Jamie’s Italian – Adelaide (with a Minority Report)
TVC ventured with friends L and M to Jamie Oliver’s eponymous restaurant in a restyled bank – an immense vault – on King William Street. Having valiantly resited the Jamieabilia for sale in the lobby shop the diner is then assaulted by a tsumani of sound and the unappetising sight of a sea of cafe-like booths. However, the further end of the restaurant is slightly more impressive, with individual tables and banquettes, low lighting and tall, bare windows. The “marble” bar, hung with red peppers and sausage lights, is an imaginative (if not authentic) rendering of an Italian lunch counter. People who…
Continue Reading →The Judge
(dir. David Dobkin) To make a film as bad as this, more ingredients are required than Hollywood plot #7, additional clichés and dollops of sentimentality. To the mix must be added really good actors – (Roberts Downey and Duvall; Billy Bob Thornton and Vincent d’Onofrio, who is starting to look like a confusing cross between Charles Durning and Brian Dennehy) – so that the hapless viewer is all the more disappointed when it turns out that there really is no more to this than appears. Avoid.
Continue Reading →Bertie
His Mutti Loved Him
(Jane Ridley) If, like my mother-in-law, you don’t enjoy books about the generation of British and European royals who were Queen Victoria’s children because Queen Victoria was so “beastly” to them, stay away from this biography of Prince Albert Edward/King Edward VII. Victoria is a mother who – knowing that her letters could well be preserved for posterity and made public – wrote to her daughter Vicky, Bertie’s sister, “The nose…is becoming the true Coburg nose, and begins to hang a little, but there remains unfortunately the want of chin which with that very large nose and very large lips is no…
Continue Reading →Under the Skin
(by Michel Faber) OK, OK, we get the message, Mr Faber. You have confirmed something we all know. Sigh. But you also confirmed something else for us here at TVC – that in no circumstances, whatsoever, is it a good idea to hitchhike. TVC had seen the film before reading the book (the two share little in common other than the name), and had read a spoiler somewhere explaining just why Isserley works so hard to pick up male hitchhikers; so there were no real surprises. It would be better to come to this book with little foreknowledge. The story…
Continue Reading →The Hustler
(dir. Robert Rossen) (1961) A tough, raw, hard-hearted story of Eddie Felsen (Paul Newman) who wants to move up from two bit hustling at pool to beat the best, Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason). Great pool scenes: Fats’ seven- ball in the corner is a shot Eddie Charlton would be proud of. Newman is also highly competent, although he joked of shooting some pool decades later when a youth approached, declaring he’d seen The Hustler dozens of times and that watching Newman play pool was one of the great disappointments of his life. Perhaps Eddie does shoot good but also lucky….
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