Contents
"Quantum Of Solace" "Quartet" "The Queen" "Queen & Slim" "The Quiet American" "A Quiet Place" "A Quiet Place Part II" "Quo Vadis, Aida?"
Following up the outstanding success of "Casino Royale" was always going to be a really tough mission and "Quantum Of Solace" - written as an immediate sequel to the earlier movie - is, while hugely entertaining, only a partial success.
The greatest plus is again Daniel Craig who has quickly made the 007 role his own. Here he is an agent full of controlled anger of the loss of his love Vesper Lynd who is visibly bloodied by the brutal, bone-crunching encounters that he faces and fights. We have a gorgeous Bond girl in the Ukrainian Olga Kurylenko (playing the Bolivian-Russian Camille) who - in a clever referencing of many of the Fleming novels - is a beautiful woman with a physical flaw (think of Honeychile Rider's broken nose). We have lots and lots of running and chases in every type of vehicle - whether car, boat or (pre-war) aircraft - and simply frenetic editing. It's all so fast and so furious, but actually too fast and too furious. Indeed the last two Bond films have so obviously been massively influenced by the box office takings of the Bourne trilogy.
What we don't have is a compelling narrative - the plot is really confused at times - or any of the humour or the gadgets that were so much a part of films earlier in the 45 year old franchise. For the second consecutive time, the main villain is a Frenchman (1066 and all that) but Mattieu Amalric as Dominic Greene is not so scary and we only glimpse the real Mr Big right at the end of the movie. Effectively there's no sex: Bond sleeps with one woman but we don't see them in bed and then she comes to a sticky end - which counterpoints the classic murder scene in "Goldfinger" - in terms which suggest that in future she should be known as Oil Fields. Even the music is a letdown: no use of the famous Monty Norman theme until the end and a terrible opening song.
In short: by the end of this 22nd outing, I was shaken but not stirred.
Link: explanation of title click here
In the last couple of years, Hollywood has given us "It's Complicated" and "Hope Springs", while British cinema has offered up "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" and now "Quartet" - all films majoring on characters in older age but designed to demonstrate that being in one 60s or 70s does not mean that one is not interested in love and even sex. Of the four, "Quartet" has the oldest combined cast age but the slightest storyline.
Set in a beautiful English residential care home for retired musicians and singers, the eponymous four are Reggie (75 year old Tom Courtenay) and Jean (78 year old Maggie Smith), who have some history, plus Wilf (70 year old Billy Connolly) and Cissy (72 year old Pauline Collins), who have incontinence and dementia respectively. The supporting cast is led by Michael Gambon (72) and includes many real life retired performers. The film is based on a play written and then adapted for the screen by Ronald Harwood (78) and it is the directorial debut of Dustin Hoffman (75).
It is such an affectionate work with fine acting and splendid music, but it really needed more bite.
By the time I finally caught this film, it had been on release for five months and won Helen Mirren in the eponymous role almost every award going for best actress including the Academy Award. Ordinarily this would simply have been a very competent, quintissentially British movie - except for James Cromwell (as Prince Philip), all the actors are British; all the locations - including wonderful Scottish highlands - are British; and what could be more British than a story of how a queen responds to the death of a former princess.
What raises the movie to a totally new level is the outstanding performance of Mirren who captures the Queen's looks and speech so brilliantly and manages ultimately to win our sympathy as someone totally unprepared for the public outpouring over Diana's death and reluctantly accepting the advice of the much more in-touch new New Labour Prime Minister, ably portrayed by Michael Sheen (who did the same thing for the television drama "The Deal"). Of course, a decade later, even Blair has to move on - but HRH is still there ....
How many American films have a black woman as both writer and director and black actors in both the lead roles and in most of the support roles? But this is how it should be for a work that reflects the Black Lives Matter agenda and it is a genre-blending triumph, part thriller-cum-social commentary, part road movie-cum-romance. One of the characters refers to the two principals as a black "Bonnie and Clyde" (and certainly the ending has echoes of that film), but they were hardline criminals and a better comparison would be with the movie "Thelma And Louise", a tale of accidental criminals on the run with character-changing consequences.
The viewer is plunged straight into the narrative - a young black couple on a first date in an Ohio diner: the Queen character, an uptight attorney who has had a bad day and is soon to have a much worse night, about whom we will learn a lot more, and the Slim personage, a more relaxed kind of everyman - well, every young, black American - about whom we learn very little. On the ride from the diner, they are stopped by a white traffic cop. What could possibly go wrong? Only when things have gone spectactularly awry do we have the film's title and opening credits, but we are now hooked and will stay so for as long as this couple is on the run, meeting a whole range of colourful characters and driving through an impoverished land.
The writer is Lena Waite and the debut feature director is Melina Matsoukas. They are brilliantly served in the eponymous roles by Daniel Kaluuya ("Get Out") and Jodie Turner-Smith, both in fact British actors. Not all the black characters that they meet are honourable and not all the white policemen that they encounter are prejudiced, but anyone in the film who has seen the viral video of the opening incident mythologises it as avenging angels on the run from injustice or callous cop-killers evading what they deserve. This is the best movie about the black condition that I've seen since "Detroit" but, whereas that work was about one true-life historic incident, this one is a fictional representation of the true and very contemporary American debate about white policemen routinely killing innocent, unarmed, and often young black men.
Set in the French-occupied Vietnam of 1952, this is based on the 1955 novel by left-wing British novelist Graham Green and is a remake of the Mankiewicz anti-communist film issued in 1957. Coming out towards the end of 2002 as the United States prepares for a major confrontation with Iraq, this new version, directed by Australian Phillip Noyce, is not likely to appeal much to traditional Right-wing American sentiment and indeed the very limited release in the States means that few Americans will see it. But it is a compelling work which - unlike so much Hollywood fare - makes clear the moral complexity of one country intervening in the affairs of another and explores the origins of America's most serious foreign policy blunder.
Brendan Fraser is good as the eponymous aid worker whose life turns out to be somewhat less quiescent than at first appears. Do Hai Yen is beautiful as the Vietnamese girl who sees him as a route to the West. But it is Michael Caine, as the "Times" foreign correspondent Thomas Fowler, who is wonderful as the initially indolent, self-serving ex-pat who finds that, as he learns more about his new world, he has to make a moral and difficult choice. The film gains much by being shot on Vietnamese locations, including Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) and the excellent soundtrack complements well the atmosphere of exoticism and danger.
Links:
official web site click here
Graham Greene's Vietnam click here
Horror is not a movie genre that generally appeals to me, but this movie received good reviews and it stars one of my favourite actors, the British Emily Blunt. So I took the opportunity of a pandemic lockdown to catch it on television. In fact, the film is something of a family affair since it was co-written and directed by and stars Blunt's American husband John Krasinski.
It is an astonishingly minimalist work with only four real characters, almost no spoken dialogue, and essentially one main setting, all contained in a taut running time of just 90 minutes. But it is a small film with a big punch as an American family seeks to stay alive when haunted by murderous creatures who can detect them from the slightest sound. This original plot device, plus Blunt's wonderful acting, raise the work to something rather special.
Following the considerable success of the original film, I was keen to see the sequel in a cinema and, after a release postponed by a year due to the pandemic, it was good to enjoy the experience in a movie theatre. Again it is directed by John Krasinski, but this time he has sole writing credit. Again it stars him and his wife Emily Blunt, but this time a larger part goes to the young deaf actor Millicent Simmonds, while Cillian Murphy takes on an important new role in the story of survival against blind but ferocious creatures who hunt by sound.
The film has a terrific pre-title opening before picking up the story exactly where we left it in the original movie. Blunt's character has lost her husband and a son but she still has two children and a baby so, on day 474 of the alien attack, she sets out on a search for help. It is an effective and satisfying sequel that again limits itself to an a hour and a half - but we can leave it there.
The break-up of the former Yugoslavia led to a number of brutal conflicts of which the worst was the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1992-1996 - a country which I visited in 2007. Hollywood has shown no interest in this war but there was a British-made film in 1997 called "Welcome To Sarajevo" about the four-year siege of Bosnia's capital city. "Quo Vadis, Aida?" deals with one particular incident - an especially brutal one - in that conflict when, in July 1995 at the small town of Srebrenica, over 8,000 men and boys were massacred by Serb forces in spite of the fact that the location was supposed to a UN 'safe haven' under the control of Dutch blue-helmeted troops.
This film is very much a locally-produced work which required the support of no less than 12 organisations to bring to the screen. It was shot locally with local actors and extras speaking local languages and at times the viewer can feel that it is almost a documentary. The writer, producer and directer is Jasmila Žbanić, a Bosniak who was born into a Muslim family. The titular role is that of a local teacher turned interpreter Aida Selmanagić, played powerfully by Jasna Đuričić who is actually Serbian, a woman does everything she can to save her husband and two sons.
We feel the fear but we never actually see the massacre in this restrained but compelling account that is deeply moving.
All reviews by ROGER DARLINGTON.
Last modified on 10 March 2022
Some Cinema Sites
"Empire" magazine
Internet Movie Database
American Academy Awards
British Academy Awards