ENTERTAINMENT
cinema
in his later years has lurched from the awful (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) to the sublime (Midnight In Paris), has ventured once more into the dark territory that he explored in Match Point, with a not dissimilar outcome. The characters are types rather than real people (Ginny excepted), but the drama that unfolds and the morality that it exposes are unnerving for their honesty.
WONDER WHEEL
THE MAN WHO INVENTED CHRISTMAS
BY JOHN CAMPBELL
The circumstances of Woody Allen’s ‘courting’ of his current wife, Soon-Yi Previn, combined with his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow’s insistence that he sexually molested her as a child might reasonably lead us to the conclusion that the revered little filmmaker is a bit of a grub. And they should certainly throw some light on the portrayal of women in his movies. In this, Ginny (Kate Winslet – a fantastic performance) and her step-daughter Carolina (Juno Temple) come to grief through their love for a man – a playwright (Justin Timberlake) – with whom Allen clearly identifies. Ginny and her husband Humpty (Jim Belushi) are battlers who live and work on Coney Island in the 1950s. Humpty’s daughter turns up on their doorstep after walking out of her marriage to a Florida gangster. Mickey the lifeguard (Timberlake) seduces Ginny before embarking on his conquest of Carolina, who is being hunted down by a couple of guys from the Mob. There is something pathetic about Ginny and Carolina’s neediness, something irritating in Mickey’s high opinion of himself, and Humpty’s oafishness is cruelly overdone. But the plot is tight and compelling, notwithstanding the bad guys’ ineffectual attempts to track down Carolina. It feels more like a play that has been adapted for the screen and, as such, its most successful scenes are those shot in Humpty and Ginny’s home, with long takes and a slowly moving, intimate camera. References to Eugene O’Neill are clunky and selfcongratulatory (Allen obviously has a high opinion of himself), but the sensual cinematography of veteran Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now) is a joy throughout. Allen, whose output
If you are familiar with Charles Dickens’s two timeless novels, Oliver Twist and Great Expectations (which is irreplaceably in my all-time top ten – A Tale of Two Cities I had to read at school, which blinded me to its worth), you might have trouble aligning Dan Stevens’s at times flippant portrayal of the 19th century’s prolific writer/speaker/polemicist with the man who is presented in the archives. For a start he hasn’t got that scraggly goatee. In director Bharat Nalluri’s depiction of Dickens, there is also a jokiness that is similar to that of Joseph Fiennes’s flighty Bard in Shakespeare in Love (1998) – not that there is anything wrong with breaking the mould owned by academia's dry sobriety. It is 1843 and, following a triumphant tour of America, Dickens has had little success with his most recent works. In October of that year, under pressure from his publishers, who are dangling before him a much-needed advance for a new manuscript, and supported by his friend and confidante John Forster (Justin Edwards), who encourages and prods him to properly understand his characters (especially Ebenezer Scrooge), Dickens puts pen to paper and embarks on A Christmas Carol. In a screenplay by Susan Coyne that is mirthful without ever losing sight of the serious intent of the message that Dickens was sending to his readers, humour is evenly balanced with the stress of his being a husband supporting a large family. Even better, the story delves deep into the creative process, as we see the writer overpowered by the people whom he has brought to life through the words on his pages – especially in the case of Scrooge (Christopher Plummer, Methuselah of the silver screen). Drawn back to the bottom line, Dickens taps into his own deprived youth as a factory worker. The title of the movie might be overstating the impact that Dickens had on the festive season, but that Christmas has degenerated into a month of carnal, mindless consumerism is our problem, not his.
Gonzalez Comes For Blues THIS YEAR BLUESFEST IS IN FOR A TREAT WHEN ARGENTINIAN INDIE FOLKSINGER/SONGWRITER AND GUITARIST JOSE GONZALEZ MAKES HIS WAY TO BYRON FOR THE ICONIC BLUES AND ROOTS FESTIVAL. MEMBER OF SWEDISH BAND JUIP, THIS INDIE FOLK GENIUS SOLD OUT THE OPERA HOUSE ON HIS ONE-OFF SOLO DEBUT. Gonzalez spends a lot of his time on the road. ‘I have been touring with an orchestra from Berlin and Gothenburg, a 20-piece orchestra. We did some touring and we recorded all the live shows, so that’s like the big release. But it’s still old songs. The new stuff – I always gather ideas but I do it at a very slow pace. It’s more like gathering riffs and chord progressions until I feel I have 10 of them that I really like, and then I write the lyrics. So I think that will happen maybe next year.’ His work as a solo artist, with Junip and with the orchestra means that Gonzalez does split his time, something that he says makes him slower than other songwriters. ‘As a songwriter I’m very slow, but this is my full-time job. In that sense I keep myself busy; I do some tours, and then I write. But I have lots of time to be home and read books and play chess, so it’s a very easy job.’ Gonzalez wasn’t always on the path to being a musician. ‘One of my dreams was to do research in biochemistry. I guess that was my most sober dream. But then as a teenager I was skating and whenever I was able to pull off some of the tricks that I’d been trying out for a while I felt, okay, this is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life. And then I picked up the guitar, played classical guitar and I felt okay, this is going to be what I’m going to do. But yeah, I also had ambitions with my songwriting and with my music but I let them go in my teenage years when I went to university and kept on playing music, but more as a side project, as a hobby on weekends, to write some songs and do demos. So it sort of came as a surprise for me, when I released my first album in 2003, that anyone was going to pay attention to it. I felt I was like an indie artist that maybe would get some recognition but maybe 10 years later. So it really did change my way of looking at things back 14 years ago.’ For someone who never really intended to be a musician, Gonzalez has an impressive track record. A few years back he scored music for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. ‘It was a fun collaboration,’ he said of his time working with Teddy Shapiro, who did most of the score for the movie. ‘I got to dig deep into a side of music that I didn’t know so well.’ Gonzalez also has a unique way of walking into other people’s songs – like John Lennon’s No 9 Dream or The Ghost of Tom Joad by Springsteen. ‘I learnt to play guitar by playing other people’s songs,’ he said. ‘When I didn’t have enough material that I felt so that’s when I started picking up Heartbeats by the Kinfe and Inaudible Name by Joy Division and The Ghost of Tom Joad. I picked that one out when we were playing as a sort of house band at Gothenburg Film Festival. I think it’s always a good way to connect with an audience, to play songs that you enjoy or they recognise.’ So what should we expect from Gonzalez at Bluesfest? ‘I’ll be playing the songs from my three albums and songs that I know my fans want to hear. And then there are songs that I like playing so I do a mix of both. Lately I have been inspired by West African music so I have some songs that will be inspired by that, that sort of Desert Blues.’ Jose Gonzalez plays Bluesfest 2018. For program and ticketing info go to bluesfest.com.au.
52 December 27, 2017 The Byron Shire Echo
Byron Shire Echo archives: www.echo.net.au/byron-echo