Manic Pixie Dream...Wait a Minute...

Films: Happy-Go-Lucky
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on The New Portable.

I’ve not been nice in the past to the manic pixie dream girl stereotype in films. It’s one of those tropes that, on its surface appears to be progressive but is essentially just another way to service yet another white guy’s fantasies. A film like Happy-Go-Lucky puts the MPDG stereotype front and center in the person of our main character. Like plenty of the movies that are still on my slowly-dwindling list, there was a reason I’ve waited on this.

This is despite the fact that I’m a fan of Sally Hawkins, who is our MPDG. And to be truthful, I should have given this a go some time past. Hawkins deserves the benefit of the doubt, even when I’m not entirely sold on the premise.

24/7/365

Film: Another Year
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on The New Portable.

Sometimes, what makes a movie interesting isn’t so much the story as it is the perspective from which the story is told. That’s absolutely the case with Another Year, a film that is, on its surface, a pretty standard slice of life drama that takes place over the course of roughly a calendar year. What makes this film interesting isn’t the stories it tells, since these stories are pedestrian and normal. It isn’t the people the stories are about, since they are not particularly unique or special in anyway. It’s that the stories are more or less told from the perspective of two people who are essentially tangential to everything that happens.

Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen) are a happily married couple who have a comfortable and happy life together. Yes, their names are Tom and Gerri, and yes, this comes up in conversation at least once. Tom works as a geologist and Gerri works as a counsellor. The two of them are the more or less stable center of a world of people experiencing a variety of problems and pains. Where Tom and Gerri are happy, pleasant, and caring, their friends are lonely, despairing, and emotionally torn apart.

Helping Hands

Film: Vera Drake
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.

There’s a generation or so of British actresses that I love in just about everything. Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren, and Joan Plowright come to mind. Imelda Staunton is a bit younger than that group, but she’s just about in the same league. What Staunton can do that the others don’t do as well is play what the Monty Python crew called a “pepperpot,” a stereotypical middle-aged British housewife. That’s absolutely the case in Vera Drake, where, aside from the seriousness of the drama at play here, she could have stepped out of a skit about Mrs. Premise and Mrs. Conclusion.

It’s some time into the film before we really get a sense of what is happening. Vera Drake (Imelda Staunton) works as a domestic for a number of families in post-World War II London. She also spends a good deal of her time looking after people who need help, including her infirm mother and a neighbor named Reg (Eddie Marsan), who she invites to tea, perhaps surreptitiously hoping that Reg might become attracted to her painfully shy and mousey daughter Ethel (Alex Kelly). Vera and her husband Stan (Phil Davis) live a normal life as much as they can in the still-rationing world of 1950s London, a fact that their son Sid (Daniel Mays) plays to his advantage. His job in a clothing shop gives him access to nylons, which he trades to his friends for small luxuries.

Song and Dance

Film: Topsy-Turvy
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla Digital on The Nook.

Over the past six years, I’ve become much less of a musical hater and have found a number of them that I appreciate. That doesn’t mean that I was especially enthused about the prospect of Topsy-Turvy about the almost break-up of lyricist William Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan and the creation of the comic opera The Mikado. The more than 2 ½ hour length was off-putting as well. But I had to watch it eventually, and today was as good as any other day.

As the movie starts, Arthur Sullivan (Allan Corduner) is seriously ill, but still manages to drag himself to the Savoy Theater to conduct the opera for Princess Ida, the latest Gilbert and Sullivan production. William Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) is unable to watch the opening night and paces the streets of London as usual. Princess Ida receives flat reviews and the general thought is that perhaps Gilbert and Sullivan have run out of ideas. Nothing seems to match the strength of H.M.S. Pinafore or The Pirates of Penzance. Sullivan retires to the continent to convalesce. When ticket sales for Princess Ida dry up in the summer heat and no new production to put on, theater owner Richard D’Oyly Carte (Ron Cook) reprises an earlier work called The Sorcerer.

Nick's Pick: Naked

Film: Naked
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

This is the ninth in a series of monthly reviews suggested by Nick Jobe at YourFace.

I went into Naked with some amount of trepidation. I know this is a film that Nick has a great deal of respect for. Were I a bigger bastard, I would suggest that Nick’s main reason for liking this film is the presence of David Thewlis, who was a major part of the Harry Potter films. In truth, Naked reminds me of a great number of films I’ve seen in the last few years. This is a film that is more or less about nothing. It’s a character study, and the entire thing turns on the performance of the actor in that role. As it happens, in this case that one role is played by Remus Lupin the aforementioned David Thewlis.

I’m not being glib when I suggest that this film is essentially without a plot. Loser Johnny (Thewlis) starts the film in the most unpleasant way possible—the film opens with Johnny in the middle of a sexual assault. This is a theme that will come up multiple times in the film—it’s not the only time that we see him demonstrate his penchant for violent and unpleasant sex. To avoid any potential legal problems with what was, essentially, a rape, Johnny heads off to London to look for his ex-girlfriend Louise (Lesley Sharp). He doesn’t find her right away—instead, he finds Sophie (Katrin Cartlidge). The two spend the afternoon having sex, at least until Louise gets back.

Mommie (Kinda) Dearest

Film: Secrets & Lies
Format: Video from The Magic Flashdrive on laptop.

Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies is the second film in two days to completely blindside me. I knew virtually nothing about it going in, and now, having seen it, I’m not sure how it passed completely under my radar. I mean, this is a film that nabbed five Oscar nominations, and those nominations were in real categories. It has a remarkably simple premise and spins it through the lives of real people, producing something startling and beautiful.

The story is deceptively simple. A young black woman with the amazingly awesome name of Hortense Cumberbatch (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) has recently lost her mother. She was adopted as a child. With both of her parents dead, she decides it is time to look up her birth mother. See, pretty simple premise.