On any trip one takes in a bunch of movies, at least on the plane. I’ve seen two that I heartily recommend. Belle dramatises (meladramatises?) the true story of a girl who was the product of a British military seaman in the 18th century and a black west indian woman. Before he dies he extracts from a relative the promise to look after his illegitimate daughter that is the product of this union. The resulting dark skinned girl receives a lady’s upbringing and the film portrays all this in a way that was convincing (for me anyway). She ends up marrying an opponent of the slave trade and so the films’ producers have turned this into a Jane Austen style story in which the drama of romance (including the wider family drama) becomes the vehicle in which virtue discovers itself in the world. An difficult thing to try, but well brought off I reckon.
Magic in the Moonlight is Woody Allen’s latest. It’s everything a good Woody Allen movie is. It’s funny and built on a conceit that generates a nice, neat plot through which Allen explores some of his themes. Colin Firth delivers the humour well, though his character is rather too didactically drawn as is Allen’s way. But a very enjoyable movie, if not must see viewing.
The final movie is Russell Crowe’s “The Water Diviner”. I would have steered clear of it from the trailer alone – which allows the viewer to gorge himself on Crowe’s non-acting – but for one thing. It was opening in Istanbul and the film is largely set in Istanbul. It’s the story of an Aussie, Aussie, Aussie who, visits Gallipoli after WWI to find his three dead sons. There in the aftermath of the war he finds Australian and British soldiers going about their moustachioed business of identifying and burying the war dead. They haven’t been able to identify his sons, but hey, Aussie, Aussie Aussie is a water diviner, so he tells them where to dig. And there they are! The characters consist of Aussies (salt of the earth – with the exceptions of the moustaches which are pretty obviously stuck on), Poms (whining and stuck up), Turks, who really can wear a moustache (tough but civilised and with a heart of gold).
But the best is kept till last. Russell ends up in Anatolia where there is major unrest between the muslim and Greek Christian population. Here the Greeks are Bad. As in About As Bad As You Can Get. They’re made up in near blackface from boot-polish and their main pass-time appears to be machine gunning turks. Russell manages to save a Turkish buddy from trouble by whacking a Greek Baddie with a cricket bat with which he’s been teaching the Turks to play cricket – I am not making them up. This was the obvious place for an “oy, oy, oy” but owing to the understated tone of the movie, we are spared. Anyway, I was puzzled at this as it made little sense to me that the Greek minority in the middle of the country would suddenly become uppity – as it was so against their interests. So I looked it up in Wikipedia. There was some aggression from the Greek nation supported by its coalition allies from WWI which landed at Smyrna inflaming racial tensions in the region. the Greeks also had designs on areas in Anatolia in central Turkey where Greeks were a majority. The upshot was vast Turkish massacres of Greeks known as the Greek genocide. It accounts for the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Greeks with some accounts giving it a similar scale to the Armenian genocide. You wouldn’t have guessed it from the film. Still I wouldn’t’ avoid the film for that reason. Avoid it for its vacuity masquerading as profundity, it’s non-acting masquerading as acting.
Good and Woody Allen film in the same sentence is an oxymoron.
Nick,
We agree to disagree.
Woody Allen’s suck to high heaven. Never again will I see one.
Russell Crowe is one of the best actors going round. A beautiful mind for example. That should have appealed to you.
From memory I thought Russell Crowe was good in beautiful mind – bit cliched, but quite good. Glad to see you can remove all Woody’s films from your agenda. There are quite a lot of them so it will save time.
Nah, Woody Allen is a good director and better scriptwriter. His only problem is that he’s become a bit of a one-trick pony; so predictable that I’m sure someone will sooner or later make a really good parody of a generic Allen movie.
Why does it not surprise me that another Australian film dealing with WW1 or its aftermath is utterly unable to rise above crude stereotypes mixed with outright falsehoods? I am already cringing at the monstrosities that will be foisted upon us in the form of TV series, popular history books, politicians’ speeches, etc in the centenary year of the Gallipoli campaign.
each to their own DD although I was never going to see this current Crowe movie. Every other movie i have seen him in he has been brilliant.
I am going to see the Imitation game at some stage over the holiday period.
Homer, are you going for some award? (If so you’ve probably come to the right place – we have an award for most things here at Troppo, so long as you don’t mind a weekend in a panel van as a prize.
Three sentences, three non-sequiturs? :)
NTTAWWT – given that a sentence need not be a ‘sequitur’. But that’s quite a jumble of ideas you’ve packed into those sentences.
always good for non-sense around Christmas!!
Nicholas , do you have any idea where Russell crow got the plot/ script from, it sounds so weird so implausible I.e the cricket bat- that it might ( just)just have some base in a individual story. For instance , have read a story that in Palestine ,just before the end of hostilities ,a group of ANZACs came across a group of Arabs ( allies)that were attacking a group of Turks ,mixed combatants and civilians, the Anzacs apparently drove off/ killed the Arabs and then sat down and had a meal with the Turks.
At the beginning it says something evasive like that the story is ‘inspired’ by actual events, but I think that just means it’s based on some guy who went to Gallipoli looking for his sons. I’d be surprised if there’s more to it than that – though
[[spoiler alert]]
there may be a bit more of a skeleton than that – for instance that one of the sons was found alive in Turkey – but it’s pretty unlikely.
The reason the third son is in Turkey is that he’s too full of shame to return. Why? Because after the three brothers have been blasted with machine gun fire, they’re immobilised in their disablement in a shell hole. One brother dies whereaupon another asks the remaining one to blow his brains out as that’s what brothers do (the other brother is done for and needs to be put out of his misery). The older brother does so but not before taking the younger brother through a nursery rhyme like exercise that the father (the gamut of human emotions from A to B Russell) has taken them through as kids. They all lie under a blanket and say the magic word to be taken to a place far away. So the older brother has the younger one say the magic word and then puts a 303 bullet through his forehead. Then he looks heavenward and screams in anguish. After acting like that I guess it’s understandable that the older brother doesn’t want to show his face.
As an aside, I may have missed something but earlier in the movie Russell gets mighty upset and wants Mustafa the Turkish commander – who has a good Turkish moustache and is helping clean up the war dead – to put his dukes up. Why? Because his son’s head has a hole in its back which looks like he’s been given a coup de grace by the Turks who took no prisoners. (Russell is calmed down by the Aussie, Aussie Aussies who tell him that Aussie’s didn’t take too many prisoners either and shot plenty of Turks like that. The problem is that the plot later shows the son to have had his brains blown out by his brother from the front. So it’s all very spooky.
Hi Nick The plot in the Crowe film sounds ‘interesting’. However almost any treatment of the topic would be interesting and potentially loaded. The bust-up of the Ottoman empire unleashed a variety of racialist nationalisms in the region which led to some very bad outcomes also including the Armenian genocide. The Greeks seem to have been stupidly opportunistic in their attempt to construct a greater Hellas in Asia Minor and the Turks were happy enough to consider driving 300,000 Greeks into the Mediterranean as they recaptured Smyrna. Choose your villain(s). In the washup some 1 million Greeks and 400,000 Turks changed country in a refugee exchange. Giles Milton wrote an accessible book on the subject a few years back.
Yes I expect you’re right. A very foolhardy venture it seems with so many Greeks exposed as a minority in Turkey. And Churchill invited us to return to Turkey – to which we said “no thanks very much” to his dismay and consternation. The expulsions are remembered with great bitterness, but I was unaware of the sizeable genocide of Greeks.
It is a trite comment that two people can see the same film but see two completely different films. I saw the Water Diviner and thought it was a deeply thought provoking film. Understand that water divining is not some magic trick. Successful diviners have a skill in observation that makes them the ultimate geographical/hydrological detectives. Russell knew the place his sons had been killed because it was described in his son’s journal. His keen eye for detail and careful observation lead him to the correct place. There is nothing tricky or superficial about that. The film was about real men, serious men who had come through a war the like of no other and a man whose commitment to achieving his goals (as promised to his broken wife) was unrelenting.
Both characters were driven by love – one for his country (that you had to go to wiki to “check” the facts says more about you than it says about this film). The other driven by love of family, a lost family then a small light of hope.
If there is a flaw in the film it revolves around the revelation of the older brother putting his younger brother out of his misery. It was enough that he could not save him and in his own eyes failed in his promise, to deter him from coming home.
I learnt a lot from this film. Today’s “men” metrosexual types are superficial hollow men in comparison. The passion was not overstated but dealt with, as one might expect from such people living in such times, quite deftly.
Your only comment that hit the mark was the reference to the moustachioed officers who could have been from any country, but were delivered as stereotypes – minor in the overall themes of the story.
Hmm, well I didn’t mention the relationship with the wife, but she was a whiner that one. Somehow blamed the husband for the death of his sons at war. I mean, Jeez, what a low trick to pull on your fellow parent. Apart from how unsympathetic it made her as a character for me, just think how anachronistic that is. This is a time when women saw it as their jobs to hand out white feathers to hound the men off to the front. And when they were bereaved all they were left with was the sacrifice their sons had made for King and country.
Well you really do have a negative view. I understood that the wife had a serious mental health problem, and besides I have heard plenty of sane women say a lot worse to already anguished partners.
Thanks PF. Yes I do have a negative view of the film.
But on reflectionI agree that the film raises powerful issues and I can understand your reaction. It’s really a matter of whether one allows oneself to enter the fiction presented in the movie. For me the bad qualities that we both (at least to some extent) agree were there just got in the way too much and destroyed my ability to suspend disbelief and enter the world of the movie. I felt I was being manipulated.
But I agree it would be quite possible to not see it that way. So if you took it in that spirit and found it moving then that’s good and as things should be. I’m familiar myself with finding what others find pretty dreadful, both moving and ‘valid’ to use a pretty awful term.
Nicholas the historian side of me is happy with multiple ,varying narratives of the same ‘event ‘ , except when they breach known historical facts. If the film suggests that the Greeks were the aggressors ( let alone the Armenians ) then it has crossed a important line , into dangerous sentimental crap.
PF,
Nick is simply saying Russell has nothing to Crowe about
True, as far as crowing goes Russell would make a good drummer in a grunting rock band.
One really good thing about the film was the acting of the main Turkish guy.
Here’s an interview with him which really rings true having seen the movie.