My Old Lady (Kevin Kline)

(Amazon UK link)

I had seen several recommendations for the DVD ‘My Old Lady’ on Amazon. Since Maggie Smith was listed as one of the main characters in it, and reviews were mostly positive, I added it to my wishlist and was given it for my recent birthday. Last night, we decided to watch it. We didn’t know what to expect, and liked it very much. 

Apparently the film is based on a play, and was directed by the play’s author who was in his mid seventies at the time. We thought he did an excellent job. There are just three main characters, and a handful of others who stand out; that’s typical of a stage production, and it works very well as a film.

The whole story is set in Paris, filmed on location. But one of the main characters is an American: Mathias (Kevin Kline) is a man in his sixties who has learned from a lawyer that he has inherited his father’s house. He has been having some financial problems, and has spent his last money on his flight.  

We quickly learn that Mathias didn’t have a good relationship with his father, and that he hasn’t inherited any money from him - that was all given to charity. However, he assumes he can sell the house in Paris which is reputed to be worth quite a lot due to its size and location.

What he doesn’t expect is that even this house comes with a sting in the tail: it was bought inexpensively under a French system known as ‘viager’. That meant that the house was occupied by an elderly lady called Mme Girard (Maggie Smith), the former owner of the house, and she would continue to live there until she died. Worse, Mathias must continue to make payments to her every month for as long as she lives.

He then discovers that Mme Girard’s daughter Chloe (Kristin Scott Thomas) also lives there, and she is very antagonistic to him…

There’s a lot in the film, which has some beautiful shots of Paris, some acerbic, perfectly timed humour (mostly from Maggie Smith’s character) and some deeply poignant reminiscences of childhood. Both Mathias and Chloe are lonely people, and while their lives have been very different, they discover that they have much in common.

The three main characters are so believable that I felt entirely drawn into the story. The supporting cast are realistic too, and it felt at times as if I knew the cast. Their screen chemistry and acting is impeccable. Maggie Smith (who was 80 when this film was made) plays a woman of 92 as well as she has all her many other superb roles over the year. 

The overall plot is perhaps a bit predictable, but that doesn’t much matter; it’s a character study as much as anything, a story about discoveries, and family loyalties, and the effects of infidelity. We were mesmerised. I had expected it to be more amusing than it turned out to be, based on the front cover: instead the humorous moments nicely balanced the deeper, more heart-wrenching sections of the film.

All in all, we liked it very much and were glad we watched it. The rating is 12A in the UK, PG-13 in the US. It’s not a film that would be of any interest to children - or teenagers, for that matter, as the main characters are in their sixties. But I’m surprised the censors didn’t rate it PG as there are no scenes of intimacy or nudity, almost no bad language, and no violence. 

The only ‘extra’ on this DVD is an interview with the author of the original play, who directed the film; it’s not too long and was very interesting.

Definitely recommended.

  Review copyright 2024 Sue's DVD Reviews

Doctor Who: Flux, series 13 (Jodie Whittaker)

(Amazon UK link)

I had the thirteenth series of ‘Doctor Who’ on my wishlist for quite some time, so was very pleased when we were given the DVD set last Christmas.  We were coming to the end of the fourth ‘Father Brown’ series, which we had been watching on DVD, and when we finished that we watched ‘The Revolution of the Daleks’, a Doctor Who special which preceded the thirteenth series, and which had been in our to-be-watched drawer for over a year.

We started watching the thirteenth series - which has the title ‘Flux’ on the box - towards the end of February. There are only six episodes, but I was away for three weeks and we had only seen five of them. We watched the last episode (and the extras on the third DVD) last night. 

What an epic series it has been! Unusually for Doctor Who, the episodes are not complete in themselves, or even two-parters. They are essentially a six-part series, each episode ending with a dramatic cliff-hanger as the story continues. The overall theme is that a huge hurricane of anti-matter, known as The Flux, is sweeping across the entire universe causing devastation and wholesale destruction everywhere it goes.

Inevitably this eventually gets stopped in the final episode; that’s really no surprise. But there are many different subplots all blending together involving almost every enemy race that I could recall from the Doctor Who series. The daleks, the cybermen, the sontarans, the creepy weeping angels… all have their place in what feels like a very confusing but well-made series. 

My favourite parts of Doctor Who are the human interactions that take place, and the more emotional stories. The start of the first episode drew me right in: a young man called Dan (John Bishop) acts as an unofficial guide to parts of Liverpool. He’s clearly a generous person but also in financial straits. Strange things start happening to him and then he’s kidnapped by an alien spaceship…

Inevitably Dan is rescued and it becomes clear that he’s going to travel with the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) for a while, along with Yas (Mandip Gill). He’s a good addition to the team, quick to grasp what is needed, and full of courage as well as having a sense of humour.

Another thread I liked involved two new characters: Vinder (Jacob Anderson) who is in a spacecraft travelling the galaxy alone and making reports, and Bel (Thaddea Graham) who is a talented warrier and navigator. The two are romantically involved but have somehow lost each other, and are both on a quest to reunite. 

There are also quite complex time-travel threads with a woman called Clare (Annabel Scholey) who reappears in different eras, and a professor (Kevin McNally) who finds everything delightfully interesting despite increasing danger. And there’s an interesting connection with real-life history, with Joseph Williamson (Steve Oram) who built tunnels under Liverpool in the nineteenth century. 

Another foray into real history happens in the second episode of the series, and involves Mary Seacole and the Crimean War… except that it’s a war against an entirely different race from that which we have learned about. Sara Powell is wonderful and entirely believable as the courageous Seacole who was a pioneer in medicine around the same time as Florence Nightingale. 

Meanwhile the Doctor has lost some of her memories, and is fighting against not just the familiar enemies but the chilling ‘Ravagers’ who seek to destroy everything. There’s a lot of backstory about the Doctor in this series, and in the earlier ones too, which hasn’t happened so much with earlier incarnations of the Doctor. 

It’s a magnificent series, shorter than planned, apparently, as it was filmed during the pandemic. My husband didn’t seem to have any problem understanding what was going on, but I find fast action and loud noises confusing, and had to read summaries of the episodes after watching to figure out what I had missed. I’m still not sure I grasped more than the overview but with all the human interest stories, I looked forward to watching it each week, and am very glad I did.

We have the subsequent ‘special’ episode to watch over the next few weeks, and in the autumn plan to start over with Series One of the ‘new’ seasons, involving the Ninth Doctor, and re-watch everything again to see if it gradually becomes clearer. 

Definitely recommended if you like Doctor Who. 

Review copyright 2024 Sue's DVD Reviews

Shakespeare in Love (Joseph Fiennes, Gwyneth Paltrow)

(Amazon UK link)

It’s nearly twelve years since we watched the 1998 film ‘Shakespeare in Love’, so it was definitely time for a re-watch. We only had the vaguest recollection of the story, and I had entirely forgotten that there were so many well-known actors in this film. Joseph Fiennes is excellent and quite believable as the young Will Shakespeare, even if rather different from how I had imagined the playwright.

The film is set in the late 1590s, in a realistic-looking London, full of commerce, noise and general hubbub. We learn that there are two theatres, one doing fairly well, the other one in dire straits. The owner of the second theatre is being tortured by his creditors as he is unable to pay them the vast sum of twelve pounds… however he promises them a new play by the upcoming young genius Shakespeare, and they agree to give him more time.

Shakespeare, meanwhile, is supposedly working on his play ‘Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter’, but is in despair as the words won’t come. He believes he needs a new muse, and it’s clear that he’s a serial womaniser, despite being married to Anne Hathaway, who is still in Stratford. We weren’t at all sure how much of this film was historically realistic and how much was fictional; the ‘extra’ that we watched afterwards explained that we know very little about Shakespeare himself, but that historical details (such as the information about theatres, and some of the minor characters) are accurate. The blend works brilliantly.

It’s quite a raunchy story, as Will meets and falls for the beautiful Lady Viola de Lesseps (Gwynneth Paltrow). She lives in a class and culture that expects arranged marriages, and her parents have decided that she should marry Lord Wessex (Colin Firth) despite him being rather overbearing and arrogant. 

Viola is quite a rebel, and sometimes dresses up as a boy, giving herself the name of Thomas Kent, so she can get out of the house without a chaperone. She has an old nurse who loves her (Imelda Staunton) and helps her in this disguise. Viola loves the theatre and particularly the plays she has seen by Shakespeare…so she decides to audition for a part in the new play.  Will, fired up by having met Viola, writes the first act of what will eventually be Romeo and Juliet, and engages ‘Thomas Kent’ as Romeo. 

There’s some humour in this film, which we both appreciated; it’s not laugh-aloud funny, but there are some ironies and a few good one-liners. There’s also the situational humour in that nobody - including Will at first - realises that ‘Thomas’ is in fact a woman despite the fact that it seems very obvious. However the idea of a woman on the stage is so shocking that perhaps it wouldn't have occurred to anyone.  

I thought the blend of reality and fiction was extremely well done. The writing of Romeo and Juliet, which goes through several adjustments, is entirely believable. Possibly my favourite character was Queen Elizabeth I, brilliantly portrayed by Dame Judi Dench. Apparently the real Queen Bess was a huge fan of theatre, despite some of the London leaders wanting them closed down. This comes through in the movie, and there’s a wonderful blend of arrogance and humour in the way the Queen is portrayed.

The film is rated 15, which I think is correct. There’s not much bad language; expletives are mostly very mild. There’s also not much real violence; the most disturbing scene was the first one, and that was quite brief. There’s plenty of stage violence, but that has some humour and is not too gory. But the whole film is about an adulterous affair, and there are several obviously sexual scenes. There are flashes of partial nudity and some scenes where little is left to the imagination, although I suppose a couple of them were meant to be humorous.

‘Shakespeare in Love’ won several awards, unsurprisingly; overall it’s an excellent film, and I would recommend it to anyone - adults or older teens - wanting to get an idea of what the young William Shakespeare and his daily life might have been like.  

Review copyright 2024 Sue's DVD Reviews

One Fine Day (Michelle Pfeiffer, George Clooney)

(Amazon UK link)

We decided to take a break from watching mid-20th century classics last night. Instead we watched ‘One Fine Day’, a light rom-com which was released in 1996. It’s a bit shocking to realise that this is nearly thirty years ago! We watched it in 2014 and had almost no memory of the story.

Michelle Pfeiffer stars as the efficient architect called Melanie. She has a young son, Sammy (Alex D Linz) who is probably meant to be about five; he behaves as if rather younger, although the actor, I gather, was about seven. He’s a likeable child who is constantly active and curious, getting into trouble one way or another regularly. 

We learn from an early conversation that Sammy adores his father, who doesn’t live with them any more; he desperately hopes that his father will make it to a soccer game he’ll be playing in later that day. And Sammy is also looking forward to his school field trip on a boat. Melanie is ready to leave; all she has to do is collect Maggie (Mae Whitman) one of Sammy’s classmates, whom she takes to school. 

The action then switches to a small apartment where Maggie’s father Jack (George Clooney) lives on his own. It’s clear that he’s rather disorganised and can be child-like and silly at times. A knock on the door heralds his ex-wife and her new husband with Maggie, whom they’re leaving with him for the next week. He doesn’t seem to be aware that this is going to happen, nor does he have any clue about her schedule. 

He listens with half a mind to his ex-wife’s instructions and takes a sheaf of papers… then spends some time eating junk food and playing with Maggie, unaware until she mentions it that she should be in school going on a boat trip. And he hasn’t remembered to let Melanie know that he will be taking Maggie to school himself. 

Inevitably both children are too late for the boat trip; equally inevitably the parents get thrown together although Melanie is very antagonistic towards Jack. It is, after all, his fault that the children have missed their trip. And she has no idea what to do with Sammy during some important work meetings…

The scene is set for an amusing day, which we see alternately from Melanie and Jack’s viewpoints. Sammy has a tendency to put objects up his nose, while Maggie is passionate about cats, and will forget everything else if she sees one and decides to follow it. The child actors do at least as well as their adult co-stars, and I was particularly taken with Sammy. Having the children as such a big part of the film brings it out of the ordinary, and we both enjoyed it very much.

There’s plenty of mild humour; we didn’t laugh aloud, but I smiled several times. There’s some choreographed slapstick type humour which slightly made me wince, but it was well enough done that it was amusing too. The pace is excellent, the conversation believable, and if the outcome is somewhat inevitable, that wasn’t a problem. 

The film is refreshingly free of ‘strong’ language, with only the mildest of profanities. It’s also free of anything violent or overtly sexual. There are quite a few risque references here and there, but nothing major. The rating of PG seems about right; parents have different opinions about what children can be exposed to and children vary in their understanding. I doubt if this would be of any interest to a young child anyway, despite the young actors. 

Definitely recommended if you want a light evening’s viewing that actually is a romantic comedy, even if the humour is mostly fairly understated. 

Review copyright 2024 Sue's DVD Reviews

Grand Hotel (John Barrymore)

(Amazon UK link)

Yesterday evening we decided to watch another of the classic films we were given recently by a friend. We knew nothing about ‘Grand Hotel’, although I gather it was very highly regarded in 1933 when it was released. And as an early example of a full-length movie (it’s nearly two hours) it’s quite impressive in its cast and some of the filming. It's in black-and-white, rather than colour, but that doesn't worry us. 

Even we had heard of both John and Lionel Barrymore, who play important characters in this film, and of course we knew of Greta Garbo by repute, although I don’t think either of us had seen her in action before. Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery and Lewis Stone are the other main characters, although we had not heard of any of them before, as far as we know. 

There are a lot of extras too, and other people who appear in minor roles, and the opening of the film is quite confusing. The entire film is set in a large, luxurious and very expensive hotel in Germany. We first see a row of girls from the back, operating what I assume is a telephone switchboard. 

Then we see several characters on the phone: a man awaiting news of his new baby, a businessman hoping for information about an upcoming deal, someone else concerned that a temperamental dancer is not happy. None of these seem to be connected - people come and go, and it took me at least twenty minutes to realise which stories were ongoing, and which were minor. 

‘Grand Hotel’ does not have a coherent storyline; it consists of several ongoing interactions between different people. The pace is good - it’s nearly two hours long, but it didn’t drag. On the other hand, it didn’t grip me at all. The only likeable character is that played by John Barrymore, known as ‘Baron’. He’s desperate for money and we quickly learn that he’s being employed to steal an expensive necklace from the temperamental dancer (Greta Garbo). 

Joan Crawford’s character is, I learned when researching afterwards, called Flaemmchen, known as Flaemm . Unfortunately it sounded like ‘phlegm’ when she or anyone else said it. She’s a ‘stenographer’ (a fast typist, possibly using shorthand). But she’s entirely willing to do other things for money, including spending the night with her married employer. 

And I think that epitomises what I disliked about this film. It’s basically quite sordid. The Baron has a kind heart, and doesn’t want to hurt anyone, but towards the end of the film something shocking and unexpected happens to him. Joan Crawford’s employer (Wallace Beery) is a sleazy bully.  Lionel Barrymore’s character, the rather naive Mr Kringelein, is staying in the hotel because he has been told that he is dying, so he wants to use up the money he has saved. As for the dancer played by Greta Garbo, she’s over-dramatic, self-centred and greedy for adulation. 

Acting in the 1930s was always somewhat overdone and artificial, and that didn’t worry us over-much, although it was hard to identify with any of the characters. And frankly, the more we watched, the more I disliked it. I kept hoping there would be some redemption - something positive for at least some of the people. But for most of them (other than one minor character) the outcome is essentially either sordid or quite depressing. 

I gather some of this film was considered amusing, but we thought it was all rather sad, given the scenarios. Not in a weepy way, though; we didn’t care enough for (or believe in) anyone sufficiently to feel moved. However, I did appreciate the irony of the comment at the end of the film (repeating one said at the beginning) that nothing ever happened in the Grand Hotel. 

There’s nothing explicit shown, of course, although there are plenty of implications of intimacies and affairs. And there’s no bad language and very little violence.  There’s one disturbing scene which is implied rather than actually shown. So the rating originally was A (now PG). The subject matter wouldn’t be of the least interest to children or young teenagers anyway - and frankly, we disliked it so much we wouldn’t show it to anyone. It’s not a DVD that we plan to keep on our shelves.

Not recommended. But having said that, this film won awards and is highly regarded by many, so don't necessarily take my word for it. Perhaps it’s worth seeing once as a bit of cultural education, and an example of a different genre of film. 

Review copyright 2024 Sue's DVD Reviews