Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

I have already written about quite a few films I watched this year, and so this isn't an inclusive list by any means, more of a brain dump of the recent movies that made an impression on me.   Saltburn Lush and stylish with fabulous actors giving great performances.  Just love Rosamund Pike in particular as the rich mother, and Jacob Elordi absolutely nails the effortlessly beautiful rich boy.  The intended and actual star though is Barry Keoghan as Oliver and he is excellent throughout, keeping us on our toes with his motives, and deserves credit for keeping a straight face in some of his scenes! Giving Brideshead and Ripley vibes, despite a criminal underuse of Carey Mulligan I enjoyed this even though it’s not as clever or as deep as it thinks it is.  It made me laugh quite a lot, mostly when I was supposed to, particularly with the couple of gratuitous scenes which anyone who has seen it will be able to identify immediately.  I have never seen a bathtub or a grave loved as much

This isn't everything I watched last year, but I wanted to call out some of the things that have stuck with me in different ways.  There might be minor spoilers but I have tried to avoid giving away any big plot secrets  The Woman in the Wall A gripping thriller with Ruth Wilson and Daryl McCormack set in Ireland and digging into the horrors of the Irish laundries scandal and the ongoing impact.  I will watch pretty much anything with Ruth Wilson and as Lorna she plays a woman who has lost a child in the system and has never recovered.  The layers of secrets still being held in the community, and the tensions and secret kindnesses are beautifully drawn. The blurring of the lines between delusion and reality are played so cleverly, partly for keeping us on our toes about what is really happening, and then also to mirror the delusions vs reality that still exist within families, friends and the wider community. Makes for an addictive narrative too.  And there is a clever 'moment&

  I popped into town on a last minute whim and got a great £20 ticket right by the stage for this new play by Annie Baker.  The journey by train was a bit painful so I rushed in to the auditorium out of breath just as they were closing the doors, wriggling out of my coat as the lights went down. This play was an immediate change of pace.  Sofi (Christina Kirk) arrives first, with her book, to sit in one of the many sun loungers, eventually joined by Eileen (Marylouise Burke) and one of those desultory conversations follows that might happen by a pool or in a hotel garden. But it becomes clear that Sofi, Eileen and the other residents are actually at some kind of strange clinic (which used to be a motel and where the patio overlooks a car park and a bakery) and all are undergoing strict cleansing regimes.   Over the next hour and 45 minutes there are snippets of conversation with long pauses and then jumps in time called out by Sofi ...'5 hours later’ ...‘22 hours later’ ...where so

  Before we went off to the theatre this week we dropped into the new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection.   Taking a fairly fragmented look at the changing cultural ideas of beauty, the beauty industry and the strange and sometimes wonderful things people do and have done to their bodies for the sake of it, it was an interesting hour or so.   I was particularly taken by the exhibits looking at how we learn what is beautiful, and particularly how to do makeup, which nowadays seems to be through Tiktok or Youtube, but in the dark ages when I was young was probably through Jackie and Cosmopolitan.   And the relationship between personal conceptions of beauty and how they are intertwined with our identities gave me quite a lot of food for thought. My favourite of all though was (Almost) all of my dead mother's beautiful things  by Narcissister.  I dread to think of what my treasures would look like if displayed in a similar way.  

The laughter as people made their way out of the auditorium could have led you to believe that we had come out from a comedy, but instead it was that laughter of relief you get after surviving a traumatic experience.  We didn’t get off to a great start as a couple of big guys with big heads sat down in front of us, so our view was a bit punctuated by shuffling about to see properly.  I was sort of hoping they wouldn’t come back for the second half but they did.  Actually the second half was so gripping I hardly noticed it any more. After the death of her husband, Bernarda locks her daughters and her own mother in the house for an eight year period of mourning.   I gather the original version was written during the Spanish Civil War and whatever way you look at it this is a pretty effective play about tyranny, but making this a female cast (except for the dancing and wordless Pepe El Romano, played by a muscular James McHugh*) added an additional layer.   The women are locked into being