Movie Fest ...
A thunderstorm that brought wild winds and heavy rain left not much to do with my Wednesday evening and with Spike not yet returned from the Glassworks I decided to catch up on films I had missed at release. So I've given over the last few hours to a couple of well-made, entirely contrasting movies: 12 Years A Slave followed by The Grand Budapest Hotel. I much preferred the latter of the two.
Steve McQueen's rendering of the Solomon Northup's memoir was visually stunning in places - arresting landscapes beautifully captured and held, almost longingly, in the frame, an artist's eye for the sky at dusk or swampland almost as an abstract painting. The performances were never less than excellent - Chiwetel Ejiofor, Lupita Nyong'o, Afre Woodard, Paul Dano and Benedict Cumberbatch in particular. But I was far from moved as I'd expected I would have been. There was an air of detachment that felt curiously disengaging about the film. Structurally, it felt odd too as if the director couldn't make up his mind whether to give us a straightforward narrative with beginning, middle and end or, as happened now and ten, to mess with linear time by circling around places, characters and events to reveal some core truth by peeling away layers of perception until only one reading could remain. A greater commitment to that latter approach might have overcome the episodic feel to the movie.
I guess the episodic approach may reflect the structure of the original text, which I've not read (yet). I have, however, read Hariet Jacobs' incredible tale, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published 8 years after Solomon Northup's story. That's certainly episodic, which may reflect the literary style of the time. So this comment may come across as a bit churlish but given the praise heaped on McQueen's film - which I stress is a powerful event - I expected more. Didn't Arthur Haley's Roots - both the novel and the television series - have everything that 12 Years has (excluding the kidnapping component)? And, I have to say, nothing in 12 Years came as close to taking my breath away as many parts of Toni Morrison's Beloved; not even the hanging scenes(s). I'd recommend the film to anyone to watch and I don't mean to damn it with faint praise but it felt just a bit too 'worthy'.
Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel by contrast was, by contrast, original, imaginative, surprising and truly memorable. Contrary to conventional wisdom I feel that movie lovers will be watching Anderson's film long after McQueen's has been filed with all those other officially 'important' documents. Structurally, Grand Budapest, mirrored the novel Cloud Atlas with its set of nested tales - the fictional today (the girl in the graveyard), 1985, 1969, 1932, 1969, 1985, the fictional today (back to the girl in the graveyard). There were the different aspect ratios on the screen with a link, I'm guessing, to time period but I'll have to check that; maybe it was related to point of view. And so many forms of film-making and genre - melodrama, thriller, car chase, romance, animation, Saturday morning thrillers, comedy, horror (hotel corridors straight from The Shining), a parody of The Shawshank Redemption. Everything you could ask for in not much more than an hour and a half. Every performance is pitch perfect. I see now why The Guardian has selected it as one of the top ten movies of 2014. (I've not read the article but shall any minute now).
The thunderstorm has passed. We're back to a warm summer evening and I've caught up a bit on my movies. Life could be worse.
