Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

I found it very inconvenient that I have to go to work, otherwise I would have bought lots more tickets but I did get to see a few things over the past week… All Of Us Strangers As it’s not going to have a general release for a while I was really keen to see this with the cast of four amazing actors.  I don’t want to give any spoilers but this film about grief, love, loss and loneliness is just beautiful with sensitive and moving performances from all.  Just love Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal together - the energy each can create on a screen by themselves could power small towns and so together they are stunning.  And Claire Foy and Jamie Bell are just so delicate in creating a pair of parents from the eighties.  Great soundtrack too.  In my practical head though I am wondering what happens after the film ends.  It was my first time going to a gala performance at the LFF and we only realised at the last minute that there was a red carpet so we took the oppor...

I’ve been on leave so I’ve had time for a bit more film and tv than usual.  This is my half time report…   God’s Creatures   I saw this at the proper cinema which was great for the cinematography on display with the wind blown seascapes.  A domestic drama set in a run down Irish fishing community where people don’t learn to swim because if they did they might be obliged to help anyone in trouble.  We get this nugget early on and it sums up the sort of place very succinctly.  A very slow burn which is all built around Emily Watson and Paul Mescal’s performances as a mother and son.  I love the choices that both of these actors make and their abilities to deliver such moral ambiguity in a compelling way.  This is a story about a sequence of tiny choices that turn out to have big and ultimately devastating impacts. This is particularly true for Watson’s character whose adoration for her son has blinded her to his faults but finds herself torn between...

Drum roll for the inaugural Chatterbox Film, TV  and Theatre awards 2022.  This is a really random selection and I  am sure I have forgotten some great stuff but these are the bits that have stuck in my memory.  You may be relieved I have forgotten some things, as this has turned out to be far too long, like every award ceremony you have ever seen.  May contain spoilers. Best TV Moment It was a good year for TV moments. The nominees are: Stranger Things: There were a lot of great moments in series 4.  I almost picked  Kate Bush saves Max, but really that's probably more a group of moments.  Or I could have picked one of the moments where poor Will has his romantic hopes dashed.  Instead though I have picked the iconic moment in the finale of series 4, with Eddie Munson's heroic playing of Metallica's Master of Puppets.  The game changer in the battle, sacrificing himself for his friends, and also spot on brand for the metalhead/ dun...

Still following the degrees of connection in my viewing I decided to follow the breadcrumb trails from Olivia Coleman and Paul Mescal which led me to finally watch this film, written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, which is (partly at least) another meditation on parenthood.  Olivia Coleman is Leda, a deliberately evocative name if I ever heard one, spending a week alone in a beachside get-away. The family that arrives to disrupt her peace is an irritant and a trigger for a series of flashes of memory about motherhood and relationship with her daughters.  Having so recently watched Aftersun, I can’t help but see this as a partner piece, but this time there is no nostalgic childlike filter to soften the edges.  The chaotic, brutal and unsparing look at the constant denial of self that parenting often requires was really on point, and the petty triumphs that the young version of Leda (an excellent Jessie Buckley) exacts are as recognisable as they are painful.  This...

I spent lunchtime today in a cinema watching Aftersun and I feel dazed and dazzled in the way you can after too much time at the beach.   It’s a beautiful, intimate and visually stunning look back at a holiday Sophie had with her Dad in Turkey when she was 11.  There are coming of age moments certainly but overall this is a tender, if oblique, close-up of a parent though the lense of childhood, and a masterful first film from Charlotte Wells.  Paul Mescal does his semi-magical thing here, as in Normal People.  I didn’t love Sally Rooney’s book mainly because I struggled to get past Connell’s treatment of Marianne but I absolutely ‘got’ what Connell was about when I finally watched Mescal in the tv series.  Here, as Calum in Aftersun, he manages to be spectacular in his quiet portrayal of a man who is a loving, fun father but with largely unarticulated adult demons too.   The two leads have a wonderful, natural chemistry and the fragmented nature o...