CineYear Begins with a Cinebinge

I was itching to start the year's cinema going but several days of torrential rain and howling wind tested my enthusiasm. Eventually I headed for Brighton and a somewhat run-down multiplex, hidden in the bottom of a multi-story car park, where I pointed my wonderful "Unlimited Card" in the direction of three films in succession. They were: The Iron Lady, The Artist and Mission: Impossible - The Ghost Protocol.

Image via WikipediaI hadn't intended seeing The Iron Lady, not being a fan of the subject matter and somewhat jaded as far as Meryl Streep's appearances are concerned. The timings made it the best bet though and I was by now after a considerable break just happy to get back into a cinema seat. There seemed a kind of inevitability about Streep playing Thatcher illustrated by Jennifer Saunders played Streep playing Thatcher several years ago. I was certainly entertained and impressed by several of the cast including her Streepness but it doesn't do any kind of serious biographical or historical documentary work and is very much an American style biopic. I look forward to a serious work on those years but in the meantime this is a popcorn movie and while there will be a lot of ballyhoo about it no doubt, it is completely irrelevant as far as any pro or anti-Thatcher debate is concerned.

I did find the depiction of presumably a completely fictional present day Mrs T struggling with her dementia rather strange and it certainly made the whole enterprise even more unbelievable as a representation of the real historic figures and times. In fact it seemed a somewhat unnecessary and distancing device although it did allow some entertaining shenanigans from the estimable Jim Broadbent as the apparition of Denis and Olivia Colman as Carol Thatcher.

The second film, The Artist, was a welcome contrast: Pure pleasure and another in the current wave of films celebrating the history of cinema itself in playful homage. This is a largely silent (or rather speechless) film shown in Academy ratio and black and white and concerning the difficulty that many great silent movie actors had in making the transition to "talking pictures" either because of, for example, squeaky voices or foreign accents (although that didn't stop Garbo.
or Dietrich).

The fact that it was shown in 4:3 or therabouts meant that there were warning signs in the foyer and doors of the auditorium in case the lack of widescreen should scare the little ones. Far from being primitive though, it makes good use of modern technology to show a black and white silent film can look wonderful and it is possible to see echoes of the great late period of silents when they had reached a degree of sophistication which would surprise many who have only heard of them but never experienced them projected correctly.

The French writer/director, Michel Hazanavicius watched a great many European silent films before concentrating on a few of the late Hollywood classics, in particular the wonderful "Sunrise" which I was privileged to see, with live accompaniment, last year as part of the celebrations of the 100th birthday of Brixton Ritzy. There are a number of moments in The Artist which evoked Sunrise's beauty for me. The Artist starts in the year of Sunrise and the beginning of talkies: 1927.

Despite its beauty and the way it celebrates these classic works of art it is not at all po-faced and moves with pace and humour, not least in the character of the little dog. The film was in fact shot at 22 frames per second so that when shown at the standard 24 it has a little extra speed. This is not intrusive (or jerky as people often imagine the original silents to be)  but gives it verve and pace. I found it a delicious cinema experience and hope to see it again before long.

Image via WikipediaAnything after this could only be anti-climax but with Mission: Impossible you are unlikely to be too disappointed because you will have a pretty good idea what you are going to see. In Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol the Cruiser and his strange running gait is back again doing the usual stuff.

If you like this kind of thing (and I do actually) it is entertaining if completely forgettable. The part that most got my attention was set on the 130th floor of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, still at the moment, I think, the world's tallest building. With the Cruise falling off bits of it and dangling from others it was several minutes of exquisite torture for someone whose fear of real heights has strangely migrated to moving pictures of them.

With plenty of all you expect from a spy film it rounded off a day at the cinema in acceptable style. With one of the films likely to be in the running for Film of the Year it had been quite a start.