Catch up with this movie when it's released

A week or so ago we were invited by the Automobile Association to put our names in the hat for tickets to go and see a movie called X+Y. We received a couple of free tickets late last week, and though we knew nothing about the movie, went along to the preview showing.

What a pleasant surprise! It's the story of a boy who has some level of autism which shows itself in an inability to relate well socially while also being able to do maths exceptionally well - to the degree that he's invited to enter for the Maths Olympiad.

There's a good deal more to it than that, but I won't spoil your surprise by telling you how it plays out. Just take it from me it's well worth going to see.

Asa Butterfield, who was The Boy in Striped Pyjamas, is superb as Nathan, the main character. (His younger self is equally well-played by Edward Baker-Close.) He manages to wend his way through the minefield that playing an autistic boy can be, and remain believable. It's not assumed in the movie that you have to be autistic to be good at maths, of course, which is one particular plus, and equally it's assumed that people who are considered autistic in some degree vary enormously.

The somewhat eccentric actress Sally Hawkins plays Nathan's mother, and though she doesn't avoid all of her quirky approaches to acting, she's good in the role, and brings character to a part that could have been maudlin. (We last saw her in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, which is possibly one of the most annoying movies we've ever seen, mostly because of the character Hawkins plays in it!)

Rafe Spall is Nathan's teacher (he has multiple sclerosis, to boot). Spall is also an actor who brings a lot of bells and whistles to his acting; indeed one awkward scene between Hawkins and Spall in this movie could quite easily have come from a Mike Leigh film. Spall is excellent, however, in spite of being saddled with an illness that doesn't seem to develop too rapidly over the course of the film's several years. He has a bunch of great lines, and delivers them wonderfully.

Eddie Marsan, hiding his somewhat odd features behind a beard, is another slightly off-the-wall character, playing the man in charge of the British team involved in the Olympiad.

There are some great performances amongst the maths whizzes, but the stand-out one comes from Alex Lawther, who's torn between the fact that his family 'require' him to be a genius, see him as 'unique' because of his autistic aspect, and obviously expect him to love something it turns out he doesn't particularly care about.

I'm sure there'll be some who carp at yet another movie about autism that only presents part of the picture, but for all that this is a wonderfully human story, and very satisfying.

The Shadow Line

There are several spoilers here.  Don't read if you're intending to watch the series.

We've watched a British series on DVD over the last week or so.  It's called The Shadow Line, and it was exceptionally gripping.  But also very nasty, and ultimately somewhat unsatisfying, as it killed off the one character who had integrity, and left the villains in charge. There was a point to this, which I'll come to in due course, but after having watched the villains do damage to all and sundry throughout the piece it was disappointing to see them getting away with it still further.

The piece has two stories running in parallel (over seven lengthy episodes), but both intersect at a number of points, and both have come about as a result of something that happened before the story began. The first episode opens with what seems a prolonged look at a dead body in a car.  Two police officers have 'discovered' the body, and the more talkative and more-knowing of the two (David Schofield) seems to have his own peculiar agenda. He plainly knows more than he's letting on, though he gives away a number of hints to the viewer.

We're then introduced to Detective Inspector Jonah Gabriel (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his working partner, Detective Sergeant Lia Honey (Kierston Wareing). The latter is a smart-mouthed, very competent cop, who's not entirely pleased to be working with Gabriel, who, as a result of being shot in the head (the bullet is still lodged in his skull) has had a loss of memory as to what he was doing the night he was shot.

Gabriel's is the main story, and he's the character with integrity, and a passion for the truth. Curiously, as so often happens with characters in modern films who have integrity, he has had a mistress with whom he's had a child - his own wife has had several miscarriages, but is hoping for one last chance at pregnancy. In the film Gabriel - to his credit - anguishes over the fact that he's never revealed the presence of this other woman, and their son, to his wife. At least in that regard he's better than the leading character in Judge John Deed, another series we've been watching, where Deed, the judge who's shown as having enormous integrity on the justice side of things, consistently plays around with various women, including his former wife, his current lady friend, and several others.

The parallel character to Gabriel is soon introduced: Joseph Bede (Christopher Eccleston). He's a wholesale flower seller - on a big scale - and is using his business as a front for drug smuggling. Also on a big scale.  Supposedly he's built up the flower business primarily as a cover for a one-off big deal that will set him up for life, and will enable him to provide constant care for his wife, who has early onset Alzheimer's. But one of the problems with the drugs game, as we see time and again in this story, is that it's a cruel master: Bede finds himself increasingly trapped inside his plan. Several others, both big and small, also come to grief before the series has finished, most of them violently.

The series may be intended to highlight the impossibility of surviving the drugs game (more than one character talks about 'just surviving', and one of the nastiest (Rafe Spall, always on the verge of insanity) says realistically, in the last episode, how he's probably only got twenty years before he'll wind up the same way as all the others), and it's plain that those who have made the big time in drugs live under the tension of being overtaken by the next villain to come along, and plainly don't enjoy the fruits of their labours.

However, this is countermanded by the fact that the corrupt police in the series, of whom there are several, seem to manage to live above the law, and thrive. Their involvement in drugs began as something that was seen as a good, but was achieved by the wrong means. Then the 'rewards' have taken over their lives and they've gone back to the trough time and again. And the chief of these, a man called Gatehouse, (Stephen Rea, in a most chilling performance), manages to manipulate and pull strings and survive assaults, like the devil himself.  He's perhaps the most improbable character, when you reflect on it all, yet Rea gives him such life and personality that you come to believe he could exist. He's utterly treacherous, blatantly murderous, and convinced of his own ability to twist everything  and everyone to his ends, even those who appear to be honest.

The story is utterly convoluted, and has several shocking moments, as well as some we can see coming. Almost no one is who they seem, apart from Gabriel, and he worries a good deal (since he has this memory issue with a very important event) that he may not be the honest man he hopes he is. The curious thing is that even the evil ones tell him he is honest, and that gets up their nose. He's the only one to make Gatehouse think he might have mis-stepped at one point, and that's some achievement.

Hugo Blick wrote the script, and directed and produced the series. (Blick has also been an actor.)  This is a major achievement, because he has filled the series with vivid characters and cast some of the best in the business in the roles. Yes, there are some moments in the story when coincidences pile up a little too high, but the tension created and maintained throughout is extraordinary - I could feel my own nerves on edge during one particular episode - and he continually keeps us guessing as to who is really who.  Some apparently good characters aren't, and some of the evil ones appear to have their moments of sincerity.

Blick's direction can be mannered - but then the best film noir directors are always mannered. That's one of the things that makes these films what they are. A great deal of the time is spent in darkness, or night, or shadows, but even when we venture out into daylight, there's a sinister feel to what we're seeing. We know, for instance, that the journalist on his motorcycle won't make it home, and this is assisted a couple of scenes before by seeing him standing in front of a full-sized photo of T E Lawrence - with his motorbike. But then Blick takes advantage of what we guess by first giving us the journalist and his motorbike a near miss, and then having him vanish into a dip in the road, while a car heads towards him. Nothing happens on the screen for a moment, there's an ominous thump, then the car quietly reappears out of the dip and proceeds. The motorcycle doesn't reappear. Finally we're taken down into the dip to see the journalist incongruously sitting on the road, dying, his bike splattered across the road, and worse, that large farm vehicle he just missed a few minutes before sounds as though it's heading his way. It's a grisly scene, but all done without any bells and whistles, and in spite of our realisation that it's going to be happen, we're still shocked.

Several other scenes shock in different ways. Gatehouse makes his way into at least three houses at different times, and on each occasion we think he's going to murder someone. Nothing ever quite happens as we expect, so that when the actual murders happen, we don't have high-pitched strings playing on the soundtrack to prematurely warn us; the murders come almost out of the blue. When he comes to Peter Glickman's son's house (Glickman is his opposite number in the story, and is absent until about half way through the series) and threatens the man's wife, the whole thing takes on a craziness via a baby monitor that we misunderstand at first. The baby is unharmed, the woman is hysterical - but unharmed - and the only disaster is the dinner burning on the stove, an echo of the soup burning after the murder of the young pregnant mother earlier on.

Then there's the confrontation between Glickman and Gatehouse, in a Dublin clock shop. It has Hitchcock written all over it, right to the point of the explosion that demolishes the place, but not the two villains. (Hitchcock is everywhere through the series, in fact, and is frequently himself put in the shade by Blick's trickery.)  And the near disposal of Gatehouse in the hospital by Glickman's mistress - at least that who she appeared to be until she stabbed Glickman to death - much to our surprise.  This hospital scene is improbable; firstly because we know they say Gatehouse has the heart of a 20-year-old, but he is actually in his sixties and shouldn't have withstood being blown up and shot twice; and secondly how does he know he's about to be done in by the mistress and what method she's going to use?  Where is the policeman outside the door (yup, that's kind of explained later) and how come the nurse doesn't see or hear anything?  Once again Blick turns our expectations on their heads.  If for no other reason than his ability to undercut what we think will happen, Blick should be congratulated for a masterly series.

I didn't like some of the things that happened in it, but it was gripping viewing!

Two movies

I've watched a couple of less well-known movies in the last couple of days.  One is an Australian comedy called Gettin' Square, which I'd never heard of, although it's got an excellent cast - it came out around 2003.  The other is a made-for-TV movie called Temple Grandin, and has a wonderful performance by Clare Danes.

Gettin' Square is a bit of an assault on the ears, since the F-word gets a thorough outing, but apart from that it has a delightfully daft performance from David Wenham, a chance for Timothy Spall to make the most of the Australian sunshine, Sam Worthington in pre-Avatar days, and a host of other well-known Aussie faces. The story, at the end, is a sting for both the audience and the bad guys (and a few of the good ones as well), but it also shows the difficulties ex-prisoners have in settling back into society without either being forced into doing more crooked stuff, or living on the dole, or being hassled by people who don't want them to 'get square.'  Wenham plays a heroin addict who's been released and just can't make it without getting himself into further disasters; Worthington is the hero, of course, (named Wirth) and does his best to keep Wenham on the straight and narrow - although Wenham can help himself if he wants to by playing the fool, as a hilarious courtroom scene shows.  (There are a couple of actors in tiny roles just before Wenham's court scenes; one is played by a guy with a face that looks as though it's going to fall apart at any minute, and the other mostly involves the actor eating the paper evidence before the manhandlers can get at him).   Spall plays a man who has a criminal past but is trying to go straight - in general.  He still has a bit of cash stowed away that he shouldn't have.  Spall's character is doing Weight Watchers too, and has some novel ways to approach the difficulties of taking weight off, not all of which WW might approve.

The other film could have been a typical biopic, if it wasn't for the outstanding performance by Danes, who manages to be hectic, funny, scary, intense and a host of other things by turns - and sometimes all of them at once.  (She also does a pretty good job of ageing from a secondary-schooler to a full adult.)  Grandin is fairly well-known as a person with autism who was saved from institutionalism by her mother and kept from retreating from society by her mother, aunt and various encouragers along the way.  She discovered that she could identify with animals, in particular cattle, and has changed the way cattle going to market are handled in a huge number of ranches around the US.  She's also redesigned slaughter houses.  She's not an animal rights person - she understands the need for beef - but her intent was to make the last stages of the cattle's lives less stressful by allowing them to do what comes naturally to them.  It also helped that she saved a lot of ranches a good deal of money in the process.

The film avoids a lot of clichés of the typical biopic as well, and while it sometimes seems things fall neatly into place for Grandin, there are also some very low patches, and a lot of people who just don't get her illness - or don't want to.  I think Danes probably shows how an actor can act the role of someone with a disability without making it all ticks and quirks (Sigourney Weaver does the ticks and quirks approach in Snow Cage).   She deservedly got awards for this performance.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

A couple of weekends ago, the Regent Theatre Trust held its first non-book sale. It focused on DVDs (which all went within minutes of opening), videos, sheet music, paintings and jigsaws. And of course, vinyl recordings by the mile.
I’ve already mentioned that I picked up some music at the sale, but I probably didn’t say I got two DVDs – the only two I could get my hands on in the crush. One was the film version of a book I read in late 2006 when I worked in a very boring job where I had next to nothing to do all day except sit and wait for the phone to ring. Which it didn’t very often. This was Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.
I enjoyed the books - there were three in the volume I got, all of which come into the movie. So-called children’s books often have a style and charm that’s lacking in many novels for adults. Of course the movie thins down the storyline considerably, as you’d expect, but it manages to maintain the conversational style of writing by having Snicket as a character in the film (played by Jude Law). What it does even better is cast Jim Carrey as Uncle Olaf, and he gives it everything he’s got. His highly stylised characterisation is wonderful, never missing a beat. He’s surrounded by artwork that is also absolutely spot on. It makes the movie worth watching several times, I’d think.
Some of the other actors aren’t quite as stylish as Carrey, which is a pity. The three children are fine: Liam Aiken, with eyes that convey amazing amounts; Emily Browning, beautiful and resourceful, and the Hoffman twins, who seem to have no qualms about being hung from a table edge with their teeth sunk deep into it. And Timothy Spall is his usual superb self. I’ve never seen him put a foot wrong.
But Billy Connolly, playing the gentle, snake-loving uncle is rather flat and seems to wonder what he’s doing there, and Meryl Streep misses the boat (not literally, as she spends quite a bit of time in one) somehow, something she seldom does.
In the end it’s the children, Carrey and the mise-en-scene that makes this a memorable movie. And of course, Mr Snicket’s humour.

There are times when I could do with a pair of Bose headphones. Even though our tv has surround sound and you can improve the bass, it comes across as very variable. I'm sure the sound would be better heard through headphones, just as it is with my Sibelius music program on the computer.

Shooting the Past

We watched the first two episodes of Shooting the Past on tv last night. BBC (I think) was repeating them. They first came out in 1999.

Timothy Spall plays one of the lead roles, in his pre-Harry Potter period. As always he’s a joy to watch: confronting, wheedling, keeping other people on the back foot. He’s not necessarily the lead character, but he certainly takes up much of the viewer’s attention.

The story is that an American business company wants to take over a building that houses a library of ten million mostly black and white photographs. The Americans would quite happily ditch the lot. The five somewhat eccentric workers in the place attempt to dissuade them from such drastic action, in part by presenting stories through the photographs. The program is worth watching for the photographs alone: they’re by turns poignant, humorous, startling, outstanding, and even seemingly ordinary. They capture the tone and times of the 20^th century in a wide variety of ways.

I’m not sure when the next episode is on, but because we never seem to be in one place for long it’s quite possible we’ll miss it. I’ll have to make an effort to catch up with it.