The Post Cert: 12A / 116 mins / Dir. Steven Spielberg / Trailer
Well, we're still in January so Worthy Chin-Stroke Film Season continues with Steven Spielberg's telling of the Pentagon Papers affair of 1971, in which the US government tried to stop the press (chiefly the New York Times and titular Washington Post) from publishing documents claiming they'd lied to the public over the Vietnam War. A srs-stry requires a srs-cst of course, and Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks have been drafted in to do the heavy lifting. Cue two hours of polyester shirts*1, hand-held camerawork and actors talking over each other to give the impression of fast-paced chaos.
And it's fine.
While I appreciated the overall exposition as someone who wasn't alive at the time of the film's events, the script feels a little over-written in some places (yet wilfully obfuscating in others). And although the visuals of the movie are undeniably on-point for the 1971 setting, and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski captures the documentary-feel of the storytelling, this always felt like a modern-day facsimile of the era, rather than an immersive environment. Although I suspect Linus Sandgren's outstanding work in Battle Of The Sexes has rather spoiled it for everyone else, now (speaking of such matters, dear lord Tom Hanks does a lot of manspreading in this movie).
Another of the director's regular collaborators, John Williams brings a score which is great at the pomp and urgency of the proceedings, but occasionally becomes too sweeping and lyrical for the story it's attached to. Although the same can be said of Spielberg's direction, to be fair.
But the film tells its story with the conviction of a committed cast and crew; I can't fault it for that. There were, however, two main stumbling blocks preventing me from enjoying it more...
Firstly, I couldn't forget that I was watching Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, not newspaper proprietor Katharine Graham and editor Ben Bradlee. This is isn't necessarily a new problem of mine with Mr Hanks, but Streep usually manages to disappear into her roles, becoming the character completely. And it's not like she's has nothing to work with here, I was just always aware that I was watching an actor, acting. The problem could well be the star-wattage of the cast - Streep or Hanks on their own have more chance of blending into a scene with their supporting players, but together their light just shines more brightly than any film they're part of.
Secondly, I couldn't forget that the while the presented issues concerning press-freedom may well be very prescient in 2018, it's also a far more complex situation now. Freedom of speech is more than a right, it's a responsibility, and the needle sways both ways in 2018. Now admittedly, that's not what The Post sets out to cover, but it was in my mind throughout. And while I also don't particularly like dragging my own politics into what is supposed to be a casual movie-review blog*2, the film's stars took what can only be described The Bare Minimum Amount Of Prodding to wade into current events while promoting the film. All The Politics isn't something you can really brush aside with this movie as that's precisely what it's about.
So, all in all, The Post is basically fine. I found the story itself interesting, but got little more out of the feature than that. A well-assembled documentary would have been just as good from where I was sitting. Your mileage will vary.
Oh, and we get the fourth Insidious movie in 2.35:1 aspect-ratio, but Steven Spielberg's delivers his awards-nudger 'tv-sized' 1.85:1? Have a word, mate…
Well, pretty much everyone else seems to think so.
Unless your thing is historical politics or Spielberg, this is a rent/stream.
It's not.
I wouldn't think so.
Hang on, you've put a Vietnam jungle battle-scene at the beginning of the film and there's still no Wilhelm? Insane.
Level 1: As noted, this film's got the one and only John Williams on score-duty…
*1 The period-detail of sets and wardrobe is reliable enough in all the right places, although at one point Hanks' wife (played by Sarah Paulson) lifts a framed photo from the side cabinet in their lounge, showing the couple reclining on a sofa with John and Jackie Kennedy. "That picture makes me sad", she says, to which I inaudibly replied "Yeah me too, love. It looks like it was put together by the intern using MS Paint. Why can't film production companies employ dececent graphic artists to put together faked historical photos in movies? They're the one thing other than the cast that the camera always lingers on, put some bloody effort in."[ BACK ]
*2 Although y'know, as I've linked to articles at the New Statesman and the Guardian, you can probably guess which side of the fence my own deckchair is on. It's not that I'm not on the side of The Post, I absolutely am. I'm just more worried that The Post isn't always on the side of The Post, and hasn't noticed. [ BACK ]
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Er, audience demographic for a movie set in The Old Days™ which doesn't appeal to the kids that have just got out of school but is showing too early for the adults who are still in work? That'd be my afternoon-off spent in a darkened room surrounded people who don't think twice about having a conversation in the middle of a film, then. On the plus-side, the older generation don't play with their phones during a cinema-screening, although many of them are too busy repeatedly scrunching bags of sweets to have time for that*1. Anyway, Florence Foster Jenkins...*2
This film tells the story of philanthropist and performing-arts lover Florence (Meryl Streep) during the latter part of the second world war in New York, as she organises society dinners and concerts to boost morale. As you'll no doubt be already aware, Florence sings opera and classical music at these performances, despite not quite having the voice for it. Throughout all of this, she's supported and encouraged by her husband, St Clair (Hugh Grant), who walks the moral tightrope of keeping his wife's sole ambition alive, whilst making sure she's not exploited or ridiculed for her perceived lack of talent. And it's one particular 'breakout' performance staged for returning troops in Carnegie Hall that the story hinges on, as the carefully managed audience of friends and sympathetic supporters is widened to include the public and critics alike.
It's important to point out that while the film's subject admittedly wasn't the best of singers, she's not as dreadful as the film's marketing department would have you believe. A keen musician from an early age, severe nerve-damage put an end to Florence's instrument-playing leaving vocal-recitals as her only creative outlet. She has the appreciation, range and technique for the music she sings, just not the control or self-awareness to realise that she's all over the shop.
The back-story of the nerve-damage and its effects on Florence's life and outlook which serves as the real heart of the film, making it a story rather than just a chain of events. It's frequently very funny, and as you'd expect we're never laughing at Florence, but we're not necessarily laughing with her, either. The humour arises more from the awkwardness of the situations created by Streep's caterwauling, but this frequently crosses over into uncomfortable territory, even before the narrative intends it to. The combination of the public and private sides of Florence's life gives the film a far sadder undercurrent than I expected, but director Stephen Frears has the good grace not to get too mawkish with it all.
That said, moments of heightened-comedy segue into full-on farce, and Frears seems intent on over-directing his cast wherever possible. Streep and Grant both manage to underplay their roles well thanks to their experience and status, but everyone else seems to be struggling to fit four facial expressions where only two are needed (poor Simon Helberg being the worst casualty of this as Cosme McMoon, the newly-hired concert-pianist who acts as the audience's introduction to Florence's world).
The end result is enjoyable and admirable in its intention, although the story and lead performances are stronger than the film as a whole. Meryl and Hugh are perfectly suited to their roles, but I think Florence Foster Jenkins needs a more delicate hand than Frears can bring to it...
Oh, and Mavis from out of Coronation Street's in it. Who saw that one coming?
The film's a little bit Suffragette, even though it doesn't intend to be..
Sunday afternoon DVD, to be fair..
Just about, but it doesn't realise its full potential..
Everyone's reliably solid, but it's probably just 'usual form' to be honest..
Nah.
Nah.
Level 1: Jorge Leon Martinez plays 'Airborne Sergeant' in this, and he also appeared in The Force Awakens as "Rebel Alliance". That's from the IMDB, of course, which is (usually) accurate enough for the purposes of this blog, but bear in mind that the Alliance no longer formally exists in TFA, having been outmoded by The Resistance, so god knows who he's actually playing. Anyway, he's in both so that counts as a direct link.
*1 No seriously, much rustling right throughout the entire film. And I know what you're thinking: Oh, that young whippersnapper's being very disrespectful about older cinema attendees! The youngsters are no better!. I assure you that my ire has nothing to do with an audience's age, and everything to do with their behaviour. And the more popular a film is, the more badly-behaved people will be in the room; that's just statistics. I genuinely love it when a cinema is busy. Just not when I'm there.
*2 In honour of a genuinely inspirational woman who caused many people to emit bad language, I'll be spearheading a movement to get FFJ adopted as a profanity-evading acronym, to be used in moments of frustration while in polite company. But I'd really like our senior-citizens on board, so we're a bit pushed for time in getting this started. Maybe the next time your regional news show is doing a piece on the 100th birthday of a local resident, he/she could let that one slip on-camera? Spread the word, anyway...
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
A decent-sized crowd was seated for the opening night of Sarah Gavron's Suffragette on its opening night, and if it can draw those numbers on traditionally-quiet Monday, it bodes well for both the box-office and exposure of the film. And for obvious reasons, Suffragette deserves every bit of that exposure as An Important Film™ which manages to convey its message without preaching or shaming. I could name several directors who could learn a lot from this, one of whom had a film in the trailers beforehand.
Focusing on the women's suffrage movement in 1912 and its transition from verbal persuasion to physical activism, the screenplay stays at 'street level', following the Suffragette's escalating protests from stones through shop windows, to (non-fatality-inducing) explosives and the unintentional death of Emily Wilding Davison at the Epsom Derby in 1913. It's a relatively short timespan to cover in the life of the organisation but the film knowingly treats it as one step forward, from being a source of gossip and disapproval to an unequivocal force in British politics.
Now as we live in (relatively) liberal times, it would be easy to make the film a mawkish and self-congratulatory history lesson, whereby the audience could leave all feeling very pleased that the battle's won and everyone's now equal (…). Instead, screenwriter Abi Morgan raises fascinatingly uncomfortable questions about the morality of the Suffragette's techniques. It's easy for 2015's audience to know that the movement wanted the right thing for the right reasons, but in our current climate it's not easy to say how far we'd go to achieve the same level of persuasion. Placards and breaking shop-windows are on one level, but when an organised group uses explosives to gain political recognition (irrespective of injuries/fatalities), you'd be hard pushed to argue that it hasn't branched into terrorism.
The 't'-word seems very extreme of course, but so were the Suffragette's actions in the early 20th century. Even the same deeds in 2015 of detonating devices inside post-boxes would attract major media attention. As the Suffragette's aims at the time were seen as utterly outlandish by the establishment, their actions were treated with equal incredulity. As mentioned above; all the right things, for all the right reasons - but what's the right way of going about it? However, it's a train of thought that the film only pushes in its second act, and which then gives way to the ongoing historical plot.
The only real drawback I found is that Suffragette isn't particularly cinematic. Don't get me wrong, it looks absolutely fantastic with all the grit and grime you'd expect of London's East End in 1912, but it looks like fantastic television. This isn't to disparage TV necessarily, especially in this day and age, but the film has the tight-shots and restrictive feel of a Sunday night drama. As it turns out, the subject matter of the film itself helps to carry this off, but there's always the feeling that the message is grander than the medium. The final scenes are a painful victory, and the film ends with archive footage of the funeral procession of Emily Wilding Davison through London's packed streets. Footage which, if I'm being honest, I found more affecting than the preceding film.
But obviously it's still very, very good.
[ Actually, the only real bugbear I had with the film is the speech that Meryl Streep gives as Emmeline Pankhurst to the amassed crowd from her balcony window. There's some quite horrific ADR at work here, and while the dialogue has been painstakingly matched, it's clear that the passion and determination we hear in her voice weren't there when the scene was filmed, as her facial movements just don't match. And it's a real shame because Streep is one of the finest actresses working, but it takes the wind out of the film's sails a little when it looks like she's miming to her own speech. ]
It's worth paying to see, but whether that's full-whack at the cinema will be up to you.
Cheap-Tuesdays, if you're unsure.
A one to buy but again, once it drops in price.
Helena Bonham Carter and Carey Mulligan are awards-worthy, here.
Everyone else doesn't quite have enough to do.
Absolutely.
A little.
Although it depends what we're disagreeing on.
There isn't.
Suffragette stars Meryl Streep, who also appeared in 1990's Postcards From The Edge, which was written by Carrie 'Last Princess of Alderaan' Fisher.
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Rob Marshall's celluloid adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's Broadway musical limps onto screens in the post-Christmas lull like a pantomime pulling a straight face; camp as a row of tents, but nowhere near as colourful. Or as useful. The story, a shared-universe crossover of well known fairytales taking place in the same woodland, is almost incoherent, desperately hoping that if enough plot-points and tropes are thrown at the viewer, enough of them will stick and might form a narrative in the process. They don't; Into The Woods is gibberish. But not creative, zany, who knows what could happen? gibberish. It's the sort where secondary - but fairly important - characters die off-screen (yes, really), central characters die from basically falling over (yes. really), and Johnny Depp is instructed to remove any semblance of metaphor from the Wolf character, and basically portray a cannibalistic child-molester in an ill-fitting suit (I wish I was joking).
But hey, the plot structure isn't critical, right? After all, we're here for a musical! Show tunes! Catchy songs! Right? Ah. Sondheim's cues all seem to blend into a single twee dirge with no memorable lyrics or melodies. The whole production has the rhythm and style of Broadway but feels completely directionless, as if the music round of Whose Line Is It Anyway? has been set up for "in the style of a West End Musical", and then just left to run for two excruciating hours while the audience file slowly out and the performers are too embarrassed to stop.
The whole debacle is only slightly (…JUST) saved by some decent performances beneath the charade of a screenplay. And it's a twisted version of reality that we live in where James Corden is one of the best things in a film. Emily Blunt Anna Kendrick and Meryl Streep also do their very best, but the roles are so haphazardly written*1 that you can see the desperation in their eyes. This will be on their CVs forever.
Oh, and Chris Pine has apparently been told to channel his best David Essex. Which, in fairness, he does and is truly bloody awful.
A stage-piece that should never have left the boards, Frozen took the Disney fairytale-story two steps forward, Into The Woods takes it one step back…*2
Well, Mrs Blackout and myself went with my Unlimited card and an Orange Wednesday code, and we still feel hard done by (I actually think she enjoyed it less than me).
Oh, rent it if you must, but this won't be one for re-watching.
Not at all.
Be a crap cinematic-port of a substandard musical? It might, actually.
…
There isn't.
Into The Woods' Emily Blunt starred in 2012's Salmon Fishing In The Yemen alongside Obi-Wan Kenobi himself, Ewan McGregor..
*1 Case in point, just in case you thought there was going to be some kind of Grimm's Morality Tale at work here on the top-level, The Baker's Wife (one of the few sympathetic characters in the entire film) has a quick snog with Prince Charming in the woods in a slip of judgement, is overcome with guilt and then dies when she falls off a cliff, while Prince Charming isn't punished for being a sleazebag for the last two hours of your time, and rides off without any character closure. Yeah, spoilers. Whatever.
*2 Truth be told, I probably didn't hate it as much as this review would suggest, but I am inordinately annoyed at having sat through the whole debacle, and who wants to read someone going 'oh, it was probably okay but not really for me'? That's not the case, anyway. I don't mind a musical at all, this was just a crap one. Humph.
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
