Wilson

Kidman and JLC are currently screaming at each other. It is demented. To be fair, JLC just called Kidman a cunt, so maybe it is worth watching...

I have stuck my head in, and it is Scarpetta. Unbelievably another Nicole Kidman TV show, I hadn't heard about till tonight.

My wife is watching a TV show in the other room, and I can hear Jamie Lee Curtis shouting across the length of my house and I can say, sight unseen, it is the worst performance in living memory.

Torres really is remarkable. She performs everything with such delicacy. I think I have only seen her in one other film, which is very poor on my part.

The film perhaps lacks some momentum at times, it is fairly languid in its set-up, but Salles is trying to do something other than make a thriller. It is a rather anxious drama about living in an authoritarian state, and the scars that leaves even after it ends.

Walter Salles directs the film with compassion, but never forgets to do some interesting things visually. The Super 8 interjections, the shadowy middle third, and prominence of photographs.

It skirts larger history. It assumes knowledge. It has a wonderful Fernanda Torres performance, that increases in intensity as the film gets into a dramatic middle hour. The film has a strict three act structure, with its breezy opening beach half-hour, and the final haunting time jumps.

It keeps its story small-scale, it narrows its focus, it tells a biopic, it tells it straight, and tries to shatter your emotions and poke you into action. It is very old-fashioned compared with The Secret Agent, but all the better for it.

It probably speaks to my middling taste, but I thought I'm Still Here was a materially more impressive and meaningful film than The Secret Agent. It is stolid political drama that hits you directly with intimate family suffering, and the toll that hopeful perseverance takes.

I hope that isn't a reflection on the quality of the film...

Rewatched the first episode of The Girlfriend Experience. The single most uncomfortable-to-watch TV show I have ever finished. The last episode of season one is a remarkable piece of television. Not sure I can manage to get myself there for a second time, it is all so painful to sit through.

Poster of I'm Still Here

Tonight's film

Bernie Winters in Jazz Boat

Gee, Officer Krupke

Jazz Boat has a song and dance number in it that could be out of West Side Story, if West Side Story starred Bernie Winters.

He is amazing in a supporting turn in Two Lovers as well. One of my favourite actors, who has had a great career and probably deserved a greater career.

His performances in Crash and Exotica are two of the best of the 1990s. Very specific and very different in his weirdness in both.

The Swedish Citizen Kane with its own rosebud (*coughs*) ending.

A rather shameless reworking of Francis Ford Coppla's Dracula, with added French. A pleasing enough gothic romance, which certainly isn't a horror film. It is relatively well-made (excepting some gargoyles), but I am Dracula'd out.

Ha! Potentially. I think he is good for certain directors - Todd Haynes, Scott Cooper, Terence Malick, maybe Nolan, and I have some bizarre affinity for a couple of Dave O Russ films - but he really needs a great performance/film soon. His casting in Heat 2 is a concern...

Poster of Dracula (2025)

Tonight's film

Announcement in 9 days.

I don't mind The Pale Blue Eye, but Bale isn't especially great in it. Ford v Ferrari is a good shout, though I don't think I really liked it all that much. Hostiles is what I was thinking about, and that is a decade old now. And his next film - David O Russell American football film with Nic Cage.

It would replace Superman as the worst film of the 2020s, I reckon, except, Jeannie Berlin plays Greta, Euphronious' maid, and frankly that is really fucking funny.

I have had a pretty easy life. I've never had too many regrets. I maybe don't have any at all. So, not walking out of The Bride! at the Puttin' on the Ritz sequence is maybe the biggest regret of my life. I could have gained an hour. I could have gone to Sainsbury's earlier, and been home for a tea.

I love Penélope Cruz. I am sure everyone loves Penélope Cruz. Her casting and performance in this seems to be a practical joke. On the audience.

The tone is really irritating. The film is constantly poking you in the side with jokes, asking "isn't this funny, isn't this a lark". But, the script is worse. The idea of a feminist take on Frankenstein I guess is an amusing one, given the author, but in practice, in this shape, is painful.

I thought everything about it was a disaster. Jessie Buckley is atrocious. I have never really liked her in anything (I haven't seen Hamnet), but this is a new level. All the guardrails and safety barriers have been removed and she flails endlessly. Bale is dreadfully mis-cast.

To be fair to Maggie Gyllenhaal, you could feel the studio hand. To be fair to the studio, I cannot imagine how bad the first cut must have been. The film almost feels unfinished. Scenes are cobbled together, you can feel where reshoots are jumped into the middle of sequence.

I thought The Bride! was dreadful. An attempt to DC Universe the monster movie. One Poor Things was more than enough Poor Things for me, and smashing that together with an aesthetic not to far away from Joker was ruinous. I think the predominantly negative reviews are being quite kind.

When was the last time Christian Bale gave a good performance?