The Nephew (Movie review)

The Nephew (1998) [D: Eugene Brady. Niall Tobin, Sinead Cusack, Luke Griffin, Pierce Brosnan] Chad Egan-Washington, the biracial American son of Karin Egan, a wayward Irish girl who emigrated to the US, goes to his mother’s home village in Ireland to spread her ashes. His arrival stirs up old memories and forces people to confront their wrongful past actions. His Uncle Tony has had a grudge against the pub owner Joe Brady ever since Karin left. Brady’s daughter Aislin and Chad develop a relationship, which pleases neither of the older men. Peter O’Boyce, who has a crush on Aislin, complicates the plot. Of course everything turns out OK in the end, with confessions and secrets shared leading to understanding and redemptive self-insight.
     That’s the story, a farrago of cliches, so the question is how well the film riffs on them. Very well, I’d say. It’s low key, does a lovely job of developing the characters’ slowly accumulating awareness, and even though we figure out what the revelations will be, they are done well enough that we care. On-line ratings are barely above average, which was my initial reaction, too. I think the rather thick lathering of Irish charm has something to do with some viewers’ negative responses.
     But this is one of those movies whose images stick in your mind, and which make you angry at the harm done by hiding shameful secrets and making respectability a prime value. So I’d say the movie is successful. ***

Bullitt (Movie Review)

Bullitt (1968) [D: Peter Yates. Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn, Jacqueline Bissett] This is a noir film in colour. The situation is simple: protect a mobster who will give evidence at a grand jury hearing. An ambitious D.A. wants to ensure he gets credit for bringing down “the organisation”. But the man is killed, and Bullitt knows something is seriously wrong. The dead man was not in fact the mobster, so Bullitt has two tasks: to find the killers, and to find the real witness. He must also fend off both the ambitions politician (played creepily by Robert Vaughn) but also the mob (who want to ensure the victim is truly dead.

     Bullitt’s an honest cop who doesn’t like being pushed around by VIPs. He goes his own way to find his quarry, but knows how to work with his team. At the turning point, he sees he’s being followed, so he dekes up a side street and begins to follow the car that pursued him. It turns into a deadly chase, one that film makers have studied and borrowed from ever since. I recall seeing it on a large screen. It looks pretty good on the smaller TV screen, too. It really is one of the best ever filmed. Many of its tricks have become standard, so anyone seeing this movie for the first time would probably be somewhat blase about the car chase.
     The plot is intricate but clearly delineated, step by procedural step. Steve McQueen’s Bullitt is laconic, unwilling to show his deeper feelings (there’s a perfunctory love subplot), and he’s finally worn down by the violence he must perforce witness and commit. The final act shows us another classic sequence, a chase across the runways of the airport at night.
     A good movie, well worth seeing again, or for the first time. ***

Get rid of veggies in front yard! (Link)

In Drummondville, Quebec, a couple are being told to remove their vegetable garden from their front yard:

http://boingboing.net/2012/07/18/thank-goodness-the-authorities.html

Away From Her (Book Review)

Alice Munro Away From Her (2001, 2007) Re-titled from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, one of Munro’s best collections. Munro has the ability to make us see and care about people, from the most ordinary to most strange. She  displays how her character’s lives are shaped not merely by the accidental meetings and events that fate bestows, but by the follies and weaknesses, the strengths and wisdom that control the responses to those accidents. Munro does this with neither pity nor cruelty: the lives she shows us simply are what they are. She leaves it up to us to make sense of them.
     The occasional first-person narrator ends the story with some summing up, but we know it’s not the final word, it’s just another fragment in the puzzle that is a person. It marks the end of an episode, but it doesn’t explain a life. Sometimes the story ends with a character’s reaction to what has just happened, sometimes it doesn’t. Either way, whatever revelation was vouchsafed to the character, it’s not a solution to a mystery, nor is it a sign of what's to come. What will happen next is as imponderable, as inevitable, and as contingent as everything that went before. The events of the story appear as part of a life, yet they contain the whole life. In this, Munro’s stories have the depth and resonance of a novel.
     It’s difficult to summarise an Alice Munro story. Describing one of the central events is not enough. In Away From Her a woman develops Alzheimer’s. In Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Marriage a woman marries an apparently unsuitable man. In Floating Bridge, a woman kisses a young man, almost a boy, who has taken to show her a floating bridge while her husband negotiates some business with his father. In  Comfort an undertaker tells a widow, whom he kissed many years before, how he has prepared her husband’s body for burial. In Nettles a woman meets her childhood sweetheart many years later. What is Remembered tells of a single but very satisfying sexual encounter between a young wife and a man who drives her to the ferry that will take her home after a funeral.
     In all these stories, people remain mysterious to each other, their relationships made incomplete by the limits of language, the constraints of social expectations, the wounds that make us fearful of suffering another injury. And yet. And yet. There are glimpses and hints of happiness and joy. Moments when some barrier is breached, some separateness transcended. Recognition that the only morality is to be with each other, and not use each other. ****

Shock and Awe (TV)

Shock and Awe (2010) [TVO] A BBC series about the discovery, exploitation, and eventual understanding of electricity. Well done, with many re-creations of crucial experiments. One comes away with a renewed respect for the scientists and engineers who worked out the way electricity does its many things, and an appreciation for the fact that we don’t really know anything else about electricity except just that: how it works. The equations describe what happens, and thereby enable us to control what happens, and that’s all.
     Those who want to know what electricity “really is” will be disappointed. But to ask what a thing “really is” is to ask for more than we can know of it. Reality is what we can know and understand. There may be more, but since we cannot know or understand it, it’s pointless to ask what it is. It is of course not pointless ask whether we can know more than we know now, but that’s not a paradox. We each of us have limitations, and we each have the ability (albeit limited) to transcend those limitations when we share what we know. Conversation is a liberator.
     One thing that’s missing from these series is the dead ends of mistaken theories and false starts. Science progresses as much from discovering what ain’t so as from discovering what is. As with all documentaries, some prior knowledge will provide the personal context needed for understanding and pleasure. In this case, a middle or high school knowledge of electricity is enough. ***

Mr Bean's Holiday (Movie Review)

 Mr Bean’s Holiday (2007) A road movie: Bean wins both a video camera and a trip to Cannes, where he wants to paddle in the water. A mess of mishaps happen, which I won’t summarise. Most of the Mr Bean tropes that we’ve come to love (or hate) are worked into the plot, so Mr Bean fans will like this movie. The rest of us will spend a more or less pleasant hour and a half, or avoid the movie altogether. I’m a lukewarm fan, so I rate the it at **

Fawlty Towers (TV series review)

 Fawlty Towers (1975-1979) Basil Fawlty (John Cleese) and his wife Sybil (Prunella Scales) run a small hotel in Torquay. Basil wants to raise the tone of the place, and repeatedly fails to do so. He fawns on guests he believes are socially acceptable, and is rude to those who don’t measure up his snobbish standards. The humour comes from his desperate attempts to rescue situations in which he’s made mistakes, his venomous wit, and the contrast between his self-esteem and his horrified self-loathing when he recognises he has, once again, messed up. We watched all 12 episodes. I think some of the humour went over Jonathon’s head.
     I was again struck by the near-perfect plotting (I say near-perfect only because I’m sure there are some flaws somewhere that I didn’t spot), the comic timing, the writing, the characterisation, and Cleese’s amazing ability as a physical actor. The rest of the cast meet the same high standards. A pleasure to watch.  Not to everyone’s taste, but highly recommended all the same. ****