Author Archive: Lesley Jakobsen
Saltburn
"every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
(Directed by Emerald Fennell, 2023) Why would any middle or working class young person accept an invitation to their aristocratic University chum’s stately pile? Every movie-goer knows that the guest will have the wrong clothes, the butler will despise them, something bad will happen and lives will be Changed Forever. There is of course the very slight chance that the young person will end-up filthy rich as a result of their visit. Perhaps that’s why they keep turning-up on foot at the magnificent iron gates, having somehow missed the serf who was sent to the station to meet them. We’ve…
Continue Reading →The Lesson
Director, Alice Troughton; Screenwriter, Alex MacKeith (2023) ‘The Lesson’ should be good. It has lots of literary talk, Richard E Grant demonstrating his special scenery-chewing skills, Julie Deply mooching about, a big moody house with a pond. Note the pond. Grant is J M Sinclair, a famous novelist of the bad-tempered, autocratic variety. Julie Deply is Helene, his long-suffering wife who has some art curator job which is glamorous and doesn’t require any work, so she mooches about. Their needs and those of their miserable, lazy but talented son Bertie (Stephen McMillan) are tended to by the butler/cook and all…
Continue Reading →The Following Events Are Based On a Pack of Lies
(Foxtel Go. Binge) (2023) Creators: Ginny Skinner, Penelope Skinner; Directed by Robbie McKillop and Nicole Charles. The name and set-up of this sleek five-part ITV series leave the viewer suspecting a twist at the end. So that the reader will not be disappointed, we will tell you that the twist never comes. The narrative is pretty straightforward, if not always credible. But that’s ok. This is bite-sized entertainment of the fairly predictable, non-demanding type, with fairy-tale themes. While pushing her bike around Oxford wearing a peculiar, self-designed red cape, our heroine, middle-aged sad-sack Alice Newman (Rebekah Staton) spots her Big…
Continue Reading →Valley of the Dolls (Jacqueline Susann, 1966)
In 1945 Anne Welles is a prissy but astonishingly beautiful young woman who will do anything to get away and stay away from her small home town. She trips in, all nice and fresh, to New York and immediately gets a job with a marvellous legal firm that specialises in managing movie stars’ contracts. Her new friend Jennifer North is astonishingly beautiful too but most importantly she has SENSATIONAL KNOCKERS. Everyone admires her boobs. The brain dead but astonishingly beautiful singer she marries wants to drink from them (vomit). The sensitive upright senator she is later engaged to calls them…
Continue Reading →Barbie (2023 Dir. Greta Gerwig)
One of these three plays Barbie in the eponymous movie. No, not that one, not her either. That one. I know!? Weird, right?
Not the least weird thing about the ‘Barbie’ film is the casting. Margot Robbie is just not…Barbie enough…but she does invest the role with a certain joie de vivre and that’s something. Our Barbie (‘Stereotypical Barbie’) lives in a lovely dollhouse world where all the Barbies party and sort of wander about doing physics and stuff. The Kens don’t do anything and are deeply stupid. (Our Barbie’s Ken’s job is not surf lifesaver, as so many people mistakenly believe. His job is ‘beach’). Fittingly, Ken is played by Ryan Gosling, but it might as well have been Ryan Reynolds or…
Continue Reading →