The Earth A Common Treasury
Now Playing: Arcade Fire--"In the Backseat"
I can't seem to get enough of the cinema these days. It's a chore to go to the googolplex, especially with some of the crap that's been coming out (stop with the remakes! There's no fucking excuse and you know it!!), but that's no reason to ignore the art entirely. First in reverse chronological order, three on British politics:

The Queen (2006): I actually saw this shortly after Prime Suspect 7, so it was pretty much the whole Helen Mirren experience this month (now all I have to do is see O Lucky Man! again). I'm not a big fan of royalty or this particular family, but this was a sympathetic portrayal by Stephen Frears that recounted the week after Princess Diana's death in 1997, and really belongs to the actors. I don't think I've ever seen Mirren bad in anything... seventeen film and TV productions that I've seen off the top of my head, and she was great in all, even Teaching Mrs. Tingle, which sucked--as, of course, did Caligula. The family's good for laughs--James Cromwell is somewhat out of place as uber-chode Prince Philip, but Sylvia Syms and Alex Jennings are good as the Queen Mum and a dopey Prince Charles. The most entertaining turns come from Roger Allam as the Queen's faithful secretary (the man's destiny to play the "late model" in a Christopher Hitchens biopic is hopefully not far off) and Michael Sheen, whose deadly performances in okay (but why the sequels?) stuff like Underworld and gloriously insane crap like Timeline have apparently led to his casting as Tony Blair. Nailing the man's too-eager, shit-eating grin to perfection, he's probably best in his scenes with the great Helen McCrory as Cherie, when she realizes he's just a sellout like the rest of them.

A Very British Coup (1988): Ray McAnally had a long and diverse career, but probably had his finest hour shortly before his untimely death as Harry Perkins, steelworker turned British Labour Prime Minister in this excellent miniseries whose main drawbacks are (a) its relative tameness in this Bush 'n' Blair era when elected politicians think it's barely worth trying to conceal their contempt for democracy and (b) the overbearing, tinny synthesizer music so common to British TV of this era (and that made the late classic period of Doctor Who so occasionally excruciating). Once in power, Perkins tries to phase out U.S. bases, nuclear power, and restore the power of labor, and is opposed every step of the way by his own secret service and the Americans. The generally downbeat trend to the story, which makes one think it's all been seen before, is redeemed by a gripping, inspiring, and strangely inevitable ending, one of the best I've ever seen for a TV movie.

Winstanley (1975): Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo wrote a strange chapter in movie history by producing and financing their remarkable alternate history film It Happened Here (released in 1966) which looked at the effects of a German occupation of Britain during the Second World War. Ten years later, they told the story of the Diggers, a group of dissidents who grew out of the English Civil War and established various communes throughout the countryside after the war's end in 1649. Pressures from without and within forced their collapse within a decade, but not before leaving a legacy of folk memories (described in detail in Christopher Hill's 1972 analysis The World Turned Upside Down). It's a simple story, shot in brooding black-and-white, but features a weirdly moving central performance from non-actor Miles Halliwell as the title character, as well as an impressively handled low-budget battle sequence of the beginning that looks at times like it might have come from an Eisenstein movie (and unsurprisingly uses Prokofiev's score from Alexander Nevsky). Perhaps even more interesting than the actual movie is the behind-the-scenes documentary on the DVD, which painstakingly details the directors' efforts at historical accuracy (using period armor and weapons from the Tower of London, as well as varieties of pigs and chickens kept up only by historical breeding enthusiasts).

And the others...

Batman Begins (2005): I really like Christian Bale, and find him all the more impressive for recovering from stuff like Newsies and Swing Kids (even his wasted performance in Shaft was neutralized by everyone else's wastage, with the exception of Jeffrey Wright). I also enjoyed director Christopher Nolan's Memento. I don't really have anything invested in the Batman "mythos" (at least the non-Adam West versions), but I had to admit that it was pretty good. The strong cast helped--Michael Caine as Alfred, Morgan Freeman as a reclusive weapons expert, Liam Neeson as Bruce Wayne's onetime spiritual advisor, Gary Oldman as a Serpico-style anathematized cop, even Rutger Hauer as a crooked businessman. I'm not into Katie Holmes, but was pleasantly surprised to find she became less unbelievable as the movie progressed. The Chinese scenes at the beginning were gorgeous. I'm less a fan of the Gotham stuff, as I tink the melodramatic urban hellhole-ness so beloved of these movies (no, not a Crow fan) is generally expressive of anti-urban undertones that haven't done much good for recent human settlement patterns, especially in this country. Still, for a movie so intent on wallowing in arty urban miasma, Batman Begins carries itself well.

A Very Long Engagement (2003): I never saw Amelie, and didn't know what to expect from Audrey Tautou in this post-WW1 flick based on Sebastien Japrisot's novel that I feared would turn into an English Patient lite, with Tautou as a French girl who goes looking for her fiance, the latter missing in action at the front. She was good, and the movie, though I found it a little longish, was better than I expected, with murderous hookers and lots of quirkiness (even if the latter too often veers towards the cutesy) to balance out the "our love is stronger than death" stuff that always makes me think of Daniel Day-Lewis in Last of the Mohicans. The visuals are sumptuous and filling--both the scenes in the trenches and those of civilian life--with at least one surprise cameo making me jump in my seat (as will you, probably, if you didn't know about it). My main beef is that there should have been much more Julie Depardieu. I won't go any further, but really. That aside, Engagement is one of those I probably should have seen in the theater. I hope there's no lesson there.