Perhaps it's inevitable that the first Patrick Keiller film I watched - Robinson in Ruins - was my least favourite, and the most recent one I watched is my favourite. His idiosyncrasies, the peculiar dryness of his films, takes a certain while to settle into. Now, I'm a convert, attuned enough to his running obsessions to have to stifle a cheer when Paul Scofield's narrator mentions Rimbaud or Sterne.
In this follow-up to London, Robinson has returned from whatever paranoid…
Ending a month celebrating Madonna with a Weird Al biopic? That's truly weird, although as this month's episode of Pop Screen shows, it's not without reason. Evan Rachel Wood's performance as Madonna is just one of the many delights of Eric Appel's spoof biopic, though there's no denying the movie belongs to an absurdly committed Daniel Radcliffe. Both incredibly silly and played rigorously straight, it might be a one-joke movie - but what a joke!
Stray observations:
- A Funny…
Too often, when we wonder who the Greatest Living Englishman is, we forget that Nick Park asked Dreamworks for thirty million dollars to make an internationally-released feature-length film about marrow-growing contests in Lancashire and they said yes.
I was going to add a caveat to this review, to say that perhaps it wasn't a 4.5 film, but if you're queer, or if you're from one of those towns - you know, the ones with shops that you've never seen without the shutters down, the ones whose people are said to be "workshy" by people on TV despite the fact that some of the older residents still have scars on their head that they got from literally, physically…
