An Education In Your Own History

As previously mentioned, in my late teens I became quite fixated on queer history and in particular in the erratic contents of a specific book. There were several films mentioned, with stills included, and for a while I made it my mission to hunt them down and watch them: this was a mission in which I was repeatedly thwarted, and in fact most of the queer cinema I encountered I stumbled across wholly by accident: the best example of this was Martin Sherman’s heartrending and stagey Bent, which I encountered because of insomnia and Channel 4′s insomniac-friendly schedules in the very early days of the 21st Century.

Recently I’ve been catching up on those films whose stills I poured over ten or so years ago, and finally managed to watch both Maurice (1987, Hugh Grant, James Wilby, and Rupert Graves) and Another Country (1984, Colin Firth, Rupert Everett, Cary Elwes). Both films are set in the prelude to a World War, although as Maurice belongs in the run-up to the First it is technically more relevant to me as my giant emo obsessiveness about the First World War and associated Sad Gay Soldiers (according to my boyfriend this is a cinematic and literary genre to which I am wedded without exception). Then again, Another Country is a very lightly fictionalised account of the younger days of Guy Burgess (they changed his surname to Bennett, that’s about it) and ever since Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy came out I’ve had a soft spot for spies. The films even have an attractive Rupert apiece: Graves for Maurice, Everett for Another Country (the latter does boast a second, back-up Rupert in the form of Rupert Wainwright, not to be confused with Rufus Wainwright).

The sex scenes in Maurice are slightly more abundant, and I could very probably talk at disturbing length about Rupert Graves’ penis, which makes an appearance – but I did promise myself this wasn’t going to be that kind of a blog even though it is a jolly nice penis. Instead, though: the comparison of time period, the comparison of idealised England, and the comparison of relationship.

For all that Judd, in Another Country, invokes cynicism and dissatisfaction and talks about the pointlessness of the war that preceded his school days, he is wrapped in the very serious and passionate belief in the ideals of Marx, and of Communism. Meanwhile the protagonists of Maurice are all of them without ideals: they adhere to a sense of propriety, of place in the order of things (and good grief but Clive Durham is a pompous, self-important ass at Cambridge), but without any real ideology to hold onto: they are older, and if not wiser then a good deal less convinced of the importance of clearly-delineated concepts.

Both films involve the notion of sacrifices made for love, which rather neatly explains my interest in them beyond the acknowledged passion for queer history; although in each case the sacrifice is rather central to the denouement of the plot, and therefore should be left for the viewer to discover themselves.

Maurice is the softer of the two. It dwells in a gentler time, before the last remnants of a specific social order were torn apart by years of mechanised war and the wholesale slaughter of a generation: in Another Country Judd mocks this and Bennett disdains it, each unimpressed with the boy soldiers lined up to commemorate the dead that have yet to fall in the narrative of Maurice.

There is almost a sense of continuity between the two, but if there is it’s a sad one: the line, “England has always been disinclined to accept human nature,” from Maurice still holds true some fifteen, twenty years later in Another Country: there is a disinclination in the upper classes of English society, still, to allow schoolboy romance or its adult incarnation, and an angry, humiliated Guy Bennett spells it out: “Because in your heart of hearts, like Barclay and Delahay and Fowler and Menzies, you still believe, in spite of your talk of equality and fraternity, you still believe some people are better than others because of the way they make love.”

After all that I’m rather in need of some happier viewing, so I’d welcome suggestions of gay and lesbian films (preferably historical in genre) with happy endings: and be aware, I’ve already seen But I’m A Cheerleader so many times that I can quote it line-for-line!

Filed under: content: essay, content: review, films, another country, cary elwes, colin firth, e.m. forster, film, films, gay, history, hugh grant, james wilby, lgbt, literature, maurice, movies, queer history, quotes, review, reviews, rupert everett, rupert graves

The Three Worst Cinemas I Have Ever Been In

Good grief, why would anyone want to write about this? Well, a friend was reminiscing about the qualities of her home town (Clevedon, Somerset) and the rather beautiful old custom-built cinema there, and I countered with the tale of woe that was my home town (Tavistock); no cinema until the mid-90s, and that one only dealing in films which had finished their run in all the main cinemas. Hardly what any teenager gorging themselves sick on teen magazines full of new releases wants.

The conversation turned to other cinemas I’d been to; in my teens I went to a boarding school in Somerset, and one of the ways to escape the tedium of sitting in a brick building in the middle of sheep fields was the regularly-organised trips to various cinemas. As a result of this, I saw some truly abhorrent films between 1994 and 1999, on the big screen, which these days I wouldn’t watch on the screen of an iPod after torrenting them if you actually paid me (alright, that’s a lie, I was paid to review The Village and that was about as bad).

Some of these films I hated because I was a teenager and didn’t really appreciate them (The Crucible, The Scarlet Jacket, the latter of which has given me a lifelong disdain for Thomas Hardy’s prose), some I hated because they were unequivocally rubbish (Forces of Nature, a deeply forgettable movie starring possibly Sandra Bullock and someone else and I don’t remember very much beyond it being bad and the leading lady had cool lavender streaks in her hair). Some were actually rather good, and most of them I watched in Yeovil’s perfectly serviceable cinema, or Poole’s swish-seeming out-of-town complex.

Then there were the films we saw in … slightly less magnificent buildings.

These reviews haul from the recesses of my teenage memory, and I fully expect the cinemas in question to have either improved or shut down by now, so don’t take them so much as warnings as whatever the opposite of nostalgia is.

1. Cinema Town: Wells

Film Watched: Fierce Creatures (a pleasant enough comedy featuring the cast of A Fish Called Wanda and very recognisably the environs of Marwell Zoo, which I visited a lot as a child).

Why it was horrific: It was like the worst kind of Scout hall. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the pleasure, but the village I lived in from 6 to 13 seemed to delete in stashing all of its social activities in “temporary” structures which were upwards of 30 years old: long, low-ceilinged bunkers which always contrived to be colder than the outside air. This was more or less one of those, with a concession stand amounting to the ticket sales person reaching under a desk for some bags of priced-up cornershop popcorn and sad-looking M&Ms. Possibly the first time I had ever been grateful for the school’s usual “no tuck” rule with cinema trips.

The floor was flat rather than sloped, meaning that it was more or less impossible to see past anyone’s head and everyone got a crick in their neck; it was freezing cold, and the place smelled of something we couldn’t quite place until half-way through the film when something large and furry ran past my dorm-mate’s foot, she screamed and clutched at me, and we realised that the smell was rat urine.

Unlike the next two cinemas, I have actual evidence that Wells is no longer like this: the extras of the Hot Fuzz DVD show the premier of the film (which was filmed mostly in Wells) taking place in Wells cinema, which in the clips is a beautiful little thing with proper staggered seating and red upholstery and a distinct absence of large rodents. Wells also holds the dubious honour of housing the most horrifying public toilets I’ve ever set foot in and then dived out of immediately afterwards, but I should stress this was in the 90s. I am pretty sure it’s now a picturesque holiday destination and it has always been populated by friendly people although possibly not towards me after I’ve written this.

2. Cinema Town: Weymouth

Film Watched: Dracula: Dead and Loving It (a largely poor parody of vampire films by Lesley Nielsen et al which nevertheless amused the rag-tag selection of juvenile delinquents given the treat of watching it).

Why it was horrific: Not so much “horrific” as just “totally unsuited to be a cinema”. The floor was damp, we could hear traffic outside all the way through, and were a couple of times convinced the screen was going to fall on us. From what I remember they began closing the cinema almost before we’d walked out of the screening, and the entire place smelled of off milk.

That said, I do have a vendetta against Weymouth anyway: my father took me there on holiday when I was 7, whereupon I suffered quite a severe head injury at the hands of some lovely children on a campsite with a concrete playground, and I spent my teens being dragged through the town after dark by various “friends” who were very enthusiastic about the possibility of hooking up with one of the multitudinous boy racers who used the town centre for demonstrating twin exhaust pipes. Perhaps it would be unfair to be rude about Weymouth’s cinema when there was so much else about it to make me steer clear of it for the rest of my life.

3. Cinema Town: Salisbury

Film Watched: The Crucible (we also watched Hercules, Ghost Rider, and Daylight here, along with a British movie about rugby so utterly unmemorable that I can’t Google anything about it, but it was only the screen in which we saw The Crucible to which this applies).

Why it was horrific: Because I couldn’t bloody see. Aside from that, it was colder than a witch’s tit, creaky, lopsided, and rumoured to be full of mice – but then “freezing, creaky, lopsided, and definitely full of mice” also applies to my flat so I can’t really complain about that. However, when we went to see The Crucible we ended up shoved into a selection of seats toward the back of a screen so steeply banked that we were somewhere above the screen, as if looking down on the stage of a theatre (in fact, without Googling, I can’t be sure that’s not what the building originally was). Directly in my line of sight and blocking most of the screen was a large wooden chandelier which, to my untrained teenage eye, looked approximately a million years old, and was held in place by a chain made of something the colour of tar.

To my perennial annoyance, our teen-herder wouldn’t let me sit in the aisle to watch it (something about a “fire hazard”, ho hum) so I watched almost all of The Crucible at a ninety degree angle from that usually considered optimum for film viewing. The question of “why the bloody hell was that chandelier there” was never addressed, but in hindsight I can only assume it was a listed building.

It’s fair to point out that none of the other screens in the Salisbury Odeon produced quite such a deleterious effect on my back and neck muscles, and also to speculate that this experience made me a little unimpressed with the possibility of “doing” The Crucible as our school play the following year…

Filed under: content: real life, content: review, films, cinemas, dorset, dracula: dead and loving it, fierce creatures, films, movie-going, odeon, personal, personal history, puff piece, salisbury, somerset, tales of woe, teenager, the crucible, theaters, wells, west country, westcountry, weymouth, wiltshire

Movie Review: Sherlock Holmes Game of Shadows

Aside from a persistent temptation to refer to this as “Sherlock Holmes: Game of Thrones“, which rolls off the tongue for a combination of reasons involving HBO and rhyme, this is an untidy but entertaining calvacade of nonsense continuing Guy Ritchie’s determination to change Sherlock Holmes from the stentorian deerstalker-sporting droll and heavy-lidded clue-fondler of vague popular consciousness into Steampunk Action Hero. Being as I am a fan of the very solid, unshowy Granada-produced Sherlock Holmes adaptations (or some of them, as The Three Garridebs is just bloody weird) and a firm holder of the belief that Jeremy Brett was the One True Holmes, I ought to be strongly against Ritchie’s meddling. However, as a fan of Guy Ritchie’s noisy, adolescent flailing films and apparently endless barrage of homoerotic subtext (which frequently breaks free of the bounds of “sub” to become merely loud, gun-wielding text), I have an iron in the fire.

Manly, gun-shooting heterosexuality

Game of Shadows has not hit the same chord of novel delight in me that its predecessor did, but I am pleased to say that it did not disappoint, either – and I went in expecting to be disappointed.

In fact, I went in convinced that it was going to be irritating bilge, and largely in a foul mood, and came out much cheered and gigglingly praising Ritchie to the cloud-strewn skies, so I would say it went rather well.

Although the film begins with an action sequence it, for me, took a while to take off. I found myself bored with Irene Adler by the end of the previous film, and uninterested in her supposed role as the Holmesian love interest (lest we forget, in the Granada adaptation she was not his femme fatale but instead merely a woman of a jaded past who was as smart as he was, which has in more recent adaptation become some sort of infuriating mash-up of Mata Hari and Lara Croft); happily Guy Ritchie took care of that, and in doing so raised the stakes.

I find Guy Ritchie’s Moriarty a lot less annoying than Gatiss/Moffat’s changeable manic pixie lunatic, and his demonstration of his mastery over Holmes is – despite involving an explosion and an assassination and an honest-to-God opera (Game of Shadows is if nothing else a lavish affair) – more subtle.

Before I raise a few matters about new cast members I should point out that this is a very action-heavy film. There is almost always something happening, and as a result of this relentless forward motion it seems almost as if the film itself is rather short, plunging away to its conclusion without really pausing for breath. There are some magnificent set pieces, some harrowing scenes – the level and intensity of violence has been raised considerably, along with the stakes – and I wish to make prolonged and passionate love to the wardrobe department over the course of several days.

And of course, the slash fans are not only well catered-to but almost overly pandered to, which guarantees the film’s success in many circles. As a friend of mine (the delightful Bostonian cabaret artiste Amy Macabre) put it, “If this film were any more gay it would just be two dicks kissing each other.” Mainstreamer reviews have been quick to comment on it, largely in tones of great delight, for it’s hard to feel particularly resentful of the barely subtextual sexualisation of the Holmes/Watson friendship in the face of such glorious silliness.

I can't imagine where they're getting this "bromance" from

On to the cast. In the previous film I felt that Rachel McAdams was the weak link in an otherwise shining cast; in Game of Shadows she returns, briefly, and is summarily dealt with. Her replacement is Noomi Rapace, who hurls knives and kicks Cossacks and shoots rifles in a refreshing change from the elegant poise and coyly sexualised tedium that has become de riguer for Irene Adlers; Sim, her character, is not presented as a potential love interest for Holmes but rather as a capable and intelligent woman trying to rescue a loved one and very much in command of her own destiny wherever possible.

It is a shame, then, that this film also fairly oozes with (period-appropriate) racial stereotypes and cringe-inducing racist notions. It would have been entirely easy to swap Holmes’s horrendous yellowface performance for something less directly ripped from the annals of 1891, considering how much else has been borrowed from the future (as a former student of sound technology I was more than a little peeved by some details of reproduction, although it is a small drop in a large ocean of deliberate and accidental anachronism); most gallingly, however, there is the depiction of the “gypsies”.

Holmes and Watson’s attitudes could easily be written off as attitudes representative of the time, were they not then immediately supported by the text as realistic. This is sad, because alongside the painful moments of stereotypy there is also an overall intent to push the “gypsies” (a word I am using because it is used in the film; it is generally speaking a racial slur on a par with “negroes”) as being brave, resourceful, loyal, skillful, and intelligent without falling into the irksome “noble savage” trap. It is all the more twitch-making because it’s not the first time Ritchie’s danced around trying to say something admirable about a travelling people and fucked it up and said something unpleasant in the process instead (please see Snatch).

Returning to the cast; I’ve mentioned the formiddable Moriarty and a burgeoning admiration for Noomi Rapace, and I think due mention must also go to Stephen Fry, not least for his exceptional ability to play himself in every film role he receives. Although this is very clearly Mycroft-by-Fry, it is Mycroft-by-Fry in the same way that his brother is Sherlock-by-Downey, and thus their hammed sketches complement each other. Tethering Fry and Downey, Law injects as much level-headedness into both the plot and the performances as he can be expected to, and turns a very touching final scene or two.

So, Game of Shadows is silly, exotic, entertaining, and quite, quite gorgeous to look at, and even if it has only a passing relevance to any Holmesian plot (rather like its predecessor) it retains an essence of the original; its significant flaws are almost certainly an overreliance on Victorian racial attitudes which stand out rather starkly.

Filed under: content: review, films, 2011, films, guy ritchie, jude law, movies, noomi rapace, rachel mcadams, review, robert downey jr, sherlock holmes, sherlock holmes: game of shadows, stephen fry