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Hampstead

Original post date: 31 March 2019 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ In the sweepstakes for unconvincing romantic movie couples let us add the names of Diane Keaton—here a poster girl for the notion that older single women are totally hopeless with money—and Brendan Gleeson, playing a Dubliner living rough on London’s Hampstead Heath. Also unbelievable is the plot of this movie, which is kind of odd since it is actually inspired by a true story. In real life, Harry Hallowes was from Sligo, not Dublin, and before he died in 2016 he expressed the intention of willing his slice of the heath, which he won in a court battle, to the British royal family, calling them the “the last bastion of refinement and sophistication.” In this flick his fictional alter ego, Donald Horner, likes to lunch next to Karl Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery, which is kind of funny because Donald is basically an anti-government survivalist and loner who refuses to pay taxes or for any city services. By the end of his court battle t...
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Candy

Original post date: 30 March 2019 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ When people say if you can remember the 1960s then you weren’t there, they are talking about not remembering this movie. Definitely a candidate for best time capsule of 1968, a mere recitation of its plot points and cast members sounds like an incredibly unlikely evocation of the era. A sort of sex-and-drug-addled reinvention of Voltaire’s Candide, the film follows the travails, adventures and education of a nubile naïf from the American Midwest. Give the film credit for making a woman the central character in this spiritual odyssey and try to overlook the fact she is played by a stunningly beautiful Swedish actor (18 at the time of the movie’s release) who is required by the plot to strip down to her underwear at least once in every reel. As played by Ewa Aulin, high school student Candy is a total innocent but of the kind that was lasciviously photographed and airbrushed in the male fantasy pictorials of Playboy magazine at the time (...
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Whisky Galore!

Original post date: 21 March 2019 Rating: ✭✭✭✰ This is the comedy that made the UK’s Ealing Studios an international success. Other classics like Passport to Pimlico and Kind Hearts and Coronets would follow quickly the same year, 1949. The film’s fortunes, however, nearly foundered like the ill-fated ship transporting the titular spirits. It was the first film of Boston-born Scottish filmmaker Alexander Mackendrick, and his insistence on filming on location in the storm-lashed Outer Hebrides nearly proved disastrous. Because of a US ban on mentioning alcoholic drinks in titles, the film was initially dubbed stateside (as was the source novel by Compton MacKenzie) Tight Little Island. (James Thurber suggested an even better one: Scotch on the Rocks. ) Loosely based on an actual incident, the film recounts how the residents of the island of Todday, under war rationing, become ever more desperate for their customary dram of whiskey. Their prayers are answered when a cargo ship, bound ...
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A Simple Favor

Original post date: 11 March 2019 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ The very beginning of this flick promises a return to old-school entertainment. For one thing, they actually run a bunch of credits at the start of the movie. Also, the music is cool with a fair helping of classic French pop by the likes of Françoise Hardy, France Gall, Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot. It has that widescreen Technicolor feel like those elegant spy or mystery movies from the 1960s. Quickly enough though, we are into 21st-century territory where irony is squeezed out of how dark and perverted American suburbs can be, how sunlight, modern architecture and children’s playdates are only a mask over the soul’s darkness. Think Desperate Housewives meets the late Stanley Donen’s Charade. Anna Kendrick’s Stephanie is a familiar type—the overachieving (single) mom who annoys all the other moms by being too perfect and who also has a video blog about cooking and crafts. Blake Lively’s Emily is her unlikely new best friend, a ...
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A Star Is Born

Original post date: 5 March 2019 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ This movie is so much better than it has any right to be. It has been done so many times now (as What Price Hollywood? in 1932 and with this same title in 1937, 1954 and 1976) the story is not even well-worn anymore. It’s just worn. Still, there is something timeless about the tale of one star wobbling at his zenith just before his upcoming rapid descent while connecting with a young woman about to begin her upward trajectory. As played in this version, it almost seems as if Bradley Cooper’s self-destructive country rocker senses his impending doom (there a couple of unsubtle early shots of nooses on a billboard) and reaches out to pass his luck on to someone deserving while there is still time. In addition to being a familiar story, this always ran the risk of being a vanity project with Cooper not only starring but also directing and co-writing the screenplay (with Eric Roth and Will Fetters). For an actor, a talented, charming, downsp...
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Cromwell

Original post date: 23 February 2019 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ My, my, this is certainly an interesting movie. An old-school historical epic (running time well over two hours) released in 1970, this flick dramatizes the life and times of Oliver Cromwell, a dominant figure of mid-17th century England. There are lots of speechmaking scenes in Parliament, lots of battle scenes, and then lots more speechmaking scenes in Parliament. It was written and directed by Ken Hughes, who may be best known for two Ian Fleming adaptations. He was one of five credited directors on 1967’s Casino Royale and sole director of 1968’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Somewhat surprisingly, Hughes tries here to turn Puritan political insurgent Cromwell into George Washington, i.e. a gentleman farmer reluctantly called on to lead his country’s rebellion against a despotic British monarch and then to become the first head of a new republic. I sought out this movie because, well, I had to. I have been steeped in all things Cromwe...
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Grandma

Original post date: 22 February 2019 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ Lily Tomlin is always such a delight to encounter in a movie or TV role (her latest gigs include being the voice of Aunt May in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and the Netflix series Grace and Frankie ) that it is jarring to see her play a really unpleasant character as she does here. Although known mainly for comedy, we have always known that she has serious dramatic chops, and they get a good showcase here. Written and directed by Paul Weitz ( American Pie, About a Boy ), this flick more or less has the classic structure of the Heroic Quest. In the middle of a messy breakup with a younger lover, Tomlin’s feminist writer/poet Elle is approached by her teenage granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner), who is going through her own crisis: she is pregnant and wants an abortion—today. The screenplay puts a somewhat arbitrary deadline on the procedure to heighten the dramatic tension as well as the somewhat arbitrary restriction of Elle being...
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