mike-hanlon Reviews

A Midwinter's Tale (1995)

A truly grim experience

[1/10 · 21 August 2007]

Am I the only person in the Universe who hated this grim clichefest of a movie? Full of gangrenous, decaying ham, tiresomely twee, this horror ends up celebrating the ghastliest form of luvviedom that it should be sending up. The real mystery is how come so many people liked it. Is it the case that there are a lots of Americans out there who are taken in by this poor-man's Ealing-comedy as something terribly, authentically, 'English'? Could it be that having Kenneth Branagh in it is enough? No idea why this should be - the man is a booming, ghastly luvvie who can't act and can't direct. It was billed I seem to remember as a 'gentle comedy', two of the most terrifying words in the English language. Terrible terrible terrible. No more needs to be said.

March of the Penguins (2005)

Scientifically illiterate sentimental claptrap

[1/10 · 10 December 2006]

This film is beautifully shot. We have seen the emperor penguins before, shivering in the -60C Antarctic gales, but not like this. Top marks for camera-work. But bottom marks for everything else. It is hard to know where to begin. We are given the impression that emperor penguins find their environment almost impossibly unpleasant. This cannot be true. They are perfectly adapted to their environment. If you moved them to Brazil they would die. What's with the leopard seal? In the cinema the children in the front seats booed and hissed when the mummy penguin was turned into seal lunch. But what was the seal supposed to do? Call out for a pizza? Wild animals eat other animals. That is how it is. The penguins themselves eat fish. If they had made a film called 'march of the fish' would the penguins have been the villains? But it is the 'love' stuff that had me retching. Penguins do not pair-bond for life. A year tops. Some show homosexual behaviour. Apparently the god-botherers in the US got very excited about this film. Stick with the BBC or the Discovery Channel.

C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (2004)

Clever but very flawed

[6/10 · 14 August 2006]

As a big fan of what-ifs I was looking forward to C.S.A. greatly. And, superficially, this is a very impressive film. With an almost fastidious attention to detail we are given the horror story of what would have happened if the South had won the US Civil War. Not only would slavery not have been abolished in the 1860s, it would be going on right now. In fact the whole history of the planet would have been different. South America under CSA rule. No American involvement in WW2. Canada the cultural capital of North America. But there are huge problems with this thesis. The main one is economic. Slavery only 'works', in an economic sense, when you have a largely agrarian economy, with a small population of wealthy landowners and a massive labour shortage. But we are led to believe that after the largely rustic South conquered the industrial North they could impose the same system - of free labour - on the cities and factories of the old Union. Think about it: Detroit - Motown - with slave labour. The great industrial combines of the Midwest staffed by slaves. Slaves in the Pittsburgh steel mills, slaves in the meatpacking plants of Chicago. See the problem? The problem would be catastrophic unemployment levels among the white working (and middle) classes, economic meltdown and certain revolution. Trying to impose slavery on a high-population, industrialised country would wreck the place in a decade or less. The CSA would effectively be saying to every blue-collar worker in the land, 'you're out of a job because here's someone who does it for free'. Of course the CSA could have stayed with cotton and tobacco, and missed out on the Industrial Revolution altogether. But then the country would soon plunge into a Third World morass. It would also have been nice to know what happened to the USSR in this alternate Universe, what the position of Europe was (we only got to her, rather tiresomely, about Canada) and how the Americans managed to build the Atomic Bomb without the help of German-Jewish refugee scientists. Still, a nice idea, excellent production values and the 'genuine' commercial breaks were painful to watch.