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Watching: All About Eve and Wild Rose
Apr. 17th, 2019 08:58 pmThere weren't any films last week that we were interested in and hadn't already seen, but we did go to the live broadcast of the National Theatre's production of All About Eve, with Gillian Anderson as Margo Channing and Lily James as Eve Harrington.
I think I've only seen the original film once, and that was over twenty years ago, so I can't really comment on how close the play is to the original film, or whether it really adds anything new. It was worth watching (largely for Gillian Anderson, who I would pay to watch reading the phone book), but on the whole I'm quite glad I was seeing it locally and at cinema prices, and not in London at theatre prices, even if it did suffer a bit from the problem that filming theatre acting in close-up always makes it look very stagy in contrast to more naturalistic film acting, especially with modern drama (it seems to work better for Shakespeare).
***
This week we went to see Wild Rose, a British film about an ex-offender single mother from Glasgow who dreams of being a country singer. Jessie Buckley is terrific as Rose-Lynn (and has a fantastic singing voice, too), with Julie Walters as her exasperated mother and Sophie Okonedo as the well-off middle-class woman who employs Rose-Lynn as a cleaner and becomes perhaps overly invested in helping her to fulfil her dream. Very funny in places and heartbreaking in others, it's an ultimately feelgood film which tackles some serious questions about intergenerational relationships and finding a balance between accepting responsibility and following your dreams along the way, managing to avoid the obvious narrative cliches. And the music is great if you like that kind of thing (personally, I'd say I like folk and folk-rock, but the line between folk-rock and country is not a hard and fast one). Also, there's a cameo from Whispering Bob Harris.
I think I've only seen the original film once, and that was over twenty years ago, so I can't really comment on how close the play is to the original film, or whether it really adds anything new. It was worth watching (largely for Gillian Anderson, who I would pay to watch reading the phone book), but on the whole I'm quite glad I was seeing it locally and at cinema prices, and not in London at theatre prices, even if it did suffer a bit from the problem that filming theatre acting in close-up always makes it look very stagy in contrast to more naturalistic film acting, especially with modern drama (it seems to work better for Shakespeare).
***
This week we went to see Wild Rose, a British film about an ex-offender single mother from Glasgow who dreams of being a country singer. Jessie Buckley is terrific as Rose-Lynn (and has a fantastic singing voice, too), with Julie Walters as her exasperated mother and Sophie Okonedo as the well-off middle-class woman who employs Rose-Lynn as a cleaner and becomes perhaps overly invested in helping her to fulfil her dream. Very funny in places and heartbreaking in others, it's an ultimately feelgood film which tackles some serious questions about intergenerational relationships and finding a balance between accepting responsibility and following your dreams along the way, managing to avoid the obvious narrative cliches. And the music is great if you like that kind of thing (personally, I'd say I like folk and folk-rock, but the line between folk-rock and country is not a hard and fast one). Also, there's a cameo from Whispering Bob Harris.
