Coffee and TV: Sunday Breakfast with Dee Reddy

Review: Blue Jasmine 

Woody Allen often uses a variety of devices in his storytelling. In Blue Jasmine he employs a similar trick to that used in his 2002 film, Melinda and Melinda. In that picture the audience sees the two lives of one woman. In Blue Jasmine we also see the former and the present lives of the central character, Jasmine, played out side by side in the film. The difference is that in the older film the narrative is dealing with a 'what if' hypothesis whereas in his latest film he is looking at the consequences of a life-altering event, the before and the after. 

Cate Blanchett plays the title character, a hyper and neurotic Manhattan socialite who has recently separated from her rich husband, played by Alec Baldwin. He has been evading tax and the family is now bankrupt. As a result, Jasmine has had her indulgent Park Avenue life torn from her and has moved to San Francisco to live a much less salubrious life with her sister Ginger. 

Much has been made of the similarities between this film and the iconic play A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. Indeed, William's Blanche du Bois and Allen's Jasmine are both tragi-comic figures, both lost in a new world which they are not comfortable in. Cate Blanchett is excellent in creating a character that is hopelessly and haughtily out of her depth in the world of ordinary people. At one point she declares that the thought of moving from Manhattan to Brooklyn had been insufferable not so long ago but now she has reached new depths living with her sister in a dingy little flat in a San Francisco suburb. 

This is a film about the clash of two worlds. Jasmine uses an endless cocktail of Xanax and vodka to deal with her new circumstances. Blanchett is a sort of female incarnation of Woody Allen; neurotic and can't stop talking about herself and her own concerns. While the Australian actress plays the role with nervous abandon and comic aplomb, the problem with the character is that she is not likeable. In fact she is a monstrous incarnation without redeeming qualities. Without compassion for her, the viewer ceases to care about her fate. 

Blanchett has been singled out for her fine performance, and well she should be. However, the real star of this film is British actress Sally Hawkins. Having excelled in former roles including her break out part in Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky, she shines as Jasmine's affable and kindly sister Ginger. Hawkins brings a lightness of touch and a genuine charm to the role, especially when she is pitted against the nastiness of Jasmine. She is a simpler person who works in the local grocery store and is the perfect foil to Blanchett. 

Woody Allen occasionally forces plot over character in his work and this film is no exception. There are times when he make his characters do things which they just wouldn't do, in order to drive the plot in a different direction. This has the effect of emptying a character of their sincerity and leaving the viewer somewhat perplexed. However, on the flip side, he has once again created some wonderfully truthful characters. Ginger aside, her boyfriend Chili, played superbly by Bobby Canavalle, solicits real compassion from the audience. Though he can be violent, he is put upon not only by Jasmine's disdain and condescension but also by Ginger's wavering commitment to their relationship. 

Blue Jasmine is an engaging and witty film which suffers occasionally from Allen forcing his narrative on his characters in order to achieve the story that he wants rather than the outcomes that his characters desire. It is certainly not on a par with his great films of the eighties such as Hannah and her Sisters or Crimes and Misdemeanours. 

Blue Jasmine is on general release across Dublin. 

Keepin' it Reel...movie news

The Farrelly Brothers have finally got around to the much anticipated sequel to their 1994 smash hit Dumb and Dumber. It is striking to look at the contrast in career paths between the lead actors, Jeff Daniels and Jim Carey, since its first incarnation twenty years ago. While Carrey has gone on to produce an endless line of comedies, Daniels has pursued a much more serious line of dramas, including The Hours and the recent Emmy winning Aaron Sorkin-penned The Newsroom, for HBO. 

For their new adventure, Harry and Lloyd set out on a road trip to find one of their long lost kids, in an attempt to procure a kidney. 

In her January appearance on Jimmy Fallon's chat show, Jennifer Lawrence talked about how much of a fan she is of Dumb and Dumber, Anchorman and Stepbrothers. It has now been confirmed that the Oscar winner will make a cameo appearance in the Farrelly Brother's sequel, since she is currently shooting the third instalment of the Hunger Games trilogy next door to Dumb and Dumber in Georgia, USA. 

The movie is entitled Dumb and Dumber To and is set for release in 2014. During the week the pair uploaded a picture to Twitter of themselves on set...

Box, Set, Match...the must-have boxset

This week’s must-have boxset is the BBC drama Top of the Lake. Created by Jane Campion of The Piano and Bright Star fame, this lonely and chilling detective series is a complex and richly satisfying watch.

Written by Campion and Gerard Lee, the show is set in a small and isolated community in the mountainous south island of New Zealand in the present day. Odd characters and a possibly corrupt police populate this idyllic setting. The lake of the title refers to the topography in which the action takes place. The cinematography takes the breath away while the story will make you tremble. 

Elizabeth Moss, best known as Peggy in AMC’s Mad Men plays the leading role as a detective drafted in to solve the case of a 13 year old girl who appears to be pregnant and then disappears. However, not only must she find the girl and her rapist but also come to terms with her own demons at the same time.

Peter Mullan delivers a tour de force as the local drug lord who has a tight hold over each section of the community. He is the daughter of the lost teenager, Tui. Mullan steals every scene he is in, at moments sweet and calm and at other times exploding in a fit of violence. He treats only his his dogs the way most attempt to treat people...with kindness. At the other end of the spectrum, Holly Hunter plays the aloof role of a sort of female shaman who shelters female victims of domestic abuse. It is the conflict of interests between these two groups and their uncomfortable co-existence which creates some of the most sizzling scenes. 

The first two episodes are a little tough going as the writers establish a detailed map of the people within the community. This is slow storytelling which rewards the viewer who perseveres. By the end of the season you know the community intimately despite the secrets which they are intially shrouded in. 

Jane Campion is a master of atmosphere and in this show she excels. There is a sense of foreboding which infiltrates the very sinews of this programme. The backdrop of New Zealand's Lord of the Rings-esque landscape adds to the menace. 

Campion has created a highly cinematic television programme. The scale and depth of the story, and indeed its consequences, are epic and linger with the viewer between its six installments. Just like its characters, the show reveals its secrets slowly, as the writers gradually peel away the layers of mystery surrounding the girl's disappearance. 

The show was filmed in the sleepy town of Glenorchy on the south island of New Zealand, by the shores of Lake Wakatipu. It is surly one of the most beautiful and melancholy landscapes you could imagine. Cinematographer Adam Arkapaw allows the camera to linger on the sad shadows which the mountains cast over the town. One feels closed in by this landscape. This is a highly isolated community at the end of the earth and there is a lawlessness at play which is frightening and dangerous. Rape and incest are commonplace. You feel that the town is so removed from civilisation that the rule of law and order doesn't appear to apply in this disfunctional community. 

ENDS

Culture Notes: Sunday Breakfast with Dee Reddy

I am a Netflix virgin. Or rather, I was until last Monday before I took the plunge and dived into a pool which has become very well populated of late.

Like sex when I was a teenager, everybody is talking about Netflix. At first, my friends were a little scared of it, not quite sure what it held in store. How do you do it? How does it work? And, just like my adolescence, I made sure my friends experimented with it first before I got involved at a safer and later stage. Mine really is the rock ‘n roll lifestyle.

The first thing I watched was a few episodes of Breaking Bad. It is almost impossible to sit through a dinner party without having watched it. If you do, you will find yourself relegated to the bottom end of the table, feeding scraps to the dog and longing for the evening to come to a swift end. 

Because Breaking Bad nearly killed me I followed it with an episode of Fawlty Towers. What I didn’t realise was that Netflix uses a complex algorithm, based on what you have watched, to create customised suggestions for your future viewing pleasure. It is now recommending I watch a documentary about cocaine and I’m Alan Partridge. I can understand their reasoning: hit him hard with some seriously debased concoction of the criminal underworld and ease his suffering with some classic British comedy for the inevitable comedown.

Television

Downton Abbey is back on our screens tonight for its fourth outing. Our appetite for period schmaltz has clearly not deflated quite yet as the show is currently the most internationally viewed program in the world.

Maggie Smith is returning as the Dowager Countess with the acid wit. Surely her character is now roughly 136 years of age, no? Still, she has the ability to add spark to the most mundane of scenes.

It is the roaring twenties and the Downton estate is facing new challenges. The trailer for the new season opens with the Dowager Countess feeding advice to the mourning Lady Mary: “You have a straightforward choice...you must choose either death or life”. No doubt Mary will wander the corridors of Downton like a moody teenager for the first episode and then shack up with Irish provo-turned pseudo aristocrat and fellow widower, Tom Branson, before the season is out. That’s my bet anyway.

Of particular interest is the arrival of Lady Grantham’s brother, played by Paul Giamatti. Giamatti is one of the most understated and exquisite actors working in Hollywood today, having put in sterling performances in the likes of Sideways and the Ides of March.

Gary Carr will play the first black visitor to Downton, as American jazz singer, Jack Ross.

Downstairs, Jonathan Howard will be playing the hot new gardener, Sam Thawley, setting the petticoats above stairs all aflutter.

Movies

The Toronto International Film Festival, or “TIFF” as it is know by industry insiders, came to a close during the week. This festival, second only to Cannes, is known as a hotspot for early Oscar buzz. The big winner this year, scooping up the People’s Choice Award, was 12 Years a Slave. From all accounts, Brit Steve McQueen, director of Hunger and Shame, has delivered another tour de force. Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and our own Kerryman, Michael Fassbender, the film also has a stellar supporting cast including Brad Pitt and Love/Hate’s Ruth Negga.

The movie follows the travails of a black man from the Union North being sold into slavery in the Confederate South during the run up to the American Civil War. There have been so many films on this subject of late, from Lincoln to Tarantino’s Django Unchained that the Civil War is almost a genre in itself.

Its release date in Ireland has been pushed forward to October.

Diana, the biopic of Princess Diana’s life, was released on Friday across the country to a widespread panning from critics. Donald Clarke, writing in the Irish Times, describes it as “stupefyingly dull”, while admitting that it is not quite silly enough to become a cult classic of ridiculousness. The Independent in London gave the film one star; saying it is a “flat biopic, failing to conjure interest, let alone controversy”.

Still, if you’re interested in dresses and the paparazzi, I’m sure you will get your money’s worth.

Ends

Supermarkets are better than museums

I love supermarkets.

The supermarket is an icon of time and place. It is better than a museum. If you could see a photograph of a supermarket aisle, taken on the day you were born, that one photograph would be full of information about the way people lived at the beginning of your life.

If I had been born in East Berlin, that photograph would show you bottles of Vita Cola but no Coca Cola, as this only entered the East German market after the fall of the Berlin Wall. That one bottle of Vita Cola tells us alot: consumers had little choice and there was no free market.

If you had been born in 1982 in London the photograph may show you people avoiding the purchase of certain products as this was the year of the Chocolate Bar Ban and the Apartheid boycott. Rowntree Mackintosh’s association with South Africa was having an effect on the supermarket aisle.

If you were born in Moscow in 1972, the photograph may contain a bottle of Pepsi Cola, the first foreign product admitted into the Soviet Union.

Supermarkets and the products that inhabit them tell us important information about who we are and the world that we live in.

I had the recent good fortune to spend alot of time in American supermarkets. If you really want to learn about people, an hour in their supermarket will give you most of the information you need to sketch a portrait.

If you go to an Irish supermarket you will find several aisles of wine, beers and spirits. You will also find an entire aisle full of crisps. I know a supermarket in a posh part of Dublin which sells sixteen types of olives. I know another supermarket in a very different part of the city which sells sixteen types of cider. One trip to a supermarket and you can size up an area quite quickly.

The American supermarket is a cultural icon. Many famous scenes from movies are played out in supermarkets because they are the standard, everyday background of our lives. The supermarket represents the banality of our existence. They are places we have to visit and therefore the inevitability of things happening there is assured. “I bumped into David in the supermarket”. “I saw my ‘ex’ in the supermarket”. “The most embarrassing thing happened to me yesterday in the supermarket”. These are all things that we have probably heard because the supermarket is a place we regularly visit. It is a stage on which our actions take shape. The way we interact with the set, or in this case the supermarket, and the props which inhabit it, tells us a great deal about who we are and what we like or dislike as people.

Kathryn Bigelow’s 2009 film, The Hurt Locker, features a particularly poignant supermarket scene. The protagonist, played by Jeremy Renner, has just returned to America from his tour of duty in Iraq. He stares at an endless aisle full of cereal boxes. The supermarket become symbolic of the benign, comfortable and quiet of normal life compared to the maelstrom of violence he witnessed in the Gulf.

In Woody Allen’s 1972 comedy, Play it Again, Sam, the central character makes his way around a supermarket as he attempts to buy groceries for a date he is having later with Diane Keaton’s character. He puts some candles in his trolley. His alter ego, played by Humphrey Bogart, says, “Don’t get those candles. They’re for a Jewish holiday. Get romantic candles”.

With these images in my mind, I was excited about exploring the American supermarket.

The first thing that struck me was the choice of shopping trolley. Sure, we have basket, medium trolley or large trolley. But the Americans have a fourth option: the ride-on trolley. Much like a ride-on mower, the ride-on trolley is designed to make life as convenient as possible. I soon realised that it was favourited by the obese.

In the 2002 film, The Good Girl, directed by Miguel Arteta, much of the action plays out in a large supermarket. What struck me was that most of the products which the viewer can see in the background were alien to me. The way products are presented is vastly different. For example, a single portion of crisps which one might buy in London or Dublin does not exist in America. What we would consider ‘party size’ in this part of the world is deemed a single portion, stateside.

Aisles of sugary syrups, “American” flavour cheese, nappies for puppy dogs, double-size wine bottles, ground chuck, unrefrigerated bacon, yoghurt-covered pretzels and ‘cheese in a can’ were just some of the exhibits in the American supermarket. Large portions and endless choice.

A phenomenon known as ostalgie spread across Berlin a number of years ago. This compounded word essentially means ‘nostalgia for East Berlin’ and alludes to a desire for Berliners to access the simple products of the former Communist East. Products such as Vita Cola which had disappeared in the early nineties, once Coca Cola was finally allowed in, suddenly became fashionable again.

This type of retro retail is common as it brings back memories of former lives or indeed of one’s own childhood. I have often found myself in a conversation where the chat moves to the subject of the sweets we loved as kids which no longer exist. Discussion of old products becomes a way for us to share in our collective past.

In this sense, supermarkets can be seen as repositories of our cultural-consumer memory. When we occasionally come across a product that triggers a series of thoughts about the past, the supermarket is playing a role in the construction of that memory.

Look at a supermarket aisle today and you will see a representation of what we need and want as people who live in 2013. You will also see the limitations of our current capabilities. In ten years time, this aisle could look very different indeed. 

ENDS