A slightly random film review today, because this is not new, and there was no particular reason why we watched it the other week, except that it was there.
This is a biopic about the early career of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the US Supreme Court Justice who died in the latter stages of President Trump’s term. If all you know about her is that she was a judge, this will fill you in on how she got to that position, and how tough things were for women who wanted to be lawyers in the mid-twentieth century. In fact there are portions of this that will probably make you really angry – they definitely did me anyway.
It has its flaws – it’s quite old fashioned in style, I don’t think Armie Hammer is great, and it probably should have done more about her later achievements than a couple of credit cards at the end, but as a primer to go and watch a documentary or read a biography, it’s pretty good.
This Sunday’s post is about Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, which I watched on the flight out to Manila the other week.
The Priscilla of the title is Priscilla Presley, wife of Elvis and the film is based on her own memoir and she’s an executive producer of the movie as well. So you might expect that the movie is pro-Elvis. Except that it’s more complicated than that. Priscilla met Elvis when her father was stationed in Germany when she was 14 and he was 24. Two years later, she is invited to visit him in LA for a holiday, but he actually takes her to Vegas. A year later, he asks her to live with his dad and she goes – attending a private Catholic girls school to finish her education. And while they do get married eventually it doesn’t really get any better for her.
I would describe this as a portrait of isolation and loneliness – it’s a quite a good watch, but it’s really depressing – because Priscilla was a teenage girl with a crush, who ended up married to her first love and caught up in a world that she doesn’t really belong in on her own terms. It stops before Elvis’s death and I’m interested to know what she did after that. And I can see why Elvis and Priscilla’s daughter, Lisa Marie, was not keen on the film – as Elvis does not come out of it that well really. I’d go as far as saying that he was a bit of a creep. Oh and there is no Elvis music in it either!
This one is so new that you’ll still need to pay for it to watch it on the streaming services – or you can watch out for it on your next long haul flight!
It’s the biggest night in the movie calendar tonight – or at least that’s what the Academy of Motion Picture, Arts and Science would like you to believe. I do love an awards ceremony – but I tend to record them so I can fast forward through the boring bits, even when they’re in the right time zone for me, so I won’t be staying up for all of the Oscars tonight – but it is the first year in a long time that they’ve been on free to air TV in the UK – they’re on ITV!
And, I’m not going to lie, I haven’t seen anything that’s nominated tonight – but there are still a few things I’m rooting for. Firstly I want I’m Just Ken to win the best original song prize, because I’ve really enjoyed Ryan Gosling’s face whenever it’s won all season. I would be all in on rooting for him to win best actor, except that I was an Ally and Larry fan back in the days of season four of Ally McBeal, and it turns out that I’m still not over the fact that Robert Downey Junior’s drug arrest meant he was written out at the end of the season and we never got the happy ending for them that the writers planned. And season five never recovered – because Larry was just so perfect for Ally that no one else could stand up to it. Now maybe if I could rewatch the series I would get over it, because I’m fairly sure it hasn’t aged well, but it’s not on any streaming services so I can’t watch it and find out. All I can do is watch snippets on Youtube. Like this one, the only occasion on which I will voluntarily watch Sting.
I would be rooting for Maestro – because I love Leonard Bernstein, but I’ve got so fed up of Bradley Cooper this awards season, and although I started watched Maestro I gave up after about 10 minutes (does this mean I’m lying when I say I haven’t seen any of the movies? I don’t think it counts because it’s less than 10 percent of the movie). And I know I won’t watch Killers of the Flower Moon (I’m too wimpy for every Scorsese except The Aviator, which I love) but I will be rooting for Lily Gladstone in the Best Actress category.
But beyond that, it may be that a fair amount of fast forwarding is going on – especially if the ceremony is as sad and joyless as some of the recent ones have been. But fingers crossed they get it right this year. I leave you with this video of the best costume nominees – I hope we get something as bonkers as this is:
It’s the August bank holiday weekend here in the UK, which is one of the most popular times to have your wedding – in fact one of my co-workers got married yesterday. So today’s not a book is one of my favourite films set around weddings – the late 90s Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore classic: The Wedding Singer.
It’s 1985 and Robbie Hart (Sandler) is the singer with a covers band in Ridgefield, New Jersey. Their main gig is weddings, and as the film opens he’s performing at one the week before his own wedding. Newly employed at the venue is waitress Julia Sullivan (Barrymore), who Robbie meets during his break and promises to sing at her wedding which she is just beginning to organise. But it seems that they may both have chosen the wrong people to get engaged to…
I have watched this film more times than I care to mention – and it’s one of those films where if I come across it on the TV I can’t help but stop to watch it. It was in Amazon Prime a month or so back and I watched it again then. In fact, while I was writing this paragraph I went back to see if it was still on Prime so I could watch it again (it’s not, it’s back to being a rental, gnash). I can recite along with large parts of it because it was one of about half a dozen films that my sister and I had on heavy rotation on Saturday nights when we were teenagers – it’s in a group of films* where even now if I send a line from them to her and she’ll message be back the next. It’s one of a couple of Drew Barrymore movies that I love but it’s also maybe the only Adam Sandler film I’ve watched more than once.
There was a musical of the film made in 2006, which falls into the category of shows I’ve never seen but still know all the lyrics to – because it hit Broadway during the period where I was deeply into the BroadwayWorld message board and when YouTube was starting to get videos of clips from TV shows – which happened to include their Tony Award performance. Although the soundtrack to the musical is iconic, the musical has an original score – except for Grow Old With You which is from the movie – which I think does a great job of capturing the energy of the 80s songs of the movie. So enjoy their opening number – It’s Your Wedding Day – from the Tony’s and see what I mean.
Anyway, I love it to the point where I find it hard to believe that there can be any one out there who hasn’t watched it, but if you haven’t and you like the sort of romances that I write about on this blog and you like romantic comedy movies, then you should definitely seek it out at your earliest convenience.
Have a great Sunday and enjoy the rest of your long weekend if you have one.
*The other films in this basket include Bridget Jones’s Diary, Drive Me Crazy, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill and on the TV front large swaths of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
A film this week and one that features Margot Robbie, but sadly not Barbie as I haven’t managed to get to the cinema to see that one yet. I’m sure I will though. Probably not as a double bill with Oppenheimer though because I’m not sure I can cope with Christopher Nolan at the moment.
So this is a dramatised version of true events – and is inspired by the real life sexual harrassment allegations made against Fox News boss Roger Ailes by women who worked there. Nicole Kidman plays Gretchen Carlson, who was the first to sue Ailes and Charlize Theron plays Megyn Kelly, who we see at the start of the film being insulted by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump for asking him about his offensive comments towards women. Margot Robbie plays Kayla, a composite character who is a young journalist who joins the newsroom and faces unwanted attentions fromAiles.
I think whether you followed the story at the time or not this is a compelling look at power dynamics in the work place and the pressures that women can face from men in positions of power. I’m not in the US so I don’t really have enough experience of watching Fox News to comment on how accurate the portrayals of Carlsson and Kelly are – except to say that Charlize Theron is unrecognisable (Him Indoors didn’t realise it was her at all!) but the make up teams won the Oscar and the Bafta for their work – and Theron got an Oscar nomination – as did Margot Robbie.* It is a bit of a tough watch – but it is very good – and if you’re planning on doing some of the other films about famous/powerful men who have faced sexual harassment allegations – like She Said (which I’m waiting to hit the movie channels) then this is definitely one to watch.
And because I hate ending posts on a down note – all the reports that I’ve heard about Barbie so far have been favourable, so I really am going to try and get to see that soon!
Happy Sunday!
They lost to Renee Zellweger’s Judy Garland and Laura Dern in A Marriage Story respectively.
I actually had a couple of things I was noodling about writing about today. But in the end, I’ve gone for the new Wes Anderson movie because it came out in theatres here this week.
So lets do the plot – and it should be said that this may be the most Wes Anderson-y of all of his plots – it starts with a TV host introducing you to a tv production of a play in which a war photographer’s car breaks down in the town where he and his family were heading for the junior Stargazer’s convention. The action from the play is interspersed with the history of the play’s original production complete with recreations of what was going on backstage. Or at least that’s what I think is going on. Have a watch of the trailer.
If you’re ticking off Andersonian tricks and tropes it’s got the changes in aspect ratios, the vivid color pallettes, completely stylised universes etc. Not that you see all of that in the trailer – which is entirely of the production of the play. So that was a bit of a shock for me when the film started! If you like Wes Anderson, this is absolutely Peak Wes Anderson and the critical response appears to be: if you like Wes Anderson already, then you’ll like this but it probably won’t convert anyone new. And I would agree with that – I enjoyed it and it was fun, but it wasn’t my favourite. Him Indoors said on the walk home that he preferred The French Dispatch – and Grand Budapest Hotel over both of them. I could have used a bit more plot but I love the whole look of it and I also loved spotting all the regulars and all the quirky weirdness of it. Like the roadrunner.
Basically if you want a Wes Anderson coming of age movie set at an Astronomy convention in the desert, this is that.
Happy Sunday everyone, another Netflix recommendation this week – but this time it’s a film not a documentary series so I am mixing it up a little bit, even if it doesn’t look like it on the surface of it.
Glass Onion is the sequel to Knives Out, which you don’t need to have seen to understand this because it’s standalone and the only character who carries over is Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc. If you haven’t seen is well worth a look though. Anyway moving on: the plot. A tech billionaire invites his closest friends to a party on his private Greek Island. He’s planned a murder mystery weekend and famed detective Benoit Blanc is invited too. Then a real murder happens and that’s about all I can tell you without spoilers because I double checked the trailer!
It’s very funny and more than a little bonkers – Daniel Craig’s southern accent is as mad as it was in the first film – and as well as him it has a great ensemble cast who seem to be really enjoying themselves. And contrary to the usual thing of fun shoot bad film the movie is really good. Or at least we enjoyed it! And if you want to draw some comparisons with real life figures, then that’s your prerogative.
Anyway if you’ve got Netflix, it’s a good way of spending a couple of hours. It did have a limited cinema release – but I missed it because work was insane at the time. I think it would have looked really good on the big screen too. And in a fun connection between a couple of my interests, director/writer Rian Johnson (of Last Jedi fame) is married to Karina Longworth, who wrote former Book of the Week Seduction and is the writer/presenter/creator of one of my favourite podcasts – You Must Remember This – which is one of the ones I save for running. Except for the Erotic 80s series which we binged on our last holiday – the 90s series is coming soon too.
I mean who doesn’t watch Mary Poppins at Christmas right? Surely it’s not just me and my family? A roaring fire and a Sunday afternoon and Mary Poppins on the TV…
I mean this is an all time classic. The Banks children have scared away another nanny in their efforts to get their parents attention – their workaholic father is a banker, their mother a militant suffragette. In flies Mary Poppins, who will put the family back together through singing and dancing, chalk pavement pictures and chimney sweeps. Dick van Dyke’s cockney accent is legendary in all the wrong ways, but Julie Andrews is practically perfect in every way.
It’s well known how unhappy P L Travers was with the way Walt Disney changed her character from the original books, but for most people the movie version is all they know so it’s made that interpretation of Travers’ nanny immortal for better or worse. And for me it’s very much for better. I can sing all the songs (although many would ask me not to) and I could probably recite the script. I’ll be getting it out to watch again this Christmas. And if you want to find out more about P L Travers and the making of the film, there’s a movie version of that too – Saving Mr Banks.
If you want to watch Mary Poppins, it’s on Disney+, or it will be on TV at some point over Christmas for sure. And I’ve still got it on DVD…
I have series of films that I always watch at this time of year, so I thought I’d feature them here too. And as I kicked off my Christmas by watching this last weekend, we’re starting with the immortal classic: Singin’ in the Rain.
In case you’ve never watched it, it’s the story of a Hollywood leading man as the movie business transforms from silent films to talkies. Don Lockwood is an ex-Vaudeville song and dance man who got his start as a stunt man who then got paired up with a glamorous leading leafy, Lena Lamont. Lockwood and Lamont have been a marquee double act ever since. The problem is that Don can’t stand Lena – and now the bigger problem is that Lena’s voice is… not suitable for the talkies. Early in the film Don meets Cathy Seldon, a hopeful actress with a great singing voice, searching for her big break. And it all goes from there.
This has a great cast – Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor – a great story and some of the best song and dance numbers you’ll see – and not just from Gene Kelly.
And the final sequence – starting with Lena’s attempts to take over the studio (I will never tire of Jean Hagen as Lena saying “detrimental and deleterious”) all the way through to the end is just *chef kiss*. And like many of these old Hollywood movies, you can dig into the making of it and the stories behind it and it just gets more fascinating. I’m not going to say any more here though – because I know some people think that spoils the magic.
It’ll definitely be on TV at least once over the next month, but you can rent it from all the usual places too
Oh yes. The sequel has just dropped on Disney plus so how could I resist talking about another Disney movie – and another opportunity for me to tell you how much I love a movie musical. Also this is a mad displacement exercise because this weekend is the start of a World Cup that I feel deeply conflicted about as well as the fact that this is Not The Right Time Of Year for a major football tournament and it is also the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix aka the last race of the F1 season, aka the first anniversary of the most controversial F1 race of all time and I really can’t deal with the stress of it all and also the fact that as the MotoGP season has already finished we’re about to enter the period of the year where there is no motorsport for me to watch. Anyway… Lets start with the original trailer for those of you who haven’t seen it…
Yes, Enchanted is a Disney princess movie and a very meta one. Unlike Mary Poppins or Bedknobs and Broomsticks where you start in the real world and have an interlude in animation, this one has the animated people visiting the real world and I love it so much. It subverts some of the princess tropes, reimagines others and it works for kids and adults. It’s also funny, the songs are great and the big production numbers are fabulous.
And that’s all before you get to the fact that that the cast is amazing. If you only know Amy Adams from her Oscar nominated stuff, it might be a shock to you, but this was her first big success as as leading lady. She had already got her Oscar nomination for Junebug at this point and my memory says that even then this seemed like a risky move. But she’s amazing in this – playing wide eye naiveite brilliantly without making you want to punch her for being so sunny and optimistic and irritating. Patrick Dempsey was pretty much at the peak of his McDreamy Greys Anatomy fame when he was cast as the real world leading man and he’s brilliant, as is James Marsden – who came off the back of playing Cyclops in three X Men films, to do two movie musials in 2007 – he’s also in Hairspray (which I also love). And of course before she was the voice of Elsa in Frozen, Idina Menzel was in this too. I’m a big West End/Broadway musical person (have I told you all that before?) and by the time this came out, Menzel was already a Big Deal on Broadway but hadn’t done a lot on screen so this felt like a big moment for her – especially because she didn’t sing in it. She was the original Maureen in Rent (she’s in the film of that too, but I can’t really recommend it unless you’re a mega Rent fan) and then originated Elphaba in Wicked, which she won a Tony for. I saw her play Elphie when she opened the West End production in 2006 and can confirm that it was epic.
If I haven’t convinced you to watch it yet, then I don’t know what will. I love the original so much, I hardly dare google the reviews, but I probably will to see if it’s going to be worth watching or if it’ll spoil my memories of the original. But all four of the two original couples are back and the trailer looks promising – even if the fact that it’s going straight to Disney + is a concern – although of course post covid, that doesn’t mean the same thing as it used to.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 