Video Throwback: You Give Love A Bad Dame

The residues from Oscar season are about done, and I just finished with Notes On A Scandal, a kind of pedigree lockerroom drama about one woman's obsessions with another. Judi Dench is the steely Old Teacher; Cate Blanchett plays her unknowing object of intense affection. Its A-grade filmmaking for a traditionally B-grade genre. And it just struck me that both the leads were once up for Oscars doing the same person, another astonishingly powerful woman who knew how to play it in the bedroom.

Video Throwback: A Case for Dr Phil

28 Days Later is the kind of film you think will be about running. Running away.

A rage-inducing virus has gulped down all of England. Not your regular rage virus this though. Because it also makes you want to [violently] pass it on to others. Cillian Murphy [pre-Red Eye and Batman Begins fame] plays a last innocent on the run, with a little help from some equally calm friends. What I was surprised about was how much time writer Alex Garland found for things other than running. What an unflinching, focussed return to instincts! When all else has been blown to bits, 28 Days Later remains scary and eloquent. A cult classic.

Video Throwback: On the Merits of Impotence

I just watched Children of Men. Wow. Alfonso Cuarón [say what you will, he made the best of the Harry Potter movies] directs almost A-grade stars Clive Owen and Julianne Moore in this spellbinding and weird and masterful adaptation of the P.D. James novel. It's the not-too-distant future. Women can't get preggers. Extinction looms large. Anarchy Rules. No, this is not an Armageddon press sheet. Then, in a barn [where else?], a tiny little secret is revealed. It's a paranoid kind of 'Pilgrim's Progress'. If you like life-affirming stories with lots of exploding things you'll love Children of Men.

Video Throwback: Where Rabbit?

After many many many [many] months of hype and 'You havent seen it?!!!' [relax people, its only a movie] I watched The Prestige, and alas, it is only a movie.

You might already know Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale are rival magicians in turn-of-the-century England. Scarlet Johansson achieves the impossible playing the sexy assistant with a few tricks of her own. Michael Caine achieves the impossible playing the unsexy assistant...or something. Piper Perabo is in it too [dispatched woefully early. Am I the only one who enjoyed Slap Her...She's French?] The movie is long and pretty, but did I mention its long? And did I mention the weird-as-hell de-noo-ma, which is one of those infuriating russian-doll type nonendings in which someone may or may not have been killed by someone else, who may be someone else, or not. [hint: it involves a giant xerox machine. I think.]

What a showy waste of good looks [somehow, that's a bad thing].

Moviewatch

So I watched Cheeni Kam and Metro over the past week.

Can I just say what a pleasure it is to watch good actors doing their thing with other good actors.

Konkona Sen Sharma, who I refused to be impressed by in the awful Page 3 and the slow-motion nonwonder that was Omkara, is a comic miracle in Metro. She plays a 30 year old virgin opposite Irfan Khan's loony romantic. Right. Shilpa Shetty and Nafisa Ali are on hand to do that seeming impossible, 'Acting While Beautiful.' Dharmendra is terrible. Kay Kay is suitably foul. And was there ever a potential star with a more cursed name than Shiney Ahuja?

Think Love...Actually except sadder [and happier]. The music is good, too.

Then there's Cheeni Kam. Tabu is probably the greatest actress working in Bombay today, and here she's breezy, sharp, weepy, all by effortless turns. Paresh Rawal is her hapless father careening over the hill. They're both brilliant, and Bachchan, unloved by me, is good too. She is an Indian touristing London. He is the high priest of 'London's finest Indian restaurant'. She sends back what she ordered. He lectures her on taste. You know the drill. Watch it, for no other reason than to observe the agile footwork of not one, not two, but three great and [rightly] respected performers. True, The last twenty minutes made me want to shoot the screenwriter, but the first hundred were an awful lot of fun.