Fatima

1. This was a surprisingly good film.  I was prepared for having to turn it off after five minutes if it was preachy, but it wasn’t – it put the 1917 “Marian Apparitions” into their historical context, and did quite a good job of it.

Portugal was in turmoil in 1917.  The king and the heir to the throne had been assassinated in 1908, and the new king had been overthrown in 1910 and replaced by a military dictatorship, which was pursued an anticlerical policy so strict that it upset other countries and didn’t go down at all well in conservative rural areas.  Then, in 1916, Portugal entered the Great War.  The film showed scenes of the entire local populace gathering in the nearest town square, whilst a local official read out the latest lists of the dead, wounded and missing – low literacy rates and the postal system presumably not allowing for the use of telegrams.

Amid all this, three shepherd children, Lucia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, reported being visited by a lady whom they believed to be the Virgin Mary.   Word spread rapidly, and thousands of people flooded into the area on the date on which the next apparition was due.  In such difficult times, everyone must have been desperate for a bit of hope.  It culminated in a mass gathering at which thousands of people claimed to have seen strange behaviour by the sun.

The Shrine of Fatima is now such a major pilgrimage centre and part of Portuguese identity that you might think that the children immediately became national heroes.   Instead, the civil and religious authorities were deeply disturbed, basically because they thought that they were losing control of the situation; and the kids, aged between 7 and 10, were thrown in jail.   They were released soon afterwards, but two of them sadly died during the Spanish flu pandemic.  The surviving child, their cousin Lucia, became a nun, and died in 2005 at the age of 97.

The film really did very well in showing the situation in Portugal at the time, and it flashed forward to the second half of the 20th century to show Lucia being interviewed by an American reporter who clearly didn’t believe a word of her story, as a way of showing that … well, people believe what they want to believe, and, as I said, the shrine of Fatima is now a major pilgrimage centre and a crucial part of Portguese culture, so clearly a lot of people do believe it.  There’s also a cafe there called O Benfiquista, which displays, amongst other things, memorabilia from the 1968 European Cup Final, but that’s rather beside the point.

So, yes, this was much more engaging than I expected.   I quite enjoyed it.

Barbie

Having missed “Barbenheimer” at the pictures, I’ve now caught up on both halves of it.  Thank you to Amazon Prime for making this available for £1.99!   I can’t make up my mind what I thought of it, though.   It was totally bonkers.   Margot Robbie as a Barbie doll who got cellulite.  Ryan Gosling dancing around in a very strange coat.  Helen Mirren making sarcastic remarks as a narrator.  America Ferrera giving speeches about how women couldn’t do right for doing wrong.   I’m not sure whether we were supposed to take the whole thing as a serious commentary on the battle between feminism and the patriarchy, whether it was all meant to be ironic, or, er, both.  The film clearly thought it was very clever, and that was quite annoying.

We had a lot of Barbie dolls living in pink Barbieland, which was all ruled by Barbies, with Kens in a secondary position.  Then one Barbie and one Ken went to the real world to find out who’d caused Margot Robbie’s stereotypical Barbie to develop cellulite, and there were a lot of scenes involving people chasing each other round Venice Beach.  Barbie then went back to Barbieland, with two humans in tow, and found that Ken had taken over Barbieland because he liked the idea of a patriarchy.  With horses.  (All the men is this film were basically portrayed as idiots.)  The Barbies eventually regained control, but Margot Robbie Barbie decided to become a human.

I think the real star of the show was actually Rhea Pearlman as Ruth Handler, who created Barbie and played a major role in Mattel, in the male-dominated world of the ’50s and ’60s.  As for the rest, I really can’t decide if it was brilliant or if it was rubbish.  It was just … strange.

I don’t remember there being controversy over toys when I was a kid, although arguments over Barbie were going long before then.   TBH, Barbie didn’t loom very large in my universe.   I did have one Barbie doll – who wore an impossibly tight yellow jumpsuit – but I never had any of the Barbie paraphernalia.  Sindy dolls were much more popular in the UK, and my sister and I had several Sindy dolls … plus a Sindy house, with a swimming pool 🙂 .   Sindy dolls were for girls and Action Men were for boys, but that was never a big deal.   In fact, it was better to be a girl, because no-one thought it was particularly weird if girls played with train sets or read Biggles books, but boys would never have admitted to playing with My Little Ponies (“bronies” were not a thing in the early ’80s) or reading Malory Towers.   Also, we had Long Distance Clara in Pigeon Street, but I can’t remember any male cartoon characters doing traditionally female jobs!

There wasn’t all this gender-divided marketing, though.   These days, you see little girls walking round town dressed up as Disney princesses.  If it makes them happy, fair enough, but no-one in my day dressed up as a princess unless they were in a play or going to a fancy dress party!   And what on earth is the idea with football clubs producing shirts and scarves in pink?!  If you’re a United fan, you want red shirts and scarves.  If you’re a City fan, you want blue shirts and scarves.   You only want pink if you support Palermo.

Apparently there were lots of different Sindy dolls in the early/mid ’80s, but I only remember them wearing ballet skirts.   Did this make me think I had to become a ballerina?  Er, no.  I did have ballet lessons briefly, but that was nothing to do with Sindy.  Incidentally, I was fat and useless, and the ballet dancer made useless fat kids stand in the back row.  This never happened to anyone in Lorna Hill or Noel Streatfeild books.   Did I think that I couldn’t become a doctor or a lawyer or an astronaut or anything else because Sindy was dressed as a ballerina?  Definitely not.  They’re only dolls.  Why does everyone want to make such a big deal of everything these days?!    Am I missing something?   Can anyone honestly say that their lives have been that deeply influenced by what sort of dolls were available when they were kids?

Maybe that’s why I didn’t think the film was as good as some people are saying.  We didn’t really have culture wars over dolls in my day.   They were just dolls.   They didn’t represent either feminism or the patriarchy.  I don’t quite get the fuss.  I don’t quite get the fuss over this film either.  Oh well, you can’t like everything!

 

 

 

Oppenheimer

  Yes, all right, I know I’m six months late to the party with this!   I went on holiday just after it was released, and somehow never got round to seeing it when I got back.   It takes some watching!   Three hours, jumping about between different timelines, some scenes in black and white, and some very loud background music.   I wasn’t sure that I was going to enjoy it, but I did: it was fascinating.

I don’t understand anything about quantum physics, so I can’t comment about the technicalities of developing the bomb.  But the way that Oppenheimer was portrayed was very much in line with what’s been said about him.   And it was just very sad that, after all his work, he lost his career because of the McCarthy witch hunts.  The 1950s had McCarthyism: we have cancel culture.   The film could have just focused on the Manhattan Project: it was very interesting that it chose to focus on the later treatment of Oppenheimer as well.    It was annoyingly American-centric, though.   What about the input that Britain, Canada and Australia had into developing the bomb?   Some of the work was done at my old university, the University of Birmingham.  Not a mention of that!   And going on about how Oppenheimer had saved a lot of “American lives” by avoiding the need for a land invasion of Japan.  What about British, Soviet, Australian, Canadian, New Zealander, Indian etc etc etc lives?!

And how ironic it is that so many of the British and American scientists involved in the work were originally from Germany, Austria and Hungary.   The Nazis and their allies drove out a lot of their best physicists.   (Irrelevant but interesting fact – Max Born, under whom Oppenheimer studied in Germany, and who later moved to Britain, was the grandfather of Olivia Newton-John.)

I thought that maybe it could have said a bit more about how Oppenheimer dealt with knowing about the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but maybe he just did.   As the pilot of the Enola Gay – and I sometimes wonder how Enola Gay Tibbets felt about her name for ever being associated with the world’s first atomic bombing – said, it wasn’t his decision to drop the bomb, and it wasn’t Oppenheimer’s either.   And the bombings may indeed have saved more lives than they took.  We’ll never know, because we’ll never know what would have happened without them.

I’m glad that I’ve finally seen this.  It’s an important film about an important subject.  And now we’ll see what happens at the Oscars.   Oppenheimer looks set to dominate.   It’d be nice to have the major awards won by a film which a lot of people have actually seen, not some obscure thing which a lot of people have never even heard of!

One Life

This is a very moving film about the work done by good people in bad times.   Those of us who remember the ’80s – how on earth was 1988 36 years ago?! – will remember how the story of how Nicholas Winton, later Sir Nicholas Winton, rescued 669 children from the Nazis was brought to light in an episode of That’s Life! in 1988.   The film moves between 1987/88, when the elderly Nicholas Winton is clearing out old paperwork, and 1938/39, when the young Nicholas Winton was asked by friends to go to Prague and work with the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, raised awareness in Britain of the situation, and battled red tape to bring the children to safety.

Sadly, the last train, which was due to leave Prague on 1st September 1939 and would have brought about 250 more children to Britain, was stopped by the Nazis, and almost all the children on board were murdered during the Holocaust.   The film shows the elderly Nicky being haunted by the thought of the children whom he couldn’t save.   It also shows, accurately, how he never spoke about heroics during the war – but, in real life, it was his wife who found his scrapbook, detailing the rescue effort, and passed it to Elisabeth Maxwell, the wife of Robert Maxwell, who then brought the story to the attention of Esther Rantzen, whereas in the film Nicky himself is trying to find a home for the scrapbook, so that it can be used to educate people about the horrors of the past.

The film acknowledges the contributions made by other people, notably Doreen Warriner and Trevor Chadwick, and also Nicky’s formidable mother, as well as Czechoslovakian volunteers.   It’s told mainly from Nicky’s viewpoint, so we don’t really get the viewpoint of the children leaving their families or the adults sending away their children, or the effects on the children of growing up without their families, and knowing that, in almost all cases those families were murdered in the Holocaust.  But one film can only show so much – and it does an excellent job of showing refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, post-Anschluss Austria and the Sudetenland, only for the Nazis then to take over the whole of Czechoslovakia.

A big theme in the film is paperwork, and we see the mountains and mountains of paperwork involved in getting children out of Czechoslovakia, across Germany and the Netherlands – the Dutch government closed its borders to Jewish refugees after Kristallnacht, shortly before the British Kindertransport scheme began – and into Britain, where they had to be settled in foster homes and an amount of £50 had to be put up for each child.

But the main theme is the goodness of ordinary people.   Nicky’s just an ordinary person.  He can’t stay on in Prague because his boss won’t give him any more time off work.  But, once home, he “kicks up a stink” by the terribly British middle-class method of writing a letter to the Times – and it works.   People send donations.   Families offer to take the children in.   He manages to arrange visas.   And 669 children are saved.  It’s estimated that the surviving “Nicky’s children” and their descendants now number around 6,000.   And, at the end, we see the famous scene from That’s Life! in which everyone in the studio audience says that they owe their life to Nicholas Winton, and they become like family to him.  Maybe the ending’s a bit twee, but the film isn’t – we’re reminded that 10,000 children in Czechoslovakia alone were sent to concentration camps, and that very few of them survived.   This is an inspiring story of how 669 children who would otherwise have met the same fate were saved.

 

 

The Three Musketeers: Milady

This was meant to be the second part of two, but it was left on a cliffhanger so I would think that a third film’s in the offing.   It’s not entirely faithful to the books, but the characters are largely the same.  And it’s in French, so, unless your French is fluent, you’ll need to follow the English subtitles!  It’s very entertaining – lots of swashbucking adventuring, everyone dashing about, plenty of history of which *some* is accurate.

And I kept finding myself rooting for Milady de Winter, because it’s usually only men who get to do the swashbuckling adventure stuff, but she gave as good as she got!   Poor Constance, D’Artagnan’s true love, met a sticky end, after she’d tried to help Milady to escape, but D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers all lived to fight another day.

Forty years after Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds, I still primarily think of Milady as a glamorous black cat.  But never mind!  Enjoyed this.  Hoping for a sequel!

Wonka

This was lovely.  Yes, all right, as some of the critics are saying, it’s all very nice and sweet, whereas Roald Dahl’s books are basically pretty horrible – whilst in the third year infants, I had nightmares about the Vermicious Knids, and was so upset about Fantastic Mr Fox’s tail being cut off that I’ve never looked at that particular book since – but, hey, it’s two weeks to Christmas, and I think we could all do with something nice and sweet.

The Pure Imagination and Oompa Loompa songs from the Gene Wilder film feature, but most of the songs are new.  Don’t expect deep and meaningful lyrics.  Sample – “Noodle, Noodle, apple strudel, we’re having oodles of fun.”

The film’s meant to be about Willy Wonka’s younger days, when he was starting out.  We’re told that he’s been in the Navy (the US Navy?), and now aims to set up as a chocolatier … in a fictional country where a lot of people have Cockney accents, there’s a clock which looks like it belongs in Prague, the police uniforms look French, there’s a large Catholic church and a lot of monks, there are dukes with Germanic names, it seems to be very cold all the time, and everyone speaks English.  The three baddie chocolatiers who feature in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory all operate there, and are bribing the police, and keeping secret ledgers and stores of chocolate underneath the church, with the assistance of a chocoholic priest and 150 chocoholic monks.

Willy is naive and innocent and very sweet.  He reminded me a bit of Freddie Slater in EastEnders.  He’s absolutely nothing like the Willy Wonka in the books, who’s really quite a nasty piece of work.  I mean, did those four kids really deserve such horrible fates.  What exactly was Violet Beauregarde’s crime, other than chewing gum?!  And don’t even get me started on the fat-shaming of poor Augustus Gloop.  This young Willy’s easily taken in by a baddie, and ends up imprisoned in a workhouse-esque laundry, along with Carson from Downton Abbey, a young girl called Noodle, and various other people.   He manages to escape for a day, and dances about a lot.  Maybe some shades of Oliver! there, and there are definite shades of Mary Poppins when he and Noodle dance about on a roof at night.  And there’s a giraffe.  Called Abigail.

There are various more escapes, and chocolates made with giraffe milk are sold – but the chocolate cartel get the nasty woman who runs the laundry to poison the chocolates.   However, with the assistance of an Oompa Loompa, the inmates of the laundry vanquish all the baddies, and Willy sets up his chocolate factory.   Noodle is reunited with her mother, and the rest of the laundry inmates all have happy endings too.

It’s all very nice and sweet, and we know that the baddies will get their come-uppance in the end.   And there’s nothing bad about Willy Wonka himself – which doesn’t fit in with the books, but, hey, it’s Christmas, and the world needs some niceness and sweetness!  Go and see this.  It’ll cheer you up!

Napoleon

Battles and Josephine.  And not much else.  To be fair to Ridley Scott, Napoleon’s main legacy was the Code Napoleon, but a film about making changes to the legal system wouldn’t exactly have made for spectacular viewing.   All the same, he could at least have mentioned it!   And, whilst I appreciate that you can only fit so much into two and a half hours, it was rather confusing and bemusing that the film suggested that Napoleon was ousted from power straight after the retreat from Moscow.  And why was there so little mention of the rest of Napoleon’s family?   Madame Mere only appeared two or three times, and there was absolutely no mention of Napoleon plonking his relatives on thrones all over Europe, or even of the marriage between his brother and Josephine’s daughter.

The battle scenes made for dramatic viewing, but they weren’t at all accurate.   There were a lot of cavalry charges which never actually happened.  We saw lots of people falling through the ice into a frozen lake at Austerlitz.  Which never actually happened.   We also saw Napoleon firing at the pyramids, which definitely never happened!   And, whilst I believe that a lot of people in France are moaning that the film’s anti-French, I thought it was anti-British.  Incidentally, people kept saying “England” instead of “Britain”, which was annoying, but it’s hard to criticise when Nelson himself did exactly the same thing!   And there seemed to be a bit of confusion between George III and the Prince Regent.  To get back to the film being anti-British, the Duke of Wellington was portrayed as doing nothing at Waterloo other than moaning that he wished the Prussians would hurry up – whilst Napoleon was shown as being a superb horseman, which he wasn’t.  And one dramatic moment which actually did happen, the meeting with the Tsar on a raft in the middle of the River Neman at Tilsit, wasn’t shown.

We did, however, see Napoleon meeting the Duke of Wellington.  They never met.  Why do film makers have this thing about people meeting when they didn’t?  See also Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots!  We also saw him witnessing the execution of Marie Antoinette.  Which he didn’t.  And why has everyone got this thing about the execution of Marie Antoinette?

So what did we see?  Well, we saw a lot of Josephine.   Played by Vanessa Kirby, who’s 14 years younger than Joaquin Phoenix, who played Napoleon, whereas in fact Josephine was 6 years Napoleon’s senior.  I don’t understand that casting.  It’s not the 1950s.  Heroines in films do not have to be younger than heroes.  Joaquin Phoenix is too old to play Napoleon in the 1790s, and I kept thinking how much he’d aged, which was rather depressing because he’s almost exactly the same age as me.  I suppose I still expect him to look like he did in Parenthood.  In 1989.  Because I tend to forget that I’m not 14 any more.   Marie Louise, whom I like – I love how she did her own thing after Napoleon’s death – barely featured.

The film ended by telling us how many people died in the Napoleonic Wars, the implication being that that was Napoleon’s fault.  That’s rather unfair, and maybe that’s what’s upset the French.   For half a millennium leading up to Waterloo, there’d been one war after another in Europe.  OK, they mostly weren’t on the same scale as the Napoleonic Wars, but many of them involved several countries.   And it was the French Revolution which upset a lot of apple carts, before Napoleon came to power.

As a film, it does make for spectacular viewing – the battle scenes are exciting, and Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby play their roles well.   But it’s very frustrating when there’s a lack of historical accuracy, especially when it’s for no obvious reason.   All the same, I’m glad I went to see it.

 

The Great Escaper

This was lovely, although I wish they’d stuck to what actually happened rather than adding in unnecessary sub-plots.   And it was poignant because the number of Second World War veterans still alive is dwindling.  There are events planned to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day next year, but it’s hard to think that more than a handful of people who actually served in the war will be there.

As people may remember, back in June 2004, large scale events took place in Normandy to commemorate the D-Day Landings 70 years earlier.   Naval veteran Bernie Jordan somehow didn’t get booked on any of the official trips, but decided to go by himself.   There was consternation when he was found to be missing from the care home where he and his wife Rene (Reenie) lived, and the story grabbed everyone’s attention and made international headlines.

The film makers invented a story about Bernie and another veteran giving their tickets for the official event to two German veterans, and going to the British war cemetery at Bayeux instead, complete with a back story for the fictional friend.  And they invented another sub-plot about someone who’d served in Afghanistan and was struggling to cope.  Bernie’s story was fascinating.  It didn’t need to be messed with.

However, the flashbacks to the war, both to the actual D-Day landings and to Bernie’s romance with Rene, worked well.  So did the scenes showing all the veterans from different countries being feted in Norman cafes.  And then, just before the end, there was a wonderful scene in which Rene, played by the late Glenda Jackson in her last film role, told Bernie, played by Michael Caine, not to feel survivor guilt, because it had all just been a matter of luck … and that theirs had been lives well lived, together.

Bernie died six months after his visit to France, and Rene died a week later.  Since 2014, my last surviving great-uncle and great-aunt, the last of the “elders” on both sides of the family, have died, and so have the Queen and Prince Philip.   There aren’t many of that generation left.  This is a lovely film about two who’ve now gone, and one of those stories which just bring everyone together.

The Teahouse Fire by Ellis Avery

  This is an interesting book, by an author who sadly died young.  French-American orphan Aurelia is taken to Japan by her missionary uncle.  When he’s killed in a fire, she’s taken in by a family who run a teahouse, and becomes close to Yukako, the daughter of the family, initially in a sisterly way but then in a romantic way.   As the Meiji Restoration brings great changes to Japanese society, we see Aurelia, renamed Urako, and Yukako coming to terms with what that means for the class structure and the role of women.  There’s quite a lot of interesting information about clothes, the arranging of marriages, the position of young wives, bathing rituals and, of course, tea ceremonies.   However, Aurelia/Urako eventually realises that she’ll never be fully accepted into Japanese society, and ends up returning to New York.

There are a lot of minor characters and it does get a bit confusing, but generally it’s well worth reading: it’s a very original book about a fascinating time in history.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3

This wasn’t quite as bad as the critics made out, but it wasn’t the tiniest patch on the original My Big Fat Greek Wedding.   There were some interesting themes, but they weren’t really developed; and a lot of it was just plain silly.

Toula’s dad has recently died – and that’s quite poignant, because the actor who played him has died – and her mum is living with dementia.  Her dad’s last wish was for the diary he kept when he first came to America to be given to his three childhood friends, with whom he’s long since lost touch.  Odd wish, but anyway.   The mayor of the village from which he came is organising a reunion for all the people who’ve left the village over the last 50 years or so, and their families.   So Toula, her brother, two aunties (one of whom is a maternal aunt who came from a completely different part of Greece), her husband and their daughter all set off for Greece.

There’s a whole load of ridiculous stereotypical rubbish as dozens of relatives come to the airport to see them off, and one of the aunties hands round souvlaki on the plane … because you’d really get on a plate with a dish of souvlaki.  On arrival in Athens, they drive past the Parthenon and the Olympic Stadium without stopping, then stop at the seaside and all go swimming fully clothed.  Why??

When they get to the remote island village from which the dad came, they find out that only six people live there.   The mayor, an old woman who turns out to be the dad’s old girlfriend, her son, who turns out to be a half-brother whom they never knew existed, his son, a Syrian refugee girl, and a monk.  Why is a Syrian refugee living in a remote village where there are only 5 other people?   Why does everyone in this remote village speak fluent English?   How have they contacted the Portokalos family?   And how come they’ve invited a load of other people – none of whom have accepted – to the reunion, yet no-one knows where these three childhood friends are?

It eventually transpires that the monk knows where the friends are, whereupon Toula’s cousin Nikki tracks them down, everyone turns up for the reunion, the diary is handed over, and the long-lost half-nephew (keep up) marries the Syrian refugee.  After a lot of references to food and goats, an irrelevant sub-plot about the daughter failing her first year at college, and not much else.

It’s a shame, because, as I said, there were some interesting themes there.  It’s the first time that Toula, her brother and her daughter have been to Greece – what’s it like for second and third-generation hyphenated Americans to go to “the old country” for the first time?   How do small villages cope, when most people move away to seek better opportunities elsewhere?   How do families cope when the patriarch dies and the matriarch is incapacitated?   How easy it was, in the days before social media and mobile phones, to lose touch with people.   There was a lot to go at.   But the film just … didn’t.