Change Your Image
nbarrett@noos.fr
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
Jupiter Ascending (2015)
In defence of rip-roaring space opera!
All I need really say is "Wow!"
But that's not quite true. If two bright movie directors were to put chunks of "Star Wars", "Brazil," "Soylent Green," "Dune" and even a few "Star Trek" episodes into a blender and shake thoroughly, the resulting cocktail might be a basis for "Jupiter Ascending", fast-moving, rich in ideas and frequently explosive.
But I'm not accusing the Wachowskis of plagiarism, far from it. To my mind, Andy and Lana have paid affectionate tribute to several sci-fi classics to serve up a rollicking roller-coaster of high-octane space opera with multiple plots. The ride was the most fun I've had since tearing through Peter Hamilton's "Night's Dawn" trilogy, which could make a fabulous film but might daunt even these adventurous brothers at more than 3,000 pages
I could swear I saw the space station from "2001" at one point in the visual blockbuster, which would suggest that the filmmakers know, like those of "Europa Report", that the worst things in space happen in total silence, but "Jupiter Ascending" is decidedly not that kind of movie.
When the film was first released, eye-catching posters in the Métro attracted and confounded me. The backdrop locations and the costumes looked too crazy and gaudy for a film even from the makers of "The Matrix" saga, let alone "Bound" long ago. So I turned to paid pundits for advice and foolishly paid too much heed to sometimes savage reviews instead of trusting to instinct. I thus missed the movie on the big screen, for which it cries out each time we're whisked from one busy, incredible venue to the next across the galaxy. I do disagree with reviewers who said that staggering special effects detracted from tales of family feuding and nasty prospects for the people of Earth and other owned planets. Did some people also fail to realise that "Jupiter Ascending" is often pretty funny -- intentionally?
The Wachowskis simply let their hair down on a big budget and this pays off. Terry Gilliam didn't take an appropriate cameo part for nothing, while Eddie Redmayne shone in what must be his first villainous role, a far cry from the starry-eyed youth of "My Week with Marianne". I shan't say that the leads, Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum, were at their finest compared with previous parts, but both did pretty darned well and put in confident performances, given that much of the time they presumably had to shoot scenes with little idea of the settings they would be standing in or flying around in the final picture. Heck, they even donned spacesuits out of nowhere in thin air, I mean vacuum! And they developed real chemistry, which always helps.
If a chance to watch "Jupiter Arising" in a big cinema comes up again, as sometimes it does, I'll take it, but can dispense with the 3D effects, too often hit and miss anyway. And far from agreeing with people who feel the Wachowskis messed up the chance for a franchise, I'm satisfied with a movie where they rolled out a complex story in a couple of hours. Next time, I look forward to something completely different again.
Amelia (2009)
"Amelia" flies, but only too rarely
If you are here to check out reviews of "Amelia" in the hope of a gripping cinematic adventure, please be warned to lower your expectations. My own proved far too high, founded on my longstanding admiration for the charismatic 1930s heroine of the skies and on a love of flying in old turboprop planes and noisy small aircraft whenever the chance arises, sidelining guilt about my bit part in aviation's major contribution to ozone depletion. Of course Amelia Earhart was free of today's environmental worries, with great distances topping her list of challenges.
When I heard that the dependable and gifted Hilary Swank had been cast in the star role, my hopes soared with a feeling that she would be perfect for the part like the smart, spunky and enthusiastic all-American girl she seems to be. And excellent she is. I had doubts about Richard Gere in the role of the publisher who becomes Earhart's fund-raising promoter and more. My prejudice was unfairly based on a period when I sat through someone's young appetite for some of the sloppiest high romance movies ever endured. Back then, Gere then seemed omnipresent and utterly beyond credibility and I started avoiding his films!
But years pass. In fact, Gere does very well in the role of the patient and increasingly affectionate George P. Putnam, while Ewan McGregor is good as the commercial flight pioneer Gene Vidal. He also becomes part of a love triangle, testified to by his son Gore. Equally worthy of mention are Cherry Jones in a cameo part as First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Christopher Eccleston as Amelia's navigator Fred Noonan on her final ill-fated bid to be the first woman to fly round the world.
Amelia lifts us off the ground in the lengthy flight sequences in Mira Nair's film, the parts I usually enjoyed the most. We are granted the spectacular views that any airborne movie should dish up, with some splendid photography and a taste of the thrill of the rides across different oceans between continents. And when Earhart succeeds in her accomplishments, we see the ticker-tape parades and meet younger female fliers whom she does her best to encourage in a man's world.
So what's so disappointing about "Amelia"? It's hard to pin down precisely, but to start with both script and direction are serviceable but pedestrian, failing fully to flesh out some key characters and at least sustain constant interest. The very worst of the film, after spells of boredom despite valiant efforts by the actors, concerns the last known hours of Earhart's short life, which make for a missed opportunity.
The aviator is world famous for attempting the almost impossible, risking all on a bid to complete her planetary tour by landing on tiny Howland Island in the Pacific to refuel and fly on to coastal America. If any true-life exploit shown on screen should generate a sense of action and high adventure, that was the biggest in Earhart's career, but Nair's movie falls regrettably short of the reality.
True, the film-makers portray in some detail one of the controversial accounts of the fatal communications breakdown between Amelia's Lockheed Elektra and the USS Itasca moored off Howland, which led to the disappearance of the aircraft. Yet hardly any real tension builds up in these climactic scenes aboard plane and ship. The cast seems all but abandoned to make their best of a bad job, not for the first time, which I blame on script flaws and unadventurous direction.
Maybe Nair tried to plod her way too close to all the details she and the producers knew to be accurate, without venturing into a little creative licence to raise the dramatic stakes. But when I rate her film 6/10, that's an acknowledgement of the background research and of factors such as the acting and some striking sets. These mean I am ready to see it more than once while wishing it could have been much more exciting, like Earhart's life often was.
I get a far bigger emotional punch from listening to Heather Nova singing "I Miss My Sky (Amelia Earhart's Last Days)" on her "Redbird" album than I did from that last act of the film. Nobody knows what really happened to Amelia and Fred, but legends persist that they did manage to land somewhere unknown. Nova's allegorical lyrics imply by conjecture that the aircraft was out of fuel or a write-off.
After all, in the film Earhart and Noonan do indeed land in places as yet unknown! Location titles solemnly inform viewers that they are in Pakistan, which did not exist until 1947, a decade after their global circumnavigation attempt, and also set them down in Mali, which was then no nation but a part of sprawling French West Africa. But these are quibbles.
For all my reservations, I recommend "Amelia" not only to die-hard Earhart fans who will certainly be able to recognize her in Swank's well-prepared performance, but also to a broader audience that might be interested in a movie about a succession of some of the most daring aviation exploits of all time. Like I said, the film does manage to fly - but mainly when it's already airborne.
Uprising (2001)
A magnificent and historically challenging tale
"Uprising" is an epic that deserves the widest possible audience among those who care to watch more about the lives, destiny, fate and remarkable bravery of Jews under Hitler's monstrous III Reich. The film also helps to remedy misconceptions about Jewish history.
I rate it alongside Polanski"s "The Pianist", also set in the Warsaw Ghetto, Stephen Daldry's "The Reader" and "Amen" by Costa-Gavras, to name but three. But the latter films deal more with the plight of Jews as victims of the Nazis and moral issues evoked by the horror of the death camps, while this movie focuses on a less well-known but tremendously heroic aspect of the war in Eastern Europe, in which Jews refused to submit to the slaughter.
At a length of almost three hours and with a superb ensemble cast, "Uprising" recounts the story of the armed insurrection against German invaders by Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto that began in April 1943, from its inception months earlier to the ruthless crackdown - by means of weapons, gas and even water - that put an end to the main insurgency but not Jewish resistance.
Those hours never drag. We are shown a realistic treatment of daily life and death, conflict and mass destruction in the Ghetto. We follow the debates and acts of the Jewish Resistance Movement, particularly once it learns for sure that the hundreds of thousands of deportees from the Ghetto are being transported not to labour camps but to their extermination. "Uprising" also gives the viewpoint of those, including Jewish community leaders, who refused to back armed insurrection on practical or moral grounds.
The first time I watched the movie I gave it an 8/10, but have upped that score to a 10/10, for all its minor flaws, upon "going to source" for a while and discovering how much writer Paul Brickman and director Jon Avnet shared a commitment to accuracy, down to small details.
It's hard to know whether they told the truth about the love affairs that bonded some of the Jews in heart and spirit, but no matter. Such relationships are among the many things that give depth and humanity to the film, along with family ties and grief, and like dilemmas faced by collaborators and some of the Jewish police who served as puppets of the occupants.
Two or three people change sides, including a black marketeer and brothel owner who comes to play an important role, and they are tested according to a code laid down early in the film as a deceptively simple classroom debate on the possibility of being a moral person in an immoral world. We see what the leader of the Jewish community does on being ordered by the Germans to put children on the trains, we see the director of a Ghetto orphanage confronted by more kids than he can afford to take in, we see a woman tied with ropes to a chimney pot so that she can swing round and around on a rooftop to hurl Molotov cocktails down on troops marching into the Ghetto along with a Tiger tank, we see the daily struggle for food and we see courageous expeditions outside the walls and barbed wire to obtain guns, ammunition and explosives and to inform the Allies about the death camps.
Most surreal of all, we see Fritz Hippler, the filmmaker ordered by Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels to make a hateful movie on "The Eternal Jew", in action several times shooting the violence of the Uprising, to the chagrin of German generals confounded by the astounding initial success of the Jewish resistance decimating their troops in a well-planned surprise attack.
Critics in other posts have accused the film of being unfair to the so-called "Aryan" Poles in Warsaw, claiming that they are portrayed as anti-Semitic, but this is not evident. True, some Poles are shown up as cowards living a life in fear, but others maintain safe houses outside the Ghetto for the Jewish resistance, which also gets support from the like of railway workers. However, the Polish national resistance rejects pleas from Jews for more weapons. Their arguments for denying help may seem spurious with historical hindsight, but they are tactical ones, which leave us to decide whether there is underlying prejudice.
What has long intrigued me has been the fiercely combative spirit of the Israeli people - despite the loss of six million lives and the tremendous scars borne by countless others after the Holocaust - that played a part in the swift and sometimes bloody foundation of Israel in Palestine, in political haste soon after World War II. This strength of will strikes me as being rooted in more than a fight to rebuild and maintain a Biblical homeland. In saying that, I equally fiercely refuse to bear either with Zionist extremists or their foes. But to watch "Uprising" is to help right a historical wrong that presents Jews as being the perpetual victims of persecution down the centuries, who never organized themselves and fought back.
In Warsaw, they did rise up and the film testifies to the way in which a deep-rooted, shared faith underpins such action, however hopeless it may seem. The insurrection was inevitably crushed, but when the film ends, we learn that afterwards, for all the might of the Wehrmacht behind them, German soldiers were too scared to enter the Ghetto at night for fear of "Jewish ghosts". Is it possible that the state of Israel has survived in part due to the persistence of ghosts?