Outlaw King

Year 11, Day 222 - 8/10/19 - Movie #3,320

BEFORE: We've reached the part of August where everything seems to slow down just a little - many people are on vacation, and nobody expects that much to get done at work, with so many people out of town.  I've got one boss out of town all next week, so I just have to keep things like e-mail running and sort a big pile of receipts from 2018, so his accountant can finish his taxes.

At the other job there's a feature in production, about half-animated, and I usually don't have much to do with that process, but since the summer interns are leaving and the fall interns haven't started yet, I've been taught how to composite scanned drawings into animation with a program called AfterEffects, and it's really the first time I've used any kind of digital program in animation production.  Back when I took animation courses at NYU in the late 1980's, such programs didn't exist, digital filmmaking wasn't even a thing, so everyone was still drawing and coloring on cels, or moving around little bits of cut-out paper (my chosen technique, which was easier to me than drawing, or messing around with clay).  But even a dinosaur like me can learn a new computer program if I have to, even if I'd prefer not to - but getting the film closer to completion takes precedence over me being stuck in the past.

My goal every day is the same - get through the day as best as I can, so I can come home, have dinner, and stay up much too late watching a movie.  After a whole week of Britfest movies, there will just three more after tonight, and then I'm on to another topic.  Steven Cree carries over from "Churchill".

THE PLOT: A true David vs. Goliath story of how the 14th century Scottish "Outlaw King" Robert the Bruce used cunning and bravery to defeat the much larger and better-equipped occupying English army.

AFTER: It seems like a while since I fired up the PlayStation to connect with Netflix, and I guess it has been nearly three weeks since I watched "Enemy" - I'm just not going to be making much progress on reducing what's in my queue this way, and that means I'm also in danger of having movies taken down from Netflix before I've had a chance to watch them.  But since I'm juggling between what I have on DVD, what's on my DVR, what's in that pile of Academy screeners, not to mention Hulu and iTunes, it's like fighting a war on multiple fronts, and falling behind on all of them.  The only thing I've really made much progress on is that pile of screeners, because if a film becomes available on one of the other formats, I usually move the disc from the two stacks I haven't seen to the much larger cabinet with all the screeners I have seen, or have no interest in watching.  And I'm hoping to reduce those two small stacks to ONE small stack before more screeners start arriving at the end of the year.  But my main watchlist never seems to get any smaller, it's a constant 160 films, and then the secondary watchlist of films I'd LIKE to add to the main watchlist is usually another 200 to 210 films.  But that's what it takes to have enough material to make all these connections.

But speaking of fighting a war that doesn't seem to end, let's get to Robert the Bruce, who took the throne of Scotland in 1306 - yeah, we're going WAY back in U.K. history for this one.  The king of England at the time was Edward I, aka Edward Longshanks, the son of Henry III.  I haven't made the connection between him and Queen Elizabeth I yet, but there must have been at least five Henrys in between, among others. (Later, when I have some time....).  A quick bit of research tells me that he killed the other claimant to the Scottish throne in 1306, but it took until 1314 for him to defeat the English army and be recogized as Scotland's ruler.  That's eight years spent in hiding and looting Scottish castles in between battles, but fortunately the movie's under two hours long.

Robert the Bruce was a prominent character seen in the movie "Braveheart", and that film's subject, William Wallace, is mentioned several times in the early part of this film.  But we all know what happened to him, right?  (SPOILER ALERT if you haven't seen "Braveheart", it's not for people with weak stomachs). This movie shows what happened after that, so it's sort of a companion piece to "Braveheart" the same way that "W.E." is a companion piece to "The King's Speech".

But it's a bloody chain of events - once it gets to the battle scenes, they're some of the goriest and harshest ones I've ever seen - but hey, that's warfare with broadswords and battle axes for you.  This film would also have you believe that Robert the Bruce came up with trench warfare, as a way to use the geography of the Scottish highland bogs to their advantage over the English.  I have no idea if that's true, but I also can't say that it's NOT.  I still have one question, though, what happened to the trebuchet?  Early in the film, as King Edward is ruling on Scottish people's claims over losing their land (most end up getting the royal "Sorry, not sorry" in response) he then makes a point of demonstrating this wonderful new gadget that can launch a flaming bucket of something to hit a castle a few miles away.  It's so prominent (and so costly, whether it was a practical effect or a CGI one, either way) that I was SURE this would be important later in the film.  When the Scots were ambushed by the Brits late at night, this would have been a PERFECT time for them to use the trebuchet, but nope, they used other weapons.  So if it didn't factor back into the story, why was it so prominently used in that early scene?

Instead, Robert sends his new wife and daughter (from his first marriage) into hiding - why he brought them with him to the battle in the first place is a little questionable - but the Prince of Wales catches up with them at Castle Kildrummy, and takes them prisoner.  Thankfully, this was still a time where even soldiers had a problem with killing women and children, but the prince did kill Robert's brother, and all the men who were hiding Robert's family.  His wife was held captive, and his daughter was sent to some kind of religious training with nuns - so I bet she only WISHED that the soldiers had killed her.

Since the prince can't seem to close the deal and capture Robert the Bruce (why the prince didn't offer him the chance to turn himself in, to save his wife, I don't quite understand, either) King Edward appears on the scene - hey, if you want something done, sometimes you have to do it yourself.  But Edward dies soon after arriving in Scotland, so the prince leads his forces at the battle of Loudon Hill, and though the Scots are outnumbered six to one, the Clan MacKinnon shows up, then Clan MacDougalls, the MacDonalds, the MacDuffs, and a bunch of other Macs.  Then this trench warfare comes into play, and it's a whole new (bloody) ball game.  The Scots defeat the British, the Prince of Wales (later Edward II) duels with Robert the Bruce and loses, and an epilogue tells us that though Robert let him live and he became King of England, at some point he was killed by his own lords.  Seems about right.

Meanwhile, Robert the Bruce's descendant was James, the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, who would eventually, one day, reunite England and Scotland under one king.  So that sort of brings me around to where I was near the start of the week.  As for that succession thing, Robert the Bruce was followed by his son, David, but then the throne went to Robert's daughter Marjorie's son, Robert II.  Then came Robert's son Robert III, followed by James I through V, and James V was the father of Mary QOS.  It's simple enough, but I'll never remember it.

Fun Fact: Apparently, this film is the reason that we don't have a new "Star Trek" movie coming out any time soon, Chris Pine chose to appear in this film instead of re-signing up as Captain Kirk.

Also starring Chris Pine (last seen in "A Wrinkle in Time"), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (last seen in "Nocturnal Animals"), Florence Pugh (last seen in "The Commuter"), Billy Howle (last seen in "Dunkirk"), Tony Curran (last seen in "Race"), Lorne MacFadyen, Alastair Mackenzie, James Cosmo (last seen in "T2 Trainspotting"), Callan Mulvey (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Stephen McMillan, Paul Blair, Stephen Dillane (last seen in "Zero Dark Thirty"), Kim Allan, Sam Spruell (last seen in "Defiance"), Rebecca Robin, Jonny Phillips (last seen in "The Death of Stalin"), Ben Clifford, Duncan Lacroix, Kevin Mains, Jack Greenlees, Chris Fulton, Jamie Michie (last seen in "The Snowman"), Gilly Gilchrist (last seen in "Rob Roy"), Daniel Jackson, Duncan Airlie James, Victoria Liddelle, Gemma McElhinney, Stephen McCole, Meg Fraser, George Docherty, Robin Laing, Laurie Ventry, Matt Stokoe, Ron Donachie, Niall Greig Fulton, Rab Affleck (last seen in "Layer Cake"), Jenny Hulse, Frank Gilhooley, Jamie Maclachlan (last seen in "Maleficent"), Benny Young (last seen in "Out of Africa"), Clive Russell (last seen in "The Young Messiah"), Josie O'Brien

RATING: 6 out of 10 flaming arrows

Churchill

Year 11, Day 221 - 8/9/19 - Movie #3,319

BEFORE: BRITFEST Day 6 has brought me to one of the most important Britons of the 20th century, Winston Churchill.  There were two competing films about him released in 2017, so this is part 1 of 2, part 2 will follow in a couple of days.  Unfortunately, the linking is forcing me to watch them in reverse chronological order, I'll just have to take that into account.  This film is set in June, 1944, just a few days before D-Day.  And I'm about two months late in finally getting to this one, as the 75th anniversary of the event took place back in June - again, I'm doing what I can for the war effort, and some concessions have to be made.

Jonathan Aris carries over from "Bright Star".

THE PLOT: 96 hours before the World War II invasion of Normandy, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill struggles with his severe reservations toward Operation Overlord and his increasingly marginalized role in the war effort.

AFTER: I'm going to hold off making any major conclusions about Churchill until after I've seen both films - again, it will just be a few days.  The portrayal of him here by Brian Cox (who bears a great resemblance to Churchill, with no fancy prosthetics or make-up needed, all Cox had to do was gain some weight and shave his head) seems mostly accurate, if perhaps a little bit like a caricature.  But that's what people remember about him, his appearance, a large (but short), jowly man who smoked cigars and wore a hat and spoke with purpose.  The portrayal here is also somewhat screamy, but who's to say he didn't get angry before D-Day, or act fed up because the war had been dragging on so long?  Now along come these crazy youngster whipper-snapper generals who think they know everything, when they didn't even fight in the Great War, so how could they have learned anything from it?

I'm less sold on the casting of John Slattery as Dwight Eisenhower - in contrast with Cox as Churchill, I don't think he looks like Ike at all.  Was this really the closest bit of casting they could do?  Was J.K. Simmons not available?  On top of that, Slattery comes with an association with characters he played in "Mad Men" and the "Avengers" films, that of a spoiled sort of rich guy, who doesn't act like he wants to put in the hard work on something, and that's just not Eisenhower, from what I've learned.

But I'm not sure what purpose it serves to show us that Churchill was apprehensive about the D-Day invasion, even if it's true.  It HAPPENED, so why show us that Churchill was trying to second-guess the plan, or come up with a better one?  Frankly, I'd be a bit more worried about a world leader who WASN'T apprehensive right before a big invasion like that, one that could turn the tide in a global conflict.  Plus, it's sending thousands of men, many of your own citizens, people who trust you as a leader, knowing that some of them are not going to survive.  Why wouldn't he have at least a little doubt?

Hindsight is always 20/20, of course - Churchill wanted to create a phony invasion in the Aegean Sea, before the real invasion in France.  He had other changes he wanted to make to the plan, also, based on his experiences in World War I.  But Eisenhower (according to this film, anyway) reminded him that this was not World War I, and there were innovations in warfare since then, like air support, that Churchill seemed to not take into account.  Still, Brian Cox supposedly ran Churchill's alleged plans by some of today's military experts, who agreed that his plans could have shortened the war by six months.  But then again, other Churchill experts say that this film didn't depict him accurately at all, so I suppose it's all a wash, a bunch of moot points.

Still, high marks for appearance and acting, if not for historical accuracy.  Stay tuned in three days for the other Churchill film, "Darkest Hour".

Also starring Brian Cox (last seen in "Super Troopers 2"), Miranda Richardson (last seen in "Stronger"), John Slattery (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Julian Wadham (last seen in "The Iron Lady"), Richard Durden (last seen in "Oliver Twist"), Ella Purnell (last seen in "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children"), Danny Webb (last seen in "Criminal"), George Anton (last seen in "K-19: The Widowmaker"), Steven Cree (last seen in "Maleficent"), James Purefoy (last seen in "John Carter"), Peter Ormond, Angela Costello, Kevin Findlay, Miro Teplitzky.

RATING: 5 out of 10 weather reports

Bright Star

Year 11, Day 220 - 8/8/19 - Movie #3,318

BEFORE: Jumping back to 1818 for a movie about poet John Keats - who, I admit I know very little about.  But that's what Britfest 2019 is all about, right?   I'm hear to learn about British subjects, and he was one of them.

Abbie Cornish carries over from "W.E."  Happy belated birthday, Abbie! (August 7 - sorry, I should have made this connection yesterday...)

THE PLOT: The three-year romance between 19th century poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne near the end of his life.

AFTER: Now I'm wishing that I included this one (and "W.E" as well) in my February chain, because there's not much to this film outside of the romance.  Keats died at an early age (oops, spoiler alert) but back then, a lot of people did.  There was no cure for tuberculosis (aka consumption) back then, apparently, and that's often reflected in movies - once a character starts coughing up blood, it's really just a matter of time.  Jesus, I had TB myself about 10 years ago, and it meant taking antibiotics for 6 months, during which time I couldn't drink any alcohol.  That was a rough six months, no beer dinners, no beer festivals, no beer on a Friday night after a tough week - I almost felt like the disease wasn't as bad as the cure.  But I got through it - John Keats and many others just had the bad fortune to live in the early 19th century.

It probably also didn't help that he lived in an age where if someone was feeling rundown, ill-tempered or troubled by consumption, a common treatment was bleeding them, which, surprise - only made them weaker and less able to fight off disease in the long run.  Whoopsie.  The bacillus that causes TB wasn't discovered until 1882, and when the pasteurization process was invented, that decreased the chances of people getting it from infected milk.  A vaccine was first used in 1921, but then really caught on after World War II.  See?  We're all learning something tonight.  But in Keats' day, consumption/TB caused one in every four deaths.

Outside of watching Keats fall sick, this film is about the romance between him and Fanny Brawne.  OK, stop giggling, "Fanny" was a common enough name back then, in fact Keats' mother and sister went by that name (short for Frances, most commonly).  But is it really a romance, by today's standards?  They're shown in this film holding hands, and then kissing, but it almost feels like that's as far as it went.  Geez, I thought that Brits were uptight during the Victorian era, but this film is set during the reign of either George III or George IV - I guess people got more prudish as you look back in time, whatever "The Favourite" and "Mary Queen of Scots" would have you believe about the acceptance of gay people in British society.  I'm not sure that Keats and Miss Brawne ever "did it", because they spent so much time circling each other, then he'd go away, come back, go away again, and then he got sick.  Carpe diem, young lovers.  

My other takeaway is that poets were like the hipsters of their day - and not just because they dressed sort of alike.  Writing poems didn't provide much income, and this was a big stumbling block in the relationship.  If your daughter came home and said she wanted to marry a guy in a band - I mean a terrible indie rock band, not like Coldplay or Maroon 5 - you'd probably want to forbid it, because the guy technically has no source of income.  (It would be the wrong move, because you'd drive a wedge between yourself and your daughter, plus you never know, his band could be the NEXT Coldplay or Maroon 5.)

Keats was afraid to ask for Fanny's hand in marriage, because he couldn't afford it?  Huh?  Who can't afford to get married?  You just go to the county clerk, fill out a form, wait a few days, have a civil ceremony, and you're married.  Not everybody has to have the big, blow-out wedding with 500 guests and 17 bridesmaids inside of St. Patrick's Cathedral.  (Sorry, St. Paul's...). Oh, I guess they mean he had no income to support a wife, and back in these days even if she had income from her sewing work, and he didn't, that would be emasculating and embarassing.   Still, I'm not seeing why these crazy kids couldn't pull the trigger on the marriage thing.  Jeezus, it's been three years, neither one was seeing anyone else, who cares what society thinks, just do it already.

And if money was a concern, why not, you know, get a job?  He could still write poetry in his spare time - reading up on Keats' Wiki page, it seems he had an apprenticeship with a surgeon, and people assumed he'd pursue a career in medicine.  Sure, medicine's loss is poetry's gain, but who said it had to be either/or?  Why not work in the medical field, get some money put aside, and then write some poetry to relax?  I don't see why he had to concentrate so hard on poetry, and in fact it seems like there was a lot of laying around, waiting for inspiration.  But what do I know?  I guess he found that inspiration, even if his poems weren't appreciated until after he died.

There's a lot of hard luck in the John Keats story, most of which isn't even mentioned in this film - from his father dying from a skull fracture after falling off a horse when John was only 8, to his mother remarrying but then leaving her new husband, forcing John and his siblings to go live with their grandmother after his mother died (also from TB).  There was some money set aside in a trust for him to receive when he turned 21, only he never applied for it, so maybe nobody ever told him about it?  That money sure could have come in handy to a struggling poet - that's when he went to study at a medical hospital, and he even got an apothecary (pharmacist) license, only right after that he decided to devote himself to poetry.  Shortly after that, he moved with his sick brother Tom (yep, tuberculosis) to Hampstead, and that's where this film picks up his story.

People back then didn't even know that TB was contagious, so it's very possible that he caught it from his brother as he was caring for him.  Now I'm super glad I didn't live in the 1800's, but I wonder if people 200 years from now will look back on us and think about how stupid we were, because we didn't know how to prevent cancer, and most of us ate like we didn't know how to prevent heart disease.

Also starring Ben Whishaw (last heard in "Paddington 2"), Paul Schneider (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Kerry Fox, Thomas Brodie-Sangster (last seen in "Tristan + Isolde"), Edie Martin, Antonia Campbell-Hughes (last seen in "Albert Nobbs"), Claudie Blakley (last seen in "Pride and Prejudice"), Gerard Monaco (last seen in "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again"), Olly Alexander (last seen in "27: Gone Too Soon"), Samuel Roukin, Amanda Hale (last seen in "The Invisible Woman"), Lucinda Raikes (last seen in "The Fifth Estate") Jonathan Aris (last seen in "The Death of Stalin"), Roger Ashton-Griffiths (ditto), Samuel Barnett (last seen in "Mrs. Henderson Presents"), Vincent Franklin, Eileen Davies, Sebastian Armesto, Adrian Schiller.

RATING: 5 out of 10 walks along the Heath

W.E.

Year 11, Day 219 - 8/7/19 - Movie #3,317

BEFORE: BRITFEST 2019, Day 4 - I wasn't all that lucky where my World War II movies are concerned - it's not like "Dunkirk", "Churchill" and "Darkest Hour" share any actors in common - so I've got to bounce through several centures of British history - but tonight I'm only jumping back a few years, from 1940 to 1930 or so.  If all this feels a bit familiar, maybe it's because I did a chain on British kings and queens before, back in 2012, when I watched the two "Elizabeth" movies with Cate Blanchett, the 1971 "Mary, Queen of Scots", "The Lion in Winter", "The Madness of King George", "The Other Boleyn Girl", "Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown", and "The King's Speech".  In some ways, I think this film will be the same story seen in "The King's Speech", only from another point of view.

There's no direct link between Queen Anne and the British royalty seen in this film, because Queen Anne died without any surviving children - so the throne went to her second cousin, George I.  But after George 1 came his son, George II, then George II's grandson George III, then George III's son George IV, George IV's brother Wiliam IV, William IV's niece Victoria, Victoria's son Edward VII, Edward VII's son George V, then George V's son Edward VIII, who's the focus of this film.  That's a lot of British monarchs between "The Favorite" and this movie.  And then of course, Edward VIII abdicated in favor of his brother George VI, aka "Bertie", the father of the current Queen.

James D'Arcy carries over from "Dunkirk".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The King's Speech" (Movie #1,119)

THE PLOT: The affair between King Edward VII and American divorcée Wallis Simpson, and a contemporary romance between a married woman and a Russian security guard.

AFTER: So I guess everything DOES happen for a reason - like I tried to watch this film in February, but it didn't seem to fit in with my romance chain, because it didn't link to much there, but I had watched a bunch of Oscar Isaac films in January, but at that point I was still sort of saving it for February, plus my January was too full.  Then I thought maybe I needed to save it for December to link to "Star Wars: Episode IX", but I found another way to get there - so that freed it up to be here, where it makes for a key link in the British chain.  It ended up exactly where it was needed, I guess.

This is another film with a "split timeline" approach, here there are two timelines, the story of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, and a more modern one with a woman who becomes obsessed with their story, perhaps due to the unhappiness in her own marriage and an inability to conceive a child - turns out you need to have sex with your husband to make that happen, and between his job that keeps him busy at all hours (or possibly he's got some other kind of late-night activity going on), plus his lack of desire to have a child, plus his often surly disposition, motherhood doesn't seem to be in the cards for Wally (coincidentally, she was supposedly named after Wallis Simpson, thus the forced connection).

She supposedly gave up her job to be this psychiatrist's wife - they never really clarify what her job was, but she seems to know a lot of people at Sotheby's, so if I read between the lines, perhaps she was working there, or for some marketing firm connected with the famous auction house?  It's all a bit unclear.  But anyway, Sotheby's is preparing an auction of items from the Windsor estate, which includes a lot of clothing and furniture that once belonged to her namesake, and Edward VIII too.  There's the famous desk that Edward sat at when he abdicated, dresses, gloves, and so on.  Through her many visits to the museum-like display, flashbacks to the story-within-the-story are triggered - I guess that's one way to toggle between the timelines.  (Eventually the characters meet after Wally buys some of Wallis' gloves, and somehow they meet in a park and have an imagined conversation.)

We're supposed to notice the similarities in the stories of the two women - and the big revelation here turns out to be that Wallis Simpson stayed with Edward in exile for 40 years, and felt trapped in that situation - Wally learns this from reading her private letters, which were NOT part of the auction, she goes out on her own to contact a collector to gain access.  I guess up until this point we were supposed to have sympathy for Edward because he gave up being king, but the film wants us to regard Wallis as the tragic figure instead.  (Why can't they BOTH be tragic characters?)

The beginning of the film was extremely confusing - I had to go back after and re-watch the beginning just to understand it. (I think they started the toggling between timelines before properly introducing any of the characters)  It turns out that this was a scene set in Shanghai featuring Wallis Simpson and her FIRST husband, Winfield Spencer, who was abusive.  After divorcing him, she married Ernest Simpson, and then left HIM for the future (temporary) king.  So I'm sensing a pattern here, seems like she was always trying to trade up, but once you hit royalty, you sort of have to stop, right?  Still, it seems like there was genuine affection there, but then why the feeling of being trapped?  Even living in exile in France and being the Duchess of Windsor seems like a pretty good deal, I mean she probably didn't have to work for a living, and everything was on the U.K.'s dime, right?

But I get it, we're supposed to draw a connection, flimsy as it is, to Wally's more modern situation, where her husband is evasive about his activities, won't say where he's going at night, and when she goes ahead with her IVF treatments, he also becomes abusive.  (To be fair, that really should have been a joint decision, and it seems like he was pretty clear about not wanting to have kids.  It should be a two-way street, while women need to be in control of their own reproductive rights, that doesn't mean that their husbands don't get ANY say in the matter.)  Just as Wallis was beginning a relationship with Edward while still married, Wally also starts dating a Russian security guard who works at Sotheby's, before officially breaking things off with her husband.  At best, this is a complicated situation - like if he beats her, even once, I agree that she should walk out - but she also should have ended one relationship before starting another.  The end doesn't really justify the means here.

The elephant in the room here is that this film was directed and financed by Madonna, who also happens to know a thing or two about being in some high-profile marriages that didn't pan out.  Is it safe to assume that she herself was also obsessed with Wallis Simpson's story, or also felt some kind of kinship to her because of similar experiences?  Was she also married to men who were abusive or neglectful?  If so, my only advice would be to not marry similarly self-absorbed people, like Hollywood actors and directors (also, professions where people have to work around the clock, a lot of nights away from home, hmmm.....).  And the point of both stories here might be that marriage isn't always what it's cracked up to be, whether you're famous or not.

Also starring Abbie Cornish (last seen in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri"), Andrea Riseborough (last seen in "The Death of Stalin"), Oscar Isaac (last heard in "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse"), Richard Coyle (last seen in "A Good Year"), David Harbour (last seen in "Black Mass"), James Fox (last seen in "Sexy Beast"), Judy Parfitt (last seen in "Dolores Claiborne"), Haluk Bilginer (last seen in "Ben-Hur"), Geoffrey Palmer (last seen in "Peter Pan"), Natalie Dormer (last seen in "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2"), Laurence Fox (last seen in "Elizabeth: The Golden Age"), Douglas Reith (last seen in "Rush"), Katie McGrath (last seen in "Jurassic World"), Christina Chong (last seen in "Johnny English Reborn"), Nick Smithers, Damien Thomas, Liberty Ross (last seen in "Snow White and the Huntsman"), Ryan Hayward, Charlotte Comer, Duane Henry (last seen in "Captain Marvel"), Anna Skellern (last seen in "I Give It a Year"), Penny Downie (last seen in "Jackie"), David Redden, Alberto Vazquez, Nicole Harvey, Annabelle Wallis (last seen in "Tag"), Audrey Brisson, Suzanne Bertish (last seen in "Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool"), Benn Willbond (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Baby") and archive footage of Charlie Chaplin (last seen in "Love, Gilda").

RATING: 4 out of 10 two-olive martinis

Dunkirk

Year 11, Day 218 - 8/6/19 - Movie #3,316

BEFORE: All right, finally back on World War II stuff - I'm jumping ahead almost 500 years in British history to WW2, and I've got those two films about Churchill on tap, so I'm gonna knock them all out during my 10-day BritFest 2019.  Tomorrow I'm back on the Royals, but I've been trying to get to "Dunkirk" for what feels like a very long time.

Jack Lowden carries over from "Mary Queen of Scots", where he had a lead role as Darnley (not Dudley).

THE PLOT: Allied soldiers from Belgium, the British Empire, and France are surrounded by the German army and evacuated during a fierce battle in World War II.

AFTER: If you've already seen "Dunkirk", and have also read my blog for any length of time, you can probably predict what I'm going to complain about today, and it's the split timeline of the film, combined with what amounts to excessive time-jumping.  Because the secret to understanding this film is realizing that there are three different timelines, representing three different aspects of the Dunkirk evacuation - the POV of the soldiers on the beach, the POV of a civilian charting a boat across the English Channel, and the POV of a fighter pilot performing air support.

These timelines cover some of the same ground, but one (soldiers on the beach) starts one week before the others, the second (the civilian boat) covers one day of action, and the third (fighter pilot) constitutes one hour of action.  Naturally one would expect the timelines to meet up in the end, when their actions overlap and each becomes relevant to the other two, but the problem is that the entire film cuts between the three timelines, as if they are all happening simultaneously, but they're not.  A few words on-screen at the start of each segment explains the format, but it's not enough - the two hours that follow then cut back and forth from Sunday to Friday (let's say...), then back to Sunday, then on to Saturday, back to Friday, back to Sunday, forward to Saturday again, then to Monday, etc.

HOW THE HELL is anyone supposed to be able to follow this?  Without words on-screen at the start of each segment, throughout the WHOLE FILM, please, it becomes one giant puzzle trying to determine what happened when.  And somehow, God knows how, this won an Oscar for BEST EDITING?  That's a travesty, a disaster, a god-damned farce.  What it reminded me most of, because this is a technique often used in film, cutting between three related actions, was the last battle in "Return of the Jedi", when they cut from Luke fighting Vader and the Emperor on the Death Star, to Han and Leia with the Ewoks battling the ground forces on the Endor Moon, to Lando and the Rebel fleet attacking the Death Star in ships.  Ideally, it should all come together and build to a climax, with each segment affecting the others.

But that's not an appropriate format for the events of Dunkirk, which played out over a week's time.  Yesterday I complained about "Mary Queen of Scots", how the film skipped over two decades of the Queen's imprisonment, and she showed up for her execution looking just as young as she did before she got locked up - and the audience didn't get to FEEL her time in prison, because the film just sort of skipped over it.  That same thing happens here, because the soldiers spent 5 or 6 days on the beach, not knowing if ships were going to arrive to help them evacuate, and during that time, they were sitting ducks for bombings from the Axis forces.  We should FEEL this long period of time, even if it's not exactly the most cinematic thing, because that was the situation.  By cutting ahead to the actions of 5 days later, and seeing a civilian boat take off from England, we know almost right away that help is due to arrive at some point.  Yes, anyone who's studied the Dunkirk evacuation would know this, but tipping the story's hand at this point also removes any dramatic tension that might have been achieved by depicting the soldiers NOT KNOWING if help was going to arrive.

The single most dramatic moment in the film should have been the civilian ships arriving, quite unexpectedly, in an unprecedented show of civilian support for a military cause - but that's semi- ruined if we KNOW they're on the way, right?  By the same token, we see the soldiers wondering, "Where is the RAF?  Why no air support?"  But cutting ahead to Saturday's action, we the audience also know that three Spitfires are on the way, and they only take an hour to cross the Channel - so again, no dramatic tension, no build-up of lost hope that can be defused by the unexpected arrival of a fighter plane or two.  It's a weird way to run a picture, that's all I can think.  I'm keeping a list of all the films that use this trendy split-timeline technique, because it's going to save time at the end of the year if I can complain about them all at once, instead of individually.

Have I got issues with each of the three storylines?  Yeah, probably, but they're overshadowed by the MASSIVE complaint over the structural problems here.  Maybe there was no other way to get all of this information into the picture in an interesting way, but isn't that the director's job, to FIND a way to make the information interesting?  And I would add a parenthetical tip - please try to do so without violating all the rules of time and space.  It's a crutch here, once you acknowledge that there's a long, boring period of time spent by the soldiers on the beach with nothing to do, I can see how one might want to develop some sort of work-around to deal with it, but this just shouldn't be the way.  Same problem with the fighter pilot, if he's introduced too late into the film, he's going to feel like a last-minute deus ex machina, something unexpected that appears on the scene and saves the day.  Still, starting his story early in the film when he's not relevant until the end shouldn't be the solution.  I mean, nobody wants to see the pilot sleeping or eating his meal or running some entirely different mission before being sent to Dunkirk, but mixing up the scenes in what equates to random order just should not be allowed.

I'm fairly sure that as a result of all this time-jumping the civilian vessels were requested BEFORE they were needed, that right there is an example of how nonsensical the final product is.  I mean, I know that an army can often make requisitions that don't seem to make sense, but this is beyond belief.  I would love to see a version of this film re-edited to focus entirely on the beach events for the first hour, let's say, and then introduce the civilian boat captain at the start of the second hour, which would make sense - this way he would find out about Dunkirk at the right time, when his boat was needed.  Right?  And then we wouldn't have to watch the same events play out over and over, just seen from different perspectives.  At least, I think that's what was happening, the overlapped parts ended up being as confusing as hell.

To put things in a larger perspective, the evacuation at Dunkirk saved over 300,000 men, but at that point 68,000 members of the British Expeditionary Force had been killed, and many members of the Rear Guard at Dunkirk were captured as prisoners of war.  Churchill declared that while the evacuation was a success, it was anything but a victory, saying that "wars are not won by evacuations".  An astounding amount of materiel was also left behind, but had the British and French forces remained at Dunkirk and perished, World War II might have had a very different outcome.  The smarter move at that point was to retreat, regroup, re-arm and then try to get some more support from Allied forces.  But I had to learn the importance of the evacuation on my own from Wikipedia, this didn't necessarily come across in the film.

Also starring Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Harry Styles, Aneurin Barnard (last seen in "Legend"), James D'Arcy (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Barry Keoghan, Kenneth Branagh (last heard in "Avengers: Infinity War"), Cillian Murphy (last seen in "In the Heart of the Sea"), Mark Rylance (last seen in "Ready Player One"), Tom Hardy (last seen in "Venom"), John Nolan (last seen in "The Dark Knight Rises") and the voice of Michael Caine (last seen in "The Weather Man").

RATING: 5 out of 10 life-jackets

Mary Queen of Scots

Year 11, Day 217 - 8/5/19 - Movie #3,315

BEFORE: From the early 1700's I'm jumping back to the 1560's, to the time of Queen Elizabeth I, following the reign of Henry VIII.  I'm still staying in the same family, though I always find that keeping track of British succession is a tricky thing for me.  I can never memorize the order of the various kings and queens, I always have to look it up.  But here goes: Mary, Queen of Scots, was the mother of King James I (aka James VI of Scotland), then James was the father of King Charles I, and Charles was the father of James II, (aka James VII of Scotland), and James II was the father of Mary II (of William and Mary fame).  When Mary II died, her sister became queen, and that was Queen Anne.  So Mary from tonight's film is the great-great-grandmother of Queen Anne, from yesterday's film.  Is that right?  They're four generations apart, in just about 150 years, but people back then had children earlier (especially royalty) and tended to not live as long (again, especially royalty).

I got really lucky here, because there was one actor who appeared in BOTH 2018 films about British queens (and I don't mean "Bohemian Rhapsody") so Joe Alwyn carries over from "The Favourite".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Mary, Queen of Scots" (1971) (Movie #1,114)

THE PLOT: Mary Stuart's attempt to overthrow her cousin Elizabeth I, Queen of England, finds her condemned to years of imprisonment before facing execution.

AFTER: You apparently can't discuss Mary, Queen of Scots without Queen Elizabeth I being noted in the same conversation - Mary's grandmother was Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots, who was the sister of King Henry VIII, so therefore Mary and Elizabeth were cousins - though they often call each other "sisters" in this film, that's apparently just a reference to how close they felt, at least at one time.  Mary was technically Queen of Scotland when she was just six days old, and her grand-uncle Henry VIII wanted her to marry his son Edward (that would also be her cousin) when she turned 10.  But this idea (the treaty of Greenwich) was ultimately rejected, and she instead went to France to marry the son of a different King Henry, Henry II of France.

Things got complicated when Mary (of William & Mary) died in 1558, and then Henry II of France died in 1559.  The English throne passed to Elizabeth I (Mary I's sister) and the French throne passed to Francis (husband of Mary, Queen of Scots).  Everything looked like it was going to work out - for about 5 seconds.  Francis II of France died in 1560, and Mary, Queen of Scots returned to Scotland.  Now, she was Catholic, which caused many problems in Protestant Scotland, while Queen Elizabeth was Anglican, which caused some problems in England because people were still angry over Henry VIII's break with the Catholic Church.  (From a distance, all these years later, the solution seems obvious - Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots should just switch thrones - only it doesn't work that way.)

Since Elizabeth I had romance troubles of her own - the so-called "Virgin Queen", who was anything but, however she didn't seem able to have a child, so there was much concern about what would happen to the throne, if anything should happen to her.  (Elizabeth never married, and apparently adoption wasn't a viable work-around, either.)  So Mary QOS saw an opportunity, since if you go back through the lineage, some argued that she should have been next in line for the English throne, since she was the oldest other surviving legitimate descendant of Henry VII.  (Is that right?  Or am I mixing up my Henrys again?)  So she tried to broker a deal, if Elizabeth didn't have any children, which seemed to be a safe bet, then the throne should go to Mary QOS upon Elizabeth's death.

That seems simple enough - but again, now we've got the whole Catholic/Protestant thing again, because the believers of each religion were convinced that theirs was the "one true religion", and the other one was shite.  So no matter who took over the throne, there was going to be somebody unhappy about it, it seems.  Elizabeth sent two suitors to Scotland, Dudley and Darnley.  Robert Dudley was supposedly also Elizabeth's lover, and if Mary had chosen to marry him, that would have put an English nobleman into a position where he could one day become king, or consort at least.  Same goes for Henry Darnley, but it seems that Mary preferred Darnley over Dudley - he must have been more charming, or at least he wasn't always brooding over missing Queen Elizabeth.

But choosing Darnley over Dudley sets off a constitutional crisis in England, and a civil War in Scotland.  Elizabeth I is advised to not approve of the marriage, which could strengthen Mary QOS's claim to the crown.  And many Scottish nobles didn't approve of an Englishman coming to town and marrying the Queen, because why couldn't she find a suitable husband among the Scots?

On the diversity front, this movie employed color-blind casting - this was probably well-intentioned, it's a practice that allegedly carries over from British theater conventions.  And, generally speaking, I would support this, but there is a downside, because it creates a film that then becomes historically inaccurate.  There are at least four people "of color" in key roles in this film, but that probably wasn't the case back in the 1560's, now, was it?  I doubt there were four minority people of note in all of Great Britain at the time, and most likely someone with dark skin, like a Moor, wouldn't be a nobleman named "Lord Randolph".  It sticks out as a form of revisionist history.  You can't just impose the wide tapestry of skin colors that right-thinking people are used to seeing today on the culture of the past, it doesn't work.  People were even more racist then than they are now, or their cultures didn't have any minority representation at all, and to sweep all that under the carpet and pretend it didn't exist seems like a strange move.

It also creates a bit of a problem with there is one character who gets taken down by an angry mob of Scots, Julius Caesar-style, when they want to accuse someone of improper relations with the queen.  David Rizzio takes the fall, and though his name sounds Italian, he's played by an actor with a Hispanic name.  The mob is wrong, at least about which member of the ruling couple Rizzio slept with (more on that in a sec) but this way, it's unclear if the mob is trying to kill him because of some trumped-up charge of adultery, or because he's a minority.  This just plain looks wrong, with a bunch of white people stabbing a brown person, and the intended message is overshadowed by the race card this way.

Now, as with yesterday's film "The Favourite", there seems to be a bit of revisionist history employed here, with regard to homosexuality.  I'm not saying it didn't exist back then, because it most likely did, but back then it was still regarded as a major (mortal) sin.  This film suggests that a major character's same-sex preference is treated with a shrug, more or less, like "Eh, what can you do about it?"  My guess is that people either didn't want to discuss this out loud, or if they did, they'd be likely to yell "Sodomite!" and then burn that person at the stake.  Well, jeez, the guy's married to the queen, so I guess that's really her problem at the end of the day - it's not like this is going to affect her ability to produce an heir, or anything like that.

But this leads to some obvious questions, like if Henry Darnley preferred sleeping with men, why did he pursue the queen in the first place?  Was it out of some family obligation, or was he intent on deceiving her from the start?  Maybe he got married with good intentions, then realized his mistake, either because they were incompatible or because later on he met the right guy - who's to say?  But finding this out later lends a whole different interpretation to his first sex scene with Queen Mary - it sort of doesn't make sense, but then again, it sort of does.  Maybe he just swung both ways, and even after getting married, he found he couldn't stay faithful to one type of lover - if that's the case, trying to deny his feelings for men and just sleep with one woman could have the opposite effect.  You can only bottle up those feelings for so long.

Queen Mary seemed very accepting of gay people, here she treated Rizzio as if he were one of her lady servants, they got to play dress-up together and (one assumes) gossip about the court and drink white wine together.  Did you SEE what the Countess was wearing in court today?  Again, this seems like a modern convention being forced on a past century, for the queen to have a GBF.  And her acceptance probably went right out the window when she caught her bestie sleeping with her husband, right?  These were very strongly religous people, after all.  OK, maybe Mary was a Protestant, and they tend to be a little more accepting of gay people than Catholics are, but that's by TODAY'S standards, not those of the 1500's.

I noticed here the same problem I had with the 1971 film of (nearly) the same name - Mary was imprisoned for YEARS, a couple decades even, but the audience doesn't feel the weight of the passage of time during that imprisonment if the film just skips over it and goes right to the execution.  How about a montage of her in a jail cell, day after day, you know, to show us what really took place?

But as I said before, after Queen Elizabeth, Mary's son James became King, and that was the end of all the conflict in the U.K. and any disputes over who should rule.  Yeah, right.

Also starring Saoirse Ronan (last seen in "Hanna"), Margot Robbie (last heard in "Peter Rabbit"), Guy Pearce (last seen in "Alien: Covenant"), David Tennant (last heard in "The Pirates! Band of Misfits"), Jack Lowden (last seen in "Pan"), Gemma Chan (last seen in "Crazy Rich Asians"), Martin Compston, Ismael Cruz Cordova, Brendan Coyle (last seen in "Tomorrow Never Dies"), Ian Hart (last seen in "The End of the Affair"), Adrian Lester (last seen in "Jimi: All Is By My Side"), James McArdle (last seen in "Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens"), Maria-Victoria Dragus, Eileen O'Higgins, Isuka Hoyle, Liah O'Prey, Alex Beckett, Simon Russell Beale (last seen in "The Death of Stalin"), Andrew Rothney.

RATING: 6 out of 10 smallpox scars

The Favourite

Year 11, Day 216 - 8/4/19 - Movie #3,314

BEFORE: Here it is, the start of Britfest 2019, 10 films all about British history, though I have to sort of jump back and forth in time if I want to keep the chain intact.  I think this will be mostly factual, except for King Arthur and Robin Hood, who most people believe were never real people back in the day.

How about this for a stroke of luck, I was going to watch this on an Academy screener, since it was taking a while to come around on premium cable.  But a week ago I went to the stack of screeners in the office, and this film (along with one other) was not available.  It could have been misplaced, or someone else could have borrowed it, or my boss perhaps properly disposed of it, there's no way to know.  So, bad news, I'd probably have to rent it on iTunes or cable On Demand for 5 or 6 bucks.  But then I checked the IMDB, that little "How to Watch" arrow was highlighted, and I found out this film would be premiering on HBO, the same night I was planning to watch it!  And the other missing screener would be premiering on premium cable about a week later, too.

Part of what I've had to do, to maintain my linked chain this long, has been to keep a long list of movies, about half of which I have copies (physical or digital) of, and the other half I don't have, but they're on the back-up watch list, films I'd like to add someday.  That means sometimes I program a film into the schedule months in advance, and I have to cross my fingers and hope that the film will be available to me before the time I'm planning to watch it.  And sometimes I get lucky, and everything falls into place before I need it to.  Only 86 films to go (maybe 6 or 7 that I would love for cable to start airing, but if no channel does, I believe I can see them in some other medium, even if that costs me 3 or 4 bucks) and then I could have my Perfect Year.

Nicholas Hoult carries over from "The Weather Man".

THE PLOT: In early 18th century England, a frail Queen Anne occupies the throne and her close friend, Sarah, governs the country in her stead.  When a new servant, Abigail, arrives, her charm endears her to Sarah.

AFTER: First off, the WAYBAC machine takes me to 1704, during the reign of Queen Anne - I had to do a bit of Googling after this film to determine if the lesbian love triangle here was historically accurate, or perhaps a modern interpretation of a 1700's situation, because things can get tricky when we look back on past events and view them through a modern lens.  And some people today could have a vested interest in re-interpreting those events the way that they want.  There's no real way to know, even to assume that Queen Anne preferred ladies over men, you sort of have to read between the lines of history.  She certainly had a best friend in Sarah Churchill (an ancestor of Winston Churchill, but that's not that relevant here) and they spent all their time together, and Sarah had an influence on affairs of state.  Whether she just accurately relayed messages from the Queen or dictated royal policy, that's another debatable point.

Sarah Churchill was married, but that doesn't mean much when sorting through history - especially with Lord Marlborough constantly off fighting one war or another.  Queen Anne had also been married, but like most royal marriages it was an arranged one, so loving her husband wasn't necessarily part of the picture, either.  And she had 17 miscarriages in a 15-year period, and one son who lived only until age 11.  Then her husband, Prince George of Denmark, died 6 years into her reign, so who's to say what her emotional state and love life was like after that?  It's almost expected that the men of this time would be married, but as we've seen over and over in period pieces like this, their husbands didn't seem to have much taste for sleeping with their wives.

It's a broad generalization, of course, and I'm not saying all of Britain's upper crust men were gay, but sometimes it sure seems that way.  The men back then wore more make-up than the women (this didn't happen again in the U.K. until the 1980's) and then the powdered wigs and the stockings - and as seen in this movie, a common parlor game was "Let's throw tomatoes at the naked fop".  Somehow back then homosexuality was seen as one of the more refined pleasures, a status it hadn't reached since the days of Ancient Greece, and then Rome, of course, who based their culture on the Greek one.  I don't know at what point it sort of fell out of favour again, but it obviously never went away, it just ingrained itself into the British education system - read up on the rite of passage known as "buggering" when you get a chance.

So with all the elite English men all dressed up fancy and enjoying each other's company, who's to say that the upper crust ladies didn't do the same?  Sure, there must have been some straight men left, but they may have been few and far between.  Meanwhile there could have been scheming ladies and maids who saw sex as just another method of advancement - use what your mama gave you, right?  When Abigail Hill first comes to court she talks of being married to a German count, it seems that her father lost her in a game of whist - so she understands that she's property based on her sexual value, so why not turn that around and trade sex for a better position in life?  Thankfully, it seems that back then if you found yourself in a bad marriage, you didn't have to wait long for the other person to die of smallpox, at which point you might lose your station, but at least you could take some inheritance and move onward.

This part of the story is historically true, Abigail Hill finding work at the palace and advancing up from scullery maid, and through a series of back-chamber dealings, eventually replacing Sarah as the Queen's favourite and manager of the privy purse, though she had no formal training in accounting or the noble art of writing stuff down.  Here the movie takes some liberties by depicting Abigail poisoning Sarah before she went out on a horse ride, causing a disastrous result.  In the realy history, after being displaced, Sarah accused the Queen of being in a lesbian relationship with Abigail, by way of a bawdy poem read in court.  A case of sour grapes, perhaps.

This is a mildly fascinating look at what life was like during the early 1700's - before there was a United States, there were only British colonies (so unimportant that they don't even get a mention here).  And when people went skeet shooting, they didn't use clay "pigeons", they used real ones.  Yeah, try to get away with that these days...   Queen Anne was affected by gout, which was a real problem among the upper class - the remedy for the Queen was to be carried around everywhere in one of those sedan chairs, which probably only made the problem worse.  People back then just didn't know the benefits of proper diet and exercise, it seems.  For a monarch to exercise, or do any physical labor at all, that was probably unthinkable.  And the maids and servants, the attendants and the ministers were all willing to work very hard to get ahead, so they could live lives of leisure also - that was the goal.  Even if that meant shooting down some pigeons, or a rival or two.

I can't say I really understood the ending here - it was very enigmatic.  Dumb it down for me, would you?

Also starring Olivia Colman (last seen in "I Give It a Year"), Emma Stone (last seen in "Movie 43"), Rachel Weisz (last seen in "The Light Between Oceans"), Mark Gatiss (last seen in "Christopher Robin"), Joe Alwyn (last seen in "Boy Erased"), James Smith (last seen in "The Iron Lady"), Jenny Rainsford (last seen in "About Time"), Emma Delves, Faye Daveney, Lilly-Rose Stevens, John Locke, Liam Fleming.

RATING: 5 out of 10 burned letters