Posts Tagged ‘Alice Orr-Ewing’

What’s Love Got to Do with it?

Director: Shekhar Kapur

Cast: Lily James, Shazad Latif, Emma Thompson, Oliver Chris, Sajal Ali, Alice Orr-Ewing

Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes

Film Rating: 6 out of 10

Pakistani director Shekhar Kapur made some commercially successful films with the impressive Elizabeth (1998) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) both starring Cate Blanchett, but his latest film with a title which is both unoriginal and boring, What’s Love Got to do with it? is a cross cultural romantic comedy fortunately saved by the performance of the two main leads Lily James (Yesterday, Baby Driver, Darkest Hour) as documentary film maker Zoe and Shazad Latif (The Man who Knew Infinity, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) as Kazim, a doctor in contemporary London.

Audiences should not get this film mixed up with the 1993 film of the same name starring an Oscar nominated Angela Bassett as Tina Turner opposite Laurence Fishburne.

The second title reincarnation of this film is a cross cultural love story which is both contrived and poorly written by screenwriter Jemima Khan. What’s Love Got to do with it? is billed as a romantic comedy although there is not much comedy in it besides a couple of goofy scenes by Zoe’s mother Cath awfully played by Oscar winner Emma Thompson (Howard’s End, Sense and Sensibility), who apart from Cruella has recently chosen some really dubious film roles. In actual fact, this was the worst I have seen Emma Thompson act in a film.

Fortunately Lily James is amazing as Zoe, a single documentary film maker who decides to take Kazim’s decision to embark on an arranged marriage with an unknown bride in Lahore, Pakistan as a fascinating subject matter for a documentary film. Except that this premise does fall flat as any documentary film maker should never fall in love with their subject matter?

The authenticity of Zoe as the film maker taking a peek into an essentially non-Western custom is questioned in terms of ethnographic film making. As Kazim says to Zoe in one of the better scenes of the film, that even though we are neighbours we are continents apart referring to the vast cultural differences between the British and the Pakistani’s.

Shazad Latif is easy on the eye and is dependable as the handsome male lead, completely dominated by his family.

As the action of the film moves from grey and dull London to bright and exotic Lahore in Pakistan, director Shekar Kapur’s handling of the issue of cross cultural relationships is muted without making a strong point except for a fabulous wedding scene, the rest of this near two hour film is not thrilling, but long winded and arduous.

By the time the two main romantic leads get together it is the end of the film. That being said, the onscreen chemistry between the gorgeous Lily James and the extremely handsome Shazad Latif holds this film together even when the supporting cast do not.

What’s Love Got to do with it? could have been so much better, a tale filled with wit and good humour but instead comes across rather surprisingly as a boring cross cultural love story which has been rehashed a thousand times since the Oscar winning Guess Who is Coming to Dinner (1967). Besides Emma Thompson should choose better film roles in the future.

What’s Love Got to do with it? gets a film rating of 6 out of 10, unoriginal and slow in parts but this romantic comedy will find a niche audience. Recommended viewing for those that enjoy an extremely lightweight and slightly exotic British romantic comedy set in London and Lahore.

The Theory of Everything

Director: James Marsh

Cast: Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones, Charlie Cox, Emily Watson, David Thewlis, Alice Orr-Ewing

Shadow Dancer director James Marsh delivers a fine, subtle film about the early Cambridge years of the brilliant theoretical physicist Professor Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything so remarkably portrayed on screen by Eddie Redmayne (My Week with Marilyn, Les Miserables) that he become one of the youngest best actor Oscar winners at the age of 33.

Redmayne’s portrayal of Stephen Hawking from gangly awkward scientist in the early 1960’s, through to his courtship of the lovely Jane Wilde, beautifully portrayed by Felicity Jones (The Invisible Woman, Hysteria) to his devastating diagnosis of the life altering motor neurone disease is absolutely phenomenal. The expressive face of Eddie Redmayne, his physical contortions in portraying Hawking is beyond superb as the Professor grapples with the horrendous paradox of being intellectually gifted yet physically crippled as the motor neurone disease takes effect on his body, limiting his speech, his ability to walk and even to eat properly.

Despite this crippling diagnosis, Professor Hawking and his wife Jane, manage to produce three children so obviously his reproductive abilities weren’t affected by the disease as weren’t his mental capabilities in which he managed to expound the Big Bang Theory and then later to disprove it in his ground breaking novel, A Brief History of Time, which sold millions of copies worldwide and propelled him to international fame http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking.

The intellectual conflict in the film between Jane’s Church of England upbringing and Hawking’s cosmic atheism is delicately portrayed. One the most poignant moments is when Jane Hawking confides in her mother played by Emily Watson that she cannot cope with her husband’s crippling disability and having to bring up several children simultaneously. Her mother’s advice is typically English and suggests she should join the Church Choir. During Choir practice, Jane meets the able bodied and charming choral master Jonathan, played against type by Irish actor Charlie Cox, who soon befriends Jane and her famous wheelchair bound husband, Professor Hawking.

Unnaturally this seemingly impossible ménage-a-trios is not set to last as soon Hawking’s motor neuron disease takes a turn for the worst after he collapses during a Wagner concert in Bordeaux. Jane Hawking soon realizes that she is going to require a full time care giver to look after her famous yet incapacitated husband. The fact that the caregiver looks like a 1960’s Bond girl is testament to Hawking’s own flirtatious nature and soon through the aide of an American sounding computerized voice he informs Jane that him and the caregiver are flying to America together.

The mathematical probability of happiness is discovered in all its infinity as soon as Jane and Stephen find partners suitable for their own physical requirements, and this eventual separation becomes the emotional crux of The Theory of Everything, apart from the bleak physical disabilities and momentous scientific breakthroughs which has characterized a highly unconventional marriage.

Despite some directorial embellishments, James Marsh’s The Theory of Everything is a well-structured and sensitive portrayal of one of the world’s most famous Physicists who despite all the odds and being unable to speak or walk, manages to expand a theory of time which transforms all future scientific endeavour and quantitative research. Hawking’s insatiable will to survive is testament to the power of the human spirit, considering he was given two years to live at the start of his diagnosis.

At the centre of this film, based upon Jane Hawking’s memoir, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen is a story of a very challenging marriage and of a couple whose determination to overcome every physical and emotional obstacle eventually led to their separation yet ultimately finding their own individual fulfillment.

The casting of Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones is critical to this film’s success as they both give exceptionally meticulously and ranged performance of Stephen and Jane Hawking which is all the more admirable for portraying such venerated and surviving figures of the British academic establishment.

The Theory of Everything is brilliant cinema, and highly recommended viewing for those that enjoyed films such as My Left Foot and Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

This is first rate acting at its best and has proven beyond doubt that Redmayne and Jones are truly gifted screen actors with an infinite career ahead of them. The soft focus cinematography of the entire film gives Cambridge a hallowed glow that ensures the audience gets a feeling that they too are watching a miracle, ably assisted by an exceptional musical score by Jóhann Jóhannsson.

Atonement

Joe Wright’s sumptious cinematic version of the acclaimed novel Atonement by Ian McEwan is really worth viewing a second time round…

Having read Atonement in 2007 and waited for the big screen version of the tale about real and imagined crimes, war and the devastation of innocence, I was suitably impressed by Wright’s cinematic version of a complex novel by author McEwan. Only on a second viewing do I fully appreciate the intricate variations of a grand tale about innocence, loss and the absolute devastation of World War II on all nations concerned. With a brilliant screenplay by the masterful Christopher Hampton, who brought us Dangerous Liaisons and the elegant film Carrington about the life of Lytton Strachey, Wright propels the viewer into an elegant scene of the snobbish society of English country life that is soon transformed forever at the approaching threat of war… showing both those that profits off war’s destruction and those that lose everything by the infinite devastation of endless violence.

*****

What makes Wright’s film version so brilliant, is his effective use of water as a motif both for purification and as a form of atonement and cleansing, whether its the illicit sexual encounters of a lazy English sultry summer afternoon or the sponging of blood and grime from the wounded soldiers as they return from the Theatre of war, that was France in 1940.  From the retreat at Dunkirk to the blitz of London and the losses suffered by all, Atonement paints a grim and prophetic picture of a world without order, direction or compassion, where many must suffer for the mistakes of the few. Wright’s cinematic achievement is that wonderfully long tracking shot on the beaches of France as the English forces prepare for an initial retreat, and the wake of devastation left behind, as one of the central characters Robbie turns and survey the catastrophe of confusion and anarchy. A society on the brink of collapse, seemingly without redemption.

Atonement focuses also on conflicting narratives, embellishments and the dangers of an imagination too rampant to remain real, only realised through the loss of innocence and that inexhaustible sense of wasted time. Besides alternative settings of elegance and destruction, are poignant performances by a superb cast that tackle the subject matter with an earnest command of look and suspense. The original score by Dario Marinelli is brilliant and exceptionally evocative, and is in line with similar films about war, love and lost chances in the tradition of The English Patient and The Remains of the Day.

Audiences should watch out for a superb performance by Saoirse Ronan as the precocious and prying Briony Tallis, who sets in motion a series of misguided accusations which can never be rectified. Saoirse Ronan deservedly received an Oscar nomination for her role as the imaginative 13 year old girl, who does not fully grasp the motives or desires of adults, particularly those of her sister Cecilia played by Keira Knightley and Robbie Turner played by James McAvoy.

Ian McEwan’s novel, Atonement is a multi-layed superbly descriptive account of the erosion of social stability in the face of a world inevitably altered by the onset of the most dramatic event in the 20th century…

The novel  is a thought-provoking and intelligent study of English society on the brink of a significant historical turning point, the affects of which still resonate today…

Even if you have seen the film,  the novel is worth reading and then set aside a luxurious afternoon to afford yourself a second viewing of Atonement.  Both endeavors are enriching and speculative, not to mention thought-provoking… After all, how is a person to atone for an accusation that irrevocably changes the course of a families history forever…

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