Category: film

book adjacent, film, not a book

Book adjacent: Conclave

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Another Sunday, and another week where I’ve been out and about and doing a few bits and bobs. It’s been a few weeks since I talked about a movie so I’ve gone with that.

Conclave an adaptation of the book of the same name by Robert Harris. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t comment on the differences between the two. But as the movie starts the Pope has died, and Cardinal-Dean Thomas Lawrence is suddenly in charge of the Conclave – the meeting to chose the new Pontiff. A flock of cardinals descends on the Vatican to be cloistered together and vote. There are several different candidates and factions as the diversity of views in the church try to find a candidate the majority can get behind.

Considering that at the core of this is a group of old men voting, this is a suprisingly exciting movie, with plenty of twists and turns as votes go on and the situation in the Sistine Chapel gets tenser. And it’s got a pretty cracking cast: Ralph Fiennes plays Lawrence, who says (repeatedly) he doesn’t want to be Pope, much to the disbelief of some of his colleagues, and who has doubts – about himself and about some of the leading candidates. Stanley Tucci is Aldo Bellini, a liberal American cardinal who was close to the previous Pope, and who is one of the favourites going in to the conclave. John Lithgow is Joseph Tremblay, a moderate Canadian cardinal and Isabella Rossellini is Sister Agnes, the head of the Vatican housekeeping staff.

I really, really enjoyed it – the plot keeps moving and shifting, and the set design and cinematography make it feel cramped, dark and claustrophobic – a feat considering it’s set in the Vatican, a place filled with marble and high ceilings and designed to make you feel small and insignificant. The ending is going to be… divisive, but I thought it worked – and fitted in to the themes of the movie in general.

Conclave is in cinemas now – not sure how easy it will be to fine for long, but this week it’s on at both the independent cinema in my town that we’re members of and at the big chain.

Happy Sunday everyone!

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Not a Book: Kiss Me Kate in Cinemas

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You all know I saw this three times at the Barbican this summer, so it’s my duty to report that they recorded the revival of Kiss Me, Kate and it’s coming to cinemas from today (17th November) and I am in fact going to see it, in my local indie today because a) I loved it and b) I want to see how it comes across on screen. It’s one of those event-cinema releases, so the dates may vary (the cinema where I’m seeing it is only showing it twice a couple of days apart at the moment) and you may need to look at either an indie or a larger multiplex cinema, but hopefully if you want to see it you’ll be able to find it.

book adjacent, film

Book Adjacent: The Count of Monte Cristo

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It’s Sunday and this week I have a movie to recommend, and it’s a bit of an epic. It’s not often that I recommend a three hour-long film, but honestly The Count of Monte Cristo didn’t feel that long because there is so much going on and it’s so much fun.

So this is the latest adaptation of the book by Alexandre Dumas (pere), and unlike The Three Musketeers, it’s not one of his that I have read so I can’t tell you how much this new French version has left out, but I suspect it’s a lot because it is a long book and covers a huge period. The early phase of this has a lot of “x years later” slates to get you to the point where Edmond Dantes returns to seek his revenge. But I’ve skipped a few steps. Here is the rough outline of the story, as told in the movie:

In 1815 Edmond Dantes, a young sailor, is falsely accused of aiding Napoleon and is arrested on his wedding day (before the knot can be tied). Betrayed by his friends and convicted by a corrupt magistrate, he is sentenced to life in prison. Some years into his time in prison, he meets an old abbé and while the two of them work to escape the Abbé educates him and also tells him where to find a mysterious treasure. On his escape, Edmond locates the treasure and sets himself up as the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo and in the 1830s arrives in Paris to wreak revenge on the people who put him in jail.

I love a bit of swashbuckling adventure, and this really delivers on that. It doesn’t have as starry a cast as the two recent French Musketeers movies, but it has a similar amount of swagger and adventure, and as I said at the top, there’s so much going on that you don’t notice the three hour run time. You might have to have a hunt around to find a screening of it, but it looks amazing on the big screen – it made me want to go to the south of France again as well as being entertaining.

Have a great Sunday!

film, not a book

Not a Book: The Thomas Crown Affair

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You know there are some films where if you come across them on TV you just end up watching them again? Hot Fuzz is one of them for me – and the 1999 version of The Thomas Crown Affair is another.

Pierce Brosnan’s Thomas Crown is a wealthy industrialist and playboy. And as we discover in the opening sequence, he’s taken to stealing art from museums for kicks. Rene Russo is Catherine Banning, the insurance investigator sent to find out what happened to the Monet that has gone missing from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She soon grows suspicious of Crown and the two start a romantic cat and mouse game.

This has got romantic tension and intrigue galore and two brilliant heist sequences to boot. You can’t help but root for Thomas, even though he’s stealing things, and Rene Russo is impossibly glamorous as Catherine. This is a remake (although somewhat tweaked and updated) of an earlier Paul Newman and Faye Dunaway movie of the same name, which I keep meaning to try and find and then never getting around to. But in terms of a film where people have cool jobs and live amazing lives in New York, this is right up there. Just try not to think too hard about how much money this must all cost – although at least to give this some credit Thomas is explicitly super wealthy and Catherine explains she gets a percentage of the value of the artwork that she recovers, so it fairs better on that front than say You’ve Got Mail or When Harry Met Sally!

The Thomas Crown Affair pops up fairly regularly on the various ITV channels in the UK, and it’s also on the MGM subscription service within Amazon Prime. And just a couple of weeks ago it was announced that there is third version of the story coming – this time directed by and starring Michael B Jordan. I’ll be going to see it just to see how different it is from the other two…

Have a great Sunday

film, not a book

Not a Book: On the Basis of Sex

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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.

film, not a book

Not a Book: Priscilla

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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!

Happy Sunday everyone!

film, not a book

Not a Book: The Oscars

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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:

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Not a Book: The Wedding Singer

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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.

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Not a Book: Bombshell

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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.

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Not a Book: Asteroid City

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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.

Have a good Sunday everyone