A review of the 1936 Chaplin classic “Modern Times”
January 22nd, 2023 by Roger Darlington
This is absolutely a Charlie Chaplin film: he wrote, produced and directed it, he composed the music, and he is the star who has one of the few and small speaking roles (actually it is a gibberish version of a song). Given the date, it should really have been a work of sound, but mostly it is a traditional silent movie complete with text cards, so it is a kind of bridge between the silent and the talkie eras.It is the last Chaplin film to feature his trademark little tramp, but this time the nameless character is a factory worker and the story is a satire on the brutalising effects of new technology and unemployment told through a succession of visual and aural gags – perhaps the most memorable being him being sucked into a huge machine of circling cogs. Some at the time regarded the film as too political and we do see the Chaplin character (accidentally) leading a workers’ protest and being imprisoned as a suspect communist.
The work highlights the scourge of poverty in this Depression era, although the representation of a gamin’s life is rather blunted by the obvious beauty of Paulette Goddard (it’s no wonder that Chaplin married her).
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A review of the classic Spanish film “The Spirit Of The Beehive” (1973)
January 22nd, 2023 by Roger Darlington
This Spanish-language film is the archetypical art house product and critics adore it. It is very, very slow and very, very opaque and I confess that I found it hard work, although I admired the haunting cinematography with its stark terrains and muted colours.It was director Victor Erice’s first film and the key to its opacity is that it was filmed and set in a small Castillian town during the later days of the Franco dictatorship. So everything is a metaphor – not least the beehive which is probably an allusion to the mindless droning of Spaniards forced to comply with the demands of a queen bee.
All the characters in the story have the same name as the actors playing them, which apparently was to assist the two young girl actors Isabel and Ana who are frankly remarkable.
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A review of the recent film “The Wonder”
January 18th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
Set in the deeply religious rural Ireland of 1862, the wonder is that a local child called Anna O’Donnell (an impressive performance from young Kila Lord Cassidy) has apparently not eaten for four months but is still in good health. Florence Pugh is excellent as Elizabeth, an English nurse hired by a council of local dignitaries (including characters played by underused Toby Jones and Ciarán Hinds) to establish what is going on.This is a dark work, both literally and metaphorically, and moves slowly for much of the film, but there is real sense of mystery with a satisfying (if unlikely) conclusion. The film is based on a novel by Irish-Canadian Emma Donoughue, who co-wrote the script, and the director is the Chilean Sebastián Lelio.
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A review of the new film “Empire Of Light”
January 17th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
I’m always going to watch something from British director Sam Mendes and recently his output has been so variable: after the Bond movies “Skyfall and “Spectre” and the war film “1917”, we have an altogether different offering.I had originally thought that it would be a homage to cinema, something like a British version of “Cinema Paradiso” but, while the setting is a cinema (located in the Margate of the 1980s) and one character has a true love for the art form (the projectionist played by Toby Jones), this is much more a story of a complicated relationship: inter-generational, inter-racial, and involving mental illness. The unlikely couple are wonderfully played by established star Olivia Colman and promising newcomer Micheal Ward.
Mendes wrote as well as directed this and, like “1917”, it is a tribute to a family member – in this case, to Mendes’ mother who suffered from mental illness. In fact, the narrative is a bit formulaic and at times contrived, so it does not always seem likely or credible, but it is a worthy work and eminently watchable.
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A review of the classic Japanese film “Rashomon”
January 13th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
Set in Japan in the deeply troubled 8th century, this black and white film tells a story which proves to be anything other than black and white: how a samurai and his wife are set upon by a bandit, who rapes the wife and murders the husband, all while being observing by a passing woodcutter. What makes the work a classic is that this basic narrative is recounted four times: first by the outlaw, then by the wife, next – through a medium – by the dead nobleman, and finally by the lowly woodcutter who may be the only independent voice but could be as unreliable a narrator as all the others.Based on two short stories, the legendary Akira Kurosawa co-wrote and directed this classic and classically enigmatic work which is acted in somewhat exaggerated, mannered style and shot through dramatic cinematography alternating between rain and forest. It raises profound questions about the nature and importance or otherwise of truth but manages to conclude on an optimistic note.
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A review of the new film “The Pale Blue Eye”
January 8th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
This Netflix movie – an adaptation of a novel – is set at the the US military academy at West Point in 1860 and the odd title is from a line of poetry. Written and directed by Scott Cooper, it starts as a slow criminal procedure but, as it picks up pace, it acquires elements of gothic horror. The conceit of the plotting is to place a real historical character at the centre of a fictional tale.The scenery is majestic, but this is a dark work, both narratively and visually – indeed the use of natural lighting (this was before the age of electricity) make for some obscure interior scenes. Where the film really scores is in the acting. Christian Bale as the retired detective Augustus Landor and Harry Melling Cadet Edgar Allan Poe are excellent and the cast list also includes Toby Jones and Timothy Spall plus cameos from almost unrecognisable Gillian Anderson and Robert Duvall.
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A review of the 1963 classic film “The Leopard”
January 6th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
This is a film adaptation of a famous Italian novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The setting is Sicily in the 1860s and the story is the challenge to the power and lifestyle of the upper class presented by the ‘Risorgimento’ movement of Garibaldi and his followers. There are several versions of this classic film and I was delighted to be able to view a restored 188 minute version at the British Film Institute.The work was directed by the great Luchino Visconti with Giuseppe Rotunno as his Director of Photography. It is a fabulous film that looks simply sumptuous with buildings, sets and costumes all looking glorious.The ball sequence – which occupies the last third of this three-hour film – was shot in 14 rooms with 250 extras. For such an epic, we need stars and there are three: American Burt Lancaster as Don Fabrizio, the Prince of Salina, and the animal of the title, French Alain Delon as handsome Tancredi, the Prince’s nephew, and Italian beauty Claudia Cardinale as Angelica, Tancredi’s love. Lancaster and Delon are dubbed.
The dialogue is often political, even at times philosophical, and the most famous quote is the observation that “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change” (that is, to keep power the aristocracy will have to make some accommodations). As the Prince puts it: “We were the leopards, the lions, those who take our place will be jackals and sheep, and the whole lot of us – leopards, lions, jackals and sheep – will continue to think ourselves the salt of the earth.”
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Word of the day: peachy
January 6th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
Apparently, it means: very satisfactory.
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For me, a new year means a new diary
January 1st, 2023 by Roger Darlington
I have a near-lifelong practice of writing a diary and I have an entry for every day since I started. As 2022 ends and 2023 starts, I have now kept a diary for 61 years and the total number of daily entries now stands at 22,278.I find comfort in keeping a diary: I record everything I have done and I can note whatever I am feeling. Also I think that keeping diary makes me more reflective about my life.
I’ll keep going as long as I can …
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A review of the 1927 novel “Steppenwolf” by Hermann Hesse
December 30th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
German-Swiss Hermann Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946 and “Steppenwolf” – one of his most famous works – was published in 1927. In an Author’s Note of 1961, Hesse wrote that “of all my books ‘Steppenwolf’ is the one that was more often and more violently misunderstood than any other”. He had only himself to blame because this novel is decidedly opaque.
The work consists of three ‘documents’: two short ones of about 20 pages each and then a main one called a treatise of some 200 pages with no chapter breaks at all. Hesse wrote the novel when he was 50 years old and suffering a spiritual crisis and its narrator Harry Haller is approaching 50 and immensely confused by his identity, so this is clearly a semi-autobiographical exposition. There is a lot of sex, a lot of drugs, savage criticism of the bourgeois lifestyle, and much talk of self-loathing and suicide.
Haller sees people with his personality as enduring a war between two souls: “There is God and the devil in them; the mother’s blood and the father’s; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement were the wolf and the man in Harry”. But he comes to realise that “Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone’s does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousands, between innumerable poles.”
I’ve long felt that, while each of us has a basic personality, there is no essential persona waiting to be discovered. Instead I believe that our personality is shaped by the time and place in which we find ourself and powerfully by the person with whom we are interacting at the time.
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