Not everything in the village is cosy all of the time.
You know that I don't report the unsavoury.
Real life can be so ugly.
Anyhow do you remember the owner of the previously black binned bagged windowed house in the village? The one that gave me a good shouting at after I had given him a piece of my mind about his staffies? Well The Prof sold him some eggs when I was out last Sunday. I suspected quite rightly that the guy had no idea that I lived in the same cottage, so he and indeed I looked rather surprised when he knocked on our door last night wanting more.
I wondered just how the meeting would pan out but decided immediately that it would serve no purpose getting shirty again, so I told him I did indeed had eggs to sell.
to be fair he held out his hand and said he was sorry that "gotten off on the wrong foot" and I shook it saying we both said what we had wanted to say. I also gave him an extra goose egg to seal the deal.
Neither of us needed an enemy in a village of 300 people.
**************
Three Movies in three days !
A Science- Fiction thriller, a
true life drama and an Icelandic Comedy.....a nice eclectic mixture for
sure.......I wanted to see Helen Mirren's " Military drone thriller too
but it's not out until Friday!
Midnight Special, I
understand, had received rave reviews, so I was interested in seeing
this homage to all of those Hollywood alien-visiting-Earth movies which
seemed so prolific in the 1980s.
Midnight Special starts
with two men and a small boy called Alton hiding away in a country
motel. The boy, we know from snippets of tv news, has been abducted from
a ranch housing a strange religious cult, a cult which see him as some
sort of divine conduit to salvation.
Slowly ( very slowly) we learn that his abductors are indeed the boy's biological father Roy
( Michael Shannon) and Roy's best friend Lucas
( Joel Edgerton) who
realise that the child needs to meet up with his own kind at a certain
spot across the Southern States of America. It is suggested, but not
made explicit, that the child is indeed an alien.
Midnight Special poses
more questions than it answers, and although the twists and turns of
the narrative are intriguing, I was rather frustrated by what was not
being said.
The audience does not understand how father and son ended up in the cult's ranch or just how the boy's mother
( Kirsten Dunst) came
to desert him. We understand nothing of the motivation of the pivotal
character of Lucas nor it is explained just how and why Alton became "
possessed " by the "alien" in the first place.
All these gaps,
left me rather let down even though the somewhat clever ( but fairly
unsurprising) twist at the end made a change from ET going home.
Nice performances, some nice tense scenes and the lovely Joel Edgerton made it a pretty ok 7/10
Spotlight is
a worthy and meticulous movie, I have to say that from the get-go. It's
a faithful depiction of the lengthy and detailed investigation by The
Boston Globe's
Spotlight Team of investigative reporters into the
sexual abuse of hundreds of the city's schoolchildren by 90 catholic
priests over a period of a generation.
Well acted ( Michael Keaton
and Paul Ruffalo are particularly good as two of the lead reporters) and
forensic in detail, this movie is a compelling watch , a fact
compounded by the fact that the reporters took on the power of the entire Catholic Church, an organisation that actively covered up the abuse and was complicit in allowing it to flourish and continue.
9\10
Hrútar (UK title
"Rams") was my final film and this Icelandic "comedy" turned out to be the oddest of choices for it turned out to be less of a comedy and more a rather stark and at times moving tale of sibling love and rural degeneration.
This film starts with a charm of the Irish, for we are introduced to two aging sheep farmers who live in adjoining farmhouses on a bleak Icelandic mountain. Gummi
(Sigurður Sigurjónsson) has not spoken to his brother Kiddi
(Theodór Júlíusson) for forty years. The pair communicate sporadically through notes taken between the two farms by Kiddi's sheepdog but when the dreaded disease "scrappie" appears in the valley and their beloved flocks are ordered to be culled, the brothers need to set aside old slights to save the few remaining sheep hiding in Gummi's basement.
It all sounds rather charming, and to be honest it is!, but the film is not a comedy as I would define one. True there are some sparking scenes between the two old men, especially when Kiddi collapses in the show after drinking and Gummi takes him to the local hospital scooped up by the bucket of a tractor digger, but the film is really a melancholic and rather beautiful study of two isolated individuals who have only two passions......a love of sheep and a shared family history.
8/10
