Author: Mark Goodyear

Short films often showcase the technical mastery of their directors. There is never enough time for performers or screenwriters to make an impact, but as a director, you can lay claim to everything. “Ida” takes a drastically different approach; this is an avenue for both its performers and screenwriting while technically being simple. 

What writer-director Parminder Singh lacks in technical flair he more than makes up for with a blunt yet moving script.

We follow title character Ida (Kerstin Jannerup Gjesing) a 10-year-old girl who opens the film by repeating the line “the monster isn’t real”. She is quickly comforted by her mother, Leonora (Molly Blixt Egelind), who reminds her monsters aren’t real. Everything appears normal until Ida displays strange behaviour at school.

She is struggling to spell the words presented to her in class. She gets stuck on one and begins to obsess about getting it right, erasing her wrong answers over and over. Once her teacher notices he inquires if everything okay, and all Ida has to say for herself is “I made a mistake”.

From here it’s clear something isn’t right about the seemingly normal household presented to us at the beginning. However, once again, Leonora arrives, as we cut to the end of the school day, to make everything okay again. The music becomes calming and she promises they’ll bake together when they get home. Soon after though Leonora gets distressed after Ida doesn’t like a present she bought her. She rapidly begins to pour glass after glass of wine and morphs into the monster of Ida’s nightmares.

When I was first confronted with this revelation, I was unimpressed with how literal the representation of the monster was. Egelind appears on screen as a veiny purple creature who stars hungrily at Ida demanding affection and laying blame; I thought it was far too blunt. It was the performance of Gjesing that changed my mind.

She seems so frightened and ridged as the monster comes out, she runs as far as she can, to her bedroom, and just lies there hoping for the monster to go away and tragically accepting the vile statement her mother throws at her, “It’s your fault I drink”.

In her mind, it’s her “mistakes” that bring the monster out, not the alcohol. Ida stares at the roof lying on her bed sharing her thoughts with us as the film ends, she proclaims she will become an angle, so the monster need never come out again because angles don’t make mistakes. The sequence is so moving the film as a whole becomes a success.

The downbeat ending serves to highlight the sobering fact that children will always struggle to get out of abusive situations with their parents, because they don’t even know they are being abused.

The eternally talented Conleth Hill delivers a line in Gavin Hood’s Official Secrets that sums up exactly how I feel about the film. He, as his character Roger Alton, the head of The Observer newspaper, labels the government leak at the heart of the film, “One hell of a story”. And I wholeheartedly agree, which is what makes Official Secrets such a powerful and important film. The telling of the tale may struggle to unravel at times, yet still, the sheer weight and shock of everything occurring is always apparent and impactful. 

Official Secrets is aptly titled after the UK’s government act designed to ensure that government secrets don’t make their way into the hands of the public, and we follow the most high-profile breaker of the laws contained within the act. Katherine Gun (Keira Knightley) worked at Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and, despite the term sounding rather superficial when based in reality, she was a spy.

Her job was to translate messages intercepted by GCHQ, and she did just that until the danger of impending war began to amount in 2003 as the UN pondered a vote to legalise an invasion of Iraq. It was then that GCHQ forwarded her an email that would change her life forever. The email, initially sent by a member of the US National Security Agency, contained clear orders to spy on nations of the UN who weren’t dedicated to legalising the war for them to be blackmailed into doing so. 

From here, we see the incredibly brave Katherine put the lives of so many before her own as she leaks the document to the press in an effort to prevent the war. The consequences of this are what the film is about; however, we do split into what feels like two distinctly different stories. We follow the men responsible for publishing the leak, most importantly the man who wrote the article, Martin Bright (Matt Smith).

The sequences inside The Observer office debating whether to support the pro-war Tony Blair or to publish the document they have come to obtain illegally are some of the films best, but all the chaos and unique intensity of these scenes is not combined particularly well. Director Gavin Hood fails to find a balance between the two sides of the story he tells, and it does the film an unfortunate disservice.

This leads into what saves the film from becoming a mess, the masterful work from Keira Knightly, Matt Smith and the man who plays Katherine’s lawyer Ben Emmerson, Ralph Fiennes. Each of them forms the beating heart of Official Secrets and display all the talents that made them enduring and endearing performers for as long as they have been. Matt Smith is especially brilliant, not because he betters his counterparts, but due to his role being so unlike his work in The Crown and Doctor Who.

Here Smith makes for a journalist genuinely worth rooting for as he fights for a story his paper didn’t want to tell. Knightly stirs as her character faces imprisonment, her ability to convincingly display the concoction of courage and despair is put on display throughout and is moving at every turn. And Fiennes finds the perfect pitch to be a consummate professional who still has it in him to do what he can to uphold justice. Even when confronted with a woman who had admitted her guilt, he never backs down and eloquently does everything he can. 

Official Secrets knows how important telling Katherine’s story is which leads to plenty of monologues of from individuals taking a stand. Yet, here they do the actors justice and actually manage to make an impact. Indeed, there is only one detracting flaw in the script, the sheer amount of times the words “official secrets” are spoken. It happens so often it becomes comically jarring, which simply shouldn’t be happening. Otherwise, the script shines a kind light on the incredibly suspicious actions in the lead up to the Iraq war, and makes clear the importance of those who did all they could to bring those actions to light. 

Official Secrets plays like two movies that eventually meet, and while it may not work how intended, the three stars are so good it doesn’t matter, and everything begins to click.

Hustlers: Review.

The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) impacted the world in all the worst ways it possibly could. Cinema is now telling the stories stemming from its immense impact and has been for throughout this decade. Those inhabiting the seedy underbelly of Wall Street are who so many films rightly vilify and target. But what, up till now, went unspoken for on the silver screen, was the new breed of criminal the GFC brought on by virtue of the dread and desperation it generated. Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers tells that story, a true one at that, adapted from Jessica Pressler’s article on two women who, after years of legitimate work in strip clubs, decided they had no other choice but to drug and steal money from wealthy men.

The film alters their names to Destiny (Constance Wu) and Ramona (Jennifer Lopez). Destiny is a youthful, almost innocent, figure when we first meet her starring into a back room mirror of her new working establishment. Quickly she is awed by the sheer amount of cash Ramona is thrown during a single stage dance, there’s so much she knocks it off the stage and doesn’t even blink. Wisely Destiny approaches her for guidance, and on a rooftop with one fur coat warming them both the unassuming beginning of a legitimately chilling group of criminals occurs.

This was 2007 when Wall Street was simply bursting with cashed-up men more than happy to unload money on any woman who would even look at them. Infamously though, things took a turn for the worse. As the harshest of the impacts from the GFC began to hit in 2008, being a stripper became much less profitable, and in amongst all the chaos, Destiny falls pregnant and moves away, not seeing Ramona again until two years later. Here, in what was a fateful meeting for the struggling Destiny, Ramona cuts her friend in on a scheme that kept her more than afloat during impossibly hard times.

The original plan of Ramona and her minions (Depicted here by Lili Rinehart and Keke Palmer) reeks of being criminal but likely falls into some messy legal grey area. It was simple, they got rich guys drunk enough to get them back to the club, then convinced them to blow all their money there, and all the while the women were receiving a sizable cut of all the spending.

This is a practice colloquially known as “fishing”. When regular fishing began to fail, thanks to too many men managing to keep their wits about them, Ramona turned to a concoction of her own making, described to us as part Ketamine, part MDMA. “Just a sprinkle” as both the article and the film say, and it was as simple as that. Suddenly, after ingesting their spiked drinks, targeted men would end up so zoned out that they could be robbed blind, and none of them would ever have it in them to go to the police, and more than likely they wouldn’t even remember what happened.

Throughout, the film sporadically cuts us back to Elizabeth (Julia Styles) who is interviewing Destiny in 2014 about their fishing and how they came to it. And all too soon for the characters of the past, her questions begin leading us to their downfall. In watching this, I saw so much of Goodfellas in the story; everything is very much about how Destiny defends what she tells us she did.

The film is rather sympathetic to her, which is where the two films heavily differ. However, both lead to one same inescapable conclusion, each set of characters get caught and found to be the criminals they are; they are condemned, as they should be. When this moment comes for Destiny and Ramona, they fall forever away from grace, and into far less lavish lives, just as Henry Hill did.

Constance Wu shines as Destiny, she is the least trustworthy of narrators just as she should be, and her evolving arrogance forming to make her so untrustworthy comes across great on screen. But it truly is Lopez who steals the show with an utter powerhouse performance. In Hustlers, everything comes back to Ramona, from the beginning of their little gang to its bitter end on account of her trusting the wrong person, Ramona is all-encompassing, and so is Lopez.

If it weren’t for how often Destiny seems to protest that she did nothing wrong it would be easy to see Ramona as the only true criminal of this film, everything was her idea and she knows it and loves it. It’s all about side hustle ideas. Yet when all is said and done, her humanity shines through, and we find she did care for Destiny all along. As the film says, “She didn’t get into the business to make friends, it just happened”, and it just happening is why she feels so much guilt come the end. Lopez embraces all of this, and in doing so, delivers her most exceptional work ever.

Hustlers is a thoroughly entertaining view of crime in a post GFC era ruled by desperation. Come the credits all are depicted as the criminals they are, even if sometimes it feels as though the film didn’t want to.

In 1985 the U.S. centre for disease control reported an 89% increase in new AIDS cases from 1984, the epidemic was so suddenly at a new terrifying height. 1985 is the same year the first films dealing with the horrific disease were filmed and released with the very first being a small low budget film by the name of “Buddies”. There is so much tragedy revolving around this film, the director, Arthur J. Bressan Jr. and one of the leads, Geoff Edholm both died of AIDS within 4 years of the films initial limited release. The rest of the tragedy comes from the film itself.

Buddies follows the heart-wrenching tale of Robert Willow (Edholm) a 33-year-old AIDS patient left in a hospital bed to face what was essentially a death sentence. That is until David Bennett (David Schachter) comes to his lonesome bedside and proclaims that he is Roberts buddy, a member of a volunteer group sent out to befriend and ease gay men dying of AIDS. The two initially fail to click before quickly forming a connection as David begins to learn about the storied and sombre love life of Roberts past. Time goes by, and the ending gets more and more apparent to everyone but David leading to devastating and lasting impact.

Realism or naturalism weren’t the goals of this picture, making clear that being gay wasn’t the problem was. Nothing ever quite feels like it’s something anyone would actually do or say. Whether it’s how instantly open the two men are with one another or just the slightly off ways they speak and react to each other, like they know the camera is in the room; the experience is never quite right. Yet the importance of the narrative, and how firmly based its consequences are in reality, elevate everything above the nagging issues. This is a film that could only be created by men on the forefront of death who had seen and were seeing so many men around them die and be vilified for it. Buddies is the ultimate product of its time and is immeasurably powerful as a result.

Two performers are all the movie needs in Edholm and Schachter and despite this being each of their second films they produce some profoundly moving work. Yes at times the fact they are acting is far too apparent, but they each produce moments purely born of copious amounts of raw emotion. From Robert reaction to the writing David brings him from his book about the thinking of groups surrounding AIDS, to David in the closing moments of the film on a payphone teary-eyed, they both shine exactly when they need too, and most importantly, they represent a scared group of people so essential to remember.

It’s hard to put into words how much this film must have meant to Arthur J. Bressan Jr. He made Buddies in 9 days; everything seems as if all the effort was to get the message out there as quickly as possible. To tell people that this is happening and not to be afraid, but to empathise, and call for help from a Regan government refusing even to comment.

This small resurgence the film is having is a silver lining on what is otherwise a sobering project. He made something historical with this film no matter how many people see it, it’s important, and that is quite an achievement.

Despite its flaws, Buddies is an incomparably powerful public service announcement designed to let the world know not to be afraid in the face of a deadly pandemic.

At the beginning of Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) sits down and begins recounting to the camera the events of his tumultuous life. What follows is three and a half hours of enthralling cinema depicting a man who went from truck driver to mob hitman with chilling ease and little remorse. Two men dictate Franks path in life, high up mafioso Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) and famed union boss Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino).

Along the way, these men lead Frank through the realms of violence, politics, and countless criminal acts, all leading him to the sombre ending where Frank, alone and estranged from his children, waits in a nursing home to die, reflecting, but never speaking on, the worst crime he ever committed, and the only one he may actually regret, the assassination of his friend Jimmy Hoffa.

No one in the world captures criminals as well as Scorsese, and there never will be. He approaches them with a sensitivity that sees them come across as human. They have feelings, they have families and people to care for, they profoundly respect each other and boast legitimate heartfelt friendships, and all of this serves to make them all the more terrifying. No Scorsese gangster is larger than life; they only think they are, and seeing them come back down to earth, as all of Scorsese’s gangsters do, has never been more haunting than in The Irishman.

In Goodfellas, Henry Hill loses everything, and the film ends. In The Irishman, we see throughout and come to dwell with Frank in his final years; we keep seeing him well after the credits of other Scorsese films would have rolled. Therein lies what makes this different to every other film Scorsese has ever made. Sheeran’s story is that of an entire life dedicated to crime all the way to the bitter end. He doesn’t get the cut to black or the sudden death the others get; he fades slowly and harrowingly. In what may well be his farewell to gangster movies, Scorsese delves deep into life and death and finds that evil men die bitterly, and when all is said and done, you know no one else ever could have made a film close to this in terms of storytelling.

The performances here are nothing short of a revelation, not because I didn’t believe the old legends capable, but because they managed to pull off three of the year’s best performances with digitally de-aged faces for lengthy periods of the vast runtime. All three are strong Oscar hopefuls, with Pacino being the best chance for a win. His take on Hoffa is impossible to take your eyes off. He’s vulgar, witty, insanely charismatic and dangerously prideful and Pacino nails every aspect.

And yet, he’s in a film that may well be host to Joe Pesci’s finest performance ever. He is so far removed from the psychos in Casino and Goodfellas. Russell is restrained. He never does the dirty work; he always has people to do it for him. He’s a character made for Pesci’s delicate touch. He is so brilliant at finding the right pitch for every character he plays, and he balances the entire film with how he goes about being Russel.

Finally, we come to De Niro, the most prolific of all Scorsese collaborators. He takes Sheeran and places him firmly in the list of memorable characters he has played in his lengthy, widely loved career. He is, at times, rightfully, outshined by Pacino, who has the livelier character, but in the final portion, where Sheeran is the only one left, De Niro firms The Irishman as his show. The regretful and sombre Sheeran is almost pathetic to look at. He declines to confess his crimes even to a priest, he stumbles his way to see his daughter at her work, and she ignores him and leaves.

I don’t think he knows why he did what he did, and he certainly doesn’t know why he’s the only one left when everyone else is gone, but I do know that his past forces him to try and find forgiveness wherever he can, even though he knows he’ll never find any. This is De Niro’s finest work of the millennium, as it is for most of the cast, and it’s truly unforgettable.

The de-aging is at first a tad jarring, almost comical, as it slightly warps now and then, particularly on Pesci, but by the end, there can be no doubting that no film has done it better to this point. There is a moment in The Irishman, and I couldn’t tell you when, where you simply stop noticing the de-aging technology is even being used. It’s a testament to the talent of everyone involved in the film that this concept could be successful to such an extent. Much of the praise has to go to the genius director, and rightfully so.

Still, his editor, one of the finest ever, Thelma Schoonmaker, pieces together Scorsese’s sprawling epic as only she can; speeding up and slowing down with hard-earned confidence and delivering maximum entertainment, she deserves as much praise as anyone.

In two distinctly different ways, The Irishman is the culmination of careers defined by crime, and it makes for one of the finest films of the decade.