WATCHING BLACK MASS

Has Hollywood given up on drama? Film-makers there seem to be going for spectacle and elegy, recently with Spectre and now with Black Mass, a slow-paced narrative, the most memorable element of which is the strings-based soundtrack by Junkie XL (as Tom Holkenborg).

The film seems 'old'. It feels like this type of gangster/cop rivalry and collusion drama has been handled better in films like Good Fellas, Scarface, Donnie Brasco and many others.

It's not clear if Jimmy 'Whitey' Bulger, played by Johnny Depp, is the protagonist or the victim. Bulger never seems to set against anyone or anything. The FBI and policing services are his allies, not antagonists. The Italian Mafia are the enemy but are never seen close to the action, apart from a killing in which mixed ethnic messages are given by a motorcycle with Italian (Moto Guzzi) and British branding (Triumph).

Johnny Depp is mis-cast, though it may simply be the problem of being The Johnny Depp. A sense that his mask and hair line could ping off at any time persists. Slick though it obviously is, that it doesn't ever become ruffled creates a vivid impression and a mystery.

There are no African Americans in the film, except perhaps in street scenes or far back in an office scene. Was South Boston so homogeneously white through Whitey's reign? This adds to the sense that the film is 'old', dated rather than historic.

Women are secured to the kitchen sink. Bulger dotes on his aged mother. He and his crew help a little old lady with her shopping. Young women are mothers or victims. Marianne Connolly rages that her husband could bring Bulger and his associates into their home for beers and barbecue. She screams that they shouldn't be in her kitchen. She later endures a murderously sexual groping from Bulger, one of the more chilling scenes in the film.

It is chilling because it is not blatant or predictable, as the many back-of-the head gun shootings or the strangulations are. They are not chilling. In a world full of images of beheadings and killings by drone-delivered weaponry, Bulger's atrocities are disengaging. Instead of feelings of shock and horror, discomfort and outrage, feelings of boredom and disconnection prevail.

If Johnny Depp is miscast, Kevin Bacon, FBI officer Charles Maguire, and Benedict Cumberbatch, as Jimmy's politician brother Billy, have very little to work with. There's a scene of a spat in the FBI office when Charles Maguire seems on the verge of uncovering the duplicity of his star investigator, John Connolly, played very well by Joel Edgerton. It has the low-energy huffiness of a faux-fight among Ivy League dorm mates, pretending to be 'street'.

The elegy rolls along as a series of voiced-over testimonies by individuals involved in the story, told in a time-line manner which grounds the storytelling in a slow-staccato 'and then and then' rhythm, to produce a downbeat biopic and, ultimately, a sense of 'so what'.

There never appears to be anything at stake for Bulger, the bent cops and agents or for the people of South Boston. The first character with agency and urgency is Fred Wysack, the late-arriving DA, played by Corey Stoll, who's actions begin the ending of the film.

Perhaps the film-makers reliance on narrative rather than drama comes from the book. Perhaps they sought to cleave firmly to it and the film suffers from a reliance on the ordinariness of the grim actions of Bulger and Connolly, without managing to require audiences to engage beyond thinking 'right, that's what happened'.

Mystic River, (Clint Eastwood, 2003) is set in South Boston and involves vicious gangsters and cops caught between collusion and conviction to much better effect. It is based on a book. A novel not a history. Thus it gives us an affecting drama, not an underwhelming bio-pic. Like Black Mass.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1355683/?ref_=nv_sr_1

http://www.junkiexl.com

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DENIS STAUNTON FINDS NOSTALGIA IN ENGLAND

Denis Staunton, a columnist with The Irish Times, finds nostalgia at the heart of two recent films in his column on 20.11.2015. The latest James Bond film, Spectre, is set in a globalised England. The Alan Bennett bio-pic, The Lady in the Van, is set in Camden and Yorkshire, urban and rural bi-poles of England. Denis Staunton writes that the films take us deep into political values there.

If you want to drop a plumb line into the soul of England today, you could do worse than to watch the two biggest-grossing films in Britain last weekend – Spectre and The Lady in the Van.

He connects these films with forms of political nostalgia he observes in England.

…. each is soaked through with an idea of England and English values under attack, a nostalgia which is shared on the political left as well as the right.

Denis Staunton situates Spectre on the political right. The dramatic threat is from

a global conspiracy bringing government and business together in a sinister public-private partnership.

He cites a former Conservative Party MP and an MI5 director-general in support of his observation that

What is arresting about Spectre, beyond the killing, car chases and special effects, is the film’s melancholic, almost elegiac mood, as if the spirit that made Britain powerful, democratic, free and tolerant – in a word, great – is smouldering in the ruins of the MI6 building on the Thames.

That's quite a list: powerful, democratic, free and tolerant – in a word, great. Denis Staunton offers them as descriptors of an England that the political right hanker for.

He puts The Lady in the Van on the nostalgic left of the political spectrum.

Bennett’s nostalgia is for the England that created the welfare state, nationalised the railways and introduced comprehensive education, all rolled back by Margaret Thatcher and her successors.

And he connects Bennett's nostalgia with the current leader of The British Labour Party -

Corbyn himself also embodies a very English style of left-wing radicalism.

- without giving us a helpful list of adjectives.

It's not clear which of the two films Denis Staunton likes. Or if he likes either one of them. He appears to be uncomfortable with nostalgia. What does he make of the nostalgia-fest Brooklyn, an emigration drama set in Ireland and New York? Is it the case that simple notions of left and right are not as readily deployed in Ireland and placing a film in that way is not straightforward?

The two films Denis Staunton writes about are not nostalgic. They are different treatments of the same political contest that rages through time, for all time. One of their core elements is 'scale'. Is it to be 'great' or is it to be 'human'? Another is given by the old Cicero line, cui bono? Who benefits? This is the political contest of the past, present and the future.

Would Cameron oversee the

​successful implementation of a global surveillance system?

Would Corbyn?

This is not nostalgia. Cameron is not bringing people backwards. Neither is Corbyn. They are both seeking to drive England, and the world, forward. The questions are 'to where?' and 'how?'

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/uk/james-bond-alan-bennett-and-a-nostalgic-view-of-britain-1.2437039

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FIONOLA MEREDITH IS ANGRY

Fionola Meredith writes an opinion column in The Belfast Telegraph, one of Northern Ireland's leading daily newspapers. In today's edition (20.11.2015), she is angry. She is forceful, polemical and vehement. Writing trenchantly, under the headline

Mealy-mouthed excusers of terror should just shut it

she draws readers in, with an appeal to a shared experience.

You know what people mean when they talk about that Friday feeling.

She, quite rightly, castigates the people who committed the atrocities in Paris and locates the responsibility for the deaths and injuries with them.

The truth is the terrorists who committed last Friday's outrages don't care whether their victims are anarchic old cartoonists or little boys at a rock concert with their mum.

She is right. The actions of the perpetrators are wrong and can be universally named as wrong. Her ire in today's column is directed not at the perpetrators of the atrocities but at people who might, as she sees it, equivocate about them.

Her article highlights a real problem for people living in the Developed North of the world. Events unfolding in Bamako, Mali, where guests and staff at an hotel are being held under threat of violence further underline this problem. In raising the Bamako events here, in the context of the aftermath of the atrocity in Paris, this article may face Fionola Meredith's ire.

but failing to mention Beirut or Syria sees you instantly slapped down as a crass cultural imperialist.

Her most vehement challenge is to

the default recourse to equivocation 






What is the appropriate response then, apart from the unequivocal assertion that they were wrong, to the recent atrocities in Paris, Beirut, Syria, Bamako and elsewhere?

There are language problems here. The use of the term 'we' to imply all-inclusive circumstances is often unfounded. The use of the word 'you' to imply a collective experience of the world is complex, even if by 'you' is meant 'the readership of The Belfast Telegraph, in print and on-line', for it includes people who do not share the experience Fionola Meredith uses to lead us into her column. Her anger heats her language and narrows her assertions.

Later that night 129 of them were cut down by barbarians with Kalashnikovs, and scores more injured. What had they done to deserve this? Nothing, except live a life of liberty in Paris, the first home of free thinking.

The term 'barbarian' poses problems. Certainly the people who did this are cruel, violent and death-dealing. And as human as Fionola Meredith and this writer. There are no monsters out there. Only people.

Who benefits from the use of such language by public writers in the press of a liberal democracy like Northern Ireland? Readers across the world may wonder at the special privileging of Paris as a home for 'free thinking'.

Fionola Meredith has no time for the

awful sanctimonious, supercilious piety which passes for modern liberalism

and wonders, in listing some of the victims,

What reasons could be found for their murders?

Fionola Meredith's appeal is to Reason, in the Enlightenment values of liberty and democracy. She fears 'we' are in danger of 'going under'. One of the problems with many people's experience of these values is that they are not all they claim to be.

Fionola Meredith, towards the end of her column, encounters this problem, but shies away from it. She is not alone in that. It is thoroughly scary and complicated. It is a problem of language and of action.

When are the excuses going to stop? Hand-wringing appeasement or well-meaning attempts at understanding do nothing to restrain nihilistic death cults (neither does a mad blitzkrieg of bombing, but that's another story).

There isn't 'another story'. There are many millions of stories and they are all linked and they are all human and live.

Ironically, on the same web-page as Fionola Meredith's opinion piece, there is an advertisement for no-risk investment opportunities in France. Might this include arms manufacturers? The world goes on and the atrocity in Paris can be used as fuel for the ad-makers.

To end. A small language note for equivocators and, thus, for all people. It's not 'either/or'. It's 'and/all'. Consider the word 'but' and try the word 'and'. As in.

The killings in Paris are wrong. 

And so is the French arms' industry.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/fionola-meredith/paris-attacks-mealymouthed-excusers-of-terror-should-just-shut-it-34217085.html

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WATCHING SUFFRAGETTE

The cinema-goer remembers his late mother, a laundry worker, as he watches the film SUFFRAGETTE.

It's the hard-hitting tale of a struggle for equality; a meditation on violence and non-violence; a set of family dramas and a major historical story very well told by the film-makers.

The cameo role for Meryl Streep as Emmeline Pankhurst gives her some famous lines, including the one that raised controversial publicity for the film.

I would rather be a rebel than a slave

Rebellion and (wage-)slavery, both manifestations of oppression and discrimination, are very well shown by the film-makers in their choice of a laundry worker and her colleagues as the main protagonists of the film. When Mrs. Pankhurst calls for civil disobedience from the balcony of a fine middle class London house

Deeds not words

the cinema-goer knows it is the women on the street who will face the violence of the police riot that ensues. It is they who then enact the violence Mrs. Pankhurst's words proffer. The women on the street blow up letter boxes, cut telephone wires and bomb the country home of Lloyd George, the parliamentarian they consider to have let them down.

It is the Special Branch police man, Inspector Arthur Steed, ably played by Brendan Gleeson, who delivers the reality-check when he insists that Lloyd George didn't lie to the suffragettes. He didn't promise them anything. So up goes the ante and the post-boxes and the second home in the country.

The family relationships of the day (and of today?) are ably captured by the Branch man

Don't bother arresting them. Let their husbands deal with them.

But those forms of social and cultural control are weakening as the women, agitating on many fronts and in many ways, complicating the given norms, questioning and challenging them, bring pressure to bear for change.

The film is driven by the terrific performances of the two laundry worker leads, Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan) and Violet Miller (Anne-Marie Duff). They are presented as forthright and capable, with complicated lives and conflicting aspirations in regard to their work, their politics and their families. The chemist and bomb-maker Edith Ellyn is played by Helena Bonham Carter, whose great-grandfather, H.H. Asquith, was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1908 to 1916, during the height of the suffrage movement. He was a staunch opponent of votes for women.

The frantic ferment of anti-state activity underway by the women is set in the context by other militancy by Fenians and anarchists. The indirect violence of poverty, discrimination, imperialism and oppression leads to direct violence by state forces and by their opponents There are many tragedies. The Branch man, Inspector Arthur Steed, predicts that Maud Watts could lose her life. The scene in which Maud Watts replies is one of the most telling in the film.

The law means nothing to me. I've had no say in making the law.

Notably The Inspector becomes increasingly less voluble from then on, as even his stake in the society becomes more fragile. He is speechless by the final tragedy.

It is Emily Wilding Davison, played by Natalie Press, not Maud Watts, who dies, mown down by the King's horse at the Epsom Derby.

The scenes at Epsom are shot magnificently, with the camera never very far from the action and the individuals living it. It is rarely out of the crowd, offering the cinema-goer full immersion in the action. Similar work is used during the police riot scenes, to very good effect.

The screenwriter, Abi Morgan, has harnessed a sweeping historical tale by writing a period in the lives of young working women, facing challenges and decisions of their time and place, that find them finally walking in the funeral of one of their friends and comrades. Their deeds and words contribute to a degree of emancipation that presents further challenges and decisions to people living now.

Abi Morgan also writes the TV cop and mental health drama, RIVER, now on BBC. Like SUFFRAGETTE, the cinema-goer considers it worth a look.

The cinema-goer is reminded of a t-shirt a friend brought back from early Sandinista days in Nicaragua. It bore the slogan

La lucha continua.

The Suffragettes held to

Never surrender. Never give up the fight.

The film ably underlines that. It does not shirk the cost. It brings before us the challenge of achieving social change in a world of direct and indirect violence. And it does so by means of an engaging and exciting film.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3077214/?ref_=nv_sr_5

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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

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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.

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