Movie review: "Quartet"

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There’s a certain kind of movie: you take mature actors and give them a simple drama with a simple framework, and you let them have fun with it.

 

 

“The Whales of August” was one of these movies. So was “Autumn Sonata.” So was “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.”

 

 

And now we have “Quartet.”

 

 

It has the simplest of simple plots: a group of elderly musicians in a retirement home. They still sing, and play, and recall their former glory. Then a great diva (Maggie Smith) comes to live there, which greatly disturbs another resident, her former husband, a great tenor (Tom Courtenay). Their friends, the sweetly demented Cissy (Pauline Collins) and the randy Wilf (Billy Connolly), heckle and coax them from the wings.

 

 

But the big gala is coming up. Will the four of them reunite to sing the quartet from “Rigoletto,” as they’d done so gloriously five decades before?

 

 

Well, yes, of course they will.

 

 

The joy is in the acting: Billy Connolly’s bright-eyed mischief-making, Pauline Collins weaving in and out of reality. Michael Gambon plays the impresario, and I swear he’s wearing his Dumbledore outfit, and he yells at everyone. Also, there are a bunch of real musicians, vocalists and instrumentalists, who came out of retirement to perform here, and they are all wonderful. (There’s a trio of elderly retired sopranos who reprise “Three Little Maids From School,” in costume yet, and they’re wonderful.)

 

 

You will not be surprised to hear that the audience (here in the Avon Cinema, a small local movie-theater on the east side of Providence) was mostly older – even older than Partner and me together (combined age 121!). This is an older person’s movie. One of the most resonant messages is this: during the credits, we see the names of the actors and performers one by one, accompanied by pictures of them when they were younger. The message is that growing old is hard, but that life is not over until it’s over.

 

 

The ultimate cliché in this kind of movie is to have someone die; it’s usually the turning point, the “message.” It doesn’t happen here. It’s not necessary. We know all too well what’s going to happen.

 

 

And in the meantime, we can still make some music.

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Movie review: "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel"

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Partner and I saw the preview for “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” several months ago. We began salivating at the mere sight of Judi Dench and Maggie Smith and Tom Wilkinson, and agreed on the spot that this was a must-see.

 

 

We made our pilgrimage to see it this weekend, as did lots of other oldsters. (I heard the lady behind us say: “It looks like an AARP meeting in here!”) We were seated behind a whole row of Red Hat Society members, who’d pulled out all the stops fashion-wise: not just red hats, but red scarves, red feather boas, red sequined purses, red fascinators. Throughout the theater there were wheelchairs, and walkers, and lots of querulous discussions about not being able to hear the dialogue.

 

 

But, my goodness, once the film started, you could have heard a pin drop in there.

 

 

The movie is a lot of fun. It follows seven people who decide to take a chance on a retirement hotel in Jaipur, India: Judi Dench as a sweet impoverished widow, Maggie Smith as a tough bigoted hip-replacement patient, Tom Wilkinson as a retired judge with a haunted look, Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton as a married couple on the lines of Richard and Hyacinth Bucket, Celia Imrie as a sassy flirt, and Ronald Pickup as a funny old satyr.

 

 

I’m not going to give you too many spoilers, but I can safely tell you that everyone finds India to be a life-changing experience. I can probably tell you also that there is at least one death, but (if you’re like me) you’ll be surprised when it happens. Dev Patel, from “Slumdog Millionaire,” is the hyperactively charming hotel manager; he’s adorable, if a little puppyish and bouncy. (Of course, in comparison with his co-stars – who have about 500 combined years of stage and movie experience – he’s bound to seem a little juvenile.)

 

 

The movie’s a fairy-tale, naturally; it’s absurd; it would never be like this in real life. India is presented as a kaleidoscopic whirl of life and color; one character refers to it as “squalid,” but we never see the squalor, only the charm.  As an American, I found the setting charming; I don’t know how I’d have reacted if I’d been an Indian. (I felt this way about “Outsourced” too, both the movie and the TV series; I thought they were great fun, but I wondered uneasily the whole time if I was enjoying the culture-clash stuff in the wrong way.)

 

 

But, back at the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, pretty much everything ends happily, and even dinosaurs like Partner and me need our happily-ever-after movies.

 

 

So pop in your dentures and grab your cane and go see it.

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Movie review: "Clash of the Titans" (1981)

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I’m not sure why I didn’t see “Clash of the Titans” when it came out in 1981.  I certainly remember the advertisements!  They were everywhere.  I seem to recall that it sounded a little foolish; sword-and-sandals seemed like a 1960s thing.

 

 

I finally caught the movie on TCM a while ago, and I am now officially a big fan of this movie, and I understand perfectly why they remade it.

 

 

Ray Harryhausen’s effects are lovely.  They’re certainly not CGI – they look stiff and artificial, compared to today’s effects – but I was very sufficiently alarmed when Perseus (Harry Hamlin with an Olivia Newton-John hairstyle) faced off against the slimy Kraken, and the snaky Medusa, and the brutish Calibos.

 

 

There’s also a darling little mechanical owl named Bubo, a gift to Perseus from Athene and Hephaestus. Bubo chirps and tweets like the spawn of a slide-whistle and an early Macintosh computer; he is a very silly addition to the story, and he is perfectly adorable, and I wish I had a little mechanical owl just like him.  (Hephaestus, by the way, is played by a big brawny actor named Pat Roach, a former wrestler who also played the German who beats up Indiana Jones, and gets chopped up by the plane’s propellers. He does not get to say one wordin "Clash of the Titans," but does get to squint meaningfullyinto the camera).

 

 

How did they assemble this cast?  Laurence Olivier as Zeus, Claire Bloom as Hera, Maggie Smith as Thetis, Ursula Andress as Aphrodite (though I don’t think she says more than three words in the movie), Burgess Meredith as Perseus’s chum / mentor Ammon, Sian Phillips as Cassiopeia.  It’s high camp, but they all have fun with it; the scenes on Mount Olympus are all just standing around and looking noble anyway, and Meredith is a good enough character actor to do pretty much anything.  (Only a few years later, Sian Phillips would turn in one of the great camp performances of all time, as Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam in “Dune.”  You may also remember her as the Emperor Augustus’s wife Livia in “I, Claudius.”  Such a nice lady!)  Flora Robson of glorious memory is in there too, as one of the Stygian witches, though I’d be hard pressed to tell you which one.

 

 

Myth can tolerate any amount of stretching and alteration, and somehow it still holds true.  The Calibos character isn’t in the original myth; I assume, from his name, that he’s a reminiscence of Caliban from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”.  Bubo the mechanical owl is pure invention, and I don’t remember anything in the myth about Medusa being a champion archer.  But who cares?  The story still works.  Perseus still kills the Gorgon, and he still rescues Andromeda.

 

 

This is good clean fun, exciting and suspenseful.  (Funny that you can still feel suspense even though you know the end of the story.)

 

 

And we were all so much younger in 1981.

 

 

Now: release the kraken!

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Downton Abbey

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I have strenuously avoided writing about “Downton Abbey” before now.  Like many others, I learned about the show after it had begun, and Partner and I started late, but we directly fell under its spell.  We finished watching the second season the other night, and – whew!  Affairs, murder, sudden death, imprisonment, scandal, the Great War, Spanish influenza, amnesia!  I need to lie on my chaise longue for a few moments so that I can catch my breath!

 

 

Seriously, the show’s terrific.  It has everything: a beautiful setting (Downton Abbey is actually Highclere Castle in Hampshire, one of those unbelievably beautiful English country homes that seem only to exist in dreams), a brilliant cast combining fresh faces like Michelle Dockery and Dan Stevens with familiar ones like Maggie Smith and Elizabeth McGovern, and brilliant writing by Julian Fellowes (who also wrote “Gosford Park”).   It’s a pleasure to hear a witty line of dialogue delivered by someone like Maggie Smith, wearing perfect 1920s couture, in a beautiful room full of beautiful furniture.

 

 

I was alive way back in 1971, when “Upstairs Downstairs” debuted on American TV.  It covered much of the same ground as “Downton,” and we were mesmerized by it as well: the serene Bellamy family upstairs, the turbulent servants’ quarters downstairs.  It even used a lot of the same plotlines (or is it the other way around?): relationships between the gentry and the servants, the Titanic, the Great War . . .

 

 

Oh, who cares?  (Well, maybe Jean Marsh cares.  She worked for a long time to bring about a new version of “Upstairs Downstairs,” which came out at almost exactly the same time as “Downton Abbey.”  “Downton” blew her show away.  She was publicly bitter about this, and I don’t blame her; it must have been a great blow.)  But, you see, “Downton” has such spectacular production values: the scenery, the sets, the cast.  And no one except dinosaurs like me remembers “Upstairs, Downstairs.”

 

 

This is not to say that “Downton” is perfect.  There was, in the second season, a perfectly ridiculous plot concerning amnesia, which reminded me of something out of “Guiding Light” or “Days of our Lives.”  It only lasted a single episode, thank god, but it was pretty ridiculous.  Also there have been some less-than-satisfactory character shifts; the precise and efficient Cousin Isabel (Penelope Wilton), who was such a perfect antagonist for the stuffy Lady Violet (Maggie Smith) in the first season, became insufferable in the second season.   (And, speaking personally, I could have lived perfectly happily without seeing Bates (Brendan Coyle) and Anna (Joanne Froggatt) in bed together after their wedding; they’re perfectly nice people, and I’m all for them, but they’re a little on the pale and pudgy side when they’re unclothed.)

 

 

New York magazine did the most beautiful set of paper dolls of some of the characters recently.  Their readers howled for more: they want the whole cast, the house, the car, the dog!

 

 

I think that would be just fine.

 

 

(I hear, in season three, we’re going to meet the American grandmother of the family, Lady Cora’s mother, Martha Levinson, played by Shirley Maclaine.)

 

 

(Levinson? Jewish? Lady Cora’s Jewish? Oh my.  It will be difficult to wait this one out. Lady Violet will have a fit.)

 

 

In the meantime: if you haven’t seen the show, seek it out.  You are in for a treat.

 

 

Tell them Mr. Pamuk sent you.

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Harry Potter and the slam-bang finale

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Finally, after all these years, it's over.

 

 

And this final movie, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two,” is the best of the lot.

 

 

All of the young actors know exactly what they're doing now. (It's been ten years, so they'd better.) It's wonderful to see Emma Watson as a calm and very confident young woman; Rupert Grint isn't goofy anymore, but stalwart and funny and sort of cute if you squint at him the right way; and dear Matthew Lewis as Neville Longbottom, the Wimpy Kid of Gryffindor, has matured beyond all recognition, and is now handsome and brave and pretty much the tallest kid in his class.

 

 

Daniel Radcliffe. Okay. He's excellent. But he's a place-holder. He's you, you see? He's your foothold in the story. You're supposed to identify with Harry, so they couldn't really cast anyone really dramatically distinctive in the role – not a funny redhead like Grint, not a zombie albino like the mutant who plays Draco Malfoy. Radcliffe is perfect in this regard, sort of like Elijah Wood over in “The Lord of the Rings”: he's got an interesting face and a pleasing personality, but he mostly reacts to stuff. Picture him in your mind. You're seeing him looking at something and reacting to it, aren't you? And that's perfect. I foresee a long and successful career for Mister Radcliffe, and more power to him.

 

 

The older actors – you know, the entire British acting community over the age of thirty – really only need to show up in costume. But it's wonderful to see Maggie Smith's deadly serious face when she's wand-to-wand with her adversary, and later to see her irrepressible giggle when she casts a spell that she's always wanted to cast. Nice to see Emma Thompson with her thick spectacles on; nice to see Julie Walters growling like a mother tiger, fighting with the terrifyingly insane-looking and insane-acting Helena Bonham Carter.

 

 

Hope I didn't spoil the movie for you with those glimpses.

 

 

But I didn't, did I?

 

 

And, see, that's the thing. There are no spoilers here. You've either read the book, in which case you know what's gonna happen, or you haven't, which means that – well, you pretty much know how it has to end, right? (Hint: don't get that Death Eater tattoo just yet.)

 

 

The cinematography is beautiful. I can't remember the last time I saw a movie with night scenes in which I could actually make out what was going on. (We saw it in 3D, and there are a few worthwhile effects – some of the spells, some of the pyrotechnics. But, kids, save your three dollars. You really won't miss a thing if you don't see it in 3D.)

 

 

The movie actually improves upon the book in a few places; it omits some of the tedious flashback stuff, and straightens out a few of the more roundabout plotlines. And maybe things don't happen quite like the book in a few places – but wouldn't it be a bore if they did?

 

 

And I am so effing grateful to see the bloody quidditch stadium burn down. Because – you know what? - I think quidditch is stupid.

 

 

But this movie is not stupid. It is really grave and beautiful and solemn.

 

 

And a lot of fun to watch.

 

 

So. Imperio! See this movie!

 

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