jebrooke

Jasper is a film maker with ideological convictions but without a production budget. He finds himself involved in some work for the council to help make ends meet, teaching film-making to a handful of children with disabilities. One of his charges has his own views, one would rather be anywhere else but cooped up in a hall with Jasper and a video camera and one couldn't care less.

In the end, blessedly, it's not about disabilities or the power of cinema. This is no Dead Poets with ramps. It is about these characters. And mostly it is about Jasper, trying to figure it out. His failed relationship with a woman. His ambiguous relationship with the idea of cinema.

The result is not perfect, but hugely watchable. The central performance by Dominic Coleman holds the film together. The young people are believable. The story line is small in scale but engaging and illuminating. If it were French it would be a hit.

But it's British, and its neither feel-good nor auter-ish. Without earnest and well funded distribution, it disappears. Which is a shame.

I'm going to write this from the point of view of someone who has not read the book (yet) and who hasn't seen the 13 part miniseries (13 parts? Mini?).

I liked it. The key performances are excellent, especially Whishaw as Sebastien. The production design is astonishing, the direction is accomplished. The cinematography skilled and sympathetic.

No doubt the particular resonances of the story have dated a little in the intervening 60 years. Does that make it a bad film? Or is it just an attempt to recall and comprehend a vanished past? In this film's telling of the story the central theme is guilt. The aristocrats are drowning in their mother's carefully cultivated brand of Catholic guilt and Ryder's story is told in terms of his guilt over his failure to understand his friends and lovers, and perhaps his failure to understand himself. That doesn't sound like an Adam Sandler movie and this isn't one, but it's a serious piece of work and worth a look.

I've seen some pretty awful films with IMDb ratings better than 5/10 - its current rating is way off beam.

In Mr Woodcock, John Farley, an apparently together writer of a top selling self-help book "Letting go", (ably played by Sean William Scott), returns to his hometown to find that the gym teacher who tortured him through childhood is now dating his mother. It's soon clear that when the chips are down Farley is going to find it difficult to practise what he has preached in his book.

There are problems. The central character is a little whiny. Some of the scenes are played pretty straight dramatic and cut straight into other scenes played pretty broadly for laughs, but there are also some killer scenes - I defy you to not laugh at the scene where Farley is introduced to Mr Woodcock's father and his opinion abouts about water sports.

Finally, I just don't get the criticism of the Billy Bob Thornton's performance - all the scenes in the gymnasium are to die for. Thornton produces a perfect mixture of boredom, deadly seriousness about how to play kickball with a thick top coat at delight in torturing fat kids and asthmatics. All played believably and with restraint. Screw the criticism - could this be his best work since Sling Blade?