Still Alice.

My blog of the latest screening at the Film Club located at the Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre in Dumfries is based on the film Still Alice (2014), having never read Lisa Genova’s 2007 novel of the same name. It was Anne Barclay, our host for the evening, that informed us that the debut novel was originally self-published but when it started to receive a lot of attention it was acquired by Simon and Schuster who published it in 2009 and has since been translated into 31 languages. Originally adapted for the stage it run in Chicago between April 10^th and May 19^th 2013 before it was adapted for the big screen, directed by Richard Glatzer, who died of complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in March 2015, and his partner Wash Westmoreland.

 

Sharing an intimate moment with her husband.

The film stars Julianne Moore who won an Oscar for her role as Doctor Alice Howland a linguistics professor at Columbia University who is diagnosed with early onset familial Alzheimer’s disease. This term is used to describe cases of Alzheimer’s disease diagnosed before the age of sixty-five of which a person’s child can generically inherit, but otherwise shares the same traits as the late onset form of Alzheimer’s. The story demonstrates how the disease gradually affected Alice Howland along with the effects on the other members of her family, including her husband John (Alec Baldwin), her eldest daughter Anna (Kate Bosworth), her son Tom (Hunter Parrish) a junior doctor and Alice’s youngest daughter Lydia (Kristen Stewart) an aspiring actor. The film picks up the story just as Alice is celebrating her fiftieth birthday and we witness her gradually loosing her word power while still carrying out lectures and how she forgets where she is during her daily jogging on the university campus. It’s after a visit to her doctor that the disease is diagnosed. This traumatic news resonates through her family, as her three children could also be carriers as well as the twins that Anna is carrying.

 

Alice's younger daughter played by Kristen Stewart.... 

....and her older daughter Anne (Kate Bosworth)

I can’t help but think how much better this film could be under the auspices of a British director, but don’t get me wrong Julianne Moore deserved her Oscar and the rest of the cast play their roles with conviction. My problem with the movie is that the gloss put on the film by the American directors hides to some extent the seriousness of its disturbing subject matter. A much more down to earth approach would have produced a far better film in my opinion. The subsidiary characters on display where not particular likable, in fact I would describe them as selfish minded - big teeth, big smiles in other words a typical middle class American family. The father refused to take time off work to be with his wife before the dementia finally took its toll, due, he claimed, to financial problems but he owned two houses!  Anna, who was due to give birth to twins, gave not a second thought to having the babies knowing that they could be also effected as she was. What I’m trying to say is that I could not empathies with any of these characters, other than possible Alice. A far better film that dealt with a similar subject was Away from Her made in 2006 by Canadian director Sarah Polly and starred Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie as a couple whose marriage is put to the test when Christie’s character begins to suffer from Alzheimer’s. Another film I would highly recommend on the subject of early onset Alzheimer’s is the South Korean movie Poetry (2010) directed by Lee Chang-dong. Both these films treat their subject matter in a very much more down to earth fashion, as I’ve said, something Still Alice lacks.  

 

Clouds of Sils Maria.

Written and directed by Frenchman Oliver Assayas (Carlos the Jackal 2010, Something in the Air 2011) his latest film has received six Cesar Award nominations including best film, best director, best original screenplay and best cinematography with Kristen Stewart having the distinction of becoming the first American actress to win a Cesar by winning Best Supporting Actress.

The basic story of Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) has been compared to Joseph L Mankiewicz’s 1950 American melodrama All About Eve.  Assayas contemporary version of the story is set mainly in Sils Maria located in a very beautiful part of the Swiss Alps. An ageing actress Maria Enders has been offered a part in a stage play she did twenty years ago by the 'must work for' theatre director Klaus Diesterweg, but this time she is offered the part of the older women, while her original role is to go to an up and coming American actress Jo-Ann Ellis who brings with her a reputation as a fire-brand. Maria, accompanied by her assistant Valentine (Stewart), retreats to Switzerland to practice her lines and get her head around the fact that she is far to old for younger role!

The wonderful Swiss scenery.  

French actress Juliette Binoche, who has now appeared in over 40 feature films gives her usual accomplished performance as the ageing, but still attractive, Marie Enders. Kick-ass (2009) star Chloe Grace Moretz gives the character of Jo-Ann Ellis a Hollywood boost while German star Lars Eldinger (Was bleibt 2012) plays the stage director.

This in fact a very wordy film that come across as a stage play with real scenery, and one must be honest and admit that the scenery is stunning with great shots of the Swiss Alps accompanied by an appropriate classical soundtrack. But even allowing for the accomplished acting from Binoche and Stewart the movie can not hide its one main fault - it does becomes a touch boring with all the talking coupled with its two hour running time! I can't help feeling that Assayas is trying to be a little to clever jumping between the fiction and the fact and back to the fiction played out on the screen. It is for all sakes and purposes a fairly traditional story about coping and maintaining your identity, as you get older. The last thing I would want to do though is put you off seeing this movie, if for no other reason than to see Binoche and Stewart at the pinnacle of their art.

Some woman have natural class.

On the Road.

It’s 1947 a struggling young writer Jack Kerouac has his life shaken and ultimately redefined when he meet’s one Neal Cassady a free-spirited, fearless, fast-talking Westerner and his girl, Marylou.  All three set out on a road-trip of self-discovery across America. It was this journey that developed the template for the middle class hippy life style and a book that made Kerouac famous. 

After watching Walter Salles's film of the same name I now realise why I only ever reached page 71 of Jack Kerouac's novel of ‘sex, jazz and freedom’ On the Road (2012). The Characters in Kerouac's mind numbing novel are collectively described as “riding the rails, hitching lifts, driving borrowed cars at a crazy hundred miles per hour. Wild parties, girls and drink and drugs. Uncertainty, loneliness and dreams synthesized by bop” More akin to a rootless bunch of criminal drifters!! These people are essentially dull and boring whom, I’m afraid, will not evoke an ounce of your empathy.

Kerouac with Neal Cassady.

The three main characters in the story are Sal Paradise a young writer played by the dreary as dishwater Sam Riley, put to better use in Control (2007) where he played Ian Curtis the singer of the late 1970’s English band Joy Division and in Brighton Rock (2010) where he portrays Pinkie, a role originally played by Richard Attenborough in the 1947 adaptation of Graham Greens novel. Secondly Dean Moriarty, a lazy feckless individual played with some conviction by Garrett Hedlund and lastly Moriarty's girlfriend Marylou portrayed by a very under-utilized Kristen Stewart (The Runaways 2010, Snow White and the Huntsman 2012)

Marylou.

It a story I felt I should have really liked, it’s influence is seen in a whole load of road movies including Easy Rider (1969) and of course Salles’s far more rewarding film The Motor Cycle Diaries (2004) about a journey taken by pre-revolutionary Ernesto Guevara. It has been said that On the Road was unfilmable; I just don’t think the story was interesting enough to film. Like the character’s, the movie loves itself too much but does not encourage the viewing public to do like wise.   

Snow White and the Huntsman.

Snow White with the Huntsman.

Based loosely on the German fairy tale Snow White, collected by the Brothers Grimm in 1812, British director Rupert Stevens debut film version of the famous story Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) differs slightly from the one we all read as a child.

Snow White in her Joan of Arc guise.

The young Snow Whites mother dies. Her father, the King Magnus, falls for the beautiful Ravenna and consequently marries her but the poor man gets more than he bargained for when she murders him while consummating their marriage. Now Queen of all the kingdom she imprisons Snow White in the traditional high tower, scares away all the decent folk that lived in the castle including the Duke Hammond and his son, Snows playmate Prince William. Ravenna’s equally wicked brother Finn, with whom she asserts a reign of terror, soon joins her. The only person that can neutralise the evil Queen’s power is imprisoned in the tall tower.

   

The beautifully wicked Ravenna.

The story develops to include a very unnerving Dark Forest; two love interests, a cracking grand finale when Snow White dressed in armour (we are reminded of Joan of Arc) leads her army along the Marloes Sands beach against Ravenna and her brother who are shacked up in the brilliant computer generated castle on Gateholm Island. And dare we forget the eight, yes eight, Dwarves who are played by a whole horde of very well known British actors, who have had their faces digitally transmuted onto small bodies, which apparently upset the Little People of America organisation, but they manage to add a sense of amusement to the proceedings.

The castle on Gateholm Island.

Although it was backed by American finance the movie was mostly photographed in the United Kingdom and boasts some great special effects.  It also has some very interesting casting including Kristen Stewart as our heroine Snow White which meant that even my local cinema, that’s better known for art house productions than blockbusters and rom-coms, did entice an audience of young pubescent girls obviously attracted to the actress in her Bella Swan guise than perhaps her portrayal of Joan Jett in The Runaways  (2010). The cast also included Sam Claflin, who was last seen on the big screen in the latest Pirates film On Stranger Tides (2011) as Prince William, Charlize Theron as Queen Ravenna and Chris ‘Thor’ Hemsworth as the Huntsman of the title. I thoroughly enjoyed this very watchable, well-made movie it certainly kept me entertained for its fast-moving 127 minute running time and I for one will be looking forward to its planned sequel.

Six of the eight dwarves.