Good Vibrations

Not many people will have heard of Terri (with an 'i') Hooley, I hadn’t, but some will have heard of Good Vibrations. Good Vibrations was a record shop setup by Hooley. It was also the name of a record label he launched to help emerging Northern Irish bands and to him, Good Vibrations was his way of life.

The film ‘Good Vibrations’ is his story, a biopic of his life. Terri with an 'i' (Richard Dormer) lost an eye when he was a child but this didn’t hold him back and fitted with a glass eye, he opened his record shop on the most bombed half mile in Europe in late 1970's Belfast at the height of the troubles.

Hooley had seen his friends divide up along political and religious grounds as the troubles escalated. He never felt he belonged in either camp despite coming from a political involved family, having a communist leaning father who was an expert at losing elections.

Instead, inspired by the local band Rudi, part of the emerging punk scene, who seemed as oblivious to this religious divide as he was, he tried to bring these camps together using his passion for music. In an ever increasing amount of cigarettes, beer and brandy everything else falls by the wayside, including his long suffering wife Ruth (Jodie Whittaker). Considering the on screen scale of his consumption, it is amazing he is still alive today.

Hooley helps emerging punk bands like Rudi and another band he discovered, The Outcasts, record and distribute their music through his Good Vibrations shop, label and concert promotions.

Many thought he was mad and they’d be right. He was also possibly the worst business man ever born. Even when he fills the Ulster Hall for a concert he still makes a loss. Every so often he appears to be on the edge of a major breakthrough, only each time managing to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

When a certain Fergal Sharkey begs him to release a record by Sharkey’s band The Undertones, who were a far from punk looking outfit in jumpers their mothers must have bought for them. Hooley was initially reluctant, until he hears the record itself. 

He releases ‘Teenage Kicks’ on the Good Vibrations label and then hikes it all round London trying to get a major label interested. No one was but he did manage to get a copy to John Peel. Who played it not once but twice, in a row. The first time he’d ever done that. The Undertones were launched, Hooley wasn’t and again lost money.

Meanwhile Rudi and The Outcasts never hit the big time at all.

Film wise, the script could be pacier and there’s no real plot, it is more a montage of the key moments in Hooleys life but its informative and at times humorous. It is a film about the power of music and that music is of course excellent. 

To this day the record shop still exists, although it has closed and reopened many times.

Stoker

A tale of fun, games and happy families.

Stoker revolves around something that nearly all households have, a sulky introverted teenager. Only this one has no equal. Ok, perhaps at first India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) has an excuse. Her adored father (Dermot Mulroney) has just been killed in a freak car accident and her mother is Nicole Kidman. That’s not a good start to your eighteenth birthday in anyone’s books.

Just as India is wondering where she’s going to get shoes from now, because her father gave her the same pair every year on her birthday and who she’s going to shoot the local animal population with because her father did that too, long lost Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) pops up out of thin air to attend the funeral. He’s been off travelling the world apparently, funny then that no one’s mentioned him before...

The good news is he’s going to stick around for a while, maybe indefinitely. India’s mother, Evelyn, who has already been taking her suddenly widowed status far too well now perks up even more. Though that’s relative, Evelyn doesn’t really do perky. Kidman is cast perfectly in the role of an unstable woman who sits around the house looking brittle, detached and pathetic all day long, stopping momentarily to flirt outrageously with her handsome brother-in-law before reverting back to type.

To be fair, Charlie makes eyes at both of them. It’s just that while Evelyn thinks Uncle Charlie is sex on legs and may possibly be up for more than your average family bonding, India thinks he’s the creepy uncle to end all creepy uncles and continues to ignore his attempts to befriend her.

In fact there’s something more than something a little creepy about Charlie. One suspects he has a whole football team worth of skeletons in his closet. Their housekeeper seems to know something. So, she promptly disappears and then turns up later amongst the ice cream in the freezer. Auntie Gwen (Jacki Weaver) knows something about him too but before she can say very much she’s packed off for a short stay at the local motel. A very short stay. 

India too, suspects that he may have ulterior motives and yet, she becomes increasingly infatuated with him.

Of course there’s something really creepy about India too and she’s a total gift to the high school bullies, who constantly harass her for being a weirdo. To their cost when they find out that she’s a dab hand with a pencil. When she gives the come on to the nice one amongst them, she then finds out that he’s not so nice after all. Ok mate, so she bit you but is that any excuse for trying to rape her?

It’s at this point in life that a girl needs a guardian uncle, luckily she has one to hand. Uncle Charlie and his belt speed to their rescue and give the boy the Auntie Gwen treatment.

Uncle and Niece, having discovered a shared interest, now bond further by sharing burying duties in the garden. After which India tries to ring the aforementioned Auntie Gwen, only to hear her phone ringing somewhere underneath her feet, in the ground. After a moment’s reflection, in the shower, she realises what a sexual turn on it all is.

Now India feels confident in her own ability to go over the edge big time, so she does, with bells on. The murderer's apprentice has graduated.

This intriguing family tale unfolds very slowly, building a gathering air of dread and gloom as it goes. This gives you time to peer into the minds of the Stokers and examine the family dynamic. It's not a pretty sight. Then when the expected murders finally arrive, they are presented with such relish that it is a little disturbing and that's not a pretty sight either.

You may guess that I loved it. Yes it's a weird film but just go with it. I thought it was clever too and nicely confusing; some scenes could either be real or imaginary, I like that sort of thing. There’s even a hint of very dark comedy in there which sits nice and uneasily amongst the murders.

People will say there’s a lack of a coherent plot and too many loose ends at the end but I’d simply say they weren't trying hard enough. What's not to understand? and as for loose ends, what loose ends? There aren't any, everyone's dead.

The Sessions

‘The Sessions’ is based on the real story of Marc O'Brien (John Hawkes). O'Brien was a childhood victim of polio and has spent his life since encased in an iron lung, save for a few hours each day. He is almost entirely paralyzed from the neck down but retains use of all his senses and has some feeling throughout his body.

Despite this, O'Brien not only retains a sense of humour but has a positive outlook on life. He studies, passes exams and becomes a poet. Although he still remains heavily dependent on his personal carers. 

After firing a carer that he doesn’t like, he falls in love with her far more beautiful and sensitive replacement, Amanda (Annika Marks). 

One day he tells her that he loves her. Which shocks her and she disappears, perhaps realising that she has similar affection for him. Despite his predicament, he can still charm the women.

Frustrated that he will never experience love or sex, he decides at the age of 38 to lose his virginity. First, as he’s a catholic, complete with a picture of the Virgin Mary staring down at him from his wall, he has to clear this with his priest (William H. Macy). Who is a rather ‘right on’ cleric with a flowing mane of hair who believes, probably wrongly, that God may give him a free pass on this one. Perhaps our (supposedly) celibate priest also wondered if there were any 2-for-1 offers.

So enter Cheryl (Helen Hunt), a sexual surrogate. Which is a fascinating profession or maybe not, perhaps it’s just another job but not a prostitute as she makes pains to point out. . 

Her husband seems to know about her job but I find it hard to tell whether he’s bothered or not bothered about her job or simply not bothered about her.

The therapy is a success but in the process Cheryl has also discovered a place in her heart for Mark, so she also bails out before they both get too attached.

After a power cut almost kills him by deactivating his iron lung and Mark ends up in hospital, he gets chance to charm a third woman and he meets Susan (Robin Weigert) who remains his partner until the day he died. 

All his ‘women’ are present at his funeral. Along with Vera (Moon Bloodgood) who is Amanda’s replacement as one of his carers and takes him to all his therapy sessions.

It looks a bit low budget at times and doesn't zing along as it perhaps might, refusing to perhaps delve into any of the potential sub-plots it opens up. Preferring to remain focussed on its main character instead. It’s very good though with plenty of understated humour and never once does it sink into the usual Hollywood sentimentality.

Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas is based on David Mitchell's 2004 novel and must have been a huge challenge for the filmmakers to adapt. The book has six radically different stories from six different time periods but unlike the book, the film intertwines these. This I thought would make it impossible to follow, particularly for someone like me who prefers a linear plot, but no, it is done well and works brilliantly. I have little trouble keeping track of who's who, what's what, where’s when etc, as the film cuts seamlessly from one century to another, often cleverly dropping us in a similar situation when we arrive there. 

As for the plot, well there’s a lot of it and it would be bordering on the insane to attempt to summarise it but here goes...  

 

We start on board a ship in the 19^th century with a man called Adam Ewing and a runaway slave. Then we’re off to 1930’s Britain and a bisexual English composer called Frobisher who is reading Adam Ewing diary.

 

Then its 1970’s San Francisco where an investigative journalist called Luisa Rey meets Frobisher’s gay lover forty years on and also reads Frobisher’s letters to him.  

In present day Britain, a publisher called Cavendish receives a manuscript of a novel based on Rey's life while he is in hiding, against his will in a nursing home, from the associates of a gangster whose book he has published.

 

He is inspired to write a screenplay of his own story, the film of which is then watched by Sonmi, a genetically engineered fabricant in 2144 Seoul, while she is on the run. 

 

She is executed and becomes the goddess than the tribesmen worship years later, 106 winters after ‘The Fall’, where pretty much everything has fallen apart and humanity has ended up back where it started, living in mud huts and caves.

So its part science fiction, part historical drama, part romance, part comedy, part thriller and fully one big audacious idea.

There are many themes going on. Oppression, freedom, destiny, the gradual increasing dominance of the establishment over everything, the idea that our actions affect others throughout time and perhaps reincarnation. What fits in nicely with this reincarnation concept is the fact that all the principal actors play different characters in each story.

So Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Xun Zhou, Susan Sarandon, Keith David, James D'Arcy and Doona Bae appear many times. If you can spot them and often you can’t because they may have been aged, or had their race changed or even they may have changed their gender.

In the end credits, each actor's name appears with a clip of each of their roles. Everyone stopped to watch this, and some roles were so well disguised that there were gasps of amazement as the audience discovered who played whom.

Cloud Atlas will entertain you as much as it will infuriate you but that is no bad thing. Really though there's simply so much to debate about it, that you should just go see the film. Don't try to understand it, just enjoy it. I actually thought I was going to hate it going in but I was sorry when it finished.

You also would have thought this mad cap idea would have been a shoo-in for several Oscar nominations, Screenplay certainly, Editing, Makeup etc, if not for the acting roles which are good but not spectacular. Still, if Daniel Day Lewis can win for one good acting role, what award do you give the actors here, several of which put in six. Sadly, not a single nomination.