It has been far too long since I last added to this blog. In fact I can say with complete pedantic accuracy that it was last decade. It is January 2010, the beginning of a year where I will regain the complete appreciation of movies I had as the fresh faced 16 year-old who stared out from the front of the Chester Chronicle to mark my appearance on the Radio 4 movie quiz ‘Screen Test’ (I will never watch ‘An American Werewolf in Paris’ because of it). The adverse weather helped me to start the year in fine form to achieve this as the time I spent stuck in my flat was largely spent in front of the television with the DVD player or Sky+ box spewing cinematic offerings of varying quality into my minds IMDb. So in order to play catch up since my Poirot-themed post in October I will indulge myself with a small review of the movies I watched in the first week of January.
We start with something that should have been put away in the attic with the tinsel and that jumper with the massive reindeer face on it. Four Christmases (2008, **) is a movie that you will sit through waiting for the good bits that seem to be permanently around the corner but they never arrive. It stars Vince Vaughan, a man whose charge sheet of cinematic crimes grows year-on-year, and Reese Witherspoon as a clinically practical couple whose Christmas plans are thrown into disarray and they are forced to spend the day trawling around their family’s houses being humiliated, abused and talking over one another in a very irritating manner. About an hour in I suddenly remembered that Witherspoon won an Oscar just a few years back and the names of Halle Berry, Maximillian Schell and Helen Hunt rattled ominously around my brain. That said pre-Oscar Reese Witherspoon made worse films such as Sweet Home Alabama (2002, *) which I will dwell on only long enough to say that it is the only romantic comedy I have ever seen where you hope the two men of the love triangle end up together having been turned off women for life by the nasty, selfish ‘heroine’.
A better romantic comedy of recent times is The Wedding Singer (1998, ***) which amazed me as being quite enjoyable despite the twin turn offs of over-blown nostalgia for the 1980s and the presence of Adam Sandler, a man who normally sends me into a deep depression that only Stan & Ollie can drag me out of. It is the usual tale of unavailable boy meets unavailable girl and their path to mutual availability runs anything but smoothly. To be fair to Adam Sandler his performance actually carries the film though the when you are battling for acting honours against the wooden Drew Barrymore that isn’t hard. Her lack of ability was much in evidence in Grey Gardens (2009, ***), an over long but eerily fascinating dramatisation of the lives of two women related to the Bouviers whose mental and physical decline shocked America when it was captured in the 1970s by documentary film makers. Barrymore wrestles with her New York socialite accent and loses but Jessica Lange is very good and the film gives one the urge to track down the 1975 documentary and see the real ‘Big Edie’ and ‘Little Edie’.
We jump now from one rich, eccentric American family to another and George Cukor’s 1938 comedy Holiday (1938, ****). It’s a bit of a slow burner this one. I tried to watch it once and switched it off after twenty minutes. However I am now very pleased I gave it a second chance as it proved to be a charming, if very predictable, movie. Cary Grant is all set to marry the daughter of a rich businessman but his free-thinking ideals are more in line with his fiancées sister played by Katharine Hepburn. Lew Ayres gives good support as Hepburn’s permanently tipsy brother and with such talent involved it is difficult not to like ‘Holiday’.
Finally in this first part of my January reviews we come to Remains of the Day (1993, *****). The story concerns a house keeper who comes to work at a country manor before the Second World War and her relationship, one of frustrated love, with the house’s butler. There is a lot to admire about this film, particularly the performances. Hugh Grant has probably never been better even though his role is pretty small. James Fox is also very good as the lord of the manor whose political manoeuvrings eventually destroy his reputation whilst Emma Thompson’s turn as the house keeper who cannot penetrate the reserved Mr. Stevens is a fantastically judged performance. Even Thompson, though, pales in comparison to a stunning display of acting by Anthony Hopkins as Mr. Stevens. Hopkins is the very essence of repressed propriety, a man whose professional pride will not allow an iota or human emotion and feeling to escape to the surface whether he is being teased, insulted or complimented. Even when his father dies he carries on with his duties with barely a flicker of evidence that this event has occurred. His scenes with Emma Thompson are simply brilliant as their relationship turns from one of friction to mutual admiration for each other’s work ethic to something deeper that is never given a hope of developing by Stevens’ incredible reserve. Coming hot on the heels of ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ and ‘Howard’s End’ this is Hopkins at the peak of his cinematic career and, in movie packed with excellent acting, his performance stands out as not only the pick of the bunch but, I feel, as one of the greatest performances by an actor in cinema history.
We start with something that should have been put away in the attic with the tinsel and that jumper with the massive reindeer face on it. Four Christmases (2008, **) is a movie that you will sit through waiting for the good bits that seem to be permanently around the corner but they never arrive. It stars Vince Vaughan, a man whose charge sheet of cinematic crimes grows year-on-year, and Reese Witherspoon as a clinically practical couple whose Christmas plans are thrown into disarray and they are forced to spend the day trawling around their family’s houses being humiliated, abused and talking over one another in a very irritating manner. About an hour in I suddenly remembered that Witherspoon won an Oscar just a few years back and the names of Halle Berry, Maximillian Schell and Helen Hunt rattled ominously around my brain. That said pre-Oscar Reese Witherspoon made worse films such as Sweet Home Alabama (2002, *) which I will dwell on only long enough to say that it is the only romantic comedy I have ever seen where you hope the two men of the love triangle end up together having been turned off women for life by the nasty, selfish ‘heroine’.
A better romantic comedy of recent times is The Wedding Singer (1998, ***) which amazed me as being quite enjoyable despite the twin turn offs of over-blown nostalgia for the 1980s and the presence of Adam Sandler, a man who normally sends me into a deep depression that only Stan & Ollie can drag me out of. It is the usual tale of unavailable boy meets unavailable girl and their path to mutual availability runs anything but smoothly. To be fair to Adam Sandler his performance actually carries the film though the when you are battling for acting honours against the wooden Drew Barrymore that isn’t hard. Her lack of ability was much in evidence in Grey Gardens (2009, ***), an over long but eerily fascinating dramatisation of the lives of two women related to the Bouviers whose mental and physical decline shocked America when it was captured in the 1970s by documentary film makers. Barrymore wrestles with her New York socialite accent and loses but Jessica Lange is very good and the film gives one the urge to track down the 1975 documentary and see the real ‘Big Edie’ and ‘Little Edie’.
We jump now from one rich, eccentric American family to another and George Cukor’s 1938 comedy Holiday (1938, ****). It’s a bit of a slow burner this one. I tried to watch it once and switched it off after twenty minutes. However I am now very pleased I gave it a second chance as it proved to be a charming, if very predictable, movie. Cary Grant is all set to marry the daughter of a rich businessman but his free-thinking ideals are more in line with his fiancées sister played by Katharine Hepburn. Lew Ayres gives good support as Hepburn’s permanently tipsy brother and with such talent involved it is difficult not to like ‘Holiday’.
Finally in this first part of my January reviews we come to Remains of the Day (1993, *****). The story concerns a house keeper who comes to work at a country manor before the Second World War and her relationship, one of frustrated love, with the house’s butler. There is a lot to admire about this film, particularly the performances. Hugh Grant has probably never been better even though his role is pretty small. James Fox is also very good as the lord of the manor whose political manoeuvrings eventually destroy his reputation whilst Emma Thompson’s turn as the house keeper who cannot penetrate the reserved Mr. Stevens is a fantastically judged performance. Even Thompson, though, pales in comparison to a stunning display of acting by Anthony Hopkins as Mr. Stevens. Hopkins is the very essence of repressed propriety, a man whose professional pride will not allow an iota or human emotion and feeling to escape to the surface whether he is being teased, insulted or complimented. Even when his father dies he carries on with his duties with barely a flicker of evidence that this event has occurred. His scenes with Emma Thompson are simply brilliant as their relationship turns from one of friction to mutual admiration for each other’s work ethic to something deeper that is never given a hope of developing by Stevens’ incredible reserve. Coming hot on the heels of ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ and ‘Howard’s End’ this is Hopkins at the peak of his cinematic career and, in movie packed with excellent acting, his performance stands out as not only the pick of the bunch but, I feel, as one of the greatest performances by an actor in cinema history.
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