UK Film Review Forum

(Release Info London schedule; June 5th, 2020, Curzon Home Cinema) https://www.curzonhomecinema.com/film/watch-guest-of-honour-film-online Guest Of Honour" Jim Davis (David Thewlis) and his daughter Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira), a young high-school music teacher, attempt to unravel their complicated histories and intertwined secrets in "Guest Of Honour", a film that weaves through time exploring perception and penance, memory and forgiveness. A hoax instigated by an aggressive school bus driver Mike (Rossif Sutherland) goes very wrong. Accused of abusing her position of authority with 17-year-old Clive (Alexandre Bourgeois) and another student, Veronica is imprisoned. Convinced that she deserves to be punished for crimes she committed at an earlier age, Veronica rebuffs her father’s attempts to secure her early release. Confused and frustrated by Veronica’s intransigence, Jim’s anguish begins to impinge on his job. As a food inspector, he wields great power over small, family-owned restaurants. It’s a power he doesn’t hesitate to use. While preparing Jim’s funeral, Veronica confides the secrets of her past to Father Greg (Luke Wilson) who may hold the final piece of this father-daughter puzzle. "Guest Of Honour" is a twisting morality tale exploring the complicated relationship between Jim, and his daughter Veronica, a young high-school music teacher, and the past that haunts them both. As the film weaves through time, scenes from the past catch up to the present, illuminating dark secrets. Jim is a food inspector working in a multicultural city. For him, each establishment is a potential hazard. He has the power to shut down restaurants not observing health codes. It’s a power he doesn’t hesitate to wield. Part of Jim’s weekly ritual is visiting his daughter in prison. Having confessed to abusing her position of authority as a music teacher during a high school band trip, Veronica rebuffs her father’s attempts to secure an early release. Confused and frustrated by his daughter’s intransigence, Jim’s anguish begins to impinge on his work. Scenes from the band trip gradually reveal that Veronica and Clive, one of her senior students, turned the tables on Mike, their aggressive bus driver. Their prank spirals out of control and becomes the basis for the charges brought against Veronica. Over Jim’s visits with Veronica, it becomes clear that there's another history at play. Veronica is using the prison sentence to punish herself for earlier transgressions. When she was a young girl, Veronica believed that her father was having an affair with her music teacher. Tragedy unfolds, in which Veronica is implicated, but was never held responsible. As a teenager, she confessed to the teacher’s son, with devastating consequences. Having lived with these secrets for years, Veronica has found a unique way of serving her penance. Jim doesn’t seem at all aware of his daughter’s true history even though he finds himself increasingly implicated in the compelling revelations of Veronica’s personal narrative. Father and daughter move towards a resolution, which is brought to a brutal halt when Jim dies. As she prepares for Jim’s funeral, Veronica confides in Father Greg (Luke Wilson) who may hold the final piece to the puzzle of the past. "Guest Of Honour" is a disturbing and compelling study of perception, memory and forgiveness. As a food inspector, Jim has the power to close a restaurant down, and while he uses this authority to determine other people’s destinies, he desperately tries to understand his own place in the world. Jim’s relationship with his daughter is obviously highly complex, that’s what the film is about. Realizing that the story really begins there, with the death of the mother. Jim is left on his own from then onwards, the fifteen intervening years between Veronica as young girl and Veronica as a woman. We've to understand what Jim so much loved about Veronica as a woman, a woman who’s gone off the rails, a woman who now baffles him, a woman who seems absolutely so incomprehensible in terms of her motives. And seeing that little girl playing the piano, the whole story becomes clear. Of course, there are sub-plots and various metaphorical issues and symbolism and storytelling, but it’s about a man trying to communicate with his daughter, trying to communicate the love he has for his daughter. That's utterly relatable in terms of how so many young people can get lost somewhere between adolescence and early adulthood, in all kinds of things that maybe one wouldn’t anticipate in their earlier years and can be catastrophic. It’s a terrible thing that’s happened really. One of the Jim’s characteristics is this sense of power he wields as a food inspector which may sound a rather banal job description. It doesn’t evoke wonderful images of this is a fascinating character we want to get to know until you really go down that hole and see what the issues are with food inspectors, and what a power-complex this man has. Simply, he can wreak havoc on people’s lives, close down family businesses with the flick of a pen-based on opinion or perfidy. He starts to abuse his power and manipulate his occupation to his own ends. But he’s rather delusional. He sees himself as some saviour, as some campaigner for health and safety, health and cleanliness, the health code is his bible and it takes him over. We've a backstory where he started a restaurant and that seems to have been scuppered by what happened to Veronica. He has to walk away from that business because of the vicissitudes of Veronica’s life and whether he holds some resentment there's another thing to be discussed. Maybe he’s doing this job as some kind of revenge. Now he enters a restaurant with the power to destroy the business, the lives of the owners. His vocation is taken away from him, and now he can visit the same fate on others. There are many levels to this film, you keep discovering. His daughter Veronica is a young music teacher who's passionate about her craft. But, she also carries trauma that bleeds into her relationship with her father. The film explores the complexities of family life. How family can absolutely make you or absolutely break you or both at the same time. The vast breadth of feelings, the turmoil those feelings cause! Music is very important to Veronica, it’s her source of joy and we’ll see in "Guest Of Honour" that she’s not always happy all the time so it will be nice to see the moments where she's lost in her music. She believes that she has found a way to a strange sort of peace in her life, until that is challenged by revelations of a past she never fully understood. She’s a character who’s broken, who makes impulsive, self-destructive decisions. We see her joy in music and we see her dark pain as well. With incarceration, she’s found a way of medicating herself. But it’s not sustainable and then something unexpected happens, which transforms her life. The character who holds the key to this past seems to be a priest. Father Greg is a Texan who's transplanted to Canada, The biggest mystery in the film is whether the food inspector Jim, in asking for his eulogy to be performed by this particular priest, has somehow planned an emotional reconciliation he could never have achieved with his daughter in life. Father Greg is an unusual priest. He knows about Veronica who’s come to see him to arrange a funeral for Jim. As he talks with Veronica to learn details for the eulogy, Father Greg comes to understand that he knows a great deal about her narrative. But he’s bound by oath not to share his knowledge. He breaks his word because, he decides, it's critical for Veronica to understand her father. Rather than see her continue to suffer, living with false assumptions, Father Greg renounces his pledge. As viewers, we can locate ourselves in this very complex narrative in terms of how he sets himself within it. Father Greg has an unexpected front row seat to Veronica’s story. Father Greg is one of those characters that’s woven throughout the story, Not quite a narrator, and not the protagonist, but a figure that intersects with the different characters. In that way, he knows all of the people that the audience meets, at different times and in different situations. And often times, as we find out, he knows these very personal parts of some of the characters’ histories. Father Greg’s character is a way for the audience to keep up with the storyline and these characters whose lives interrelate. You've these imperfect, interwoven characters and then there’s the priest who’s something of a psychiatrist, or a psychologist, or a doctor, somebody that people go to and share their personal stories. “Guest Of Honour" is an emotional investigation of the bond between a father and a daughter. Their history has been rocked by events that neither fully understands. They’re both in a suspended state for much of the film, trying to understand the nature of their connection to one another. There’s a very clear sense of time passing in this film. While we understand from the beginning that their physical relationship has ended with the father’s death, the details of their  past are evealed in a form of psychological autopsy. The film finds a cinematic way of allowing the viewer to inhabit they particular world the characters are trying to navigate. The film explores what might be called the emotional chronology of Jim and his daughter, Veronica, a way of measuring their complex feelings. While the structure of the film is non-linear, it's actually based on a simple recounting of the scenes as they flow into the characters’ minds. While the situations specific to Jim and Veronica are extreme, the parent/child bond will be very familiar to audiences. The film creates a sense that for Jim and Veronica the scenes all play in a continuous and sometimes shocking sense of the ‘eternal present’. The film itself becomes a sort of machine through which the characters come to an understanding of what they mean to each other. "Guest Of Honour" is a story told through glass. Apart from the actual glass of the camera lens, which displays the way in which images of the past can be refracted and refigured, there's a literal use of a glass musical instrument woven through the film. The use of glass as a distorting lens, as well as a material which allows the process of creative expression, is an important motif in "Guest Of Honour". The soundtrack wows in unexpected ways, as the characters come to terms with the complexity of their lives and the exoticism of their relationship to their own pasts. Every child feels their parents made mistakes, certain ways in which the parent did not express love, or pay the right sort of attention. Those moments reverberate through our lives in sometimes painful ways. "Guest Of Honour" covers such a wide range of time, you get to see the evolution of specific characters, which is very exciting. Our family has been around us for our entire lives, they’re everything we know. Sometimes we project our feelings onto them, sometimes we feel their words are hurtful, but that’s what having a family is all about. The film ends with an unexpected reconciliation.

Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Mundane Movie If you are looking for a true, faithful and accurate adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s brilliant source material then Guy Ritchie’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’ is not for you. With Robert Downey Jr as the protagonist, the once respected detective is now a crazed madman crossed with some kind of wacky action hero. It is hard to tell what kind of character Holmes is in this oscillating confusion of film and I’m not too sure the director knows either. Throughout, the film fluctuates back and forth between action, comedy, mystery and crime. These tones aren’t balanced well at all and are instead clumsily juggled by a blindfolded dimbat of a director. Speaking of clumsiness the main character is constantly falling over and dropping things as if he is Mr Bump from the Mr Men. This cartoonish and silly depiction of Sherlock Holmes strips the character of all reputability. Then at other points in the narrative the same detective is a strong and brave action hero who uses methodical scientific processes to fight street thugs. Holmes spends more time using his intelligence and deductive ability to beat up criminals instead of actually solving crimes like he’s supposed to. The action scenes are another weak component as they are mostly a mess of CGI explosions, which made me feel like I was watching a trashy Michael Bay blockbuster instead of a mystery thriller. These special effect shenanigans don’t even add any high stakes as the protagonists easily walk them off as if they were simply a mere inconvenience. This reoccurring trope of ‘plot armour’ turns the once relatable characters into invincible superheroes who the audience cant connect with or relate to. The removal of high stakes cancels out any tension or fear, which are fundamental emotions in crime cinema. The bipolarity of the film and its characters fails to allow for any emotional connection to be made with it, as there is nothing whole to connect with. Both of the protagonists who we are supposed to root for are dislikeable. Holmes is a lunatic who carries no charisma and is mainly just an arrogant idiotic douchebag. Nobody seems to like him not even his only friend Dr Watson. Played by Jude Law, Watson is to put it simply, very boring. He serves one purpose that is to complain and look annoyed. To be honest I don’t blame him as if I was an acquaintance of Downey Jr’s Sherlock Holmes let alone share an apartment with him I would find it unbearable. Instead of professional partners Sherlock and Watson are instead more like squabbling siblings with no sense of brotherhood, chemistry or comradery. The antagonist of the film is another mundane element that adds nothing of interest at all. Blackwood as played by Mark Strong is nothing but a generic one-sided villain who is evil just for the sake of it. He doesn’t seem to have any real motivation or reason for his wickedness except from that the script wills it so. Strong attempts to present him as terrifying vampire like adversary but instead comes off as frivolous. Blackwood’s plan is a grand convoluted scheme, which involves black magic and taking over the world (muhahahahaha). Yeah I know, it’s as ridiculous as it sounds. I can’t help but wonder what happened to the small, niche and actually interesting schemes of Holmes’s opponents that made Doyle’s stories so fascinating. Another uninteresting component is the set and mainly the colour pallet used. The mess of dark grey ashy buildings in nearly every shot may convey Victorian London effectively but feels lifeless and uninspiring as nothing new or exciting is bought to the table. The film attempts to distract the audience from this with very weak attempts at ‘comedy’. Every single ‘joke’ falls completely flat and I genuinely can’t remember a single time I laughed during my viewing experience. I couldn’t even chuckle at how bad the comedy is. The only laughable thing about the film is the film itself. The one part of this film that evokes actual positive emotion is the fantastic score by Hans Zimmer. Hans perfectly captures the essence of 19thcentury industrial London with the strings and percussion giving an eerie, dark but powerful feel to this dim, drag of a movie. Every positive part of Sherlock Holmes (and there’s not a lot of them) is completely outshone by the BBC series ‘Sherlock’. Comparing the two live action adaptations really highlights everything wrong about Ritchie’s attempt at bringing Doyle’s iconic character to the silver screen. The series has the perfect balance of action, comedy, mystery, crime and enjoyable but accurate characters all whilst taking place in the modern world. The 2009 Sherlock Holmes lacks all of this and is probably why I found myself falling asleep before I even reached the 3rdact (I’m not even joking). If you really want to watch a satisfying and well-made version of Doyle’s stories then please stay far far far away from Guy Ritchie’s insulting mess of a movie also known as ‘Sherlock Holmes’.

(Release Info UK schedule; May 8th, 2020, Curzon Home Cinema) (Virtual Screening) https://www.curzonhomecinema.com/film/watch-the-whistlers-film-online "The Whistlers" 'The Romanian New Wave' goes global in 'The Whistlers', the latest eccentric yarn from director Corneliu Porumboiu. Not everything is as it seems for Cristi (Vlad Ivanov), a corrupt police inspector in Bucharest who plays both sides of the law. Embarked by the beautiful Gilda (Catrinel Marlon) on a high-stakes heist, both will have to navigate the twists and turns of treachery and deception. This twisty gangster noir opens on 'La Gomera', where Cristi is sent against his will. In a downright whimsical turn, he’s there to learn the region’s aboriginal whistling language, which he needs to pull off an elaborate plot right under the noses, or rather ears, of 'The Romanian Police'. As the film’s labyrinthine plot unfolds with clockwork precision, revolving, of course, around a stash of money, there are twists, turns, and double-crossings aplenty, involving not just Cristi’s also-corrupt superior Magda (Rodica Lazar), but also his mother (Julieta Szönyi), and femme fatale Gilda. A secret whistling language spoken on 'The Spanish' island of 'LaGomera' might just be what they need to pull it off. The opening scene, the almost triumphant arrival on the island of 'La Gomera', lays the foundations of the film; Cristi thinks he’s in heaven but soon discovers he’s bugged and under surveillance. He's in fact imprisoned by the gaze of others. Within the context of a very ambiguous police investigation, it's a story of a disillusioned cop, who shows up at 'La Gomera' to meet a woman and learn a whistled language. But things get more complicated and nothing goes according to plan. The policeman embarks on an initiatory journey, a kind of adventure with many turns and surprising twists. We don’t immediately understand that Cristi is wire-tapped and suspected by the police. His character does not lend itself to immediate identification, but the film gradually reveals his secret to us. Cristi is a complex character, initially thinks he’s controlling things but he’s mistaken because very soon he's caught in a storm, a vertiginous triangle. He's no longer the master of his fate. Cristi is disillusioned and elusive. He's no longer believes in his vocation, he starts to work with the mafia and to make money from drug trafficking. He’s a person who no longer believes in anything, in his professional life, his private life, and he seeks to escape all of this when he gets to the island of 'La Gomera'. As a police officer, he's part of the power structure and he thinks he’s in control of his life, but rather quickly he's caught up in a storm of events beyond his control. People talk a lot, ponder things, to try to define this revolution that eventually overthrows the power that's unshakeable for so long. In this film, the characters are caught up in a world dominated by strong opinions, where everyone wants to impose their point of view on others; it’s a permanent power play. In a dark world where everything must be negotiated, genuine communication functions better through a secret language that enables, for those who master it, the ability to extract oneself from the control of very tense human relationships, to be able to preserve a kind of sincerity. This secret language is crucial for Cristi, as he comes to use it for personal ends that have nothing to do with the criminal reasons for which he has to learn it. His seriousness in all circumstances occasionally makes him comical. Cristi is quite opaque and doesn’t show much emotion, but he shows his hand at a key moment; when he negotiates Gilda’s future with the mafia. He's madly in love with her. So we discover the truth about the characters only through their actions. Gina is the archetype of a woman. She betrays the men, turning against them. She's a lure, ambiguous and unsettling character who manages to manipulate others without them realising it. She succeeds in giving full weight to the scene of the kiss with Cristi, staged to dupe the police officers following them. It's a moment that reveals her power. She always knows how to play her different roles before the surveillance cameras and she masters some very tense and borderline situations. Gilda eventually escapes this constant roleplaying, gradually revealing herself to herself, and becoming a more real or realistic woman. All the while remaining a film character. Gilda is the femme fatale, and Magda, the prosecutor, Cristi’s boss, is a strong and cold woman in the style of Marlene Dietrich. The mafia boss Paco (Agusti Villaronga) avoids the cliché of 'The Mafiosi'. In the end, we understand that the strongest characters are the women around him; Gilda, Magda, and his mother. The women are pulling the strings to move the story forward. Here, we understand that he's being carried along by the women. In the end, his decisions are not his choices. It's a story with characters who lie, who play a double game. They believe they’re the masters of their fate. The principle of this film lies in transactions, including the transaction of words. The dialogues here are no longer discussions based on an idea but hard and fast exchanges, like ping-pong, blow upon blow. Each character is caught up in their professional role, the cops and mafia have a functional way of talking, there’s not much time for forethought because they’re constantly having to take action. In an increasingly controlled society in which everyone must play a role, a very old form of communication can allow people to escape it; to escape from this control and the constant power relations that determine the actions of each character. The characters are playing roles and the film plays with the codes of language and genre. The visual references follow this idea. Each character plays a role for others. Only Cristi’s mother has retained a kind of sincerity and realism. Each of the chapters bearing the name of a character who plays an important part in Cristi’s story arc. The film establishes distanciated, abstract aesthetic, to emphasise the idea of artifice and the roleplaying of each of the characters. This film is based on the whistled language 'El Silbo', practised on the island of 'La Gomera'. 'The Romanian' title refers to the name of this island in 'The Canaries', a place to get away from it all, a lost paradise. 'The French' and 'English' titles refer to the mysterious whistled language that exists in many different places in the world but whose roots are unknown. This island of 'La Gomera' is closely linked to the tradition of these whistles. The whistled language struck as a possibility for pursuing this theme differently. Adjective on language and the way in which it's used for political ends. The history of a secret language, used for criminal ends, is the core that determined the narrative style and staging. The language 'El Silbo Gomero' allows us to code spoken language, in a similar way to how film codes reality. The film plays with the codes of very different genres, from the detective film or film noir, to the western or comedy. 'The Romanian' auteur’s glossiest, most expensive production to date, "The Whistlers" nonetheless retains a eclectic sensibility and deadpan humour. Watching this deliriously enjoyable tale, you like the characters, you getting away with something. You’ll want to go along for the ride. The film creates an imbalance between heroic pretensions and the reality of things. This terribly serious side, in all circumstances, gives the film a touch of the absurd. "The Whistlers" is edgy, imaginative, and seems to deal with reality. It's a very dark film, a comment on human relations and today’s society.