Miss Me?

 So on Christmas Eve last year, I gave up movie blogging. A lot of effort for not much return, it seemed to me at the time. But with Christmas looming again, it feels right to re-enter the blogosphere, maybe this time with a wider scope. 

Last night, I watched Death at a Funeral (Frank Oz, 2007), a sometimes amusing, sometimes stupid British farce with some performers I like, namely Matthew Macfadyen, Peter Dinklage, and Rupert Graves. It was remade in 2011, and that version lies somewhere in the queue of movies on my DVR that I've recorded. Dinklage apparently plays the same role -- a gay man who crashes the funeral of his lover after being cut out of the man's will -- in the remake. On the whole, not a total waste of his and the other actors' talents, but not a movie I'd urge upon anyone who hasn't seen the classic Brit farces like Kind Hearts and Coronets or The Lavender Hill Mob or The Ladykillers, all of which do this sort of comic larceny and mayhem with greater finesse.

Matthew Macfadyen and Peter Dinklage in Death at a Funeral

On TV I started the second season of The Witcher, a well-made Netflix fantasy series starring Henry Cavill as some kind of fantasyland soldier of fortune dedicated to killing monsters. The first episode of the season opened with highlights supposedly recapping the first season, which started two years ago. I watched that season and enjoyed it, but I have to admit that the recap didn't really refresh me on what happened then, much of which I've forgotten. No matter, the new season started off very well on its own, and I didn't really need to be au fait with the backstory to enjoy it. 

I also watched the sixth episode of Maid, an often depressing Netflix series about the struggle of a young woman, played well by Margaret Qualley, to make it on her own with her 3-year-old daughter after leaving her emotionally abusive alcoholic husband. The series focuses on the complications and contradictions of the American welfare system, as the heroine, Alex, tries to keep her head above water despite the snares of its red tape. Andie MacDowell is wonderful as Alex's air-headed, gray-haired hippie mother, who hinders more than she helps. The series often seems to be on the verge of sinking into sentimental mush, but it hasn't done that yet. 

I'm also reading Anthony Trollope's The Warden, which takes me back to my days as a Victorian literature scholar. More on that later, maybe.

A Handful of Dust (Charles Sturridge, 1988)

A Handful of Dust (Charles Sturridge, 1988)

Cast: James Wilby, Kristin Scott Thomas, Rupert Graves, Judi Dench, Alec Guinness, Anjelica Huston, Pip Torrens, Stephen Fry, Jackson Kyle, Christopher Godwin. Screenplay: Tim Sullivan, Derek Granger, Charles Sturridge, based on a novel by Evelyn Waugh. Cinematography: Peter Hannan. Production design: Eileen Diss, Chris Townsend. Film editing: Peter Coulson. Music: George Fenton.

Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust is a sharp-edged, cold-hearted satirical novel whose plot turns on the death of a child. Any adaptation needs to be willing to be as ruthless as the novelist in its portrait of the feckless upper classes of Great Britain in the period between two World Wars, but instead Charles Sturridge's version gives us yet another handsomely mounted, elegantly clad film in the Merchant Ivory vein -- without the intelligence of Ismail Merchant's producing, James Ivory's direction, and particularly Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's screenplays, which managed to capture the tone of the novels they adapted with precision. Its leads, James Wilby as the ill-fated Tony Last and Kristin Scott Thomas as his unfaithful wife, Brenda, are handsome but a little too attractive to capture the fatal emptiness of the characters. Scott Thomas almost suggests the depths of Brenda's vanity in the crucial scene in which she receives the news of her young son's death -- at first she thinks she's being told that her lover has died, but when she hears that it's her son, she impulsively mutters, "Oh, thank God," before realizing the enormity of what she has just said. Unfortunately, Sturridge hasn't prepared us for the moment -- he has made Brenda too engaging a character for so wicked a reaction. Nor has Sturridge allowed Tony to be enough of a silly ass for him to deserve the fate he receives at the end of the film. The supporting players fare better: Rupert Graves lets us know from the start that John Beaver is a callow gold-digger; Judi Dench is suitably brassy as his upwardly mobile mother; and Alec Guinness makes a convincingly subtle monster out of Mr. Todd. Anjelica Huston brings her usual smartness to what amounts to a cameo role as Mrs. Rattery, a rich American whose perspective on the Brits and their preoccupation with class and the past opens Tony's eyes, even if a bit too late. Unfortunately, any substance that the film carries over from Waugh's novel has been slicked over with glossy production values and sapped by a timidity about depicting the characters as sharply as the author did.

V for Vendetta (James McTeigue, 2005)

I'm not sure how Guy Fawkes became a hero and blowing up the Houses of Parliament an admirable political act, but V for Vendetta certainly seems to endorse both of them. (The latter seems especially odd in a movie made only four years after the 9/11 attacks.) I haven't read the graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, so I can't comment on the fidelity or lack of it to the source, which is just as well. But the film bears the stamp of most adaptations from graphic novel/comic book sources: an assumption that the viewer will accept the movie's milieu on its own terms, without trying to haul in real-world plausibility. It's easier to do that if you have a cast capable of playing almost anything from Shakespeare to soap opera. So the presence of actors like Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea, Stephen Fry, John Hurt, Tim Piggott-Smith, Rupert Graves, and Sinéad Cusack goes a long way to keeping V for Vendetta alive. I particularly liked Roger Allam as a rabble-rousing news commentator in the mold of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. I was less impressed with Natalie Portman, whose British accent came and went fitfully and who generally seemed at sea. It may be that the script by Andy and Lana Wachowski called for her character, Evey, to be off-balance through most of the film, but I failed to connect with her performance, which since she is meant to be the audience's point-of-view character is something of a fatal flaw.