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. While I’m now a fan of their music, at the time of its release I knew very little about the band, and went to see the movie primarily because of its director, the Dutch photographer and music video director Anton Corbijn. You can’t be a massive U2 fan and not know the work of their unofficial photographer and visual chronicler, but other than that I just plain adore his stuff, especially his black-and-white photography. This film was a labour of love which Corbijn partly financed by himself, and as you’d expect it looks absolutely stunning, one of the most beautiful black-and-white films I’ve ever seen, with strikingly lit and composed shots everywhere you look. Even the grubby provincial town in North West England where Curtis and his family lived looks bloody exquisite.
