think that Mark Hamill has one scene, one in which he doesn't even speak. Daisy Ridley and John Boyega play the leads and swing through all kinds of emotions in the process. Whether they'll survive into the next episode is anyone's guess, but they deserve to: by the time the movie ends they're fully-fledged characters. 

Adam Driver plays Kilo Ren, the main baddie. (Kylo Ren? Many of Lucas' characters have oddball names that don't work for me: this is one of them, along with Poe Dameron, Maz Kanata, Unkar Plutt (Simon Pegg gets landed with this monstrosity), and Supreme Leader Snoke. Snoke? Is that really a name for a villain, apart from the difficulty of pronouncing it. Max von Sydow plays Lor San Tekka. Come on, George, give people names that sound like names, as you did with Han Solo, Luke Skywalker (a brilliant name) and Princess Leia. 

Maz Kanata, incidentally, is one of the more interesting characters amongst the smaller roles: played by a normal-sized human being - the Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong'o - she appears on screen as a pint-sized woman with enormous glasses almost set into her head, and a couple of slits for nostrils. Andy Serkis is in the cast too, though as usual he's unrecognisable. He plays the Supreme Leader who only appears as an immense hologram, his face beginning to disintegrate and his longevity obviously telling on his body. I don't know how he fits into the scheme of things, though no doubt there are hundreds of fans out there who could tell me. And presumably, being broadcast from somewhere else in the galaxy, he survives the holocaust near the end. 

The visual effects are endless, but remain within the realm of plausibility. The John Williams score is hugely varied, as always, with familiar themes appearing at appropriate times, and plenty of new ones. 

I went expecting to be underwhelmed, after the last three mostly awful pieces, but it's great to see the series back on form. 

Fiction/non-fiction

We've watched a couple of DVDs over the last few days.  One of these was The Way Back, which is supposed to be based on a true story of a group of escapees from a prison camp in Siberia during the Second World War three of whom managed to make it to India finally, by walking all the way.  When I say 'supposed' apparently there's a bit of argy-bargy gone over over the years as to how much truth and how much invention is contained in the original book on which the movie is based.  And then, of course, the movie makes some changes of its own.

Be that as it may, this movie, directed by Peter Weir, is surprisingly engrossing, especially considering that it's over two hours long and for a good deal of that time the characters are walking.  Yup, walking. Naturally, other stuff happens within that, and there are inter-relational things that go on, especially when the group of men is joined by a young girl who seems to be the only one capable of getting their histories out of them.  The main character, Janusz, played by Jim Sturgess (who kept reminding me of Sam Worthington of Avatar fame for some reason) is cast in the heroic mould: not only is it his intention to find the wife who betrayed him, he also wants to bring forgiveness to her.  But beside that underlining aim, he's also the one who has the endurance and determination and skills to keep going, and to assist the others to struggle on.  Of course some don't make it - we know that only three will survive because of a note at the beginning of the movie - but that doesn't stop us being involved with their journey; the adjective 'intrepid' barely covers it.  The cast includes Ed Harris as a grizzly old American caught up in the War - he's excellent - and Colin Farrell as a Russian criminal who only gets to come along because he has a very sharp knife.  Farrell does one of his wild man performances, and covers his natural intelligence under a guise of feral survival instincts.  He's excellent too.  Saoirse Ronan, who was only 16 at the time she made the movie, brings her wonderful waif presence to her role, and, for a time, becomes the centre around which the movie moves forward.

The characters walk through Siberian forests in blizzards, over mountains in the sunshine, out into the Siberian Desert where they nearly get cooked to death, up into Tibet (snow again), and finally to India, where the women are picking tea.  The photography is superb, and the things the actors themselves have to go through in the performance of their roles is sometimes almost beyond the call of duty.   I picked this movie up at the Library without knowing anything about it.  It was well worth getting.

The other film is a documentary called The Promise of Music.  Directed by the German, Enrique Sánchez Lansch, with a German film crew, this movie looks at a number of aspects relating to El Sistena, the system used in Venezuela to teach children music and bring them into a place where they're a contributing member of a proper orchestra.  It's publicly funded in that country, and the idea is now spreading further afield, both England and Scotland have begun to use it.  It has a deeper purpose that 'just' music-making; it aims to help youngsters from poverty areas to gain a good foothold in life and get themselves out of the poverty net.  As a result, in Venezuela it was under the Social Welfare area of the Government, rather than the Cultural one.  

While this movie looks in some degree at the process of El Sistena, it focuses more on some members of the Simón Bolivar Orquesta Sinfónica and its young conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, a lively and impassioned man who began his musical career as a violinist but quickly realised that conducting was his true love, and forte.  At the beginning the Orchestra (who also appear in the video on the Scottish version of El Sestina) is in the late stages of rehearsal for a concert in Bonn, where they'll play, amongst other things, Beethoven's Eroica Symphony.  We travel with them to Bonn and see part of the concert - though if you go to another section of the disc you can see the entire concert, including the wonderful piece at the end in which they truly let their hair down, Venezuelan-style.  This is only one of the many heart-warming moments: another is when several of the children's orchestras combine together to perform Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony, with Dudamel conducting.  

But apart from the music performances, there are a number of interviews with various members of the orchestra showing how they came up through the ranks, how they feel about El Sestina, what it's like to be part of such an organisation, and much more.  These are often entertaining, as the young people, mostly in their early to mid-twenties, are a delight, though they take their music very seriously.