SHUTTER ISLAND. (2010) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

SHUTTER ISLAND. (2010)

BASED ON THE BOOK BY DENNIS LEHANE.

DIRECTED BY MARTIN SCORSESE.

STARRING LEONARDO DICAPRIO, MARK RUFFALO, MICHELLE WILLIAMS, BEN KINGSLEY, MAX VON SYDOW AND TED LEVINE.

I was glued to this psychological thriller film from the moment it started, but I knew I would be as I’d read the book by Dennis Lehane about a decade earlier and found it to be top-notch stuff. It has a terrific cast as well, with men who’ve acted in such unforgettable films as SCHINDLER’S LIST (Ben Kingsley), SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (Ted Levine) and even the most famous horror film of all time, THE EXORCIST (Max von Sydow).

Then, of course, we have Leonardo DiCaprio himself, who by this time has starred in films like TITANIC, THE BEACH and CATCH ME IF YOU CAN. He has yet to win his long-coveted Oscar with THE REVENANT, and hasn’t yet acted in the terrific films that have made him one of the highest-paid actors in the world, films like THE GREAT GATSBY, THE WOLF OF WALL STREET and ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD.

Leo is brilliant in SHUTTER ISLAND as U.S. Marshal, Edward ‘Teddy’ Daniels, who has come to the titular island in Boston Harbour to investigate the case of a patient/prisoner who’s gone missing from the mental institution on the island, Ashecliffe Hospital. He has another Marshal, Chuck Aule, with him to help him work on the case.

It’s a woman called Rachel Solando who’s gone missing, a patient who refuses to accept that she murdered her three children by drowning them. Marshals Teddy and Chuck stay overnight in the creepy, atmospheric old hospital, which has a cemetery and a lighthouse on its extensive but rocky grounds, and try to get a handle on what they’re dealing with.

A hurricane and torrential rain batter the island as they talk to Drs. Cawley and Naehring, played by Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow respectively, but the doctors run rings round them and Teddy feels like they know more about the missing patient and just exactly what kind of medicine is being practised on this spooky, out-of-the-way island than they’re letting on. But of course they do! They’re psychiatrists in a government lockdown hospital for the criminally insane. D’uh…!

Poor Teddy is plagued by migraine headaches, by memories of his beautiful dead wife that make no sense and also by memories whose meaning he understands only too well, painful recollections of when he was a young soldier liberating Dachau concentration camp in the depths of a bitterly cold winter in 1945.

Teddy is a complicated man, with a lot going on in his head. He has a shadowy past that we don’t fully understand and an uncertain future. His present is bewildering and confusing to him. Are the things that we see happen to him on the island really happening? What things are dreams and which are reality? Is U.S. Marshal Edward Daniels emotionally disturbed? I think we can safely say that that’s the least of what he is.

There’s even a suggestion that he may have been lured to the island by the government, using the ‘missing prisoner’ thing as the pretext. If so, that’s straight out of THE WICKER MAN, the 1973 British mystery film that sees Edward Woodward as poor Sergeant Howie being led a merry dance by the sinister, ill-intentioned islanders.

Is the same thing happening to Teddy Daniels? Is he being ‘gas-lit’ or misled by Drs. Cawley and Naehring? Are his every thought, action and movement being determined or dictated by them? Has he been brought here to fulfil some special, as yet unknown destiny?

And what about his conviction that Nazi-style medical experiments are taking place on the island, using the poor unfortunate patients as guinea-pigs? Just what is the truth behind the strange events that are happening in Ashecliffe Hospital, and also in poor Teddy’s injured mind…?

If I told you there was a massive twist in the movie that will blow your mind, would it ruin the movie for you? Would you spend the whole film trying to work out said twist? Everyone’s dead and this is all just a fantasy? It’s a dream and he’s going to wake up from it? He’s really his own wife? This all really happens, but to someone else and on a different timeline? This is all just a movie script written by some dude and none of it is real?

Tee-hee-hee. What larks! You’ll never guess. Or will you? I’ve had to stop watching films with my daughter because she can guess a twist a mile off. We’ll be watching a cool horror film together for a few seconds and she’ll say something like, one of the sisters is dead, that’s why you never hear them talk when someone else is in the room! And the annoying thing is that she’s always bloody right. Spot-on, in fact. So bloody annoying…

Don’t worry though, I won’t ruin Shutter Island for you. Pretend I haven’t even mentioned a twist, if you prefer. Just enjoy the movie and let your brain switch off as the twists and turns- ooops, it’s that word again- take you to some strange but exciting places. And drink in that gorgeous, wild and desolate scenery, very WUTHERING HEIGHTS. Over and out, guys and girls. See you next time…

THE QUEEN. (2006) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

THE QUEEN. (2006) DIRECTED BY STEPHEN FREARS.

WRITTEN BY PETER MORGAN.

BASED ON TRUE EVENTS.

STARRING HELEN MIRREN, JAMES CROMWELL, ALEX JENNINGS, SYLVIA SYMS, MICHAEL SHEEN AND HELEN MCRORY.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I LOVED this film. I’ve become obsessed with the Royal Family since binge-watching THE CROWN on Netflix last December. My kids and I literally watched all sixty hours of it in the run-up to Christmas.

We were enchanted beyond belief, and then watched the movie SPENCER, in which Kristen Stewart from the TWILIGHT movies plays a neurotic and emotionally strung-out Princess Diana attending at Sandringham Castle for three days over Christmas of 1991.

Her marriage to Charles was already in tatters and she was giving serious thought to leaving both him and the Royal Family. Seriously gripping stuff. We also watched THE WINDSORS, a wickedly funny spoof show on Netflix, and now we’ve just watched THE QUEEN as well.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in favour of the Royal Family or anything like that. My personal views are that everyone is born equal, and that no human being is better than another just because of the family they were born into.

Also, the money spent on the Royal Family could house and feed a load of homeless and hungry people. But they’re good value for money in the entertainment stakes, the Royals, and it’s that element which we’ve been enjoying.

THE QUEEN is as well done as any of the aforementioned films and shows. Helen Mirren plays the titular role of Her Madge, Queen Elizabeth the Second. The film concerns the slowness of the Royal Family to publicly mourn and react to the death of Princess Diana in an horrific car crash in a Paris tunnel in August 1997.

At the time of the crash, in which Dodi Al Fayed, Diana’s supposed lover at the time, was also killed, the Queen and Prince Philip and the Queen Mother were all in Balmoral in Scotland, enjoying the hunting, or stalking, and shooting of the beautiful deer and other livestock on the fifty thousand or so acres that comprised the magnificent country estate that had once belonged to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

When news of Diana’s death reaches them in Balmoral, the inner circle of Royals, led by the Queen, battened down the hatches and refused to interact with the press or public at all. The Queen wanted a quiet private funeral with no fuss or razzmatazz; she wanted ‘a period of restrained grief, followed by sober, private mourning.’

Now, doesn’t that sound healthy and cathartic, not to mention lovely and inclusive, not! Keeping so much in at all times can’t be good for the body, and yet old Queenie lived to be nearly a hundred, so what do I know…?

The Queen was even crass and petty enough to mention that Diana was no longer a member of the Royal Family, or an HRH, and therefore wasn’t entitled to all the bells and whistles of a Royal send-off. Surely no queen in history has ever been so out of touch with the mood and needs of her people. Well, maybe Marie Antoinette of France…!

The British public adored Diana. Fact. Remember the ‘outpouring of grief’ and the sea of flowers, cards and little notes and tokens left outside Buckingham Palace in her honour? Remember Elton John singing his specially re-worked hit song CANDLE IN THE WIND?

Diana had a lot of friends from the world of fashion, pop music, entertainment, charity and celebrity in general and everyone was giving their heart-broken reactions publicly. Except for the family she’d married into. The question Where is our Queen began to be asked.…

Luckily, Tony Blair, wonderfully played here by TWILIGHT actor Michael Sheen, was on hand to do some damage limitation. The dynamic young(ish) leader of the Labour Party, elected Prime Minister of Britain at the start of the summer that year, put out a statement about the ‘People’s Princess,’ the ‘Queen of Hearts’ and the ‘beacon of hope’ that was Diana, Princess of Wales, that struck just the right note with the grieving public.

When people began to express extreme doubt as to the need for such a useless monarchy, even the Queen realised that it was time to act. Tony Blair issued the reluctant monarch with a to-do list re Diana’s death designed to get her back into the peoples’ good books. Personally, I feel like it was all too little and too late, but whatever, she did it anyway. One didn’t want to lose one’s privileged position, you see…

I was disgusted by the way the Queen Mother, whom I’d always thought of as a harmless old dear, was so anti-Diana in her sentiment, so vehement in wanting nothing to change in the Royal Family’s routine on Diana’s account. Ditto the rude and arrogant Prince Philip, who, when told there’s some bad news about Diana, barks, Why? What’s she done now…? Such truly awful, horrible people.

The film is interspersed with real live footage of the news as it broke over Diana’s death. The lovely Kay Burley is there for SKY NEWS and some of the BBC lads are there too. There’s even a clip of the famous PANORAMA interview in which a shy Diana peeping out from under her long eyelashes tells a now-disgraced Martin Bashir that ‘there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a little crowded, yeah.’   

This film is a must for Royal watchers, though the Royal Family themselves don’t come across very well in it. Unlike the Blairs, a happy, normal noisy family by comparison. And if you can think of any more films about Royals past and present, let me know. I’m on a roll here.