{"id":18455,"date":"2022-08-10T00:30:57","date_gmt":"2022-08-10T00:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/?p=18455"},"modified":"2022-08-09T19:53:02","modified_gmt":"2022-08-09T19:53:02","slug":"the-great-british-picture-show-with-shoes-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/2022\/08\/10\/the-great-british-picture-show-with-shoes-on\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great British Picture Show . . . With Shoes On"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Ken Stokes<\/em><\/p>\n

Just when we thought we were out of the woods, here we go again: Jan. 6\u2014the gift that keeps on giving. The \u2018sound and the fury but doing nothing\u2019 of the January 6 committee, \u2018run, Hawley, run,\u2019 an \u2018egregious dereliction of duty\u2019 topped off with Trump\u2019s audacious return to the scene of the crime, and Matt Gaetz trolling for teens just up the street. Blind respect for leaders was cracked by Richard Nixon, broken by Bill Clinton and shattered and swept away by Donald Trump. Over the course of the intervening 50 years the virtue of civility went by the wayside as well.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s not lose sight of the fact that \u2018civil\u2019 is an indispensable building block in the word \u2018civilization,\u2019 and it could be easily argued that, for all its glory, America is no longer civilized.<\/p>\n

Add in the heat, fires, inflation, monkeypox and the daily shootings and all I\u2019ve wanted is a haven far away from it all. I switched from cable news to the sports channels and there they were, once again, with the dependability of Big Ben itself: strawberries and cream at Wimbledon and the brisk ocean breeze whipping across the links at St. Andrews. I said to myself, \u201cYes, it\u2019s time to venture once again across the pond, back to the mother country for some tea and cakes accompanied by a large dollop of good manners.\u201d<\/p>\n

And then COVID-Umpteen.0 reared its ugly head. Damn.<\/p>\n

So this summer I find myself once again living vicariously through British art-house cinema. Hard to imagine these days, but growing up in Twin Falls, British films were fairly common, not just the David Lean epics, but treats like Tom Jones, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Alfie, Blow-Up <\/i>and Darling<\/i>, all of which my Aunt Connie and Uncle Steve would sneak me into. Over the years when I\u2019ve needed a lift I\u2019ve reveled in the very-British artistry of Terry Gilliam, Mike Leigh, Stanley Kubrick, Peter Greenaway, Danny Boyle, Neil Jordan and the uber-British period gems of Merchant-Ivory (who were Indian and American, but who cares).<\/p>\n

Fortunately for all of us, this summer the Brits have yet again come through for cinema-goers starving for scraps of civility and charm. Of particular merit:<\/p>\n

The Duke<\/i><\/p>\n

The Phantom of the Open<\/i><\/p>\n

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris <\/i><\/p>\n

Downton Abbey: A New Era<\/i><\/p>\n

All four are period pieces that deal with class, interlopers, posturing and pretense, and all offer up two observations:<\/p>\n

People who are not to the manor born can easily be to the \u2018manner\u2019 born, and<\/p>\n

Persons of high position can easily be horse\u2019s patooties.<\/p>\n

Not so \u2018period\u2019 after all.<\/p>\n

The first two focus on middle-aged men with modest aspirations\u2014one who wants to ensure senior citizens have access to free television (requiring a wee bit of larceny), the other who mistakenly thinks that the British Open is truly open to anyone (and has in fact never played so much as one round of golf). The third is a Cinderella story where a housecleaner with self-esteem issues is visited upon by a number of fairy godmothers, only to become one herself to no less a luminary than couture icon Christian Dior. Then there\u2019s the dependable downstairs of Downton Abbey, which, after a 10-plus-year run on TV and in cinemas, delivers the goods once again to both its upstairs counterparts and its loyal audience (come on, who else is going to see it), turning some tables in the process and serving up a satisfying meta-driven entertainment aspiring toward (relative) egalitarianism. True to form, Dame Maggie Smith\u2019s formidable Violet, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, puts the berry on the trifle with a final one-liner that\u2019s for the ages.<\/p>\n

The bad behavior that is so exhausting in contemporary American culture is at the heart of each of these movies. That being said, even the worst behavior is packaged in old-fashioned British restraint, and each film\u2019s 20th-century heavies are at worst annoying, and not remotely as vile, disgusting or repugnant as their 21st-century, real-life counterparts. Like all good fairy tales, the wicked are punished (or at least humiliated) while the characters of good character, after genuine struggle, enjoy their modest victories. Kindness and magnanimity triumph. And there are, indeed, tea and cakes. Oh, that life was equally fair.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019d be remiss not to mention the most wonderous cinematic respite from our challenging times. Based on a TikTok phenom and two very popular children\u2019s books, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On\u00a0 <\/span>is a stop-action meta marvel\u2014a sophisticated, grown-up narrative and deft study of human psychology masquerading as child\u2019s play. The moral of the story: loneliness can bring out the best in us, but there\u2019s an unmatched richness of aspiring toward and living within a \u2018community\u2019 consisting not just of our relatives and peers, but of individuals who are nothing like us, to include the disenfranchised and those so commonly and cruelly labeled as society\u2019s \u2018dregs.\u2019 If any film ever truly captured the state of grace, it\u2019s this one. Quite simply, it\u2019s the best movie of the summer.<\/p>\n

Marcel joins that small cadre of films I use as a human barometer. If you don\u2019t find this movie both enchanting and profound, we\u2019ll most likely never hit it off. With a 99% Fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes, there\u2019s a good chance we\u2019ll get along just fine. Regardless, there\u2019s still that 1% of you out there I will at some point meet. And I promise I\u2019ll try my level best to be, at the very least, civil.<\/p>\n

Tally ho!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ken Stokes Just when we thought we were out of the woods, here we go again: Jan. 6\u2014the gift that keeps on giving. The \u2018sound and the fury but doing nothing\u2019 of the January 6 committee, \u2018run, Hawley, run,\u2019 an \u2018egregious dereliction of duty\u2019 topped off with Trump\u2019s audacious return to the scene of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","_pvb_checkbox_block_on_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-commentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18455"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18455\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18456,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18455\/revisions\/18456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}