It is a glorious September morning and although I stayed up late to finish watching a dreadful but enjoyable film I have successfully got the house ready for the arrival of the new fridge except that a phone call suggests it might not arrive, with the official reason vehicle breakdown although my suspicion is that drivers have not turned in because of the fine weather.
And the film? Only one of several time fillers to relax before beddies has the title Outrageous Fortune (Slings and Arrows etc) is a screwball comedy featuring Bette Middler with Shelly Long as the co star. Shelley plays would be actress Lauren Ames who has trained in London and is being interviewed for a new class with the renowned émigré theatre Stanislav Korzenowski (Robert Prosky) who also selects Sandy Brozinsky played Brett as a loud mouthed hopeful who sees acting as the way out from the humdrum of her life struggling to make ends meet. The two women take an instant dislike especially as Bette has not prepared a role performance for the interview and later admit she has no idea who or what Hamlet is,
To make ends meet Shelley works in a costume store and is immediately smitten by Peter Coyote who plays Michael Sanders, a school teacher who is seeking a Pumpkin outfit for one of the poor pupils in his class. She offers to help and becomes his bed partner with fantasies of happy ever after.
The one day both women see a news broadcast where a man they recognise as Michel is seen walking into a store followed by a bomb blast (how many bomb go off with a camera waiting?) and one of the victims is identified as Michel because of a fragment of information however his upper body is damaged beyond normal identification processes. The two women cannot believe they have both been lovers of the same individual but this becomes secondary, momentarily because they know from the lower anatomy of the victim that this is not Michael. They assume he survived and went to see one of them so they decide to go together to establish which one is telling the truth about their relationship, You get it both women are stupid with the ability to think through anything in advance of acting with their emotions and impulses, just like your average actress, you believe!
At the first flat they find two men searching the room so they escape only to be chased by two others who look central European. The two men in the room kill the two central Europeans and then chase the girls who escape and using some skills and outrageous behaviour hey work out that Michael faked his death because of being pursued and the find that that he made a phone call, took and took a cab into black land territory where they pretend to be cops on a bust of two well armed gangsters who admit they provided Michael with a false identity and that he took a cab to the airport. They are able to pay for the trip and for the cab driver waiting by stealing a tin of cash from the gangsters on the basis of letting them go. They are now being tailed by the two men who searched the flat who we know are CIA on the trail of Michael who up to no good.
When Lauren and Sandy finally find Michael at a boathouse waiting to picket up by collaborators they realise they have been played and more so when they are rescued by the two CIA officers and the vehicle driver and assistant are none other than Russian operatives and one of these is none other than their theatrical Professor and we learn to full dastardly nature of the plot.
Michael was a brilliant CIA officer who became a double agent and then went freelance stealing a deadly defoliant in order to blackmail the USA government into giving $20 million dollars in exchange.
He has also been dealing with the Russian and had deliberately got to know the two girls so he could pass micro dot information onto their course notebooks so he could keep in communication with the Russian theatre teaching Professor. The girl get away from the quartet of spies who decide to join forces with one of the CIA men a former class mate who believes the girls’ story that they were duped and not conspiratorial associates. The girls decide to find Michael and get the toxin to convince the authorities of their innocence as well a punishing their former lover for his deception.
The chase leads to rural Arizona when Lauren is taken hostage by Michael and his rouge associates who force a trade with the CIA for the toxin, and with Korzenowski with the stolen cash he intended to give to Michael. When the trade goes awry, Lauren gets away with both the money and the toxin, with Michael in hot pursuit, cornered on a series of mountain picturesque rock tops. They have involved a white Indian tourist guide and tracker who also bring a long the motorcycle riding Indian brothers who also still use the bow and arrow as a tourist attraction
Lauren uses her former ballet skills to evade him, leaping from one top to the other over deep chasms, culminating in a grand Jeté, as pursuing Michael slips and is killed on the rocks far below whilst the money is lost to native Indians.
By this time the two women have become friends and in the final scene one play Hamlet and the other Ophelia on Broadway watched by the CIA friends and the Russians who have been given asylum and their now wealthy Indian Tracker and his friends. Oh gosh how wonderful and to think I stayed up until 1 am for this!
However I stayed up for other trash previously and for one film which attracted many awards but which I abandoned unwilling to watch the rest, a rare action on my part. The Lovely Bones title is a quotation taken from the novel's end, where a murdered 14 year old Susie reflects on her friends' and family's newfound strength after her death. She is reported as saying: These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections — sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent — that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events my death brought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous lifeless body had been my life.”
So this is a film is a supernatural work about a belief an after life, so that all else what happens before is preparation, trials and tests in which there are levels of heaven! The film based on the book by Alice Sebold and directed by Peter Jackson. Because it is Peter Jackson the film attracted advance media attention but on seeing the trailer I knew it was not a film or a subject that I wanted to see but on noting a showing on Television I decided to begin the experience.
The film is the story of what happens to a family when their daughter disappears, with evidence that she was murdered subsequently although the rest of her body is not discovered. The girl is different from others and remarkable in that although barely able to drive when several years younger she takes her brother who has collapsed to hospital and saves his life. Her grand mother (Susan Sarandon) says this is an omen that she is going to have a long and good life.
The girl takes up photography saying this is what she wants to do as work when she becomes an adult and uses over a year’s supply of film within a few days so that the parents explain that the cost of developing is such that they will allow her one role of film a month. When she is declared dead the father honours this commitment by developing one role a month (which is one of many flaws in this disturbing and sickening film because in reality the police would have developed every film immediately and hence discovered the significant clue/evidence on the last film taken for developing.
We the audience know that December 6, 1973, in a suburb of Philadelphia, Susie Salmon takes her usual shortcut home from her school through a cornfield and meets George Harvey, a 36-year-old neighbour who lives alone and builds dollhouses for a living, He cleverly persuades her to visit, and an underground den he has created for young people and when she become suspicious and wants to leave she is prevented from doing so. At last we are spared the gruesome details of what happened to her and thereafter we see her whole being, apparently content and happy, upset because her family do not understand and are upset and disunited, believing at first she has survived but then realising she is living in her own “perfect” world
The Salmon family refuses to accept that Susie is dead, until part of her body is found by the neighbour's dog. The police visit the neighbour among other suspects and while deciding he is eccentric they have no evidence to tie him with the crime. With the death of school girl Milly Dowler so much in mind because of the News World Scandal, the announcement that News International is to enter into a private settlement with the family and that the case was again mentioned in the speech of the Labour Party Leader to his conference on Tuesday afternoon I found the whole way this story is portrayed upsetting and nauseating. It is exploitation of the worst kind especially as the story continues.
The film covers the usual family developments in such situations with the parents devastated and guilty because of the times they disciplined their daughter or were unable to grant all her wishes. Father becomes preoccupied gives up work and becomes obsessed with finding the killer, not helped when the detective assigned to the case, tells the Salmons that the police have exhausted all leads and are dropping the investigation. That night in his study, Jack looks out the window and sees a flashlight in the cornfield. Believing it is Harvey returning to destroy evidence, he runs out to confront him, armed with a baseball bat. The figure is not actually Harvey, but Clarissa, Susie's friend. As Susie watches in horror from heaven, Brian - who was going to meet Clarissa in the cornfield - beats Jack with the bat, after finding him and the panicking Clarissa, and breaks Jacks knee. While Jack recovers from a knee replacement surgery, Susie's mother, Abigail, begins an affair with the widowed Detective.
.
Trying to help her father prove his suspicions, Lindsey the other daughter in the family sneaks into Harvey's house and finds a diagram of the underground den, but is forced to leave when Harvey returns unexpectedly. The police, however, satisfied with Harvey's explanation, do not arrest him, which allows him to leave the community. Later, evidence is discovered linking Harvey to Susie's murder, as well as to those of several other young girls.
Susie meets his other victims in heaven, sees into Harvey's traumatic childhood, and realizes that he has made several unsuccessful attempts to stop killing.
Abigail leaves Jack, eventually taking a job at a winery in California. Her mother, Grandma Lynn, moves into the Salmons' home to care for Buckley and Lindsey. At this point I had enough and watched the end of a Bond film.
According to Wikipedia Eight years later, Lindsey and her boyfriend, Samuel Heckler, become engaged after finishing college, find an old house in the woods owned by a classmate's father, and decide to fix it up and live there. Sometime after the celebration, while arguing with his son Buckley who Susie had saved, Jack suffers a heart attack. The emergency prompts Abigail to return from California, but the reunion is tempered by Buckley's lingering bitterness for her abandoning the family for most of his childhood.
Meanwhile, the murderer returns to the town, which has become more developed. He explores neighbourhood and notices the school is being expanded into the cornfield where he murdered Susie. He drives by the sinkhole where Susie's body rests and where two former classmates are standing and who had felt Susie's spirit rush past her immediately after she was murdered, senses the women Harvey has killed and is physically overcome. The father and the son had also felt Susie’s presence during the time where what had happened was unknown
Susie, watching from heaven, is also overwhelmed with emotion and feels how she and Ruth transcend their present existence, and the two girls exchange positions: Susie, her spirit now in Ruth's body, connects with Ray, who had a crush on Susie in school, and had made plans to go out with her a few days before the murder. Ray senses Susie's presence, and is stunned by the fact that Susie is briefly back with him. In the bike shop of Sam Heckler's older brother Hal they find a room to make love, as Susie has longed to do after witnessing her sister and Samuel. Afterwards, Susie must return to heaven.
While I remain uncertain about many aspects I believe there is a sub plot which Wikipedia does not mention in that Ray had sent a love note to Susie or from Susie to Brian whom she had with her when she returned home and let go just before she was murdered. It was found by Ruth who gives is to Brian and not to the police as a means of commencing their relationship.
Susie moves on into another, larger part of heaven, occasionally watching earthbound events. Her sister gives birth to a daughter, Abigail Suzanne.
When stalking another young girl in New Hampshire, the serial murderer is hit by a huge icicle and falls down a snow-covered slope, dying from the wound. At the end of the novel, Susie's charm bracelet is found by a Norristown couple who know nothing of its significance, and Susie closes the story by wishing the reader "a long and happy life.
Unsurprising the film is reported not to have been immediately popular with limited income so was redirected in its marketing from a sophisticated adult audience to high school and college girls aged 13-20 during a three year screen theatre release. I agreed with one critic who described the film as deplorable in that it appears to suggest that the girl become happier and more fulfilled after being murdered. Some claimed the problem was the direction and editing by Jackson which failed to communicate the spirituality of the book.
And the film? Only one of several time fillers to relax before beddies has the title Outrageous Fortune (Slings and Arrows etc) is a screwball comedy featuring Bette Middler with Shelly Long as the co star. Shelley plays would be actress Lauren Ames who has trained in London and is being interviewed for a new class with the renowned émigré theatre Stanislav Korzenowski (Robert Prosky) who also selects Sandy Brozinsky played Brett as a loud mouthed hopeful who sees acting as the way out from the humdrum of her life struggling to make ends meet. The two women take an instant dislike especially as Bette has not prepared a role performance for the interview and later admit she has no idea who or what Hamlet is,
To make ends meet Shelley works in a costume store and is immediately smitten by Peter Coyote who plays Michael Sanders, a school teacher who is seeking a Pumpkin outfit for one of the poor pupils in his class. She offers to help and becomes his bed partner with fantasies of happy ever after.
The one day both women see a news broadcast where a man they recognise as Michel is seen walking into a store followed by a bomb blast (how many bomb go off with a camera waiting?) and one of the victims is identified as Michel because of a fragment of information however his upper body is damaged beyond normal identification processes. The two women cannot believe they have both been lovers of the same individual but this becomes secondary, momentarily because they know from the lower anatomy of the victim that this is not Michael. They assume he survived and went to see one of them so they decide to go together to establish which one is telling the truth about their relationship, You get it both women are stupid with the ability to think through anything in advance of acting with their emotions and impulses, just like your average actress, you believe!
At the first flat they find two men searching the room so they escape only to be chased by two others who look central European. The two men in the room kill the two central Europeans and then chase the girls who escape and using some skills and outrageous behaviour hey work out that Michael faked his death because of being pursued and the find that that he made a phone call, took and took a cab into black land territory where they pretend to be cops on a bust of two well armed gangsters who admit they provided Michael with a false identity and that he took a cab to the airport. They are able to pay for the trip and for the cab driver waiting by stealing a tin of cash from the gangsters on the basis of letting them go. They are now being tailed by the two men who searched the flat who we know are CIA on the trail of Michael who up to no good.
When Lauren and Sandy finally find Michael at a boathouse waiting to picket up by collaborators they realise they have been played and more so when they are rescued by the two CIA officers and the vehicle driver and assistant are none other than Russian operatives and one of these is none other than their theatrical Professor and we learn to full dastardly nature of the plot.
Michael was a brilliant CIA officer who became a double agent and then went freelance stealing a deadly defoliant in order to blackmail the USA government into giving $20 million dollars in exchange.
He has also been dealing with the Russian and had deliberately got to know the two girls so he could pass micro dot information onto their course notebooks so he could keep in communication with the Russian theatre teaching Professor. The girl get away from the quartet of spies who decide to join forces with one of the CIA men a former class mate who believes the girls’ story that they were duped and not conspiratorial associates. The girls decide to find Michael and get the toxin to convince the authorities of their innocence as well a punishing their former lover for his deception.
The chase leads to rural Arizona when Lauren is taken hostage by Michael and his rouge associates who force a trade with the CIA for the toxin, and with Korzenowski with the stolen cash he intended to give to Michael. When the trade goes awry, Lauren gets away with both the money and the toxin, with Michael in hot pursuit, cornered on a series of mountain picturesque rock tops. They have involved a white Indian tourist guide and tracker who also bring a long the motorcycle riding Indian brothers who also still use the bow and arrow as a tourist attraction
Lauren uses her former ballet skills to evade him, leaping from one top to the other over deep chasms, culminating in a grand Jeté, as pursuing Michael slips and is killed on the rocks far below whilst the money is lost to native Indians.
By this time the two women have become friends and in the final scene one play Hamlet and the other Ophelia on Broadway watched by the CIA friends and the Russians who have been given asylum and their now wealthy Indian Tracker and his friends. Oh gosh how wonderful and to think I stayed up until 1 am for this!
However I stayed up for other trash previously and for one film which attracted many awards but which I abandoned unwilling to watch the rest, a rare action on my part. The Lovely Bones title is a quotation taken from the novel's end, where a murdered 14 year old Susie reflects on her friends' and family's newfound strength after her death. She is reported as saying: These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections — sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent — that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events my death brought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous lifeless body had been my life.”
So this is a film is a supernatural work about a belief an after life, so that all else what happens before is preparation, trials and tests in which there are levels of heaven! The film based on the book by Alice Sebold and directed by Peter Jackson. Because it is Peter Jackson the film attracted advance media attention but on seeing the trailer I knew it was not a film or a subject that I wanted to see but on noting a showing on Television I decided to begin the experience.
The film is the story of what happens to a family when their daughter disappears, with evidence that she was murdered subsequently although the rest of her body is not discovered. The girl is different from others and remarkable in that although barely able to drive when several years younger she takes her brother who has collapsed to hospital and saves his life. Her grand mother (Susan Sarandon) says this is an omen that she is going to have a long and good life.
The girl takes up photography saying this is what she wants to do as work when she becomes an adult and uses over a year’s supply of film within a few days so that the parents explain that the cost of developing is such that they will allow her one role of film a month. When she is declared dead the father honours this commitment by developing one role a month (which is one of many flaws in this disturbing and sickening film because in reality the police would have developed every film immediately and hence discovered the significant clue/evidence on the last film taken for developing.
We the audience know that December 6, 1973, in a suburb of Philadelphia, Susie Salmon takes her usual shortcut home from her school through a cornfield and meets George Harvey, a 36-year-old neighbour who lives alone and builds dollhouses for a living, He cleverly persuades her to visit, and an underground den he has created for young people and when she become suspicious and wants to leave she is prevented from doing so. At last we are spared the gruesome details of what happened to her and thereafter we see her whole being, apparently content and happy, upset because her family do not understand and are upset and disunited, believing at first she has survived but then realising she is living in her own “perfect” world
The Salmon family refuses to accept that Susie is dead, until part of her body is found by the neighbour's dog. The police visit the neighbour among other suspects and while deciding he is eccentric they have no evidence to tie him with the crime. With the death of school girl Milly Dowler so much in mind because of the News World Scandal, the announcement that News International is to enter into a private settlement with the family and that the case was again mentioned in the speech of the Labour Party Leader to his conference on Tuesday afternoon I found the whole way this story is portrayed upsetting and nauseating. It is exploitation of the worst kind especially as the story continues.
The film covers the usual family developments in such situations with the parents devastated and guilty because of the times they disciplined their daughter or were unable to grant all her wishes. Father becomes preoccupied gives up work and becomes obsessed with finding the killer, not helped when the detective assigned to the case, tells the Salmons that the police have exhausted all leads and are dropping the investigation. That night in his study, Jack looks out the window and sees a flashlight in the cornfield. Believing it is Harvey returning to destroy evidence, he runs out to confront him, armed with a baseball bat. The figure is not actually Harvey, but Clarissa, Susie's friend. As Susie watches in horror from heaven, Brian - who was going to meet Clarissa in the cornfield - beats Jack with the bat, after finding him and the panicking Clarissa, and breaks Jacks knee. While Jack recovers from a knee replacement surgery, Susie's mother, Abigail, begins an affair with the widowed Detective.
.
Trying to help her father prove his suspicions, Lindsey the other daughter in the family sneaks into Harvey's house and finds a diagram of the underground den, but is forced to leave when Harvey returns unexpectedly. The police, however, satisfied with Harvey's explanation, do not arrest him, which allows him to leave the community. Later, evidence is discovered linking Harvey to Susie's murder, as well as to those of several other young girls.
Susie meets his other victims in heaven, sees into Harvey's traumatic childhood, and realizes that he has made several unsuccessful attempts to stop killing.
Abigail leaves Jack, eventually taking a job at a winery in California. Her mother, Grandma Lynn, moves into the Salmons' home to care for Buckley and Lindsey. At this point I had enough and watched the end of a Bond film.
According to Wikipedia Eight years later, Lindsey and her boyfriend, Samuel Heckler, become engaged after finishing college, find an old house in the woods owned by a classmate's father, and decide to fix it up and live there. Sometime after the celebration, while arguing with his son Buckley who Susie had saved, Jack suffers a heart attack. The emergency prompts Abigail to return from California, but the reunion is tempered by Buckley's lingering bitterness for her abandoning the family for most of his childhood.
Meanwhile, the murderer returns to the town, which has become more developed. He explores neighbourhood and notices the school is being expanded into the cornfield where he murdered Susie. He drives by the sinkhole where Susie's body rests and where two former classmates are standing and who had felt Susie's spirit rush past her immediately after she was murdered, senses the women Harvey has killed and is physically overcome. The father and the son had also felt Susie’s presence during the time where what had happened was unknown
Susie, watching from heaven, is also overwhelmed with emotion and feels how she and Ruth transcend their present existence, and the two girls exchange positions: Susie, her spirit now in Ruth's body, connects with Ray, who had a crush on Susie in school, and had made plans to go out with her a few days before the murder. Ray senses Susie's presence, and is stunned by the fact that Susie is briefly back with him. In the bike shop of Sam Heckler's older brother Hal they find a room to make love, as Susie has longed to do after witnessing her sister and Samuel. Afterwards, Susie must return to heaven.
While I remain uncertain about many aspects I believe there is a sub plot which Wikipedia does not mention in that Ray had sent a love note to Susie or from Susie to Brian whom she had with her when she returned home and let go just before she was murdered. It was found by Ruth who gives is to Brian and not to the police as a means of commencing their relationship.
Susie moves on into another, larger part of heaven, occasionally watching earthbound events. Her sister gives birth to a daughter, Abigail Suzanne.
When stalking another young girl in New Hampshire, the serial murderer is hit by a huge icicle and falls down a snow-covered slope, dying from the wound. At the end of the novel, Susie's charm bracelet is found by a Norristown couple who know nothing of its significance, and Susie closes the story by wishing the reader "a long and happy life.
Unsurprising the film is reported not to have been immediately popular with limited income so was redirected in its marketing from a sophisticated adult audience to high school and college girls aged 13-20 during a three year screen theatre release. I agreed with one critic who described the film as deplorable in that it appears to suggest that the girl become happier and more fulfilled after being murdered. Some claimed the problem was the direction and editing by Jackson which failed to communicate the spirituality of the book.
A film which I saw during daytime is Three Faces West with John Wayne. Two refugees from the Nazi Germany annexation of Austrian reach the USA-a distinguished medical doctor and his daughter. He agrees to appear on a government sponsored broadcast inviting communities to bid to provide a home and expenses for the refugees who are willing to give something back to their new country after being rescued. The couple only managed to escape through the help of the fiancée of the girl who they believe has been killed.
They accept the invitation from a town not knowing that it is in dust bowl America during a prolonged drought full of struggling farmers. The only medical help is provided by a vet. They have attempted to employ a doctor before but always the individual has lasted a matter of hours on seeing the conditions.
They are met of the train by John Wayne during a dust storm and they find the allocated accommodation filled with dust. Wayne and a friend have moved into separate accommodation at the top of what used to be his family home. Before reaching the homestead and fearing that they will immediately leave the doctor and his daughter are taken on an exhausting tour of all the sick. The couple decide they will not stay but the doctor performs surgery on a boy with a limp and waits to ensure the operation is successful. His daughter helps out as a nurse. The couple decide to stay, especially after a rainstorm eases the situation but not for long as the drought continues.
Wayne persuades the other farmers to pool together and implement government recommended drainage and good husbandry schemes but is advised by the authorities not to bother as the land has been declared permanently unsuitable for cultivation. They recommend the town to move in it’s entirely to Oregon when a new dam is being built and which creates ideal farming conditions. It is agreed to follow this advice after further and prolonged difficulties. There are many problems on the long journey with dissent about Wayne’s leadership and control of the funds.
During the journey the father learns that the fiancée survived and had come to the USA in search of them and they are reunited. The girl who has fallen in love with Wayne and planned a wedding is torn between her feelings and obligations to the man who saved their lives. However they learn that he has become a fascist and wants them all to return to their home in Austria so the two decide to rejoin the Wagon train. The father has been offered a major post in the USA but had decided to continue to support the community. With his daughter happily settled with Wayne he can consider working at his original level for the USA. The film has echoes of the Grapes of Wrath. It was released in 1940 to encourage Americans to accept refugees, the New Deal and promote anti Fascism. It heart warming stuff within the context of the era.
No comments:
Post a Comment