Synoiz Music Blog

Posted 6th January 2012

Bit of an odd blog this time, hope you had a good new year and have not yet broken ALL of your resolutions. I just thought I'd take a moment to write a film review as I've just got back from the cinema. 

The Iron Lady

I have to say I wasn't totally sure what I expected of this film. On principle I don't pay attention to reviews from people I don't know and it looks like I'm the first one of my friends to see this. 

Personally I am unsure of my opinion of ex-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, I grew up with adults around me still seething about her, still hating her even though she was out of office. But for me, to make that much of an impression on a country, on a world, makes me wonder if I should respect her for simply DOING things and having the nerve to simply make decisions that people wouldn't be happy with. I guess I've grown up during the period in Britain where nobody does anything cos they're scared of upsetting someone or messing up the balance. For instance, the only reason I can remember who John Major was (the guy who followed Thatcher as Prime Minster) is because of his caricature in Spitting Image (left)! No idea what he did for the country. 

Anyway, the film. Straight to the point, it's not a brilliant film. It's a film that quite simply stumbles along and flutters about as though it's a wall of post-it notes and the window is open. The story and flow just don't work for me, there are times when it genuinely feels like an unbiased documentary about a woman's life taking you through her highs and lows, her triumphs and her mistakes, and then it will suddenly cut to a total propaganda section punching you in the face to feel sympathy for her. 

It feels as though there was a script, then someone with a red pen got to it and put "this bit may stop people liking her, do something like this instead", the same way that Michael Bay (of Transformers infamy) might go "this bit is too slow, we need to put an explosion or a car chase in". 

The "plot" follows Lady Thatcher (Meryl Streep) near to present day as she lives coping with dementia and being an old biddy being old, imagining her dead husband Dennis (Jim Broadbent) is still talking to her and alive. The film works like an edition of Tales From The Crypt with old-Thatcher as the crypt keeper having trips down memory lane and reminiscing or weeping over flashbacks of her life. In places this works, in others it doesn't. The sections with Young Thatcher are cringeworthy, with Dennis proposing to her only for Thatcher to go into a speech about how she refuses to be a house wife and she'll never be the sort of woman to wash dishes as the stirring music rises beneath her words.

I think I just heard a suffragette clapping from the 1930s.

Just one. 

Often in The Iron Lady it's not what's BEING said, it's the way it's said. It feels like the film has no idea how to lead its audience and the music and words are expecting the audience to feel something while they're actually feeling the total opposite. 

HOWEVER...

...it is impossible not to say that Meryl Streep is amazing. It feels weird saying this but it's great to see real acting again. Throughout the film she IS Thatcher, from mannerisms down to speech and you get a constant feel for her and what she's thinking and what she must be going through. One of those roles where you forget that it's a person you've seen in plenty of other films, you ALMOST even forget sodding Mamma Mia.

When myself and Ian Lawlor (from 12 Ft Beast Productions) went to see The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (awesome film, bleak but amazing) I remember him saying that Dragon Tattoo will probably miss out on all the awards and fame because of films like The Iron Lady. All honesty, if there's any justice in the world that won't happen, however Streep does deserve the Best Actress award for The Iron Lady even if it winning Best Film would whiff of money changing hands. 

The simple fact is that no matter how good Streep's performance is, even she can't save the film from itself and the heavy handed script. I have to say there are times when the Britishness of everything she does and her tone of voice got to me, but that is what Thatcher was like as Prime Minister. 

All in all I give the film a score of 4/10, mainly for Streep's performance and the way that some dark events weren't skimmed over as I expected them to be.

In the end I left feeling sympathy for Thatcher, not because the film depicts her as a poor defenceless old widow who just did what she felt she needed to do and everyone ended up hating her for it, but because the film shows a flicker, a hint of a great life and story that still needs to be told by better writers. It might not be a happy story, it might be about a woman who did damage the country in some people's eyes, but it's an important part of British history that needs to be told well.

Posted 11th November 2011

Today was weird for me, I pondered for a while whether I should do something special for 11/11/11 but in the end I decided I've got enough to promote at the moment without throwing another free track/release or such out there. Plus considering what day it is today in England would make any "oh look at the date!!!11" celebration seem crude. 

Today was/is Remembrance Day which marks the official end of the first World War. For a lot of people including myself it also ties in with those who fought in World War II also. We marked it today by having a two minute silence at 11:00am and while it felt a bit like a ritual at the time, it kinda made me  wonder. 

I have great respect for those who fought in the two World Wars, the stakes were high and the conditions were dreadful. All those people who were drafted in and I really can't conceive (in my wonderfully sheltered suburban life) the horror of being forced to go to war when you don't really want to and getting killed or maimed, the nightmare for the family back home, knowing that their loved one might not come back and there was never a choice there to make. 

What Remembrance Day this year has made me consider is how I feel about modern wars and what's happening in Afghanistan and Iraq and now Libya. This may upset a few people but over the past few years I've found myself having little to no respect for soldiers involved in these wars, I've not given to charities such as "help the heroes" simply because the soldiers I class as heroes are those from World War I and World War II and even their grandkids are old enough to not need support now I suspect. 

Why this big divide? For me the main difference is the element of choice. Do "heroes" choose to go to war? I'd say no but I guess they do, well in fairy tales and stories anyway. In real life I would say that the only time something needs to be done is when there isn't a choice or that the other choice is so wrong to be inconsiderable, that's the definition of "need" really isn't it? I don't see any of the current wars as that, I see them as fragile, pointless and horrifying. 

I guess what it all comes down to is whether the current wars needed to happen, and when a lot of the evidence for them can be considered as suspect (World Trade Center detonations, "terrorism" groups, Weapons of Mass Destruction that don't seem to have existed, no evidence of Osama Bin Laden being killed etc) you have to wonder who are the aggressors in these wars. If that ever was the case, if the UK and the United States are the "bad guys" then what does that make the soldiers that are fighting in them? Puppets? Murderers? This is what has made things so difficult in my mind for so long, if the soldiers make a choice to go to war but the information they have to base that decision on is suspect, does it dissolve their actions? It goes back to that old line I remember my mum saying a lot whenever a friend would make me join in on some stupid activity, "oh well if he told you to jump off a bridge would you?". 

But what I realised today is another side that I hadn't considered really, is it bravery? Is it a trait so pure and amazing and selfless that these troops are willing to offer up their lives in order to do what they think is right? Even if it might not be and the evidence is all lies, does that stop the troops being any less courageous if they're truly doing it in their minds for Queen and country, for what the same people fought for in World Wars 1 and 2? 

Today made me wonder if in my cynical mind there's no space to conceive traits like bravery or nobility, but at the same time, in a logical world there can never be good or evil - just shades of grey with outcomes in a scale of preferable to non-preferable. 

I guess for me, I can never make a decision without first considering it from every angle, I've always been like this, I'm a nightmare with a restaurant menu as I factor in things like "how full will I be later?" "will it take longer to make than everyone elses?" "too expensive" "Portion might be rubbish" etc, so it makes me feel odd towards anyone who could just believe what they're told without looking into it any further (in all fairness I'd probably envy them more than anything!). 

A lot of the people I know who are in the armed forces fall into three main categories for me,

1. Those who genuinely believe the job needs doing.
2. Those who want the money/benefits and can't do other work. 
3. Those who just want to "kill some darkies" (not my words). 

Worryingly this third category seems to be commonplace due to racial tensions especially around the north east of England where I'm from. When you know people like this, people who probably weren't sure what to do with their lives after they stopped being the high school bully or the nerd needing to prove himself a man, it becomes hard to feel the same way about those fighting in modern wars as one does about those who died in World Wars I and II. Is this purely because those older wars are now legend? That their participants are immortalised as caricatures, good Englishmen and bad Nazis as the details of those involved fade away? Or is it like I said before, because of choice, or because they were in the army already and chose not to leave? 

I hope I haven't upset people with my rambling here but it's just what I've been considering during the day. What are your thoughts and feelings? You can post them using the comments thingy below. Don't just flame me if you don't agree but please put forward your opposing point of view in as much detail as you can. Have I gotten this totally wrong? Is there even a right answer do you think?