Reviewing Movies

When the voyages of the Seaview were shot five decades ago Computer Generated Images, Blue Screens, and other Special Affects were either yet to be invented or in their infancy. Computers were still more science fiction than fact, data was stored on reel to reel tape drives. Nuclear powered submarines were still rudimentary. The first season of the show was shot in black and white. All this by way of saying that the series is an artifact of its time.

Lacking the kind of technological wizardry we take for granted today this series depends less on the flash-bang of things blowing up and more on character-driven plots and situations. The technical side of things can look clunky, the science grade school, and the villains rather cliché but in contrast to the action-adventure series and movies we see today these episodes have real storylines and we learn to care about the people involved. They aren't there simply to lead us along to the next big explosion or chase scene.

The producers continually recycle the same shots of the Seaview Model descending to the depths among dangerous looking rocks and the shots of a boat that size popping out of the water at a 75º angle are totally unrealistic. One of the anachronisms, I would hope, of the time is the fact that Richard Basehart virtually chain smokes throughout which may explain why he's dead and his partner David Hedison still lives--smoking on a submarine? Proving that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing the final disk has a colour version of the first episode on disk one billed as an unaired pilot, the only difference is rather dated colour.

I picked up Volume One of Season One some years ago and finally got into it the other night. In those days a season had 32 hour-long episodes.  Since I bought the first 16 episodes the entire 4 seasons have been brought to disk. The producers could have easily placed all 32 episodes on four disks but as with the people bringing us Gunsmoke they split each season into two packages. If you don't mind the rip-off this entails you'll enjoy the voyage.

You may remember that the most heinous oath you can swear in Ireland is the curse of Cromwell, that Puritan  leader who parceled out Irish lands to absentee English Landlords. Those same nobles who put Irish peasants aboard leaky boats bound for the New World caring little whether they ever arrived and forcing them off their lands during the potato famine. During the Irish revolt that followed the Irish Republican Army or IRA fought a largely guerrilla style campaign because they lacked the resources to take on the British Army head to head. It was customary for those guerrilla forces in the field to carry barley in their pockets for those times when they could find no better nutrition. When men were buried in shallow graves those grains would sprout hence the title of this movie.

Soldiers are young men and no more so than in this conflict where boys such as Brendan Behan whom we met in Borstal Boy were sent to fight for the cause. Child soldiers are so prized because their morals can be molded to become fanatical supporters of the cause and will perform their duties without question. In the movie Michael Collins the young sniper meets the general in a pub solely so that he may identify him when he lies on the hilltop in ambush to take the fatal shot. Without actually coming out and saying it in so many words this movie highlights the terrible waste of human life and potential the civil war and the Northern Island question that followed Irish Independence caused turning neighbour against neighbour and even brother against brother. No one experiences life more fully than those whose daily tasks place them in danger of losing it. Although this story ends in tragedy there are many joyful moments interspersed.

Just for the record my only Irish blood is five generations removed, my ancestors were German peasant farmers who came to Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia in 1753 to escape the German/French conflicts that raged across their lands.

As the movie begins a woman is peddling a creaking bike up a steep grade with two flats of eggs in a courier basket; the women collapses and dies, no word on the eggs. The woman in question proves to be Duncan Mudge's mother who dropped dead of a heart attack. Whether the movie feels awkward because of the uncomfortable relationship between widowered father and son or the fact that the direction and acting are just plain bad I can't quite decide. Life on a rural farm can be stifling, forcing one to find companionship and comfort in unlikely places with unlikely people and things--choices are limited. In small communities where everyone knows everything about everybody else and makes it their business, to be "different" can attract unwelcome attention and make one an outsider. Rural agrarian societies tend to be less educated and more conservative in their outlooks. Although protective of their own it is not wise to stand out too starkly.

It is easy to forget that the father is mourning here as well and not coping particularly well. Tom Guiry is almost unrecognizable here as the little kid who joins the crew in The Sandlot. As Duncan’s closest neighbour and erstwhile friend he plays Perry as a swaggering macho kid full of false bravado who attempts to hide the fact that he is being abused by his father. Can’t quite put my finger on it but this movie just leaves me feeling uncomfortable. Whether Duncan is just effeminate and a Mother’s boy or will discover that he truly is homosexual is left hanging.

As the film starts sixteen-year-old Brendan Behan arrives in Liverpool with two sticks of IRA dynamite strapped to his inner thighs giving a whole new meaning to the expression, ballsy move. An Irish lad with an alarm clock being a red flag at customs he is promptly picked up and eventually sent to reform school. Then as now underage lads are sent on such missions because they will attract lighter sentences. Behan maintains throughout that he is a POW--prisoner of war. At Borstal Behan meets true hardened criminals--rapists, thieves, juvenile delinquents but has the good fortune to arrive during the tenure of a truly enlightened chief warden and to meet his daughter an artist forced home from Paris by WW#2. He manages to convince his bunk mate Charlie that he is not gay but willing to make a friend.

The movie features a mixture of heavy dialects--Behan's Irish brogue, Scottish, Yiddish, Cockney--that can be difficult to follow at times without subtitles. There are assaults and two lads are blown up on the beach by a land mine. But for the most part the film is filled with good-natured banter and the high spirits of young men couped up against their wills. The warders are not mean spirited. Highly recommended.

This is a gay stream of consciousness, coming of age movie. Dorian has a homophobic doctrinaire father, a housewife mother with a spiked mullet who is dominated by her husband, and an all-star athlete brother. Dorian is not athletic, likes fashion, wears fuscia shirts, and he's.... Being baled out by your younger brother may save your hide but does nothing for your ego.

Due to the restrictions placed on child actors most high school parts are played by adults. Michael McMillian was 25 when he played Dorian. Lea Coco who played his younger brother was a year older. The movie has humour and pathos. The turnaround occurs when jock Nicky visits his brother in NYC and breaks down crying in the night because he's lost his athletic scholarship. It takes the death of their father to make a man out of Dorian and supply some surprise revelations from his mother. Surprisingly good production given the genre, better than average.

Quite a coup for a young Canadian Director to score Sir Ian McKellan to record a voice-over.

Judge Earl Lagatos has two faces. There is the upright public face he shows the world and the private man, estranged from his own Father who causes the death of one son after he announces at the dinner table that he is gay and drives the other to the streets of Vancouver. There Pip meets a gay hustler who fancies him, a young Catholic Priest whose intentions he suspects, and a young aspiring social worker who becomes his lover. His fourth encounter is with the taped memoirs of his deceased Grandfather, (recorded by McKellan), who at eighteen found himself in the middle of WW#1. Cut to WW#1 where Jason Lagatos meets a torch singer in Albourne, England and in France a wounded and dying medic officer. Pip first meets his grandfather via the tape on his eighteenth birthday.

Fledgeling director Richard Bell scores another coup in the person of Conductor Branwell Tovey who conducts he own score for the background music. Bell moves from a $500 two-hander to an $800,000 major motion picture.

Intended for adult audiences this movie confronts issues of gay prostitution, sexual predators, safe sex, and life on the street. For most of the movie the runaway Pip is a resentful, defiant, smelly street person; not an easy character to like. Persevere and you will at least understand why he got there.

Note in Dutch with sub-titles. Stan lives with his Mother and the dentist she married after his biological father abandons her. Stan finds his trucker father who avoids seeing him the second time until Stan reads of his death in a multi-vehicle pile-up on the highway. He finds companionship with Michael, a small-time crook and his lieutenant Sef. Together their crimes become more violent and pointless. Throw in a gal, Anna, who offers herself to Stan but is attached to Michael and you get the picture.

Stan is a handsome looking intelligent lad with great possibilities but lacking the parental support to see them through. Having fallen into bad company his life spirals downward into hopelessness and despair. No good can come of this. The movie is shot in sepia tones with scenes in a Catholic Church and a background score heavy on chant. This is not a feel-good movie, there is no redemption here.

Watching this movie makes me homesick for long summers at a Lake CottageI have never had the opportunity to spend. Few but the very rich, unless the cottage has been in the family for generations, can afford such a luxury today. My parents spent a week-long honeymoon at a cabin on Molega Lake, Queens County, Nova Scotia seventy years ago. Probably the only such vacation they ever took. Today those not wealthy enough to afford a million dollar cottage property live in trailers in crowded RV Parks.

Katherine Hepburn and Henry Fonda both at the end of long and distinguished film careers are perfectly cast as Norman and Ethel Thayer Jr. One wonders just what Norman's professorship was in? Henry's daughter Jane plays their screen daughter, Charlie, an old flame still delivers the mail and she shows up with a boyfriend and his son Billy layed by Doug McKeon who at 14 never played a better role. The two marina attendants, one showing off youthful pec development are the only other actors on screen. Of course the pair of loons and the fish are every bit as important to the script. And the lake is an equally important character.

As the aging couple the pair are note perfect, they are mercifully spared a gag reel of flubbed lines. Since the piece is adapted from a screen play the sets are limited to the cottage, the boat on the lake and the dock. The majority of the film involves the developing relationship between Norman and Billy as Norman abandons his morbid preoccupation with death in his growing enthusiasm for showing Billy how to fish. As Ethel says if I'd known how it would bring Norman out of his shell I'd have rented a 13-year-old ages ago.

Life unfolds slowly and gently on Golden Pond as this couple lives out their golden years. Norman grumbles like an old lion just to prove he can still roar. Billy plays the cool teenager from California and Ethel plays the understanding wife who knows her husband better than he does himself. With the Lake never far from the foreground and the loons calling in the background and a piano score playing obbligato this is a movie that calms the soul.