I Shot Andy Warhol
2019-08-15 23:48:09
read moreThe tagline on the film's poster says it all, to wit: You only get one shot at fame. On June 3 1968, Valerie Solanas took her shot. By all accounts an abused child who turned to prostitution to fund her education, Solanas came to New York in the mid sixties convinced that the rambling polemical essay she had written- The Scum Manifesto - was exactly the kind of literary agitprop every card-carrying ultra-radical feminist was waiting for. Sadly, neither Andy Warhol, into whose rarified orbit she initially ingratiated herself, nor her duplicitous publisher, deigned to take her seriously. In the end, rejected and abandoned, she walked into Warhol's Factory offices and pumped two bullets into him. Fortunately, he survived. Though Mary Harmon's low budget indie feature bears the odd ragged edge, its sense of time and place is evocatively persuasive, and Lili Taylor's focused central performance gives the narrative an urgency that never falters. As Warhol and transvestite superstar Candy Darling, both Jared Harris and Stephen Dorff are eerily perfect.
Swingers
2017-12-09 00:25:50
read moreAfter spending several frustrating years in Hollywood schlepping from audition to audition waiting for that big break, actor Jon Favreau's luck changed when the semi-autobiographical screenplay he had written scored some meagre financing and went before the cameras with a debuting Doug Liman on board as director. Featuring Faverau in the lead and his two best friends, Vince Vaughn and Ron Livingston, playing essentially themselves, the film is a surprisingly wry, insightful ode to male bonding which captures the loose banter and self-deprecating humour of a group of guys who spend their daytime hours griping their about life and their nights bar-hopping and looking for love in some of L.A.'s hippest night spots. Couched in the language of the so-called cocktail nation, a 90s retro-Swing movement that's apparently captured the imagination of the nation's nightclubbers, it all adds up to a laid-back, anecdotal journey into the comical, pseudo angst-ridden world of guydom where love and its attendant euphoria and shortcomings is only as far away as the next trendy bar. Not bad.
Some Mother's Son
2017-12-08 23:40:53
read moreIn March, 1981, in Northern Ireland's notorious Maze Prison, twenty one IRA prisoners went on a hunger strike hoping to force the Thatcher government to recognise them as political prisoners and not common criminals. Some seven months later ten men were dead. The other eleven were saved through the intervention of their respective families who, against their sons' wishes, gave the authorities permission to feed them intravenously. Written by director Terry George and Jim Sheridan, the creative team behind In The Name Of The Father, Some Mother's Son is a stark, wrenching journey into the hearts and minds of the ordinary Irish mothers and daughters who found themselves confronted by a harrowing moral and emotional nightmare. Resisting the temptation to push a partisan line or engage in facile moralising, the film reaches behind the headlines and the statistics to graft a human face on the innocent victims of a conflict where the single common denominator attendant to the rabid rank and file on both sides of the barricades was the cockamamie belief that their ongoing barbaric handiwork was somehow sanctioned by God himself. Helen Mirren and Fionnula Flanagan are superb in the key roles.
