Showing posts with label Chiwetel Ejiofor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chiwetel Ejiofor. Show all posts

Monday 28 September 2015

The Martian (2015) : The science of deliberately piercing a hole in a space-suit...

At one time, probably an expanding group of Tweets about The Martian (2015)


More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


28 September

At one time, probably an expanding group of Tweets about The Martian (2015)













Some external links...

http://www.universetoday.com/77070/how-cold-is-space/

The AstroCritic: What 'The Martian' Gets Right About Astronauts




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Saturday 12 April 2014

A Night in Tunisia ?*

This is a review of Half of a Yellow Sun (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


11 April (updated 30 April)

This is a review of a special preview screening of Half of a Yellow Sun (2013), based upon the novel of that name by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and screened at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse), Cambridge, on 8 March, followed by a Q&A with screenwriter / director Biyi Bandele





When one has heard Biyi Bandele talk about discussing making a film with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie of her novel, and even had him acceptingly answer one’s question about whether we had been right to feel uneasy sometimes that we were laughing (he wanted to see tragedy in comedy, and vice versa, and referred to ‘gallows’ humour’), there is the danger of losing objectivity, and of failing to say what one heard, saw and felt, because one does not wish to offend. However, the film is the thing being reviewed, and the worst that can happen to it – obviously not as a result of this review – is to be re-edited, censored, or even banned.

There are two neat shots in this film, first where, early on, we move downwards, through the floor / ceiling, and see Olanna (Thandie Newton) at the table, who had just been preening herself upstairs. The other is a similar magic-trick in a way, which is when Odenigbo’s mother is to Olanna’s right (we are facing her), then we move across to look just at her, and, when we move back, Olanna is now sitting next to Odenigbo (Chiwetel Ejiofor), having another – but related – conversation.

These shots seem quite out of place in the rest of the film, where the next nearest thing is a busy tracking-shot, back and forth outside the home that is being evacuated (though they all act as if they are going on holiday, not least with what they think it necessary to take with them, rather than fleeing) – rather than intensifying a moment that is already tense (please excuse the wordplay !), the tracking is just somewhat irritating.

The aesthetic that gives rise to these devices, which seem out of character with the rest of the film, can therefore scarcely be intended to provide some sort of alienating perspective, since they act in isolation. (However, with the one last mentioned, one could probably seek to justify it, after the fact, by maintaining that it heightens our appreciation of how their bourgeois values have not yet been ground down to face the reality of conflict as against, say, preserving candlesticks.)

Likewise, Olanna and her supposed twin sister Kainene (Anika Noni Rose) really just present as spoilt bitches, not out of place on the set of late-1970s t.v. series Dallas. Though they are certainly not virgins, of course no one watching wants them [to have] to sleep with the minister who has come to dinner to win their father the lucrative contract that [Kainene and ?**] he wants, but that does not make their general attitude and behaviour endearing, any more than it does in the story of Cinderella***.

To some extent, though, that trans-generational revolt provides a sort of alienation – except that the film will also have us believe that they will discover what it is to be a mensch through the horrors and deprivations of the war in Biafra (1967–1970). (It has to be said that, in that, it appears little different from the novel****. It is also little different, say, from The Book Thief (2013), where we see similar kindnesses in the time of war, probably more so, but neither film approaches anywhere near the atmospheric and dramatic status of Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943).)

According to what it seems Toby Miller (@tobytram) [of Cambridge 105’s ‘Bums on Seats’ radio-show] established in his interview with Biyi Bandele after the screening, the film is actually intended to show a melodrama, whereas, as intimated in the question to Bandele, it appeared that it was perhaps striving to be something else. In any case, if one compares Sun, say, with a dynastic film such as Buddenbrooks (2008) – though any difference is, obviously, largely rooted in the different nature of the original text – the only parent who has any real part is Odenigbo’s Mama (Onyeka Onwenu), and we have a chance to get to know and value her.

Therefore (although this may be a matter of digesting the elements of a novel and making a screenplay from it), we have no further sight of Kainene and Olanna’s father (there is telephone contact*****), and we are never again in Lagos. Tellingly, Bandele had told us that his view is that slavishly trying to capture every strand of story of a novel is best fitted to a t.v. series, not to a film, and that the latter medium best makes a screenplay based on a short story.

Yet what Bandele has nonetheless chosen to make into a film is, of course, a novel, and where he stated that he had had ‘to tone down’ Ejiofor’s character (known between the sisters as ‘The Revolutionary’, seemingly privately) so that he was not overlarge for the screen. When asked if he had relied on his own memories of the civil conflict, Bandele had to point out that he was only aged three when it ended (and, indeed, we can see that the novel’s author Adichie was not born until a decade after him), and we hear that what happened is not talked about now in Nigeria.

Clearly, there are good reasons why we should learn that ‘Biafra’ is more than a name from the 1960s, where it was, why, and why it no longer exists. Thus, in addition to Anika Noni Rose, and Thandie Newton (whom Bandele says he has known since the age of nineteen), let alone the now-celebrated Ejiofor, he also has Joseph Mawle (as Richard) in his cast, plus cinematographer John De Borman, to whom he referred for his work on The Full Monty (1977) (though arguably better known for Made in Dagenham (2010) or An Education (2009) – or even Quartet (2012). However, one cannot help feeling sorry for Ugwu (John Boyega), turned into (compared, one gathers, with the book) someone who is ordered around for much of the time, and only much valued when traumatized.

Sadly, that is too much a paradigm for how the film operates / fails to operate as a whole. It was a valiant effort for Newton, amongst others, to work on through typhoid to complete filming, and for Bandele to wrap with just enough time to let Ejiofor get to the States and straightaway start filming Slave. However, does the film do justice not so much to the novel, but to the history of Biafra and of the Biafran War, in giving proper insights into what was happening then, rather than relying on newsreel (even if that need not have been ineffective - the first clip set the scene wonderfully well) ?


Amanda Randall (@amandarandall5) writes more here about the adaptation...


End-notes

* At the party to which (or the one that we see) Kanine and Olanna escape from their father’s house, we hear the distinctive strains of Dizzy Gillespie’s composition A Night in Tunisia – it is a shame that it has not been contrived that we are unaware that they are miming (to a credited version of the tune).

** Kainene is going, as she says that she will be, to Port Harcourt to head her father’s business operation, not continuing her extensive education (unlike Olanna in her academic post). Maybe their father would not listen to Olanna and her about sexual favours for the minister, but the impression is that it had been assumed, never discussed, and that these women suddenly assert their own rights…

*** A certain literalism seems to go with Bandele's approach to film-making, such that we have an unnecessary caption to tell us that where we see Kainene at one point is the airport (it plainly is), and her entry to get married is cued by, of all things, 'The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba' (from Handel's oratorio Solomon).

**** * Contains spoilers * The film would have you believe that you have watched a true story, by putting up captions afterwards such as ‘Kainene is still missing’ – given that it is 2014, and that part of the film is set in 1970, this seems a strange assertion, because few people probably consider someone ‘missing’ who has not been seen for more than forty years.

***** Despite an apparent desire to attend to period accuracy for props (e.g. chunky handsets for telephones, with those shell-like cupped mouthpieces), when Olanna uses wine as the means (or catalyst ?) of seduction (the film – maybe, also, the book – plays with drunkenness as a licence for illicit sex (reminiscent of Lot’s daughters ?)), the type of corkscrew that she uses did not exist (according to Wikipedia, it was not invented for another twenty-five years - so certainly not the modern method that she employs, piercing the capsule and pulling the cork through it…).




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Wednesday 15 January 2014

What if we read the book from 1853 ?

A rating and review of 12 Years A Slave (2013)


More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


15 January

A rating and review of 12 Years A Slave (2013)

77 = S : 11 / A : 13 / C : 11 / M : 10 / P : 12 / F : 10


S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel
9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)







If you think that, as films go, 12 Years A Slave (2013), despite its emotive content, is just an average piece of film-making, and patchy in places, you are almost damned before you open your mouth : people refuse to separate the content of a film, when it is such as this, from the worth of the film itself, even if it does function in large part as a medium for the story (or message).




Of course, what happens is objectionable (either crime, or people turning their eyes from it), but one cannot make out that slavery exclusively resides in the cotton-fields of Georgia, not, say, in tribes in Africa long subjugating each other's people by war or raiding, and with the well-known example of the people of Israel in captivity in Egypt. In the same way, The Roman Empire had freemen and slaves, and that goes back two thousand years, such that the New Testament is talking about slaves obeying their masters almost as a given (and which is a source for the preaching heard in the film).



The same director's (Steve McQueen's) film Hunger (2008) evokes The Maze Prison, but making a feature about the IRA hunger-strikers in the early 1980s was likely to make a modest gross at the box office (IMDb reports $154,084 at 5 June 2009 in the States, with $1,980 for the opening weekend (5 December 2008)), compared with the relative distance that one has on events 130 years earlier in Slave. As to a powerful piece of film-making, one may think that Slave does not pull any punches, but, compared with Hunger, it is all of these things - mainstream, stereotypical, and stylized in a very conventional way - and feels like a betrayal of that earlier aesthetic.

There are also scenes in the film (of which follow a few) in which McQueen seems to revel as moments, whether or not they work with the film, and so lose its direction and weight :

* For no very good reason (when he would not help her as asked), Northup, when he brings Patsey back to the drunk Epps as requested, tries to pretend that he has not whispered to her to make herself scarce (which he could have done at any point), and a ludicrous chase, in and out of the piggery, ensues - does it do any more than show Epps as gross, and that Northup is capable of a tactical misjudgement ?

* When Northup makes a request for a letter to be carried to his family, he certainly is - it is only by conceiving that he had worked out the lies of his cock-and-bull story beforehand, in case he was betrayed (but, then, he would not already have written the incriminating letter), and that he catches Epps at a good time, that it is credible that he escapes punishment or death by his excuses

* It is clever, but very foolish reasoning (as in any workplace), to contradict and show up your overseer in front of the owner, because, even if you demonstrate your cleverness by proving him wrong and that hardly justifies him finding fault to have an excuse to lynch you, you must know that he will not see it thus Your slick nigger ways

* A more subtle enemy might have got at Northup by breaking the violin that he has been given, and then showing it up as his ingratitude - that approach might have got Ford on his side and against Northup, where this one of finding fault to provoke a fight did not

* Patsey is almost definitely flogged out of deeper motives than whether she went to a neighbouring property for a bar of soap, and no one wants to flog or see another flogged, but can the irrational zeal of Epps (for once in tune with that of his wife against Patsey, whose urging renders him impotent to the task and makes him involve Northup) be yoked to the explicit reasoning of spelling out the doctrine that a man's 'property' is his to do with as he wishes (as Epps' wife would be, since she has no rights except through him, and so he early on chooses Patsey over her, if she wishes to exert herself) ?

* The uneasy moment when other men whom Northup finds on the way to the store are being strung up - maybe just scene-setting that lynching is a part of life (though that seems contrary to a film whose ethos is not to make everything normative), but a lost opportunity, with Ford's wife (who declared, when Northup and the fellow woman slave arrived, that the latter would soon forget her children) to set up some other resonance

What does not seem like a betrayal is simply lifted from someone else's vision (that of Terrence Malick) :



The vision was in the cinematographic ethos, for example the gorgeous close-up of the caterpillar that, although Epps (Michael Fassbender - also in Hunger as Bobby Sands) denies it, is causing the blight of his cotton-plants : it feeds into other moments of the film, but not in the absorbed way that the wide landscapes do of Days of Heaven, and so makes the downright ordinary photography seem gratingly poor and uninspired.

The film contains four main moments of extended dialogue, first with the weeping woman who has been separated from her children (when sold with Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor)), then when Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o) makes a request of him, then when he makes a request of a white former overseer with whom he is working, and finally when he makes the same request of Bass (Brad Pitt). Certainly, the first two (whether or not the conversation is written out in full by Solomon Northup's memoir Twelve Years A Slave (in which he was assisted by a local writer, David Wilson)) sounded very stagey, trying too much to imitate the manners, language and diction of the age to be more than artificial - even if people ever did talk to each other in that way, it sounded more Shakespearean than from the mid-nineteenth century, and one felt that one was being told that these were Important Words to Heed : for example, How came you there ? How is this ? Tell me all. (I doubt it, but maybe some sort of attempt at Brechtian alienation, as when Northup arrives home and says I have had a difficult time these several years ?)

Hans Zimmer's soundtrack sought by means of rumbling, low-frequency percussive sounds, which would not have been out of place in Peter Gabriel's Millennium Show Ovo (e.g. the machine music of the track 'The Tower That Ate People'), or even The Wachowskis' The Matrix (1999), to impart a sense of menace or the like, but it lacked subtlety for a composer who had scored Inception (2010), and sounded derivative :



If this film is remarkable, and breaks ground, it would be good to know in what way, and how one's understanding is advanced beyond that of Alex Haley's t.v. series Roots in 1977, or even the t.v. film Solomon Northup's Odyssey (1984) and the slavery strand in Cloud Atlas (2012).




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)