Category Archive: Drama Film
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 →Oppenheimer
(Directed by Christopher Nolan) (2023) On 16 July 1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated, at a test site named “Trinity”, in New Mexico, USA. It went so well that, on 6 August 1945 at 8.15 am, the US tried it on an actual city: Hiroshima. A blinding flash shot over the city, and then some 100,000 people were vapourised. The morning turned dark; a priest, Father Kleinsorge, wandered in the garden of his mission, dazed and bleeding, to see his housekeeper, Murata-san, crying out “Shu Jesusu, awaremi tamai!” (‘Our Lord Jesus, have pity on us!’).* Of course, President Truman’s…
Continue Reading →She Said
(2022) Yes, it’s all ‘She Said’ in this tedious, overblown 90 minute polemic from director Maria Schrader. Anything ‘he says’ is misogynistic and stupid, ipso facto, because the speaker is a man. The scene is set early on with gratuitous Trump-bashing. Then whispers about Harvey Weinstein’s predatory behaviour are heard and leapt upon voraciously by our female reporters (they are, apparently, the only ones doing a real job apart from, possibly, Anderson Cooper who is also on to it, (no surprises there)). Everyone’s aghast. The ‘casting couch’ is such an evil and new concept (but only to be expected). Weinstein…
Continue Reading →Living
(Directed by Oliver Hermanus, 2022) Well, this is a new idea for a story! A reserved and disciplined person of a certain age gets a terminal diagnosis and decides to LIVE before he shuffles off. Mr. Williams (Bill Nighy) is a decent enough chap but frosty (and is in fact referred to as ‘Mr. Zombie’) in a middle management civil service position*. The table of junior civil servants over which he presides (stiffly and politely, of course) is piled ridiculously high, with towers of aged paper and nothing ever gets done. After the appropriately stiff upper-lipped scene with the specialist,…
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