A review of “Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania”
March 25th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
This is the third Ant-Man movie and the 31st film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Over the past 15 years, I’ve diligently seen every episode of the MCU, but sometimes – like here – it feels more like a duty than a delight.Paul Rudd and (now short-haired) Evangeline Lilly are back as the tiny titular superheroes, while Michael Douglas and (the ever watchable) Michelle Pfeiffer reprise their roles as the original holders of the eponymous titles. But now we have a plethora of other characters in play, including Kathryn Newton as a third superhero, Bill Murray as minor bad guy Lord Krylar, and Jonathan Majors as major bad guy Kang the Conqueror.
Visually the best part of the movie is a tour of the Quantum Realm revealing a host of weird and wonderful life forms (including one that looks like a bunch of broccoli), many of which are observed in a piece inspired by the cantina scene in the original “Star Wars”.
However, the opening is plain silly: apparently one can simply be sucked into the Quantum Realm five at a time thanks to the fiddling of a teenager. Then the plot is very weak: basically Kang has to be prevented from rebuilding his multiversal power core that will enable him to depart the Quantum Realm and travel anywhere in time or anywhere in the multiverse causing all sorts of havoc.
Two clips in the course of the endless credits suggest that nothing is actually resolved and all the main characters will be back for more mayhem. Scriptwriter Jeff Loveness has a background in comedy and has produced a storyline that is pityingly thin and a tone that lack any sense of dread.
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Word of the day: misophonia
March 23rd, 2023 by Roger Darlington
Misophonia is a disorder in which people feel strong emotional responses to certain sounds, feeling angry, distressed or even unable to function in social or work settings as a result. Researchers say they have found 18.4% of the UK population have significant symptoms of misophonia.You can read more about this here.
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A review of the new South London rom-com “Rye Lane”
March 19th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
We all remember how “Notting Hill” (1999) was a rom-com that failed utterly to reflect the ethnic diversity of London, but the British rom-com is changing.Hot on the heels of “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” which features a lead character of Pakistani heritage (plus a segment in Lahore), we have “Rye Lane” in which the lead characters and most of the support characters are Black British and almost all the location shooting is in the Peckham and Brixton districts of South London.
This is the directorial debut of Raine Allen-Miller, a light-coloured Black Londoner who has made a point of casting dark-skinned Black actors in the lead roles. So we have David Jonsson as Dom and Vivian Oparah as Yas, two young South Londoners, attempting to get over a relationship break-up, who find themselves walking around their neighbourhoods for the day talking about all sorts of subjects in a style reminiscent of the Richard Linklater movie “Before Sunset”. Both stars are appealing and Oparah shows particular talent.
The location shooting is colourful, in both the literal and metaphorical sense, and the cinematography is quirky with lots of wide-angle bendy sequences. The narrative follows the traditional romcom pattern of attraction, break-up, reconciliation, but the final segment of this triptych is surprisingly short, as if this low-budget film had suddenly spent all its funding.
In fact, the work as a whole is shorter than most contemporary movies at just 82 minutes, but this is no bad thing. These days too many films are too long and, in this case, the script does not have enough punch to take us along for much longer.
Rye Lane is in the London Borough of Southwark where I live and the final sequences in this film were shot around Tate Modern just minutes from my flat. I enjoy rom-coms and I welcome the extra diversity in storytelling. Therefore, I really wanted “Rye Lane” to smash it, but I found it only moderately successful. The script is just not really up to it.
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A review of the 2022 film “White Noise”
March 16th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
I chose to watch this film because I’ve found interesting some other work by the writer and director Noah Baumbach (such as “While We’re Young” and “Marriage Story”) and I usually admire the performances of the lead actors Adam Driver (such as the aforementioned films and recent segments of the “Star Wars” saga) and Greta Gerwig (such as “Mistress America” and “Maggie’s Plan”).But let me save you two and a quarter hours of your life by advising you not to bother with this movie. Some critics have loved it, calling it absurdist and post-modern, but I found it incoherent and inexplicable. I suppose it is some kind of satire on modern America, but it left me cold and confused.
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A review of “TJ’s War”, a biography of a World War Two secret agent by his son Ian Maclean
March 15th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
In the Second World War, Scottish Highlander Thomas John Maclean – known to his comrades as TJ – almost accidentally found himself recruited as a secret agent in MI6 which resulted in immensely challenging operations in the United States, Norway, Italy and Germany. For such a young man (he was only 19 at the start of the conflict), such clandestine service proved to be a deeply traumatic experience so that, during the war, he became an alcoholic and, after the war, he effectively drank himself to death by the age of 49.His son Iain Maclean was not quite 11 when he lost his father and it has taken him half a century to understand fully who his father was and finally to bring the incredible story to print.
Of course, there have been endless memoirs from this global war, but this one covers parts of the conflict that rarely feature in other works, including the role of MI6 in Nazi-held Europe, the situation in occupied Norway, the failure of the failed Anzio plan, and the betrayal of Russia’s Cossacks. Also the tone is very different from the stoicism, even detachment, of many such works with plenty of terror and tears and a profound revulsion of killing.
Maclean has chosen to tell the story in a style known as creative non-fiction. As a management consultant who has never previously written a book, he is to be commended for producing a work that reads like a novel and demonstrates immense flair and fluidity. I understand that he was inspired by the writing of Ernest Hemingway and Jack London. The book is a real page-turner with the 450 pages divided into 72 short paragraphs.
The problem with this style of writing is to know what is fact, what is fiction, and what is simply embellishment or creative licence. I read the book before I met the author and, in an interview of over two hours, I questioned him about why he had chosen this particular style of writing and the extent to which he had used his imagination to create incidents and characters and to input the thoughts of TJ and others.
As a result, I would expect the serious student of the war to approach “TJ’s War” with a degree of caution. However, for the general reader, this is a war story with a difference that will have wide appeal and make a riveting read.
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A review of the film “The Banshees Of Inisherin”
March 13th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
This is a film that elicits mixed emotions. Certainly it is both written and directed by a considerable talent (Martin McDonagh who gave us “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri”); it has some wonderful scenery (not Inisherin – which is a fictional island – but Inishmore and Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland); and it has no less than four stand-out performances (Colin Farrell, Brendon Gleeson, Kerry Condon and Barry Keoghan).But the subject matter is desperately sad – a sudden break in the long-standing friendship of the Farrell and Glesson characters – and the consequences of this break-up are brutal while the conclusion is heart-breaking.
The story is set in 1923 during the Irish Civil War on the mainland and the ruptures between these one-time friends is another, more intimate, kind of civil war. Maybe one can understand the first (it was a conflict over the nature of Irish independence), but the second is hard to comprehend.
Maybe it is a consequence of the smallness and isolation of an island community, but it ought to be possible to end a friendship more kindly. Farrell’s character is confused, then angry, and finally vengeful and, in portraying all these emotions, the actor gives possibly the finest performance of his career to date.
“Banshees” is supposed to be a black comedy – like “In Bruges” when Farrell, Gleeson and McDonagh last worked together – but really there is much more blackness than comedy. Everyone on this island seems to be a bit crazy, except the Condon character who wisely decides to leave.
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A review of the new rom-com movie “What’s Love Got To Do With It?’
March 12th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
The rom-com is such a staple of the cinematic diet that any addition to the genre has to find a new angle. In this case, the novel element is the comparison of arranged marriage – or assisted marriage, as it now called – which is so common in the Indian sub-continent (with a very high survival rate) and the so-called love marriage which is standard in the West (with an appalling success rate).The screenwriter has some personal experience to bring to bear, since Jemima Goldsmith married for love in an Islamic ceremony to former cricketer and later Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, but divorced nine years later. This choice of subject enables some more novelty: many actors of Pakistani heritage and some location shooting in Lahore. The director is Indian filmmaker Shekhar Kapur who has made such classic works of British history as “Elizabeth” and “Elizabeth: The Golden Age”.
So there is some distinguished pedigree here, but this is not a film that will win awards, just one that will satisfyingly entertain anyone who is a romantic (like me). The two leads are good-looking and watchable: documentary filmmaker Zoe (Lily James) and oncologist Kazim (Shazad Latif), the former commitment-phobic and the later keen to follow his community’s traditions. In real life, such cultural differences might prove problematic, as Jemima Goldsmith found, but in reel life the end is never in doubt.
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A review of a fascinating book on the making of the classic film “Lawrence Of Arabia”
March 12th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
“Lawrence Of Arabia” by Kevin Jackson (2007)The film “Lawrence Of Arabia” (1962) is my favourite cinematic work and to date (2023) I have seen it 12 times, so I thoroughly enjoyed this short (127 pages) examination of the making of the movie, which is one of the books in the British Film Institute Film Classics series. We become so enamoured and familiar with a classic work that there is a tendency to think of it as the perfect execution of a brilliant plan.
However, Jackson relates the number of failed efforts to bring T. E. Lawrence’s story to the screen, the number of other possible producers before the formidable Sam Spiegel took charge, the other directors considered before the superbly talented David Lean was chosen, the other writers who worked on scripts before Robert Bolt produced such apposite and memorable dialogue, and the other actors who were contemplated for the key positions before newcomers Peter O’Toole in the eponymous role and Omar Sharif as Sherif Ali gave arguably the best performances of their lifetimes (although today white actors would not be given the Arab roles filled by Alec Guinness and Anthony Quinn).
Jackson describes the logistical and financial pressures involved in the filming in Jordan, Spain and Morocco and the rush to cut the gargantuan output down to a screenable length. We learn how Lean was filming before he had a completed script, how Maurice Jarre struggled to finish the score in time, and how Lean was making cuts until the last moment and, even then, was not entirely happy, even with scenes that have become iconic (such as the arrival of Sherif Ali at the well, which Lean would have liked to have been even longer).
When Lean originally finished it in late 1962, “Lawrence” ran for 222 minutes; however, the version that went on general release in early 1963 was cut to 202 minutes; finally, the restored version of 1989, with cuts reinstated by Robert Harris and Lean’s final cutting, lasts 216 minutes (plus overture and exit music). “Lawrence Of Arabia” is not flawless – no work of art is – but I agree with Jackson when he declares that “It’s the most wonderful combination of spectacle and intimate character study which ever fell into a filmmaker’s lap”.
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Would you like to see inside the Global Seed Vault in the Norwegian Arctic?
March 8th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
“Jutting out of the permafrost on a mountainside on Spitsbergen, in the Svalbard archipelago, the entrance to the world’s “doomsday” seed vault is worthy of any James Bond movie. Surrounded by snow, ice and the occasional polar bear, the facility houses 1.2m seed samples from every corner of the planet as an insurance policy against catastrophe. It is a monument to 12,000 years of human agriculture that aims to prevent the permanent loss of crop species after war, natural disaster or pandemic.The Global Seed Vault in the Norwegian Arctic, which opened in 2008, is closed to the public and shrouded in mystery, the subject of numerous internet doomsday conspiracy theories. Now, to celebrate the vault’s 15th anniversary, everyone is invited on a virtual tour to see inside the vast collection of tubers, rice, grains and other seeds buried deep in the mountain behind five sets of metal doors.”
This is the opening of a recent article in the “Guardian” newspaper.
You can access the virtual tour here.
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A review of the new Italian film “Nostalgia”
March 7th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
My mother was from Naples and took us there twice as children, so the city has a special place in my heart. Naturally, therefore, I was attracted to this 2022 Italian film, co-written and directed by Mario Martone and based on a 2016 novel, which is shot mainly in the impoverished Rione Sanità district of Naples.The cinematography is simply wonderful and captures brilliantly the atmosphere of this urban slice of comradeship and corruption. Felice (Pierfrancesco Favino) is nostalgic for the friendship that he had with Oreste (Tommaso Ragno) some 40 years ago, before he left the city to make a new life in Egypt, but revisiting his past is going to have huge consequences for his present.
There are so many magical scenes in this moving work but, for me, the most touching was when Felice reconnects with his aged mother and bathes her with gentleness and love.
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