Their Finest

First Hit:  A very sweet and thoughtful film about making a propaganda film in World War II England.

The story takes place in London during war time and between the German buzz bombing. Catrin Cole (Gemma Arterton) interviews for, what she thinks is, a secretarial position at the Ministry of Information only to discover she gets the job as scriptwriter for propaganda films. She needs to money as she is supporting herself and her, almost, husband Ellis Cole (Jack Huston) who is an artist and was injured in Spanish Civil War. She's not officially married to Ellis but wears a wedding ring and takes his name.

The British propaganda films, designed to motivate the population to work hard for the war effort, are not being well received. Fellow writer Tom Buckley (Sam Claflin) is hard on Catrin because she’s a woman and screenwriting is a man’s world.

However, he sends her on an assignment based on a newspaper article where twin women stole their father’s boat to go to Dunkirk to help save the lives of men. When Catrin interviews the women, she discovers that the boat stopped off shore. Never getting to Dunkirk, they did get wounded home because some of the boats that came from Dunkirk were overloaded and those boats gave them wounded personnel to take home.

The written article makes it more than what they did, but Catrin, Tom and the film making team make a variation of the adventure. The film uses an older famous actor Ambrose Hilliard (Bill Nighy) as part of the characters and as the only strong actor, he has ideas of how the plot and his part needs to go.

However, he begins to trust Catrin’s writing as she knows what she’s doing and when writing in concert with Tom, they excel.

What was interesting was this film also showed how important women were and their strength in helping the country defeat Germany. It also showed how people had to scale back their lives to support the war effort. I genuinely enjoyed watching Catrin watch the film she wrote and how the audience around her were engaged with the story. This was touching.

Arterton was fantastic in this role. Her reserved, yet expressive ways through the film created a wonderful character. Huston was good as the injured artist. Buckley was strong as Catrin’s fellow writer. His disbelief in women being able to write subtlety changing as the film enfolds was wonderful. Nighy was superb as the aristocratic and self-obsessed actor who comes to appreciate what he has. Gaby Chiappe wrote a wonderful screenplay, which unfolded with greater strength as the film went on. Lone Scherfig did a great job of directing this story and keeping the feel of the time and how films were constructed in the 1940’s just right.

Overall:  I was surprised by how much I liked and felt this film as it moved along.

One Day

First Hit: Disappointing overall as the chemistry wasn’t there between the leads and I couldn’t care about Dexter.

This film spans 20 years of time and neither character showed much aging.

Briefly, Emma (played by Anne Hathaway) and Dexter (played by Jim Sturgess) are college mates. The audience sees that Emma likes Dexter but is cautiously afraid of him because she doesn’t feel worthy of his good looks and charm. He is supposedly attracted to her but shouldn't be because she isn't hot enough (that's the feeling I got).

They spend the night together but without sex and the audience is to believe that there is something magical growing between them. They go their separate ways and they keep in touch phone calls and occasional dates. The passage of time is noted by the anniversary of their meeting (July 15th) continues to pop-up on the screen.

Dexter uses his charm and looks to snag a job as a TV host who is supposed to be hip. He spends all his time drinking, snorting coke, and screwing women he doesn’t care about. It isn’t that people cannot redeem themselves, but there must be something that touches the audience where redemption springs up from within the audience want him to redeem himself.

There really isn't anything. Only when he is with his daughter at the end of the film did I even begin to like the guy (and maybe that was the point – but it was too little too late). Meanwhile Emma, wanting to be a writer (poems and a novel) works in a Mexican restaurant in England (where they are both located). Ian (played by Rafe Spall) also works at the restaurant and thinks himself as a comedian. So together they are too lost souls not doing what they believe in but working together in this Mexican restaurant.

Because he is stable, and they are having this pitiful life together, he and Emma decide to move in together. This made no sense as Emma's character just wasn't that dumb to do this and yet the story has her doing this. But she’s supposed to have chemistry with Dexter (her life’s love) and there is none here as well.

As time goes by and both Dexter and Emma find their path back to each other, no matter the dialogue, scripting or scenes, there’s nothing really there between them to make me believe that is a “love of my life” relationship.

For comparison, look at Matt Damon and Emily Blunt in “The Adjustment Bureau” for an example of on-screen chemistry.

Hathaway would have done much better with someone with whom she could create chemistry with along with a director who knew how to get something interesting from his actors. I think her acting here is solid enough, but everything around her is sub-standard. Sturgess has the look of a “player” but there was emptiness about him which made his character two dimensional and not worth caring about. Spall played either did a horrible job at his clueless character or the script was equally clueless. Either way, each time he was on the screen I cringed, he resembled no one I’ve ever run into. Ken Scott (as Dexter’s father) and Patricia Clarkson as the mother were solid in their roles. David Nicholls wrote the screenplay from his book which could have been good. While the direction by Lone Scherfig never captured real characters fully and let the story flail away at drama and romance.

Overall: This film is forgettable and had little to offer in the realm of romance.

An Education

First Hit: At times the acting was good but not by the main characters and the story was not very believable.

Carey Mulligan was 23 when she made this film. Her character, Jenny, is 16 and this is immediately noticeable especially when she is in scenes around other real 16 and 17 year old people. These scenes came early in the film and therefore the pallor of this knowledge diminished the intent and believability of the story.

The film was shot in England and the 1960s. Her father Jack (played by Ralph Molina) is a very conservative man who has plans for his daughter. And as much as he wants to control her, his focus is to have her go to Oxford so that she can have freedom to live a more full life than he is living.

Her mother Marjorie (played by Cara Seymour) is a dutiful, stay at home wife who follows in her husband’s footsteps. One day Jenny, while it is raining buckets, is picked up and given a ride home by David (played by Peter Sarsgaard).

David is a lot older than Jenny but is charmed by her beauty and apparent sophistication and wants to date her. He convinces her parents that going to see a Ravel string concert and dinner afterward is a safe venture with him.

Their relationship grows and becomes cemented when she accepts that David and his counterpart Danny (played by Dominic Cooper) are thieves and make their living through dubious ways. But Jenny is in love and when David asks for her hand in marriage she accepts but then learns he’s not really available.

Mulligan was obviously too old for the part, although during the first nightclub scene, she held both the amazement as a young person out of her element and creating a nervous sophistication which is one reason why David likes her. The best acting was by Molina as her father. Lone Scherfig was the director and don’t think he created an interesting enough story.

Overall: This was a mediocre film, using an old story line, and added nothing to make it very engaging or interesting.