Ilovehandbagsandshoes Reviews

Effie Gray (2014)

I adore this film!

[10/10 · 19 April 2024]

I will admit that when I first saw this film, it appeared to me to be soo subtle that I thought it was a bit flat.

Now I come to see it again so many years later and watched it again and again after that.

Each time I watch it I see more and more 'understatement' and very fine writing indeed.

You can easily miss really important clues, if you are not fully paying attention.

For instance, Ruskin, newly married, is still given a bath by his mother!!

For me that says it all. He may not have wanted the scandal, but what did he do afterwards...fell in love with another 10 year old girl!

Apparently poor Effie suffered for the rest of her life with insomnia, which is so sad, but completely understandable.

I have looked into the real Ruskin and can quite honestly say, I feel desperately sorry for him too. His childhood must have been awful, truly awful.

Goodnight Mommy (2014)

Excellent psychological thriller

[10/10 · 28 September 2022]

I caught this on freevee and I adored it from the get go. It's a fascinating exploration of its subject matter. I thought the imagery was very persuasive and the tension very well gauged. It's like you're taken by the hand to go and play with these two boys who are looking at the world that you see in a completely different way. For ages you teeter on the edge of understanding what you are seeing. I love it when a film makes you aware of your role as viewer. You want to believe what you want to believe but gradually that is stripped away and ultimately you feel completely robbed of your misconceptions and then it happens....that big kick in the guts that is the film's denouement. Superb film making!

Runners (1983)

Hidden meaning....maybe?

[9/10 · 20 June 2021]

I caught this film on 4 on demand. I must say it was compelling viewing but pretty bleak.

Somewhere around two thirds of the way through, I realised I was dealing with a hidden theme.

If you swap the experience of the parent, with that of the child, you can see it's about a societal neglect.

All that the children have done is said "if you can't beat them, join them"; adults do not seem have time for the children "because of their jobs".

Then in the second half of the film, the children themselves do not have time for the adults, because of their jobs.

I suppose you could open this view point up and say, once the need for survival is understood, that is the critical point of departure from family life.

Notice how contemporary London then was full of underage workers, yet 'hidden' in plain sight. The film is sometimes clunky and as I t was PoliKoff's first, I think we will forgive him that, and I wonder if this film were reinterpreted now, what else could be made of the abundant tension and intrigue.

I particularly liked how the father's obsession started to tip into insanity, in the view of outsiders and how that view of desperate hope is a cynical observation of existence.

Valhalla Rising (2009)

Amazing amazing film *contains spoilers*

[10/10 · 16 October 2019]

I watched this in three instalments because I was so overcome each time with awe at all aspects of the film. First off I wanted to say I remember the posters for it but I never got round to seeing it till now. I come at history from the opposite end to most people and I'm actually working my way forwards from pre-history. Understanding that warfare was to ancient man, what the NHS is to modern England, e.g. the largest employer, it's not difficult to fully inhabit the mindset of human killing machines. The film opens with a shock and I was pulled in from the word go. The survival instinct is the main theme, but it's followed very closely by finding grace, so overall I think this film has a loosely religious theme. I love films that reaffirm common humanity, especially ones where acceptance of oneself are also mixed in. I wanted so much to find out who one-eye was but realised it wasn't what he told us, it's what he shows us. The cinematography goes hand in hand with the overall storytelling of the film. Religious themes are a peculiar business in modern times, as much as works of art will refer to themselves as humanist or at least agnostic, there's the sense that these reference frames are part of the warp and the weft of cross-culture debate.

Straw Dogs (2011)

Well worth seeing - amazing!

[10/10 · 27 May 2016]

There aren't that many films that I would give full marks to but this has to be one of them. Some unusual things happen while you're watching this movie. First there's the story that you're watching unfold in front you and then there's another story running along side it that reminds you of lots of other similar stories of characters being tested. Then there's the story in your own mind revealing itself in response to what you're seeing. The story certainly makes you think, its not passive viewing by any means.

For quite a long time I felt myself getting more and more upset with the tone of foreboding. I kept asking myself if I could withstand what I was about to see. Then you realise its not so much about the characters dealing with their problems, its about you and how you would deal with the prospect of this kind of menace.

So very rarely as happens in films, you find yourself in the action, in the story and the 'you' in the story is doing exactly what the male protagonist does.

There's a tipping point in the processing of events, that switches all of the choices and threats from being extraneous, to intimate and very personal. If that shift is communicated in the original book or if its Sam Peckinapah's contribution I don't know, but its rare all the same. Lots of films try to do it, but most fail.

It could be that I've been reading too much about human evolution lately and how we are all essentially still just another species of animal on this earth struggling to survive, I don't know? But the idea that there's a desert island and beautiful tree with one perfect branch and two birds sit on the branch and fight till the death for the right to sit there, is the same for every single living thing. Whether we like it or not. Competition, greed, supremacy and the quest for ownership, however temporary, are everywhere, in all species.

I do think though that the notion of choice is something that's only on offer in times of peace.

Sybil (1976)

What about the truth?

[8/10 · 21 August 2012]

This review assumes you have read other reviews...

Whether or not Multiple Personality Disorder exists, the fact is that this film is about the emergence of the real deal: the truth about the lives of a very disturbed mother who subjected a small child to agonising abuse. The fact that this woman had such devastating 'functional' mental illness is the most horrible fact. Behind closed doors, well within the confines of 'domestic life', this film kicks the living daylights out of the idea of 'home sweet home'.

Perhaps the various personalities were not as distinct as the film depicts, but all the same, assuming the voice of a younger self, to enable you to admit to facts, is a very obvious way of dealing with things like this.

I don't care if the publisher made them 'invent multiple personalities', I don't care that it was a trend in 1970s therapy, I don't even care that the shrink and the patient became lifelong friends, or if money or fame make people tell the truth - as long as the truth comes out!

Personally I'm sick of the view that 'mothers are perfect' that is handed down to us by all of history and culture. Guess what people: mothers can actually be bad, really bad!

So I'm just glad some films stick their neck out and tell it like it is.

Mad Men: Mystery Date (2012) Season 5, Episode 4

This episode was the best ever

[10/10 · 14 April 2012]

I've just returned from a big discussion over dinner about this episode. I had said that I thought it was the best yet, others at our table thought it was the worst. I was told to "view Don, essentially, as a coward". I'm sorry, but he didn't want to die in a jungle in the middle of nowhere after having had such a miserable early life and feeling he had so much yet to contribute to society. That is not a coward, that was survival. Leaving that facet aside. This is a man tortured by his appetites. Being faithful, being of one purpose, being single-minded, is not something he can do for a long time. He is split in two, like his two identities, he cannot reconcile the conflict in his personality. And his personality represents a much wider voracious consumerism that is now, 40 years later, totally rampant. Thank you!

Winter's Bone (2010)

Country noir

[10 September 2011]

What a brilliant film. It lingers in the mind long after the closing credits. I watched it on two consecutive nights, first time about 15 minutes into it. I'm really glad I saw the opening shots the next night because they are essential to understanding Rees plight.

In the beginning we learn their horse hasn't eaten in 4 days, their dog is near starving too. The children have only seed potatoes and squirrels left to eat. We meet Ree, the eldest daughter of this abandoned family. She is still a child at this point, but during her long journey grows up, stops waiting for others and relies on herself.

A remote barren landscape, cut off from America's rich mechanised food production. The sparse environment is controlled by a strange medieval hierarchy of warlords and family honour. Images of tethered dogs, rags on washing lines that have half-fallen, dingy shacks with broken doors. Whatever could be grown in these parts is squandered on drug addiction and disaffected squalor. The question I kept asking myself throughout is why do people stay there? The answer was quite simple. Everyone had really bad teeth and a tainted address. You felt they could never get out because they would never look good enough to survive in the city.

But the thing that struck me most powerfully about this film is the women's faces. Women of 28 looking like 68. Drawn sunken faces with dead eyes. The substance being made, as we all know was the drug of choice for the Gay community in the early 80s. It is a dis-inhibitor and gives you massive amounts of energy so you can have sex for days on end without food or sleep. Well, for me the women's faces showed the sexual bondage they were being subjected to.

As a small counterpoint, when Ree has to go off for a 'chat' with someone she shouts back 'Make sure the children do their homework'.

Cherry Tree Lane (2010)

Home Invasion addict

[10 September 2011]

Seen Funny Games and The Strangers. We all know the basic framework. However, this British film is particularly disturbing and kind of brilliant because it highlights how the worlds of the middle class recreational drug user/dealer and the violent existence of gangland's criminal ring underclass collides.

As I heard two West Indian blokes once say on a train "the only time a black man is invited to a white man's party is coz he wants drugs".

I preferred this film to the previous two mentioned because among its powerful themes, it really explores just how much a person can take before they snap.

Mutilation is banal compared to full-on maniacal rage....

The White Ribbon (2009)

Too many loose ends again

[5/10 · 3 March 2011]

I liked this film a lot for its wonderful recreation of time, place and mood.

I know when I sit down to watch one Haneke's films I'm going to end up annoyed. I know he teases his audience and wants us to really 'think about' things and likes to challenge our expectations, especially of passivity as viewers blah blah blah

I know all of that, but I also know that if you are going to make a film that sits within the genre of a whodunit, then some answers would be appreciated.

Too many characters, too many houses that looked the same, too many kids that looked terrified and too many angry adults.

The scene with the boy and the bird cage was really wonderful and touching though.

And as far as the bigger picture goes - war etc - sorry, but does he think we're so thick we needed quite so many reasons 'WHY'?

The film is about a very old world, a world that had remained unchanged since Medieval times. Men were dominant, women were oppressed, children were beaten and the rich stayed safe. So what!

He could have made a film about the emotional journey of 2 or 3 characters, instead he made a film about making films - as usual.

Reluctantly I have to admit, that because he's so good at making 'weird' films, I will naturally hopefully see them all, in due course.

(What did happen in the end to the boy that was going blind??)

Bully (2001)

I thought it was a brilliant film

[9/10 · 3 March 2011]

I happened to catch this film late last week and when I finally had the chance to see it all the way through I thought it was kind of brilliant really.

I disagree with what others have said about there being too much sex. This was one of the few films where I think I understood why there was so much.

First off I want to say that I think it's another film that falls within the genre of 'the aftermath of the American Dream'. This is a world where the kids have everything; large luxurious houses, smart cars, parents that are solid and affluent etc.

But they chose to live in Florida. There is something intoxicating about living in continual sunshine if you are basically of Northern European descent. What I mean is, you end up with too much of a good thing.

Their environment doesn't test them - apart from school exams - which is a sanitised way for society to cream off the best and leave a heaving vat of wasted, average intelligence people to die slowly of misery and relative poverty.

Sex is their ticket to thrills they can't get from the concrete jungle that has no trees for climbing; hunting; beating each other up; or climbing up rock faces to get honey etc etc. What I mean is the landscape doesn't test their strength - what tests them is how far they can go with sex and drugs.

What teenagers know more than anyone else, is how much hope there is OUT THERE. And I am afraid to say, like so many kids from good homes that end up as part of the underclass, these kids have sussed that all that's left after their society has relocated jobs to the Far East or Eastern Europe, is working in Pizza Restaurants.

In this environment, it would seem, murder becomes a solution to lack of motivation.

Sherrybaby (2006)

An unflinching look at the legacy of sexual abuse

[10/10 · 17 March 2009]

I've read lots of the comments on here and I would just like to say that a lot of people seem to have completely missed the point of this movie.

For starters it was showcased at the Sundance Festival – which should make you think 'this is gonna be a bit different, a bit cleaver than usual perhaps'. Then, if you had bothered to watch every scene - and not walk out to make coffee and miss the crucial incident (more later) - then you would come to realise that there is no linear narrative, this film doesn't give you the answers or partial answers in any logical order. Unfortunately for some, you do actually have to do a little work here to piece it all together and work out that this is a woman who was systematically abused by her father, probably for a long time and through the misery of self-loathing and guilt turned to drugs and alcohol as a teenager as a means of escape. She eventually fell pregnant (it may have been her father's child) has the child, then, unable to cope on her own, let alone with a child, descends into a spiral of chaotic behaviour that winds up with her doing time in, as you would call, the state pen.

Maybe she is a washed-out, no-good, pathetic whatever-you-want-to-call-her but please, people, look at the part where in a startlingly familiar e.g. habitual way, her father assaults her, notice too that her brother is watching, and runs to hide. No one confronts the father (who has a new wife and yet still tries it on with daughter), instead, Sherry (the victim) runs out of the house and goes straight to her drug dealer on an auto-phobic bender. Notice also that its her brother who later says to her "I am on your side". (e.g. I know what you have been through, I know what has messed with your mind and your self-belief). In other words, some pretty big reasons as to why people behave they way they do don't actually take a huge amount of guesswork to figure out...

Under the Piano (1996 TV Movie)

"Bitter mother of an autistic child"

[10/10 · 10 February 2009]

This film was described as "the story of a bitter mother with an autistic child". But actually, what you get is a lot, lot more. It's a very good film indeed and that's why I gave it a 10 score. Of course its shocking and you'll cry like a baby, (I used two Kleenex with no possibility of recycling them in my pocket for tomorrow). I am really glad I watched it alone, too. Sometimes you just want to weep for all the world in private, and this film will make you weep for all autistic children and the people that love them and the people that don't. I am not saying that Rosetta's mother doesn't love her, its just in my view, she loved herself a whole lot more.

I was blown away by the relationship between the sisters. Its terribly sad that this poor girl was lumbered with a mother who was poorly equipped to cope but thank goodness, she had a sister like Amanda Plummer.

I think the closing scenes of this film will stay with me forever. Brilliant performances....I'm gonna try and source the book.

Funny Games (1997)

unforgettable movie, forgettable title

[9/10 · 20 January 2009]

I saw this movie late one night about 10 years ago and had to watch it till the end. I spent a long time trying to trace it on this database and only solved the mystery when they broadcast the re-make just the other night, and there I was, watching the unmistakable scene with the mobile phone and knew I had finally traced it.

I remembered it as a foreign film but the main actor I had tagged as Danny Zane. I don't think any other film has stayed on my mind as much as this one, (perhaps 'Lost in the Desert' when I was a kid). This film is pure horror. Horror doesn't have to be expensive or full of camera tricks and CGI to really get to you. The best horror is the sort that is about our basic fears. I felt really cold when I watched this film and when I remember it now, I kind of get a chill. So there you are in the middle of this journey of horror and suddenly the protagonist turns round and does something so totally unexpected, even now, it makes me think about the power that cinema has to get right inside your head and disturb you.

The Child (2005)

globalisation and the underclass

[10/10 · 17 August 2008]

Generally speaking I don't like films that make me feel sorry for thieves but this film made me sob. So you start watching it with this weird detachment, like what is this; film or documentary? I didn't even realise till afterwards that there was actually no music. Incredibly skillful and at times so moving its uncomfortable to watch. Not because its sentimental but because ostensibly the characters inhabit a world where no one cares.

Like when we see Bruno trying to fix the supporting rod for the pram's hood. The camera steps back and frames him within that whole grey barren post-industrial backdrop. He stands there banging this rod into shape with a stone; literate but unemployed; good-looking and healthy yet wretched and at the bottom of the heap.

Insignificant you may say but if you realise that the city of Seraing pre-1970s used to be a big steel manufacturer and was once a prosperous place. Now, only two generations later, at the very edge of survival, Bruno and Sonia are the unfortunate wasted grandchildren of an industrial ghost town. The halted crumbling landscape of disused factories, yawning bridges and derelict houses seem at times to shed silent tears of helplessness for the young couple and their child.

I am so glad it didn't cop out into 'just another love story'. They say we must love ourselves before we can love another, this film, with its colourless sincerity shows us we have to despise ourselves before we can ever be forgiven.

A Dad for Christmas (2006 TV Movie)

why isn't this actor more famous?

[10/10 · 19 June 2008]

I caught this movie at around 8pm on the movies24 channel. I don't know what drew me in, but from the opening credits you somehow realise this is going to be a 'little gem' and it was. Basically its about finding out who you are and the consequences that has on the others around you; coming of age; rites of passage; etc, but this one is very good especially I suppose because we hear so much about fathers reneging on their responsibilities and the people who never knew who their father was etc etc, that a film like this, tries to show us another side of the whole 'unwanted pregnancy' conundrum.

I don't want to say too much else about the plot because you should all see this film if you get the chance.

Another point, if family rifts have touched your life, then this film will make you cry and cry....I think the greatest message communicated in this film is not in the dialogue, but in the Pinteresque loaded silences between the dialogue and all these actors are ideally suited to that kind of intelligent non-verbal communication.

I don't think I had ever seen this particular young Canadian actor before. Kristopher Turner is a face to watch and I hope he breaks onto the big screen soon. He may want to consider getting a new agent if this doesn't happen soon as he is a wasted asset. The guy has everything for crying out loud and he's 6'.....(move over Mr Cruise!!!)

Road to Perdition (2002)

Genre hybrid

[18 August 2006]

As a film Noir the Road to Perdition must be very successful, however, I couldn't help feeling I was watching a post-modern Western; the frontier landscapes being exchanged for the urban underbelly of 1930s prohibition era, and the usual central conflict of civilisation and savagery.

Realising early on that quite apart from all its religious symbolism; e.g. Cain & Abel, Roman Catholicism, guilt, etc, this is also a film that concerns itself with a very popular notion in films made since the 1970s; the corruption of the American dream. I don't believe Tom Hanks' character had been a particularly good father before we pick up the story, he also wasn't a bad one, however, once the main plot line kicks-in, his son represents, to me, more than anything else, a mirror by which Hanks fully understands and accepts his own social identification. There is a point in the movie in which he looks at the boy, in that inimitable way, in a scene full of exquisite self-understanding; the house may have been big and the cornbread had tasted good, but at what cost!

The Lady Vanishes (1979)

I loved this film

[7/10 · 5 August 2006]

I haven't seen the original but I watched this with 1 hour delay on two channels simultaneously, I was at home with a cold at the time and feeling very sorry for myself. Anyway, if you would just put the two leads aside for a moment (although Eliot Gould was SO cute in the movie and Cybil Shepperd did the visual pun of Marilyn Monroe on the air vent very well when she gets out of the train...) The thing I really liked about this film were the characters of Charters and Caldicott - they made me laugh hysterically - there they are drinking tea - understating this understating that - then suddenly.....they are really terrific minor characters. I would love a whole film on those two. Very affectionate look at English manners. ARTHUR LOWE MADE ME FORGET HOW ILL I FELT!

Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)

I finally just saw this film on DVD

[28 May 2006]

This film is really amazing and I would recommend it to anyone. I have filed it in my personal viewing folder as a film to watch when I am blue, because it will definitely lift me out of the doldrums. I must say for half the film I did think 'what is all the fuss about'. New York looks fantastic yeah, yeah, and the clothes and the music and all that etc etc...but in the second half I became aware that it was really extremely clever and brilliantly directed. Audrey Hepburn is superbly cast, I mean she is just wonderful. And I didn't realise that George Peppard was so cute when he was younger. I wouldn't have put the film at having been made in 1961, its so ahead of its time. At last, finally, I now know what all the fuss about 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' is about! Oh, and of course, Henry Mancini's score is a knockout!