OUT OF GAS: Movie Reviews of The Lady in the Van and Aferim! by Howard Casner

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Warning: SPOILERS

rev 1 Forgive me if I start out with a pun to describe the new comedy The Lady in the Van. It’s basically little more than a vehicle for the legendary actress Maggie Smith. To add insult to injury, I’ll continue with another pun: it’s a pretty stalled vehicle when all is said and done.

The cental premise is based on something that sorta, kinda happened to the British playwright Alan Bennett (The History Boys, The Madness of King George). After striking up a conversation with the neighborhood bag lady who lives in her van, and after not being able to shake her off, the playwright acquiesces to her suggestion that she park her vehicle in his driveway. He agrees, more out of an inability (or cowardice as he describes it) to say no. It’s only supposed to be for a little while, but she stays there until she dies fifteen years later.

Even though this is a vehicle for Maggie Smith, she is only fitfully effective, and I think that this may be because her character is more a construct than a real person. I mean, Bennett’s bag lady here is not your run of the mill everyday type of bag lady. No, here she is a former concert pianist and ex-nun who has gone into hiding because she thinks she is responsible for the death of a motorcyclist (she’s not) and who is being blackmailed by a police officer. Read the rest of this entry »


THERE’LL ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND SEQUEL: Movie reviews of Queen and Country and The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Howard Casner

First, a word from our sponsors. Ever wonder what a reader for a contest or agency thinks when he reads your screenplay? Check out my new e-book published on Amazon: Rantings and Ravings of a Screenplay Reader, including my series of essays, What I Learned Reading for Contests This Year, and my film reviews of 2013. Only $2.99. http://ow.ly/xN31r

 

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Warning: SPOILERS

queen and countryQueen and Country, the new semi-autobiographical film from writer/director John Boorman (the semi part) is a sequel to Boorman’s earlier film Hope and Glory, an episodic comedy about a young lad’s picturesque adventures during World War II.

When we last saw the wee Bill, he had arrived at school to see it on fire from having been bombed during the Blitzkrieg, prompting him to yell out, “Thank you, Adolf”. It’s nearly a decade later now and Bill is an older teen and is conscripted into the army during the Korean War.

How you respond to Queen and Country will probably depend on how you respond to the way Bill is dramatized here. Personally, and to be ruthlessly honest, I found him a poor excuse for a human being who, first, has an amazing inability to fully comprehend just how lucky he is, and second, for someone whose future lies as a filmmaker, an amazing inability to understand, empathize or read the people he interacts with. Read the rest of this entry »


DADDY’S DEAD, YOU KNOW…AND WON’T LET US FORGET IT: Movie reviews of This Is Where I Leave You, My Old Lady and The Skeleton Twins by Howard Casner

First, a word from our sponsors. Ever wonder what a reader for a contest or agency thinks when he reads your screenplay? Check out my new e-book published on Amazon: Rantings and Ravings of a Screenplay Reader, including my series of essays, What I Learned Reading for Contests This Year, and my film reviews of 2013. Only $2.99. http://ow.ly/xN31r

Warning: SPOILERS

this-is-where-i-leave-youGosh darn, daddy’s seem to be dropping like flies this month. Three movies have opened lately in which the pater familias is no longer in the picture. Not only that, it’s these fathers that often seem to be getting the brunt of the blame for the way their kids have turned out.

I guess it’s kind of convenient for all the characters involved, then, that the man from whose loins they were loosed is no longer around to defend himself.

But, you know, whatever, I guess. At any rate, he’s dead, dead, dead. And just won’t let us forget it.

Read the rest of this entry »


Review of THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL by Howard Casner

In the movie Gandhi, the titular character was asked “You don’t think we’re just going to walk out of India” and Gandhi replied, “Yes, in the end, you will walk out”.  And the British did.  But now, according to the movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, the British are walking back in.  And perhaps now India will get its comeuppance for having the temerity to ask their empire builders to leave in the first place.

There is something kind of cute when it comes to the core idea of …Marigold Hotel.  Our jobs have been outsourced.  Now we’re going to get revenge for it: we’re going to outsource one of our biggest and most unpleasant industries: our old people.  In this pleasant and entertaining, but little more, comedy from writer Ol Parker and director John, Shakespeare in Love, Madden, a group of England’s most respected thespians pack their bags and leave the country and foist themselves upon the unsuspecting Indians when they fall for the equivalent of swamp land in Florida: a photo shopped hotel that has been opened by that refugee from Skins and Slumdog Millionaire, Dev Patel, to especially cater to their specialized needs.   And with no takesy backsies.

But this outsourcing isn’t even the biggest irony here.  No.  When the British were asked to leave, the Indians claimed they’d be able to take care of themselves and would be responsible for their own problems.  But nearly seventy years later, according to Parker, they are now no better off than when the English were there.  So it is left to this group of patronizing patrons to teach the local yokels how to manage their love lives; stand up to their parents; treat the disenfranchised; and run a hotel.  Yes, the British are not only back, their back in their old roles of telling the people they once ruled how to rule their country.

Okay, I’m taking a film that is not all that serious a bit too seriously.  Because in the end, …Marigold Hotel is a fun movie.  Not because it is about a group of people discovering the wonders of India and how it brings  new meaning to their lives (which I don’t think the movie remotely does), but because it gives us the great honor of watching a group of incredibly talented actors strut their stuff.  And do they strut it.  There’s nary a false note here.  Everyone–Tom Wilkinson as a gay judge; Judi Dench, as a widow who has never had to take care of herself; Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton (together again as husband and wife from Shawn of the Dead) as a couple whose relationship is on its last legs; and Ronald Pickup (an appropriate name for his role) and Celia Imrie as two birds of a feather, people looking for sex, love and/or money in a relationship, not necessarily in that order—are first rate here.   But it has to be said that as good as everyone is, it’s Maggie Smith, as a racist cockney housekeeper/nanny, who is magnificent.  No, I mean, she is really magnificent.   I mean, did I happen to mention how magnificent she was?  Well, if I didn’t, I have to say it, Maggie Smith is magnificent.

Perhaps Hollywood actors need to take a lesson from the story here.  England had no use for these senior citizens, so they gladly shipped them off to the Far East (out of sight, out of mind).  Older actors have found that L.A. has no use for them, so maybe they should start outsourcing themselves to England where maybe they could get work doing such movies as Harry Potter (I mean, you had to be a pretty poor actor not to get a part in those films somewhere along the line), Downton Abbey and the recently released Quartet (which would make more than a suitable companion piece to …Marigold Hotel).   The parts they’d get certainly couldn’t get any worse than The Bucket List.


Movie Review of QUARTET by Howard Casner

One of the things I couldn’t stop thinking about while watching Dustin Hoffman’s (yeah, verily I say unto thee, that Dustin Hoffman) directorial debut Quartet, is that in England, when actors get older, they’re given showcases like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Quartet, or are made head of MI6, but in the U.S., the women either retire or go to TV and the men are stuck with vehicles like The Bucket List and Little Fockers (I’m not sure which is worse, but I guess I’d rather be working than not).

 

Quartet is a depressingly uplifting feel good movie about a group of senior citizens who reside at a home (well, actually a magnificent mansion) for musicians and singers (especially, but not exclusively, of the classical variety).  The premise of the film, if one wants to even call it that, is that the home is having serious financial difficulties, and if they don’t raise enough money at an annual benefit, they may have to close.

 

The screenwriter here, Ronald Harwood, whose written some interesting scripts in the past (The Pianist, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) and some not so interesting ones (Australia), has fashioned a trifle of a film here (he wrote it as a vehicle for Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney, who both received Oscar noms for Harwood’s The Dresser, but Finney become ill and Billy Connolly took over his part).  There’s nothing much to the plot.  It’s almost insulting in a way.  Age old conflicts that are spoken of in terms of life and death are resolved in a matter of minutes.  And the central premise of the film, that of the home closing, never seriously drives the story and almost feels like an afterthought.  In fact, when the benefit is held, it’s sold out, but with such a small audience, no one will ever be able to convince me that the box office sales (even at Covent Garden prices, as Michael Gambon’s Elizabeth Taylor-caftan wearing drama queen director of the show claims they can charge) would remotely cover the electric bill for one month, let alone keep the whole place going for a year.

 

But if Quartet is a soufflé, light and airy, that comes dangerously close to falling, it never does.  The movie may be a trifle, but the acting isn’t.  This is a wonderful collection of old (both literally and figuratively) pros like the aforementioned Gambon, as well as Maggie Smith, the diva (okay, type casting); Tom Courtenay (the stoic); and Connelly (the satyr).  All are expert, but most delightful has to be Pauline Collins, as the hysterical and heartbreaking ditzy life force who is starting to demonstrate the symptoms of Alzheimer’s and steals every scene she’s in.

 

Hoffman uses all his experience as an actor to grand effect.  He knows better than to get in anybody’s way and that his chief responsibility is to make sure the actors get to do what they do best—act.   Based on the resulting film, it was a very wise choice.