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The Goldfinch (2019)
A beautiful encapsulation of the novel
So often a movie does not do justice to a book. But this film is almost better. The way it pulls the story together with such beautiful poignant acting. At times just a couple of wonderfully put together scenes show what took pages and pages of text to tell. I loved it.
2036 Origin Unknown (2018)
Completely misunderstood by most reviewers
There was a time when we went to the theatre to be intellectually challenged. What went on under the proscenium arch quite often was a wild adjunct to the reality of every day life. Plots built slowly and much was left for the theatre-goer to interpret on their own, using the grey matter between their ears.
This is a play like that. It maybe should never have been a film as it is so unlike a run-of-the-mill contemporary movie and has none of the cheap tricks used by producers and directors today in the money-driven sausage machine of film-land.
And making it a film highlights its failings. It's a very low budget exercise. The FX are more trippy than contributory and the whole thing looks as though it was put together by that brand of 70s sci-fi before computer graphics were invented.
Making an attempt at the tricks diverts from the story and what the writer is trying to offer as a meaningful take-away. You have to ignore all of the stuff that is wrong to see the value in this piece. It's a two-handed, single scene exercise which provides a thoughtful, chilling and in places quite beautiful treatise on what will inevitably become, in the next 20 years, a significantly impactful shift in the way that human consciousness and as a result society evolves.
It makes you think. What if the first alien life-form that we encounter doesn't have pointy ears or an ovipoistor? What if it is actually the uncontrolled development of AI? What would a machine think about humanity? And more to the point what would the artificial intelligence do about it? Do we, can we or even should we control it?
If you want a blockbuster sci-fi movie stick to Star Wars. And if that is what you want, I'd agree that you'd find this slow, boring, pretentious and lacking much in the way of entertainment for you. Which begs the question, when did you last go to the theatre to see a real play? But if you like Huxley, Clarke or Asimov, buckle up, endure the nature of the show and dive into what it is trying to say. It gets quite compelling. And I liked it for being different. And for making me think.
Adrift in Soho (2019)
Clever, Challenging and Beautiful - A Welcome Return To Cinema Verite
This is a very clever film. Set in 1959 in London's Soho "village" it chronicles the history of the place from its faded grandeur of the past through its literary centre of excellence during the era of the "Angry Young Men", on into its descent from a gentle Bohemian laissez-faire to the sharper, more harsh culture of drugs and sex, a further contrast between the birth of CND and the exploitative commercialism of TV advertising and ultimately the self-destruction of the spirit of the area.
Played out through the eyes of an ingénue writer juxtaposed with a louche, vulnerable and ultimately destructive bohemian actor, it is kept rattling along through the medium of an on-going documentary on people and life, and the film never lets up. With a visual style that emulates the gritty reality of the time, this film informs, challenges and shocks in equal measure. It is fascinating in the traditional art-house style and has moments of exquisite cinematic beauty.
The players execute an engaging screenplay effectively, given that in no case, due to the nature of the film, is there any character development beyond that which is before you. These are not easy characters and for me the actors involved, both leads and supporters did an excellent job. But the film is not really about them. They merely serve to point the viewer along the chronicle of the piece.
It is different, intelligent, engaging, challenging and miles away from the mainstream churned-out film-making that is so prevalent today. This harks back to the true art of cinema verite and I loved it. Yes, a bigger budget could have provided a bit more padding, but to say that is to miss the point of the film.
The title is misleading as it points to the ingénue. But ultimately it is Soho itself that is adrift.