| | | Frankie review – trouble in a Portuguese paradise with Isabelle Huppert | | by Simran Hans May 30, 2021 | | A spectacular setting and compelling performances lift Ira Sachs’s humourless drama about the woes of the wealthy The famously stylish Isabelle Huppert spends a stretch of this handsome drama on her hands and knees. In the verdant foothills of Sintra, Portugal, ailing actor Frankie (Huppert) searches for the €40,000 bracelet her only son, Paul (Jérémie Renier), has tossed into the woods, rejecting her offer of a valuable family heirloom that could be cashed in after her death. It’s that kind of film – one in which depressed rich people go on holiday to argue about death, inheritance tax, diamond jewellery and their deteriorating marriages. The approach taken by director Ira Sachs (Love Is Strange) is utterly sincere and so utterly humourless, though the performances are quietly compelling; Marissa Tomei brings a liquid warmth as Frankie’s American friend Ilene. Sachs plays on Huppert’s queenly presence too. It’s fitting that she gathers her nearest and dearest in a town that was once a sanctuary for the Portuguese nobility. Continue reading... | | | | | Beth Ditto: 'Seeing Boy George was like coming home' | | by Beth Ditto May 30, 2021 | | Growing up in the Bible Belt, MTV opened up a world that felt free for Beth Ditto. Here, the singer writes about queer visibility and why positive role models are still so vital My earliest memories of queerness come from pop culture. I was born in 1981, when it felt like queer culture was just pop culture. This was around the time that Girls Just Want to Have Fun and Material Girl came out. Prince was everywhere, as was Annie Lennox and Culture Club. Boy George was really the first explicitly queer person I saw on TV; I was four years old. My mom had me young (even though I was her fourth kid) and she was a “cool mom” – meaning we had cable TV. I remember we’d watch MTV, which was brand new, and that’s where I saw Boy George. I was so enamoured of him. It didn’t not make sense to me. I never thought: so that’s a boy dressed as a girl? Wearing makeup? It was almost like it was home. Not everybody felt that way. After I saw my first images of queer people on MTV, the channel was banned in our town, Searcy, a small place in Arkansas. The county was and still is influenced by a very conservative Christian college – you couldn’t go to a bookstore and buy a gay or feminist magazine, you had to ask behind the counter. We weren’t even allowed to have dances! It was the Christian college that made the cable company drop MTV and when they did, those images of Prince, Annie Lennox and Boy George were the last glimmers of pop culture I’d see for a while. But they stuck with me. It’s like I had a tiny window into queerness in my little developing brain. I took those moments and ran with them. They shaped my idea of what gender is and what music is. Continue reading... | | | | | Dinner in America review – odd-couple romcom with punk flavour | | by Simran Hans May 30, 2021 | | Emily Skegg’s suburban nerd and Kyle Gallner’s runaway rocker work a treat in this abrasively funny 90s throwback Those who identified with the girl geeks of Ghost World and Welcome to the Dollhouse may also find something to love in Emily Skegg’s Patty, a wide-eyed suburban nerd whose life is turned upside down by the arrival of Simon (Kyle Gallner), a punk rock runaway. A throwback to the brightly coloured offbeat teen movies of the 90s and a rude riposte to that era’s more mainstream offerings (She’s All That’s sexist makeover scene is subverted), this sweet romcom is buoyed up by the chemistry between its leads. Tender moments, such as an original song penned by Patty, are tempered by the film’s abrasive and often scatological sense of humour. Continue reading... | | | | | Charlotte Ritchie: 'Feel Good has been cathartic for a lot of people' | | by Michael Hogan May 30, 2021 | | The co-star of Mae Martin’s award-winning romcom on the new series, working with a pigeon on Ghosts and accidentally dressing like a Minion Actor Charlotte Ritchie, 31, grew up in south London and was still finishing her drama degree at Bristol University when she landed the role of Oregon in Channel 4 student comedy Fresh Meat. Subsequent TV roles include Alison in Ghosts and Nurse Barbara Gilbert in Call the Midwife. She co-stars as George in Feel Good, a semi-autobiographical romcom by comedian Mae Martin, who identifies as non-binary. The show won two Royal Television Society awards earlier this year and is nominated for a Bafta at next weekend’s ceremony. Feel Good is back for its second (and final) series. Why the move from Channel 4 to Netflix?
Channel 4 didn’t pick up the second series but I’m so relieved that Netflix did. I knew that Mae [Martin, creator and star] and Joe [Hampson, co-writer] had planned a two-series trajectory and had solid ideas of how it was going to end. It would’ve been a real shame to cut it short. I think it feels different to the first series. Our characters are more mature and everything has progressed. Continue reading... | | | | | 'I wasn't what you'd call sensible': a walk on the wild side with Call My Agent's Liliane Rovère | | by Jonathan Romney May 30, 2021 | | The actor’s remarkable life fed into the character of Arlette in the Netflix hit, from growing up Jewish in occupied France, via Left Bank jazz and a relationship with Chet Baker, to global fame in her 80s If you’re an actor in the rare position of becoming internationally famous in your 80s, then it’s rather fitting to achieve it with a role that ripely resembles you. In recent years the world has come to know the veteran French actor Liliane Rovère as Arlette Azémar, the seasoned “impresario” – as she prefers to be known – in the French TV series Dix Pour Cent, AKA Call My Agent!. The show has become a global hit on Netflix, and Arlette has struck a chord as everyone’s ideal disreputable aunt with a repertoire of outrageous stories that she just might tell if the burgundy is flowing. She is the sly, sharp-tongued doyenne of top Paris talent agency ASK, who knows where the bodies are buried, and just when to dig them up. It is easy to imagine that Arlette is Rovère. You can just see Arlette reading Nietzsche while listening to Charlie Parker and smoking a joint – and if you dip into Rovère’s 2019 memoir, La Folle Vie de Lili, you’ll see that she depicts herself doing just that on the first page. Likewise, it came as no surprise in season two to learn that Arlette had supposedly had a youthful romance with jazz legend Chet Baker – a plotline that also came directly from Rovère’s own “wild life”. Continue reading... | | | | | Dream Horse: the true story of a Welsh village that raised a racehorse | | by Vanessa Thorpe May 30, 2021 | | Twenty years ago, one woman convinced her neighbours to buy, rear and train a thoroughbred racehorse, Dream Alliance. Now their unlikely story is relived in a feelgood film Ever felt stirred by a warm sense of connection to the world around you? Well, the Welsh have a word for that precious sensation: “hwyl”, sounding a little like “hoyle” to an English ear. And, as cinema projectors whirr into action again, there is one film above all others that aims to bring you this very emotion. Out on 4 June, Dream Horse is the true story of the extraordinary racehorse that brought a group of impoverished Welsh owners together and offered them fresh hope against all imaginable odds. And the concept of hwyl, a kind of mystic combination of those two more famous buzz words, the Irish “craic” and the Danish “hygge”, is right at the film’s core, according to director Euros Lyn. Continue reading... | | | | | First Cow review – celebrating the milk of human kindness | | by Mark Kermode Observer film critic May 30, 2021 | | Kelly Reichardt’s offbeat gem about an unlikely friendship founded on biscuits is a satisfying fable of America’s past and present “The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship,” reads the William Blake quotation that opens Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, setting the tone for a deceptively simple tale of man’s natural home – companionship – and the ongoing struggles of commerce verses comradeship. Reichardt’s intimate explorations of Oregon range from the modern drama Old Joy to the frontier western Meek’s Cutoff. Yet there’s still a profound element of discovery in this latest Oregon-based gem, a fable of land and freedom that serves as an up-close-and-personal portrait of friendship and a wider snapshot of America, rooted in the rich soil of the Pacific north-west. Continue reading... | | | | | 'My parents still have no clue what I'm doing': Lupin star Omar Sy on Hollywood, fame and fighting racism | | by Tom Lamont May 30, 2021 | | After a decade in Hollywood, French actor Omar Sy returned home to star in Netflix’s much-loved hit, Lupin. He talks about playing the charming thief, growing up with Arsenal’s Nicolas Anelka and his battle with racism Actors, obliged to exhaustively market their wares, will pose for hours in front of posters of their latest film or TV show. They’ll hop between city premieres, sit on dreary festival panels, tell rehearsed comic stories on night-time talkshows, then get up early to be on breakfast radio. Before meeting Omar Sy, a 43-year-old Frenchman who stars in the massively popular Netflix drama Lupin, I’d never heard of an actor picking up a bucket and brush to spend a day gluing up their own billboard posters on the Paris metro. Sy, who is 6ft 2in, born in a working-class Parisian suburb to West African parents, explains the thinking behind this unusual marketing stunt that took place just before the first series of Lupin debuted earlier this year. “A lot of people know me in Paris,” begins Sy, who worked as a comedian in France through his 20s before becoming a film star there in his early 30s. “Because people in France have watched me in stuff for years, I’m used to meeting strangers who recognise me and who already have smiles on their faces.” In Lupin, lightly adapted from the classic heist books by Maurice Leblanc, Sy plays a French-Senegalese man called Assane Diop, an anonymous Parisian who is used to being ignored and overlooked in his home town, but who is willing to use that to his advantage while robbing the city’s jet-set blind. “The show is entertainment and we want to have fun with it,” he says, “but at the same time we’re talking about something very serious: that some people in France are simply not seen.” Continue reading... | | | | | | | The Triumph of Nancy Reagan review – foibles and failings of a troubled first lady | | by Peter Conrad May 30, 2021 | | Karen Tumulty’s biography, on the centenary of Nancy Reagan’s ‘official’ birth, paints a romanticised picture of a neurotic prototype for Melania Trump After Jimmy Carter’s glum diagnosis of national malaise in 1979, Ronald Reagan supposedly restored the customary swagger of the US by making the country “feel good about itself”. That folksy blessing didn’t extend to his wife: on the evidence of Karen Tumulty’s biography, Nancy Reagan spent his entire presidency in a state of seething anxiety that frequently tipped over into hysteria. Aides in the White House came to dread her passive-aggressive silences on the phone and her basilisk glare when she allowed them face time. Likening her to a missile, a friend tells Tumulty “she was good at going stealth”. She monopolised Ronnie and staff members who had to relay her phone calls to the Oval Office said they were on the “Mommy Watch”. In later years, as his mind blurred, she became his agitated attendant, whispering panicked prompts in the hope of covering up his debility. Continue reading... | | | | | | | Gavin MacLeod, The Love Boat's Captain Stubing, dies aged 90 | | by Associated Press May 30, 2021 | | MacLeod, also known for the Mary Tyler Moore Show, died at his home in California Gavin MacLeod, the actor who achieved fame as sardonic TV news writer Murray Slaughter on the Mary Tyler Moore Show and cheerful Captain Stubing on The Love Boat, has died aged 90. MacLeod died early Saturday at his home in Palm Desert, California, said Stephanie Steele Zalin, his stepdaughter. She attributed his death to his age, saying he had been well until very recently. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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