Music and Lyrics (2007 Marc Lawrence & scr)

A daft film well summarised in my last jotting: "In the climax performance, Grant having managed to write the new song perfectly well all by himself, that fluttering sound you hear is the script flying out of the window." 

Mildred Pierce (1945 Michael Curtiz)

Fine film noir melodrama backed with great Max Steiner score (orchestrated by Friedhofer) and photographed with lots of lovely lighting detail by Ernie Haller.

Mildred really is a bitch - trying to frame Jack Carson for a murder she knows he didn't commit! She's also an idiot who doesn't realise her bitch cunt daughter is taking her for a ride.

The Yellow Rolls Royce (1964 Anthony Asquith)

A trio of sad Terence Rattigan stories about love.

The 1920s. (Or is it? My previous jotting contends that the car is a 1930 model.) Foreign office minister (whose idea of a hard day's work is to sign a document) buys his wife Jeanne Moreau said vehicle but bitchy Moira Lister reveals to him what we all know - she's having an affair with his assistant Edmund Purdom. He catches them at it in the car at Ascot.

The telephone is for speaking to the driver - you idiot!

With Roland Culver, Michael Hordern, Lance Percival.

The 1930s. (This I can be more sure about - we see the Dinner at Eight poster so must be post-1933). Gangster George C Scott buys car in Italy to use on vacation with moll Shirley MacLaine and his sidekick Art Carney. She falls for photographer Alain Delon, but Carney makes her see that if she doesn't leave him the consequences will be ghastly. This is the most effective episode, Carney particularly good and a really sympathetic character.

Then in the 1940s wealthy socialite Ingrid Bergman gets involved with Yugoslavian partisan Omar Sharif and helps him in their fight against the Germans. But he ends up sending her back to safety. A shame, really, as she's a sort of Nancy Wake type and could easily have stayed fighting alongside them. With Joyce Grenfell.

All splendidly photographed on location in widescreen by Jack Hildyard. MGM.

Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie & co-scr)

With Ronald Bronstein.

Marty Supreme may be about an egocentric, egomaniacal  table tennis player, but it moves with such momentum - over two and a half hours - that you don't mind. Frankly I find the way he manages to get his win and be there for the birth of his baby to be not at all redemptive for his behaviour and end up not caring about him one way or the other. It's a good performance though from Timothée Chalamet, who was also a producer.

It's the journey that's the pull, the way he brazenly takes the Ritz suite, romances film star Gwyneth Paltrow (for no particular reason), gets involved with her millionaire husband, hides in rubbish, takes a bath which falls through the floor, inherits a dog and loses it, wins a hustle con then loses, gets to Japan.

Evocatively photographed by Darius Khondji. Didn't understand why a fifties movie used eighties pop music, nor why the sound mixing was in favour of music over dialogue. Safdie edited it with co-writer Bronstein.

Featuring an extremely eclectic cast. Odessa A'zion, Milton Rockwell, Abel Ferrara (dog owner), Luke Manley (fat son), Tyler, The Creator (taxi driver friend), Koto Kawaguchi, Penn Jillette, Sandra Bernhard.

Safdie has ejected his brother Benny, with whom he made Uncut Gems (with Bronstien again as co-writer).

Made me think a lot about Nowhere Special, a film in which hardly anything happens, yet is totally engaging and moving.

Waking the Dead Season 8 / 9 (2009, 2011)

The end of End Game has psycho genius Ruth Gemmell given some good stuff to get her teeth into as she organises an ingenious escape from prison, then takes Boyd on a journey to kill the nutter who's killed his son (Barbara Marten) - but he can't, even though Grace will die. The genius though has let herself down somewhat as she's in the next room as Boyd, and ends up learning how not to fly.

I had a feeling we'd seen Harbinger before - I'd remembered the scene where the WPC in the empty house is set on fire. It turns out to be one of Ed 'Tall Tales' Whitmore's most successful stories, about a woman whose family seems condemned to die of illnesses and the disappearance of her husband; and the appearance of a weird looking couple.

We're misdirected to think that nurse Cecilia Noble has something to do with it.

 

Actually now I come to think of it, some of it is quite far-fetched. But an enjoyable ride. Genevieve O'Reilly is suitably mad.

Also Spence has somehow moved back into the unit after being in CID for five minutes, and a new DCI - Sarah Cavendish - played by Eva Birthistle from Bad Sisters - has joined the team after 'falling off a high wall'.

We were impressed with some of Crispin Green's editing.

We started Care, Richard Warlow, which revolves around a horribly corrupt care home which seems to be run by the children. T here's rather too much of the 'bag man' and an insane family, with Nicholas Jones and Alice Krige as the insane 'parents'  of Iddo Goldberg, Steve John Shepherd (This Life) and Charlotte Hope. The latter two play out quite an eerie scene in an old deserted house.. In an outrageous finale, Boyd suffocates the mother with a green plastic bag to get Shepherd to release his 'sister'. 

It was like Ed Whitmore had written it.

I finally (!) realised that we know nothing about Boyd's private life, never see him 'off duty'.

Waking the Dead Season 8 cont. (2009)

Substitute. Edward Bennett and Ed 'Tall Tales' Whitmore.

Eve has become involved with an Eastern European, Joseph Mawle, who is so terrified of water that he has to clean himself with wipes. Now, it may be possible that you can be that afraid of water (in his case triggered by a near drowning) but it doesn't seem credible even if true (the William Goldman rule). Anyway that's not nearly as crazy as when Eve resigns, then goes to investigate a disused hospital, on her own and without telling anyone, where all the bad guys are working from. It turns out to be a story about organ farming (what a nice way of putting it) which is quite upsetting.

The ending is a real bummer. Get this - Boyd leaves the guy - he cannot make a case stick - to be killed by the other bad guys. He leaves someone to be killed. After all his moralising. And - the guys that kill him - Boyd has evidence of their crimes. (Nigel Lindsay.) Why does't he arrest them? It's a very anti-audience ending and actually doesn't make any sense.

Spence has had enough of Ed's logic-defying scripts too and quits.

Mike Spragg has a kind of orangey colour palette going on in this one.

Then in End Game, the serial killing genius (read Hannibal Lecter) Ruth Gemmel is back, trying to entice Boyd into a game of some kind. Daniel Percival (who also directed) and Andrew Holden wrote it.

There's a couple of places where you just want Boyd to kiss her, as a surprise move.

Gina McKee stands in for Grace, who's having an operation. Alexander Siddig is a very suspicious doctor, Bertie Carvel has a small role.

Waking the Dead Season 8 (2009)

Magdalene 26. Declan Croghan. The doppelganger episode. A naked women with amnesia. A dead body in a rich woman's house. Three Turks. An insidious nun (in black and white). 

We just wished something horrible would happen to that nun and it didn't.

Sharon Maughan is Mrs Eve, since 1980. Her nude appearance must have been quite a conversation in the Eve household. Daughter Alice isn't making much headway, unfortunately. 

Unexpectedly, Stella dies. And the 'insubordinate' Katrina, Stacey Roca, becomes the new member of the team (which is actually quite guessable) in Ed Whitmore's End of the Night, in which Michelle Dockery is understandably finding it hard to get over her double rape and the murder of her brother. With Kate Fleetwood, Ian Mercer, Rory Kinnear.

Boyd has fun roasting a yuppie. And breaks into a suspect's house. But Dockery gets her revenge, killing the rapist in front of his daughter - has she really won?

Best of Waking the Dead

Anger Management. The flamenco one. And Boyd in therapy. John Milne, Andy Hay

Final Cut. The Performance one. Stephen Davis.

Cold Fusion. Ed Whitmore. S. 5 finale. Spence pursued by assassin.

Sins. Declan Croghan. The beheaded prison governor.

Pietà. Declan Croghan, Bosnia-Serbia.

Waking the Dead, Season 7 finale (2008)

Pietà, written by Declan Croghan, directed by Phillippa Langdale, edited by Adam Trotman, is one of the best, and thankfully eschews those silly woosh sound effects all over the place. No, this is a sobering story set in the Serbia-Bosnia conflict and how its reverberations are felt in London, affecting medical researcher Myana Buring - no, Anna Madeley, in fact, and her father Ron Cook (good accent). The Serbian militia now in London are the chameleon-like Sean Harris (at one point I myself began to doubt it was him), Jacek Koman (Children of Men), Emil Hostina and Anatole Taubman. And thought we recognised the mother in the flashbacks, Branca Katic. (Recognised Robert Emms, too; the other runaway is Bryony Afferson.) All acting good, action scenes well done (pulling out the sound or using melancholy music).

And Boyd has to accept the death of his son.

Felt sorry for Madeley here, being obfuscated by Mike Spraggs' lighting design

Also - what you learn. The Dutch UN troops didn't keep the Safe Zone safe. And that the war actually began when Chechen rebels attacked Serbian villages.

Coast to Coast (2003 Paul Mazursky)

The last - well, he's still alive, let's say latest - screenplay from Frederic Raphael, who wrote the novel in 1998, thus before his daughter, artist Sarah Raphael, tragically died in 2001. ( I was wondering if he was partly writing about his and his wife's own grief, but it turns out that was a ghastly episode of life imitating art.)

Married Richard Dreyfuss and Judy Davis drive across America to deliver his Thunderbird to their son David Julian Hirsh as a wedding present. Three things become clear: 1. They're not getting on too well and she is threatening divorce and sale of their home. 2. They have both had affairs. 3. One of their children has died.

They drop in on various friends and family on their journey. What's quite funny is that the entire film was shot in and around Toronto.

They encounter an angry wannabe teenage actor Owen Roth (who reminded me of one of our own relatives), and a college professor from the past, Maximilian Schell, whose former wife is still living in the same house but they don't see each other - like, weird, man.

Then a former comedy partner of Dreyfuss, played by the director. And their daughter, who's pregnant and now with a huge basketball player (Selma Blair and John Salley). Davis's ex lover, Fred Ward, who's absolutely horrible to her, and a producer who has ripped off Dreyfuss, Saul Rubinek, leading to the film's best gag.

What can I say? From the writer of Two For the Road, it's obviously really good on relationships. Most enjoyable. 

There's a moment where a couple coming to view the house are discovered in bed by Dreyfuss! How can people do such things, I said, then remembering a close family member had done something similar when viewing a boat... Meaning? You don't have to look far to see all sorts of strange and outrageous and naughty human behaviour in or close to your own life.

A TV movie, photographed by Jean Lépine, edited by Richard Halsey (Rocky, American Gigolo, Joe Versus the Volcano, and three Mazursky films: Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Moscow on the Hudson, Next Stop, Greenwich Village).

The Duchess of Duke Street - Season 2 (1977)

We were delighted to learn that season 2 has another 16 episodes; less delighted that Louisa's long lost brother Martin Shaw turns up for a job and begins to disrupt the entire staff; her mum is also taking the piss, outstaying her welcome at the hotel. Writer Julia Jones.

Then is Jeremy Paul's story, two undergraduates conspire to set up Louisa with their college professor Freddie Jones - he falls for her. Julian Fellowes is one of them!

A chauffeur inherits a fortune - £30,000. Louisa and his employer's nephew try and turn him into a gentleman - we know it isn't going to work. He is Kevin McNally.

In an unusual on location episode, Louisa travels to Charlie's bleak country pile, finds she's uninterested in her own daughter, who's something of a wild one, and that Margaret (Joanna David) is wasting away - turns out anorexia is the culprit but they have no idea what they're dealing with; she dies. Interesting to have this subject matter arising in 1977 - good for them. Maggie Wadey is the writer. Ian Cuthbertson and Liz Smith co-star.

The Lady from Shanghai (1947 Orson Welles)

Welles hated the incidental music that was snuck on quickly, when he had already created a temporary library music and effects track - the mirrors sequence should have been silent, just sound effects, for example. Another request he made that was ignored was to cut the very last scene, which PB thinks is the worst in any Orson Welles picture.

The Night of the Hunter (1955 Charles Laughton)

Nothing new to add. Mitchum's fabulous.  When Mitchum is apprehended and the boy cries out for him is memorable. We presume that crowd's going to lynch Mitchum at the end.

Waking the Dead Season 7 (2008)

One of those ones you're glad when it's over as to terribly overdone sound effects we keep referring back to a sort of pagan drug fuelled male bonding ritual which ends in death. Wounds was written by Paul Farrell. Familiar faces are Lorcan Cranitch, Ian Puleston-Davies, Christoper Fulford and Ian Dunn.

In a shock ending, Boyd's son has been found dead of an overdose. We don't think the writers used the son at all effectively in the series.

Sidney Poitier double bill: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967 Stanley Kramer) / In the Heat of the Night (1967 Norman Jewison)

In fact Dinner was released second, December 1967; Heat was August. But what a year for American cinema - Bonnie and Clyde also came out that year, and changed everything. But get this - Poitier was not even Oscar nominated for either film. Can you dig that? His performances in both films are fantastic.

To get Dinner into perspective, it is mentioned in William Rose's screenplay (which seems like it was adapted from the theatre but isn't) that in sixteen or seventeen states then, mixed race marriage was illegal. I mean, that's absolutely shattering, and puts the whole dilemma of Spencer Tracy into much sharper focus. Which as I mentioned in my review of Loving, has never been illegal in the UK or any other European country. No, it's just the fucking stupid American dickheads that have this persistent race problem.

With that in mind I don't think it can be written off as "fluff" the way Maltin glibly does.

We did think, however, that the couple are in far too much of a rush - they have only known each other ten days for Christ's sake.

And - I usually laugh at the funny and corny way the delivery boy jives with the help; but look - there's an interracial couple there getting along famously.

And then Heat, written by Sterling Silliphant from John Ball's novel (which resulted in six sequels).  "Why are you dressed in white man's clothes?" Good lord, it seems dated, but again, it's in our lifetimes. My favourite moment: when Larry Gates slaps Poitier and he immediately slaps him back - "I could have had you shot for that in the old days".

Quincy Jones' score is most interesting. Plus you have Hal Ashby editing (and assistant to the producer) and Haskell Wexler on camera. it's cinematically the more interesting of the two films.

While We're Young (2014 Noah Baumbach & scr)

Initially a rather cool film about how we've lost touch with the way things were better - that moment of 'Don't look it up on your phone, let's try and remember it' - summarised brilliantly by the closing shot of the toddler on the phone.

But it turns into a story about how 'hip' youngster Adam Driver manages to manipulate his way into Ben Stiller's documentary making world and steals his contacts while making his own film in in a most underhanded way. Stiller and Naomi Watts are great attempting to act young, Driver's fantastically edgy. Amanda Seyfried is his partner. With Charles Grodin and (fleetingly) Peter Bogdanovich.

And also about how Stiller has spent 10 years making a six hour documentary which is 'boring'.

Very well written. 

"Are you filming me??"
"Your sleeve's on fire!"

Shot by Sam Levy. Jennifer Lame, future Oscar winner of Oppenheim, does some great cross-cutting.

Life of Crime (2013 Daniel Schecter & scr)

From Elmore Leonard novel. John Hawkes and Yaslin Bey hatch a plan to kidnap crooked property developer Tim  Robbins' wife Jen An and hold her for a cool $1million ransom - but he's planning to divorce her and resists paying, egged on by mercenary girlfriend Isla Fisher. The pair have unwisely involved Nazi obsessed lunatic Mark Boone Junior. Neighbour Will Forte is peripherally involved.

There are a couple of moments when you think - why's he doing that? But otherwise this is in the main a funny crime story with a real doozy of an ending!

Silent Witness: Season 7 (2008)

Duty and Honour. Adrian Meade. Another beheaded body is found in the woods. It all links back to soldiers in Iraq.  Some tasty co-stars: Jamie Sives, Holliday Grainger (two years before Any Human Heart), Nicholas Farrell, Rupert Graves; with Richard Riddell, Elliott Jordan.

Skin. Clive Bradley & Declan Croghan. This one has the neat resolution that a supposed neo-Nazi skinhead is in fact Jewish and has been tattooing the rest of the group with AIDS-infected ink! Philip Whitchurch is the main bastard and his daughter is Jo Woodcock (Collision). John Dougall is a right wing politician involved.

Boyd is a terrible father.

Silent Witness: Season 7 (2008)

Sins. Declan Croghan. Who beheaded the prison governor? Halfway through, I think his daughter (Alexandra Moen) bashed his head in and her creepy psychiatrist boyfriend (Michael Maloney) did the decapitation. Though I suspect Ruth Gemmel of something too... Possible suspects include David Schofield and Tony Maudsley.

It turned out I was half right, which is pretty good for me - I'm usually wildly off. I thought Moen's performance was fantastic; and Gemmel's good too. So I have to rate the director Daniel Percival (he also directed Death Comes to Pemberley).

And in flashback - Boyd almost kills a man his son is with...

Darling (1965 John Schlesinger)

What's it all about, Freddie? A young woman restlessly tries to find happiness of some sort but doesn't, can't. Why? What in fact is she looking for? Is the old writer that Dirk Bogarde interviews a key here? She says she doesn't understand their conversation, is just happy to be accepted. Fred Raphael has a great way of writing empty headed conversation, the intelligentsia (with a barbed fork) and the muddles people make of their lives.

It has a great momentum, through the writing and Jim Clark's catch-me-if-you-can editing. Though it does go on a bit. There's a most peculiar moment where a couple make love in front of guests; then a bizarre party where it looks like everyone is on drugs (but isn't shown that way) - the empty trappings of the rich and infamous. In that 'Darling' achieves some sort of fame through doing nothing and being talentless, the film is actually even more relevant today than it was in the sixties.

I mean, you just know that things like the charity dinner, with black youths being used as colonial serving boys, is a very deliberate jibe which you'll find in Fred's original screenplay. (Plus talk of famine as some plump society dame chomps food.)

It's pretty clear she doesn't really enjoy sex. What does she enjoy? What's it all about, Freddie?

'I remember John calling me from New York after the premiere and saying, "Well, dear, it's a hit. Don't ask me why, but they love it." ' Jim Clark, Dream Repairman. (Which also answers Q's good question - was Schlesinger 'out'? Yes indeedy. Jim also thought it went on a bit.

Malcolm Cooke is the sound editor. Kenneth Higgins shot it