BEHIND THE SCENES OF A FAIRY TALE : "GRACE OF MONACO"

I decided to see this one (again on a plane) because I was rather bemused by the overall “mediocre” reviews of it. It was set as an extravaganza after all, opening the Cannes Film Festival no less, a clearly opulent, highly visual film about a modern fairy tale; the story of Grace Kelly, who left the glamour of Tinsel town to be the Princess of Monaco.

However, the fairy tale, we quickly learn, is not all it seems. Grace misses Hollywood and her old world,  Rainier ( Tim Roth) is distant and increasingly stressed about Monaco’s increasingly tense relationship with De Gaule era France and no matter how hard Grace tries, she can’t seem to get it right, every single thing she says and does seems to be wrong. When Hitchcock offers her the leading part in his latest film, Marnie, Grace reaches crisis point. She has the perfect opportunity to return to the stage – but with a crisis brewing in Monaco and her new family to consider… Which way will Grace turn?

I mean we have the advantage of hindsight here, we all know she stayed with Rainier, never acted again and was her Serene Highness the Princess of Monaco for the rest of her life. And herein lies the problem with this film. There is no real crisis, because most, if not all of us know what Grace decided to do. The interest of the film lies – or would lie – in portraying her psychological process in getting there. It offers an interesting opportunity to look into the mind of a woman forced to choose between her career and her family. What we end up with, between Grace’s wise father figure Father Tucker, the elocution lessons and the French lessons (complete with the now rather stale parody of Americans being unable to pronounce foreign languages) something akin to the Princess Diaries, or, you know, all those tweenage films about regular girls learning to be princesses. And on the other hand, I mean come on. The dilemma is between being a famous actress or an actual princess. It’s not exactly an easy dilemma to sympathize with.

The second point, which I actually read in another review is that the same is valid for the Monaco deal. It is, of course, absolutely tragic for any country to lose its sovereignty but at the end of the day, in real terms, they would simply become French citizens and lose some tax privileges. It’s bad. But it’s not exactly being put to the sword either. And just as it was in the case of Grace’s story, we actually know what happened. Monaco still exists. The end. In fact the whole “danger” is largely economic, the long discussions (and the explanations thereof, as given to Grace who plays the role of the Everyman) are basically a lot of men in tuxedos round a board room table. Again, very hard to sympathize with.

In both crises typical Hollywood tricks are used to heighten emotion, extreme close ups of faces (and eyes and mouths quite a few times), tense music, suitable sequences of both Nicole Kidman and Tim Roth looking tortured….   But in the end, the moment you take a step back, there is no real “crisis” there, not for us. I would have found a much more deeply psychological behind the scenes angle a lot more interesting.

It’s a shame really, because there  is a really good opportunity there, something akin to what we discussed concerning CallasForever – an actress, playing an actress, playing a part. Or rather learning to play a part. I mean we do get hints at that, I rather liked the vignettes of Grace Kelly rehearsing Marnie in front of her bedroom mirror. I do wonder how Kidman approached that; did she do it the way she herself would play Marnie or try and figure out how Grace Kelly would do it? Both maybe? But I mean even that is marred slightly, there comes a moment when Father Tucker holds Grace’s hands earnestly and says – as deep down we knew he would : “Grace, learning to be the Princes is the role of a lifetime”.

I mean yeah, the film is beautiful, opulent… But for all that, it falls short on the way the story is told. I know the whole idea is the “backstory” of a typical fairy tale being exposed, but if the fairy tale is typical, this doesn’t mean the way we tell it has to be as well… So I’m afraid I have to say yes, I totally see why so many people just turned around and said it was just… “Meh”… I feel sadly obliged to join their ranks… 

ESSIE'S GUSHING CONTINUES - ONE OF THE BEST ENTRANCES EVER : "RESERVOIR DOGS"

I have a sneaking suspicion that over the course of the next couple of weeks, Quentin Tarantino’s entire filmography may well creep its way into the blog. Yes there is a “because I say so” element to this creeping.  What can I tell you. I love the guy. I gush and gush about his films.  People who know me in offline life have learnt to deal with it. I’m sure you will too. Why only the other day a colleague at work was saying how Quentin Tarantino was “this weird guy who never even finished school”. I spent the next fifteen minutes verbally crushing her about that statement. Yes, he never went to film school. Despite this fact, his first feature film? RESERVOIR DOGS. Beat that as far as entrances go, I mean seriously. I do agree that the most important thing is watching movies as opposed to film school. If you love it enough, it will creep into your bones. If you have sh.tloads of talent to go with it, you’ll make a film like Reservoir Dogs.  I can report (with some pride) that other colleagues present ended up agreeing with me and the colleague who initially made the observation was silent and then changed the topic (although that may have been due to the sentences pouring out of me ever louder and quicker, accompanied by sweeping gestures with hands and arms). Now, being an Aries, I am at the very least amused by fighting off such objections with posture and tone of voice alone (admit it you guys – we are a zodiac sign that is especially partial to grandeur). But you know, there is logic behind this argument. Queue, this post.  Let’s talk about Quentin Tarantino and Reservoir Dogs. Not like it’s one of my favourite movies by my favourite director or anything…

The story itself is easily told and is, in truth, as old as the hills. It is a gangster movie. A heist movie to be exact. A major crime boss of the area, Joe Cabot (Lawrence Tierney), puts together a group of criminals he trusts (to varying degrees, it should be said, but it is pretty clear they are all “cool”) to pull off a jewellery heist. It seems like a very basic, easy job for a group of seasoned criminals such as we have here, however things do not go according to plan. The whole affair is carnage from beginning to end. As the survivors make their way back to the rendezvous point, one thing is clear: there is a rat in their midst.  How else would the police have appeared on the scene so quickly and so well prepared? Thing is, the criminals don’t know anything about each other, for security reasons they are not even allowed to exchange first names. Thus begin the mind games. Who is the rat, how to find him and how to deal with him when they do? And oh by the way, where have the diamonds they managed to grab got to? 

Ok, right off the bat, this is vintage Tarantino. This is another reason I respect the guy so much, like a lot of great directors, he had a style from the word go, and although it has been “added to” as years went by, the basic tenets have never changed. Here we have a heist / gangster movie – a favourite genre of the director as we know rather well – with a vintage soundtrack  and a storyline which is both simple and at the same time fuller of surprises than you could possibly imagine. Stylistically, Tarantino starts on something he will elaborate on further later on with Pulp Fiction – non-linear narration. And while in Pulp Fiction, the narration tends to go in larger chunks – that is to say the “morsels” of story we see out of order are larger / longer, here that length is a great deal shorter. This is mainly due to the fact that there is only one story line here.  So as you watch, a bit like the characters, you are piecing the story together, trying to figure out what the heck happened. As the film progresses – and we are, as viewers, blessed with multiple points of view, and hence info the characters don’t all possess, the suspense grows. Because, in a bizarre kind of way, the more we know, the less sure we are how the whole thing is going to end. Expect plot twists. Like, a barrel load or two. This film includes one of my favourite “raaaah” moments in a film. I would call this moment the precise incarnation of why I like Tarantino’s films so much. I’m obviously not going to describe it here but ask me in real life and I’ll be happy to tell you.

And if nothing else, people, here is a thriller that actually needs you to use your noggin as you watch. A rarer and rarer breed of movies these days  as I am sure you have observed. Oh and the cast : Tim Roth, Harvey Keitel, Michael Madsden and Steve Buscemi to name but a few. Come on. Admit it. You’re tempted… 

ESSIE SPEAKS OF HER FAVORITE FILM EVER : "PULP FICTION"

I have made a momentous discovery. I have discovered my favourite film. As someone so engaged in films of all kinds, I am hard pressed to pick one. It will always be a close contest. I will always rattle off a couple in close succession, as opposed to one single one. But if you press me for a single one, I am now sure this is IT. Now, you guys know I don’t really write that much about the big classics. I like talking about the “hot” stuff out there along with the ones you may have missed along the way. But come on. This is my favourite film. I have a sneaking feeling it always has been. I want to gush about it for a second. And who knows, maybe I can somehow convince you Tarantino-haters out there (and I really don’t know what to do with you guys but anyhow) to give this a spin. I have a feeling you guys have the impression that all Tarantino films are just jumped-up slasher flicks, you know, with the emphasis on the blood as opposed to any actual content. You are SO WRONG. Ok, let’s get right to it.

There is no one single story here. Actually, there are three. Two of these stories revolve around the gang boss Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames). See, Mr Wallace likes his sports. He likes to watch, for example, a good boxing match. He is also a betting man – and like the rest of us, he likes to win his bets. But he has an advantage over the rest of us in that field. See if, for example, he feels unsure how things will go, he can take precautions. Like taking Butch (Bruce Willis), a good pro boxer who is a tad bit past his prime for example, and explain to him if he should win or lose and at which round. Butch gets paid handsomely for his trouble, and Mr Wallace is happy. If Butch does not comply however, Mr Wallace is not amused. And I think we all know by now that an unamused gang boss is never a good thing. Then there are his two right hand men – Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Jules Winnfield ( Samuel L. Jackson). They do things gang bosses do not condescend to tire themselves with. You know, extortion, debt collecting, murder and the like. But Vincent  especially is a little nervous of late  - he has an extra job you see. He has to take Mr Wallace’s dashing young wife (Uma Thurman) out to dinner while Mr Wallace is not in town. He must show her a good time, not offend her in any way, yet not cross any boundaries. I.e., he is on VERY thin ice indeed until the dinner date is up. And then there are two small time robbers. Pumpkin and Honey Bunny. They are planning their last couple of hits before they retire to some exotic location together. And they hit on an idea – why not rob a restaurant? And how do all these people come together you say? You will have to watch the film and see. But trust me when I say, regardless of what you’re thinking the answer is… You’re probably wrong…

Now, take these three stories. Cut them all into a few large chunks and jumble them up. And tell them in completely non-linear order with seemingly no rhyme or reason. Welcome to Pulp Fiction. As you can well imagine, in the wrong hands the formula is an unqualified disaster. But these, you see, are not the wrong hands. The puzzle is constructed in such a way that, although between Mr Tarantino’s penchant for surprises and the way the story is told you have no way of knowing what “comes next” until the last minute, it is, at the same time, clearly done so that you don’t actually have to research the film online later to clearly understand what is going on . On a side note, some people see this “incomprehensible” quality as a major asset – I don’t get it quite honestly. A film is something you should be able to understand as you watch it. Or a bit later, when you think about it. It shouldn’t take research. But at the same time, especially if you watch a lot of films, you want to be surprised. You want to not be able to tell what is coming next. I can categorically promise you that in this film, be it in terms of plot twists or actual pieces of the plot, you will rarely know what is coming next. This is one of the things I truly love about this film. 

The other thing I like about the film – and all of Tarantino’s films as it happens – is his own particularly dark brand of humour. This is what puts a twist on this little number too. Because, by Tarantino’s own admission, the three basic plot lines that are interwoven are as old as the hills. That is precisely the point. You take a classic and you put your own twist on it. How far you can twist it largely depends on your personal talent. I think you see where I’m going with this…

I mean yes, there is blood – people die. But newsflash – it’s a gangster flick.  If nobody died and there was no blood, you’d complain about it being unrealistic. This is something for you cats who want something both truly entertaining and truly original as entertainment.          Just take the plunge man. There is a reason every single person on the planet calls this film a classic. Time you found out why. 

FOUR MEMORABLE STORIES FROM "FOUR ROOMS" -

Now this is an interesting project. It’s one of those things you wish you had thought of yourself, you know? I’ll give you the tagline for the film: “Twelve outrageous guests. Four scandalous requests. And one lone bellhop, on his first day on the job, who's in for the wildest New Year's Eve of his life.” Set in a hotel, an old rambling hotel – so down on its luck that the entire staff is down to just the manager and the bellhop – four rooms tells the story of, well you got it… Four rooms. Now, each “room” is directed by a different director and is about 20 – odd minutes long. The writer /directors are Allison Anderson, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino.
Ted the bellhop (Tim Roth) is stuck at work on New Year’s Eve. The hotel isn’t exactly what you might call full, but there are quite a few guests (twelve in total) knocking around… They are possibly the last handful of guests the hotel may have, so he runs hither and thither to assist and serve… However, not everything will quite go his way… There is a group of very strange ladies (among whom we can spy Madonna) gathering in the honeymoon suite. A rather rowdy couple in 409 who will prove more trouble than they first seem to be. A gangster (Antonio Banderas) and his wife who desperately need a babysitter for their two rather spoilt children will squarely land on Ted in 309 and just as he is ready to pack the whole thing in and leave, the famous film star in the penthouse (ironically played by Tarantino himself) rings with a rather bizarre list of requests.
Now, I love the idea of this film – and it’s really funny in bits, especially the Rodriguez and Tarantino segments (the gangster and the star in the penthouse. By the way, don’t you love the way Tarantino casts himself in his earlier films? Does anyone know why he stopped doing that?) . But, without presuming to be an expert, I may well have done a few things differently. For instance, the four stories DO NOT interact at all if you don’t count Ted. Except once – and even that was, I felt, a slight push. I kind of like the Balzac approach, you know, he will be talking about a character in a novel and just then another character from another novel will come walking by… Not necessarily for any reason in the plot, just as a cameo as it were. They could at least have done that in my opinion – this result is just too cut off… Tim Roth is VERY good to give him his due. However, there were times where I could swear that he was just trying to be Basil Fawlty from Fawlty Towers and only just failing (you’ve heard of Basil Fawlty right? John Cleese’s character from the British sitcom? Oh never mind, just click here) Thirdly, well, not all the stories were, in my view, that interesting. I mean, the first one is well and good; but I wouldn’t have persisted with the rest if I didn’t know that a Tarantino performance was coming up in the end… However, persist I did, and ended up positively howling with laughter in bits and remembering why it was that I adored Mr. Tarantino. I have also developed a healthy interest in Mr. Rodriguez and will proceed to dig a film of his out of my “to watch” pile for next week… You’re going to have to be patient for that one though ;)