Ben Wheatley’s take on the Daphne du Maurier story has moments of spectacle and disquiet but hunky Armie Hammer is miscast as the troubled widower
The star is the suit. Armie Hammer’s three-piece is an outrageous showstopper that upstages everything and everyone in its bold shade of Colman’s-mustard-slash-baby-poo. Hammer even at one stage accessorises it with the same colour tie. This is a suit permanently ready for its closeup. It’s a suit that would have intimidated George Melly. Hammer fills out that suit as tightly as if both Vinkelvoss twins were in it at the same time. At night, he must keep it in its own climate-controlled glass case, like Iron Man. This suit deserves its own trailer, its own agent, its own sex tape. Perhaps this film is its sex tape.
But wait. Surely an English gentleman of the inter-war years at leisure in the...
The star is the suit. Armie Hammer’s three-piece is an outrageous showstopper that upstages everything and everyone in its bold shade of Colman’s-mustard-slash-baby-poo. Hammer even at one stage accessorises it with the same colour tie. This is a suit permanently ready for its closeup. It’s a suit that would have intimidated George Melly. Hammer fills out that suit as tightly as if both Vinkelvoss twins were in it at the same time. At night, he must keep it in its own climate-controlled glass case, like Iron Man. This suit deserves its own trailer, its own agent, its own sex tape. Perhaps this film is its sex tape.
But wait. Surely an English gentleman of the inter-war years at leisure in the...
- 10/15/2020
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
It’s a Brit sex comedy that addresses the basic facts about boy-girl petting — and not much else. A noted ‘adult’ role for Hayley Mills, it pairs her with an unlikable Oliver Reed, trying his damnedest to affect natural charm. Was Reed the reason Hayley chose as her next picture a story about a lady studying penguins?
Take a Girl Like You
Blu-ray
Twilight Time
1970 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 98 min. / Street Date June 19, 2018 / Available from the Twilight Time Movies Store / 29.95
Starring: Hayley Mills, Oliver Reed, Noel Harrison, John Bird, Sheila Hancock, Ronald Lacey, Penelope Keith, Imogen Hassall, Pippa Steel, George Woodbridge.
Cinematography: Dick Bush
Film Editor: Jack Harris, Rex Pyke
Original Music: Stanley Myers
Written by George Melly
Produced by Hal E. Chester
Directed by Jonathan Miller
Wait a minute — when exactly did they finally stop calling young women, ‘birds?’
When the Hollywood studios all but collapsed at the end of the 1960s,...
Take a Girl Like You
Blu-ray
Twilight Time
1970 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 98 min. / Street Date June 19, 2018 / Available from the Twilight Time Movies Store / 29.95
Starring: Hayley Mills, Oliver Reed, Noel Harrison, John Bird, Sheila Hancock, Ronald Lacey, Penelope Keith, Imogen Hassall, Pippa Steel, George Woodbridge.
Cinematography: Dick Bush
Film Editor: Jack Harris, Rex Pyke
Original Music: Stanley Myers
Written by George Melly
Produced by Hal E. Chester
Directed by Jonathan Miller
Wait a minute — when exactly did they finally stop calling young women, ‘birds?’
When the Hollywood studios all but collapsed at the end of the 1960s,...
- 6/30/2018
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Stage and screen actor who excelled in playing authority figures and appeared in TV shows such as Brookside and Lovejoy
Malcolm Tierney, who has died aged 75 of pulmonary fibrosis, was a reliable and versatile supporting actor for 50 years, familiar to television audiences as the cigar-smoking, bullying villain Tommy McArdle in Brookside, nasty Charlie Gimbert in Lovejoy and smoothie Geoffrey Ellsworth-Smythe in David Nobbs's A Bit of a Do, a Yorkshire small-town comedy chronicle starring David Jason and Gwen Taylor.
Always serious and quietly spoken offstage, with glinting blue eyes and a steady, cruel gaze that served him well as authority figures on screen, Tierney was a working-class Mancunian who became a core member of the Workers' Revolutionary party in the 1970s. He never wavered in his socialist beliefs, even when the Wrp imploded ("That's all in my past now," he said), and always opposed restricted entry to the actors' union,...
Malcolm Tierney, who has died aged 75 of pulmonary fibrosis, was a reliable and versatile supporting actor for 50 years, familiar to television audiences as the cigar-smoking, bullying villain Tommy McArdle in Brookside, nasty Charlie Gimbert in Lovejoy and smoothie Geoffrey Ellsworth-Smythe in David Nobbs's A Bit of a Do, a Yorkshire small-town comedy chronicle starring David Jason and Gwen Taylor.
Always serious and quietly spoken offstage, with glinting blue eyes and a steady, cruel gaze that served him well as authority figures on screen, Tierney was a working-class Mancunian who became a core member of the Workers' Revolutionary party in the 1970s. He never wavered in his socialist beliefs, even when the Wrp imploded ("That's all in my past now," he said), and always opposed restricted entry to the actors' union,...
- 2/22/2014
- by Michael Coveney, Vanessa Redgrave
- The Guardian - Film News
Asked by George Melly what it was like going around his 1961 Tate Gallery retrospective, Max Ernst said the pride he felt was like that of a prize stud bull being taken to see his progeny. In Ken Scott's comedy, Starbuck (apparently the name of a famous Canadian bull that sired 2,000 calves) is the pseudonym chosen by David Wozniak, a French-Canadian butcher of Polish extraction, who has precisely the experience Ernst fancifully described.
After having sold a large amount of his bodily fluids to a Montreal sperm bank while a young man, he's confronted by 533 adult children, 142 of whom have launched a class action to discover the identity of their biological father. Come! Come! you might well say. The film's French-Canadian director has much queasy fun confronting David's predicament and its effects on his tight-knit Catholic family and his pregnant fiancee. One way and another, it makes a man of...
After having sold a large amount of his bodily fluids to a Montreal sperm bank while a young man, he's confronted by 533 adult children, 142 of whom have launched a class action to discover the identity of their biological father. Come! Come! you might well say. The film's French-Canadian director has much queasy fun confronting David's predicament and its effects on his tight-knit Catholic family and his pregnant fiancee. One way and another, it makes a man of...
- 11/25/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Originally published in the Observer on 11 February 1973: George Melly praises the hugely controversial black comedy Trash, which was produced by Andy Warhol
At long last, Trash has opened at the London Pavilion and, thanks largely to the efforts of Mr McWhirter and his associates, there are queues in the rain and the film's distributor, the indefatigable Jimmy Vaughan, will reap a rich reward for his persistence.
There are three cuts and, although I'm loth to have to admit it, two of them marginally improve the film [produced by Andy Warhol]. The fellatio scene at the beginning has been trimmed, and while the logic escapes me, it lasts quite long enough to establish the hero's heroin-induced impotence. The blood pulled into the syringe and then repumped back into the vein is, for those of us who tend to be queasy about needles anyway, something of a relief.
Only the beer bottle sequence, now cut...
At long last, Trash has opened at the London Pavilion and, thanks largely to the efforts of Mr McWhirter and his associates, there are queues in the rain and the film's distributor, the indefatigable Jimmy Vaughan, will reap a rich reward for his persistence.
There are three cuts and, although I'm loth to have to admit it, two of them marginally improve the film [produced by Andy Warhol]. The fellatio scene at the beginning has been trimmed, and while the logic escapes me, it lasts quite long enough to establish the hero's heroin-induced impotence. The blood pulled into the syringe and then repumped back into the vein is, for those of us who tend to be queasy about needles anyway, something of a relief.
Only the beer bottle sequence, now cut...
- 2/13/2012
- by George Melly
- The Guardian - Film News
Cinema Retro has received the following press release:
Ian Hendry Michael Caine Brit Ekland
Get Carter
40th Anniversary of Cult Classic
March 2011
"(Like a) bottle of neat gin swallowed before breakfast" George Melly (1971)
This March will mark a landmark anniversary for the original British gangster movie, as Get Carter turns 40. Lauded as the Best British Film of All Time (Total Film), Mike Hodges's directorial debut delivered a classic 70s thriller, and captured a young Michael Caine at perhaps his finest hour. Available on DVD from Warner Home Video, Get Carter is an essential addition to any film collection.
Adapted from the 1968 novel 'Jack's Return Home', by Ted Lewis, Get Carter finds vicious London gangstar, Jack Carter (Michael Caine), returning to Newcastle for his brother's funeral. Suspecting foul play, Carter's quest for the truth leads to a complex trail of lies, deceit, cover-ups and backhanders, all played out against the...
Ian Hendry Michael Caine Brit Ekland
Get Carter
40th Anniversary of Cult Classic
March 2011
"(Like a) bottle of neat gin swallowed before breakfast" George Melly (1971)
This March will mark a landmark anniversary for the original British gangster movie, as Get Carter turns 40. Lauded as the Best British Film of All Time (Total Film), Mike Hodges's directorial debut delivered a classic 70s thriller, and captured a young Michael Caine at perhaps his finest hour. Available on DVD from Warner Home Video, Get Carter is an essential addition to any film collection.
Adapted from the 1968 novel 'Jack's Return Home', by Ted Lewis, Get Carter finds vicious London gangstar, Jack Carter (Michael Caine), returning to Newcastle for his brother's funeral. Suspecting foul play, Carter's quest for the truth leads to a complex trail of lies, deceit, cover-ups and backhanders, all played out against the...
- 3/8/2011
- by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
- Cinemaretro.com
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