I missed the publicity and the critical evaluations of the 2010 British film Never Left me Go. The film raises important issues and is the story of a group of children attending from the age of 11 an isolated special school which young people they later encounter saying they wish they had been given the opportunity to also attend. The one thing all the children have in common is that they do not have relatives who visit. They are warned against leaving the school unless supervised something about which they are obedient. In fact obedience is something which appears all the children have in common although in other respects they appear normal each having friends within the school, some rivalries and picking on someone who appears different, in this instance Tommy who is not good at sport but also at art which appears to be highly regarded with the best paintings, sculpture and other art selected to appear in the “gallery.” He is befriended by two girls who are also friends.
While the children are still at school a teacher played by Charlotte Rampling breaks the news that they are special because they are clones whose originals have paid for them to have a better life than other clones brought up in secret establishments, the different between battery hens and free range. However as with hens who all end up in the cooking pot, once they are adults they will be used for body parts, up to four organs after which their use will be completed and are terminated unless this has happened beforehand because of complications with the transplanting of body parts. The teacher disappears.
When they become adults they able to live in cottages in the area close to the school and are free go out and about and enjoy life until their time.
One of the girls played by Keira Knightly has a relationship with the now young man Tommy (Andrew Garfield) until the harvesting commences and she dies on the operating table because of complications. She has been supported by the other girl Kathy (Carey Mulligan) who becomes a carer, someone who travels the country visiting and supporting other clones when ready for transplant and the post operative experience, if it is explained why she has been selected and has not as yet been asked to donate transplant, I missed this.
Tommy and Kathy meet up and fall in love and he persuades her to go and see Madame, the former school head at her home after learning that the school has closed. The purpose of the visit is to show Madame the art work that Tommy has created since being an adult and the hope that this will enable him to have deferment similar to the position of Kathy. It is Kathy who grasps the there is no such thing as deferment and the purpose of the artwork was to establish if the clones had “souls” A twist in the tale is that the sacked teacher shares the home of the Madam. We see Kathy helping Tommy to cope with another transplant before completion.
The film as with the book by Kazuo Ishiguro in 2005 was highly regarded with the film receiving several nominations in the lesser institutions and groups with Carey Mulligan winning best actress by UK Independent film awards and Andrew Garfield also winning in others competitions. The film well acted and thought provoking and may well sit in the memory.
The film is based on an alternative reality claiming that as early as 1952 the ability to clone humans meant that we all had a life expectancy of 100 years. It not stated but presumed that some clones were used for medical experiments to eradicate diseases such as the cancers. The story is told by Kathy when she and Tommy are 28 and she looks back. Although between 1950 and 1980 the film has a feel of the 1950’s throughout, apart from the medical centres.
Those brought up at the residential school are fortunate because their originals have paid the extra to enable them to have a good childhood and free adulthood until the body parts are needed. The film does not explain why the clones accept their fate without revolt. The school is closed when originals are unwilling to pay the additional costs and society in general does not want to see the clones out and about thus raising the issue that we tend not to want know about the price paid for our way of life... The lives led by those who make the cheap food and clothing or who die because the food, water and medicines which they need and are available are not provided.
The subject of transplants is not knew and I remember the fuss which Oh Lucky Man created when it was released some 50 years ago and the hero attends a clinic when there are experiments in transplanting with one young man finding his head and brain attached to a pig. I still have the Long Play record of the excellent music composed and played by local Jarrow man Alan Price of the Animals with Eric Burden.
It could also be argued that the film is more about the choices we make as a society collectively and the implications as much as the issue of cloning. All those years ago some 50 now I decided to go to prison for six months when I was given an alternative as a statement that I could not accept the potential use of weapons of mass destruction.
Another film set in the 1940 and 1950 also released in 1958 is Another Time, Another Place starting a young Sean Connery as the male lead who plays an international journalist and radio broadcaster who at the start of film reports on the dismantling of a bomb. He has an affair with Lana Turner who is also a Journalist from America covering the war in Europe and engaged to her employer who travels to the UK and France to cover the allied invasion as well as the creation of the United Nations.
Sid James plays the personal assistant to the boss in Europe with whom Turner confess that she has decided to break the engagement with the boss because of her affair with Connery. However coinciding with this intention Connery who is about to leave for Paris, has decided to break with Turner because he has a wife and child in Cornwall who he also loves. Earlier in the film we see Connery declaring his eternal love for his future wife promising to be always together. We also witness saying as much to Turner during their love affair. The wife is played by the excellent actress of my childhood and youth, Glynis Johns, who has take her son to live in a Cornish fishing port to get away from the bombings in London. Connery also has a Journalist/BBC colleague who is also a family friend and has been against he relationship with Turner persuading Connery to remain with his family.
When the boss arrives he senses relations between them has cooled and presses James to reveal what is going on. Turner admits the relationship but also the irony of the situation because she has been rejected. The following day the boss calls on Turner when she is about to listen to the next broadcast of Connery from Paris. He attempted to stop her listening but understandably she insists only to learn this way that thee plane Connery travelled in had crashed and he had been killed. She is devasted has has a emotional breakdown and admitted to a residential clinic headed by John Le Mesurier. The boss visits after about six months when she is ready to leave although still in a state of shock. The boss played by Barry Sullivan arranged for her take a cruise back to the USA from Plymouth Devon. She agrees but arranges to go for the day to Connery’s hometown on the day beforehand. Finding that with the peace the local hotel is fully booked she leaves her overnight case with the rest of the luggage sent on to the ship and goes on a walkabout until the evening train.
She visits the outside of his home where she meets his son out playing and is invited in for a cuppa and then because the boy takes to the American and wants to know all about the USA, she stays for an evening meal and then missing the train is asked to stay. She is overcome by the situation and the following morning goes off a panic. I am not clear what happens next except that she is brought back in a collapsed state and is cared for by the wife until she recovers. She agrees to stay on and write a book about the life of Connery with the help of the wife much to the horror of Connery’s former colleague who survived he crash and who know also lives in the same community. He is understandably concerned that the looking back will arouse concerns which the wife had expressed to him about the fact that Connery’s letters to her shortly before his death had become brief as if something had changed or was wrong. Lana’s boss also arrives to take her back to America but too late to prevent the widow realising what had happened and then the woman was Lana. Lana is asked to immediately leave but at the station Glynis and the longstanding friend come to say goodbye with Lana leaving for the USA able to move forward.
According it a brief Wikipedia article during the making of the film the gangster boyfriend of Lana Turned arrived on set with a gun to warn Connery not to get involved with the actress. There was a struggle with the gun firing but fortunately no one was injured. The film looks as if there was some location shooting in Cornwall although it could have all been created in a studio .is is a pleasant film full of nostalgia for Cornish fishing ports. I do have a Newlyn Pottery vase bought from the pottery shop in St Ives.
Abandoned is a 2010 released thrills and actions film which requires a considerable stretch of credulity. The films can be said to be in two parts. In the first a young woman accompanies her boyfriend to a hospital for day surgery. She accompanies him to the ward where a nurse asks him to get ready and tell the girl friend when to leave and how long the process will take. The hospital is in the processing of closing down with transfers to a new building already in hand. It is never explained why it is closing and transferring as the building is modern with modern facilities. While she waits she shares a cup of coffee with an elderly man who is spending his days at the hospital visiting his wife. When the boyfriend does not return at the time expected she makes inquiries and there is no record of him, or the nurse who she has encountered or the doctor he was supposed to be seeing and that the area where he was admitted and which she visited had been cleared and was no longer in use.
She makes various inquiries and eventually the hospital administrator is called because she making a nuisance of herself. When he is not found after extensive searching the girl calls a female friend who surprisingly appears the reinforce the hospital view that maybe the man used the visit as an excuse to break with her. She calls the police and the selected nearest officer is also sceptical but does a search of the large multifloor building without success. The direction of the film is to add to the sense that there is some great conspiracy especially when we learn that the man’s laptop has disappeared from his car. That he worked from home and other planted clues suggesting he has been kidnapped for some reason and with staff at the at the hospital colluding. When she spills her purse to reveal a bottle of anti depressants, although why should carry round such a large bottle is not explained, the suggestion is that she is making everything up and is in need of psychiatric help and with the doctor again appearing part of he conspiracy. The policeman leaves although calls at the home of the boyfriend and after breaking from the psychiatrist the girl goes on another search and gets a phone call from the boyfriend saying he is being kept prisoner within the hospital.
A key aspect of the film is that the girl works as an electronic expert for a bank and by phone she is told to transfer $10 million from the bank to an International account. She does this demanding to see her boyfriend before submitting the final transfer code.
We now come to the second part which occurs from the moment she pus through the transfer on seeing her boyfriend. Only then she realises she has been part of an elaborate hoax of which the boyfriend is the leader. His partners in crime include the man with whom she had a cup of tea, the nurse and the head security officer, with the latter responsible for erasing the CCTV record of his entering the hospital and going to the ward from which he official disappeared without ever having been there. This trio go off leaving the security chief to kill the girl and dispose of the body in a part of the hospital that is to be demolished but he wants to test out a comment from the boyfriend that she is great in bed. This provides the opportunity to escape and eventually to kill him with a piece of pipe.
Throughout the film she has been carrying a novel given to her by the boyfriend. At one point she uses the cover to do a paper trace for his National Insurance number as he used the book as a rest to complete a form. This number proves false as does the phone number of his mother he had put into her mobile. She gives the book to the policeman and when he gets home he looks at the final pages which appears to be include a story similar to what the young woman had explained happened to her boyfriend. The last part reveals that it was a scam and that the life of the victim is in danger. He calls for back up and make his way to the hospital.
Meanwhile the boyfriend, the girlfriend and the partner have made their getaway but a phone call reveals that the transfer has not in fact gone through. They arrive back as the girl is about to make her getaway so there follows a chase back through hospital during which the girl has the gun from the security guard and shoots the partner. The policeman gets back and captures the nurse girlfriend who is waiting in the car and then shoot the boyfriend just before he shoots the girl. The extent and levels of implausibility should be self evident. This is a three out of ten film with the rating shared by the critics.
While the children are still at school a teacher played by Charlotte Rampling breaks the news that they are special because they are clones whose originals have paid for them to have a better life than other clones brought up in secret establishments, the different between battery hens and free range. However as with hens who all end up in the cooking pot, once they are adults they will be used for body parts, up to four organs after which their use will be completed and are terminated unless this has happened beforehand because of complications with the transplanting of body parts. The teacher disappears.
When they become adults they able to live in cottages in the area close to the school and are free go out and about and enjoy life until their time.
One of the girls played by Keira Knightly has a relationship with the now young man Tommy (Andrew Garfield) until the harvesting commences and she dies on the operating table because of complications. She has been supported by the other girl Kathy (Carey Mulligan) who becomes a carer, someone who travels the country visiting and supporting other clones when ready for transplant and the post operative experience, if it is explained why she has been selected and has not as yet been asked to donate transplant, I missed this.
Tommy and Kathy meet up and fall in love and he persuades her to go and see Madame, the former school head at her home after learning that the school has closed. The purpose of the visit is to show Madame the art work that Tommy has created since being an adult and the hope that this will enable him to have deferment similar to the position of Kathy. It is Kathy who grasps the there is no such thing as deferment and the purpose of the artwork was to establish if the clones had “souls” A twist in the tale is that the sacked teacher shares the home of the Madam. We see Kathy helping Tommy to cope with another transplant before completion.
The film as with the book by Kazuo Ishiguro in 2005 was highly regarded with the film receiving several nominations in the lesser institutions and groups with Carey Mulligan winning best actress by UK Independent film awards and Andrew Garfield also winning in others competitions. The film well acted and thought provoking and may well sit in the memory.
The film is based on an alternative reality claiming that as early as 1952 the ability to clone humans meant that we all had a life expectancy of 100 years. It not stated but presumed that some clones were used for medical experiments to eradicate diseases such as the cancers. The story is told by Kathy when she and Tommy are 28 and she looks back. Although between 1950 and 1980 the film has a feel of the 1950’s throughout, apart from the medical centres.
Those brought up at the residential school are fortunate because their originals have paid the extra to enable them to have a good childhood and free adulthood until the body parts are needed. The film does not explain why the clones accept their fate without revolt. The school is closed when originals are unwilling to pay the additional costs and society in general does not want to see the clones out and about thus raising the issue that we tend not to want know about the price paid for our way of life... The lives led by those who make the cheap food and clothing or who die because the food, water and medicines which they need and are available are not provided.
The subject of transplants is not knew and I remember the fuss which Oh Lucky Man created when it was released some 50 years ago and the hero attends a clinic when there are experiments in transplanting with one young man finding his head and brain attached to a pig. I still have the Long Play record of the excellent music composed and played by local Jarrow man Alan Price of the Animals with Eric Burden.
It could also be argued that the film is more about the choices we make as a society collectively and the implications as much as the issue of cloning. All those years ago some 50 now I decided to go to prison for six months when I was given an alternative as a statement that I could not accept the potential use of weapons of mass destruction.
Another film set in the 1940 and 1950 also released in 1958 is Another Time, Another Place starting a young Sean Connery as the male lead who plays an international journalist and radio broadcaster who at the start of film reports on the dismantling of a bomb. He has an affair with Lana Turner who is also a Journalist from America covering the war in Europe and engaged to her employer who travels to the UK and France to cover the allied invasion as well as the creation of the United Nations.
Sid James plays the personal assistant to the boss in Europe with whom Turner confess that she has decided to break the engagement with the boss because of her affair with Connery. However coinciding with this intention Connery who is about to leave for Paris, has decided to break with Turner because he has a wife and child in Cornwall who he also loves. Earlier in the film we see Connery declaring his eternal love for his future wife promising to be always together. We also witness saying as much to Turner during their love affair. The wife is played by the excellent actress of my childhood and youth, Glynis Johns, who has take her son to live in a Cornish fishing port to get away from the bombings in London. Connery also has a Journalist/BBC colleague who is also a family friend and has been against he relationship with Turner persuading Connery to remain with his family.
When the boss arrives he senses relations between them has cooled and presses James to reveal what is going on. Turner admits the relationship but also the irony of the situation because she has been rejected. The following day the boss calls on Turner when she is about to listen to the next broadcast of Connery from Paris. He attempted to stop her listening but understandably she insists only to learn this way that thee plane Connery travelled in had crashed and he had been killed. She is devasted has has a emotional breakdown and admitted to a residential clinic headed by John Le Mesurier. The boss visits after about six months when she is ready to leave although still in a state of shock. The boss played by Barry Sullivan arranged for her take a cruise back to the USA from Plymouth Devon. She agrees but arranges to go for the day to Connery’s hometown on the day beforehand. Finding that with the peace the local hotel is fully booked she leaves her overnight case with the rest of the luggage sent on to the ship and goes on a walkabout until the evening train.
She visits the outside of his home where she meets his son out playing and is invited in for a cuppa and then because the boy takes to the American and wants to know all about the USA, she stays for an evening meal and then missing the train is asked to stay. She is overcome by the situation and the following morning goes off a panic. I am not clear what happens next except that she is brought back in a collapsed state and is cared for by the wife until she recovers. She agrees to stay on and write a book about the life of Connery with the help of the wife much to the horror of Connery’s former colleague who survived he crash and who know also lives in the same community. He is understandably concerned that the looking back will arouse concerns which the wife had expressed to him about the fact that Connery’s letters to her shortly before his death had become brief as if something had changed or was wrong. Lana’s boss also arrives to take her back to America but too late to prevent the widow realising what had happened and then the woman was Lana. Lana is asked to immediately leave but at the station Glynis and the longstanding friend come to say goodbye with Lana leaving for the USA able to move forward.
According it a brief Wikipedia article during the making of the film the gangster boyfriend of Lana Turned arrived on set with a gun to warn Connery not to get involved with the actress. There was a struggle with the gun firing but fortunately no one was injured. The film looks as if there was some location shooting in Cornwall although it could have all been created in a studio .is is a pleasant film full of nostalgia for Cornish fishing ports. I do have a Newlyn Pottery vase bought from the pottery shop in St Ives.
Abandoned is a 2010 released thrills and actions film which requires a considerable stretch of credulity. The films can be said to be in two parts. In the first a young woman accompanies her boyfriend to a hospital for day surgery. She accompanies him to the ward where a nurse asks him to get ready and tell the girl friend when to leave and how long the process will take. The hospital is in the processing of closing down with transfers to a new building already in hand. It is never explained why it is closing and transferring as the building is modern with modern facilities. While she waits she shares a cup of coffee with an elderly man who is spending his days at the hospital visiting his wife. When the boyfriend does not return at the time expected she makes inquiries and there is no record of him, or the nurse who she has encountered or the doctor he was supposed to be seeing and that the area where he was admitted and which she visited had been cleared and was no longer in use.
She makes various inquiries and eventually the hospital administrator is called because she making a nuisance of herself. When he is not found after extensive searching the girl calls a female friend who surprisingly appears the reinforce the hospital view that maybe the man used the visit as an excuse to break with her. She calls the police and the selected nearest officer is also sceptical but does a search of the large multifloor building without success. The direction of the film is to add to the sense that there is some great conspiracy especially when we learn that the man’s laptop has disappeared from his car. That he worked from home and other planted clues suggesting he has been kidnapped for some reason and with staff at the at the hospital colluding. When she spills her purse to reveal a bottle of anti depressants, although why should carry round such a large bottle is not explained, the suggestion is that she is making everything up and is in need of psychiatric help and with the doctor again appearing part of he conspiracy. The policeman leaves although calls at the home of the boyfriend and after breaking from the psychiatrist the girl goes on another search and gets a phone call from the boyfriend saying he is being kept prisoner within the hospital.
A key aspect of the film is that the girl works as an electronic expert for a bank and by phone she is told to transfer $10 million from the bank to an International account. She does this demanding to see her boyfriend before submitting the final transfer code.
We now come to the second part which occurs from the moment she pus through the transfer on seeing her boyfriend. Only then she realises she has been part of an elaborate hoax of which the boyfriend is the leader. His partners in crime include the man with whom she had a cup of tea, the nurse and the head security officer, with the latter responsible for erasing the CCTV record of his entering the hospital and going to the ward from which he official disappeared without ever having been there. This trio go off leaving the security chief to kill the girl and dispose of the body in a part of the hospital that is to be demolished but he wants to test out a comment from the boyfriend that she is great in bed. This provides the opportunity to escape and eventually to kill him with a piece of pipe.
Throughout the film she has been carrying a novel given to her by the boyfriend. At one point she uses the cover to do a paper trace for his National Insurance number as he used the book as a rest to complete a form. This number proves false as does the phone number of his mother he had put into her mobile. She gives the book to the policeman and when he gets home he looks at the final pages which appears to be include a story similar to what the young woman had explained happened to her boyfriend. The last part reveals that it was a scam and that the life of the victim is in danger. He calls for back up and make his way to the hospital.
Meanwhile the boyfriend, the girlfriend and the partner have made their getaway but a phone call reveals that the transfer has not in fact gone through. They arrive back as the girl is about to make her getaway so there follows a chase back through hospital during which the girl has the gun from the security guard and shoots the partner. The policeman gets back and captures the nurse girlfriend who is waiting in the car and then shoot the boyfriend just before he shoots the girl. The extent and levels of implausibility should be self evident. This is a three out of ten film with the rating shared by the critics.
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