﻿{"id":28462,"date":"2023-01-17T20:47:36","date_gmt":"2023-01-17T19:47:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=28462"},"modified":"2023-01-17T20:47:36","modified_gmt":"2023-01-17T19:47:36","slug":"a-review-of-the-new-film-empire-of-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=28462","title":{"rendered":"A review of the new film &#8220;Empire Of Light&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"\nI&#8217;m always going to watch something from British director Sam Mendes and recently his output has been so variable: after the Bond movies &#8220;Skyfall and &#8220;Spectre&#8221; and the war film &#8220;1917&#8221;, we have an altogether different offering.\n<p>\nI had originally thought that it would be a homage to cinema, something like a British version of &#8220;Cinema Paradiso&#8221; 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.\n<p>\nMendes wrote as well as directed this and, like &#8220;1917&#8221;, it is a tribute to a family member &#8211; in this case, to Mendes&#8217; 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.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m always going to watch something from British director Sam Mendes and recently his output has been so variable: after the Bond movies &#8220;Skyfall and &#8220;Spectre&#8221; and the war film &#8220;1917&#8221;, we have an altogether different offering. I had originally thought that it would be a homage to cinema, something like a British version of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28462"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28463,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28462\/revisions\/28463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}