Kudos to the Turner Classic Movies (TCM)
channel for showing the documentary The Eyes of Orson Welles on May 13,
and hopefully it will be shown again.
It’s the creation of filmmaker and film historian Mark Cousins, best
known for his 2011 15-hour series The
Story of Film: An Odyssey. There’s no better guide and Cousins, narrating
in his distinctive Irish-Scots brogue, probes Welles’ complicated cinematic
genius through the legacy of the artist’s numerous sketches and paintings—a
lifetime obsession yielding clues to his influential visual sense.
This
is still NHL playoff season (even with no Canadian teams since the first round)
and an excellent hockey documentary is the Canada-U.S.-Russia coproduction The
Russian Five (https://therussianfive.com/)
which tells the story of how, in the last years of the Cold War, star players
from the Soviet Union’s elite Red Army team led by Sergei Federov (military
officers, some with vulnerable families) defected to play with the then hapless
Detroit Red Wings. Other Russian players joined the Wings, becoming a
formidable five-man unit that propelled the team to its first Stanley Cup in 42
years. That remarkable chapter is worth revisiting.
General
Magic (https://www.generalmagicthemovie.com/)
recalls the earlier days of Silicon Valley when a group of visionaries and
innovators from the original Apple team anticipated the idea of a smartphone
long before wireless networks and google existed. Although the maverick company of the title
failed and disappeared, its core of brilliant creators moved on to great
success, and the vindication of that idea on a global scale.
Let
me also single out this new documentary for special attention.
The Biggest Little Farm
(https://www.biggestlittlefarmmovie.com/)
I grew up on a Saskatchewan farm that
was nothing like this one. Over almost
a decade cameraman and director John Chester records how he and wife Molly,
with additional motivation from rescue dog “Todd”, moved out of a tiny L.A.
apartment to own a plot of several hundred acres in the hills of Ventura county,
a parched abandoned piece of land in dire need of regeneration. Their idealistic vision was to create a
thriving small-farm ecosystem of great biodiversity in harmony with
nature. With advisor Alan York, and relying
on an aquifer for irrigation, they planted thousands of fruit trees of many
varieties, created extensive groundcovers, a pond, and introduced numerous
animals from fowl to pigs, sheep and cattle.
It’s quite the menagerie! This
would-be rural eden, dubbed “Apricot Lane Farms”, attracted investors, workers
and volunteers. However the focus stays on the Chesters as the driving force
and on their dogged determination to stick with it while confronted, again and
again, by multiplying, serial challenges—diseases, insects and all manner of
pests, clever coyotes preying on their flocks, extremes from record drought to
fire threats. Credit their resolve,
because a venture that seemed crazily quixotic at first has somehow managed to
endure. York and Todd are no longer
around to inspire. But the Chesters now
have a young son to raise on this restored patch of earth. Complete with animal characters like “Emma”
the sow, it makes for an absorbing story and the director’s visual skills result
in some stunning cinematography. A-
Below
are reviews of three historical dramas, and a new rom-com that shoots and misfires.
A Fortunate Man (Denmark)
Now streaming on Netflix, this fine
adaptation of an eight-volume novel (published 1898-1904), centres on an
ambitious young man Per Sidenius (Esben Smed) who rejects his austere Christian
upbringing and family to pursue an engineering vocation in Copenhagen. He devises big plans for major public works
and cultivates connections with the wealthy Jewish Salomon family in hopes of
financial and political support. That also includes pursuing the eldest
daughter Jacobe, a relationship he subsequently breaks off (without knowing
that she is pregnant). When his plans come to naught, Per retreats back to
rural Jutland where he has a family, yet spends his last years as a solitary
acetic. The film has an epochal sweep and bears staying with for the almost
three-hour runtime. B+
Tolkien
(U.S. http://www.foxsearchlight.com/tolkien/)
It’s perhaps surprising that the life of
the author of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings epic saga, John Ronald
Reuel Tolkien, has not inspired previous film treatments. This version from Finnish director Dome
Karukoski focuses on his boarding school-boy and later Oxford days (played by Nicholas
Hoult as a young man). The film toggles back and forth between this formative
period of academic “fellowhip”, during which Tolkien met future wife Edith
(Lily Collins), and the horrors of the First World War trench warfare he
experienced, losing several close comrades. Derek Jacobi has a memorable turn
as an Oxford don who inspires Tolkien to study philology. The trauma of war haunted Tolkien and served
as inspiration. But the film ends just
as he is beginning his most famous works, and sheds little light on them. B-
The White Crow (UK/France
https://www.sonyclassics.com/thewhitecrow/)
Renowned actor Ralph Fiennes is also a
skilled director and this is his third feature from a screenplay by David
Hare. The “white crow” of the title is
Rudolph Nureyev, the Russian outsider who became a classical ballet
prodigy. He is well played by Ukrainian
dancer Oleg Ivenko. Fiennes himself
plays his teacher Alexander Pushkin at the famed Kirov ballet in St. Petersburg
(then Leningrad). Nureyev allowed
himself to be seduced by Pushkin’s wife but was bisexual (he died of AIDS in
1993). Although apolitical, his
developing artistic genius (and difficult prima-donna personality) increasingly
clashed with the stifling Soviet system of control and conformism. This came to
a head during the Kirov’s 1961 visit to Paris—heralded as a cultural thaw in
the decades-long Cold War—when he socialized with French dancers and notably Clara
Saint (Adèle Exarchopoulos), whose deceased partner was the son of French
Minister of Culture André Malraux. Nureyev’s triumphs on stage didn’t prevent a
formal warning from his minders (who reported to the KGB). When ordered back to Moscow, Clara helped him
get political asylum. These tense scenes in Le Bourget airport were a
life-altering prelude to Nureyev becoming the most celebrated male dance of the
20th century.
The
film intersperses Nureyev’s early dance career with brief flashbacks to his
provincial childhood (born on a train) that are shot in a near-monochrome
palette. Like the backstory elements in Tolkien,
this screen biography only takes us up to Nureyev’s early career and the
seminal point at which his greatest years lay ahead. B+
Long Shot (https://longshot.movie/)
I’m still trying to figure out why The Guardian gave a strong review to
this cringe-worthy affair, calling it “outrageously funny”. They got the first part right. Maybe it’s the element of post-Hillary
fantasy that has a glamorous Charlotte Field (South African Charlize Theron) as
a Democratic Secretary of State who runs for president and (spoiler alert) is
elected. This is largely thanks to
hiring the schlubby Fred Flarsky (Canadian Seth Rogen) to “punch up” her
speeches after he gets fired as a supposedly radical journalist. They had a
babysitting moment years ago. Casual vulgarities abound and their sexual
hook-up isn’t even the grossest element en route to the White House. Oh, and handsome
Swede Alexander Skarsgård makes three brief inconsequential appearances as a
flirty, presumably unattached, Canadian prime minister James Steward
(channeling a vaguely Justin Trudeau look).
Secretary Field, with Flarsky in tow, swans about the globe championing
an international environmental initiative (for “trees, bees, and seas”), but
then caves to get the endorsement of her lamestream president (Bob Odenkirk)
who’s backed by a moneybags media mogul. Caricature stands in for character.
It’s all depressingly vapid and cynical.
(For some really wickedly good satire on the state of American politics,
the HBO series “Veep” is vastly superior.) C
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