
The Notorious Bettie Page – Film Review

This biopic about Judy Garland’s final 1968 concert run in London has very little to it outside of masterful performance from RenĂ©e Zellweger, but what a performance.
It’s nice to be wrong about a movie sometimes. Though I was incredibly sceptical about this biopic of Queen and their extraordinary frontman Freddie Mercury, it turned out to be one of the most purely enjoyable and entertaining cinema experiences I’ve had in a while.
I very much enjoyed this highly entertaining biographical drama about the controversial ice skater Tonya Harding, which plays as part savage black comedy, part tragedy, and part Mommie Dearest.
Not your conventional biopic, Jackie mostly focuses on one specific period in its subject’s life, the days following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy when Jacqueline Kennedy became the world’s most famous widow. As a framework for the film, it uses a fictionalised encounter between Jackie and a journalist (Billy Crudup) who comes to interview her soon after she packs her bags and leaves the White House. The interview is somewhat tense; the journalist’s attitude is not necessarily reverential and Jackie displays candour and calculation in equal measure.
I’m house sitting at a friend’s with Netflix at the moment, so I decided to watch this movie. It’s one of those staples that seems to regularly pop up on free-to-air TV, and I swear I’ve seen the same scene of John Nash (Russell Crowe) trying to chat up a pretty girl at the bar with disastrous results at least three times, but for whatever reasons I just never got around to finishing the movie.
Rewatched this wonderful and sad movie, based on life and death of Ian Curtis, the lead singer and lyricist of Joy Division.