The Favourite

The Favourite is about Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) who rules Britain from 1702 to 1714. The film portrays her as bit of a sad person plagued by ill health, a recluse and a part-time lesbian. She’s possibly sad because of her 17 failed pregnancies for which she has to show only 17 rabbits representing each one that ended in either miscarriage, stillbirth or a very short life. This I suppose might be enough to make you seek solace in your own sex. 

Or possibly sad because of the political turmoil she has to precede over, not that she takes much interest in ruling the country and leaves most of the bickering\blackmailing\murdering etc to her Prime Minister Sidney Godolphin (James Smith) and the opposition leader Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult).

She does opt to raise taxes to pay for the war with France on the advice of her ‘lady in waiting’ Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz), Duchess of Marlborough, the wife of the general who commands the army. Mostly because Sarah is not only in possession of the royal ear but also the royal bed.

However Sarah’s sexual obligations to Anne are curtailed when Sarah’s cousin, Abigail Hill (Emma Stone), arrives on the scene as a chambermaid intent on shagging her way up the social ladder. Abigail was once an aristocrat herself until her father allegedly gambled her (and lost) in a poker game. I hasten to add there is no historical record to support this nor for that matter Anne’s rabbits. Although with the whole film supposedly being a riotous comedy sticking to the facts is probably not strictly necessary.

It doesn’t take Abigail long at all to oust Sarah from her role in delivering special services to the Queen while at the same time, conveniently for him, Harley is trying to get Abigail to persuade the Queen to stop financing the war. He strikes a deal with Abigail by offering her marriage, which will restore her status, to his friend Masham (Joe Alwyn) who Harley refers to as ‘c*** struck’ with Abigail.

Abigail though is not so struck with Masham and she consummates their marriage by nonchalantly jerking off her new husband with a look of disgust on her face before wiping her hand on the bedclothes.

Quite where Anne’s husband, Prince George of Denmark, is throughout all this we’re not sure.

All in all it’s an excellent period romp and all great fun, although obviously not good clean fun. The film boasts three excellent female leads which may stop people pointing out there are not enough female lead roles but probably not. In what is looking to be a very thin year for films it will no doubt pick up an award or three as well as educating everyone with new and varied uses of the ‘c’ word.

Denial

Denial is based on a 1996 legal case between Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz), an American professor of Holocaust Studies, and the historian David Irving (Timothy Spall). Irving sues Lipstadt over her book ‘Denying the Holocaust’ in which she accuses Irving of being a Holocaust denier and falsifier of history.

The trial is held in Irving’s native England where the burden of proof is with the accused not the accuser. Basically she has to prove that the Holocaust happened. Easy right. Not so.

Lipstadt, a runner and a dog lover (so you have to like her), engages a top legal team to fight her case. This actually means that she doesn't in the end have to prove anything as her legal team totally take over. So she can pretty much get back to her running and dog walking for the next few years as the process rolls along.

In fact solicitor Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott) and barrister Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson) treat her more like a naughty child than the one accused. They quarrel about how to approach the case with Lipstadt wanting to take the stand herself and bring in Holocaust survivors to testify while Julius prefers to simply present the facts. So off they go to try to find proof of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Denial must have been a tricky film to make when you consider the topic, the potential for emotional bias and the fact the majority of the viewers either knew or could accurately guess the outcome of the trial. Which does not leave much scope to build meaningful tension but overall I think overall they did a decent job.

In court, Irving, serving as his own lawyer, has an answer for everything but not usually a very convincing one. So things progress as you would expect and hope until Mr Justice Gray (Alex Jennings) throws the defence team slightly off balance when he asks whether Irving might not actually be lying as they claim, if he genuinely believed the Holocaust didn’t happen. It is the one moment of ‘almost tension’.

Denial is easy to watch, informative but perhaps just lacking that vital dramatic spark that would have made it great.

The Light Between Oceans

Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender) is war veteran returning from WWI to Australia. Haunted by the experience, Tom is intent on withdrawing from the human race completely and he accepts a job as the lighthouse keeper on some desolate island somewhere off the coast of Australia called Janus Rock. 

Before he departs he is given a send-off on the mainland where he meets Isabel (Alicia Vikander), who sees something she quite likes under his ridiculous WWI moustache. Well I guess the post-war man market was probably a bit depleted, so she quickly expresses a desire to get withdrawn and desolate with him on Janus. The only problem is the lighthouse has a wives only policy, so they quickly get married.

It’s an odd match with Vikander very much the toy girl here. In real life she is 28, eleven years Fassbender’s junior, but here she looks about 18 whereas he looks every day of his real age. Which is somewhat sinister for starters. 

Still they start married life on the island and we get treated to scenes of idyllic sex as the waves lap furiously up against the lighthouse. My partner says filmmakers are incapable of making a film with Fassbender without putting a sex scene in for him but in his defence it was Alicia Vikander. What's the guy supported to do? Well, he could at least look like he's enjoying it.

Fassbender’s facial expression doesn’t change much from sad/gloomy during the whole film even when he is getting down to it with Vikander. She at least gives pleasure a go and, after this film, they became a ‘real life’ couple. So she obviously wasn’t faking.

Isabel gets pregnant but has a miscarriage. Then she gets pregnant again but has another miscarriage and it is at almost this exact moment that a rowing boat is seen bobbing up and down close to the lighthouse.

The boat contains a man who is dead and a baby who is not. It is later revealed that the man was German, as if this explains why he would leave his wife, put his baby into a rowing boat and head out on to the ocean before eventually ending up at a lighthouse a hundred or so miles from anywhere. There is no attempt to explain how the husband died while the baby survived this journey.

Isabel’s urge to have children is so great that rather than ask her husband to move back to the mainland where she could get some decent antenatal care, she persuades him not to report the incident, to bury the dead man and to steal the baby to raise as their own. Erm, somewhere of course there is likely to be a grieving mother? No matter, the infant Lucy is raised by them.

 

Four years later, Tom comes across a memorial for a missing man and baby which leads him to find out who the real mother is, namely Hannah Roennfeldt (Rachel Weisz). It really makes you wonder why nothing was in the local paper at the time or perhaps a few ‘missing’ posters? Why did no one say to the lighthouse keeper ‘seen any random rowing boats Tom?’ but implausible plot twists are de rigueur here. Tom promptly goes off to send a note to Hannah to let her know her baby is safe. Pillock.

Then the police gets involved and it all quickly boils down to a murder\kidnapping trial and a nasty custody battle over poor Lucy aka Grace who doesn’t know which mummy to turn to. Well she does and it’s not a popular choice.

There’s still time for more implausible plot twists as Isabel inexplicably puts her husband in jail for the alleged murder of the man in the boat and the film ends up tying itself in such a knot with its own twists and turns that the ending makes even less sense than what has gone before it. 

You’ve probably guessed by now that I didn’t enjoy it that much.

The tagline of this film is ‘you only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day’. I have forgiven my partner for taking me to see this.

The Lovely Bones

‘The Lovely Bones’ is based on the best selling book by Alice Sebold.

The year is 1973 and on her home from school a young girl, Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), is approached by her neighbour, George Harvey. He persuades her to enter an underground den he has built. Once she enters, he attacks her, kills her and then dismembers her body before bundling it into an old safe. Meanwhile, Susie's spirit goes up into her own personal afterlife, an 'in-between' state between life and death, which looks shockingly like Windows XP world. You know those garish green grass/blue sky images from the default Windows XP backdrop. Either that or it's that hillside that features in the Teletubbies programme. At first, I thought L had sneaked me into ‘Alice in Wonderland’ instead. Except a Tim Burton film is sure to be darker and there's not much dark here.

From up high Susie watches down over the aftermath of her death, like an angel and she doesn’t seem to mind being dead. The Salmon family react as you would expect, at first reluctant to believe in what has happened and then consumed by grief. Meanwhile Harvey is not suspected by the police and gets away with the crime. Jack, Susie's father, isn’t so sure and continually harasses the police about Harvey.



I don’t know the book so I’m probably not in a good position to comment. Although I’ve read a synopsis of it and L has filled me in on details as well. So I was expecting an intricate story and a disturbing one, dealing with difficult issues, but we didn’t get it. In fact we didn’t get much at all. I kept waiting for something to happen but nothing did, for ages. This was not edge of the seat stuff.

Perhaps Peter 'Lord of the Rings' Jackson was the wrong person to be handed the reins to this film. His liking for the visual effects side of film making has been used to full effect and to make room for all that, they’ve had to dispense with the plot, or perhaps all the computer generated stuff is to try and distract you from the fact that somewhere along the line they forgot what the plot was.



The film also has some celebrated actors in it. Rachel Weisz is the distressed mother and Susan Sarandon plays her alcoholic mother. While Mark Wahlberg plays the devastated father well and there is an excellent performance from Stanley Tucci, who is menacing as the murdering neighbour.

There are a few good scenes but not enough of them. Suzie was supposed to be trying to influence things from beyond the grave but there is little of this. It kind of got exciting when Susie's sister Lindsey grew suspicious and finally breaks into Harvey's house where she discovers information that implicates him. He discovers her there but fails to catch her. Then comes an unbelievable scene where she takes an age to hand the information over to her family, as if it wasn’t that important after all. In the meantime, Harvey, knowing the game is up, disappears. Although he eventually gets his comeuppance when he is killed by an icicle...



It’s a very empty film and an incoherent one, which perhaps thinks it’s a murder mystery but a poor one at that. The murder is after all revealed early on but we still get the suspicion that, that is what the film is all about. It has no flow at all and it’s hard to see who the finished product is aimed out. Perhaps they asked Jackson to Disney-fy the story but how can you do that to a story about a girl who has being attacked and murdered.