An Angel at My Table: the film that teamed Jane Campion and Kerry Fox

Firstly, I would like to extend a sincere thank you to the staff of the website dbtechno.com for having recently featured material from one of my blog entries on their website.

Secondly, as noted on this blog’s very first entry, I mentioned that the years 1980-1990 would be covered herein. Therefore, today’s entry deals with a film from the year 1990. That film is An Angel at My Table, which is the biography of New Zealand author Janet Frame, and is based on the author’s three separate autobiographies. It was originally intended to air on television as a miniseries but was instead released as a feature film.

An Angel at My Table was directed by Jane Campion, who a few years later went on to direct the Oscar-winning film The Piano. Incidentally, Campion was the second female ever to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar, for her work on that film.

This film stars Kerry Fox in the role of Janet Frame. Fox is perhaps best known for her starring role in the 1994 cult classic film Shallow Grave. In this film however, Fox delivers what I would say is probably the best onscreen portrayal ever of a morbidly shy woman.

The film is divided into three segments. The first segment covers the early years of Frame’s life. We see Frame as a young girl growing up a crowded, noisy household in a rural setting. We witness her interactions with other kids. The intense shyness that would go on to permeate her adult life wasn’t readily apparent at the time.

We don’t begin to get glimpses of what her life would turn out to be like until she’s already an adolescent. The second segment of the film covers this period. Any viewer who’s ever suffered from shyness or general awkwardness can sort of relate to Frame and/or see aspects of themselves in her. I first saw this movie when I was my teens, and in some ways I kind of identified with her, since growing up I was mainly a shy kid. Also, Frame was a late bloomer, much like myself. Nevertheless, hers was a life that seemed to have a thread of constant pain and suffering woven into it. It was during this period of her adolescence that she lost one of her sisters to a drowning.

It’s not until the events in third segment of the film that Frame’s life begins to fall apart. By this part of the story, she has already reached adulthood. We see her living with an aunt and uncle while she attends college. Things seem to be going fairly well for her as she undergoes training to become a teacher. That plan ultimately gets derailed one day as her anxiety prevents her from being scrutinized by an inspector who observes her as she teaches her class.

Innocently, she allows one of her instructors to read a draft of an autobiography that she’s written, and through it he learns that she had attempted suicide by swallowing a large number of Aspirin pills. He and some officials from her school convince her into spending some time at the psychiatric ward of a hospital. But, when the time comes for her to be sent home, she refuses to leave (due to her father’s violent temper), and she therefore gets sent to a mental asylum. Once she’s there, she gets diagnosed with schizophrenia, which according to a dictionary definition of the condition read by her sisters is "a gradual deterioration of the mind with no cure."

Although she's been discharged from the asylum, the worst is still to come, as she once again loses a sister in yet another drowning accident. As Frame herself mentions in the weeks after the drowning, she comforted herself with writing. Unfortunately for her, she later gets talked into going back to a mental asylum, being told that they offer a "new treatment" there, and it's believed that her condition is curable. For the next eight years, she becomes subjected to over 200 electric shock treatments at the asylum. She’s even placed on a schedule to have a lobotomy. Thankfully though, her first book (containing short stories) gets published while she’s still at the asylum, and it’s subsequently determined that she won’t be needing the lobotomy.

When she finally gets discharged from the asylum for once and for all, she gets introduced to a famous writer who invites her to move in with him so that she can spend her days working on new writing material. It is during this time that her first novel gets published, and she thereby secures a literary grant to travel overseas. Her travels take her to the cities of London and Paris, and later to coastal Spain. While in Spain, she briefly falls in love with an American man during the course of the summer. She then returns to London and has difficulty finding decent work, so she voluntarily admits herself to a psychiatric hospital. After some time, a psychiatrist there determines that she never suffered from schizophrenia, and he recommends that she undergo weekly psychotherapy sessions. Thenceforth, she continues with her writing endeavors.

This movie has a runtime of two hours and thirty minutes, but it’s well worth it. The story itself is very sad, as Frame’s life was, for the most part, a sad life. In spite of that, you do get to see moments of joy in her life, and you can't help but feel proud for her whenever she's seen having a new successful accomplishment. Kerry Fox’s performance (as Frame) was simply astonishing. A tremendous performance, and it was a breakthrough for her acting career. And in summary, this film was a marvelous achievement for its director, Jane Campion.

A Handful of Dust, featuring the always-amazing Kristin Scott Thomas

I consider the years 1984 and 1988 the two best years of the 80s for films. Those two years contained many wonderful movies and noteworthy performances. One of those performances that stands out to me is that of Kristin Scott Thomas in the 1988 film A Handful of Dust. Directed by Charles Sturridge, the film is set in England during the 1930s. Scott Thomas plays Brenda, the wife a landed aristocrat named Tony. The duo reside in a large estate in the countryside with their young son. Despite the fact that nothing appears to be lacking in Brenda's life, she seems to have grown bored with the relative isolation and the monotonous routine of living in Tony’s ancestral home, known as Hetton Abbey.

After a weekend visit from a friend of Tony’s named Thomas, who’s of a lower social rank, Brenda decides to spend time in London, as she has developed a special interest in Thomas. She fancies Thomas and wishes to get to know him better. She thus begins traveling back and forth from Hetton Abbey to London on a fairly frequent basis, first under the pretext that she’s going visit her sister. Later, she decides to rent a flat in London. It just so happens that the woman she’s renting the flat from is the mother of Thomas. Brenda then very willingly enters into an affair with Thomas, seeing him whenever she’s in London, all the while maintaining the illusion that she simply wants to spend some time away from the idleness of Hetton Abbey to relish the liveliness of London.

Brenda’s trusting and unsuspecting husband has no clue of what’s really going on, though a couple of other people within their social circle are fully aware of the circumstances. She even convinces him to let her sign up for an Economics course -- more of a reason to spend time in London. It’s during one of her stays in London that an unexpected family tragedy leads her back to Hetton Abbey. Once there, she’s determined make the definitive choice to leave Tony. She returns to London to reunite with Thomas, and writes a letter to Tony to inform him that she had been having an affair with Thomas and intends to marry him. She then files for divorce from Tony and seeks a large financial settlement from him, which incidentally would require him to lose his ancestral home.

Tony refuses to grant Brenda the divorce, and instead chooses to travel abroad for a few months. He ventures to South America with an explorer friend of his, and that voyage, as it turns out, will change his destiny and that of Brenda.

The role of Brenda was the breakout performance for Scott Thomas, and it’s a pity that she wasn’t nominated for an Oscar. Though I must admit that 1988 was a very competitive year for actresses in leading roles. The film boasts a great cast which includes Judi Dench, James Wilby, Rupert Graves, Angelica Huston, and Alec Guinness who plays an elderly loner living amidst native Indians in the Amazonian jungle. Altogether, this a very good film which managed to snag an Oscar nomination for its beautiful costume design.

Resurrection: One of Ellen Burstyn’s best performances

In the 1980 film Resurrection, Academy Award-winning actress Ellen Burstyn plays a woman who undergoes a near-death experience following a car accident. She subsequently develops a supernatural power to heal the sick, apparently as an after-effect of having survived the near-death experience.

The film starts off showing Burstyn’s character Edna going about her daily life with her husband Joe in California. Edna decides to buy Joe a new car for his birthday, which she presents to him that very day after he gets out of work. The couple then decides to go for a joy ride in their new car, with Joe driving. Once on the road, Joe loses control of the car in an attempt to avoid running over a young boy who had carelessly skateboarded onto the street, and the car ends up crashing over a cliff.

Joe dies in the accident, whereas Edna sees herself being pulled into a dark tunnel with a bright light at the end, indicative of a near-death experience. In the tunnel, she happens to see people that she knew from her past who had already died, some of whom she doesn’t immediately recognize. She winds up waking up in a hospital bed, unable to move. There, she learns that Joe is dead, and her doctor informs her of the severity of her condition. She’s got damage to her lower back including a blood clot on her spinal cord, and she learns that she won’t be able to move her legs because the main nerves in both legs have been severed below the knee.

Devastated upon hearing of what has happened, Edna decides to move back to her native Kansas with her father, who had come to visit her at the hospital. He drives her from California to Kansas, and on the way there, they make a stop at an isolated gas station manned by an elderly male attendant. Unbeknownst to Edna, that gas station will play an important role later in her life.

Not too long after they arrive in the rural small town where Edna grew up, she comes to the realization that she has a power to heal people of their injuries and afflictions -- something that she can accomplish by simply placing her hands on their bodies. From that point on, she becomes determined to not only help heal other people but to heal her own self of the injuries that she sustained in the car accident.

The townspeople grow impressed with Edna’s ability to heal, though some suspect that the healing power she possesses is in reality the work of the Devil. One of the naysayers happens to be a devoutly religious man whose son, named Cal (played by Sam Shepard), becomes Edna’s love interest. Amidst the town’s speculation over Edna’s healing power, a couple of scientific researchers from California who have witnessed some of her public healings invite her back to California to conduct tests on her power. Cal himself eventually develops a suspicion of his own with regard to Edna’s power, wondering if there is a divine source to it.

Burstyn rightfully received an Oscar nomination for her work in this film. It's a believable performance, and one I consider among her best ever. The film features striking music composed and conducted by Maurice Jarre. Overall, this is a very good film which I happen to like a lot. Though I must say, it seemed almost like this film was a satire, made with the intention of poking fun at the deep-rooted religious convictions that can typically be found in the small towns of America’s heartland.

Amityville II: The Possession -- A blatant ripoff of The Exorcist

My last blog post was about a movie franchise (the James Bond film series). So, in this entry, to continue with the theme of movie franchises, I’m going to cover a movie that was part of another franchise: Amityville II: The Possession.

The 1977 book The Amityville Horror: A True Story (written by Jay Anson) was based upon the aftermath of a 1974 multiple homicide that took place in a Colonial-style house situated within a neighborhood known as Amityville, which is located in Long Island, New York. A young man by the name of Ronald DeFeo, Jr. murdered six members of his family in that house. The following year, a man named George Lutz moved into the house with his family, but that would turn out to be a short-lived stay. After only 28 days, the Lutz family decided to move out. The reason they chose to abandon the house was that they claimed to have experienced paranormal activity during the time that they lived in the house.

The original Amityville movie (from 1979) was based on Anson’s book, and it focused on the paranormal experiences of the Lutz family. In contrast, Amityville II, despite being the second Amityville movie is actually a prequel of sorts. This movie was based on a different book titled Murder in Amityville, written by Hans Holzer in 1979. Holzer’s book delves with what caused DeFeo to murder his family -- specifically demonic possession. So, the movie showcases the murderer’s demonic possession, hence the words “The Possession” as part of the title. However, for the movie, the DeFeo surname was changed to Montelli.

The plot primarily revolves around the Montelli’s elder son named Sonny who becomes possessed by a demonic entity one night while his family is out and he happens to be home alone. As a result of the possession, Sonny’s personality becomes drastically altered in the weeks that follow. One of the shocking effects of the possession is that Sonny decides to engage in an incestuous relationship with one of his sisters. And after some time, the entity that has possessed his body orders him to kill his family.

After the murders, Sonny -- seemingly unaware of what took place -- winds up in jail. A priest who had unsuccessfully tried to bless the house shortly after the Montellis moved in decides to go visit Sonny in jail and thus determines that Sonny is possessed by a demonic entity. In the denouement, an exorcism takes place, with an unforeseen outcome and a mysterious ending.

This movie very obviously “drew inspiration” from The Exorcist. In fact, some of the scenes in this movie seemed almost like direct copies of some of the scenes from The Exorcist -- particularly the scene in which the priest performs the exorcism on Sonny, as well as a scene in which the words “Save Me” magically appear on Sonny’s forearm. And overall, this movie as a prequel falls flat in comparison to the original Amityville movie. Though, I can admit that some of the scenes are genuinely scary and creepy. Nonetheless, this is an awful movie with no famous actors other than Burt Young who plays Sonny’s father. But, the movie deserves a mention here, as it was one of the many movies that I saw as a child in the 80s.

For Your Eyes Only: The first James Bond film that I ever saw

The James Bond franchise is one of the world's long-running film franchises as well as one of the most successful. The original James Bond film was Dr. No (from 1962), and the most recent one was last year's Skyfall. This particular film, For Your Eyes Only, dates from 1981, making it the first James Bond film of the 80s. It also happens to be the first James Bond film that I personally ever saw, and the one that made me develop a love for the whole Bond franchise. Several different actors have played the role of James Bond over the years, and in the case of this particular film, he is played by the legendary Roger Moore, who cleverly portrayed the character in every James Bond film from the mid 70s to the mid 80s. I've seen all of the Bond films, and of all the actors who played the role of Bond, Moore was my favorite.

In this installment of the Bond film series, Bond's mission takes him to Greece, Spain, and the Italian Alps. His purpose is to recover a device belonging to the British government known as an "ATAC" which uses a coded transmitter to order Britain's submarines to launch ballistic missiles.

The ATAC had been aboard a British spy ship in the Ionian sea, which was sunk by a mine. As Bond seeks to uncover the whereabouts of the ATAC, he inadvertently meets a beautiful Greek woman named Melina (played by French actress and former Chanel model Carole Bouquet) who seeks to assassinate the man who murdered her parents. It just so happened that Melina's father was a marine archaeologist who had been working with the British government to locate the wreck of the ship that contained the ATAC. Within a matter of time, Bond agrees to have Melina assist him in finding the ATAC, while in the process he tries to determine who was the entity that ordered to have a mine sink the British spy ship.

The film's scenery is quite interesting, as it showcases the Greek mountainous terrain and the snowy landscape of the Italian Alps. But, more importantly, the film features a lot of underwater footage, as several of the scenes take place out at sea.

And of course, one of the most amazing and unforgettable things about this movie is its namesake theme song, "For Your Eyes Only," sung by Sheena Easton.