Christine's reviews

Lovely review, C.

I'm behind on my Zhang Yimou and just got Curse of the Golden Flower a few days ago.

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I'm sorry to hear that, Tacitus. I hope it clears up soon.

Taccy. I've not seen Curse of the Golden Flower. You'll have to let me know what it's like.

Meantime I watched another Zhang Yimou film, Ju-Dou:
The story starts in an ancient village run along feudal lines where an old man has just married his third wife, Ju Dou played by the lovely Gong Li. This is the old mans third wife, the other two have apparently died through ill treatment cos they didn't provide him with any children. The old man falls back into those ways again and his mild mannered nephew is forced to listen to the poor girls screams in the night and witnesses her bruises. Soon he falls in love with Ju Dou, and they carry on an affair behind the old mans back and have a child, which over the next few years brings tragedy and intrigue.

All this is playing out against the backdrop of the family cloth dyeing business and the strong colours of the bolts of cloth hung out to dry, reds, yellows, blues, greens are stunning against the sunshine.

The intense life behind bolted wooden doors and high stone walls of the house and workshop is full of sexual tension and resentment, longing and unfulfilled hope. The male elders of the village show us the ancient rigid laws of the family and so the improbability of any happiness for Ju Dou. She is married to the old man and that's the custom, she's a possession and she'll be treated how he pleases. At least behind those doors she can defy the old man and conduct this affair but at the end of the day even the nephew is bound by convention and refuses to contemplate ever leaving the village.





This is another Zhang Yimou film which was banned by the Chinese authorities on release, I imagine partly to do with the open depiction of adultery. Zhang Yimou seems to be out of the bad books now after his spectacular organisation of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. Maybe he's fighting from within!

The dvd is of disappointing quality, scratchy and yellow saturated but you can see the whole film would've been visually beautiful in it's original form. Shame really, the film deserves a much better release than this.

4/5 but 1/5 for the state of the dvd

Un Prophete, being the acclaimed French crime film directed by Jaques Audiard . I wanted to see this cos it's had such good reviews in the UK.

The film follows the whole prison sentence of Malik El Dejebena in a French jail. Entering as a 19 year old illiterate orphan whose life has obviously up to then consisted of petty crime and fighting to survive. The jail is controlled on the inside by the Corsican mobsters. The many Muslim prisoners keep themselves to themselves in another prison block. Malik not being religious hangs out on his own till he's given the protection of Luciani the Corsican boss in exchange for committing a horrendous murder.
Malik then is all eyes and ears and uses his wits to progress himself beyond those who are using him. Smart kid, he extricates himself from some tricky situations while aligning himself with various sides. When he's allowed out on some day passes he realises his own time has come.

An absorbing film. It's long but I never lost the plot being used to the goings on in The Sopranos! Tahar Ramin is excellent as Malik considering his lack of acting experience. Audiard was right to take a gamble on him having the intelligence to play the role from innocent abroad to quick witted, hard boiled gangster.


Le Prophete deserves all the praise its been getting and is well worth seeing if you like a well plotted, intricately charactered film.

4.25/5

The Go Master
directed by Tian Zhuangzhuang

'Go' is the black and white counters (stones) game popular in China/Japan/Korea. It has a similar context to chess, being a game of immense concentration, and one that can last for days, weeks even months.

The Go Master covers the life of Wu Qingyuan, a real life Go master. Raised in China, his family moved to Japan where the young Wu becomes interested in Go and becomes increasingly brilliant at the game. When China's relationship with Japan in the 1930s begins to become acrimonious his family return but he stays to study Go. He joins a religious sect, marries, and is regarded as a top Go master, but is plagued by TB, and is mentally quite fragile.



..and so we learn of Wu's whole life from childhood till death but without understanding him hardly at all. The film is a series of scenes from his life, sometimes connected, sometimes completely disjointed, held together by double captions - a statement about his life followed by a quote from him. You need those, believe me , just listening to the dialogue won't bring you much revelation.

The film is obviously made to be as contemplative as possible, I suppose to reflect the game, and yes it succeeds in that but it fails to immerse you in Wu's world, like it's being shot as a scientific observation. So for those reasons I really can't recommend The Go Master, however Tian Zhuangzhuang's film The Blue Kite is a fantastic film, so pop out and rent that instead!

2.5/5

Great reviews Christine

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The Sun
directed by Aleksandr Sukurov


An intimate study of the final days leading to Emperor Hirohito surrendering to General McArthur at the end of WW2. The film is asking you to put aside what you know about the complex leadership of Japan during WW2, and whether Hirohito was personally responsibility for the terrible massacres that occurred in China, or was he kept deliberately in ignorance under the military leaders? It appears that no one truly knows. The film gives you to concentrate on the man in those few weeks. Whether you can do that is debatable cos none of these things are approached, we're given the portrait of an isolated, frail man whose world has collapsed.

Hirohito is played with an extremely fine performance by Issei Ogata who captures the strangeness of a man who has been treated as a living god for all his life. In order to understand the underlying repressive feeling of the film, you have to have some understanding of the structure of Japanese society.
The Emperor's lack of privacy and the constant attendance by servants at his every move, even when he desires to be left alone is stifling, and Sukurov recreates this very well. It helps with the atmosphere as the first scenes are in the Imperial palace's bunker with its low ceilings and panelled walls. With the arrival of the US forces into Tokyo, the Emperor comes out into the light blinking to be confronted by US soldiers a foot taller and without the deference he has been used to all his life. The film is deliberately grainy, giving an old musty feel, and sometimes thre is a scratchy quality to the soundtrack that's only half felt but adds to the atmosphere.



When he is called to Allied HQ to meet McArthur he appears as a quaint shrunken Chaplinesque figure. Although he does the right thing as history has shown, surrendering, co-operating and ultimately seeing Japan emerge as a powerful economic force, he didn't do that surrender till after the US had dropped the atomic bombs.

Sukurov gives us a portrait of a point in time of a man in isolation. The weight of the dreadful acts of murder and repression committed under his reign are left to the imagination of viewers who are aware of history.

Recommended if you appreciate quiet, still films that reveal themselves very slowly

3.75/5

Dean Spanley directed by Toa Fraser.

A gentle ensemble piece with a strong cast of Peter O'Toole, Bryan Brown, Sam Neill and Jeremy Northam.

Set in Edwardian Britain, Peter O'Toole is Mr Fisk, an old curmudgeon whose eldest son has died in the Boer War and whose wife has died of heartbreak due to the loss. His younger son Henslowe (Northam) fulfils his filial duty by visiting his father every Thursday, but sadly Fisk Snr is an unforgiving old b'stard who is inconvenienced by the lack of wife and elder son rather than grieving for them.
In his eagerness to find something different to do on the Thursday we meet them, Fisk Jnr proposes attending a talk by a visiting Swami on the subject of reincarnation.

At the talk they meet the roguish 'conveyancer' Wrather (Brown) and also the eccentric man of the cloth, Dean Spanley (Neill). Fisk Jnr is sufficiently intrigued by Spanley to invite him for dinner, but he will only attend if Fisk can provide a bottle of his favourite drink - the dessert wine Tokaji. This proves difficult to track down until Fisk remembers Wrather is able to lay his hands on any commodity for a price...and then the dinners start where the Dean's eccentric story unfolds to the astonishment of Fisk Jnr and the skeptical Wrather. When old Fisk is invited one evening, the whole story comes together in a delicious but cathartic ending.




I hardly want to tell you any more of the plot as it unfolds in such a gently delightful way , but I can tell you that reincarnation and dogs are involved! If you do feel like watching this film, don't read about the plot, just let the film build up to it's end, much nicer. It is a little meandering in the middle, but if you have the patience to watch slow films which don't seem like they know where they're going, then you'll be rewarded by a story that'll warm your heart.

All the actors are wonderful, specially the relationship between father and son Fisk. Peter O'Toole on top grumpy form, and Jeremy Northam lovely as meek Henslowe who misses his mother and brother but who is forbidden to talk about them by his father. Sam Neill is very funny as the Dean, understated and very quirky.

Funded by the New Zealand Film Commission, it's filmed in NZ and England. Credit is due to the director for making such an elegant little film.

4/5

ps I can't remember now who recommended this to me, but if it was someone here then thanks! I couldn't find it on the search facility though.

The Class

directed by Laurent Cantet from the book by Francois Begaudeau, who plays himself in this autobiographical semi improvised film. Takes place over a school year for a class of teenagers in a school in Paris. It starts with the teachers meeting at the start of the year when we get to see the teachers introducing themselves to the new teachers, and the cleaners getting the classrooms ready. Then Begaudeau, playing M. Marin, the French teacher, introducing himself to his class. Some he knows already from last year, some are new.

The film is all about the interaction of teacher and pupils and is a fascinating look at the dynamics of of the classroom, one which unless you are a teacher you never get to experience after you've left school.

Marin is a charismatic teacher with a lot of empathy for his multicultural class. Through some other scenes in the staff room and discussions with other teachers, we see Marin as a liberal teacher who places emphasis on his pupils individuality. His class is certainly full of big characters but Marin's methods deal well with teenagers full on moodiness and cofrontations are good natured. He seems to enjoy his questioning class, and isn't even phased by a lad asking him if he's gay, throwing it back at him to reveal the boy's prejudice. He still has to teach the very formal French grammar, and it's through this that we see the difficulties of teaching not only pupils from different backgrounds and cultures, but also the pressure of teaching traditional lessons to kids used to street slang. Present perfect subjunctive anyone?



Cantet has made a realistic film, which comes across in a very natural way. There's none of that awkwardness that a level of improvisation can sometimes produce. The use of Begaudeau to play himself is inspired, his enthusiasm and openness with the cast of non acting children is very engaging. The children themselves are brilliant too. There are some translation problems, for example I'm not sure how many non French speakers will be able to pick up on the disrespect shown to Marin by one problem pupil who uses the familiar 'tu' rather than 'vous'. In that scene it makes Marin look more confrontational than is warranted, but I guess that whole scenario is going to play out and get exacerbated by Marin's own behaviour in the final part of the film where his methods are called into doubt.

His high hopes for his pupils can make him feel betrayed, and conversely a teachers words can belittle or affect a pupil far into their lives.

That's how important a teacher is.

4.25/5

Good write up, christine, but I'm a little puzzled by the rating. After, what to me, read as a very complimentary opinion of the film you've scored it less than 5/10. Is that a mistake or am I missing something?

oops! that was meant to be out of 5! I can't get the hang of these numerical ratings

sorted now

Considering that's how you usually rate (out of 5) I assumed that to be the case, but you never know.

Good review Chrissy

The Damned United directed by Tom Hooper from the novel by David Peace

The dramatisation of a period of 6 years in the life of Brian Clough, a well known English football manager and very much a love/hate figure during that period. The film stars Michael Sheen as Clough and Tim Spall as his friend and working partner Peter Taylor. The film jumps around between 1968 when Cloughie is managing Derby County, and 1974 with his short term managing Leeds United.

Derby went from dwindling in the depths of the Second division to winning the First division title in 1972 thanks to some decent signings, backroom work by Taylor and charismatic leadership by Clough. This was never enough for Clough, his ambition would lead him to taking the managership job at Leeds Utd whose long term manager the much revered Don Revie had just left to take on the job of managing the England team. Clough and Revie were not the best of mates as Clough criticism of the Leeds team as cheats and dirty players were always plastered all over the papers, and thus Leeds players and fans were never going to welcome the colourful Clough with open arms.

This film is all about the build up of those years, up to his short tenure at Leeds. It's about a gruff love affair between two men - the outspoken Clough and the quiet man Taylor - a successful team who worked together for years. There's some great character acting here. Michael Sheen again captures the role he's playing brilliantly. How can he always look like who he's playing? David Frost, Brian Clough, Tony Blair - his mannerisms are spot on. Tim Spall, although not physically similar to Peter Taylor, gets the quiet foil to Cloughs baravado perfectly. Special mention has to go to Colm Meaney, such an ace actor, as Don Revie - he was Revie, you could recognise him a mile off!



I watched this with a smile on my face. It's very personal to me, but this was my era - all those years I used to take my two kid brothers to watch Everton every week. When we would sit around at school arguing with the boys about football, passionate about the game as are most people in Liverpool. These players being depicted in The Damned United, we saw 'em play. It was us shouting insults at the likes of Billy Bremner and Norman Hunter. Great players but hard men when the game wasn't as regulated as it is now. We saw Clough come out onto the pitch and look round like he owned the place, the cocky b'stard .
Ah.. good times, so probably I'm not much of a judge whether anyone else would like the film, it was just a huge nostalgia trip for me specially with the extras too. There are some factual inconsistancies, but the era is captured perfectly

Clough died a few years ago, but it's nice to remember he did go on to even more success at Nottingham Forest after the Leeds debacle. In his own words : "I wouldn't say I was the best manager in the business. But I was in the top one."


4/5

Re: The great Colm Meaney - Have you had a chance to listen to the commentary yet?

Someone who knew Revie well complimented the filmmakers on being able to cgi the man himself into the film.

Lovely review of a lovely film, by the way.

lol! yeah I could hardly believe Meaney's Revie, jeez the man is a genius! and the blue suit too, I remembered that before they mentioned it.
I dunno, there were some characters in football then weren't there? I meant to also ramble on about how football was more real then, I mean footballers lived in houses in posher areas than us yes, but we all knew where they lived and you'd see them around doing normal stuff without hangers on. When they finished football they'd get a pub or go back into a family business like my hero Brian Labone did. Or you'd see them shopping with their wives in the supermarket without any of the fuss there is now. They were our heros but they were also fellers just doing a job.
Now the top footballers live in mansions, and live celebrity lives. It's a shame they've lost touch with the common people

I didn't listen to the commentary cos I wanted to get it back to Lovefilm, but am going to buy the dvd

Aye, footballers were well paid then but not so much that they could all retire to their mansions when they couldn't play any more. For example, Micky Gynn (FA Cup Winner with Cov City in the 80s) was my mate's postman for a few years after he retired and Harry Gregg (one of the Busby Babes to survive the plane crash) is a friend of the family who owned a guest house on the north coast.

I once saw Stan Collymore shopping in C&A, but he always was a bit weird.

Although I think that the players need to be better educated about their money, I think it's good that they get well paid. For decades the best players were, to all intents and purposes, ripped off considering all the money they made for their clubs/owners. Obviously this changed with Jimmy Hill and created the era that's so fondly remembered now (and examples given by you both) but, although they were better rewarded, they still weren't being paid what they were worth, which is why those who were good enough and prepared to move, went abroad to play in Spain or Italy. Hell, even France and Germany paid better than we did before football became 'media friendly', interest increased and brought more money into the game. Basically 1990 onwards.

The problem now is to do with the illusion of being able to challenge and fans getting ahead of themselves and wanting their club to challenge for something they've little/no chance of obtaining. That's why clubs get into finacial trouble, because they pay wages to players chasing something they shouldn't be after, usually because the fans 'demand it'.

Sorry for the double post, but I just wanted to say that I used to see Chewbacca in Woolworth's. He lived not far from me and used to come into town to shop, sometimes. I don't know if you've lived until you've seen Chewbacca flipping through cd's.

Hey, I haven't been in here in awhile. Great stuff Chris! I too, loved Un Prophete, The Class and The Damned United quite a bit.

Did you track down Curse of the Golden Flower yet? I haven't seen that since I bought here when it came out on DVD several years ago but I remember it was very bright and colorful. I think I liked the film too.

Thanks for your kind words too. And you can actually thank Honeykid as he's the one that posted up all the lists of films up for awards over there, so I just tracked down as many as I could find.

I also really dug Bronson and 44 Inch Chest. Have you had the pleasure of seeing either of those yet?

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