I looked forward to watching Peace Love and Misunderstanding which starred Jane Fonda as the former hippie, commune living, free love mother who refused to change her approach to life and relationships as she grows old .
Because of this lifestyle her daughter Diane has cut herself off from her mother who has had no contact with her now teenage grand children. When Diane who works as a lawyer in Manhattan learns that her husband wants a divorce after finding someone else she is devastated and decides to turn to her mother who continues to live her lifestyle at Woodstock with a group of former hippie friends.
The teen age vegetarian peace loving daughter is attracted to a young man who turns out to be butcher while the teenage son films and records their lives to make a film about the nature of present USA society and the world and those who believe and try to live differently. Diane also grows close to a man who works with hands as a carpenter and is also a singer until she learns that the man was one of her mothers many lovers.
As the film progresses Jane celebrates a pagan rite with her women friends which at first only alienates the daughter more reminding of all the situations when she was faced with different men in their home as she grew up and the ideas of her mother which was determined to protect her children from. The film has a good feeling ending with mother and daughter reconciled the grand daughter appreciating the positive aspects of the young man and the brother winning with his film entry and the daughter also re-establishing relationship with the older singer carpenter. Life of course is not like this and I remained unclear what was the purpose of the film which overall disappointed. However I enjoyed the performance of the now elder Jane Fonda, such a long way from Barbarella!
However I was unexpectedly impressed by Elles starring Juliette Binoche and this is my film of the recent month of film experiencing. The film is directed and co written by the Polish Malgorzata Szumowska. Juliette plays a journalist in Paris undertaking research for an article on female student prostitutes. The two students who agree to be interviewed are nothing like what she expects and finds that they fearless, unashamed and in control. Instead of she having an effect on the young women they have a profound effect on and the relationship with her husband and two sons with everything coming to a head at a dinner party for her husband’s boss his wife and another colleague.
Juliette is disturbed by all she learns, not just the response of two girls to having sex with strangers, usually old enough to be their fathers if not older, but she learns of the men who talk openly about their lives, their work and usually their wives and families. This brings home that the men are ordinary leading ordinary lives look usually trying to recapturing the sexual excitement of their youth no longer satisfied by domestic sex. However there are dangers to as one of the girls is beaten up by a client.
Their experience has the effect on getting Juliette to reflect on her own sexuality and which in turn has a disturbing impact on her husband and their relationship becomes threatened. The film is more than a dramatised documentary and I thought revealed many insights about adult relationships in general. The two young women student prostitutes also gave first rate performances as did her husband and the two sons.
I took someone to see Oz the Great and Powerful, in 3 D who had never seen the medium before at the 02 Millennium Dome,
We were both impressed by the story as well as the production. The Wizard of Oz is not just one of the important films of my childhood but in the final years of her life my mother enjoyed seeing the film together with Return to Oz and a programme the making of the film and its history on video tape at the home where she was resident.
The film is set 20 years before the Wizard of OZ and also commenced in a black and white prologue in which we come to know of Oscar Diggs who works in Kansas as a magician always on the run from the husbands and parents of women he flirts with as well as angry crowds when he is unable to fulfil promises of magic. He has to escape in a hot air balloon which like the subsequent story, is sucked up into a tornado and finds himself in the land OZ.
Here he becomes embroiled in a battle between two sisters the Good and the Wicked Witches. The films has all the ingredients of the Wizard of Oz with Munchkins, flying baboons, a poppy field which sends anyone entering into sleep and various other characters. The colouring and visuals are both gorgeous and stunning.
The core of the film is how Diggs uses his skills as magician to create a projected holographic image of himself after he is believed dead in order to defeat the wicked witches and regain the Emerald city, and free the Munchkins from domination. Thus he becomes the Wizard of Oz choosing to stay in the land with the Good Witch rather than return to earth. The films includes the use of a Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion and Tin Man plus references to the original stories and subsequent films. I though it was engaging and not overlong, a criticism made by Dr Mark Kermode, The story ended in such a way that a sequel is possible,
I had seen Four Brothers before 27th March 2013 but only remembered this after the film commenced having watched because of the inclusion of Blue Blood’s detective Mark Wahlberg who I had not realised had become such an established film actor before inclusion in the series about the New York Police Department.
A woman appears to have been randomly killed as a witness to a robbery at a local convenience store and this brings home the four brothers, former adolescents in trouble adopted by the woman who managed an open house of local waifs and strays. The four track down the two men who carried out what emerges to have been a deliberate killing. They execute the killers without learning who paid them.
Attention focuses on one of the four when it is found that he used previously unknown to the others life insurance money to pay off a local villain.. He explains that because the three others had left he had been responsible for the foster mother’s bills and that he used some of the insurance money to payoff the gangster who was holding up work by his construction company.
The bothers are then attacked by mobsters with one of the four killed but one of the assassins reveals the identity of villain and it is discovered that the mother filed a police report about the way the villain was operating, a report which disappeared because the policeman involved was in the pay of the mobster.
More by accident than design they manage to unmask the rogue policeman who is gunned down by other force members. They then plan the execution of the mobster. The surviving brothers face a hard time in custody but despite beatings are not broken and released they return and repair the badly damage home of their adopted mother and return to live together with their women folk in the family house in honour off the woman and their murdered brother. A class B movie which we now call TV movie.
Now for two adventure films, with the first like OZ a prequel to the Spider Man films, the Amazing Spider Man 2012. Against all expectations I thoroughly enjoyed this film which sets out to explain how and why Peter Parker became Spider Man
Peter grew up with his uncle, the excellent actor Martin Sheen and his wife after his parents have been killed in a plane crash. He had been taken to stay with the relatives after the family home had been ransacked because his father had been working on how to combine human and animal DNA as a way of curing major illnesses, in a throw back idea to Oh Lucky Man perhaps?
Peter who is a bullied weakling at school and then High school, has no chance with the girl he fancies, the daughter of a senior policeman but then discovers a secret diary of his father in which he has noted down his major discovery, a formula which solves the problem of combining the DNA in such a way to achieve the objective. He finds that the man with whom his father collaborated is now in charge of a successful major research corporation and he finds a way to gain entry posing as an Intern where he meets up with the police chief’s daughter who has a part time job at the company’s HQ laboratory..
Without realising what is involved Peter finds the project where the former partner has been pressurised to bringing forward the research which involves spiders. Peter is bitten by a processed spider at the wrong (or right) time and his body is transformed with the ability to move like a spider and with a dramatic increase in physical power. Unfortunately Peter then shares the secret formula with the partner whose boss pressurises him to use the project on humans not knowing about what has happened to Peter and when the partner refuses he is fired.
The partner then uses the formula on himself to regenerate a previously severed limb however this is only the first stage to a transformation into a human attacking giant lizard with ideas which threaten the whole of humanity.
Meanwhile at High School Peter has found it difficult to control his strength and athletic abilities but does begin to date the police chiefs daughter, eventually reveals that he is also Spider man. At first Peter uses his power to prevent a crime but on realising his potential he commence to help the police who condemn his involvement as a vigilante and he becomes their target. Refusing to give up the work he creates the second skin disguise familiar to everyone as Spiderman and also how to create and use super strength thread into the ability to create webs and links enabling him to move through the city at great speed,
The situation comes to a head when first the lizard creature creates havoc on a bridge but Peter saves the son of a tower crane driver as their car is about to topple off the bridge, a crucial development when later other crane men help Peter to move across the city to prevent catastrophe. This is after Peter has been captured by the police and the chief discovers that this is the boyfriend of the daughter. He lets Peter escape after learning that the daughter is in great danger and that Peter may be able to save her. Peter is able to stop the humanity threatening disaster with the help of the police chief who losses his life but makes Peter swear he will have no further contact with his daughter. This breaks both hearts and eventually girl visits demanding to know why she has been rejected and then correctly guessing that he has been persuaded by her father not to have contact. Peter agrees to the request because he failed to prevent the death of his aunt and understands that he will have to live alone to continue his at times dangerous activities.
Returning to High School Peter reveals to the girl that he is a failure at keeping promises and meanwhile in a prison cell a shadowy figure asks the former partner if he has revealed to Peter the truth about the boy’s father. The reply is no thus heralding the next film!
The second adventure film is Man in Black 3. I enjoyed the first in the series with the great Tommy Lee Jones as the senior specialist operator with the ability to wipe memories with a Dr Who type of hand gadget. He partners the young Will Smith and this film is primarily about how the relationship became established.
When Will Smith as was a young boy, played by Josh Brolin his father, a military/policeman, was killed during the capture by Jones of a notorious criminal Boris the Animal, the last of a vicious race of Boglodites and who is then imprisoned in secure unit on the moon with forty years passing. Unfortunately with the help of an expendable lady friend Boris escapes and commences to cause havoc on the planet.
The consequence of the escape is that Boris finds a time travel device which enables him to change history so it is Jones that is killed and Boris is able develop his plan to conquer earth. Finding that his partner is dead long ago understandably unsettles Will Smith who attempts to seek answers from his boss Emma Thompson. He works out what has happened and also goes back in time to the point just before the death of his father and the capture of Boris by Jones. Jones has also returned knowing that that this time he has to kill Boris and prevent the alternative reality from developing. For the change in history to work the two must work independently of each other.
In this they are both successful but Will learns the truth about the death of his father and how Jones wiped his memory of the event and then raised him as his son out of the debt of gratitude he felt for the boy’s father. As with the first two Men in Black films there are various creatures extraordinaire from other planets about which the majority of the population are oblivious and several good actions sequence with the film a tongue in cheek approach yet with emotionally charged moments. It is good fun but I enjoyed Spider man more.
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