The Spanish Prisoner

The Illusionist is a French animated film directed by Sylvain Chomet, based on an unproduced script that Jacques Tati wrote back in the 1950’s. He reportedly wrote it as a “personal letter” to an estranged daughter. It tells the story of an unsuccessful stage magician who goes on a tour of Britain. In a small town in Scotland, he meets a young girl, Alice, who believes he actually possesses magical powers. She runs away from the town and follows him to Edinburgh, where they develop a father/daughter relationship.

Anyone who has seen a Tati film will recognize his approach in this movie: understated comedy with moments of pathos. There is very little dialogue. The main character is a well-intentioned, but hapless, outsider who can never quite fit in wherever he goes.

This film is beautifully animated. There is a scene of Edinburgh seen from above that I found just breath-taking. Overall, I found this film enchanting and subtly moving.

I’ve always been something of a railroad buff. I remember when I was a kid, my father built a model railroad set on a pool table in the basement of our house. It was complete with paper-mâché mountains with a tunnel going through them, and a little town. I was heart-broken when my father got bored with it and threw it out. So I just had to see Unstoppable, which is inspired by a real incident of a runaway train.

Due to a mistake by an engineer, an unmanned freight train, carrying toxic chemicals, is sent rolling out of a train yard. On the same day, Will Colson (Chris Pine), a recently hired railroad worker, shows up for work and is teamed up with a grizzled veteran, Frank Barnes (Denzel Washington). Immediately the two men come into conflict. (Does this sound familiar?) However, when they learn about the runaway train, they work together to attach a locomotive to it to try to stop it.

I mostly enjoyed Unstoppable, the action sequences are well done, although the personal conflicts in it are a little pat and familiar. The film touches upon the issue of corporate greed. When the CEO of the railroad is told about the damage a toxic spill from the train could cause, his first question is what effect this would have on the company’s stocks. We learn that the company has been forcing experienced engineers into early retirement, so it can hire younger engineers for less money. The working class heroes have to struggle against the stupidity of the management to avoid a catastrophe.

As I said before, this film was inspired by a real incident that took place in 2001. Not surprisingly, the real story was not quite as dramatic as the film, though the real-life train did carry toxic chemicals. Interestingly, in the film the engineer whose mistake causes the incident is portrayed as a buffoon. In the real-life incident, the engineer was a 35-year veteran who had a good record. This should remind us that even good people can make very bad mistakes sometimes.

I remember seeing a made-for-TV movie about a runaway train many years ago. Does anyone else remember it?

As a child, I considered myself a connoisseur of giant monster movies. King Kong and Godzilla were the two classics, but there were various giant insect films from the 1950’s, the best of which was Them!, which is about giant ants that infest the sewers of Los Angeles (perhaps they were hoping to break into the film business.) I also remember one with a giant preying mantis. And there was Reptilicus, about a giant lizard that throws up acid on people. Then there was The Monolith Monsters, about these giant rocks that absorb people. (I remember I found this particularly disturbing for some reason.) And there was The Monster That Challenged the World, which was actually about giant snails that challenge a section of the Salton Sea. (Anyone who has ever been to the Salton Sea knows that’s a pretty good place to set a horror film.) The one that I found the scariest, however, was Kronos (I had nightmares about it), which is about a giant robot from outer space. (And what could possibly be scarier than a giant robot from outer space? Yeah, a Sarah Palin presidency, ha ha. I knew you were going to say that.)

With Monsters, the British director, Gareth Brooks, has bravely attempted to resurrect this beloved genre. A NASA probe has found samples of life outside Earth. While returning to the U.S., it crashes in Mexico. (Great, another reason for the Mexicans to hate us.) Giant creatures grow. Eventually most of northern Mexico becomes an “infected zone”. The U.S. builds a wall along its border to keep the monsters out. Now, I know that this is starting to smell like a political allegory. That’s not quite the direction this film goes in.

Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy) is a photojournalist working in Mexico. His boss has charged him with the task of bringing his daughter, Samantha Wynden (Whitney Able) back to the U.S. Andrew takes her to Mexico’s Gulf coast, where she buys a ferry ticket to the U.S. Through Andrew’s stupidity, however, her ticket and their passports get stolen. (Yeah, this is another movie in which the guy is a total jerk, but the woman falls in love with him anyway.) In desperation, they hire some men to lead them through the infected zone to the U.S. border. Now, this is where the movie started to bug me. They then enter a rain forest. (Even a tea bagger knows that northern Mexico is arid.) What’s more, near the U.S. border they stumble upon a Mayan temple. Porter apparently assumes that most people don’t know anything about Mexico.

After a couple of horrific encounters with the monsters, which look like giant octopuses, Andy and Sam make it across the border. They find a town that has been completely destroyed. The monsters have entered the U.S. They find an abandoned gas station, where they call for help.

Spoiler Alert: I am about to give away the ending. While hiding in the gas station, Andy and Sam observe two of the monsters mating. They then realize that they love each other. I guess there is nothing more romantic that two octopoid creatures trying to reproduce.

At one point in the film it is suggested that the monsters attack people because the U.S. war planes keep bombing them, though this idea is never really developed. And it’s not clear what, if anything this film is trying to say about the current situation along the U.S.-Mexico border.

As giant monster movies go, I would say this film is much inferior to Them! and Kronos.

Made in Dagenham is a dramatization of a 1968 strike by women sewing machine workers in Britain. The women made seat covers for Ford Motor Company. The strike led to the passing of the Equal Pay Act in 1970.

When the 187 women who work at the Dagenham Ford plant learn that they’ve been re-classified a unskilled workers and that they are being paid less than male workers, they decide to go on strike. Rita O’Grady (Sally Hawkins) becomes the leader of and spokeswoman for the strike. Their shop steward, Albert Passingham (Bob Hoskins), is supportive of the strike, but his superiors in the union are hostile and they go along with it with deep reluctance. Rita and a group of the strikers eventually meet with Barbara Castle (Miranda Richardson), First Secretary of State in the Harold Wilson government. Castle negotiates a deal in which the women receive 92% of the wage rate that the men receive.

I liked Made in Dagenham, but I thought it could have been a better movie. First of all, it devotes way too much time to Rita’s relationship with her husband, Eddie (Daniel Mays). I would have liked it if we had learned more about the other women on strike. Also, there is a sub-plot about an older worker, Connie (Geraldine James), whose husband, a World War II veteran, commits suicide. This sets up a scene in which Rita gives a patriotic speech to justify the strike. I didn’t buy it. Also, Rita finds an unlikely ally in the wife of one of the Ford executives. I found this far-fetched. And there are also too many scenes of Barbara Castle berating her dim-witted male aides. I guess this is supposed to be comic relief, but it just isn’t funny.

Still, it’s always good to see a film that celebrates the ability of workers to change things.

Note: I’m told that this film was released in Germany under the title We Want Sex. I guess something was lost in the translation.

The National Society of Film Critics picked The Social Network as the best film of 2010, so I felt obligated to go see it. I didn’t think a movie about rich, nerdy college students could possibly be that good. It is based on the true story of the founding of Facebook.

The film begins in 2003 when Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is an undergraduate student at Harvard. A computer stunt that crashes the school’s computer system makes him a notorious man on campus. The Winklevoss brothers (both played by Armie Hammer) hire him to build a social network site for Harvard students. Zuckerberg takes the idea and runs with it – but without the Winklevoss brothers. He gets his friend, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), to put up the money to start his new business. Zuckerberg calls his new social networking site “The Facebook”, and Saverin becomes its CFO. Zuckerberg eventually meets Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the founder of Napster. Parker becomes Zuckerberg’s Mephistopheles, helping him to aggressively expand Facebook. He and Zuckerberg conspire to force Saverin out of the company. The film is mainly told through flashbacks during discovery meetings for lawsuits brought by the Winklevoss brothers and by Saverin against Zuckerberg. The film has a “money can’t buy happiness” ending.

Zuckerberg comes off as not really a bad person, just self-absorbed and insensitive. There is an implied irony in the fact that a man with poor social skills creates the world’s most successful social networking site. Since the film is a fictionalized account, I don’t know whether or not it fairly represents any of the people involved. The acting is pretty good though. Eisenberg is believably geeky as Zuckerberg. Timberlake exudes a devilish charm as Parker.

I found The Social Network funny and entertaining, but I do not think that it is a better film than A Prophet or Winter’s Bone. I can only guess that film critics like to watch movies that portray rich people as back-stabbing assholes. So it appears that film critics do have class consciousness.

Tamara Drewe is a British comedy directed by Stephen Frears, with a screenplay by Moira Buffini, based on a graphic novel by Posy Simmonds. The film opens at a writers’ colony in Dorset. It is run by Beth Hardiment (Tamsin Greig), who is married to a philandering crime novelist, Nicholas Hardiment (Roger Allam). The lodgers include an American academic, Glen McCreavy (Bill Camp), who is writing a book about Thomas Hardy. Beth is assisted around her farm by a handyman, Andy Cobb (Luke Evans). When Tamara Drewe (Gemma Arterton), a comely young woman sporting a recently surgically shortened nose, moves into the farmhouse next door, Andy (her erstwhile boyfriend) and the lecherous Nicholas both take notice. However, Tamara launches into a romance with a rock star, Ben Sergeant (Dominic Cooper). This draws the attention of two bratty teenagers, Jody and Casey (Jessica Barden and Charlotte Christie), who are obsessed with Sergeant. Their attempts to intrude into the lives of Ben and Tamara set off a chain of events that have consequences for the other characters that are both comic and tragic.

Tamara Drewe is a thoroughly delightful comedy. There is a light-heartedness about it that is just wonderful. Even when, towards the end, the tone of the film suddenly turns serious, there is still a feeling of joie de vivre about it. It never sinks into melodrama, the way The Kids Are All Right does. The acting is uniformly good. I especially liked Roger Allam and Tamsin Grieg. Allam does a very good job of conveying his character’s smug cynicism and complacency. Grieg makes the long-suffering wife very real and sympathetic.

There is a touch of class consciousness in the film, in that Andy’s family was forced to sell the house that Tamara now lives in. More than once Andy refers to himself as a “peasant”. Perhaps not coincidentally, he is the most level-headed character in the film. Having experienced poverty, he has fewer illusions than the other characters do.

I highly recommend this film.