Peterloo

First Hit: This historical event deserved a much better rendition.

In 1819 England was in turmoil because there was famine, unemployment, and the Lords in Parliament, along with King George III, were controlling the country with their own greed.

Wages for textile workers went from 15 Shillings a week down to 5 for the same period. Corn wasn’t allowed to be imported, so they had little to eat. Additionally, the people of Manchester did not have representation in Parliament which meant that almost all the people in Northern England weren’t thought about and were taken advantage of by the London led government.

This story is about how the people in Northern England decided to change their lot in life and support reform. They started by gathering and speaking to each other about change and what they needed. They also talked about bearing arms and doing whatever it takes to support a reform movement and get representation in Parliament. They want to be able to earn a living, not starve and have some say over their lives.

The leader of this movement for all of England was orator Henry Hunt. Hunt was a wealthy landowner who also wanted to support reform in England. His focus was to do it peacefully. The local Manchester group was to take arms against the government because talking hasn’t worked. However, Hunt won’t have anything to do violence, and before he spoke in Manchester, he required a commitment for no force and no arms.

The day of the rally, a Monday, where Hunt is speaking, 60,000 – 80,000 people show up. Unfortunately, so do representatives from the government who decide to teach the citizens a lesson, so they bring in the Army, who end up killing 15 and injuring 300 – 400 people.

This was a huge black mark in British history, and it was unfortunate that this film seemed to belabor conversations about suppression. I thought that the language and word vocabulary used by most the players was too sophisticated and really appreciated two women, during a woman’s meeting, speaking up saying they couldn’t understand the speaker. Yes, that was part of the point. But the words were used in this film didn’t seem specific or relevant to the time, and the speech making seemed way too sophisticated as well.

I didn’t think any of the actors really gave me enough to give me pause to write about performance. For example, Roy Kinnear as Hunt just seemed too out of touch with the time. He came off at too sophisticated and arrogant for even 20th-century speech making. Mike Leigh wrote and directed this film. The story is compelling, and this representation of it was weak.

Overall: This is a great story not done well.

After

First Hit: Good girl and bad boy, a predictable sappy story of young romance.

This film is made for young teen girls as witnessed by the number that showed up for the early Friday afternoon showing I attended. Cell phones screens lit the anticipatory faces of these young audience members and unfortunately, they kept looking at them during the film.

The Story: Tessa Young (Josephine Langford) is headed to college. Her mother Carol (Selma Blair) has worked hard to create this opportunity for her daughter. Tessa is smart, pretty, and wholesome. Her boyfriend Noah (Dylan Arnold) is a senior in high school and a year behind her in school. He’s wholesome and is liked by Carol.

Arriving at her dorm room, both Carol and Noah are taken aback by Tessa’s roommate Tristan (Pia Mia). She’s hanging out with another fellow girl on the bed, and she’s pulling on an electronic cigarette while dressed in a very skimpy outfit.

Carol immediately wants to go to the housing authority to find her daughter another room. Pulling her mother off the ledge of embarrassing her, Tessa tells her mom, “let me figure this out on my own.”

Getting to know Tristan loosens Tessa up a little and when she goes to a party Tristan knows about; she’s out of her element. At the party she meets the bad boy, Hardin Scott (Hero Fiennes Tiffin). During a truth or dare, Tessa is asked to kiss Hardin, she is lulled into getting close, but pulls away at the last second. Walking through the party’s house, she stumbles into Hardin’s room and sees all the books on his shelves. He comes in, she’s interested to follow through with the kiss, but she also wants to honor her relationship with Noah and pulls away again.

The stage is set because they both have had absentee fathers. We learn more about why Hardin has such a sad view of love and relationships through his upbringing which is demonstrated through a classroom discussion. We also see Tessa’s cautiousness towards intimacy because her father walked out when she was very young.

The story goes back and forth with Tessa and Hardin getting together and then splitting up. She’s naïve to some of the life that Hardin has lived. There are moments of wonderful tenderness between the two and then there are moments of coldness by them.

The pacing of this story is slow, and it isn’t difficult to know where the movie is going and why. I’m not sure how well it held the audience it was meant for, because a whole row of young girls got up and left two thirds into the film. Additionally, two others in the row in front of me left in the last fifteen minutes.

Langford was okay in this role. There was nothing outstanding about her performance and it was believable. It was good to see Blair again, it has been some time since she’s been in a film role and she was good. Tiffin was mediocre as the bad boy. It was predictable and there was nothing that really made his performance stand out. I didn’t think there was much chemistry between him and Langford. Arnold was good as the, wise beyond his years, high school boyfriend. Mia was strong as the slightly edgy fun lesbian roommate. Jennifer Beals and Peter Gallagher were good as Hardin’s new mother-in-law and father. It was a pleasant surprise to see Beals again. Susan McMartin wrote a slow-moving predictable story. Jenny Gage directed in a way that ended up feeling compromised and mediocre.

Overall: I patiently waited for this film to end and left knowing it wasn’t worth the cost of making it.

The Aftermath

First Hit: It took a while to develop, but Keira Knightley (as Rachael Morgan) made it work.

Keira Knightley has developed into a wonderful actress, and her look and presence are uniquely suited to period pieces.

The beginning shows Rachael on a train arriving in Hamburg, Germany. It’s a few short months after WWII has ended. She’s coming from England because her husband Captain Lewis Morgan is in charge of rounding up the remaining Hitler supporters, keeping peace in Hamburg, and trying to make things better for the ruined city.

This is a difficult position for him to be in and we see it in his face and demeanor. One thinks that having his wife join him that it will be better. But when he meets Rachael at the train station, there is a distance between them because they barely hug, and she turns her head away when he awkwardly attempts to kiss her. Something has happened between them, and this part of the story takes a long time to unfold.

Because of the distance between them, Lewis can’t share the difficulty he has with his job. He’s not only battling something that’s gone wrong with Rachael, but he is also facing own past actions in the war, and now he’s managing the aftermath of the war and its ugliness.

The Germans are giving up their surviving homes to the British who are managing this reconstruction. Because Lewis is the highest ranking, he gets the best home. They move into a large luxury home belonging to Stephen Lubert and his daughter Freda (Alexander Skarsgard and Flora Thiemann respectively).

Stephen’s wife died in a firestorm bombing by the Allied forces, and because of this, Freda acts out and is very resentful that the British are living in their home. Stephen and Freda are supposed to move to a camp, but Lewis’ kind heart convinces Rachael that he wants to offer the Luberts a place to stay.

The angst of Rachael and Lewis unfolds as the audience slowly learns that they had a son who died years earlier during a bombing run by the Germans over London.

Feeling very separate from her husband, Rachael’s inner passion is sparked to life by Stephen’s advances.

In another part of the story we see Freda and Rachael have a beautiful moment together at the piano but Freda’s resentment at the loss of her mother, home, and feeling distance from her father, she gets involved with Nazi sympathizers who want information to harm Lewis.

In addition to this, the inner conflict of Lewis is continually brought to a head by one of his fellow officers Burnham (Martin Compston) who is hell-bent on continuing to make the Germans suffer. Lewis is more reflective, seeing the pain of both sides, while Burnham wants the Allied victory to be oppressive and pronounced.

As Rachael and Stephen’s relationship grows, the distance between Rachael and Lewis becomes more pronounced, until the deep hurt and resentment come to the foreground. Will the attempt to heal their struggle be too little too late or can they reconcile.

That’s the point of the film. As I indicated it took a meandering path, and the story wasn’t really engaging, but because the camera stays on Knightley (as Rachael) it holds together because she made it work.

Knightley was excellent. She’s full of passion and approaches it angularly. I like how Kiera can project sexuality while also being proper. She’s very skilled. Clarke is keen as the embattled Army Captain who is battling both inner and outer battles. He’s effective at creating that hidden volcano look. Skarsgard was terrific as the lonely man attempting to deal with the ravages of war including the loss of his wife and the distance between him and his daughter. Thiemann was terrific as the young girl, lost. With no mother, distant father, finding some solace with a Nazi sympathizer teaches her what really is essential. Compston was good as the soldier wanting to assert his power over the Germans. Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse wrote the screenplay. It languished from time to time, but it did pay off in the end. James Kent adequately directed this film, but it was Knightley that made it really work.

Overall: It wasn’t a great film, and it did have something to say about sharing your pain with your partner.

The Best of Enemies

First Hit: I loved the story and the concept behind the story, but at times, the movie languished with its 133-minute running time.

Civil rights, the rights of all people, are a continuing subject in our country. This is shameful, shocking, and sadly mind-numbing to me. As Ann Atwater (Taraji P. Henson) said in the film, “when any of us get cut, we all bleed the same red blood.” Or, at another time she says, “same God made you, made me.” This is the whole point of the film.

Atwater is an activist in her community of Durham, North Carolina. She fights city hall to help the causes of black people in her community. She’s brave and outspoken.

At the beginning of the film, she’s fighting for the rights of people who are renting from a landlord that wants to raise rents or kick people out of his buildings because they are black and want him fix the problems in his units. Some of the issues are no hot water, toilets that don’t work, and electrical issues which mean his renters are struggling to survive in their homes. She’s fighting the slumlord and the whole white part of town that seems to support him to fix the issues in the the homes.

When the black only school burns down, the black community wants her to take the lead to fix the problem of educating their children, and she’s up for it. She and the black community want the children of that school, including her daughter, to go to a white only school – in other words – she wants, what the US government says she’s entitled to, school integration.

To fight against this move, the white city council asks their local KKK President and Exalted Cyclops, C.P. Ellis (Sam Rockwell), to lead the charge against the integration.

The film spends time with both characters learning more about who they are and what they believe. We learn that Atwater clearly has a belief of what is right and she fights for what she thinks. She does this with angry outbursts, persistence, and fortitude. She also has a soft tender side which the film shows as well.

Ellis is shown leading his KKK Chapter at meetings and at the gun target practice range promising to uphold the charter of the KKK. He is married to Mary (Anne Heche) and has four children. One of the boys lives in a psychiatric hospital because of, what appears to be, autism. C.P.’s scenes of tenderness towards this son are lovely, and it shows that he does have a heart. Mary, however, does not hold C.P.’s racial views, but they somehow are able to make their marriage work, and I think it is because she knows the deeper C.P.

As the battle of whether the black children will attend the white schools grows, the city of Durham decides to bring in Bill Riddick (Babou Ceesay) to lead a two-week charrette mediation program to appease the court-ordered school desegregation decree and to come up with a community answer about school integration.

Much of the film and at times, too much, is spent wading through the two weeks of the charrette in a high-level glossy way. Occasionally there is pointed discussion between Riddick, Ellis, and Atwater and we can see how they are slowly beginning to listen to each other.

The worst aspect of the community is when the film shows radicals from the KKK attempting to influence the outcome of the vote through intimidation.

Of course, this film wouldn’t have been made if the vote wasn’t favorable for integration, and the suspense is good enough to wait for. But the part that sickened me was the back stories of how the city council led by Carvie Oldham (Bruce McGill) believe that bending the rules and breaking the law, it is for the betterment of the whole.

Besides the beautiful gas station scene at the end of the film, it was such a nice touch to have short clips of the real Atwater, Riddick, and Ellis during the credits – make sure you see this part.

Henson was excellent as Atwater. She clearly provided the kind of intent and sense needed for the role. Some of her looks at Ellis were slightly overdone, but nothing that came across detrimental to the part. Rockwell is making a name for himself as being the guy on the wrong side of right and easing his character to the right side of freedom. As in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing. Missouri,” he faces and is the opposition to a tough woman but ends up becoming friends with them. Ceesay is terrific as the mediator for the charette. McGill was perfectly southern and arrogant to the plight of anyone but himself. Heche has a small but powerful role in this film as Ellis’ wife. Her clarity of purpose and her visit with Atwater was perfect. Robin Bissell wrote and directed this film. The best part was making this story come alive, but it felt long, and some judicious snipping would have helped.

Overall: The lesson is still alive today, we need to stop seeing people as different, we are one.

Dumbo

First Hit: Overdone, overreaching, and overproduced leaving little to the imagination — dumb.

Director Tim Burton has a habit of creating worlds and often what we see is his complete vision. He tidies the storyline in such a way that the audience can only watch and not imagine themselves. With fantasy, I think it is important to leave things to the imagination.

With Dumbo he’s created a world where we have to feel sorry for the Medici Circus because it has fallen on hard times. The circus is run by Max Medici (Danny DeVito). The train cars are perfectly faded. There is the strong man who is also the accountant, as well as assorted clowns, snake charmer, and other mixed people. The only animals that are left in this dilapidated circus are dogs with colored fur and elephants.

Two children are running around the circus, Millie and Joe Farrier (Nico Parker and Finley Hobbins respectively). They are being taken care of because their mother has died and their father, Holt (Collin Farrell), had to leave the circus to fight in the war.

Upon the father’s return, he’s missing an arm which adds to the depressing scene. Holt’s act with the circus was riding horses, and when he returned with one arm, he discovered the horses were already sold. He’d hoped he’d do a one arm riding act. Max tells Holt his new job will be to tend the elephants, including the new huge one who is pregnant.

When the elephant gives birth, they find out the baby elephant has enormous, I mean really huge, ears which makes him the laughing stock of the circus audience. Here is where I see a mistake, why is the audience laughing? It is merely a ploy used to make everyone feel even more bad for the Medici Circus clan.

The children are fascinated by the big-eared pachyderm, and through an accident of inhaling a feather, Dumbo sneezes and ends up leaving the ground. Soon the kids discover they can induce Dumbo to fly by flapping his ears and coaxed by a feather.

The circus is about to fold when evil villain V.A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton) and his girlfriend, Collette Marchant (Eva Green) come to see the flying elephant. Vandevere likes what he sees and buys the Medici Circus, and now everyone works for Vandevere.

Unfortunately, V.A.’s money man J. Griffin Remington (Alan Arkin) puts conditions on V.A. and Dumbo’s performance. This enhances the sadness because Dumbo’s mom is taken away again and now the Medici Circus team wants to retaliate.

You can easily imagine what happens. The whole story is to make everyone feel bad, then let Dumbo save the day along with the kids.

The most positive aspect of this film was the quality of the pictures. Burton does this well, and he’s to be commended for this, but otherwise, the movie is predictable and sadly lacking soul. The computer-generated Dumbo was a work of thoughtful art, but at times, he seemed to human-like.

Farrell was reasonably adequate to the role, but there was nothing for him to stretch into and make it his own. Keaton was OK as the villain, he’s good at it. DeVito was charming as the small circus owner, but I found it hard to believe he owned or ran the circus. The actual running of the circus, like putting up tents, seemed to happen through magic. BTW: The tent poles were longer than a train car, so I kept wondering how did they get them from place to place? Parker was stunning. Her intelligence and maturity were well beyond the child character she played. She embraced this role and was the best thing in the film. Hobbins was equal to the task as well, and it is his and Parker’s performances that kept me engaged. Green was excellent and put something of herself into this role and made it work. Arkin was sardonically perfect for this role as an arrogant banker and money man. Ehren Kruger wrote the screenplay which seemed too buttoned up and left little to the imagination. Burton was himself. His visuals were good and generally dark in character. I also thought that Vandevere’s “Dreamworld” was overdone and took the film too far out of any sense of wanting this film to be real and down to earth.

Overall: Everything was perfect and the way it was to be seen, therefore when I left the theater, nothing came with me.