The fin de siecle for London’s independent music scene showed up a little late, and seemed awfully retro as it passed from existence, at least in the version related in Laura Jean Marsh‘s too-brief, too-thinly-sketched parable “Giddy Stratospheres.”
A bunch of artsy-druggy and fashion-backward types boozed and snorted their way through a reprise of The End of Punk, which faded from favor almost 30 years before this 2007 tale is set.
This “Giddy” time had a dash of New Wave in its sound, fewer piercings and no razor blades, but lots more cocaine, just judging from this.
Marsh — a bit player with a decade in cinema behind her — wrote, directed and stars in this, playing a would-be artist and certified party pussycat — definitely over 30 — captured over a couple of days that spell “The end of all this” to her, at least.
Lara is near the end of her “pure denial on toast” age, according to her running mate, Daniel (Jamal Franklin). He can’t get her to talk about “last night,” about the guy she woke up with, how “wasted…off your face” she was, and what that says about her.
He’s quite fey and has had trouble with drugs and warnings about “that girl” from his worried mother. But heedlessly, the duo boards a train to dash off to the funeral of Lara’s granny. She’s to read a poem, something she can’t fob off on her New York artist-brother (Nick Helm) but something she’s not really up to performing.
She can’t remember to get them off at the right station, forgot to bring money, and only has it together in the context of the arch and Pythonesque “types” who comprise her family, the other mourners. Richard Herring plays her too-too-theatrical Dad, Charlotte Milchard‘s is Dad’s new wife, Fifi (Lara’s dizzy nemesis) and Charlotte Weston is her caring but indulgent Mum.
Flashbacks give us a whiff of the club life, bands that sound like the early ’80s (New Order was their god…apparently) and Lara’s disreputable crew.
It’s all winding down, and that’s what the movie shows us, “giddy” stoners carrying on until that “Trainspotting” moment when she sees the dead end.
There’s a heady sense of “vibe” here, old feuds, “friends” who aren’t dependable and rivals who aren’t dependably at odds.
It’s a little hard to make heads or tails out of, what with thick accents, the under-identified characters and their relationship to each other. The film needed more scenes, more background, more fizzy fun and more pathos for any of this to come off properly.
Marsh seems a trifle old for the part, which may be the point. But that’s the lure and the trap of a “scene,” isn’t it? You show up, very young, with the energy and ambition and talent to master your art, and the good times and the drugs and the “going out” and endless fear of missing out have friends remembering the “grant” you got to study art and see “what a waste” you’ve made of things.
I’m grading this class project/music history remembrance “incomplete.”
Rating: unrated, drug and alcohol abuse, profanity
Cast: Laura Lean Marsh, Jamal Franklin, Richard Herring, Charlotte Milchard and Charlotte Weston
Credits: Scripted and directed by Laura Jean Marsh. A Bulldog release.
The gloriously sentimental 9/11 musical “Come from Away” comes to Apple TV with all its Canadian cuddliness intact. This filmed version of the Tony winning show captures the charms of this folksy production, about the good people of Newfoundland and their role in coming to the aid of thousands of stranded airline passengers on that fateful day back in 2001.
Using real locals and composites of the 7,000 strangers “come from away” to “the rock,” the giant remote airport on the North Atlantic in Gander, Irene Sankoff and David Hein crafted a feel-good celebration of Canadian empathy and compassion, and the unique hospitality of a windswept town at the edge of a continent.
A cast of 12 assume multiple roles as Newfoundlanders and passengers, pilots and stewardesses, mayors and the constable, an animal shelter worker, a profiled Egyptian passenger and barflies, a gay couple, strangers who connect and others worried and wary and the lone local TV reporter, new to the job, who captured this miracle of logistics and triumph of generosity as it happened.
It’s as Canadian as Tim Horton’s, as warm as “a cuppa” whether that cuppa be of tea, coffee or Irish whiskey.
“Fish and chips and shipwrecks, that’s Newfoundland” the mayor (Joel Hatch) and ensemble’s opening number proclaims. The school bus drivers are on strike. The constable (Paul Whitty) is keeping the peace, which is peaceful. The airport is set for another routine day of limited arrivals, its days as a refueling station for almost all transatlantic flights receding into the past. In 2001, much of the place was overdue for a planned demolition.
And then there it is, on the radio, the TV. All these flights are diverted as North America’s skies empty of planes, with every landing flight a potential threat.
Newfoundlanders? They’re singing “Can I do something, I need to do something! Because I can’t watch the news.”
So they start converting schools, a Salvation Army Camp and the like into shelters. They empty the stores, with shopkeepers telling them “Take what’cha need.”
A pioneering female airline pilot (JennColella) sings of her struggles to get this coveted job, and remembers a colleague she learns died that day.
And on the planes — fear, uncertainty, everyone kept in the dark about the “incident” in the U.S. Unable to call home, unable to deplane, having run through every movie on every flight (38 jetliners), the “complimentary booze” comes out.
As somber and sad as all this was and is, “Come from Away” is never more than a minute or two removed from reminding us that there was an awful lot of disarming, homespun hilarity.
A bus driver (Tim Walton) — they put their strike on hold — turns late night tour guide as he shuttles people from all over the world through the woods to a shelter.
“Dot dare in de middle of the road? Dot’s a moose. Yah. She’ll move when she’s good an’ready.”
Local cuisine earns raised eyebrows — “Cod au gratin. Fish. With cheese!” “Are there no vegetables in Canada?”
The cub reporter (Emily Walton) does live updates, becoming a town crier as the Newfoundlanders rally, and maybe get a bit carried away as they do.
“For tha’LOVE of God, stop bringin’ toilet paper to the Lion’s Club!”
And the frightened and suspicious, the mistrusting, the worried-sick and the ethnically-profiled find moment after moment of common ground and communication as Operation Yellow Ribbon springs to life.
The stage magic here is the simplicity of the production — just characters in chairs, swaying in time to simulate a bus ride, singing as they do. All it takes to turn a few tables with people seated at them into an air traffic control tower is dimming the lights and breaking out flashlights.
Six passenger cardiologists have their “Magic Mike” moment, volunteering to clean the toilets at their shelter.
And with an accompanying on-stage musical ensemble and lots of booze passed around, can a lesson in singing a local sea chantey be far behind?
It’s an old fashioned show, not remotely as hip as the Lin Manuel Miranda musicals that have turned such folksiness into antiques. The songs are pleasantly forgettable, even as the get the job done.
But as characters riff through personal stories, slip into Swahili, Hindi, Arabic, Hebrew and Newfie — “Lard thunderin’ JESUS!” — and the plucky have their moment to shine, “Come from Away” reminds us of a time when people gathered together and did the right thing, and those they were doing it for appreciated the heck out of them for it.
Rating: TV-14, profanity, drunking
Cast: Petrina Bromley, Jenn Colella, De’Lon Grant, Q. Smith, Caesar Samoya, Tony LePage, Joel Hatch, Astrid Van Wieren, Emily Walton and Paul Whitty.
Credits: Directed by Christopher Ashley, musical by David Hein and Irene Sankoff. An Apple TV+ release.
How much should one give away about “Post Mortem,” this six episode Norwegian series set in a funeral home and a nursing home in Skarne, a little town where the running gag — among cops and morticians alike — is that “no one ever dies in Skarnes?”
Saying “It’s ‘Six Feet Under’ meets ‘True Blood'” is stretching things a tad. Because it’s just not as interesting or engrossing or darkly funny as either. But yes, there’s a character who turns up as a corpse in the opening scene, and then wakes up, just after a coroner has joked “We declare Live Hallangen (the undead woman’s name) open for business!”
As Live (Kathrine Thorborg Johansen) does not sputter the Norwegian word for “BRAINS!” upon awakening after that first incision, we guess “Oh, vampire,” even though the script tries ever-so-hard to hide the obvious.
Live doesn’t know how she showed up, stiff as a board, in a field outside of town. The cops (Kim Fairchild and André Sørum) do nothing to disavow the local joke that Skarnes would be “the best place to commit a murder because” of the lazy” police.
The chief, Judith, fusses over “natural causes” and dismisses every suggestion otherwise because of “budgetary” considerations involved in an autopsy. When Live turns out to not be dead, Judith offers her most heartfelt apology.
“In our defense, you looked really dead!”
Reinert, her subordinate, frets over who they call to get the body. Because this isn’t “NCIS,” Judith scolds. There’s no calling an ambulance (money). Reinert is reluctant to summon the only funeral parlor in town. Because he recognizes Live. She’s the daughter of old Arvid (Terje Strømdahl) and sister of fellow mortician Odd (Elias Holmen Sørensen). That would be an awful way to give her family this terrible news.
It’s just that the old man takes it well. Or well enough. It’s Live’s awakening on the autopsy table that chills him to the core. What does he know?
And whatever Judith says, Reinert’s sure some crime was committed that put Live out in the middle of a field, seemingly dead. As Live gets a few flashes of her memory back, the long process of piecing together what happened begins, and the series settles into her finding clues, evading detection and adjusting to her new hyper-sensitive hearing and her ability to see veins pulsing beneath the pale Norwegian skin of pale Norwegian necks.
Did I mention Live works in a nursing home? With her sister-in-law, Rose (Sara Khorami)? Who’s trying to have a baby with Odd?
Petter Holmsen’s series peaks with that first episode, and I’d go so far as to say that it peaks in the first couple of scenes in that episode. Everything that follows is about the tedium of a small town where “nobody dies,” the struggles of keeping a funeral parlor in the black when there simply aren’t enough corpses to turn to cash and Live’s efforts to either adapt to her new life cravings, or fight them off, and keep “lazy” cop Reinert from figuring out what’s really going on here.
The best moment for me with the obvious financially-strapped glee that the morose, broke Arvid lets show when he gets that first phone call from the police.
Johansen makes an affecting lead, trying to play cagey and cracking under the strain at the same time. And Sørensen has his moments as a guy wrestling with a funeral business that stretches back five generations — to 1914 — and yet has only survived due to a Trump level cooking of the books and dodging of debts.
Yes, there are political jokes (in Norwegian, with English subtitles, or dubbed into English).
The problem is that the dark humor isn’t humorous enough and the darkness too light to hold interest on its own. The series empties its clip in the opening episode, and little that follows reloads it.
Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity
Cast: Kathrine Thorborg Johansen, Elias Holmen Sørensen, André Sørum, Kim Fairchild, Sara Khorami and Terje Strømdahl
Credits: Created by Petter Holmsen. A Netflix release.
Running time: six episodes @:44 each
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John Steinbeck wrote “The Grapes of Wrath” with a mixture of outrage and pity, a novel with a stark, almost Biblical warning embedded in every page.
John Ford’s classic film leans towards the sentimental, but he kept some of Steinbeck’s fury — just enough to make this, in my mind, the only Labor Day movie that matters.
We romanticize the past, and nobody was better at that than Ford. But in 1939, he was making a movie in the latter stages of a global financial crisis and the tail end of a national disaster — the Dust Bowl. He couldn’t have known this movie would stand the test of time and earn rebroadcasts every year when we kick back, crack open a cold one and forget what Labor Day was all about. He made a movie about his “present,” with oppression and predatory capitalism and widespread intense poverty and hardship, people starving while others lived lives as far removed from that as escapist screwball comedy millionaires.
I remember bawling my eyes out when my family watched it on TV as a child. But sentiment and tragedy aside, here’s what I’m taking away from watching it again this Labor Day.
We can’t confer sainthood on everyone who lived through the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl that just made it worse.
Steinbeck’s book and Ford’s film reminds us there were plucky survivors and sad-eyed cynics who just gave up. There were good Samaritans and folks without a hint of pity for another person’s struggle.
We’ve always had an awful, self serving or self-deluded minority struggling to keep The People down.
There were miserly oligarchs who exploited a bad situation with no compunction or humanity. And there were always cops — state police and their heartless cheerleaders (right wing mobs) of the day — willing to back up the monied and keep “The People” in their place.
“What’d you do in the first place?”
“I talked back.”
Timely? Timeless. That what a movie that still has something to say to viewers 81 years after it’s release is.
Worth chewing on as you’re moved by Ma Joad’s (Jane Darwell) plight, that of her boy Tom (Henry Fonda), the very human, “touched” and Christ-like Jim Crasy (John Carradine) and everyone else we see in this film, crafted in a way that has haunted generations who knew something of the want depicted in it, and generations griping about having to wait on their delayed iPhone to come in.
November 12 Netflix gets into the Reynolds, Rock and Gal G action biz with this one, which has a whiff of a Reynolds film here, a Dwayne Johnson outing there, and the Bruce Willis all star actioner “RED.”
“Wife of a Spy” doesn’t traffic in most of the tropes of the espionage thriller. The espionage takes place off-camera. There are no shootouts, and the closest thing to a chase is a bit of the old “I think we’re being followed.”
Kiyoshi Kurasawa’s understated thriller is about trust and how it is the ultimate test of a couple’s connection, about the seemingly simple but fraught logistics of plotting an escape from a fascist police state, and about feeling morally out of step with your homeland.
Considering Japan’s long history of cinematic World War II denialism — the days when a movie like “The Last Emperor” or any film related to “The Rape of Nanjing” were banned — it’s a remarkably frank film that gets at the heart of questioning nationalism in general and “My country, right or wrong” in particular.
Yû Aoi has the title role, that of Satoko, the trusting, adoring wife of Yusaku Fukuhara (Issey Takahashi). He’s a Kobe fabrics importer/exporter, and the film opens with the arrest of a British business associate of his.
“What has Japan become?” the portly Brit protests. It’s 1940, and at least for the moment, Japan isn’t at war with any Western country.
A childhood friend Taiji (Masahiro Higashide), now an officer in military counter-intelligence, stops by and ever-so-politely confronts Yusako with his association with the accused.
“You must choose your friends,” he warns (in Japanese, with English subtitles). “Times are changing.”
In the streets of Kobe, on the docks — everywhere it seems — formations of troops are parading or marching off to ship overseas, to China, which Japan invaded years before, or to Indochina. Japan forces France to allow it to occupy the French colony after Dunkirk.
The people crowd the streets as they pass chanting “Banzai!” But not Yusako. A wiry, confident man of means, he strikes us as a cool customer. No, this British fellow isn’t a spy, he laughs.
At home, Yusaku films himself, Satoko and his nephew Fumio (Ryôta Bandô) in short, silent melodramas using his Pathe 9.5 mm camera. They show these arty potboilers to their friends.
But Yusaku is cagey, and there’s a distance between him and his submissive but more Westernized and thus less passive wife. She’s concerned about his travel plans to Japanese-occupied Manchuria, the “Settlers’ Paradise” that Japan renamed Manchukuo and which its Kwantung Army runs, encouraging Japanese immigration in the creation of what their fascist friend Hitler would later call “living space.”
Yusaku’s blather about “opportunities” there placate Satoko. Or do they? And when he returns, he’s even cagier than before. He’s seen things, awful things.
She fears for her marriage, and her mutual friendship with the suspicious Taiji plants further seeds of doubt. Is she the wife of a spy?
The conflicts here are mostly conflicting loyalties, and Aoi and Takashi manage a brittle, careful couples’ waltz around what he might be doing and her thoughts about his close association with a Brit, and plans to travel to America, which he saw, briefly, as a sailor years before.
“But they’re our enemies,” she protests. Not his, he insists. “I’m a cosmopolitan!”
That pose grates a bit in an era where bigshots of business around the world are pursuing pan-national agendas and acting without regard to “national interests.” But with the ggift of hindsight and guessing what Yusaku has learned, we buy in.
Will Sakoto?
The screenplay sets up expectations, and then sets out to upend them. We’re invited to over-estimate one spouse and underestimate the other. We see the bond grow as they scramble to turn their Yen into “metal” — jewelry you can take on a trip, one that might be permanent.
Kurosawa — “Tokyo Sonata” is still his best-known film in the West (and no, he’s not related to Akira Kurosawa) — tries to tell an expansive, saga-length story on a budget, taking the characters on into World War II. That leads to anticlimactic moments in what plays as an epilogue that rather dull the impact of the film’s true climax.
Similar movies set in Germany (“13 Minutes,” “Sophie Scholl”) managed far more suspense and pathos.
And the English speaking bit players seriously let down the film. I could round up more convincing actors at any regional theater in America.
But Kurosawa has made a period piece with believable characters and intrigues that generally avoid melodrama. The stakes are human-scaled and deathly personal. And the script and players ensure that we ride out the same conflicting loyalties and emotions that they do, forcing ourselves into their shoes and never letting hindsight give us an easy way out.
