Watch the whole thing HERE!
CAST: Andrew Garfield, Jamie Bell, Stephen Dillane, Tom Hollander, Cosmo Jarvis, Thomasin McKenzie, Jonny Lee Miller, Woody Norman, Katherine Waterston. Written and directed by Paul Greengrass.
REVIEW: Gritty and kinetic, “The Uprising” is a story of struggle for class equality that gets medieval on its subject.
Set against the true events of the 1381 English Peasants’ Revolt in the aftermath of the Black Death, “The Uprising” wastes no time jumping in action. To fund a lavish lifestyle, feudal serfdom and endless wars King Richard II (Woody Norman), and his cabal of self-interested advisors, send tax collectors to the countryside to forcibly extract money from every person aged fifteen and above, a tax the farmers simply cannot afford.
“The taxes,” shouts heretical priest John Ball (Jamie Bell), “you ask too much!”
When the King’s men assault the local women and children, a farmer named Ploughman (Andrew Garfield) reaches his breaking point and fights back, sparking a bloody uprising led by Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis) and Ploughman. Cobbling together an army of the oppressed from across the country, they stormed London, breached the Tower, and demanded justice from the King. “There will be no peace until we are free.”
A story of justice and treachery, “The Uprising” is not your typical historical drama. Heavy doses of grim mano-a-mano violence—so many beheadings—shot through director Paul Greengrass’s roaming, handheld camera give the film some frenetic forward motion, like a medieval video game.
The almost epic crowd scenes and the rampage through London are immersive—although the use of CGI to bulk up the mobs is noticeable and distracting—and captures the chaos of the large-scale battles but Greengrass’s in-your-face shooting style occasionally makes it hard to determine who’s smiting who.
As Ploughman, Andrew Garfield brings soulfulness and a haircut that seems too modern by about 600 years. His character is the instigator of the action, but he’s also a symbol of working-class resistance and as such carries much of the weight of the film’s political messaging. He’s up to the task, handing in a raw performance, tempered by rage and the grief he suffers in the wake of the loss of his wife and children during the plague, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that he’s a man out of time, too contemporary for the role.
“The Uprising” has none of the formalism of many other historical dramas. In the style of his Jason Bourne movies, Greengrass’s restless camera is always on the move, which brings immediacy to the action but threatens to overwhelm the film’s core study of class, tyranny and survival.
In the movies The Kingsmen are a secret spy organization whose members have manners that would make Henry Higgins proud and gadgets that James Bond would envy. They’ve been the subject of two movies, “Kingsman: The Secret Service” and “Kingsman: The Golden Circle,” and now, three movies into director Matthew Vaughn’s spy franchise comes an origin story that takes us back to the early part of the 20th century and the confusing beginnings of these modern-day knights.
“The King’s Man,” now playing in theatres, begins with a tragedy that makes the wealthy and powerful Duke of Oxford (Ralph Fiennes) reject the Colonialism and violence that is the bedrock of his family’s fortune. He questions why he was killing people who were trying to protect their own land. “With every man I killed,” he said, “I killed a piece of myself.”
Meanwhile, as World War I approaches, an assembly of the world’s most despicable tyrants and villains, working for an evil mastermind with plans for world domination, are hatching a plan that could lead to genocide.
With the lives of millions at stake, and his son Conrad (Harris Dickinson) off to war, the Duke realizes he can’t rely on politicians to do the right thing. In an effort to save the world, he abandons his pacifist ways. With the help of his most trusted colleagues, swordsman Shola (Djimon Hounsou) and sharp shooter Polly (Gemma Arterton), he goes into the fray and sews the seeds for the formation of The Kingsmen, an organization that uses violence to attain peace.
The first two Kingsmen movies were overstuffed, but had a certain lightness of touch. Unfortunately, “The King’s Man” lands with a thud. A mix of fact (well, almost true stuff) and fiction—real life characters like Rasputin, the mad Russian monk (Rhys Ifans) are woven into the fanciful story—the movie is all over the place. It’s a spy story, a tale of duty, a slapstick comedy, an action film, a fractured fairy tale of world events.
Some of the action scenes are quite fun and Ifans eats so much scenery it feels like he’ll never go hungry again, but the story takes far too long to get going.
“The King’s Man” feels as though it is splintering off in all directions, like it’s three movies spliced-and-diced into one, bloated, messy sequel-ready story.
These days journalists aren’t just reporting the stories, often they are the story. Just ask Jim Acosta. A new film, “A Private War,” places the journalist front-and-centre while detailing a story from our recent past.
Rosamund Pike plays Marie Colvin, long serving war correspondent for The Sunday Times. For three decades she put herself in harm’s way, covering conflicts the world over. “I care enough to go to these places,” she says, “and write about it in a way that makes people want to care about it as much as I do.” While on assignment in Sri Lanka she loses an eye in a bomb blast. Later, when accused of being “stupid“ for going into that war zone she says “I think stupid is writing about the dinner party you went to last night.“
Years of witnessing bloodshed have taken a toll. “You’ve seen more war than most soldiers,” says her photographer Paul Conroy (Jamie Dornan). Plagued by nightmares, she would drink a quart of vodka to calm herself. Her PTSD didn’t keep her from the job, in fact it may have been the engine that kept her going.
In 2012 she, along with Conroy, embarked on her most dangerous assignment, covering the siege of Homs in Syria. Her reporting revealed the Syrian government was targeting civilians in an effort to quell the Arab Spring uprising. “I see it,” she says of the horrors of war, “so you don’t have to.”
As the title suggests “A Private War” is about the push and pull inside Colvin. The battle between her life in England with boyfriend Tony Shaw (Stanley Tucci) and the adrenaline rush provided by her work in the field. “Maybe I would have liked a normal life,” she says, “or maybe I don’t know how. Or maybe this is where I feel most comfortable.”
Pike brings passion and fire to the role, although while on duty in Sri Lanka she looks like she’s part of a “Vogue” fashion spread, not a reporter in the field. Emotionally raw, it’s a portrait of a single-minded person who always put her work first. Unfortunately we don’t learn much more than that. It’s a jittery performance that effectively portrays Covin’s state of mind but by the film’s second half it feels one note.
“A Private War” comes at an interesting time for journalism. With the profession under fire from Fake-Newsers it’s important to discover the stories of the people who report on “the rough draft of history.”
I have very fond memories of Queen. They were one of the biggest bands in the world when I was in my early teens and their brand of pomp rock appealed to my young ears. “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the band’s best-known song and masterpiece, isn’t a dance song by any stretch of the imagination but that didn’t stop my classmates and me from giving it a go in the school gym.
The slower introduction and the rockin’ last part are fairly easy to move around the room to, it’s the operatic middle section that would have caused less determined kids to abandon the dance floor. But, in a moment I have never forgotten, my school chums spontaneously came together like a roomful of Maria Callases and Luciano Pavarottis to sing lines like, “Scaramouch, Scaramouch will you do the fandango?” at the top of their lungs.
That song brought us all together, the romantics, the head bangers, the nerds; everyone stood up and was heard. It was fantastic. Magnifico even. I wish I could say the same about the new film “Bohemian Rhapsody” starring Rami Malek as the late, great Freddie Mercury.
Mercury was not a subtle performer and that spirit has rubbed off on the film, for better but mostly for worse. The performance scenes are fun, over-the-top and enjoyable. It’s when Mercury doesn’t have a microphone in his hand that the movie suffers. “We need to get experimental,” he says to EMI executive Ray Foster (Mike Myers). Too bad screenwriter Anthony McCarten (“Darkest Hour,” “The Theory of Everything”) only wrote the line and didn’t take it to heart.
With a script researched by Wikipedia the film zips through the band’s career and singer’s personal life, focussing on the high points—the writing of “Bohemian Rhapsody” and Live Aid—while giving the truly dramatic details a boilerplate treatment.
Mercury’s homosexuality is addressed but not deeply explored. He has relationships with two men, Paul Prenter (Allen Leech) and Jim Hutton (Aaron McCusker), and we see him visit a fetish club but not until the movie is half over. Before then it spends a great deal of time establishing the bond with Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton), a woman he called the love of his life.
In the film’s best dramatic scene he comes out of the closet, admitting to her that while he loves her he also thinks he may be bisexual. She disabuses him of the notion, admitting she knows he is gay. It’s a tender scene that sheds light on their connection more than anything that comes before or after.
As for the band, if not for their brightly coloured wardrobe, Brian May (Gwilym Lee), Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy) and John Deacon (Joe Mazzello) would barely make an impression. They are there to stand behind Mercury and start the occasional argument so he can whip out a bon mot, smirk and flit away.
Mercury, of course, is the most compelling character. Overcome with father issues and a desire to perform both on stage and off he’s also a man who allows himself to be manipulated by a lover who clearly does not have his best interest in mind. Malek, fake teeth and all, does a good imitation of Mercury. He can strut and swagger but it feels like an impression, a very good one, but one that never goes beyond skin deep. To paraphrase one of Mercury’s most famous lyrics, “it never feels like real life, it feels like fantasy.”
Brian May and Roger Taylor were directly involved with the making of the movie so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the story has an “authorized” feel to it, but it is puzzling how the timeline has been twisted to fit the narrative. The montage of their first tour of America is set to “Fat Bottom Girls,” a tune they wouldn’t write for another four years and the writing of “We Will Rock You” is off by three years.
Those are fan details and easily forgiven narratively. What’s more troubling is the film’s handling of Mercury’s AIDS diagnosis. The movie portrays Mercury telling his band mates, three men he calls “his family,” about his illness a week before Live Aid in July 1985. Jim Hutton, Mercury’s boyfriend at the time of his death, says the singer was diagnosed in late April 1987, years after the events in the film. Moving a song or two through time is one thing. Playing around with the life-and-death details of Mercury’s illness for dramatic effect is quite another.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” ends with a rousing recreation of the band’s legendary twenty-minute Live Aid set. Cut back to four songs (“Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Radio Ga Ga,” “Hammer to Fall” and “We Are the Champions”) it captures their fist-pumping triumph on the Wembley stage. It also sends audiences out of the theatre with some of Queen’s biggest hits ringing in their ears. It’s the Principle of Recency, wherein the thing you experience last is the thing you remember most, like a delicious, sugary dessert at the end of a bland meal. The “Live Aid” impersonation is an effective and memorable way to end a by-the-book movie.
In “Breathe” Andrew Garfield plays Robin Cavendish, one of the longest-lived responauts in Britain history. It is, among other things, undoubtedly the bubbliest movie about polio ever made.
The opening moments of breeze are so unrelentingly chipper that as an audience member you just know the party will soon and in some sort of tragedy will happen. When we first meet Cavendish it’s 1958. He’s a young, vital man who falls in love at first sight with Diana Blacker (Claire Foy), a beautiful, rich woman he meets at a cricket match. It’s all sunshine and roses as they quickly fall in love, get married, get pregnant and move to Kenya to pursue Robin’s career as a tea merchant.
It’s a picture perfect romance until Robin’s health begins to falter. He’s short of breath, his limb ache. Soon he can barely stand. By the time he is diagnosed with polio he is paralyzed from the neck down. “The result is you become like a ragdoll,” Diana is told by the doctor. “He can’t breath for himself. The paralysis is irreversible.”
Grim news for the newlyweds. Given just three months to live Robin asks to be allowed to die but his doctors and Diana will hear nothing of it. Hooked up to a ventilator he lays motionless and despondent in a hospital ward waiting for the inevitable. Unable to find any joy in life he tries to push Diana away but she perseveres, visiting everyday.
Then the jaunty music reappears on the soundtrack and a smile returns to Robin’s face. The couple hatch a plan to move home so Robin can live out his final moments surrounded by the creature comforts of home. “No one, anywhere in the world with your husband’s degree of disability exists outside a hospital,” warns the doctor. Except that he does. In fact he thrives, living for decades, becoming an activist for disabled people and helping to design mobile life support machines to untether patients from their beds. “Do you see a creature who is barely alive,” he asks, “or a man who escaped the confines of a hospital board? I don’t want to just survive I want to truly live.”
“Breathe” breathes the same air as other indomitable spirit movies like “My Left Foot” and “The Theory of Everything.” The big difference is that this is a relentlessly upbeat film. “Are we plucky or pitiful” asks Diana. The answer is obvious but eventually there is something endearing, winning even, about its uncompromisingly buoyant tone. Perhaps that’s because director Andy Serkis paints the story as a love story rather than a medical drama or maybe it’s because of the winning performances from Garfield and Foy.
Garfield is ostensibly the lead but it is Foy who impresses. “The Crown” actress is the heart and soul of the story, providing a rock solid foundation for Garfield’s character.
“Breathe” doesn’t have the gravitas of “The Theory of Everything”—it spends too much time trying to wring all the emotion out of the story like tears from a sponge—but it does have compassion and heart.
