Bob Hoskins

Everyone always makes a fuss of big names who die, and of course they’re each special in their own way but even so, Bob Hoskins was different. Seems to have been a lovely guy, in all sorts of ways, which is a bonus, but as an actor he seemed to get to parts that the others didn’t reach. We’ll all have our own favourites. Mine include his desperate concern for Cathy Tyson in Mona Lisa, and his amazing ability to interact with thin air. But right at the top of the pyramid will be that weekly dose of heartbreak we got as we tuned into Pennies from Heaven. Somehow, he made a middle-aged, frustrated failure an Everyman with whom we were totally involved. Thanks, Bob. In your case, we really shan’t forget.

Nebraska

And still they come. So many really good films this year already. Nebraska isn’t everyone’s taste, won’t blow so many people away like Gravity or 12 years a slave. But it is beautiful, considered and a pleasure to watch. Intelligent throughout. What other director would choose to make a contemporary film in black and white? It’s not pretending to be something from the 20s or 40s. It’s a detailed, honest portrait of an old guy falling apart, and his pointless journey with his son to claim a million dollars that he hasn’t really won. The photography is riveting; lots of flat, horizontal landscape, with fabulous music. You just sit, and look and listen. Not as edgy or busy as American Hustle, but a considered look at a few lives, powerfully presented. Very ordinary people, acted and directed with total conviction.

Philip Seymour Hoffman

“Where do we begin – where will he end?” that’s David Thomson, marvelling at Hoffman’s varied talents and massive potential in his Biographical Dictionary of Film. As of today, we know the answer to the second bit: he’ll end up dead at 46, from a drug overdose. It’s heartbreaking. The films I can remember immediately are the Talented Mr. Ripley, Hard eight, Capote and The Master, but I know there’s tons more, and in all of them he’s totally watchable and exactly what the film requires. Such a sad, sad waste.

Blue is the Warmest Colour

So this is how it feels to be a film critic. I’m not, i’m just a retired person with time on my hands, but there are so many good films around at the moment that it seems a shame to miss any of them. This is the French one about two young lesbians, with the detailed sexual nudity. And also the backstage story of the two young actresses who appeared smiling with their director at the film festival, but later slagged him off for his exploitative approach.
Generally, it doesn’t feel like that. “It’s three hours”, the woman at the box office said, as though we might demand our money back if we hadn’t been warned in advance. It doesn’t feel like that. The time flies by, because these lives feel real and interesting, and the characters are filmed so closely we shared every aspect of their lives. School, with the intense teenage gossip, and the fascinating philosophical nature of the lessons, is just riveting. It’s only the sex scenes that disappoint, full of grunting action but lacking speech or a real sense of the people involved.

12 years a slave

It is. It really is a very special kind of film. I suppose, having seen Hunger and Shame, I knew it would be, but the force and detail of it still comes across as a kind of shock. Steve McQueen (that’s the cuddly black bear of an intellectual, not the white actor with the cold blue eyes) really is quite special, very thoughtful and intense, but without the extravert shoutiness that some directors favour. Everybody involved in the film talks about it seriously, as something that required total effort and concentration, and the result shows on the screen. Sometimes it’s painful and appaling, but it’s always totally watchable, superbly acted and brilliantly filmed.

Mandela

Well, it’s three days since I went to a movie, so off I go again. Mandela this time, very much in the news, and I’ve just watched a really interesting TV documentary, including some articulate radicals who feel betrayed by the whole reconciliation thing. The new film is good, well worth watching. solid rather than electric, but with terrific performances from Idris Elba and Naomie Harris – the impossible Winnie seems understandable as never before. And Mandela’s not the saint we get on the news. Womanising, and ruthlessly arbitrary when it comes to politics – Winnie gets told off for not accepting the leadership line from the ANC, but when Nelson’s outvoted in a council meeting by 4-1, he still goes ahead anyway, and negotiates with the whites on his own. a whiteknuckly ride – or hugely egotistical?

Gravity

Finally, I make the effort to catch Gravity, because so many people say it’s good. Mercifully, I follow the explicit advice to see it in 3D. More complicated arrangements, and more expensive – but wow! For once, there really is a reason for all the 3D fuss. You’re there, with her, in the capsule, in space. And the sheer scale of the photography is mind-blowing. So many stunning, other-worldly pictures, on that huge screen. Acting’s good, too. a massive tour de force from Sandra Bullock, all the more impressive because that’s a sentence lots of people never thought they’d see. OK, she’s done some stuff that’s good, and other stuff that’s not so good, but they’ve taken a gamble on her and she’s worked her socks off, and the result is excellent. I don’t care if there are scientific imperfections, or the script lacks verbal subtlety. I just haven’t ever had a viewing experience quite like this, and surely that’s one of the reasons we still have cinemas – while we still do…

Maestro Thomson

I’ve just finished The Big Screen, David Thomson’s history of the movies. Over 500 pages, but it slipped past like a dream. It goes on the shelf alongside Have You Seen? ( A thousand one-page reviews of individual films) and his Biographical Dictionary of Film, which would definitely be my desert island book. He knows so much, has seen so much, yet remains totally fresh, opinionated, witty – a joy to read. By comparison, everybody else’s comments on films just seem that bit duller, as though they’re not really trying.

American Hustle

Now that’s more like it. Finally escaping from lousy weather and even lousier mainstream TV (three showings of Love Actually in one week?) I got out to the cinema, and saw a current film that’s smart, sexy, witty and made me laugh out loud. that hasn’t happened for a while. Directed by David O Russell, which for me means Three Kings and silver Linings Playbook, both of which I really enjoyed. As the title suggests, this is about con artists conning each other, in an intricate series of bluffs, but there’s also real feeling and tension in there, and a terrific cast – Christian Bale, Amy Adams and Bradley Cooper. Plus the wonderful Jennifer Lawrence, who in my book can do no wrong.

The Gatekeepers

Finally caught up with this documentary, which I’ve known about for most of this year but haven’t been able to catch. It sounds improbable. Radical Israeli film maker interviews six previous heads of the Israeli secret service, who piece together a withering indictment of current Israeli policy. They’re a mixed bunch, canny and ruthless as you’d expect, talking calmly about Palestinians being beaten to death, or neat assassinations they have planned. But they’re also scathing about the lack of clear overall strategy, the dishonesty of government spokesmen, and the huge cost to Israel – let alone the Palestinians – of the current occupation. This ought to be shown on mainstream TV, at least once a week.

Hannah Arendt

It is a kind of miracle. I can drive to Ludlow, and watch this niche film about the intellectual Hannah Arendt, going to Jerusalem to report the trial of Eichmann. She’s a distinctive, demanding character, who takes no prisoners and often exasperates her friends. But she’s fiercely intelligent, and this is that rare treat – a film about thinking. We’ve had the slushy side, Zhivago or Keats composing their poetry on screen, but this is a close, unsentimental portrait of how the writing business might actually work. No sex, no explosions and a lot of talk – but it’s magical.

Philomena

Heard an interview with Steve Coogan today, in which he was rambling to the point of incoherence. So it’s just as well that I’d seen what he’s talking about, which is the excellent film Philomena. It centres on Judi Dench, who – as a lifetime of it testifies – remains utterly watchable, with Coogan as the cynical journalist Sexsmith, gradually drawn into her quest to find the son sold off by the nuns fifty years earlier in punishment for her sin of being a single young mother. Both as scriptwriter and actor Coogan is tactful and restrained, and I never thought I’d be writing that. It also has Anna Maxwell Martin, who will be my second Judi Dench for the rest of my life. Not flashy, not beautiful, but utterly watchable. I’ve seen her do a range of stuff, and she’s always convincing.

The Squid and the Whale

“If you liked that, you’ll love this…” Sneaky when amazon do it, but it’s a logical way to proceed. Having really enjoyed Frances Ha a couple of weeks back, I now get the dvd of The Squid and the Whale  (same director) from Lovefilm. They’re both neat, witty, economical, but this is much more about blokes – two brothers and their dad, heavily outnumbering the sublime Laura Linney. (Frances Ha, acted and mainly written by Greta Gellwig, centres on a female friendship). Baumbach comes over as very smart, despite his habit of saying “you know” every other sentence. There’s a great bit where he’s talking about Bernard, the self-important intellectual dad played by Jeff Daniels, and he describes having to resist the Hollywood urge to impose an upward arc, redeem this self-centred fool. No. This is a guy who starts off as a painfully self-centred fool, and ends up the same way, probably sadder but not much wiser. Terrific.

The Stuart Hall Project

When I was a student teacher in the sixties, one of my bibles was The Popular Arts, by Hall and Whannel. Leavis didn’t have to be right. Great literature wasn’t the only route to intelligent discrimination, and mass media wasn’t an impersonal sea of corruption, dragging adolescents down to damnation. Teachers prepared to think could profitably encourage pupils to examine TV, newspapers or popular music.

For fifty years since the name of Stuart Hall (no, not the guy from It’s a Knockout) has been synonymous with intelligent, critical thinking, raising questions and valuing ideals which lazier figures would rather dismiss. This film, The Stuart Hall Project, is both a celebration of Hall’s work, and a history of the last fifty years. As a fellow leftie and grandad, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Actors in films

So many different ways of making a film. I’ve just seen 360, the most recent project of Fernando Mereillas, whose City of God and Constant Gardener were both terrific. This is wide-ranging and tricksy, a thread of interconnecting stories which range from Bratislava to Vienna to Paris to London to Denver to Phoenix and back againt. Star-studded cast, who each fly in for a week’s filming and then fly out again. On the background documentary they rave about how pleasant and easy this is, such a change from the long-term immersion of normal filming. And they all love Fernando, who is supportive, encouraging and very flexible.

Peter Bogdanovich, by all accounts, was much less endearing. Making The Last Picture Show, which I watched again last month, he deliberately segregated his actors from the crew, kept them together as a tight, intimate bunch, and stopped other people trying to talk to them about their roles. It was a young, largely inexperienced cast, spending a long time in a small Texas town that was suspicious of the way it would be presented in the film. But it worked. The actors gelled, held together as a loyal committed group, and helped make a powerful, moving film that is deeper, stronger, better than the slick but rootless 360, which has clever tricks and a few smart lines, but very little heart.

Edith Tudor Hart - A Hi-Jacking

After the New Lanark site, we go into Edinburgh for the day, which is always a joy. Today there’s a photo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, of work by Edith Tudor Hart. Amazing woman. Viennese communist, taking refuge from the Nazis, marries a Brit doctor, and accompanies him wherever he goes, taking photos of poor families, a minsers’ protest march, a man holding a small bird. All direct, sympathetic, totally unsentimental. And in her spare time she’s a communist spy, running messages for Burgess and Blunt, and apparently responsible for recruiting Kim Philby.

In the afternoon Hilary and I go to A Hi-Jacking, at the reliably brilliant Cameo cinema. It’s about a real-life hijacking, with Somali pirates taking over a Danish ship, but we don’t actually see the take-over, or the rescue attempts, or the daring escape at midnight. This is contemporary Danish, so there’s a couple of Borgen regulars, and a really close examination of what this process means, for negotiators, bosses, hostages and families. The alternatives to Hollywood get clearer all the time.

Chasing Ice

The joys of rural culture. Off to Ludlow again, to see another movie. there’s people my age in Wenlock who’d regard driving twenty miles to see a film as fanatical, but to me it’s part of the programme. They’ve always had a wonderful selection, but I gave up going after the fourth occasion in two years when I drove there, and they either hadn’t got the film, or it was the wrong size for the projector, or the equipment broke down (twenty minutes into Blue Valentine).

And I’m so glad I did. Chasing Ice is a wonderful documentary, about an American cameraman who had this hunch that photographs taken over a period could dramatically convey the nature and speed of climate change. It’s won all kinds of prizes, and for good reasons. There’s some stunning individual pictures, but the sustained intelligence and commitment of the whole venture is deeply impressive. This is a man who’s changed his mind, and thinks the issue is important enough to take over his life and put his health at risk. Well worth it, so far as I’m concerned. But find it, and judge for yourself.

Nashville

Robert Altman’s Nashville is one of my favourite films. It’s a potent mix of politics, country music and personal heartbreak. So a new TV series which pinches the same title is bound to be a pale imitation, right? Wrong. More 4’s Nashville, (written by Callie Khouri, who wrote Thelma and Louise) is also a mix of politics, country music and personal heartbreak, and it’s also terrific. More 4, Thursday nights, ten o’clock. (I am not being paid for this commercial).

Argo

Went with a friend to see Argo, Ben Affleck’s thriller about smuggling US officials out of revolutionary Iran. I know Affleck’s more than a pretty face, and loved Gone, Baby, Gone – a really intelligent, complex piece of work. Much less happy with this. My friend loved it. It’s gripping, incredibly easy to watch, and occasionally very funny – John Goodman and Alan Arkin having a ball as Hollywood execs helping out on the imaginary film front. So why wasn’t I more enthusiastic?

It’s partly US against the rest. The climax of the ecape is a powerful plane surging down the runway, while ineffectual Iranians in trucks ride alongside, shouting dire threats but unable actually to do a thing. We sigh with relief as the plane lifts off, but we’re also leaving behind extras who are threatening, impersonal, poor, inarticulate…Mmm, that’s a bit worrying.

But it’s also CIA man Tony Mendez (Affleck), against the rest. In the early stages of the planning, madcap scenarios for rescuing the group are ruthlessly shot down – and by Mendez every time. There’s this crowded room of security experts, but there’s only one guy who knows what’s going on.

He’s a great dad, natch. He’s always concerned for his son, and wants to give him a souvenir of his dad’s great coup, even if it remains an official secret. We’re never told why Mendez and his wife have split, but at the end he goes to see her, and waits patiently outside the house, asking her permission before he goes in. The absolute model of a well-behaved, considerate guy. And what does she do? She melts into his arms. Why? Hell, he’s just rescued six Americans who thought they were dead. We need personal uplift to match the political triumph. What more do you need to know?