MADE IN DAGENHAM

This movie from 2010 is the true a group of some 180 women machinists in the Ford Factory in Dagenham, a London suburb, who in 1968 defied the fiercely male entrenched society at the time and did the unheard of thing by going out on strike and demanding equal pay. Lined up against them were Trade Union Officials that cozied up to Management, and Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson who was not wanting to alienate a big corporate employer, plus the powerful might of Ford itself, and worse of all, the women’s own husbands who, like most of the town, were also Ford employees.  However thanks to an unlikely naïve but passionate heroine forced into the limelight as their shop steward who even managed to sway the formidable Barbara Castle the UK's first female Employment Minister,  they won their case.

This delightful period piece tells of a historic breakthrough in women’s rights but in a thoroughly enchanting and entertaining manner thanks in no small part to director Nigel Cole (‘The Calendar Girls’ & ‘Saving Grace’) who seems to excel at portraying plucky women.  Most for this goes to Sally Hawkins who so superbly underplays the role of Rita the women’s leader and proves what a dynamic actress she really is (and maybe how wrong I was in dismissing her so quickly after Mike Leigh's 'Happy Go Lucky' when her somewhat misplaced performance did not play well) . Plus I loved Miranda Richardson as the fiery red-headed Mrs. Castle who verbally beat up her male Civil Servants at every opportunity.

Brit filmmakers particularly excel at producing two genres of movies very well viz. Period Pieces and Blue Collar (working-class) Dramas.  This one is a superb example of both.

PS In 197O the UK went on to introduce the Equal Pay Act and Ford and all the other corporations had to change their working practices.  BUT that was then, and this is now.  Last month a Republican filibuster in the Senate prevented the success of the Paycheck Families Act which would have strengthen equal pay right, but some things never change.

PPS In 2014 the movie was adapted into a stage musical by David Arnold and is currently playing in London's West End.

★★★★★★★

THE PARKING LOT MOVIE

The surprisingly intriguing quirky documentary made in 2010 is exactly what its title states: a movie about a parking lot.  A very scruffy triangular one in the centre of Charlottesville Virginia behind a motley line up of late night bars and restaurants and smack opposite the University Campus.  Filmmaker Meghan Eckman focuses on interviewing a rather large cast of parking attendants and former parking attendants all of whom are so over qualified for the job.  This motley crew of graduate students and budding musicians articulate their over intellectualized ideas on the power struggle between often obnoxious customers and themselves which makes hilarious viewing. In attempting to explain their disdain for the superior attitudes and sense of entitlement that seem to automatically come with drivers of the giant SUV’s that crowd the lot, sometimes their quick witted remarks have more than a tinge of inverted snobbery.

There are moments in the movie when it feels like real time and you are actually there in the Lot and nothing much happens, but that said, it is still a refreshingly original and bizarre wee film, thanks mainly to the wonderful odd crew of charismatic and eccentrics who run the place.  And take note you simply cannot just apply for one of these much jobs, which are much sought after, as you have to know some on the inside track to make the grade.

If you have a taste for oddball outré films, then this off-the-wall gem is for you.

★★★★★★★

NEVER LET ME GO

I’ve never been a fan of the supernatural but the buzz around this movie back in 2010 intrigued me sufficiently to want to see I would change my mind.  The story from the best selling novel that almost won Kazuo Ishiguro the Booker Prize, is about children who are reared with the sole purpose in their lives of becoming organ donors so that other people can live beyond 100 years old.  More specifically it’s about 3 in particular Kathy, Tommy & Ruth who we first meet as children at a rather austere and scary Boarding School where they are indoctrinated with their predestined futures.  Love is never meant to be part of the ‘plan’ so when Cathy falls in love with Tommy much to the chagrin of Ruth who steals him away to become her boyfriend it throws mire than spanner un the works.

We later meet the three again when they are now grown up and in the process of making their ‘donations’ which will inevitably lea to their deaths, known much nicer as ‘completions’, except for Cathy who has become a ‘carer’ who looks after others like them.  Ruth confesses up about stealing Tommy's affections in the hope that now Cathy and he can be together they can apply for a ‘referral’ which will delay the donations a while so that they can have a life together as lovers.

The first part of this movie dragged at such a slow pace I was bored enough to start imagining Charlotte Rampling, the elderly prim headmistress Miss Emily, as she was back in the 60’s in her scant Nazi uniform in 'The Night Porter'  … but I digress.  But the pace quickened, and so did my interest as the real story unfolded, and by the end I was actually interested on what happened to all three of them.

Two fine Brit actors in the leads helped. Cathy was played by Carey Mulligan who the camera loves as much as me; Tommy by Andrew Garfield (about to hit the big time with the lead in Spiderman).  Ruth was played by my nemesis Keira Knightly who irritates me consistently as much as Catherine Zeta-Jones (yes, that bad!), so the less said about her the better.

Out on DVD at Amazon
★★★★★★★

LENNON NAKED

Hard to believe that in just a months time John Lennon, the most infamous member of the Beatles, would have been celebrating his 73d birthday.  In the 33 years since he was gunned down outside the Dakota the attention to his colorful life never seems to dim. A couple of years ago there was Sam Taylor-Wood's excellent  movie 'Nowhere Boy' a fictionalised account of Lennon's unusual childhood, and next week sees the release of a hot new documentary 'Good Ol' Freda' which tells the Beatles old secretary/p.a. Freda Kelly's account of life with the Fab Four in their heydays.

I came across this made for Brit TV movie which was a dramatised re-telling of Lennon's early life from his first taste of fame up until his tumultuous and histrionic exit from the UK to which he never returned.  It starts in 1964 when The Beatles had their first No I Hit 'Please Please Me' (and when in fact I first got to see them perform live in my hometown, which sadly is somehow omitted from the film).

Success is fast and furious and Lennon has married his childhood sweetheart Cynthia and they live with their young son Julian in a ridiculously outrageous unsuitable house in a stockbroker belt in the London suburbs simply because they could afford it and so much more.  With each success comes untold wealth and the re-emergence of Lennon's own father who had deserted the family home when John was just 6 years.  His anger with his father is very real but it still doesn't eventual stop him also up and abandoning his own son very shortly.

Lennon's constant search for a sense of something more profound and spiritual in his life results in an aborted trip to a Guru in India, and eventually to the eccentric performance pieces of avant garde artist Yoko Ono.

In Ono, Lennon either sees a kindred spirit or possibly just a suitable avenue to indulge in unsociable behaviour whilst making enormous impossible demands on everyone else in their lives. Robert Jones unbalanced script ensures that we unceasingly see the way that Lennon and Ono acted together as both obnoxious and positively psychotic. He does everything to please this woman for whom he has thoughtlessly abandoned his wife and son, and is about to jettison The Beatles future together too.

Director Edmund Coulthard unwisely chose to mix archive footage of the real Beatles with his dramatisation which only proved how so unlike them his miscast actors were.  Poor Christopher Eccelston (one of the Doctor Who's) was too old for the part but at least he fared better in his series of bad wigs than Andrew Scott playing Paul McCartney with a most excruciatingly bad accent.

The title was for the fact that the piece was intended to get the inside scoop on what made this man tick. It failed to do that completely, but Christopher Eccleston did literally bare all quite proudly posing with an equally stripped Yoko, so the title still fits.

Mocked by the Press for some of their zany escapades and harassed by the Police for their drug use, Lennon and Ono flew to a new life in New York hoping to be free (and naked?) at last.  He was killed a mere nine years later.

Unless you are an avid Lennon fan I would miss this one, and rent 'Nowhere Boy' and go see 'Good Ol' Freda' when it opens.  And there is so much more to come ...there is a musical movie in production right now called 'The Mersey Boys'.  We so havent heard the last of Lennon yet.

★★★

THE HAIRDRESSER aka DIE FRISEUSE

A morbidly obese unemployed hairdresser in Eastern Berlin is sent by Social Services for a job interview in a Hair Salon in a Shopping Mall which she fails to get the job as she is not 'asthetically pleasing' ..... the Owners actually words were “what we sell is beauty, and you’re not beautiful, my dear”.  Hard words, but very true. Kathi exaggerates her enormous size wearing the most bizarre array of clothes topped off with chunky wooden fruit jewellery.  It aint pretty.

Anyway, taking umbrage she locates an empty store next to the Salon and vows to set up on her own. No small task for a woman with no money or any business acumen, and when the State and the Bank won't cough up the capital, she resorts to helping smuggle Vietnamese illegal immigrants into the country.  Oh yes, her skinny sulky daughter who lives with her in their high rise tiny apartment suddenly stops hating her which makes no sense at all.  But then again very little did in this dreadfully unfunny movie that Netflix had suggested this as a comedy I would like!

Maybe you had needed to have been used to a miserable life in the old Communist East Germany under the Stasi to appreciate this humorless piece.? Discovering that it was directed by Doris Dörrie a highly awarded German filmmaker who cut her teeth directing Opera, adds resonance to the review I have just read (belatedly) in 'The Hollywood Reporter' who aptly noted that even when The Fat Lady Sang, very sadly it still wasn't over!

Unless you have an overwhelming desire to see a very very large woman get naked way too often .... and even have sex with a skinny Vietnamese guy  ..... and trust me, you won't ...... then you won't need to sit through this, as I did that for you!!!!

LEONIE

This is the true story of Leonie Gilbert : a fiercely independent American woman who constantly defied taboos at the turn of the 20th Century when she became the Editor, then Lover, then Mother of the child of Japanese poet Yone Nogucci in New York. And then when he abandoned her and his son to go back home to Japan and his wife (that she knew nothing about) Leonie followed him, and in society where women were even more scorned than in the US, she raised their son on her own to become the world famous artist Isamu Noguchi.

The story starts when Leonie as a Bryn Mawr graduate answers a newspaper advert and becomes the N.Y. Editor of the yet unpublished poet. She soon also becomes his mentor and co-writer and is the one who persuades publishers to accept his work. When she falls pregnant with his child, the rather cold and restrained writer cannot hot-tail it quick enough to get out of there.  And when the US political climate changes and outlaws inter-racial marriages Leonie takes her son to Japan to claim her rightful place besides Yone as his wife.  

Snag is, he has one of those already, something he had failed to mention previously. When this is revealed Leonie moves into the Japanese countryside, not knowing a word of the language and very little of its customs, and sets on a meager living as a English teacher.  Along the way this woman, out casted by most of the local society, and ignored by Yone (unless he wants something edited) gets pregnant again .... presumably by one of the pupils, but that is never revealed.

Young Isamu is perpetually playing truant from school and Leonie has sensed that whilst he has no aptitude for general subjects such as mathematics he is displaying an extraordinary aesthetic for every aspect of art.  As the family are about to move again, Leonie entrusts her ten year old son to design their new house from scratch.

As a young man Isamu asks to go back to the USA to study, and when he graduates, Leonie and his half sister join him there. And they live happily ever after.  Almost.  For the next six decades until his death in 1988 Isamu becomes a renowned artist/sculptor/landscape designer  and furniture designer (the Herman Miller Company still produce some of his designs).  What is clear from this account of his mothers, it is her free spirit, openness and courage that helped shaped her fatherless son against all odds to succeed.  He straddled the two cultures with the same ease that she eventually managed. and much of his artistic legacy is, as the NY Times enthused in his obituary 'bridges both the East and West.'

This movie co-written and directed by Hisako Matsui has been languishing on a studio shelf since it was completed in 2010 and I am not sure why. True, it lacks a little clarity in some of the story line, but overall it is an impressive account of a 'great woman behind a great man' story of the last Century.  Emily Mortimer, a discerning Brit actor who often makes some unusual career choices, is compelling as the determined and resolute Leonie. The nearest thing she has to a best friend is Catherine, is played by Christina Hendricks ('Mad Men') who helps narrate the story.   Shidô Nakamura ('Letters from Iwo Jima') plays Yone as such a cold fish, its kind of tough imagining what a young Leonie would have seen in him .... besides the poems.

Beautifully photographed too (New Orleans stands in for old New York) and something of a wee gem, even if like me, you are ignorant enough to have never heard of either Noguchi, let alone the daunting Miss Gilmour.

P.S. Ailes Gilmour, the other child, went on to be one of the early pioneers of American Modern Dance and was one of the first members of The Martha Graham Company, who her brother sometimes designed Sets for.

★★★★★★★★ 

Available on DVD and AMAZON VOD

LITTLE WHITE LIES aka LES PETITS MOUCHOIRS

After visiting one of their best friends in intensive care unit at the hospital after he had a near fatal motorbike accident a despondent tight knit group of friends gather outside. Their big dilemma is do they hang around in Paris waiting for Ludo to be well enough to have visitors or just go on their regular planned vacation together as usual. They choose the latter which speaks volumes for this bunch of assorted individuals who all seem slightly too self-obsessed as they all enter middle-age.

Max, the 'leader' is a wealthy hotel owner and its his rather wonderful house on Cap Ferrat that they all spend every summer as his guests.  He is a micro-manager and total control freak, qualities he brings with him on holiday much to the chagrin of his vexed wife .... and the friends too.  Vincent one of his oldest friends has confessed he has a man-crush on him and that brings out the homophobia in Max. And this is just one of the many un-said things that bubble under the surface that this close group of friends choose not to deal with, and opt to cover up with some little white lies.

Antoine is convinced that Juliette who dumped him after 11 years to marry someone else will take him back, Eric thinks Louise his girlfriend is 'the one' but she only flies down from Paris to tell him she is not, Marie now regrets ever having let Ludo go and is working though that by sleeping with men she really doesn't like to be around.  The only two people to keep this group grounded and the closest they get to real happiness is their old neighbor Jean-Louis and Ludo.  This summer then its all down to the local oyster fisherman as Ludo can only be there in spirit.

The story is full of high drama: lots of laughter and tears as they each of angst-ridden bang their heads against a brick wall, when they are not out having fun in Max's fancy speed boat. And annoying as the storyline can be at times, it is very watchable because of the very impressive ensemble of some first-rate French actors that include: Francois Cluzet, (who is a dead ringer for Dustin Hoffman), Benoit Magimel, Gilles Lellouche, Laurent Lafitte, and a scene stealing Marion Cotillard.  Ludo is played by Jean Dujardin before he made his Oscar winning performance in 'The Artist' ..... and he doesn't get to speak in this much either.  Jean-Louis the oyster fisherman is rather brilliantly played Joel Dupuch who is not an actor but an oyster fisherman.  His is a pivotal role as just when you are on the verge of despair with some of the group's antics, he gives them a good talking too.

At 150 minutes it is at least one hour too long and if writer/director Guillaume Canet ( directed the excellent 'Tell No One') had trimmed it so, then I would liked this piece even more.  I do have a soft spot for French movies of this ilk, and although it may not have been the best of the genre, it was still thoroughly entertaining. Maybe because I like a bit of weltschmerz myself?   

P.S. Have a box of kleenex ready for the end

★★★★★★★★

CHASING MADOFF

It's just a sheer co-incidence that I sat and watched this documentary about the uncovering of the Bernie Madoff's audacious Ponzi fraud scheme the day before that Peter his son is sentenced to 10 years in jail for his part in the conspiracy. A reminder nevertheless that even though Mr Madoff Snr. is already behind bars and has started his 150 year prison sentence, this affair will not disappear from the public gaze for many more years to come.

You would have to have been living on a remote planet in 2008 if you haven't heard of the massive swindle that the Madoffs perpetrated on the public in several countries stealing billions of dollars over the years. The scheme named after Charles Ponzi, a Banker in the 1920's, is simply that they create the illusion that a Fund is earning higher returns than the norm when the reality is that they are doing the opposite, but are providing them with their own personal kitty to fund their extravagant lifestyles.  The prospect of high dividends attracts more investors monies and the new income is used to pay the interest to the existing clients.  To keep this all going they need a constantly source of new investors with more money, something that both Mr. Ponzi and Mr Madoff excelled at until their respective bubbles burst.

This version of the scandal focused on the four Brokers in Boston who back in 1999 studied a Madoff prospectus and report and spotted the fraud within minutes, and so immediately alerted the S.E.C. (Securites Exchange Commission) and several important financial journals, but all to no avail. These brave souls risked their reputations, their jobs and even their own lives by trying to make anyone in authority sit up and notice that this powerful man, once the Chairman of the NASDAQ Exchange, was probably the biggest crook in the history of Wall Street.  When the story actually broke some NINE years later, Harry Markopolos the main whistleblower was desperately worried for his own safety thinking that the SEC would take revenge on him for revealing their sheer incompetence, but once again, they did nothing.

The complete and utter failure of the SEC to investigate any of the detailed evidence that was presented to them over the years should have warranted criminal charges being brought against the organisation's management who were instead, simply allowed to resign their positions.  The documentary highlighted that here can be no question that the failure of the very Authority that exists for the sole purpose to regulate such financial matters on our behalf, brings into question the very need for such a grossly mismanaged Body in the first place.

Two other major points that I discovered during the film. Firstly, was the whole extent of Madoff's rather vast reach that seemed to extend into even deeper pockets all across Europe, including several Royal Families.  The second fact was the realisation that asides from the (once) wealthy clients Madoff milked dry, he also robbed the desperately needed funds of many Charities and Non-profit organisations.  This was unquestionably the most despicable of all his crimes, and the ones that really showed how evil the man was.

Filmmaker Jeff Prosserman's approach with the telling of the story is a little uneven at times, but the facts as he reveals them are compelling enough to make this a very watchable expose of this contemptuous crook, with the hope that his type will never be seen again.  But we know they will. 

Available at Amazon 

★★★★★★★

THE FIRST BEAUTIFUL THING

Bruno is a unhappy and somewhat troubled middle-aged college Professor living in Milan with a girlfriend he cannot commit too and the only way that he makes his days bearable is by taking prescription drugs illegally obtained at a local park.  One day Valeria his sister turns up on his doorstep to tell him that their mother is terminally ill and that he must come home to Livorno.  It seems that Bruno has avoided his family, especially his mother, since he left many years ago and it takes some hefty persuasion to make him make the journey despite the urgency of it.

Clearly Bruno has issues, and as the story unwinds through a whole series of flashbacks, we learn that with this complex family history with its many layers, he certainly wasn't the only one. Anna his mother was always a real beauty which was a source of conflict with her abusive husband whom she left when the children were very young. She was at best naive and always managed to hook up with a succession handsome men who either abused or neglected her before throwing her out.  The children where snatched back and forth between her and their father and somehow what ever befell them, the ever optimistic Anna always believed and promised them that things would be better tomorrow.

As a kid, Bruno was intelligent and artistic but he seemed to have inherited the grumpiness of his father, and certainly his present life yields him no joy.  But as soon as he spends time with his dying mother whom he was stayed away from all this years in a huff, he gradually realizes through her about some of the pleasures of life that he has been missing.  He eventually finds it hard to resist Anna's irrepresible gift for happiness that he has for so long begrudged.

In this rich Italian family comedy/drama that spans some four decades there are plenty of twists and turns that are not always predictable especially towards the end.  It has all the makings of a glorious melodrama .... have your kleenexs at the ready ... but as multi-faceted the plot scenarios were, they were extremely realistic and anything but exaggerated as the term implies.

It's the type of movie that I always think that Italian filmmakers are the masters of.  In fact it was their official entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Movie last year. Beautifully written and directed Paolo Vizri, it is superbly acted by a brilliant cast that includes legendary Italian Actress Stefania Sandrelli whose lengthy resume includes Bertolucci's 'The Conformist' in 1970. 

Coming in at 2 hours and 2 minutes long, have a large glass of wine ..... besides the kleenex that is ..... but you wont regret it.

★★★★★★★★