That’s where we’re at, Future Angie! After her parents, Chinese father Fai (KaiChow Lau) and American mother Veronica (Liz Waters), suddenly get divorced, high school student and teen artist Angie Chen (Emma Galbraith) records her thoughts for a video diary and turns to secret hookups with her private school’s most popular jock Liam (William Magnuson). They keep the relationship secret from their friends and Liam is already dating the whitest person Angie could ever imagine, popular blonde influencer Sheryl White (Emily Garrett). Angie and Liam hook up after school in her bedroom and Angie thinks he feels about her how she does about him but at the same time gains empowerment from a gradual mastery of sex, which briefly engenders fantasies about other boys in school. Then she discovers her father has moved on from his family with a new woman in his life, another Chinese, Min (ShanShan Jin) whose daughter Fang (Thanh Phuong Bui) is Angie’s age. When Angie has to contend with being paired in class with Sheryl for a literature project she discovers appearances can be deceptive because Sheryl’s life is far from perfect. The girls have a lot in common. Angie realises that Liam is playing them both when he refuses to split with Sheryl and Angie confesses to Sheryl about their relationship. Then Min teases Angie about her inability to speak Mandarin and Angie causes a quarrel at her father’s house. Her life seems to be falling apart then her mother realises Angie has been having sex … I really like driving you home and sometimes it’s the best part of my day. A portrait of the artist as a girl, Mei Makino’s funny and affecting debut feature as writer and director debut is complex, smart and true. It’s like real life but you get to control everything. That’s what Angie tells Liam about playing Sims but it’s how she’d like her home existence after her father leaves and her hard-working lawyer mom leaves bagel bites for dinner. I know Liam is sort of an asshole but he’s MY asshole. The best looking guy in the school also appears to have it all but when he and Angie get together he tells her things she thinks are real revelations. When he’s with me in my room he’s not just the hot guy at school. When he seems to regret telling her about his life and bolts early one morning, she figures it’s just reluctance to be open but he still has Sheryl and keeps Angie his secret. But she too is complicit in this hidden relationship. Can we just have a Coke and a smile? he pleads when Angie wants to learn more about him. They are vulnerable to each other but it remains within the four walls of her bedroom. Is that love? Angie ponders. Don’t you want to soak up all life has to offer? he asks, offering her a spliff. This is a hedonist in the making. Maybe Min and Fong give him something that Mom and I never could. The issue of Angie’s biracial identity is horrifically exposed when Sheryl’s mom (Jane Schwartz) compliments her on her Asian-ness – Sheryl’s humiliation is beautifully expressed. The hit is twofold when Min shames Angie over her inability to speak her father’s language. The cultural gap is now a gaping chasm. The maturity that Angie experiences is achieved through empathy – with Sheryl and with her father. She recognises that other people have different outlooks and lives. Of Liam she concludes, It’s funny how he was this mythical presence in my life. When I look at him now he’s just a boy. That’s quite the take home lesson from teenage love: guys will be guys, no matter how they’re dressed up. Wonderfully performed, this is simultaneously obvious and subtle, just like teen life. Angie’s artwork is by Texan illustrator Larissa Akhmetova, as playful and delightful as the film’s protagonist. Okay Future Angie, I can feel your judgment!
In the week it’s been announced a fourth entry in this series Mad About the Boy is due for imminent production, it’s incredible to think that it has been going for close to a quarter of a century. The first adaptation in what became a franchise was released twenty-three years ago today.
Helen Fielding’s hit 1996 novel was a rewrite of Pride and Prejudice and became a cultural milestone. A film adaptation was inevitable.
If the search for the iconic and beloved 32-year old slacker singleton heroine wasn’t quite that for Scarlett O’Hara it seemed of almost national import so the casting of the very un-British Renee Zellweger caused a ripple of consternation but it turned out to be an inspired choice.
She allegedly gained twenty pounds to play Bridget who notes her weight daily in her diary and struggles into her clothes with the help of very big pants.
The meta-casting of Colin Firth, TV’s Darcy from the BBC’s global hit adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, as Bridget’s love object human rights lawyer Mark Darcy, hit the sweet spot. It also meant Firth could send himself up and move on from the typecasting that had followed that other iconic role.
That TV series’ screenwriter Andrew Davies co-wrote the screenplay with Fielding and her onetime boyfriend, romcom king Richard Curtis.
Hugh Grant delighted as the devilish Daniel Cleaver, the rival for Bridget’s affections.
Directed by Sharon ‘Shazza’ Maguire, Fielding’s BFF and immortalised in the film by Sally Phillips, one of the posse helping Bridget through her trials and tribulations, the film was a huge hit and a critical success.
Zellweger was nominated for an Academy Award for her charming performance. Long live Bridget Jones!
I’m here to learn your ways. Following the destruction of the House of Atreides by the House of Harkonnen, Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) daughter of Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV (Christopher Walken) the head of House Corrino secretly journals that Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) may be alive. On Arrakis, Stilgar’s Fremen troops including Paul and his pregnant mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) overcome a Harkonnen patrol. When they arrive at Sietch Tabr some Fremen suspect they are spies, while Stilgar and others see signs of the prophecy that a mother and son from the so-called ‘Outer World will bring prosperity to Arrakis. Stilgar tells Jessica that Sietch Tabr’s Reverend Mother Ramallo (Giusi Merli) is dying and that she must replace her by drinking the Water of Life, a fatal poison for males and the untrained. Jessica’s body transmutes the poison, surviving and inheriting the memories of every female ancestor in her lineage. The liquid also accelerates the cognitive development of her unborn daughter Alia (Anya Taylor-Joy) allowing Jessica to communicate with her telepathically. Jessica and Alia agree to focus on convincing the skeptical northern Fremen of the prophecy. Jessica urges Paul also to drink the Water of Life and become the Kwisatz Haderach [‘the shortening of the way’ in the Kabbalah]. The young and rebellious Fremen warrior Chani (Zendaya) and her friend Shishakli (Souhelia Yacoub) believe that the prophecy was fabricated to manipulate and subjugate the Fremen but she begins to respect Paul after he declares that he only intends to fight alongside the Fremen not to rule them. Paul and Chani fall in love as Paul embraces the Fremen ways: learning their language, participating in rites such as riding a sandworm, becoming a Fedaykin fighter and helping raid Harkonnen spice operations. Paul adopts the Fremen names Usul and Muad’Dib as he his likened to a kangaroo mouse. Due to the devastating spice raids, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Starsgard) head of House of Harkonnen and former stewart of Arrakis and enemy to the House of Atreides replaces his nephew Glossu Rabban Harkonnen aka Rabban (Dave Bautista) as Arrakis’s ruler with his psychotic younger nephew and heir apparent Rabban’s younger brother Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler). Lady Margot Fenring (Lea Seydoux), a Bene Gesserit is sent to evaluate Feyd-Rautha as a prospective Kwisatz Haderach and to seduce him to secure his genetic lineage: she is duly impregnated. Jessica travels south to unite with Fremen fundamentalists who believe in the prophecy of the Mahdi. Paul stays north, fearful that his visions of a holy war will come to pass if he travels south as a messiah. He reunites with Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) the former military leader of House Atreides and Paul’s mentor who leads him to the hidden atomic stockpile of House Atreides. Paul was not able to foresee Feyd-Rautha’s attack on the northern Fremen, including Sietch Tabr, forcing Paul and the survivors to head south. Shishakli remains behind and is killed by Feyd-Rautha. Arriving south, Paul drinks the Water of Life and falls into a coma. Chani is angered by this but is forced by Jessica to revive him by mixing her tears with the liquid. Paul attains a clearer vision of the past, present, and future, seeing an adult Alia on a water-filled Arrakis and that Jessica is the Baron’s daughter, making Paul both an Atreides and a Harkonnen. Chani attempts to warn the southern Fremen that the prophecy will be used to enslave them, but Gurney quiets her down. Paul galvanizes the fundamentalists by showing that he can read their innermost thoughts. He declares himself the Lisan al Gaib and sends a challenge to Emperor Shaddam. Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother and the Emperor’s Truthsayer Gaius Helen Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling) tells Irulan that she advised the Emperor to annihilate House Atreides because they had grown too defiant. Shaddam arrives on Arrakis with Irulan, Mohiam, and his Sarduakar troops. As he meets the Harkonnens, the Fremen launch a massive military strike using atomics and sandworms … He’s a sociopath, highly intelligent, in love with pain but sexually vulnerable. And so the behemoth that is the second half of director Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci fi Dune carves its path into global consciousness with a positively Shakespearean scenario unfolding. Viewed through the prism of one of Herbert’s great influences, Lawrence of Arabia, the fey, androgynous and rather reluctant protagonist who rallies the rebels against the powerful desert overlords makes more sense of Chalamet’s casting, a callow youth not quite ready for his hero’s journey who says to Zendaya’s Chani, I want to be your equal. In the 1960s the interest in ecology and the world’s resources together with a question about the future of Islam can clearly be mapped onto today’s geopolitical catastrophes with Paul’s Messianic position as Mahdi key to the resumption of the Fremen fundamentalism and the miracles of Christianity given a wholesale workout. Essentially the Abrahamic religions intersect in battle and beliefs, the role of the desert prophet a common trope. The visual debt to Lawrence is clear in certain visual quotes but it’s mitigated by the murky palette of greige created by cinematographer Greig Fraser and the tendency to blur Chalamet’s slight figure against the rippling sands: not a visual choice Lean would ever have made when clarity and precision were key to the earlier film’s expressive beauty. Sometimes this looks like it’s shot through Paul’s dusty goggles and his lusciously long lashes. The extraordinary Colosseum/Nazi-styled gladiatorial fight in an infrared rendition of Harkonnen is a glorious and daring exception, a clear statement about a world drained of colour. And, not to put too fine a point on the general tendency of the film, when we step away from the major world building sequences, there are too many close ups – a problem afflicting many films at the present time. This can’t be a budgetary choice so must be an aesthetic one. The storytelling in the streamlined screenplay by Villeneuve & Jon Spaihts (with early work by Eric Roth) is much more efficient here than in the first part: that film’s setting up of the spice-mining story and the different planets’ ecological concerns permits a slicker narrative to unfold here, the 2 hour 46 minutes running time notwithstanding with a religious and familial fight resulting in war. Every beat is hit at the right time. Happily there are a couple of clunky moments which might make you giggle at presumably unintentional reminders of Life of Brian (sometimes this prophet doth protesteth too much) while the ladies say twice (repetition being a screenwriting trick) that the religious prophecy is designed to distract, a common Marxian precept (something about the spice of the people, natch). The major jaw-dropping story twist at 120 minutes is of the Star Wars variety and very pleasurable it is too, turning the last 45 minutes into an astonishing conflict of character, wits and strength. Every hero requires a vicious enemy and Butler makes for a mesmerisingly sadistic villain. Caveats aside, this is mostly masterful filmmaking with engaging characters, terrific timing and excellent structure, which creates a narrative matrix of totally absorbing events and developments with an open-ended conclusion in which we can see Paul evolving into an anti-hero while the women take charge. This psychedelic sci fi encompassing faith, friendship, fascism, imperialism, breeding programmes and destiny, is hitting theatres when the concerns of the recent past are replaying out in real time. Part three (Dune Messiah, which is set 12 years following the aftermath of the war) is in the works but according to Villeneuve, he is not rushing it. More’s the pity! I am not the messiah
If he did this now could he have done that then? Melbourne-based federal agent specialising in corruption Aaron Falk (Eric Bana) goes back home to his drought-stricken outback hometown of Kiewarra to attend a tragic funeral. His best friend Luke Hadler (Martin Dingle-Wall) has shot his wife Karen and young son Billy dead and taken his own life. Luke’s parents Barb (Julia Blake) and Gerry (Bruce Spence) want Aaron to find out what could have possibly motivated their son to kill the family he loved – yet leaving his baby daughter alive in her cot. Was it money problems following the failure of the wheat crop due to the lack of rain? However, Aaron’s return reopens the door to the unsolved death of a teenage girl Ellie Deacon (BeBe Bettencourt) whom both he and Luke loved and young Aaron (Joe Klocek) and his father Erik (Jeremy Lindsay Taylor) were driven out when the boy was blamed for her drowning. Luke (Sam Corlett) approached Aaron and made him swear to say they were shooting rabbits at the time Ellie died, a story Aaron has stuck to throughout his life which gave them both an alibi. But his father believed he did it and now he’s dead. Gretchen Schoner (Genevieve O’Reilly) made up the foursome as teenagers and now she’s a single mother to young son Lachie and a good shot besides. Ellie’s demented father Mal Deacon (William Zappa) and cousin Grant Dow (Matt Nable) want Aaron out of town for the murder they say he committed twenty years ago. Aaron hangs around, initially for Barb and Gerry’s sake but then for himself as accusations are levelled at him about his complicity in Ellie’s death. Sergeant Greg Raco (Keir O’Donnell) begins to wonder at Aaron’s motivation for getting involved in finding the reason for the Hadler massacre because everyone suspects he and Luke lied about their whereabouts on the day of Ellie’s death. The locals campaign against Aaron’s presence, echoing the harassment twenty years earlier. Local farmer Jamie Sullivan (Jame Frecheville) has an alibi that doesn’t stack up for the time of the Hadler’s deaths now presumed to be the work of a third party. Then Karen’s work at the school accounts for principal Scott Whitlam (John Polson) might yield some answers when everything else fails … You just gotta keep going. You gotta keep going back. Adapted from Jane Harper’s smash hit 2016 novel, the flaws that exist here are due to the screenplay by Harry Cripps and director Robert Connolly. In the novel we were waiting for a Murder of Roger Ackroyd-type twist that would ironically have worked here due to the way Bana’s outsider character Aaron is constructed. The procedural details of the present-day investigation are sidelined in favour of dramatic recreations of Ellie’s friendship with Aaron, Luke and Gretchen twenty years ago leading to the girl’s demise. We were just four dumb kids. This works in the novel but the extensive flashbacks detract from the urgency of the criminal investigation and dilutes the tension which of course is posited on the presumption that another individual was involved, that Luke was a better man than the act of family destruction suggests, that people are hiding something. The secrets and lies of a small outback community suffering from no rain for almost a year is a setting ripe for metaphorical writing – just one match could light up like tinder and devastate a parched town that’s already drowning in hypocrisy and expedient blame. We’ve been waiting so long for rain. The subplots arise in order of supporting characters, with displaced blow-ins making the best of it for a while – Suburbia in the country – worst of both worlds, says the school principal – and the typical ensemble, nicely etched in this God-forsaken outpost but it feels a little incoherent in terms of the connections between people. The multi-racial casting of some wives may serve some kind of diversity quota but it introduces unnecessary and irrelevant questions about the story’s theme causing a diversion to a plot that is already dissipated from the unbalanced emphasis on the past. Superficially this narrative nods to Twin Peaks which also brings up the idea of two investigations in parallel by very different men who were surely the root of the relationship theme in the novel – Aaron and Raco – the veteran and the rookie teaming up, damaged cop and better cop. A much more problematic and guilty cop might have made this more cinematic: Aaron’s history as a suspect in Ellie’s death is not sufficient reason for his conduct in this iteration (the element of doubt of all kinds is largely internal in the book) and the fact that he’s an expert at financial cases doesn’t compromise his professionalism, it’s his origins that are the issue. Of course it’s precisely his expertise that helps solve the present-day crime. Bana simply doesn’t have enough to work with. Gretchen provides a kind of love interest for Aaron (but it’s hard to buy into) and she is potentially a femme fatale: O’Reilly is fine even if her accent slips a little. Your old man would be so bloody proud of you – he always knew the man you were. The villains are of the paternal variety but the detail of the novel is sacrificed for broad stroke action much of which being an Australian film has to take place in the bar. This whole thing was for my family. The doubts about the two deaths – their cause, their potentially wrongful identity as murders, at least with the wrong culprits, the introduction of different suspects, the psychological implications for Aaron – bring up memories of In Cold Blood but the context here is different, the violence of the family’s deaths downplayed and the past constantly rises up to ask questions about the moral turpitude of Aaron. Why are you still here? The great films about smalltown Australia (Wake In Fright) are about thwarted masculinity, inchoate rage and the erupting of sudden violence in an unforgiving sun-baked landscape. That is true of this, a great story that somehow stays too true to the source – altering the plot material and making Aaron a much more defective detective would have substantially improved the opportunity for Bana to give the great performance he deserves and Raco’s role is downplayed to the story’s detriment. And – unbelievably – the key line from Ellie’s diary, found close to the film’s climax, is left out of the voiceover. This is solid rather than gripping. Yet it’s atmospheric and well shot by Stefan Duscio, whose widescreen and aerial shots mark this out as a sensory experience, part of a bigger picture of loss and lies, devastation and death, juxtaposing the rich flowing river of the past with the dried-out desert bed the present has become in this wilted, shrivelled world. When you’ve been lying about something so long it becomes second nature
Trust is a variable quality. London during World War 2. Novelist Maurice Bendrix (Van Johnson) meets Sarah Miles (Deborah Kerr) the wife of civil servant Henry Miles (Peter Cushing) at their sherry party. He is asking Henry for information to help with his next book. Maurice is intrigued by Sarah after he sees her kissing another man. They become lovers that night at his hotel. After his rooms are bombed when they are together there, she ends their relationship and he suffers from the delayed shock from the bombing and from her ending the affair. After their break-up and the end of the war, Bendrix encounters Henry, who invites him for a drink at his home, especially since Sarah is out. Henry confides that he suspects Sarah is unfaithful and has looked into engaging a private investigator, but then decides against it. Sarah returns home before Bendrix leaves and is curt with him. Bendrix follows through with hiring a private detective agency on his own account. They come across information which suggests that Sarah is being unfaithful, which Bendrix shares with Henry in revenge. Bendrix then obtains Sarah’s diary via the private investigator Albert Parkis (John Mills) which reveals that Sarah is not having an affair and that she promised God to give Bendrix up if he was spared death in the bombing. Then they meet again … I’ve learned that you must pray like you make love – with everything you have. A deeply felt narrative revolving around love, sex and religious belief sounds like a melodramatic quagmire but Lenore Coffee’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s 1951 semi-autobiographical novel is a rich textured work with impressive performances by the entire cast. Kerr and Johnson might be perceived to be something of a mismatch but that’s the point of the story: he is fated to forever misunderstand her and as he tries to navigate his way through her complex emotions and her deals with God, he responds with just one emotion – jealousy. His unruly misunderstanding in a world of good manners and looking the other way means he flails hopelessly while we are then persuaded of her beliefs via her diary, the contents of which dominate the film’s second half, leading him to regret his desire for revenge. Love doesn’t end just because we don’t see each other. The ensemble is well presented and their individual big moments are sketches of superb characterisation, Mills’ pride in his snooping a particular highlight. It’s extraordinarily well done, very touching and filled with moments of truth which never fail to hit home in a story that is cunningly managed and beautifully tempered with empathy. Kerr is simply great. Directed by Edward Dmytryk. The ‘not done’ things are done every day. I’ve done most of them myself
I’m not much of a reader. Lilian (Grace Van Patten) is a budding filmmaker living in New York City after her father Neil (Norbert Leo Butz) abruptly moved to Paris with his girlfriend. When her boyfriend Nate (Gary Richardson) dumps her for being immature, she moves in with family friends who she last saw when she was a baby. While musician Don (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is welcoming and friendly his wife Julia (Emily Mortimer), a famous and reclusive British novelist, immediately clashes with lazy Lilian and it appears she bullies her husband. Lilian smokes marijuana with Don which leads to his having a fight with Julia and he promptly leaves the house. Julia sequesters herself in her room and begins communicating with Lilian through messages in Lilian’s private journal. After running into Nate and his co-worker, filmmaker Laura (Condola Rashad), whom Lilian works out he is seeing, Lilian pretends she is working on a documentary about Julia to make herself look good. Rather than ask Julia for permission, Lilian begins scouting for cameramen and settles on Simon aka ‘Sol’ (John Early) and uses her father’s connections to contact famous writers and interview them about Julia.She finds out from Jonathan Ames that her father is back in New York and his girlfriend is pregnant. She also realises that Julia is using her as possible writing inspiration and has used her as inspiration before, when she was a child. Then Julia finds out about Lilian’s documentary when Lilian is late to meet Sol, and he enthusiastically tells Julia everything. Julia cuts off all communication with Lilian. Depressed, Lilian makes a move on Julia’s reclusive dog walker George (Timm Sharp) who rebuffs her. Then she reconciles with her father and meets his girlfriend Celeste (Emmanuelle Martin, the film’s costume designer) and they don’t even tell her what she already knows about their future plans … Tell Miss Havisham I’m on it. It’s difficult to tell what age our heroine Lillian might be even though when we meet her she is clearly (formerly) involved with an adult male but she wears pigtails, is parented by phone from Paris and also does drugs. She’s tricksy, unlikable and a bit ungrateful. Likewise her authoress host is prickly as a porcupine, sour and not exactly pleased to see her. A bit like real life then. A writer who doesn’t write, a musician husband who hasn’t made a record lately, a house guest of indeterminate duration who doesn’t read yet wants to make documentaries but admits that she has ‘never sat through one’ and fixes on making one about the woman she refers to as Miss Havisham whose books she doesn’t know. Yet we find out Lilian’s mother abandoned her (she died) and Julia lost a baby. It’s a film about people in the mass media who don’t know how to communicate with each other. Information is passed like contraband behind people’s backs. Julia writes in Lilian’s diary and uses it for a new novel. We find out about the story from the songs composed for the soundtrack by Heather Christian. It’s also about how the children of well known people coast through life using their parents’ contacts and money. It’s about how bereavement plays out for years and years. It’s about how people can’t see what’s staring them in the face. It’s about the millennial generation’s sense of entitlement. It’s replete with contradictions and human comedy and the film within a film boasts cameos from novelists Zadie Smith and Jonathan Ames who play along gamely with the witty script but leave it to Martin Amis (who is gleefully credited as ‘Self’) to deliver the zinger that is both dramatic and comically relevant: It’s not an intellectual stimulus, being happy. On the contrary. The performances are perfect. Mortimer is an underrated actress. She looks so harmless but one remark can hit right below the belt and power several scenes ahead when she’s nowhere to be seen. She has one employee solely to care for her dog whom he walks and cooks for yet she bullies her own husband out of the family home. Van Patten has a tough role and plays it excellently – spiky, spiteful, irritating and manipulative, eventually developing a degree of self-awareness. The epistolary nature of her relationship with Mortimer reminds us of nineteenth century literature. Low-key, writerly, amusing and ironic with an unpredictably clever romcom happy ending plot-engineered by master puppeteer Mortimer: I would expect no less from writer/director Dolly Wells, Mortimer’s co-star in the cherishable TV series Doll & Em, similarly set in Brooklyn.  Let’s keep it happy
Do you ever wake up and think, I wonder if I could have been a poet. Shy and sullen Steven Patrick Morrissey (Jack Lowden) is the unemployed and depressive son of Irish immigrants growing up in 1976 Manchester. Withdrawn and something of a loner, he goes out to rock gigs at night and then submits letters and reviews to music newspapers as well as keeping a diary. His father (Peter MacDonald) wants him to get a job, his mother (Simone Kirby) wants him to follow his passion for writing, and Steven doesn’t quite know what he wants to do. His friend, artist Linder Sterling (Jessica Brown Findlay) a nascent feminist, inspires him to continue to write lyrics and urges him to start to perform, but she eventually moves to London. Forced to earn a living and fit in with society his income from office work permits his gig-going but Steven’s frustrations and setbacks continue to mount. Although he eventually writes some songs with guitarist Billy Duffy (Adam Lawrence) for the band The Nosebleeds until Duffy breaks it off, and he tries his hand at singing and enjoys it, nothing substantially changes in his life, and Steven seems at the end of his rope until another teenage fanboy who can play guitar Johnny Marr (Laurie Kynaston) shows up on his doorstep in 1982… The past is everything I have failed to be. A biography of The Smiths’ singer-songwriter and solo artist Morrissey before he became famous, this is hampered by the lack of The Smiths music (because the makers didn’t own the rights) but nonetheless forms another part of the puzzle that is is the man. In many respects it hymns the kitchen sink realist films that he himself paid homage in so many songs, colouring in his Irish background in the northern city of Manchester but pointedly avoiding his later songwriting and sexuality and stopping at the moment he meets Marr, the guitarist, which is where most of his fans come in. Instead it’s a portrait of a bedroom loner, a fan who fantasises about being famous and in that sense paints a fascinating picture Billy Liar-style of someone who manages to rise above their miserable circumstances and then (after the film) in protean style fashions fame from their influences and obsessions despite the apparent lack of propulsion in his life. In that sense, it’s a portrait of celebrity and how it can inspire people to escape their humdrum lives and find their own voice. The songs on the soundtrack from New York Dolls and Mott the Hoople to Sparks and Magazine are as much a part of the narrative as the arch teenage diary entries which echo the later mordantly amusing lyrics and the performance by The Nosebleeds is the most thrilling sequence in the film. Anyone who ever lived in Manchester will recognise the dreadful rainy place Morrissey wrote has so much to answer for. Director Mark Gill who co-wrote the screenplay with William Thacker gets into the head of one of the most singular talents ever produced on the British music scene and perhaps the best ever Irish band on the planet, The Smiths, the only band that mattered in the Eighties. He’s played quite charmingly by Lowden who livens up a drama that may cleave much too closely to the exhausting reality as lived in Northern England at the time. Today is Morrissey’s sixty-first birthday. Many happy returns! If there was ever a revolution in England, we’d form an orderly queue at the guillotine
The legendary photographer Peter Beard has been found dead close to his home on Long Island, New York following his disappearance 31st March. His iconic images and glamorous lifestyle attracted the kind of attention more usually visited upon some of his subjects (for whom he was also a muse) but at the heart of his work – art, collage, diaries and books – is a real love for life of all kinds: animal, human, and above all, the wildlife of Africa, his home for so many years. Rest in peace.
The shy pornographer. After he bails on the Pratt Institute, horrifying his conservative family, Robert Mapplethorpe (Matt Smith) leaves for New York City where he lives on the wild side and teams up with another wannabe artist, Patti Smith (Marianne Rendón). They set up home together at the Chelsea Hotel where they discover their artistic abilities and dream together. However Mapplethorpe is gay and Smith disappears to enjoy a hetero marriage when she is supplanted by curator and collector Sam Wagstaff (John Benjamin Hickey) who takes Mapplethorpe as one of his lovers. He becomes his benefactor and backer and shows him some nineteenth century photographs that open up Mapplethorpe to the possibilities of the medium, having two exhibitions simultaneously, one high-art, one erotic, showing both sides of his artistry. A symbiotic relationship is born, albeit Mapplethorpe continues to party and sleep around as his success grows. He falls for black model Milton Moore (McKinlay Belcher III) but when Milton finds his diaries he believes he’s being used fetishistically and abandons him. Mapplethorpe’s lifestyle verges on the reckless, between sex and drugs, but he is now famous and celebrated. His younger brother Edward (Brandon Sklenar) whom he barely knows is training in the technical side of the medium and joins him as his assistant. When Edward displays his own talent, Mapplethorpe doesn’t want the competition and tells him to stop using the family name. Wagstaff has AIDS but Mapplethorpe refuses to be tested. When he is dying, Patti visits. He gets Edward to take one more photograph of him… I’m an artist. I would have been a painter, but the camera was invented. Luckily for me. Unsurprisingly considering the subject matter and the fact that this was made in co-operation with the Mapplethorpe Foundation, this contains an array of graphic and pornographic images, all by Mapplethorpe himself. That’s only disconcerting when Matt Smith is in the same scene as Mapplethorpe’s self-portraits. The value here is not intrinsic in the dramatic exposition but in the ideas it espouses and the path it traces as Mapplethorpe finds his medium – from drawing and making jewellery to figuring out that his narcissism offered a view on masculinity previously unexplored (or exposed in public). You’re the Jekyll and Hyde of photography. He’s not an easy character to portray or to like because his essence lies in provocation and attention-seeking and Smith’s performance is not terribly convincing in a role that is better written than it is acted. Nor does the script deal with the essential lesson that this is a man who knew he wouldn’t live long and was prepared to die for his art. Beauty and the Devil are sort of the same thing to me. The relationship with Patti Smith doesn’t quite ring true either. The film is about how photography evolved as Mapplethorpe’s own high-contrast signature developed – as he repeatedly says, Look at the blacks. It’s the revolution in image-making to replace the affect and emotion of painting that holds the eye. The context in which the drama is produced is a major factor in the narrative and the celebrities of the day become his models but NYC has cleaned up a lot since the filthy Seventies and if the Chelsea Hotel looks grimy enough for anyone and the spectre of AIDS haunts every frame a cleaned-up look still expresses a dispiriting social scene. The chronological approach that dogs biographical film drama doesn’t add a lot here but the punctuation – setting up famous photographs and then showing the real thing – is a useful technique of juxtaposition that adds to the tension of creation: these pictures still manage to shock, captivate and provoke. Mapplethorpe died thirty-one years ago this week. Directed by Ondi Timoner (on Kodak film) from a screenplay co-written with Mikko Alanne, based on a screenplay by Bruce Goodrich. They call itplaying chicken with the avant garde
mondomovies 