My Favorite Movies

Is it possible to love the impossible? Let me put this another way: is it possible to love someone even in the face of the most terrible truths?
My boyfriend and I went to see The Reader earlier this year. The movie is based, of course, on the novel of the same name by Bernhard Schlink, which I read some years ago when I was still at school. It?s chiefly about guilt; guilt about the Holocaust and guilt about the past; about personal guilt and about national guilt. It?s an impressive book, a tour de force, which made me think deep into the issues raised, but in an entirely cerebral way. I felt a certain guilty sympathy for the character of Hanna Schmitz, but nothing more. Then I saw the movie.

Hanna Schmitz is played by Kate Winslet, a part for which she was awarded a golden globe and an Oscar, deservedly so. She brings out the human tragedy of Hanna, a woman whose struggle to hide a personal shame determines each and every choice she has made in life.

The story begins in Germany some ten years after the end of the war. Hanna, a tram conductor, meets Michael Berg, the narrator of the story, and more than twenty years her junior. Despite the age difference they begin an affair, strongly sexual in nature, but lacking in real emotional engagement. Hanna continually holds Michael at a distance, and is sometimes quite callous in her attitude towards him. But she loves to be read to, all sorts of things, from Homer to Chekov. She never reads herself, not even the menu in a restaurant. The relationship continues over the course of a summer, the reading becoming as important, if not more important, than the sex. Then Hanna disappears, leaving nothing behind.

Years later, Michael, now a law student, attends the trail of some former SS guards in the company of his professor and others in his seminar group. It?s just another exercise for him, but there, among the female defendants is Hanna. As the trail unfolds she is the only one to express just exactly what she had done, in a straightforward and altogether human fashion. She is guilty, yes, but no more than her fellow accused, who dissimulate and evade.

When the court tries to establish who is most responsible for the principle crime, allowing hundreds of Jewish women to burn to death in a church, a document is produced, a report written after the event. The other accused collectively say that Hanna was the author. She is asked to provide a specimen of her hand writing. At once she admits that she wrote the document.

This is the critical point, the point when Michael, watching from the galleries, understands the full truth; Hanna is illiterate. Everything has followed from this, even her decision to evade a promotion at Siemens and join the SS. She is the victim of her own shame. Michael, carrying his own guilt, remains silent, and Hanna goes to prison for life.

Through all these stages, and all these changes, Winslet brings out Hannah?s inner struggles, shows her as a vulnerable and tragic figure, finally living through years in prison, consoled only by tapes sent by Michael; tapes of him reading Homer and Chekov. She ages; she learns to read; she asks Michael to write to her. Nothing ever comes; only the tapes. On the verge of release, after a visit in prison from Michael, their first meeting since she left his hometown all those years before, she hangs herself.

Winslet made me understand Hannah, she made me ever more sympathetic to Hannah and, at the end, she made me love Hannah.

Yes, it is possible to love the impossible.

Full of magic and mystery

If you go to my profile page on my Ana the Imp blog you will see that I've listed The Wicker Man as one of my all-time favourite movies. I do stress that this is the 1973 original directed by Robin Hardy and written by Anthony Shaffer, not the ghastly 2006 remake with Nicholas Cage. The movie recently came up in a discussion on Blog Catalogue in a post by my friend Yun Yi. So, taking my cue from this, I thought I would say a little more on the subject, really just to clarify any confusion that might remain.

To begin with I'm not quite sure exactly when I first came across it. It was on television, certainly, but how, where or when I simply can't remember. What I do remember is that I made a huge impact on me (I was just beginning my flirtation with witchcraft and paganism), particularly the ending, when Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) is sacrificed by a modern-day pagan community, anxious to appease the gods of the earth and thus ensure a fruitful harvest. I've watched it dozens of times since, and that is not an exaggeration.

The movie has an interesting history. It was made in the days when cinemas offered two features in a single sitting, the main dish and a minor starter. The Wicker Man was the minor starter. No matter: the studio executives in both Britain and the United States were so perplexed by the movie and its themes that they insisted on quite hefty cuts, which had the effect of completely distorting the time sequence as well as removing some superb scenes.

The movie was shown in a bowdlerised version and that was that; it was expected to die, the usual fate of the B product. It did not; it grew and grew, catching the imagination of horror fans everywhere, until it acquired a huge cult following. Now fully restored in the director's cut, it holds a 90% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, an aggregate of all reviews, not bad for a film made almost forty years ago.

As I said in a previous blog, so far as I am concerned The Wicker Man is the best pagan-themed movie ever made, full of drama, sexuality, ritual and song. The sacrifice at the end recalls the fate of the Roman captives after the Battle of Teutoburger Wald in 9AD, when many were allegedly burned to death inside huge wicker effigies.

For those who don't know the movie, or who are confused by its themes, as I said on Blog Catalogue it's essentiality about the cycles of life and death; about sex, death and reincarnation. The community of Summerisle, a remote Scottish island hidden away from the world, lives by its produce, apples principally. They also worship the old gods and are completely free of any form of inhibition or Christian concepts of morality. Sex is not just practiced; it's celebrated as the generative force in nature, represented by the Maypole, the image of the penis.

A crisis comes when the crop fails. A sacrifice is needed and that sacrifice has to be a male virgin, Sergeant Howie, a policeman from the mainland, lured to the island on the pretext of a report about a missing girl. He arrives two days before the great festival of May Day and is steadily manipulated to the point where he takes on the guise of Punch in a procession. He is king for a day, and who but a fool would take on that roll? In the end the virgin, Christian policeman is led to his appointment with the Wicker Man.

Everyone should be satisfied; firm in his beliefs, Howie is martyred; he will sit in heaven among the elect. Firm in their beliefs, the islanders look to a renewal of their fertility, though whether the gods are listening or not is never revealed.

Apart from the story I just love the mystery, the magic and the music. My favourite scene is that which features the singing of Gently Johnny, as another virgin is sacrificed, this time to Aphrodite in a living form. Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), the community leader, offers a boy, Ash Buchanan, to Willow Macgregor (Brit Ekland), the daughter of the pub landlord, the community's sexual vamp. Willow and Ash fuck, the people in the bar sing, Lord Summerisle muses;

I think I could turn
and live with animals.

They are so placid
and self-contained.

They do not lie awake in the dark
and weep for their sins.

They do not make me sick
discussing their duty to God.

Not one of them kneels to another

or to his own kind that lived thousands of years ago.

Not one of them is... respectable
- or unhappy
all over the earth.

This is cut to a scene with Howie praying by his bedside, as the sounds of Willow's sexual encounter come through the wall. These are scenes of innocence and guilt, I'll leave you to decide which, but the pagans will know, yes, they will know. :-)

I put my hand all on her knee
She says to me do you want to see?

I put my hand all on her breast
She says do you want to be kissed?

I put my hand all on her thigh
She says to me do you want to try?
I put my hand all on her belly
She says to me do you want to fill 'ee?

Gently, gently, Johnny,
Oh gently, gently, Johnny,
Johnny, my jigaloo!

I haven't been to the movies in an age, not since I saw Insidious earlier this year. I've been busy but just as important there hasn't really been anything I've wanted to see. So, as my Flixster badge on my blog is showing empty (Doh! There are currently no reviews to show) I thought I would go over some of my old favourites from the past.

I begin with The Craft, a movie which I saw when I was twelve, one which had a huge impact on me, a girl on the threshold of her teenage years, already demonstrating a heightened sense of anxiety. I know, looking back, looking from the perspective of an adult woman, that it's not a great movie but for me it is a significant movie, one that spoke to me personally. Some of the most significant movies are not necessarily the greatest.

Directed by Andrew Fleming and starring Fairuza Balk, Robin Tunney, Neve Campbell and Rachel True it's the story of four girls, four outsiders, at a school in Los Angeles who form a coven of witches. They discover the Craft; they discover the empowerment the Craft brings. That which was outside is now inside; that which was weak is now strong, strong in sisterhood, strong in magic.

Sarah (Robin Tunney) is originally the outsider among the outsiders, but the other girls, Nancy (Balk), Bonnie (Campbell) and Rochelle (True), who have already been experimenting with the occult, notice that she has a natural power and so invite her to form a fourth in their magic circle. It's then that things really begin to happen, the spells working, all that is wrong with their individual lives being set right.

But with power comes responsibility, except in the case of Nancy: for her power came with a thirst for even greater power. She - the bad witch - was the one I was most attracted to. Oh, how I wanted their experiments in magic to be taken to ever greater heights but the solidarity of the group is broken by Sarah, the good witch of the north as Bonnie is the wicked of the west!

The Craft is a black comedy, a great-fun teen movie, a more down to earth vision of Heathers. I loved it for the simple magic it brought to my life. I still love it for the abiding interest it gave me in witchcraft. Sarah is my light side by but Nancy is most definitely my dark. These are the poles I move between. :-)

I long to believe in immortality?If I am destined to be happy with you here-how short is the longest life. I wish to believe in immortality-I wish to live with you forever.
John Keats to Fanny Brawne, July 1820


A thing of beauty is a joy forever. It is indeed, and Jane Campion?s new movie Bright Star, about the tragic and moving love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, is a thing of beauty. I liked The Piano, the film for which Campion is best known, but this is better; this is truly special.

There is a wonderful succinctness to it all, sharp imagery and a delightful economy in words and scenes, beautiful without being overly lavish, highlighting the growing love between Fanny, played by Abbie Cornish, and Keats, played by Ben Whishaw; highlighting, perhaps, the nature of love itself. Both of the leads are super, oh but Wishaw is John Keats, John Keats as I imagine him, pale, thin, intense, fey; hopelessly, hopelessly romantic.

The action begins in 1818 in the village of Hampstead (it was once!), where Fanny and Keats are living next door to each other, and proceeds over the next three years until shortly before the poet?s death from tuberculosis in 1821. To begin with Fanny has little interest in either Keats or poetry, taking pride, rather, in her own skills as a dress-maker and designer, coming across as rather shallow and vacuous. But bit by bit they fall in love, intense, deep?and hopeless.

Campion describes her movie, which draws on Andrew Motion?s biography of Keats, as ?a ballad, a sort of story poem.? And that?s really how it proceeds; the story is the poem. There are some passages and lines from Keats poetry, though this is really subsidiary to the interplay between the two characters. Here the exploration of emotions and moods takes first place. Some of the imagery, the cinematography, is just so starkly beautiful that it?s almost impossible for me to put into words. Let me just say that the boundaries between life and art seem to dissolve altogether

Cornish and Whishaw show with skill and conviction how the two characters become entwined in each other. There is passion, yes, but no consummation; in the end there is only consumption, the disease that carried Keats away in Rome. Fanny learns of his death from his friend Charles Brown, played by Paul Schneider, a scene intercut with his coffin being carried in front of the Spanish Steps. Fanny breaks down; I broke down, with lavish waterworks, which continued through to the closing credits, over which Whishaw reads Ode to a Nightingale, and reads it beautifully. This is a movie to savour.

Precious is the kind of movie that leaves one almost lost in finding the right kind of words. Directed by Lee Daniels and based on a novel by Sapphire, a writer and performance poet, it tells the story of Claireece ?Precious? Jones, an obese New York teenager, played by Gabourney Sidibe, living in a home where the curtains are always drawn and the TV always playing; a kind of hell where she is subject to repeated sexual, physical and mental abuse at the hands of her father and her mother. Twice impregnated by her father, she is forced to leave school on the second occasion.

Through this misery Precious creates an alternate reality for herself, a dream world where she matters, where she is cared for, where she is the centre of attention, the only escape available. Precious finally leaves her awful home and bit by bit manages to recover her life, discovering her inner worth for the first time in attending an alternate school, where she learns to read and write properly, where she learns to give shape to her thoughts, give shape to herself. Precious is a raw, uncompromising and honest movie, altogether quite moving.

Sidibe was good in the title role, though I have to say that I found some of her dialogue difficult to follow at points. Mo?Nique was superb as Mary Lee Johnston, the abusive mother, and there were some very good supporting roles from Paula Patton as Miss Blu Rain, the teacher who helps Precious to read as well as find a home, and from Mariah Carey, who plays Miss Weiss, a social worker.