Category Archives: Movies

by

Claire Danes plays Temple Grandin and Betty asplodes from the awesomeness

Claire Danes is a good thing. Apart from dying a truly horrible and unforgivably anachronistic death in Armstrong’s 1994 Little Women, Danes’ performances have been mostly quite remarkable: I also remember reading once that she has a trapeze in her loft apartment, about which no more really needs to be said.

Temple Grandin is a good thing to the point of legend. Granted, an air of horrible and anachronistic death does tend to hang about her for professional reasons — she’s a world expert on cattle-handling and slaughter — but her enduring and captivating renown comes from her insight into the autistic mind. In her seminal autobiography Emergence: Labeled Autistic, Grandin chronicles her tumultuous childhood and early adulthood (and Grandin is not a little bit autistic — she’s full-blown, Kanner-sits-down-looking-smug-and-informs-the-parents-that-he-doesn’t-need-to-check-the-manual autistic. You know, if Smokey the Magnificent was the size of a marble Temple Grandin would be forty miles away and bigger than a house: that kind of autistic). Then Oliver Sacks added his own not inconsiderable insight in a book he titled using one of Grandin’s own felicitous descriptions, An Anthropologist on Mars.

Betty heard Temple Grandin speak once, an experience that was up there with the greatest brushes with greatness Betty has ever had (these would include The Lads doing an encore at Parachute against all known rules, and having breakfast with Don Carson while he spoke pointedly about his single and most eligible son, so readers need not fear that they are overestimating the significance of this). There was a rubbish truck outside during the keynote address, and Temple Grandin is fascinated with rubbish trucks, and stopped her talk several times to check out the window; and then she told the story of the flooded library and cried. Betty’s mother personally asked Temple an autism-related question during the break, and Temple answered it straightforwardly, and then walked off. Thrills, srsly.

Serendipitously, HBO (also a good thing: see Wit) are making a movie about all of this, mostly. It will come out in 2010.

Et voila.

Danes as Temple Grandin

by

Thomas has autism and Alice is a goth

Speaking of cult status, which we were — try to keep up — there are several luminous examples among the screen media — among literature in general, in fact — of titles with especial resonance for certain niche groups. Let me be precise: groups which are obviously united by their neurology or their response to societal norms are often, in ways that are sometimes only loosely intuitive to the outside observer, drawn to specific works of literature. It’s true.

alice-burton-wonderlandFor example, it’s fairly easy to understand why those who identify as Gothic would also identify with, say, Tim Burton. It’s all the black scary things. Simple. But the part that is actually intriguing is the fact that goths everywhere (a certain type of goth, anyway) have an uncannily strong affinity with Alice, adventurer in Wonderland. Crazy blonde hair, powder-blue frock, poor self-control — it is easy to imagine her appealing to some groups. Pre-teen Disney fans, yes; socially inept bookish children, yes; lonely mathematicians with questionable motives, indeed. But the fact remains: dive into the world of Alice appreciation and you’ll inevitably find yourself rubbing shoulders with a gaggle of Gothic fans. Some will be delightful whimsigoths hanging out at Gorey Details; some, enterprising artists sharing their Tenniel hairpieces on Etsy; some lining up to see (and note the felicitous congruence here) Tim Burton’s adaptation, or Erich Hoeber’s, or one by Marilyn Manson too ghastly to link.

Continue reading →

by

I miss Auteur House

The screen media, as all readers will know, are useful chiefly for two things: they pass time and rot the brain. Very well. If, let us say, one is in the position of contending with hazardous circumstances, such as, let us say –

  • one’s abject poverty
  • the late hours one keeps
  • one’s iBook being on the fritz, perhaps permanently
  • one’s mother’s gratifying yet somehow anticlimactic probable triumph over a rare cancer, on a technicality
  • one’s practically only sister living in London and not able to come back quite when planned
  • 120 roll film costing the earth and leaving one’s Holga to lie fallow
  • one’s substandard ankles, now structurally unsound due to two accidents
  • the bus system

– and so on, the screen media occasionally do provide one with a welcome diversion. There are different kinds of media into which one can sink oneself: sometimes, for example, plonking down in front of Firefly on DVD is just the thing, and other times few things are more appealing than an afternoon curled up with cups of tea and a dozen or so YouTube clips of Draco and the Malfoys.

The trouble is, DVDs must either be picked up on sale at JB Hi-Fi, or rented from a frankly useless chain video store in the central city. This is no good. Auckland may be a bustling, forward-thinking metropolis (though this is doubtful), but what it needs is to take a lesson or two from Hamilton, at least in the matter of the Hydro-Majestic, cafes that open after six PM, and Auteur House. Shortly before I moved away, I had nearly finished watching a series of Truman Capote films (I think I still had one version of In Cold Blood to go) and a bunch of Hitchcocks, and Dr Richard was handing over Danny Kaye films as soon as I walked up the stairs.

I miss Auteur House.

by

Coraline

I first heard of Coraline when a friend sent me a link to the rather lovely official website. coraline

Then I missed it at the film festival. But then! One who shall remain delicately nameless took me to see it at the Village on Queen Street.

I have mixed feelings about Neil Gaiman. On the one hand, Stardust; but on the other, such pretentious travesties as the Sandman and “Snow, Glass, Apples”. Still, though, some university cronies of mine once had a superb bash at “We Can Get Them For You Wholesale”, so it’s only fair to give the guy a chance.

Coraline

He steps up, in Coraline, generally. A couple of plot points are played with all the artistry of a kids’ video game, and there are some distracting breaks in tone, but not enough to completely ruin the mood. Some things that should by rights have made it into the negative column, like French and Saunders, actually do a decent job.

But visually, Coraline is absolutely stunning. The baddies are just awful with their buttony eyes and skeletal hands, and the garden and forest that Coraline discovers are so richly realised, it’s lovely.

by

Doubt

Some things to which there really is no downside: Meryl Streep. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Black bonnets. The Dutch tilt. Silence. Philip Seymour Hoffman.

You’re welcome.

The boy person friend, with reluctant generosity, rented Doubt the other day – mainly to take my mind off the fact that he had also picked up a copy of Dan in Real Life. I never look a gift horse in the mouth, however, and Doubt more than lived up to its early promise. Meryl Streep, as a no-nonsense nun with a funny accent, whups the pants off Philip Seymour Hoffman (he’s in this movie, I meant to mention) – not literally, about the whupping off of his pants, but she does allow herself the grim pleasure of developing suspicions about his sordid goings-on with altar boys in the rectory. Unfettered by any actual evidence, she simply takes her ecclesiastical ranking in one hand, grasps her middle-aged New York chutzpah in the other, and lets rip with a campaign to get Father Frank (Philip Seymour Hoffman) out of her parish.

It’s a simple story told at an unhurried pace, and some of its devices are planted with wide-eyed naivete (such as the housekeeper hunting down an unwelcome mouse: “Takes a cat,” she declares with satisfaction when her mog has finally succeeded at the task, and Streep’s character archly replies, “Yes it does”). But Doubt, make no mistake, is on: tautly threaded, blinkered at all the right moments like the black bonnets that festoon the heads of dozens of unassumingly distinctive nuns, crafted with spare three-act precision – a Witness for those too titchy to remember it, assuming, that is, that they weren’t in the multiplex watching Dan in Real Life and consequently missing it.

In its final act, Doubt emerges as a devastating tryptich as Streep’s Sister Aloysius, her protege and sometime antagonist Sister James (beautifully played by Amy Adams, who’s a darn good thing), and the beleagured Father Frank (Philip Seymour Hoffman) turn cat and mouse, mother and child, saint and sinner, serpent and dove, Eve and madonna, protector and quarry, confessor and comforter. Its stage origins are evident, but Doubt uses the cinematic frame with deft expertise. It’s sometimes simplistic, not a little obvious, but never heavy-handed; subtle and well-finished to a fault.

Also, Philip Seymour Hoffman.