WATCHING RICKI AND THE FLASH

Can't you just call in sick and skip therapy?

No, mom, I am sick, that's why I'm in therapy.

The cinema-goer gets it. Ricki and the Flash is a film-allegory about the sick state of family life in the USA, and maybe even in the world, today. Yet the cinema-goer finds nothing to care about. Not the down-at-heel pub rocker, Ricki, played thoroughly well by Meryl Streep. Or the recently jilted daughter, played by Ms. Streep's own natural daughter, Mamie Gummer. There is such a forced confection of family relations that the cinema-goer experiences not interest or complexity but apathy.

Then there's Kevin Kline, who played the mercurial Otto in A Fish Called Wanda, lazing through his role like a satrap in his opulent mansion, while being told by his first wife that he always worked too hard. The cinema-goer doesn't see him do a tap or break a sweat. He organises a disastrous family reunion dinner in an overly-lit high-end restaurant, with packed neighbouring tables crowded about. Petulance and immaturity, rather than comedy, are the dominant vibes in the scene. Is Dad missing something? He doesn't even offer Ricki a cup of coffee on arriving at his house, in response to their daughter's collapse. And he asked her to come from her L.A. scrape-a-life, in the first place.

The cinema-goer resorts to wondering how the animal wranglers got the big, white poodle to do the many things s/he does without seeming to be acting. S/he's as effortless as Brando.

There is a good band on view, doing covers of rock and roll Americana, including the works of Tom Petty, Edgar Winter, Bruce Springsteen and others. As soon as a wedding is mentioned, the cinema-goer knows the finale will include the band on stage as Mom (Meryl Steep) gains some redemption though rock and roll lyrics of love in place of actually doing some loving. She is as selfish as an amoeba. Her guitar-playing lover sells his prized instrument to fund the wedding trip. The cinema-goer considers him a love-struck schmuck, for martyring himself on Ricki the Narcissist, who, despite her protestations, is not looking for love but simply for attention.

The moral seems to be that some of us follow our dreams into family and business and make a great success of things, others follow our dreams into rock and roll and perdition, but what matters is following your dream, each one an approved version of the American Dream, while you keep the flag wrapped around you at all times. In order to give the Meryl Streep character some depth, she's presented as a blue-collar food-store worker, with a Stars and Stripes tattoo on her back and an altar at home to her brother who was killed in Viet Nam. The film opens with the band doing Tom Petty's American Girl, a classic of aspirations and dreams crashed into oblivion, given a marvellous rock treatment, that makes everything pathetically alright and allows Ricki to be mildly jingoistic about America. Is she being ironic? Doubtful.

There is a bounteous African-American second wife, a gay son who looks even more preppy than his straight brother, affronted in-laws, and a loveable, dotty mother-in-law, all of whom look like they stepped out of the window of a Tommy Hilfiger shop.

The effect is not 'feel-good' but rather 'feel-nothing'.

The cinema-goer experiences ennui and dismay. Is this it? Is this the best that industrial film-making on a grand scale, coming out of Hollywood, can produce? The cinema-goer’s companion notes there is no story, never any sense of drama, nor of something being at stake in the lives of the characters on the screen. Both cinema-goers burst out laughing, not the intended effect sought by the film-makers, when Mom says 'walk on' to the tear-filled daughter on the trip up the aisle at her brother's wedding. It sounded like Johnny Cash enforcedly crossed with Val Doonican.

On leaving the cinema both agree they made a mistake in choosing to see Ricki and the Flash. The chill in the air reminds them of a great Autumn film they once saw. The conversation tests the cast list, the film title and the outline of the story. All tests are passed with flying colours: glorious golds, flaming reds, searing pinks and sumptuous ochres. The film is Far from Heaven, with Julianne Moore, Denis Quaid and Denis Haysbert and a lush orchestral score by Elmer Bernstein. It might be time to view it again. A decent story. Fine acting and cinematography. Something at stake.

The music is good in both films, but in Far from Heaven there is more than cover versions. That's it. Watching Ricki and the Flash, the cinema-goer is left with the feeling of watching a cover version of something that wasn't very good in the first place.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3623726/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXkblbJqwn0

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

HOUNSLOW IS AN EASTERN CITY

Arrive at Heathrow airport, in the London Borough of Hillingdon, follow the exit signs, then the signs for the Underground, trains, taxis and buses, until you emerge into the diesel-tinged air, where the red buses – 111, 120, 190 – huff, turn, park, load and pull off. You are on the eastern frontier.

A large hoarding shows a Beefeater, Crawford Butler, who welcomes you to London. But Crawford and the London of Beefeaters, towers, bridges, museums and sights are miles to the east. Ironically, you are in West London, set to enter Hounslow, an Eastern city.

Visually it is the women’s dress that tells. There are many forms of elegant head coverings and costumes over shop uniforms, café scrubs, airline uniforms and formal wear, all of which include the ubiquitous round-the-neck plastic identity photo id tag. Skin colour is another tell. Wonderful shades of light cream melt to latte then chocolate and on to ebony colouring the human palette in the bus queues. Rough stubbled pink-fleshed men, just off night shifts as handlers, cleaners, movers and lifters stare bleary-eyed at timetables on bus-stops, in the global pursuit of the next bus home.

Amidst the ferment are people pulling suitcases and carrying bags, including young couples lugging rucksacks stamped with flags and regional badges. A tidy troupe of Japanese tourists assembles behind a leader, seeking assurance that they have indeed landed in London, one of the western world's urban marvels and not in the travel hub of a way-station on the ancient Silk Road, somewhere east and south of Dushanbe.

Aurally the languages are a further tell. The rolling way English weaves among them creates a motif rather than a lead melody. The harmony and chorus are Hindi, Urdu, Russian, Bengali, Latvian, Polish, Dari and others, occasionally sparked with Anglo soundbites such as 'the next one five minutes now' and 'over here, this stop' and 'not see you tomorrow. I'm on a late”.

On board bus 111, the driver and the voice-over announcer are native English speakers. Both are welcoming, informative and professional. The driver helps a couple, seventy year olds dressed in dapper Mod-Oldie clothes, negotiate the complex bus network that will connect them with a second bus to take them home. He then swings the bus into the hair-raising pell-mell of the local road system, exiting the airport complex, past a model aeroplane sponsored by Emirates. Planes descend to the right. Cars, lorries, vans, trucks and more buses career past, on the other carriageway of the Great West Road, the A4, as it leaves the metropolis. Ours is a great east route.

Passengers board and alight and the sense of being in an eastern city is confirmed by the dress, skin colour, languages and demeanours of the people. Two old men with snow white beards, wearing pristine gowns, get on, nod together, murmuring quietly in Pashto and get off one stop along. A west African woman pulls a wheeled shopping trolley, clothed in a tartan that seems muted in comparison to her own flowing robes, and finds a seat. A young Afghan man in a white gown pulls another trolley, this time topped with a plastic bag badged Iceland, yet we are far from the north. We push further into the east. He leans against a pole, holding on.

The bus passes a small parade of shops, where one is signed Grocery and Wine. Graffiti wipes out the word wine. A young woman, an elegantly simple, black gown covering her, apart from an angelic face, gets on with a toddler at heel and a buggy bearing an infant in front. The bus is now somewhere between Addis Ababa and Khartoum, perhaps in the city of Keren or even across the gulf in Sana'a. The woman smiles, while declining the offer of a seat. She gestures and speaks gently to the toddler who has dashed to the rear. She plays her long, immaculate fingers along the chubby cheeks of the boy in the buggy, who smiles his best new teeth. The rest are coming.

In a hotel lobby an Indian cricket team, a tumble of athletic men strewn across sofas and kit-bags, wait for their bus to the airport. A carnival troupe, freshly painted and costumed, all set for Notting Hill, load two vans, laughing and joshing, sociable and chipper as dolphins. The reception staff are courteous, welcoming, professional and eastern – Asian and European.

On the strip of shops opposite the hotel, there is a Chinese restaurant, a halal butcher, an off-licence featuring a special offer on Zywiec beer, a grocers and an undertaker. A family group - women in saris, men in slacks and good shirts - come out and make for the cars parked kerbside. One young woman says to another.

“He looks like he should sit up and give off to us.”

Next morning, Chinese tourists have fun with room numbers, calling translations to one another in their group, then calling them to the maitre d', who records them in the breakfast register. Two oh nine. One six four. Eight two four.

Hounslow is global. Hounslow is an eastern city.

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter