MrGareth’s Missives

Although I'm not sure the world needed another one, Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood” is absolutely worth a watch.  Its a cracking yarn at a rapid pace with a fairly thick plot and a spectacular battle scene at the end that leaves you well entertained and a little enlightened historically.  It clearly sets up a no doubt profitable franchise placing the outlawed Robin Hood and his Merry Men in Sherwood Forest for a predictable series of jovial robin’-the-rich-to-feed-the-poor romps.  It lacks the fantastic villainy of Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham from the 1991 movie (fortunately it also lacks the theme tune!) but Mark Strong's Godfrey villain is a proper rotter. Both Crowe and Blanchet are fairly wooden I feel – and despite his grump, Crowe’s supposedly Northern accent is distinctly dodgy, as one journalist said, portrayed "Robin Hood [as] an Irishman who took frequent holidays in Australia."  But the film stands up regardless.

The history varies in its accuracy.  Richard Lionheart’s Death is accurate-ish, with a bit of poetic license taken to an incident that in truth doesn’t really do the brave warrior-king justice.  All of the Magna Carta stuff was, while interesting, quite wrong I think.  King John did sign the Magna Carta with the English Barons in 1215 and instead of the French King invading England, John invaded France (interestingly marrying off his bastard daughter Joan to Llewellyn The Great to keep the peace while he was away.)  

However, one dark little historical nugget was surprisingly accurate of particular importance to me.  Early in the movie, Richard Lionheart asks Crowe – playing Crusader archer Robin Longstride - to tell him if he thought God would be happy with his the King’s Crusading efforts.  Crowe, controversially, advises the King that he did not think so.  When asked why, he spoke of “the massacre at Acre” and how it ensured the King did not deserve to conquer Jerusalem.  It struck a loud note with me because I visited Acre (now Akko), just north of Tel Aviv, in 1999 and when I learnt of the decidedly disturbing 1191 event, wrote this at the time...

After Richard I seized Acre, he realised that the booty of most importance was not the treasure they had captured from the Saracen occupiers, but the 3,000 or so civilians they had chosen not to butcher as they swamped the city.  He decided to use these to negotiate a truce with Saladin who had watched the collapse of Acre through the Anglo-Norman barrier that prevented his route of rescue.  Richard demanded the release of his captives in an exchange, for Saladin had around one and a half thousand prisoners he knew of and of course the return of the True Cross, which he was given to believe Saladin had brought with.  The negotiations went on for some time, and a deadline of a month that Richard had set for the exchange of prisoners passed without result.  Richard grew impatient and eventually snapped. 

In full view of the watching Saracen hordes, his army and he led the 2,700 men, women and children out of the city under protection of the Knights, and brought them to the top of a hill just outside the citadel.  There they dramatically put all the prisoners to the sword, beheading and then disembowelling them while the Knights held off wave after wave of devastated Saracen soldiers aghast by what they were forced to watch.  Rumours that the victims would have swallowed gold coins to save them from their captors led to the wholesale gutting of everyone.  When not a living soul remained, the army marched back into the city.  Relations between Richard and Saladin soured from that moment, oddly, and the Muslim resolve to rid their land of the Crusader plague grew stronger.  It is a tale that horrifies me.  As the Crusader soldiers returned to their halls - the halls I have just been walking through under the modern town, they would have listened to the screams of woe as the Saladin’s men checked the victims for survivors.  What a horrible story, just horrible, and perhaps hammered the nail in the coffin of Richard’s Crusade, for if either Christian or Muslim God existed surely Richard’s actions would have disqualified him from the halls of fame that house the great conquerors of Jerusalem.

(More of this?)

Richard never did conquer Jerusalem, and after a fairly unproductive campaign, left the Holy Lands empty handed and defeated the following year. 

UPDATE: Something I actually fogot to mention was that it is believed by some that in his anger and disgust at the horrible atrocity at Acre, Saladin buried the True Cross - which he had captured at the battle of Hattin in 1187 - under the door way of the The Ummayad Mosque in Damascus so that every entering Muslim would walk on it!

I just had to share this - the loudest I've laughed out loud for a long time.  But I guess in typical fashion, you might have had to be there - i.e. watch the film.  So I'll try and set the scene.

Grow Your Own is...well, I actually think its best described by a reviewer on the IMDB site:

"Wow! A genuinely funny and moving film that lingered in my head for days. Probably the most unsexy list of ingredients to make a movie from - gardening, immigration, telephone masts - but it links all these plots with an amazing cast of characters who it is impossible not to care for." 

I really don't think I could do a better job of summing it up than that.  Delightful film and all along I thought its a perfect example of that genre of English Indie movie like Full Monty, Brassed Off, Happy Go Lucky and in fact any number of Mike Leigh movies.  Jolly black comedies with deep characters, tremendous dialogue, tight plotlines and those kind of bittersweet moments that can move you quite profoundly.

As the reviewer said, who could imagine a more unlikely combination than immigration and allotments to make for a successful yarn.

However, to share the gag I have to ruin a little bit of a one of the sub-plots - so please forgive me.  But it involves an African woman who's husband appears to be missing, feared dead, and she's waiting for word.  Anyway, there's a very moving scene where the lost husband - who obviously got seperated from her in refugee mayhem - reappears and comes to find her with flowers.  After a brief reunion cuddle, she stares teary-eyed into his eyes and says in her exotic French-Saharan accent:

"I thought you were dead."

And he replied, with a huge grin, "I am not dead.  I was in Leicester".

If you've ever been to Leicester, you will understand how the two could be confused!

Here's a movie that did thrill.  The Boston Strangler.  I'd never heard of it, and stumbled on it quite accidentally.  Its a terrific cast with Henry Fonda and George Kennedy and Tony Curtis in a really, really dark and demanding role where he usually persisted with comedy roles, hero roles or romantic leads - with the occasional debonair villian.  But there's nothing redeeming about this part - an evil serial killer.  His performance is electric and captivating.

Without wanting to ruin anything, the first half of the film is a chronology of the murders.  The film opens with a promise that it is a true reflection of events.  Not inspired by actual events or an interpreatation of recorded facts.  So you kind of feel close to the day as the police go down one dead after another and one innocent victim's death is portrayed in some of the more remarkably shot scenes of the age.  The cinematography is quite unusual with lots of picture-in-picture stuff and innovative editing that takes what a lot of films did in the late sixties that little bit further giving the haunting murder scenes an extra spooky and harrowing edge.  Always, Tony Curtis is brilliant, clinical and apparently unmoved.

The second half of the film deals with Curtis after he's captured and charts Fonda's efforts to get him to confess.  Its psychologically quite compelling and leads you exploring in your own mind how would that scenario feel.  As Curtis - or rather Alberto Desalvo - increasingly comes to first suspect then realise that an alternative personality within him might be responsible for the crimes, its thoroughly moving and disturbing. There's even one scene where a tear slowly appears and rolls down his cheeks as the penny drops and he begins to mime out one of the crimes.  How would it feel if you lost faith in who you were and your knowledge and awareness of what you had and hadn't done.  The visits from his wife and child are equally upsetting. 

The movie - however - leaves you feeling quite convinced that this is what happened.  He did it.  Thats it. So I did some research and its quite intrigueing...even today it remains inconclulsive whether he did or not.  The theory being that in fact the Police Department used him to collate a whole host of different, hitherto unsolved murders.  Its worth reading about.  He died eventually in Walpole prison in 1973 stabbed to death by assailants unkown. 

For the most part I would like to – and will - use this blog to pay tribute to many of the movies that make me happy, inspire me, amuse me, move me, educate me and thrill me.  However, it seems that the very first pseudo-review I’m going to attempt is to savage one of the worst travesties of film making justice I’ve ever seen: The Boat That Rocked.

The overwhelming sense of disappointment I experienced from this dreadfully poor excuse for entertainment is quite overpowering, and the main reason I’m now drafting this is in some way to derive some mitigating value from the 2 hours or so I wasted in front of it.

On the bright side, it must be said that the soundtrack is monumental – sincerely a terrific collection of tracks I am probably going to go out and  buy as soon as I’ve finished writing this.  Its a beautifully made movie too (from the makers of Love Actually, Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Thing, etc etc) – visually stunning, superbly edited and really quite stylish; evoking all of the images and visions one would expect from the 1960s.  Most notably, the cast is truly “stellar” and was the main reason I - quite regretfully - sought it out to watch it.  Phillip Seymour-Hoffman leads a cast peppered with both the well-established and the up-and-coming.  Stalwarts of the British Acting Establishment like Kenneth Brannagh, Bill Nighy and Emma Thompson; are united with Jack Davenport, Tom Wisdom, Tom Sturridge, Tom Brooke (there's a lot of Toms) Chris O’Dowd, Talulah Riley, Rhys Darby and just a whole heap of people I really can’t even be bothered to list out any more.  Even Mad Men’s January Jones makes a small – if not completely pointless – cameo which almost promises to brighten the film up a bit (the sub plot in which she starred unfortunately, however, instead just further served to annoy the sh!t out of me).  All of the performances were top notch, proving what remarkable professionalism is all about.  Because I really can’t fathom how these people managed to follow through on their contract.  What an almighty pile of stinking pooh this film really is.

This cliched, tedious, indulgent, predictable, improbable schmaltz was even plagiarism in places I suspect.  I really feel for the poor sods who got babysitters  in to go and watch this in the cinema - a place of such a dark cultural horror they must have been so mercifully relieved to have got out alive.  I’ve always thought funny the phase “you could torture terrorists with that” but in this case I think its sadly true and wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere right now in G'tmo, there’s some pooh jihadist peasant wishing he could stab himself in the eyeballs rather than continue to watch. 

The writing is just so dire its literally unbelievable.  How, oh how, could the producers bring themselves to even finish reading the script, let alone shoot it.  The “Tw@t” gag, for a start, is not only so weak and obvious – its an outrageous rip off of the “Darling” joke in Blackadder – only it isn’t theft because Richard Curtis wrote both (I’m guessing he wrote the latter sober and brilliant instead of drunk, mad or FCUKING TRIPPING which is what he must have been when he played a part in writing this).  The continuity is appalling, the plot lines and sub-plots all rather than interweve cleverly in fact unwind miserably like a toilet roll spinning quickly and fatally out of control.  The marriage plot – merely an excuse for the stag do which is only a poorly-conceived and thoroughly transparent ruse to shoot a bunch of clichéd stunts perfect for the trailers – was perplexingly irrelevant and fleeting.  The Fatherhood plot was weak and dire and utterly expected.  So many plot lines long and tedious cul-de-sacs conceived only to string out the movie for as long as possible in lieu of any actual creative ideas.

In fact I’ve just thesaurused “predictable” and got a whole bunch of words that I’m just going to list out as they all are valid: humdrum, conventional, boring, unsurprising, uninspiring (except it isn’t the latter actually is it ‘cos its inspired this rather cathartic diatribe.)

I’ve got plenty more to say but think this is now becoming just unhealthy.  In short, it offends me deeply that raw commercial motivations could allow someone to just NOT BOTHER to ensure the writing is up to scratch when they know that the cast, concept and trailers alone will lull huge audiences in their millions into the cinemas around the world regardless.  Richard Curtis should be thoroughly ashamed of himself and so should the producers.  Scrub thatm they should be taken out and FCUKING SHOT. In fact I’m so upset instead of buying the soundtrack I’m going to overcome my usual principles on pirating and illegally rip it from someone else as I just can’t bear to contribute to their profits.

(Rhys Ifans was surprisingly good though.)