Edited by Úna Ní Dhonghaíle, photographed by Charlotte Bruus Anderson.
A most Kafkaesque situation from the Iranians - '"tell them to make the deal" - it's not very helpful, is it? Then the moment the debt repayment meeting is adjourned and two days later she's charged with more fictional crimes.
Narges Rashidi and Joseph Fiennes are the unfortunate couple. Oh - that's who he is. I thought he was some unknown.
I only even heard of this, tucked away as it is on Disney+, because it's another fine piece of work from Úna Ní Dhonghaíle. But the true story of Trudy Ederle's fights against illness, society, her 'trainer', her family, the media, sexism etc etc. and her triumph at not only being the first woman to swim the channel but to have done it two hours faster than her closest male counterpart is rich and wonderful. Jeff Nathanson tells the tale, basing it on the non-fiction account by Glenn Stout.
Daisy Ridley I remembered correctly has been in some Star Wars films, also Mr Selfridge, and Branagh's Murder on the Orient Express. She and her swimming doubles are fine, and there's good support from Kim Bodnia and Jeanette Hain as her parents and Tilda Cobham-Hervey her sister; with Stephen Graham a welcome presence in the film's final section. Plus Chris Ecclestone, Glenn Fleshler (promoter), Sian Clifford (trainer), Alexander Karim (French contestant). The French Contestant sounds like a Wes Anderson film.
Music by Amelia Warner, photographed by Oscar Faura (and underwater by Peter Zuccarini), production designer Nora Takacs Ekberg.
Hurray!
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| Van Gogh, we were both thinking |
Why though isn't it The Young Woman and the Sea? Or - Young Woman and Sea?
Tony McNamara (The Great, The Favourite, Poor Things) adapted Warren Adler's 'The War of the Roses' without his distinctive black comedy; the most innovative thing about this version is the sarcastic repartee between the two Brits - Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch, who also exec produced - and how it's received by their American friends. Cue dinner party scene where the Yanks try to do it themselves and fail.
Kate McKinnon, Andy Samberg, Ncuti Gatwa, Sunita Mani, Zoe Chao, Jamie Demetriou, Allison Janney.
It's rather over-edited. We quite enjoyed it - wasn't the best or worst thing we'd seen.
It was actually filmed in Devon. It was? No way!
Claire Bloom travels to Berlin to visit her brother (Geoffrey Toone) and his German wife, Hildegarde Knef, who seems to be up to something. Then somewhat shifty James Mason turns up, and the plot thickens. Bloom is radiant in earlyish role; Mason's accent less convincing.
Good on location filming of the wintry city by Desmond Dickinson, with Reed throwing in his famous Dutch tilts here and there.
Wasn't quite sure the lapse into romantic was working but the ending - all flight and tension - is highly successful.
Good support from Aribert Wäscher as the ruthless East German and Ernst Schröder as the agent he's after. Schröder was a noted theatre actor, also appeared in The Longest Day and The Odessa File.
We know Knef from Fedora but one of her first films was the important German post-war drama Die Mörder sind unter uns in 1946.
Written by Harry Kurnitz, from a story by Walter Ebert. Music: John Addison. Production design: Andrej Andrejew. Camera: Denys Coop, Robert Day. Editor: Bert Bates.
Naughty Libyans are at work using classic MI5 destabilizing tactics.
I could not work in Slough House nor for Lamb. He and Ho remain thoroughly unpleasant characters.
Jack Lowden, Saskia Reeves, Aimee Ffion-Edwards, Tom Brooke, Christopher Chung. Working with Kristen Scott Thomas: Ruth Bradley, Cherelle Skeete, James Callis ('front desk'). Nick Mohammed, Abraham Popoola (The Curse, Cruella), Victoria Hamilton.
Too Much. Lena Dunham thing. Did at least finish it.
Etoile. Amy Sherman-Palladino thing about ballet. No! Couldn't get past first episode! Didn't even finish the first episode!
Insomnia. Very daft Vicky McClure thing.
Cold Water and The Guest. Both linked by Eve Myles, who should know better. Both unbelievable rubbish.
Dope Girls. Just couldn't get into it.
Girl Friend. More unbelievable rubbish... but I think audiences realise it is. Certainly the ones on Gogglebox seem to.
Zero Day. Robert de Niro President thing. Just never went further than episode 1.
The Iris Affair. Giant super-computer thing? Who commissions this stuff?
Paradise. Dan Fogelman's gone mad. Or it's just not our thing.
Hostage. Farcical Suranne Jones thing.
Suspicion. Oh yeah - that one. More fucking rubbish.
The Assassin. The Williams Brothers. One episode enough.
The Forsytes. You just know immediately whether something is going to work, Bad script => bad acting.
The Ridges. Really annoying over-edited and filmed in that irritating in-out zoom style that I thought and hoped had gone out of fashion.
Murder Before Evensong. 1980s priest-copper Grantchester rehash. Boring. Matthew Lewis weirdly (intentionally?) evoking Bertie Carvel in Dalgleish.
Summerwater. Shenanigans at holiday park in Scotland. Seemed so far fetched just couldn't even finish episode 1. Complete with erotic ghosts. Who writes this stuff?
I Know This Much Is True. Well, I don't know it was rubbish, but when it opened, identical twin Mark Ruffalo cut his own hand off, and we thought 'Yeahhh.... Not sure if this is really our baaaaaag'.
Wild Cherry. Can't remember. Seemed pale and insincere. Also that it had a 5/10 rating didn't help.
They didn't really need to make Airplane - this is it already.
Surely a contender for the so-bad-it's-good movie of the year.
Really bad dialogue - Don Ingalls is the credited *writer*. Badly directed and edited.
And, an extremely eclectic cast. Karen Black, Charlton Heston, George Kennedy, Effrem Zimbalist Jr., Susan Clark, Helen Reddy, Linda Blair, Dana Andrews, Roy Thinnes, Sid Caesar, Myrna Loy, Gloria Swanson (somehow looking younger than she did in Sunset Boulevard!) and Nancy Olson (also from that film).
First saw it on 21 July 1975. Thought it was 'suspenseful' and had 'good colour photography'! (Philip Lathrop.)
We celebrate Woody's 90th birthday with his last hit and his last Oscar (he was also nominated as director) - but you don't need an excuse to watch his exploration of 'Golden Age thinking' (he may well have come up with this phrase). He writes the various characters so brilliantly and then a gallery of amazing people perform them brilliantly. And it's also as much a love letter to Paris as Manhattan was to New York.
I love that Gil reads about himself in the past through Adriana's journal (Carla Bruni's reading of this and the way the camera moves is exceptional), and that he only cottons on to his fiancee having an affair through the intuition of Ernest Hemingway!
We went from Rachel McAdams and one Wilson to Rachel McAdams and another.
Why this one so much? I've always loved time travel stuff I suppose as far back as The Time Tunnel and The Time Machine. And Paris is such a great city.
You don't hear much about the Bezuchas these days. well... he did do Let Him Go.
For once Sarah Jessica Parker is cast absolutely right as an uptight and thoroughly unlikable women who somehow Dermot Mulroney has fallen for and somehow his brother Luke Wilson finds irresistible. What a weird family. Mum Diane Keaton, playing it with a steely edge, is dying, but we didn't really need the epilogue with them celebrating Christmas without her. Christmas? Yes, it's a sort of Christmas film.
Rachel McAdams is good too as the disruptive sister. With Craig Nelson, Ty Giordano, Brian White, Elizabeth Reasor, Paul Schneider, and - top billed - Claire Danes.
We see / hear the original 'Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas', sung by Judy Garland from Meet Me in St Louis, after she's changed it. See here. The original went ' ‘Have yourself a merry little Christmas // It may be your last // Next year we may all be living in the past.’ I think these things need to be told.
Michael Giacchino wrote the score. And Jonathan Brown shot it. Jane Ann Stewart designed it and Jeffrey Ford was the editor.
A film that bears the awful distinction of having its ending changed as a result of a preview screening. Alex (Glenn Close) originally killed herself but following audience reaction the ending was changed to the wife (Anne Archer) finishing her off with a handily found gun.
To be honest, the original ending sounded a bit crap. The husband (Michael Douglas) is charged with murder but then the wife finds the tape the psycho has made in which she threatens suicide so the wife can clear her husband. Yawn. Also any cheating husband would have gotten rid of that tape immediately - incriminating evidence.
I mean, it's bad enough having a husband cheat on you but to then attract the disturbed psycho you'd find hard to forgive.
It plays about as well as it ever did. I blame writer James Dearden. Though the scene where he comes to her apartment and attacks her and she fights back I thought worked rather well (though what the fuck was his motivation?)
'Oh, she's washing up', Q commented in one of the sex scenes.
Photographed by Howard Atherton. Edited by Michael Kahn and Peter Berger.
Lyne made eighties films that you kinda don't want to revisit: Foxes, Flashdance, 9 1/2 Weeks, Indecent Proposal, Jacob's Ladder, Lolita and Unfaithful.
Michael Douglas kept reminding me of Family Guy's Quagmire.
Also what the fuck is 'spaghetti sauce'?
One of the key words describing this film on Amazon is 'Cerebral'. I think not.
Could have been the seed for Hacks. An aging advertising genius hires a young journalist to research her life and write a decent obituary - at least, that's the way it starts. Shirley MacLaine ends up semi-adopting a small child (AnnJewel Lee DIxon) and becomes a DJ, whilst teaching budding Amanda Seyfried how to act. Sorry - not act. What am I talking about? How to, er, fulfil her potential or something. See? It's Hacks.
Shirley MacLaine - I was thinking while it was going on - is quite bonkers. In real life.
It was quite enjoyable even though you can't help watching it and thinking that there's a better film going on somewhere else that you're missing out on.
With Anne Heche, Thomas Sadoski, Philip Baker Hall, Tom Everett Scott, Todd Louiso, Millicent Martin.
Grim and powerful social realist drama set in Mexico City, lives of impoverished youths (and adults) particularly well caught, with the odd surreal moment.
Throwing egg into camera noticeable amongst other directorial effects. Good music (Rodolfo Halffter and Gustavo Pittaluga) and photography (Gabriel Figueroa). Incredibly ironic ending - murdered boy thrown away into garbage - one of the most memorable of all film endings, in fact.
Estela Inda, Miguel Inclan, Alfonso Mejia, Roberto Cobo (almost an Adrien Brody type), Alma Delia Fuentes, Mario Ramirez (lost boy).
Wondered if it was the influence on Cidada de Deus?
Lindsay Lohan has grown up to be the mother of Julia Butters and is about to be married to Manny Jacinto, who has his own daughter Maitreyi Ramakrishnan - the girls don't get along. So it's something of a bummer when the girls swap for Lindsay and her mom Jamie Lee Curtis and vice versa - cueing all sorts of young-person-in-old-body type 'jokes'.
Jordan Weiss's screenplay really isn't very good. And the film ends slackly, which isn't good either. Then adds an even lamer end....
... and so not for the first time, the outtakes are the most fun thing in it, like they had more fun making it than it turned out.
Bette Midler is 80! No way! Both she and Mayim Bialik deliver great versions of 'That's the Story of Love'. 'Story'? No. 'Glory'. And that's not Bialik singing, apparently. Oh well. Bette's version is good, anyway.
Two girls meet and become instant best friends, even though they come from very different backgrounds. Mary Agnes Donohue adapted Iris Rainer's hit novel.
Dante Spinotti shot it.
Th - th - that's all folks!
Cinematographer Lyle Vincent did want to shoot on 35mm celluloid, after the style of Gordon Willis, though ultimately he used an Arri Alexa 35, but he does manage to emulate that look.
Feels like it's from a novel, but isn't. Suspected murderer Matthew Rhys moves in next to reclusive writer Claire Danes, semi-deranged FBI agent David Lyons drops in in the middle of the night to warn her.. Set various plots in motion and see what happens. I have to say that I love the way it begins in a place in time and then moves forwards - none of this 'three months earlier' bollocks. (Though episode seven - of eight - is completely a flashback, it's OK by then.) Luckily it's an ending you feel happy to have reached.
Engrossing without being necessarily very believable. That bit where he's copying the files off the laptop as they return home is soooooooo clichéd (as is doping the dogs).
Why is she living in such a fucking big house? Sell up, already!
Not a great title. Danes - Rhys interaction is good, though we wonder whether Danes is getting a bit samey.
Good editing as well in ep.1 Philip Neel. then the next two have different editors. Fuck me.
Directed by Antonio Campos and Tyne Rafaeli. And with various writers, makes the DP the main consistent creative force at work here across all eight episodes.. There are ten executive producers, a co-executive producer, a supervising producer, two producers, and two co-producers. And an associate producer.
Concerning the death of trusty doorman Lester, his involvement with the mob (Bobby Cannavale) and a trio of billionaires who are gambling in the Arconia's basement - these are Logan Lerman, Renee Zellweger and Christoph Waltz. Also new in the building - Beanie Feldstein.
Louise Kennedy's first and only novel adapted by Ailbhe ('Alva') Keogan and directed by Dawn Shadforth running around three hours.
A Catholic barmaid and teacher, played by Lola Petticrew, befriends a Catholic family with Protestant husband. This being the Troubles of 1975 they're extremely unpopular and he is beaten to shit. The little boy is in her class at school; the older brother loves reading but is disillusioned and probably radicalised. And we sense has a crush on the teacher.
Concurrently she meets and falls for older married barrister Tom Cullen, who's Protestant, thus their affair has to remain doubly secret.
So it's 'Romeo and Juliet', in essence, complete with tragic ending. Its sense of place and conflict in frightening times is well caught.
Gillian Anderson is the alcoholic mother (great accent but sometimes indecipherable) and Martin McCann the not great brother. With Lorcan Cranitch.
Lots of familiar seventies songs, and incidental music by David Holmes.
Lola was in She Said, Weinstein scandal thing, Jimmy Nesbitt's daughter in Bloodlands, another Troubles one called Say Nothing last year. Cullen we know from Downton and more recently The Gold, as well as that Vicky McClure bollocks Insomnia.
Well it did not seem like almost ten years ago we last watched it. It was written by Gary Ross and Anne Spielberg (Steven's sister).
The famous duet on the giant piano looks like it was done for real - certainly they are hitting all the right notes. Robert Loggia looks fitter than Hanks.
Woody's production designer Santo Loquasto designed it, leading to several cries of 'Oh how very Loquasto!' Barry Malkin is the editor, Barry Sonnenfeld the DP.
I was interested to learn that Penny shot Hanks' scenes first with his younger self David Moscow so Hanks could see how he behaved.
If I had to carp I might suggest that Heather Tobias's performance is a little too shrieky and manic - she in fact became upset over the birthday party scene and stormed off, which is why it ends up just on Dore with wild tracks of audio around her - and that Dore herself might have been allowed just one laugh or little smile. (She was in fact only sixty six at the time.)
"Two steaks. Same day. Totally different."
"Your hair's getting longer."
"I had it cut yesterday."
But central to it all and most successful is the relationship between Phil Davis and Ruth Sheen, who's unforgettably good.
And the film is still strong and moving,
Well edited by Jon Gregory with an eye to the performances. Photographed by Roger Pratt. Music by Andrew Dickerson.
Well, we found this film quite bizarre - almost as if the writer-director was tripping. It does get somewhere in the end, but it's a really strange journey - we're not quite sure what Michael Sheen was doing in it. (He looked older when wearing the long hair extensions of his 'youth'.) The frequent changes of aspect ratio aren't very helpful. The production designer / art director were kept busy.
A man on a train keeps jumping around in time and into alternative versions of his life and that of his brother / cousin, an unrecognisable Cary Elwes from The Princess Bride. An eclectic cast features Nathalie Emmanuel, Katherine Kelly, Phyllis Logan, John Thomson, Danny Ashok, Anna Lundberg, Mia McKenna-Bruce, Sophie Simnett, Robin Askwith and Hayley Mills!
I wouldn't write it off altogether but I would definitely file under 'misfire'.
