It’s Rhimenocerous extraordinaire Bret McKenzie’s 36th birthday today, so in honour of him and his Flight of the Conchords cohort Jermaine Clement, let’s have a look at the Top 5 Funniest Musical Moments in film.
The unfortunately named Stingo (Peter MacNicol) moves from his southern home to be a writer in New York. He rents a room in a house, and so finds himself firm friends with a neighbouring couple, Sophie and Nathan (Meryl Streep & Kevin Kline). Sophie and Nathan have a tumultuous relationship, as she has a tragic past and he has issues of his own, and slowly Stingo learns of their history, and the hardships Sophie has had to endure.
There are some actors who have a very famous role that they simply cannot overcome for some people, or in this case a role they’ve only played once but that has been seen many times. For me, Peter MacNicol will always, and only, be Dr. Janosz Poha from Ghostbusters 2. The mild-mannered southern writer Stingo doesn’t stand much of a chance against Janosz, seeing as he’s given very little characterisation here, but then this isn’t his film, he’s a cypher through which we get to know Sophie. This film belongs entirely to Meryl Streep, whose performance is just as good as it’s ever been suggested. No superlative can be left unused when describing the levels she goes to, mentally, physically and linguistically, to completely transform herself into the concentration camp surviving Sophie. Her accent is spot-on, and you completely forget you’re watching Meryl Streep. If it weren’t for Kline and MacNicol sharing the screen with her, I’d occasionally have sworn it was a documentary. I’m guessing that Julie Andrews, Jessica Lange, Sissy Spacek and Debra Winger, the other Leading Actress Oscar nominees that year, didn’t even bother showing up to the ceremony. Not only did she learn Polish and German, but Streep goes so far as to convince that they are her first languages, as she trips and stumbles her way through near-broken English, whilst during her flashbacks of the camps she looks to be several days passed Death’s door with her pallid skin, sunken eyes, roughly shaved head and frail, skeletal frame. This performance should be mentioned in the same breath as DeNiro in Raging Bull. It’s hardly a surprise that the rest of the cast pale in comparison.
It’s a shame then that her performance is the only outstanding part of the film. I had an understanding of the meaning of the title before watching, so assumed it would play a large focus in the film, but it is only at the climax that we see the pivotal scene, and it’s very nearly glossed over. We get a sense of the ramifications and the how it has made Sophie who she is today, but it eventually turns out that the choice she made would have made absolutely no difference anyway. As a story detailing the personal effects of concentration camps and World War 2 this is compelling, yet there are too many detours to detract from the story in an attempt to lighten the mood – Stingo’s date with the nymphomaniac Leslie Lapidus (Greta Turken). There are some nice comparisons between the camp prisoners and the guards – an officer’s daughter complains about the lack of a heated swimming pool.
The film also falls into two of my bigger pet peeve pits, in that a 28-year old MacNicol, who looks about 35, is playing a 22 year old, and at a couple of times there are phone conversations where the person on the other end is almost inaudible, but not quite, so some volume control had to be undertaken.
Despite possibly the greatest acting performance ever, this film is unfortunately let down by an incredibly depressing plot and an unsatisfying ending. There’s no doubt it’ll stick with you for a long time, but I highly doubt you’ll ever want to watch it again.
Choose life 7/10
Regardless of whether you know the story of Homer’s Iliad, it’s a certainty that you know of the expressions Helen of Troy, Achilles’ Heel and The Trojan Horse. These plot points have become more than the legend of which they are a part, and have entered the modern lexicon as sayings and day-to-day phrases. They aren’t anything new, you know what is means and have heard them a million times before, and the same can be said for every aspect of this film.
Lord Dashwood (Tom Wilkinson) passes away and, unable to split his vast estate between his two families, his wife and three daughters are ousted from their palatial mansion by their half-brother John (James Fleet) and his vile wife Fanny (Harriet Walter), and are forced to considerably downsize their opulent lifestyles. Hope, it seems, arrives in the forms of Fanny’s reserved brother Edward (Hugh Grant) and the dashing Mr. Willoughby (Greg Wise), who each take a shining to two of the Dashwood sisters (Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet).
One of the most unusual romantic stories I’ve ever heard, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film sees the widowed Mrs. Lucy Muir (the achingly beautiful Gene Tierney) fleeing her haughty, oppressive in-laws and moving to the seaside with her daughter Anna (a young Natalie Wood) and their maid, Martha (Edna Best). Upon arriving at Whitecliff-by-the-Sea, Lucy seeks the assistance of estate agent Mr. Coombe (Robert Coote) in finding a suitable property. She is immediately taken by Gull Cottage, despite the disapproval of Coombe and the warning that no other resident has managed to stay there for even a night. This probably has something to do with Captain Gregg (Rex Harrison), the former owner who passed away there some time ago, and whose spirit still haunts the house. In spite of all this Lucy moves in, and she and the ghost of Gregg form an unusual bond.
You’re probably wondering how long it’s going to take me, in this review, to mention a certain other film from 1997, directed by James Cameron, that follows a similar plot to this film, and I’ll tell you that it’ll take exactly 48 words for me to mention Titanic. If you’ve never seen A Night to Remember, but are a fan of Titanic (as indeed you should be, for it is a much better film than it’s cool to admit), then you need to start paying more credit towards Night‘s director Roy Ward Baker, for it is from his 1958 picture that Cameron stole most of his film.
I found myself mentally checking off every scene that Cameron stole – the steerage dance number, lavish 1st class dining scene, the soot-caked stokers escaping the closing doors in the engine rooms, playing football with ice on the deck, the dining cart gently rolling down an increasingly listing dining room, the steward appalled at the passengers damaging White Star Line property, the musicians disbanding then reforming to play as the boat sinks. The drunken chef even looks the same, and the shot of Murdoch turning his head away in shame, unable to stand watching the boat sink from his wrongfully claimed lifeboat seat is identical! I understand that a lot of these scenes help to set the atmosphere aboard the boat and couldn’t really be avoided, but Cameron should either have admitted he was remaking, paid some form of acknowledgement to the previous film, or at least changed the shot compositions. Mr. Andrews, the boat’s designer, even at one point gives a young couple – who may as well be called Jack and Rose – details on how to survive whilst he’s stood next to the clock on the mantelpiece, and the ‘unsinkable’ Molly Brown, here played by Tucker McGuire but more famously by Kathy Bates in Titanic, vehemently demands that her lifeboat turn around to help drowning survivors.
Based on the book by Walter Lord, and using the real-life experiences of survivors, the film paints an effective picture of the differences between the classes – made particularly clear when some steerage passengers attempt to flee the waters, but recoil in shock at the extent of the upper class facilities. After some initial scene-setting and the launch of the boat, we pick up the action on the night of the 14th, as the supposedly unsinkable liner receives warnings of ice in the area. As opposed to after 90 minutes, the immortal line of “Iceberg, dead ahead” is heard after just half an hour. After the boat has struck and a 300-foot long gash has been haphazardly carved into the hull, events play out largely in real time, and a great deal of time is spent on the engine rooms and the crew’s efforts to contact the nearest boats, of which the Carpathia, a good 58 miles and 4 hours away, is the only one to respond. There are some nice examples of the typical British stiff upper lip – a man putting on a brave face as he waves goodbye to the wife and children he knows he’ll never see again – but there are all in all far too many scenes of the crew trying to convince disbelieving passengers of the seriousness of the situation, to the point where I got so annoyed with some of the passengers that I hoped they’d stay on the boat and attempt to sit it out.
It’s probably not a good thing that the only Jet Li movies I’d seen prior to this film are his most American ones – Lethal Weapon 4, Unleashed, The Mummy 3 and The Expendables, so his notoriety as a master of martial arts has been more than a little lost on me, as though he gets to show his stuff in most of these films, they aren’t built around him and he is far from the star. There are several other Li films on the List, including Hero and Enter the Dragon, and I hope that they aren’t as much of a mess as this one.
Life Vs Film 