Meantime (1984)

Director: Mike Leigh 

Meantime's most remarkable feature is that it debuts Gary Oldman and is Tim Roth's second film. As you watch the movie, it is quite easy to see how Tim Roth will progress into the star he is today. Not as much for Gary Oldman, in my opinion. Tim Roth plays Colin, a young man in his late teens or very early twenties who is simple-minded. His performance is brilliant. The character is handled lovingly and with care and understanding. Colin seems to be the soft-spoken voice of tranquility in a world that is loud and confusing and out of control. He watches what goes on around him, processing it with his own unique views on the world, sometimes with clarity.

Gary Oldman plays a secondary character, Coxy, a local skinhead who bums around with his friends. The group is always shown acting up and laughing and having fun, while the rest of the unemployed, Thatcher-era masses are downtrodden, sour-faced, and angry. He is goofy and his dialogue is often hard to understand. I think this could be due to the terrible sound on the DVD as much as the way he's speaking, though.

The movie centers around the Pollock family: Mother Mavis (Pam Ferris), Father Frank (Jeff Robert), older son Mark (Phil Daniels), and younger son Colin (Roth). The sons are past the age that they should be moving out of their parents' home, but the economy does not allow them the pleasure. All four members of the family are unemployed. Mavis goes to bingo in hopes of winning a jackpot to free them of their financial burdens. Frank is lazy, not even bothering to call the building manager when windows and other things break in their tiny flat. While he is shown lounging around in a bathrobe like a lazy sod, there is the sense that some of these cliche behaviors are due to depression over his job failures and the successes of his wife's sister and her husband who live in a nearby town in a large house in a nice neighborhood.

The movie also showcases friends and neighbors of the Pollock family.  There is a local girl named Hayley who seems to have a past with every boy in the neighborhood.  She seems only marginally more functional than Colin, slumping everywhere and barely talking.  Hayley's friend and her boyfriend are shown briefly.  The girl is pregnant and living with her mother.  She and the baby's father are both unemployed.  Uncle John (Alfred Molina) and Aunt Barbara, who are upper middle class, have no children of their own.

The relationship between the two brothers seems to be the focal point around which everything else in the film unfolds.  Mark seems to care for Colin, and worry about him, but he is also torn by jealousy.  He is feeling the pressure, as the oldest, to try to find a job and make a way for himself, while watching his former friends (the skinhead gang) loafing around happily stuck in a sort of teenage limbo.

The movie is more guided than scripted.  There are some shots that you don't see often in movies that make the scenes around them more effective.  There is one scene lasting several minutes of the wash room at the Pollock's house that features the washing machine and a bottle of detergeant in its center, focusing only on the legs of the family members as they walk around it.  Another scene, when the aunt is upset and sitting on the floor of her bedroom, the camera focuses on Alfred Molina in the doorway.  He moves about changing clothes from work, and moves out of the shot several times, but the camera remains focused on the empty doorway, what his wife is seeing as she waits for his return, to see the effect of her words on his face.  It gives a starkness to the film, as if the viewer is there, part of what's going on.

The soundtrack is horrid, though.  At times it is louder than the voices and it's a very annoying, after-school-special sort of generic music. It was made for TV (a year later released theatrically) so that's forgivable.  I do think it would have been a lot better if it had had some actual music. I kept wanting a soundtrack of The 4Skins or some other relavent oi bands.  Instead there was that blaring trumpet and sudden outburts from an electronic keyboard at inappropriate times.  Otherwise, the movie is a lovely slice-of-life drama that portrays characters whose lives before the film are obvious, and whose lives after the film is over continue.  You can hear their conversations after the screen goes black and the credits roll.  It makes the viewer want to imagine what happened next, but even though you don't know for certain, it still feels as if the film had all the closure it needed.  It's dated, but should still be watched to see the beginnings of the careers of two of the best actors of our generation.

Vatel (2000)

Director: Roland Joffe (The Killing Fields, Fat Man and Little Boy)
Writer (English Adaptation): Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Brazil, and where the name of my blog comes from)

As the movie begins, the Marquis de Lauzun (Tim Roth), is sending a letter on behalf of King Louis XIV (Julian Sands) to the Prince de Conde. The Prince de Conde is played by Julian Glover who's been in a bizillion things, but one thing that I thought was interesting (mostly that I didn't know it already of which I'm ashamed) was that he was the voice of Aragog the spider in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. The King is inviting himself and about a hundred courtiers to spend three days at the home of the Prince and Princess de Conde. The preparations to entertain so many people put the already bankrupt Prince in a terrible bind. But there is nothing to do but find a way. Thanks to the prince's master steward, Vatel (Gerard Depardieu), the King is impressed with the spectacle, and oblivious to the poverty stricken commoners who are footing the bill for the party, already destitute and starving.

Throw into the mix Uma Thurman's character, who seems to be an afterthought. She is some insignificant courtier noticed by the King, and by Vatel, and by the Marquis. Enter the ill-fated love interest that has no bearing on the plot and no interest to the viewer. Richard Griffiths plays the Prince's physician. And the most notable character in the entire movie: the brother of the King, "Monsieur" Phillipe d'Orleans played by a very interesting person, Murray Lachlan Young. Young has only appeared in bit parts in about 3 movies. He was a successful performance poet in the 1990's and even produced an album of his material. He plays his part to perfection and is the only one in the movie who does. His part is small, but he is wickedly good. Monsieur has a well documented love of little boys that in this script is attempted to be transfered to middle-aged French men. He has some of the best lines and looks absolutely insane in some of his scenes. I don't know how this guy hasn't done more. He was captivating. He looked like a maniac. I think he was my favorite thing in the whole movie.


There is a little bit of uninteresting court intrigue, lots of money problems, and a bunch of nothing. The food and food preparation scenes are fun, as are the scenes of how they set up the 3 day party. The scenery and costumes are breathtaking and have a very real feel to them. The story is based on a reality, loosely, but is not even an interesting enough story for me to look up the facts on it. Julian Sands playing the King was a fairly small role but I didn't even recognize him until halfway through the movie and still had a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact it was him. He was better in this than in nearly anything else I've seen him in, which is to say, he didn't seem like an overgrown toddler or a corpse.


Tim Roth made me grin. He was hilarious in a few of his very few scenes. When you first see him interact with Uma Thurman when the courtiers get to the Prince's home, he is fabulous. I had expected to see him in the movie a bit more than he was, since he was featured foremost on the cover of the DVD, but was sadly mistaken. He was only a bit better than a cameo. Adding to the picture is the fact that while all the other wigs are just gorgeous, his looks like a rooster, which doesn't help the fact that his face sort of looks birdish anyway!



There was a special feature called "The costumes of Vatel" on the DVD and I settled in for a good, in-depth feature, but it was about a five minute thing with a couple interview clips of a couple of the actors talking about costumes. It was disappointing.


The movie was considered a great failure. French audiences hated it, with reporters at Cannes when it opened trashing it and Gerard Depardieu. I agree with them in that sometimes it does seem as if he is lost in either the plot, the scene, or what the words mean that he's supposed to be saying. I had to turn on the subtitles a few times to understand what he mumbled. Despite the trash talk of Depardieu, I found Uma Thurman much harder to take. Not only did I feel her part was just tossed in to create a love interest, but she was wooden as usual. She has the look for period pieces, that's for sure, and while I don't think she's particularly pretty, she has something interesting about her face that I sort of cut her inability to make me believe her some slack. I don't understand, though, why movie makers cannot make a movie without turning it into something sappy, at least in parts. It's alright if it fits, but usually it just messes up a strong plot line. It does that here. Although calling this a strong plot line might be a stretch. There are a few places that the movie could have taken a better turn and a handful of plot threads that went nowhere would have been more interesting than what finally came out.

Concentrating either on the court intrigue, the love triangle, well it would actually have been a...quadrangle... is that a word?...or concentrating on the exploits of the courtiers while on the short holiday with more humor in it would have been better ideas than trying to throw all of those things into a movie that ended up feeling jumbled and lackluster when you got below the wigs and powder and costumes. Gosford Park did a better job of what it felt like these people were trying to accomplish.



The movie is great if you're watching it for the costumes and the setting, or for the actors that are in the smaller roles. Expecting something entertaining out of it is going into it with the wrong attitude. In fact, unless you want to check out Murray Lachlan Young, or you are into costumes, this blog is probably all you need to know about the movie.