Another Earth

Sometimes it's worth remembering that Science Fiction doesn't have to be all about spaceships, artificial intelligence and time travel. Another Earth is an unusual, haunting little film, more in the mold of the New Wave SF of the late '60s / early '70s. It uses the so-called "One Gimme" approach - it's set in what is recognisably our world but one thing has changed: another, identical Earth has suddenly and mysteriously appeared in the sky. Ignoring any of the "Hard SF" questions ( how did it get there? why isn't its gravity wrecking our own Earth? etc. ) the film asks more human, emotional questions: what would its appearance mean to people? how would you react if you knew you were duplicated on another planet? what if you could travel to this new world?

Co-writer and star Brit Marling plays Rhoda, a physics student with a bright future ahead of her... until, on the night the new Earth first appears, she drunkenly crashes her car, killing a composer's family and leaving him alive but an emotionally broken man. After four years in jail Rhoda returns home but is unable to function in the outside world, can't connect with her parents and even attempts suicide. By chance she discovers the bereaved man's identity and decides to try and help him. She poses as an agency cleaner and, while she cleans his neglected house, she also attempts to rebuild his shattered life. Slowly, they become friends and then lovers but, all the while, John ( William Mapother ) is unaware of Rhoda's identity. And then she finds that she may have a chance for a new life on the other Earth...

Another Earth is a subtle, cool ( as in "chilly" ) film with a jittery, scratchy style and plenty of food for thought, leading neatly to a lovely, ambiguous ending. Although more a relationship drama than a true Science Fiction film, the SF concepts are ticking away in the background, just like the new Earth, unobtrusively hanging in the sky in virtually every exterior shot. The two leads are excellent as damaged, disconnected people, hesitantly reaching out to each other and hoping for some redemption. The gorgeous and talented Brit Marling, in particular, is a star in the making, her melancholy presence shining in many almost dialogue-free scenes. The lo-fi soundtrack by Fall On Your Sword is worth a mention, too: nervy and atmospheric, it perfectly complements the low-key visuals and naturalistic acting.

Rating:

Four out of Five New Earths

( Oh, I should also mention that this was another film viewed at Gloucester's wonderful Guildhall Arts Centre. Always a pleasure. )

Another year gone by...

If I may be totally self-indulgent and serious here for a moment, here's a photo of me and my Dad, Pete, from back in 1984. I think this pic was taken at the Beaulieu Motor Museum when we were on holiday down in Bournemouth. It's not a great quality photo but I like it because I've got very few photos of me and Pete together.

( Yes, I called him "Pete", not "Dad". I don't know why, really. It was just always that way. I don't think it's anything to do with the fact I was adopted - I certainly never called my Mum "Marlene" - it's just one of those peculiar, specific quirks that I suppose all families have and don't really think about, but look strange from the outside. )

Pete would have been 81 today which is impossible for me to imagine as he was only 64 when we lost him. I don't really want to go into a lot of detail here ( it's boring for other people and saddening for me ) but I'd just like to say that he was a lovely bloke, a fantastic father and husband, a genuine, salt-of-the-earth character... and we all love and miss him.

Anyway, thanks for indulging me, people of the Blogosphere, and I hope you'll understand why I've interrupted this usually frivolous blog for something a bit more personal.

I'll leave you with some of Pete's favourite music ( and mine too! ) from Glenn Miller...

Ditko Dreams

Coming soon...

Glen Matlock / Chinese Burn

"I saw one of those Sex Pistols down the pub last night..."

Well, it was last Sunday to be accurate. The second M4 Music Festival in aid of the Alzheimer's Society at the Old George Inn in sleepy South Cerney.

Living legend and original Sex Pistols bass-player Matlock played an acoustic set covering his career from the Pistols days through the Rich Kids, Dead Men Walking and more obscure solo stuff, as well as covers of songs that have influenced him. It was a very intimate, low key gig with a really warm interaction between singer and audience. Matlock had us all singing along to Stepping Stone, Ghosts Of Princes In Towers, God Save The Queen, Pretty Vacant ( of course! ) and more.

The songs were all preceded with anecdotes and stories from Matlock's 4-decade career, as well as examples of his personal philosophy of positivity. He told us which songs he loved as a teenager; which songs he wrote after he "fell out with the Sex Pistols the first time"; and that, if he had his own radio show , he'd have a feature called "Matlock Murders" where he'd play his favourite covers. ( In fact, any "murdering" that night was perpetrated by the God-awful support band Operation 77 who dribbled out lame, passionless karaoke versions of classic Punk and Ska tunes. But the less said about them the better... )

It was a great set by a much-underrated artist who has a fine, powerful voice and charisma to spare, and is actually a damn good guitarist - just watching some of the chords he was playing made my fingers ache! And singing along to All Or Nothing just a few feet away from a Sex Pistol was one of the coolest things ever. And so was shaking hands with a Sex Pistol...

Also playing were legendary Stroud disco-Punks ( remember that description, guys? ) Chinese Burn. Not much Disco in evidence but plenty of fantastic, melodic Punk instant-classics, played with the band's usual passion and very LOUD!

Poor old Ben somehow cut his lip open and proceeded to bleed over the mike, his shirt, the floor, the audience etc. Still, it's Punk Rock innit?

...but it certainly looks painful :-)

I've never seen the Burn boys put on a bad show, but this was definitely one of their best. A short, sharp shock of a set with no time to breathe as they banged out great song after great song. And for a band playing an unfamiliar venue to a mostly new audience, they pulled the biggest crowd of the evening.

And did I mention they were BLOODY LOUD?

We ( Sarah and I ) missed most of the bands from earlier in the day but we did see the Go Go Cult, rabid rockabilly rebels who looked like they'd just robbed a bank.

A very raw, ragged but powerful set of ( I think ) original songs in a Punked-up Rockabilly stylee, but stopping short of the dreaded bat-on-a-string cliches of Psychobilly. Well worth seeing, I'll have to catch them again.

And here's me and Sarah enjoying the Burn experience. Long live the underdog!

War Horse

After watching a couple of small-scale movies at Gloucester's Guildhall ( Midnight In Paris, My Week With Marilyn ) it's time to head back to the multiplex for Spielberg's latest blockbuster, War Horse.

Based on the classic children's novel by Michael Morpurgo, War Horse is a deceptively simple tale of a young boy and his horse. Teenager Albert Narracott ( Jeremy Irvine ) is growing up on a dirt-poor Devon farm on the eve of the First World War with his alcoholic father ( Peter Mullan ) and long-suffering mother ( a wonderfully weary but tough Emily Watson ). His father returns from market one day, having blown his money on a horse which, at first glance, seems totally unsuitable to the hard task of ploughing stony Dartmoor fields. Albert names the horse Joey and takes it upon himself to break in and train the reluctant animal. But even with all Albert's hard work and love for the horse, a combination of ruined harvests and an unscrupulous landlord

( David Thewlis having a great time ) means that Albert's dad ends up selling Joey to the army when war is announced.

The film then follows Joey's adventures as he passes from owner to owner and witnesses firsthand ( firsthoof? ) the horrors of war.

First, Joey becomes a cavalry mount for thoroughly decent chap Captain Nicholls ( Tom Hiddleston, vying with Michael Fassbinder for title of hardest working actor in showbiz ) but then, after a disastrous raid on a German camp, along with another horse - Topthorn - he falls into the hands of the German army. Two young deserters take Joey and try to escape from the front line. Inevitably, they are caught and executed and Joey is then taken in by an old Frenchman and his sickly granddaughter.

Eventually, Joey finds himself amongst the mud, barbed-wire and bloodshed of the Front, again at the mercy of the German war-machine. At this point in the story, now near the end of the war, Albert too is in the trenches, still dreaming of being reunited with his horse. If he can stay alive...

War Horse is a return to old school film-making of the family-friendly kind for Spielberg. You won't find the bleached-out, shaky-cam action scenes of Saving Private Ryan or War Of The Worlds here. Instead you get expansive, wide-screen compositions, with the camera lingering over landscapes like the clouds drifting over the Dartmoor hills. From England's green and pleasant land, to a thundering cavalry charge ( referencing Lawrence Of Arabia's attack on Aqaba ), to the swampy hell of No Man's Land, Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski paint their backdrops with the skill of an Old Master.

And in those landscapes they show us people ( and horses ) struggling to stay alive, to get back home, to make sense of it all. Albert and Joey are two of a kind: innocent but headstrong and loyal. They are both buffeted by fate, both lose friends to the war, and their eventual reuniting is as moving as it is inevitable. Spielberg pulls the audience's strings in a way he hasn't since ET but you don't mind: this is a proper, old-fashioned epic which asks you to invest in the characters and leave your modern cynicism at the door. There are so many beautiful moments along the way: Mrs. Narracott's speech about her husband's traumatic experience in the Boer War, the touching friendship between Joey and Topthorn ( who said "Get a stable"? ), the hissing goose that chases after anyone setting foot on the Narracott farm, the luminous French landscapes only miles from the Front, the English and German soldiers uniting to save a trapped Joey, and the titular horse's exhilarating gallop through the trenches.

War Horse is a film that speaks of the horrors of war but also of the importance of friendship, loyalty and love. It's that simple and that powerful...

Soundtrack: Dark And Long, Mmmm Skyscraper I Love You, Surfboy by Underworld

2012: Year Of The Dragon

The Chinese Year Of The Dragon starts today...

Hope it's not too hot for you...

Midnight In Paris / My Week With Marilyn

Sometimes you need to get away from the multiplex, away from the boy wizards and robots-in-disguise, and away from the twenty-first century altogether.

I've seen a couple of films recently at my favourite venue, Gloucester's Guildhall Arts Centre, a place where I've spent many a night jumping up and down to loud rock music, but haven't frequented as a movie-house. Which was my loss, obviously.

First up was Woody Allen's latest, Midnight In Paris. Although I've been a fan of the Woodster ( as nobody calls him ) for many years, I've never seen any of his movies on the big screen before. I was too young for the glory days of Annie Hall, Manhattan etc. and a lot of his later films haven't really grabbed me. Midnight In Paris, however, is something different: a romantic comedy / drama / time-travel movie (!), somewhat in the vein of his earlier A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy.

Young(ish) engaged couple, Gil ( Owen Wilson ) and Inez ( Rachel McAdams ) are holidaying in Paris with her awful Republican parents. Gil is a successful Hollywood screenwriter but feels he's just a hack and longs to be a novelist, preferably one living in the Jazz Age of Gay Paree, while Inez is mostly concerned with buying hideous objets d'art and hanging around with her former tutor / lover, Michael Sheen's pompous Paul. One evening, while his companions head out to a club, an inebriated Gil decides to walk the Parisian streets to clear his head, only to find himself picked up by a bunch of champagne-swigging revellers in an old car and somehow whisked back in time to Paris in the '20s. Here he meets a veritable Who's Who of Jazz Age stars: Hemingway, TS Eliot, Gertrude Stein, the Fitzgeralds, Picasso, Dali, Man Ray, and many more. Gil can't believe his luck as he gets to meet and party with his heroes... but he also starts to doubt his sanity. Over a few nights of time-travelling he falls in love with Adriana, muse to the stars, as played by the luminous Marion Cotillard...

Midnight In Paris is a beautifully shot, warm, witty and romantic fantasy. The footage of Paris itself is exquisite ( if a little "chocolate box"-y ) and had me reaching for my passport. Owen Wilson ( an actor I've never been too bothered about before ) is fine as poor, romantic Gil, in way over his head; Marion Cotillard is as elegant and full of life as ever; Michael Sheen is wonderfully slimy as the pontificating professor who meets his match in Carla Bruni's museum guide; and there are some memorable performances from Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein, Corey Stoll as a testosterone-fuelled Hemingway, Adrien Brody almost stealing the movie as Dali, and a beautifully vulnerable Alison Pill as Zelda Fitzgerald. Although a fairly lightweight movie ( especially compared with some of Woody's more serious works ) Midnight... is not afraid to make the point that nostalgia is all well and good, but it's too easy to idolise the past and forget to live today. Gil sees the Jazz decade as being a Golden Age, but '20s socialite Adriana yearns for the turn of the century Belle Epoque, and when they are both transported further back in time they discover that artists such as Matisse are similarly misty-eyed about the days of the Renaissance. And so it goes.

Last week we again went to the Guildhall ( it's becoming a habit! ), this time to see My Week With Marilyn, the allegedly-true story of a young Englishman's affair with Marilyn Monroe. Colin Clark was a would-be film-maker who got a job with Laurence Olivier's production company in 1956 and wound up working on the limp comedy The Prince And The Showgirl. As Third Assistant Director he was basically "Larry" Olivier's gopher but soon became confidant and lover ( so the story goes ) to the biggest female movie star in the world...

My Week With Marilyn chronicles the disastrous meeting between two schools of acting: the old, theatre-based style of the great Olivier and the modern, "Method" style as attempted by Marilyn. I say "attempted" because Ms. Monroe, at this point in her career, was notoriously incapable of learning her lines or turning up to set on time. The film shows Olivier trying to deal with a Marilyn whose marriage to her third husband ( Arthur Miller ) is on the rocks after only a matter of days, who is constantly doped-up to combat her nerves and insomnia, and who is accompanied at all times by interfering Method guru Paula Strasberg ( Zoe Wanamaker ), much to Olivier's fury.

The scenes of film-making - the Rank studios, union in-fighting, constant delays, tea and biscuits - are a wonderful peek into a drab, post-war, very English movie world, a million miles from Tinseltown. The usual thespian suspects are present and correct: Judi Dench as a warm, ever-considerate Dame Sybil Thorndike, Derek Jacobi as a royal librarian, a feisty Emma Watson as Colin's put-upon girlfriend, and Kenneth Branagh in probably his dream role as England's greatest Shakespearean actor.

But the film belongs, of course, to Michelle Williams as Marilyn. By turns vulnerable, flighty, neurotic, funny, harsh and very sexy, without being the cartoon-Marilyn of a thousand impersonations, Ms. Williams' performance is spookily accurate, and it's only her slightly slimmer physique that stops her from being Marilyn reborn. She perfectly conveys the disconnect between Marilyn's public and private personae ( facing a crowd at one point, she says to Colin "Shall I be her?" as she puts on the Marilyn glamour for their approval ) and her yearning for a family life she was fated to never have. The only weak link here is Eddie Redmayne as Colin. The character comes across as naive and wide-eyed, but still strong in his desire to protect and love the American beauty. However, there is very little else to the character beyond his obsession with Marilyn; and his treatment of Emma Watson's Lucy doesn't endear him to the viewer. He's really there to stare in wonder, on our behalf, at one of the greatest stars of her time...

( While I'm on the subject of the Guildhall Cinema, I'll just mention that this week I went to the first meeting of the Film Focus Group, a monthly meeting to decide which films will be shown at the Guildhall in coming months. I didn't know what to expect, really, but I'm always interested in movies and I'm a keen supporter of the Guildhall, so I thought I'd give it a try. It turned out to be an interesting evening with a real cross-section of people there, from young film students, to bloggers, to former projectionists and amateur film-makers. The ages ranged from early twenties to one very outspoken 81-year old. The selection of films under consideration wasn't too hot, but we watched trailers and debated them, and also talked about ourselves and our interests in film. I definitely enjoyed it and plan to go again next month. )

FF Fridays: Medusa