Picturenose

Kings for a day?

I was clearly in trouble. The take away food had been ordered, the beers were in the fridge and I sat my good lady down in order to treat her to a screening of David O. Russell’s Three Kings (1999). It was partly her choice - she said something about George Clooney and, after allowing her a few moments reflection, I thew a bucket of cold water over her and she was back to normal. I knew there was something wrong when she spent the first fifteen minutes with her face in her hands - this is, after all, not a movie many people would like to watch while eating.

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Blues heaven…
It was with a poignant shrug, a sigh and a great deal of whining on my part that I was first dragged bodily toward watching this movie, many years ago. The object of my desire at the time had said: “It looks great - it’s the first in a trilogy of semi-autobiographical films about the playwright Neil Simon.” Imagine my excitement. It didn’t take long, however, for me to be introduced once again to a concept not unfamiliar to me - that of being proven horribly wrong.

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The best of times, the worst of times

Has a movie ever consigned so many catchphrases to posterity?

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Angry young boy
Young writer-director Shane Meadows is fast making a name for himself as a social commentator in the mould of Ken Loach – his films, such as Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002) and A Room for Romeo Brass (1999) are uncompromising and unforgiving, but have a solid respect for audiences who want to be entertained, rather than preached to. Read more »

Black gold, black hearts, bloody masterpiece

At the risk of being unbearably smug, reviewing films for a living can be an absolutely wonderful occupation - and 2008 would appear to be shaping up into one of the best years for flicks in living memory.

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My name is Colin and I’m a Batman fan. I have been Batman-free for two years. There, it’s out of the way. As regular readers will know, James is the one who generally goes to see the films that have subtle metaphors and maybe actually mean something. Me? Yes, I watch them too but every so often I like escapist movies with an inordinate amount of gratuitous violence and pyrotechnics. So, it was with enormous pleasure I came to know of two movies coming up that fit the bill nicely.

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Amazing Amélie

Pre-Iraq II, Time magazine ran a cover story rationalizing the ‘freedom fries’ line - WHY FRANCE IS DIFFERENT. Interestingly, the cover star was Audrey Tautou, which was a pic ed’s nice take on softening the editorial frog-bashing. This was indicative of the unarguable fact that nobody could quite rationalize - beyond Tautou’s indescribable beauty - what made Amélie (as it was known in the anglophone territories) such a sensation in spite of its unashamedly atavistic celebration of a dying Frenchness, right down to Amelie’s clogs, the Catholic notion of charity, the Proustian notion of nostalgia.

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Bad day at the office?

Thank your luckies you’re not CC Baxter, Jack Lemmon’s resentfully downtrodden clerk in an NYC corporation, who has become so cowed by the predations of his boss and the insecurity of his position he allows his superiors use of his flat to have it off with their mistresses. He’s 9 to 5 – they’re cinq-a-sept. Baxter’s immediate overlord, Sheldrake, is a nauseatingly complacent rat played to oleaginous perfection by Fred MacMurray whose attempts to ingratiate himself with Lemmon’s character amount to no more than using the insulting and hated nickname ‘Buddy Boy’ to a man he is doubly exploiting.

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I heard there was a new trailer out for M. Night Shyamalan’s new thing, The Happening. Starring Mark Wahlberg, it is - somewhat astoundingly - a supernatural thriller. His last commercial effort, The Lady in the Water, was critically acclaimed. Critically acclaimed as being complete rubbish, in fact.

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Comedy coup

Is Neal Hefti’s misleadingly jaunty theme tune for The Odd Couple derived from Klezmer? It should be, because writer Neil Simon’s stratospheric comedy of bad manners is possibly one of the most New York-Jewish films ever made. True, there are no references to nebbechim or kasha or bubelehim or goyim or jokes about protective mums and rabbis from Chelm, but one always feels they are about to break out, and the central characters’ endless bickering grows out of Talmudic logic and the letter of moral contracts. That and the fact that the credits read like a Tel Aviv phone book.

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