Not quite satisfying...

I Care a Lot is a new movie that's just arrived on Netflix. Brilliantly directed and shot, but it has no heart. Rosamund Pike plays an amoral woman running a business that claims to care for the elderly by making herself their guardian. It's a scam, helped along by a number of other scammers, and the end result is that the old people wind up in a rest home against their will and all their income, that is, what's left over they've forked out for all their weekly costs, goes to Pike's character, Marla Grayson. 

She mistakenly takes one independent old lady away, seemingly all in a moment. Apparently in real life this couldn't - or shouldn't - happen. The old lady turns out to have unknown connections rather than being someone without any living relatives, and the main connection has a heart even less moral than Marla's. If that's possible. 

Initially it's a cat and mouse game, but in the last half hour or so it becomes ridiculous after Marla survives a certain death and takes her revenge. The ending, though satisfying and just in dramatic terms, leaves the viewer wondering what they've just seen. Two evil people trying to outdo each other, mostly. 

Pike, on a recent chat show, touted the film as a comedy. Certainly it has its moments of humour, but the thing is hardly a comedy. When the old lady is first removed from her home, there's nothing but horror for the viewer. Could this happen in real life? The movie makes it seems possible. 

Netflix also likes to dredge up movies that have mostly been forgotten, such as Daniel Radcliffe's first major movie outside the Harry Potter series. The December Boys was shot in Australia, with a mostly Australian cast. It came out in 2007. 

Radcliffe somehow sticks out like a sore thumb. His character is already older than the other three boys who feature (and he was around 18 when the movie came out). He tries to play gawky and awkward and looks overly gawky and awkward doing so. He has a near sex scene, which plainly didn't feature in the Harry Potter advertising when he had his first kiss in one those movies. And he is, in fact, not the main character, but because of his billing and celebrity by that time, tends to take over more of the movie than he should. 

It's difficult at the beginning of the movie to figure the character out; is he supposed to be a similar age
to the other three boys, who all look around twelve, possibly thirteen. He trots along with them as though he was near their age, playing like a younger child. He doesn't appear to have a leadership role with this group even though he's plainly the oldest. 

In due course we see his role in the scheme of things, but by that time it's hard to get past the Harry Potter persona Radcliffe brings with him: the same habit of talking with his mouth nearly closed, the eyes that squint when he doesn't have glasses on (and he doesn't wear glasses in this movie so it looks as though he's perpetually squinting); the sense that he doesn't really inhabit a role but does all the right moves. 

A poster that misinterprets 
the story in favour of 
promoting the big name actor.

It's a pity, because there's a good story at the heart of this movie; it just isn't Radcliffe's. Far better to have cast a relatively unknown actor, as the other three boys are, in the role, and hope that the thing would take off without a celebrity name on the billing. As so often is the case when a 'star' is brought into a role that doesn't require one, a sense of unevenness pervades the film. 

When I say the other three boys are unknown, I mean that they were mostly unfamiliar to audiences at the time. All three have had successful careers in the movies, the one playing Misty, already fairly experienced by the time this movie came along. 

The actors apart, the photography is outstanding, and the movie is worth seeing for this alone. It's a story that takes a while to warm up, and for once, even though it features an orphanage run by Catholic nuns, there's none of that anti-Catholic feeling about it that so often pervades any movie with that sort of setting. 

Irritation in #gigatowndunedin

We don't tend to stay up late these days. Even with a nap in the afternoon, we're still often tired by the time 10.30-11.00 comes round.

So you can imagine our irritation at being woken around 11.30, three nights running, by someone ringing us to tell us that our computer isn't working properly, and that they can fix it for us. You know the routine: this is a scam, and once they get you to open up your computer they ask for your credit card to deal with the cost of the issue. And then start using your credit card details fraudulently.

What fool of a scam company thinks it's a good idea to ring people at this time of night? Don't they have a world clock on their own computers that tell them what time it is in our country?

They've had a short shift each time they've rung, a short and increasingly grumpy one. I'm thinking of leaving the phone off the hook overnight from now on. But then of course if we have a real phone call, an emergency perhaps, we'd miss it.

Even more ridiculous than the late night scams was the text message I got yesterday informing me that I'd won £125,000,000 in some mobile number lottery. One hundred and twenty-five million pounds? The credibility of this text is instantly undermined by the sheer size of the prize. Who gives away that much money in a lottery? If they'd suggested I'd won a thousand pounds I might have had second thoughts about how genuine the text was. But vast sums being allotted to me out of the blue - sorry, it just doesn't work. I've been around the world too long.

If you're going to scam us old people, then you're going to have to use your brain. I know some people fall for these things, but all your past scams have made me a lot more suspicious. But I'm not actually asking you to work harder at trying to fool me. I'd much prefer that you went and did something of value with your life, something that actually contributes to the good of society.

The Best Offer

There are spoilers here.

We watched a strange movie last night: The Best Offer. It was made in Italy by Italians, for the most part, although the leading roles were mostly taken by English-speaking actors.

It concerns an ageing and wealthy art auctioneer who is so full of himself that arrogance reeks from him. Not only that he's been running a little scam for decades in which a friend of his bids for art works that the auctioneer is actually buying. And in the first scene we see him snapping up what appears to be a worthless piece of wood because he knows that underneath the grime is a valuable painting - snapping it up in the sense of saying that he'll take it off the hands of the unknowing owners.

Geoffrey Rush plays the auctioneer and plays him brilliantly. But I suspect that the scriptwriter had someone younger in mind; there are elements of the story that seem a little awry as a result of this piece of casting. Rush's character Virgil Oldman (did you get it? - not obvious at all) has never been in love. He can't even bear to touch other people, and wears gloves all the time. A young woman calls him and asks that he make an inventory of the furniture and art works in her parents' home. He goes to the house, but she never turns up for meetings, always having some excuse on the phone. She continues to persuade him to go ahead with the inventory, and then one day he discovers that she actually lives in the large house, behind a false wall. He pretends to have left the house, but stays behind to see her. She has claimed that she has a form of agoraphobia, that renders her unable to leave the house and not to be good with people, face to face.

In a secondary element to the story, Oldman, on his visits to the house, keeps finding more and more pieces of something mechanical, dating from the 19th century. He takes it to a young engineer friend of his (a man who has no problem attracting young women) and gradually the engineer (Jim Sturgess) puts together an automaton, one that was known to have spoken to customers and given them answers to their questions. The engineer, incidentally, never seems to have any customers in his shop, and does all the work for Oldman for free...

The audience's suspicions have by this time been aroused that there's something not quite right about the girl, or the relationship she's formed with Oldman, or even, perhaps about the young engineer. Things seem to be fitting together too nicely. And in the end that's exactly the case: the whole thing is a scam against the auctioneer, and the biter is bit.

If it wasn't for the acting, especially Rush's, the film would fall apart. Most of it turns out to be nonsense, but it's beautifully done, the visual elements are extraordinary (especially the room full of paintings of women that Rush has hidden in his own house), and it sustains its major hoax until near the end. Even if you're suspicious about it all, you won't necessarily figure it all out.

The director and writer is Giuseppe Tornatore, who made Cinema Paradiso. That film was so long that it's never been seen in its entirety. Even the shortened version now available on DVD is stretched out. And Best Offer is overlong too; there are some moments, especially towards the end, when you just want it to reach its point and stop. But it's too beautiful, like most of the works of art that appear in it.