Both Hugh Grant and Haley Bennett are funny taking the piss out of their different musical genres - he the ex-eighties popstar and she the Billie Piper sex dancer. The Pop! video is fabulous.
Brad Garrett is from Everybody Loves Raymond.
Susan Morse edited again. Her last film for Woody had been Celebrity in 1998. A Castle Rock film.
Composer Adam Schlesinger also wrote the lyrics of 'Way Back Into Love' and 'Don't Write Me Off', Lawrence wrote 'Love Autopsy'. The music and lyrics do work well.
Emma won the Best Actress BAFTA but lost the Oscar to Susan Sarandon in Dead Man Walking - I haven't seen that for a while but would still contend Emma should have won it. And whilst the Academy gave her the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, BAFTA instead awarded John Hodge for Trainspotting, another robbery. Emma's screenplay (and possibly Miss Austen's novel) is a masterclass in dramatic irony.
Michael Coulter's photography is great, and I don't just mean the 'pretties'. For example there's a scene where Emma gets out of bed with a candle and walks down a corridor and you can see it's not just the candle that's providing the light but lots of other subtle flourishes of lighting - very clever. He was BAFTA and Oscar nominated but lost to John Toll for Braveheart.
Hugh Grant's hesitancy when entering a room kept making me laugh.
I love the scene where Emma and Gemma are talking and the camera tracks back down a corridor where a curtain is being blown in by the wind - I don't think we can see the women any more - and they stop talking, and the camera just stays there for a second longer than you think it will.
Sandra Bullock is a romance novelist who is kidnapped by Daniel Radcliffe - he wants her ancient language translation skills to find some priceless artefact. Book cover model Channing Tatum comes clumsily to the rescue after real rescue guy Brad Pitt is knocked off. Manager Da/Vine Joy Randolph comes after them.
It's as bad as it sounds.
For some reason the moment where Bullock falls to the bathroom floor and offscreen we hear her say "Right. Right-o" I found really funny.
You can see they're getting on well by the number of single two shots there are between them. Susan Morse edited.
I don't think The Grand on White Street is there any longer.
Castle Rock.
It has a choreographed rhythm, e.g. the red clad schoolgirls, in church, characters sitting or standing simultaneously. Written by Eleanor Catton. Most successful.
The cast: Anya Taylor Joy, Bill Nighy, Johnny Flynn (Fleming in Operation Mincemeat, One Life. The Clouds of Sils Maria, The Dig), Josh O'Connor (hilarious), Mia Goth, Callum Turner (War & Peace), Miranda Hart, Rupert Graves, Gemma Whelan, Tanya Reynolds (Fanny Lye Deliver'd) and Connor Swindells (both Sex Ed).
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| Johnny Flynn. Still has noticeable facial scars from dog attack when he was three |
Photographed by Christopher Blauvelt.
Tony Parsons' novel adapted by Kevin Hood.
Take this:
Add a touch of this:
Clint is visibly relaxed on the Carmel cliffs above the Pacific, with his adopted baby deer, Basset hound and young Alison, talking to a ridiculously over-dressed Iain Johnstone. They talk about Clint's early career and his Universal bit part days, Rawhide, Leone and on.
Interesting to hear the differences in two august film critics. Pauline Kael thinks he can barely act, is a lousy director and his later films are right wing political. Dilys Powell loves his films, and thinks he's a great actor (in the Tracy, Mitchum, Stewart mould) and a good director. It's clear which critic I go with.
Editor Ferris Webster rated him over Sturges and Frankenheimer for his consistency. (No doubt he would have revised this opinion in Clint's mixed eighties period.) Richard Burton also rated his acting as one of those people who seem to be doing nothing much but conveying a lot.
Clint reveals that he loves the quaint names of pubs in England and so named The Hog's Breath Inn in that tradition. That he takes his evening run along the beach, views the latest film releases in the local cinema, both without harassment, is a tribute to his standing in the community.
A BBC production. Funny to see all the clips cropped to 4x3 and of dubious quality.
Another experiment to prove, er.. something or other, has some awful people join our crew in The Good Place. But it's finally proven to judge Maya Rudolph that the points system is fallible and our crew move to the proper Good Place, in which everyone (including Lisa Kudrow) has become lifeless, joyless zombies... until they are introduced to the idea that they can go through a door into nothingness. To die, in fact.
Yes, had I been paying attention and took notes I would have known quite a bit about philosophy by the end of the 52nd episode.
Jason / Manny Jacinto great interjection: "Chess mate!" And one of his stoner buddies: "Why are ghosts white? Are they racists?"
And of course the great thing is that our Eleanor (who also directs in this season), Kristen Bell, is the most fucked up and selfish one, but because of her tough life, she manages to be smart and lead the group when things look impossible.
One complaint - the Bad Place people's bad language just isn't bad enough and sounds stupid.
Oh yes, the whole thing is forking ballocks. And yet somehow does make you think.
Rupert Penry-Jones thinks Sally Hawkins was 'persuaded' out of marrying him. Certainly she took stock of her godmother's advice (Alice Krige) but in fact it's her horrible and snobbish father (Anthony Head) who has forbidden her to marry... clearly Penry-Jones didn't get this information as he's rather grumpy with her.
Poor Anne Elliot is so put-upon. Her sister Julia Davis is horrible to her and younger sister Amanda Hale feigns illness and is also truly selfish. And cousin Tobias Menzies, when he turns up, is an unbelievable shit (we find out in the nick of time)... though by the look of her, Anne has worked this out already.
Peter Wight, Marion Bailey and Joseph Mawle are other notable cast members.
Some of David Odd's hand held camera (looks like he's his own operator), particularly at the beginning, is a little jarring, but his ending (as I've jotted before) through the streets of Bath is sensational, as is that last so slow kiss.
Scenes shot on the Cobb at Lyme Regis look like they were all filmed on the same day, but look fabulous.
Simon Burke wrote it. Martin Phipps wrote the music.
Another Max Bygraves social conscience piece, as he takes on the job of teacher at a tough inner city school. Written by John Cresswell from Michael Croft novel, based upon his own experience of being a supply teacher. The scene with the Julius Caesar reading actually in life turned into a school play where Croft managed to get half the school involved in an outside production, which led to the (eventual) formation of the National Youth Theatre, which occupied him for the rest of his life.
TPTV had somehow picked up a print where the little bits of bad language had been excised! Gritty episodes include near seduction by 15 year old (Claire Marshall, I think) in overcrowded room full of younger siblings.
German poster gets down to hard tacks:
Donald Pleasance is the uninterested head but Geoffrey Keen is vile as the brutish woodwork teacher. With Betty McDowall, Jean Anderson (Morse, GBH, Lucky Jim, Lease of Life) and Richard O'Sullivan as a delinquent.
The ending - if not exactly downbeat - is sober. Also refreshing that he doesn't end up dating the fellow teacher.
A Bryanstone production. DP Paul Beeson. Music Laurie Johnson.
By this time Bygraves was already a writer and singer of hits, an impressionist and a radio and TV actor. Ended up much on TV, in his own show, and as a singer / entertainer. Film appearances were rare. And O'Sullivan did have a career after Man About the House, with its sequel Robin's Nest, and then multi-series Dick Turpin and Me and My Girl (1984-88). At 80, he's still with us.
Gill Hornby's novel was based on the remaining Jane Austen letters and switches the focus to sister Cassandra, played later in life by Keeley Hawes and earlier by Synnøve Karlsen, both rather good. She has turned down a marriage offer from a Henry Hobday (Max Irons) because she promised her now-dead betrothed she would never marry anyone else. (And also, we feel, to be an ally for Jane (Patsy Ferran) who we doubt will marry.)
The villain of the piece is the sister-in-law Mary, played well by Jessica Hynes and Liv Hill. And the girl being evicted is Rose Leslie, who we know best from two seasons of Vigil.
Interesting faces in four part BBC drama, most enjoyable. The one I couldn't really remember was Persuasion. Must watch that again (the 2022 Dakota Johnson version has very mixed reviews), and Emma.
Director Aisling Walsh. Music by Dominik Scherrer (pleased to see he's still going), DP Si Bell - oh, Si Bell! Lovely candle-lit stuff. Editor Alex Mackie (1 & 3), Anne Sopel (2 & 4).
Hornby is Nick's sister. She attributes their writing careers to having divorced parents in the 60s and 70s, something that was then unusual, that made them outsiders but also observers; and being dropped off at the local library every Saturday morning.
We didn't really get from it why Cassie destroyed most of her sister's letters but the thinking is it was to protect her inner secrets, her privacy, particularly with regard to her periods of dark depression.
Hazel Court was the only name I knew either in front of or behind the camera in this short low-budget B movie from Eros Pictures. A blonde (Zena Marshall) picks up a confident man (Griffith Jones) from outside a prison and enlists him to help with a bit of safe cracking. The man is in fact an insurance investigator, undercover, but it doesn't matter because she drugs him and frames him for murder. Court is the overly enunciating boss of Jones who helps him finds the murderer Robert Percival.
Of the leads, Court initially carved something of a niche for herself in horror films (The Curse of Frankenstein, then Corman Poes); both ended up regularly on TV.
It wasn't very good, really.
It's translated as 'The Does' which is what Jacqueline Sassard is chalking on the floor when Stéphane Audran picks her up. They go off to out-of-season St Tropez, and when Jean-Louis Trintignant enters the scene, things start veering into romantic complication.
I wasn't sure where Chabrol was going with this one until near the end, but if you think about it, Sassard picks up and examines that poisoned dagger quite near the beginning.
Henri Attal and Dominique Sardi are the annoying and childish friends.
It's moodily photographed by Jean Rabier, again, with good music from Pierre Jansen. It's another chilly relationship / murder from Chabrol's key period.
Sassard should have retired on this one, but it was 1969's less loved le Voleur de Crimes (though I think this is a cameo done as a favour to Trintignant's wife Nadine, who wrote and directed it).
It was Groundhog Day. Which is all bollocks, by the way. If you can see a shadow, the sun's out. If you can't, the sun's in. If the sun's out, it suggests the weather is better.
I worked out at one point that there were 41 different days depicted, but for him to get so good as a pianist - how long did that take??
It's really about all of us in our boring, routine lives, and how in order to make our lives better, we have to do things better, to change. It wasn't nominated for any Oscars but BAFTA were sensible enough to award Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis the award for Best Screenplay.
Surprised we'd left it so long. It's surprisingly serious.
It's funny how all the indoors smoking seems quite shocking now.
He wrote the screenplay, too, with Jay Cocks, based on the novel by Edith Wharton. Marty's doing some really interesting things with the camera, and his and Thelma's editing is quite layered and complicated. almost as though at times the film is unfolding in front of you.
It's a tragedy, basically. Engaged New Yorker Daniel Day Lewis meets separated cousin Michelle Pfeiffer and falls in love with her, but they can't do anything about it without bringing their elite families into disrepute. The betrothed, Winona Ryder, eventually finds out but by then she's pregnant and the wedding goes ahead. Goes on a bit too long, really.
Engaging support from Alec McCown, Miriam Margolyes, Sian Phillips, Geraldine Chaplin, Richard E Grant, Mary Beth Hurt, Stuart Wilson, Michael Gough, Norman Lloyd, Jonathan Pryce, Robert Sean Leonard and (in a tiny part) June Squibb.
Artfully photographed by Michael Ballhaus with Florian as first assistant.. Production design Dante Ferretti. Music Elmer Bernstein. Alisa Lepselter is the first assistant editor. Skip Livesay is the supervising sound editor, Tom Fleischman the re-recording mixer.
OK, I was wrong, There was an Irish Civil War in 1923 between the Irish Free State and the IRA. However, this might still act as a mirror for what's going on between Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleason. It's also about artistic freedom and the trappings of boring normalcy. (As you get older you don't have much time to waste.)
The animals are incredible.
I think it's American opera singer Jessye Norman performing the Brahms.
It was nominated for nine Oscars and didn't win any - is this a record of some kind? Won BAFTAs for Outstanding British Film of the Year (something McDonagh was suitably sarcastic about), Best screenplay and for Kerry Condon and Barry Keoghan (who are both fabulous).
Ur. What's going on? The four are trying to relive their lives but work out they can never get to the good place. So they try and do good for others including Tahani's sister and Eleanor's mum.
When they are rescued to Janet's neutral space, she (D'Arcy Carden) plays them all, but they should have used the actors' voices - it would have been funnier. Though in Episode 9 when she burps and it turns into Cher 'I Believe' is hilarious.
Larry Beinhart wrote the novel 'American Hero' which was written for the screen by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet, and has that recognisably fast, funny and mad dialogue from State and Main. In fact we really must get more into David Mamet. This was extremely enjoyable.
Robert de Niro is the fixer brought in to distract attention from President's sexual misconduct prior to an election. He enlists the help of film producer Dustin Hoffman, and they stage a war with Albania.
I had expected Kirsten Dunst to turn up on TV saying 'I'm not Albanian', but it went another way...
With Anne Heche, Dennis Leary, Willie Nelson, Andrea Martin, Woody Harrelson, William H Macy, Kirsten Dunst.
Gorgeously lit by Robert Richardson. Edited by Stu Linder. Music by Mark Knopfler.
His only film made outside Japan has a yakuza travelling to LA to reunite with his brother, who is running a drug gang. You know Takeshi - his films can be quite hard to grasp the first time - his story-telling is quite elliptical. But you get there in the end. This is his usual mixture of ultra-violence and comedic moments, one involving a Mafia crime boss on the beach (yes, beaches again). Some remarkable visual moments. e.g. machine gun battle done in quick flashes of fire edits (Takeshi is the editor).
But there's an unexpectedly sweet relationship developing - not between Takeshi and his brother, but with one of the members of his gang, played by Omar Epps (known for being in House). Though from their first encounter - for me a laugh out loud moment - you wouldn't have thought so.
Great music as ever by Joe Hisaishi.
