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| The Guardian - Culture: Film | | | | | | Here Today review – Billy Crystal and Tiffany Haddish smile through tears in dementia dramedy | | by Peter Bradshaw Sep 2, 2021 | | Crystal directs and stars in this oppressively sentimental film about a TV writer coming to terms with his condition with the help of an unlikely new best friend Billy Crystal directs and stars in this oppressively sentimental dramedy: a glutinous soup of heartbreaking and heartwarming life-lessons, learned as you smile through your tears. Crystal also co-writes with his longtime collaborator, SNL veteran Alan Zweibel, on whose short story The Prize it is based. Crystal plays Charlie Burns, an ageing New York comedy writer and widower. Charlie created Broadway hits and Hollywood screenplays in his day (some cameos here from Kevin Kline and Sharon Stone), and he is still working on a late-night TV comedy show, though regarded as a dinosaur by the younger writers. Tiffany Haddish plays Emma, a woman who wins lunch with Charlie at a charity auction. Despite her having zero in common with the old guy, there is an intergenerational spark and they develop an odd-couple friendship. Charlie finds that Emma is the only person to whom he can confide his awful secret: he has dementia and the symptoms are getting worse. Continue reading... | | | | | Janine Jansen: Falling for Stradivari review – violin virtuoso on a mission | | by Peter Bradshaw Sep 2, 2021 | | This absorbing documentary follows the brilliant Dutch violinist as she attempts to record an album with 12 of the most exquisite Stradivarius violins in existence There’s such intelligence and connoisseurship in this documentary about the Dutch violin virtuoso Janine Jansen and her recent mission to record an album with 12 of the most exquisite Stradivarius violins in existence – that is, violins made by the great Italian craftsman Antonio Stradivari (1644-1737), of which perhaps around 500 are now extant. The 12 that Jansen records with are a veritable European Super League of Strads, and the film absorbingly tells us about the great musicians who used to own them. It’s impossible not to be overwhelmed by Jansen’s mastery of her instrument, and the fineness and the delicacy of her response to each Stradivarius; from each she conjures vivid stabs and blocks and twines of sound. (I notice that some of the English musicians she speaks to have that distinctive, eccentric high-classical mannerism of calling these precious violins “fiddles”.) Jansen is a rather remarkable personality; brilliant but entirely without what the English used to call “side”: she is completely candid, open and unpretentious, no false modesty, no false anything. Continue reading... | | | | | Wildfire review – potent Irish drama about the legacy of violence | | by Peter Bradshaw Sep 2, 2021 | | Cathy Brady’s disquieting film about a mysterious return has an extra layer of melancholy, because it features the last performance by the late Nika McGuigan Two fiercely committed performances are the bedrock of this drama from writer-director Cathy Brady. Nora-Jane Noone plays Lauren, who lives near the Northern Irish border with her partner, and works in a vast Amazon-style fulfilment centre; and Nika McGuigan (from RTÉ’s TV comedy Can’t Cope Won’t Cope) plays her troubled sister Kelly, returning home after a mysterious yearlong absence. This tense reunion revives painful memories of their mother, who took her own life when they were both children. Yet Kelly’s homecoming also appears to relight the wildfire in the hearts of both women, as they challenge the menfolk thereabouts who are still in hock to the macho cult of terrorist violence. This sombre film has an extra shadow of sadness because it marks the final performance of McGuigan, who died of cancer in 2019 at the age of 33. There are powerful moments and surreally disquieting images in Wildfire, which incidentally reminded me in some ways of Pat Murphy’s classic Northern Ireland drama Maeve from 1981, also about a young woman returning home to make a reckoning with the past. I especially liked the strange tableau of Lauren and Kelly in the pub dancing wildly to Van Morrison’s Gloria on the jukebox and then finally stopping exhausted, as if emerging from a dream, to see a bunch of faintly sinister middle-aged guys glowering at them resentfully from the bar. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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