Category Archives: Movies

On Holiday by Mistake: The Enduring Legacy of ‘Withnail and I’

by John Carvill

Oomska takes a fond look back at the film that gave our site its title: Bruce Robinson’s ‘Withnail & I’.

Forget Ealing Comedies and Kitchen Sink Dramas, ‘Withnail and I’ is the quintessential British film. Truly unique, impossible to adequately describe, in a sense it’s an English ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, with a dash of Gustave Flaubert’s ‘Bouvard and Pecuchet’. The largely irrelevant plot follows a few fraught days in the bibulous lives of two unemployed actors living in bohemian squalor in London at the tail end of the 1960s. Borrowing a cottage in the Lake District in an attempt to rejuvenate, they find that they’ve “gone on holiday by mistake”. The idyllic rural retreat turns out to be a “horrible little shack”, they have trouble with the menacing locals, and their problems culminate in the arrival of the cottage’s owner, Withnail’s Uncle Monty (a career-making performance from Richard Griffiths), in hot and unwelcome homosexual pursuit of the resolutely heterosexual Marwood (the titular ‘I’).

As quotable as Shakespeare, funnier than Monty Python, sadder than Shelley’s Adonais, writer-director Bruce Robinson’s script is a work of literary genius: resonant and evocative as a great novel, and obviously revelling in the richness of the English language. The pyrotechnical brilliance of Richard E Grant’s Withnail threatens to overshadow Paul McGann’s lower-key portrayal of Marwood, but both performances are equally accomplished, and both men are more than capable of transmitting Robinson’s mastery of idiom, nuance, and laconic inflection. McGann’s ability to exude nerviness is wonderful, the solemnity he imparts to key lines such as “I’ve been called a ponce” an unfailing delight. For his part, the sense of bitter dissatisfaction with an endlessly inadequate world and tragically disappointing life that Grant gets into Withnail’s line, “How could I possibly know what we should do? What should we do?,” is phenomenal.

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Self-Styled Siren

by John Carvill

Websites We Love – Part 4 – Self-Styled Siren

“Let me introduce you to, uh, a friend of ours…”

There are millions of movie sites out there, but here’s one which offers an irresistable balance between erudition and enjoyment, someone who takes cinema seriously but without undue solemnity. In short, the Siren knows her movies inside out, and – crucially – knows that movies are there to be enjoyed. Covering a range of old and new, with an empathis on the classics, there’s always something interesting to be found on the site’s front page, including, at present, one of the best writeups we’ve seen on Scorsese’s ‘Hugo’.

Dig a little deeper and you’ll soon find articles which – like this one on Raoul Walsh’s ‘The Strawberry Blonde’ (1941), starring James Cagney, Rita Hayworth, Olivia de Havilland, Jack Carson, and Alan Hale – cover their subject so thouroughly and entertainingly that you’d struggle to find anything left to say. And yet the quality of the numerous comments posted by the Siren’s equally knowledgeable readership gives the lie to such notions.
 

- by John Carvill

 

You Don’t Know How to Dunk: a Clark Gable Double Bill

by John Carvill

Oomska Recommends – Classic Hollywood Double Bills

You can’t get much more classically Golden Age than Clark Gable, so let’s indulge in a double bill featuring the ‘King of Hollywood’, one from his prime, the other the last film he ever made.

Part One: ‘The Misfits’

First up, it’s John Huston’s ‘The Misfits’ (1961), in which a weathered, crumpled-looking Gable leads a stupendously great cast including Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach, Thelma Ritter and – of course – Marilyn Monroe, for whom this would also be the last film. The problems afflicting the production of this film are legendary. Both Monroe and director John Huston were hammering the booze (and, in Monroe’s case, pills) pretty hard, Huston was in the grip of a gambling addiction, a recent car accident had left Clift needing resonctructive surgery, screenwriter Arthur Miller’s marriage to Marilyn was breaking up, and all concerned were beaten down by the extreme heat of the Nevada desert. And it’s very sad to reflect that, within just a handful of years, all the principal cast – except for Wallach who is still with us today, aged 96 – would be dead.

Gable didn’t even live to see the completed film, suffering a fatal heart attack – said to have been triggered at least in part by over-exerting himself in the stunt department, wrangling horses etc – immediately after shooting finished. And Gable only got involved in the stunts because he was bored waiting around for the forever late-arriving Marilyn Monroe, who is as luminescent as ever in this often overlooked film. Was Monroe ever more beautiful than in the crisp, crystalline black and white footage shot by veteran cinematographer Russell Metty? If so, not often.

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The End of Oscars

by Stephen Glaister

The End of Oscars (as) History?

Eliminating Testimonial Awards from the Academy Awards Telecast is a Depressing Mistake

by Stephen Glaister

For many[1] viewers[2] the high point of the 2010 Golden Globe Awards was Martin Scorsese’s Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in motion pictures.[3] Scorsese’s clips package wowed (at least up to its embedded Shutter Island trailer), and his acceptance speech[4] eloquently testified that film is both massively collaborative (“[T]hat making movies is a collaborative process is not a cliché, it’s the truth”) and deeply historical:

“Because, as William Faulkner said: The past is never dead. It’s not even past. As far as I’m concerned, making films and preserving them are the same thing. In this room, none of us who make films and watch them would be here without the people who came here before us.”

The Oscars’ counterparts of the DeMille Award – principally Honorary Awards and the Thalberg Award (for producers) – have, similarly, long provided ceremony highlights. For example, while recent Oscars telecasts have lived in the ratings shadow of the 1998 ceremony at which Titanic won 11 Awards, on the night itself, Stanley Donen’s Honorary Award[5] upstaged James Cameron’s juggernaut. Scorsese introduced Donen’s clips package, which spanned immortal ’50s musicals with Kelly and Astaire, and ultra-chic ’60s confections with Grant, Hepburn, Loren, Peck, and Finney, then Donen accepted his Award, saying that he should really be giving it to the long overdue Scorsese. Next, in two graceful minutes, Donen serenaded his Oscar statuette with a verse of ‘Cheek to Cheek’, brought down the house with an elegant soft-shoe routine, and humbly and wittily saluted 25 of the key writers, songsmiths, and actors who’d made his directorial success possible. It was a sublime moment. Hollywood’s glamorous past (and its past’s past – Astaire premiered[6] ‘Cheek to Cheek’ in 1935′s Top Hat) indeed wasn’t even past, and the implicit argument that Hollywood c.1998 would have been quite different but for the efforts of Donen & co. was made. The evening’s other shenanigans (from Bart the Bear delivering an envelope, to Cameron’s grimace-inducing ‘I’d like to do a few seconds of silence in remembrance of the 1500 men, women and children who died when the great ship died’) looked simultaneously pinched and overdone by comparison.

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The Kids Are All Right

by Anthony Bryan

Directed by Lisa Cholodenko. Starring Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Mia Wasikowska, Josh Hutcherson

by Anthony Bryan

It’s got Julianne Moore and Annette Bening in it. What could go wrong?

Well, they play a married couple, married to each other. Of course they do – how else can you cast two middle-aged women in the lead?

And they’re sunshine-class Californian – obviously, they have to be, otherwise they’d spend most of the film being chased by pick-up trucks.

And they have two teenage kids. Just turned eighteen, ‘Joni’ (yup, named after Mitchell) and younger brother, ‘Laser’ (named after the nightclub in Stoke), who is at that age (fifteen) where he may be pining for a male father figure – as the opening scene telegraphs when we see him standing back while his meathead mate, Clay (named after raw earthy stuff that is easily malleable, sets really hard but usually ends up broken in bits) roughhouses with his dad.

And it just so happens that just turned eighteen Joni is now officially old enough to legally contact their sperm Donor Dad.

‘Donor Dad’, get past the seedy bit and it kind of sounds like a super hero ‘Donor Dad (comes) to the rescue…’ And, you know what? In a way he does. See, the ‘moms’, like any long-time married couple trying to keep it all together, are straining a bit: Nic (Bening), a Doctor and the main bread-winner, is struggling to accept that her neat family unit is going to fracture when Joni leaves for college in the Fall, while Jules (Moore), who has sacrificed her personal ambitions to be the stay-at-home mom, is now trying to build a new career, and grow her confidence, as a landscape gardener. So, right now, neither of the moms are a barrel of laughs.

But Donor Dad, Paul – when they finally track him down in a single phone call – is full of easy-going cool (and full of himself).  He dropped out of school  – ‘I’m a doer’ – but that’s ok because he has his own groovy restaurant, and grows his own  organic produce. He’s really hands-on – gardening in the morning, manning front-of-house in the evening and filling in those split shifts by getting hands-on with his restaurant manager Tanya (Yaya DaCosta). What a guy. And, of course, he’s played by Mark Ruffalo. Who can do that easy smile, syncopated semi-mumble thing sooooo well. Hell, he could even charm a lesbian into some split shift action. You can see where this is going.

So on paper – director Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg wrote the script – there’s a lot to go wrong. There’s enough ropey stuff going on in ‘The Kids are All Right’ for the film to hang itself several times over. All it needs to do is push the same sex marriage comedy thing, get too heavy with the ‘modern’ versus ‘traditional’ family thing, or slide into the bottomless shitpit of modern middle-class mores. Easy. Getting the balance right, so your eyes don’t bleed, your brain doesn’t die and you don’t gag, that’s hard.  Cholodenko pulls it off but, at times, it’s a close thing.

There’s the time when the ‘moms’, almost giddily, suspect Laser is ‘exploring’ with his meathead mate Clay – ‘I can’t believe you thought I was gay’ – oh how we laugh, instead of feeling patronised.

There’s the times that Jules falls back into the traditional comfort zone, and bed, of Paul – it seems kind of reasonable instead of a cheap stunt, and, frankly, insulting.

And there’s the time-warped 70s psychobabble – which you just kind of go with, instead of going out of the cinema.

To bound along this kind of tightrope, you’ve got to be fearless. The cast aren’t afraid to push as much, or as little, emotion out there as the scene needs. And Cholodenko isn’t afraid to give them the time and space to do it – the camera is happy to linger long after the script has played out.

It makes for tense viewing. There’s a dinner party turn-around scene where Nic and Paul duet Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case of You’, over some rare Argentinean steak. It could, at a push, be tender. Halfway in it gets pretty raw, and by the end it’s a bloody mess that makes you feel squeamish and wrong.  But then, as you’re trying to hold it all down, Nic makes a discovery, everything changes and we rejoin the dinner party from Nic’s, now poisoned, POV and get to feel sick in a good way – a right rhubarb crumble and custard walloping.

Despite the high wire act, ‘The Kids Are All Right’ is really just sauntering down the rather well worn path of ‘Gosh this marriage and family thing can be a bit tricky and messy’. And of course they’re right. It can. We know. Because we’ve seen it, lots of times, in MOR movies and, if we’re not careful, ‘moving’ TV dramas.

The skill is getting us to see it from a different vantage. At this level Jules can even stand up and do a tearful monologue on the subject, trotting out lines like,  ‘Marriage is a marathon’ – and you take it on, you think about it, you’re even moved by it.

Just don’t look down, and you’ll be all right.