The Basement Corridor to Ideas

On my recent hospital vigils, I have passed in and out through the grim basement corridors where this creepy mural abides outside a childrens treatment unit.

The picture’s inhabitants all portray something beyond the usual menace that toys can sometimes appear to have and the painting has an otherwordly presence.

A truly affecting piece of art I feel it doesn’t belong anywhere near kiddies as it’s really quite sinister. I begin to wonder what sort of person thought it would be a good idea to put such a thing where sick children would see it right before they go through traumatic treatments…

… and despite the distractions of many other more pressing and traumatic things in my own life, the beginnings of a film idea begin to coagulate at the back of my mind.

And that is largely how my ideas tend to come.. they pick me, and not the other way around.

And just like that! Your whole life can change..

Life isn’t easy when you’re a jobbing actor. Truly, no actor expects it to be, and we all know it requires a level of commitment that often comes ahead of our personal lives.. and most of the time that is rightly so, because in a very real way, our craft is our personal life. It becomes over time an integral function of our being so that sometimes it feels we can’t do without it any more than we could do without our liver or kidneys. And if what we do is that important to us, then all the more important to chose the right people to do it with. They will over time come to define our lives.

Because sometimes events in our personal lives get so big that it becomes hard to commit to being an actor, a performer, a filmmaker, a writer.. this has happened to me recently. My mother became very sick and needs full time care as in the not too distant future, she is going to die of cancer. A blunt way for me to put it, especially in a blog, but this reality is a huge event in my life right now and I can think of no nice way to express it or the catastrophic effect it’s had on me.

Apart from the emotional shock of learning this blunt fact, there are practical things that need taking care of, and my life has turned upside down and everything I had planned for my immediate and long term future has had to be abandoned or put into question in order to accommodate the more pressing practicalities.

It’s heartbreaking though, I have to say. Not only am I going through what is probably one of the most emotional times of any person’s life, losing a parent, but at the same time my own lifeline, the thing that sustains me emotionally has been taken out of my reach for the time being. I can’t commit to acting work. I can’t disappear at short notice to go to auditions, I can’t do long hours on a film set. I no longer have any regular financial income of any significance. My plans are abandoned and I am struggling to write or make films. I’m finishing my latest short film now and starting my new screenplay, both at a painstakingly slow pace, and when I can manage to squeeze such things into my new schedule of hospital visits, drugs regimes, and grief counselling it’s hard to concentrate. And I don’t know what the future holds or how I’m going to manage from now on because living this uncertain life is a hard thing to do over decades without a very solid rock to anchor oneself to, and my mother has always been mine.

And yet.. within the heart of all this ‘giving up’ going on in my life, being divided from my profession, I feel closer to my craft than ever before. Because the people I’ve met through my acting life have begun to come forward, unasked and unselfishly, and have gone out of their way to give me support and kindness and whatever strength they have been able to offer. Each one of them are people I’ve worked or trained with, or met through my work, some of them only briefly, and yet this community, this camaraderie of craftspeople that I am part of, who’s work and lives are all about communicating the human experience, have sensed or understood what’s going on in my life and have put themselves into my sphere to share it with me. And as I’ve come loose from my anchor and become lost in deep waters this coral reef of support I’ve discovered has helped me keep my footing and not drown. And in that I am finding a new type of strength.

And whatever the future holds for me, I can tell you this.. that the people I have learned from and worked with have become as much a part of my DNA as my mother is. The people we choose to work with define us. Right now, I am very glad I chose so well.

Julie & Julia

As the daughter of a chef, I’ve been brought up to believe that a dollop of butter can improve anything (except perhaps one’s cholesterol level) and there’s certainly no shortage of butter in Julie & Julia. Even so, I wasn’t sure this film was going to be my cup of tea as being English I’d never heard of Julia Child and have no idea why anyone would consider cooking their way through a cook book to be a tremendous achievement (having made my own way through many). Still I decided to give it a go on a cold winters night when I’d missed the beginning of a film I’d actually gone to see.

I was pleasantly surprised that although the film is very long, it held my attention throughout, Meryl Streep is fantastic as ever as the slightly barmy cook and Amy Adams was thankfully way more animated than her dull character in Doubt. Stanley Tucci and Chris Messina made their support roles charming too.

Technically well done, colourful soft cinematography and a score as pleasantly frivoulous as hollandaise sauce makes for a pleasant film which, captures the drama and comfort of cooking, the respective cities and time zones, the feel of day to day living and eating, friendships and relationships and sets the scene for a film that was more relevant than I expected it to be. It’s about the stuff of life, the food we eat, the people we share with and the way we validate ourselves. Perhaps a bit of a girls film and nothing that will blow anyone away but a decent watch nevertheless.

The Lovely Bones

The Lovely Bones is certainly not the thriller I’d expected but what it is, is a beautifully filmed poem about coming to terms with loss, be it the loss of a loved one, a relationship, a first kiss, or a life.

Cinematic in it’s fairytale-like narration the film is simple and lovely as the bones of it’s structure. Though for myself, I’d like to have seen a bit less narration and a bit more of a chance to piece together the mystery it does work as a whole and is an unusual and unusually uplifting film about a murderer and his victims, including the tortured family that’s left behind grieving for a girl who’s body is never found. I didn’t think I’d ever see a film that conjures such hope and enlightenment from such a vile situation, but The Lovely Bones manages it with ease and leaves the viewer with a sense of peace and a readiness to accept the bounty of life, however it ends.

Nicely done, lovely cinematography, simply acted, great sound and a honey score but perhaps because it’s so very light and sweet it could come across as a little saccharine to some, certainly the subject matter could have made for a much darker, more thrilling film than the very subtle one we got, and instead it skips over a lot of the baser elements of the stalking, rape and murder of a young girl. However I think there’s plenty of that thriller fayre out there for those who like it, and this film is something else. It’s nice, it’s happy, it’s redeeming and it’s a very zen perspective on coming to terms with things we can’t change. Peter Jackson made a 12 certificate film about a difficult subject and did it well in a non offensive way. I liked it.

Daybreakers

Bring Sci-Fi, Vampires and Ethan Hawke together and you’ve pretty much got the basis for my perfect film. Add in a great premise, fantastic moody lighting and cinematography, stylish art design and awesome special effects, a solid sound design and score and the redoubtable Willem Dafoe and you’ve sealed the deal.

This film lived up to my expectations. Great action with fantastic set pieces, the plot was unconvoluted, made sense and was nicely scripted. The acting was spot on (Michael Dorman a great addition) and the effects and design were super cool. Overall a good, intelligent, entertaining movie that was refreshing and satisfying. All the fun of a gory Vampire movie with a thought provoking plot. Written and beautifully directed by brothers Michael and Peter Spierig, while it’s not quite ground breaking in it’s brilliance, it’s nevertheless a very clever film that delivers the goods and is great value for money. If you like Vampires, go and see it!

The Road

While I was very much looking forward to a deeply troubling and touching film delivered with poignancy and poetics, The Road sadly fell uncomfortably short of what I had hoped for. A real shame. Hard to sit through it turned out to be nothing but bland in it’s bleak portrait of a dying Earth and the struggle of a man and boy to carry on in their quest for the coast and to find some meaning in doing so.

Amidst the marauding cannibalistic humans left in the populace there are very few with redeeming features to be found making Mankind feel as lost as the world around them. And though father and son attempt to rationalise what must be an ultimately futile quest for survival and more importantly retain their humanity, in a world that no longer grows anything to survive upon or has much humanity left in it, there was little to enlighten or engage me about their philosophy. I came out at the end feeling like the suicidal mother had had the best idea all along and they’d have been much happier dying as a family, out of their misery and sparing me the misery of watching them.

Coupled with the bleakness, lack of charisma and no real plot to the story, the film has an annoying amount of convenient ways for the characters to survive, an astonishing amount of stupidity in the way they take care of themselves, and the ending was to my mind totally contrived, the whole hammed up by a rather manipulative score. Though Viggo Mortensen has done his best and the child actor wasn’t as annoying as some can be (though his character was very timid for someone born in an appocalypse) there is little they can do with this material.

The one thing I did like about the film was the cinematography, which I thought was nicely done, bleak in all the right ways and that made the landscape at least interesting. The film might be worth a look for the thoughts it provokes and as a warning lest we all become selfish marauders of our land but ultimately, and disappointingly I found it rather long and lacking.

An Education

A nice screenplay by Nick Hornby and a fabulous cast brings depth to An Education which would otherwise be a bog standard coming of age story. Simple in it’s premise it tells the tale of a bookish young woman who under her dominant father’s influence aspires to attend Oxford University. But loving all things French, avant garde desires lurk inside her only to be brought out when she meets a charming older man and ends up with quite a different education than the one she planned. The ending works but is predictable, however the journey turns out to be rather delicious and the film is a pretty good watch.

Though Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard are wonderful in the leading roles I have to say that a great deal of the charm of the production comes from supporting actors, Dominic Cooper and the wonderful Rosamund Pike who give truly good performances. The look of the film is stunning, capturing the period perfectly and contrasting the dullness of school life and suburban living with the swish life of sports cars, nightclubs and the London art world through which the girl is charmed. All in all a pretty film, nothing to blow me away but jolly nicely done indeed.