Filmgoing in Fenland

It has been a wet, drab and chaotic year for me so far, but what better to brighten things up than the launching of a new trail within Typee Valley - Typee Film. In the early days of this bloging enterprise, just as pandemic lock-down was easing, I included a handful of film reviews amongst my posts. For the last couple of years, I have been somewhat preoccupied with my ongoing Symphony Project (the first tranche of which is nearly done) but now feel it is well past time I returned to the consideration of matters cinematic. This has partly been prompted by involvement in the World Cinema Club, run from his Hackney studio by my seemingly indefatigable life-long friend, the film-maker and teacher Richard Hering. Every fortnight, or thereabouts, half a dozen or so of us scattered across the globe meet up online to exchange views on two related (or interestingly contrasted) movies. In between these sessions, we maintain a lively informal group discussion of all things film. The entire wonderful enterprise has very much revived my interest in an art form I was starting to lose patience with, and acted as a corrective to the pessimistic view of current cinema that it is all too easy to slip into if you are and ageing provincial thechno-phobe with a continuing attachment to the strange practice of attending film screenings in commercial spaces.

As I have commented before in these virtual pages, cinema seems little more than a historical concept to anyone much I know under the age of 50. The representation of classic and foreign films on UK tv is feeble and the independent channels which air the bulk of them chop into them with interminable breaks for adverts. More dismayingly, however, over the last decade or so, the number of new releases worth bothering with (at least in UK provincial cinemas) has dwindled to a near nothingness. Living in Birmingham in the 1990s and Manchester for much of the 2000s, film-going was probably my chief outside home diversion. Both cities had energetic arthouse outlets as well as multiplexes seemingly happy to accommodate genres beyond the vulgarly comic, the cheaply horrific, or the stupefyingly "superheroic". Not all the films I saw were good, but few struck me as a complete waste of time and it was a disappointing week where I couldn't find something adequately enticing to lure me into the dark.

Since 2009, I have lived in Ely, a delightful diminutive English city, many of whose middle-class inhabitants have ties to either the great Cathedral, the historic King's School or the educational and scientific foundations of Cambridge, some 20 miles to the south. Until 2017, its only cinema was at The Maltings, a former brewery, picturesquely situated on the curve of the River Great Ouse, which acts as the local Art Centre. About two or three times a week, when not hosting wedding receptions, amateur drama productions, trade fairs, Saturday night discos, all-in wrestling or the annual Beer Festival, it screens a film. The programme is a generally well-balanced selection of popular movies just off general release, art house offerings, and the occasional repertory item. The audience is loyal and appreciative, if (like me) greying. Having lost its local arts grant a couple of years ago, it now struggles on as a community-run venture, and I do my best to support it.

On the very edge of the city, with fields on one side and a particularly dismal retail park on the other, is Ely's Cineworld multiplex. It studiously avoids anything subtitled, and seems largely to keep going on cheap horror flicks of the kind that, paradoxically, would have been "straight to video" items in the 1980s. Few of the screenings I have attended there are anything like full, and I sometimes wonder if the place can survive much longer. Still, it is convenient to catch mainstream commercial pictures there, rather than have to trek into Cambrige.

That city city of dreaming spires currently has three cinemas. I have no use for the recently opened Everyman - seemingly a place to chomp overpriced burgers and neck nasty cocktails whilst idly watching Jason Statham punch people - which leaves the Arts Picturehouse, just up from Parker's Pieces on St Andrew's Street, and The Light Cinema in the so called Cambridge Leisure Park. After the acquisition of the Picturehouse chain by Cineworld a few years back, I let my membership of The Arts lapse, not so much in protest but as a simple reflection of realities. The Light is cheaper, less than half the walking distance from the railway station and programmes just about everything The Arts does - including foreign-language movies and "event cinema" (not to mention regular films in Indian languages). That said, I am frankly baffled as to why Cambridge's Picturehouse should be so markedly less adventurous in its programming that just a bout every other member of its brand. Is it really the case, say, that there would be no audience in Britain's most elite university city for Aneil Karia's Hamlet, ( as opposed to Chloe Zhao's Hamnet ) ? One wonders what F. R. Leavis, who spent his bruising Cambridge career in Downing College, virtually next door to The Arts, (and who cultivated a lifelong disdain for the entire culture of cinema) would have to say about that were it true.

Having expressed a distinct preference for The Light, as my preferred place to watch films in Cambridge, I must concede that it is not, perhaps, a venue for the overly fastidious. Where The Arts boasts a popular (if pricey) Bohemian cafe-bar, The Light has a vast cavernous foyer with a somnolent-looking bar space tucked into the corner. It's internal corridor is poorly signed and lit, whilst often lightly dusted with uncollected litter. When booking your ticket, you will have been asked to choose an available seat from a plan suggesting a busily attended screening. However, upon entering your allotted auditorium (its carpets liberally patched up with gaffer tape), you will see that in reality whole rows of seats are either missing or seriously frayed.

None of this especially bothers a solitary scruff like me, but I can easily imagine it troubling others.

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Still, enough scene-setting. I must get on to posting the first of a set of reviews covering what I hope to be the whole of my cinema-going over the coming year. How extensive the series turns out to be depends upon how many films I get to watch away from home, but let's hope they are greater in quality, quantity and variety than those listed in my dispiriting diary catalogue from last year.

So, in a spirit of self-exorcism, let me offer up a belated list my last year's pretty dismal Top 10, with capsule crits.

1. Hard Truths - (Mike Leigh)

Aided by a fearlessly un-ingratiating performance from Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Leigh combines unsparing social and psychological observation with quiet formal perfection in a disturbing late masterwork.

2. It Was Just an Accident - (Jafar Panahi)

Made under challenging circumstances, Panahi's Cannes winner is a volatile black comedy of state repression and personal revenge, with spirited ensemble acting, that presents a valuable panoramic picture of modern Iranian life and leads to to a really scary surprise coda.

3. On Falling - (Laura Carreira)

Fictions about the world of repetitive work are notoriously hard to sustain, but Carreira's more than promising debut feature makes, humane, engrossing, understated drama out of dehumanising labour and drab settings.

4. F1 - (Joseph Kosinski)

A rousing, solidly upholstered, good humoured multiplex spectacle, lifted by a superior script and relaxed performances, that confidently puts the money up on the screen. One can almost forgive it for being such an uncritical celebration of a dangerous and ecologically damaging capitalist enterprise.

5. Blue Moon - (Richard Linklater)

The bitter creative breakup of Rodgers and Hart has been dramatised before, but this is surely the definitive version of the sorry tale. As Hart, Ethan Hawke is just perfection and Andrew Scott (Rodgers), Margaret Qualley and Bobby Cannavale give excellent support. Robert Kaplow's witty, literate script is beautifully realised by Linklater, whose unobtrusive camera keeps any sense of boxy theatricality well at bay.

6. Black Bag - (Steven Soderbergh)

Another chamber work from a American independent, this sleek, minimal espionage thriller hardly astonishes with its plot, but does not outstay its welcome, conveying a persuasive sense of an unwholesome, incestuous London spy-world. Working unexpectedly with a prominent commercial screenwriter, Soderbergh adds a further characteristic entry to his quirky CV.

7. Sinners - (Ryan Coogler)

A muddled mash-up of From Dusk Till Dawn, Crossroads, and Honeydripper, Coogler's ambitious musical fantasy is both overblown and under-realised, whilst hinging on a rather unsatisfactory central performance. Yet the whole is not without haunting, imperishable, and atmospheric moments. Let's see how many of its Oscar nominations it manages to convert.

8. Eddington - (Ari Aster)

Wild, irresponsible and distinctly unlovable, Ari Aster's undeniably provocative melodrama does at least capture something about the dangerous times we appear to be living through. (Rather more so, in fact, than the more ideologically "correct", but blander One Battle After Another.) Somehow, Joaquin Phoenix manages to make his role as the monstrous Maga sheriff both terrifying and plausible

9. The Mastermind - (Kelly Reichardt)

Despite its undeniable funny moments and appealing autumnal settings, I was somewhat disappointed by this smug and one-note satire. Nonetheless, Reichardt is a usually rewarding film-maker and future viewings may uncover more depth. (I'm sure josh O'Connor is a fine actor but, after this, La Chimera, and the execrable Challengers, I'm starting to wonder if he ain't nothing but a hangdog.)

10 The Brutalist - (Brady Corbet)

Another overambitious outing from a not un-gifted director, disappointingly thin in its architectural detail, highly objectionable in its use of rape as a metaphor and with two excellent male lead performances let down by a badly miscast female one. Still, a bold and timely attempt to deal with the European immigrant contribution to America's modernist culture, sustaining its considerable length with some style.

And those are the good films. (Well, let's say six of them are.) Amongst much-hyped movies I disliked were not only One Battle After Another (the only Paul Thomas Anderson I have ever been left cold by), Marty Supreme (a convincingly "grundgy" period production with a promising comic premise that quickly descends into protracted scenes of mirthless frenzy and witless shouting shouting) and, especially, Mikey 17 (an expensive heap of wreckage that starts out as every by the numbers cyberpunk outing you've ever seen before turning into something like a 50s liberal western shackled to elephantine would-be satire ).

Let us see what 2026 brings. But first, may I just give out the now customary warning that, though I will not disclose denouements or major surprises, I see no way around describing certain scenes in detail and "giving away outlines of plot and character.

Hope you will bear with me. Back soon...