Review - The Damned United, Islington Vue

Glory,Glory Leeds United!
scene one int. north london

woman ( indeterminate age, fading looks, English teeth, Emma Thompson with water retention, perhaps) first drink of the evening in hand.. looks out window and jumps up in excitement.

scene 2 ext. street north london

man ( mid thirties, tall , floppy hair, Oxford educated, Julian Rhind-Tutt in my dreams) sitting on wall. woman gingerly approaches...

W: Are you Tom Hooper?

M: Yes ( fear in eyes)

W: I'd just like to say, we loved The Damned United.

M: Oh, thank you very much

W: No thank you, it was very good

M: When did you see it

W: Yesterday, at 11.30 in the morning

M: Wow, in the morning! You're my perfect audience

W: Guaranteed no kids, you see. And I loved John Adams, and Longford, and that last series of Prime Suspect you did.

M: Bless you

W: Of course, I'm not sure why you changed the televised interview with Don Revie, especially as it's on Youtube and every one can see it, and I don't believe that Clough would watch such an important match from his office and not know the final score - but it was a beautifully filmed scene.

Michael Sheen is a minor miracle but we thought we could detect traces of David Frost still clinging to his jaw and the Silver-Fox identified hints of Blair at the hairline. The evocation of early seventies Yorkshire was spot-on and I should know, even though I was brought up in the posh part, and well done for not flooding the sound-track with random 70's pop.

The hair-dos on the footballers were a bit dodge, but having the Leeds team names on the backs of their trackies, as written in the book -The Damned United by David Peace, should be adopted by other film-makers as a way of shortening character exposition.

Speaking of the book-The Damned United by David Peace, you obviously lightened the mood in your version, made Cloughie more likable and less of a Jacobean revenge character racked with paranoia and bile, but nevertheless you portrayed a man consumed with ambition and a sense of injustice. The sweet ending in the car with his boys, was maybe a little too easy, d'you think?

The relationship between Clough and Peter Taylor, it's beautiful..Brokeback Mountain with out the sex but with more balls.

Jim Broadbent/Sam Longson, Timothy Spall/Peter Taylor, Colm Meaney/Don Revie, Henry Goodman/Manny Cuzzins, Maurice Roeves/Jimmy Gordon ... don't it make you feel proud to be British? Oh by the way, don't employ Brian McCardie/Dave MacKay again. I went on a date with him once and he's a cocky so-and-so.

M: You seem a very perceptive young woman, are you interested in helping me in my next project, I am looking for someone just like you and nobody I have met 'til now has your critical facility and you are so right about Brian McCardie. Would you be free to start work tomorrow and ..........

Oh well, it nearly went like that, all the way up until "Bless you" and then I thanked him a little more for just "being Tom", he started to look a little scared, and I left the next winner of the Bafta for Best British Film to enjoy the rest of his evening.

Review - Il Divo, The Screen on the Green

The Volpe-Argento and I have been learning Italian since the beginning of the year, or anno as I now know it. The Volpe has been concentrating on grammar and construction and declensions, while I have mastered the art of ordering vino and mangiare. We hoped we would be able to put this knowledge to some use when we shimmied in to see Paulo Sorrentino's Il Divo at The Screen on the Green, most uncomfortable seats in filmdom, on Saturday. Unfortunately there wasn't a scene where President Giulio Andreotti, seven times premier of Italy, and his small child entered a trattoria and was asked whether he/she or they would prefer red or white vino, they ordered some spaghetti/meat/fish, then paid the bill and left. Questa e la vita! So once again the VA put on his glasses and launched into the world of the subtitle. Over the few years that we have been together his reluctance to read a film as well as watch it has receeded, in the beginning was the word and at the beginning he wouldn't go there, but now there is hardly a whisker's flicker if I suggest a movie not in the English language.


As we entered, one of the ushers was being asked to explain what Il Divo was about, she's probably still trying.


What it is, is fabulous, witty, highly intelligent film making with a mesmerising central performance by Toni Servillo channelling a bloodless Nosferatu by way of Peter Sellers in Vittorio de Sica's After The Fox.














What it is not, is easy to follow.

It covers Andreotti's life from his successful election win in the 1980s to his arrest and unconvincing aquittal for Mafia connected crimes in the 1990s. The time shifts are confusing and the constant introduction of many minor figures, all male and all unfamiliar faces, left us unsure of what story we were following at times. There seems to be a lot of bother over whether Andreotti kissed a man called Riina, a no-no when he's the head of the Mafia. And as to those subtitles, the VA wasn't the only one finding the reading to watching ratio a little challenging.

But the visual wit and the beauty of the cinematography makes your heart soar, the script is literate and it's humour as dry as apparently Andreotti was and is still, because the man that Sorrentino is persuasively implying was involved in numerous murders and supposed suicides is, at the age of 90 a senator for life.


It is said the character of Don Licio Lucchesi in The Godfather Part lll was based on our gnome- like leading man, which gives greater weight to the argument that Coppola's film was actually a documentary rather than a work of fiction.

Walking home my happy Volpe was explaining that proportional representation as a voting system was responsible for the fragmented nature of the Italian political landscape and resulted in a weak opposition to any Andreotti or Berlusconi that acquired power.

I will never look at the Liberal Party political broadcast in the same way again. Ciao

Review - Spring Awakening, Novello Theatre

I'm Just a Teenage Dirtbag ,baby!

You can see why I thought I was on to a winner by persuading the Silver-Fox to visit The Novello Theatre for the press night of the multi Tony award-winning ("the best new musical I've seen in years" Mark Shenton) Spring Awakening. Because these are not members of the fresh-faced-making -their-professional-theatrical-debut cast, no!

These are pupils at the school beloved Silver actually attended, Christ's Hospital, in Sussex and this is what he actually wore. Though he is not in the picture

This is the cast.
See what I mean?

Maybe the evening would prove a trip down scholastic memory lane with tales of midnight feasts and tuck shops and roastings in the dorms. Well James Robertson Justice how wrong could a girl be?

To misquote Boney M....."O Those Germans".

It's crap being a teenager; bad hair, bad clothes, bad teachers, all the hormones in the world and no where to put them. If only someone could write a great musical about being young and in love and misunderstood, maybe adapted from a great play! Oh, I forgot they did..Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein and West Side Story.

The songs in Spring Awakening are the kind of adolescent soft-rock that you hear in shopping malls, immediately gettable and instantly forgettable.The lyrics think they're shocking and radical and they may be if you are fourteen and saying fuck very loudly in front of your parents over and over again gives you a hard on. Speaking of which, Mark Ravenhill handled synchronised masturbation much more enjoyably in Over There at The Royal Court.

It's a musical for people who don't like musicals, for people who really want to be rock stars. The themes are dark; suicide, teenage pregnancy, abortion leading to death but the show is as deep as a teenager's mood swing and just as interesting.

What did we like? The cast are fresh and energetic, Bill T Jones' choreography in "The Bitch of Living" (surely a shoo-in for our next Eurovision entry?) was a highlight, the set and lighting by Christine Jones and Kevin Adams are fun. We were particularly taken by a sideways moving Stannah chair lift creation that crawled across the back wall for no palpable reason, and I loved the innovation of the song list being written on the school blackboard so I could count them off more easily than sneaking a look at my programme too often. The hair products used should get their own credit.

It all ended to a standing ovation, saving S-F and myself , and a reprise of that old crowd pleaser "Totally F***ed". Speaking of which how about the search for the next Connie Fisher/ Lee Mead being based on Spring Awakening and every time one of the contestants is voted off they have to be serenaded by the others singing..."you're f***ed, you're f***ed, you're totally f***ed"?

Turning on Newsnight at home we found the debate being about sex education for the young, with the prospect of abortion clinics being advertised on television. Nothing changes.

Review - Genova, Empire Leicester Square

Warning: this film may seriously distress those viewers who have a child, are related to a child, may have once seen a child or were in fact brought up as a child!

Michael Winterbottom had a spare few weeks in his hectic schedule so he decided to take a crack cast of American actors, plus Equity's Mr. Dull - Colin Firth, follow them round the older bits of Genoa and scare the bejeesus out of me.

With shades of Don't Look Now, twisting alleyways and glimpses of a loved one, and bizarrely Walkabout (maybe it's the browning of a sixteen year old skin, or the trailing of one sibling by another) the film follows a newly widowed Firth and his two children, Willa Holland and Perla Haney-Jardine as they re-locate to the titular Italian city after the death of his wife in a terrible car accident. Firth teaches, what, I'm not sure, at a university and dabbles in a flirtation with a younger student, the elder child, Holland, explores her sexuality, the local lads and the local drugs, while her sister plays the piano, sketches and is visited by the ghost of her mother.

And watching it unsettled me more and gave me more distress than a barrel load of Japanese horror movies.

The handheld camera work is fantastic, the acting is superb; Catherine Keener, Firth's old Harvard flame, as always looking right at home in whatever she does and ageing like a real person, not a Hollywood actor, Perla Haney-Jardine heart-breakingly touching, Willa Holland needs to eat some pies and Colin Firth does Colin Firth very well...But....Love-Will-Tear-Us-Apart it was painful!

I don't think I recovered from the terrible way the Hope Davis dies in the opening scene and as Winterbottom racked up the sense of guilt and forboding and despair I just wanted it all to stop...and then it did incredibly abruptly.

the horror, the horror.

Genova is released on Friday the 26th of March.

Review - Liliane Montevecchi, Pizza on the Park

The Silver-Fox always goes a little misty-eyed, not to say wet of nose, at the sound of an accordian or the roll of a Gallic rrrrrr, so on Saturday night we nipped onto the number 9 bus and leaped off at the Pizza on the Park, to see the legendary (and very French) Broadway survivor Liliane Montevecchi.

At 76 Ms Montevecchi has a trunkful of theatrical anecdotes to share and she manages to remember most of them. From the Folie Bergere to Elvis Presley to Follies, to her Tony award winning performance in Nine.

We were particularly interested to hear that her best friend is that well known cosmetic surgery experimenter and mother... Jackie Stallone.

The ex-BB contestant is a practitioner of "rumpology" which is divination using the buttocks of a person rather than their palms, something that would be wasted on the divine Mme M as she seems to have no bottom at all but merely bends in the middle where her fabulous legs meet her hand-span waist. ( Note, all OAPs should try the velour cat-suit /Juliette Greco eye-liner look ...it's a killer).

The songs are wonderful; Sondheim, Aznavour, Jerry Herman and Piaf all delivered with total fabulousness and mostly in yer actual French. My S-F was in Brel heaven.

The evening was produced by a walking perma-tan called Jeff Harnar who bounded, comme un grand fromage, onto the stage at one point to join our star in a Cole Porter medley. I think Jeff likes Liliane, he nearly licked her cat-suit off with adoration. Mr Harnar is producing and starring in "The 1959 Songbook" which runs for the next couple of months at Pizza on the Park and to which I had thought of taking the S-F, but I'm afraid that too much exposure to Mr Harnar might induce type 2 diabetes.

The audience for this amazing women was saddeningly small, but she never gave the slightest hint that she wasn't seeing the auditorium at Carnegie Hall when she looked out at us. It was a privilige to eat pizza in front of her.

(Has anyone seen Liliane Montevecchi in the same room as Carry On favourite and Morecambe and Wise alumni Anita Harris, ever?)

Review - The Murder Game, the King's Head

"It's local" I said.

"It's a cheap ticket" I said

"It's got Michael Praed in it. You know Michael Praed...Robin of Sherwood, Prince Michael of Moldavia? .....the narrator of Timewatch : Aces Falling!"

Got him.

So the Silver-Fox and I slipped into the Sunday matinee of The Murder Game at The King's Head, looking forward to an undemanding couple of hours of " screwball comedy set in the cut-throat world of the New Orleans legal system."

Dear Reader, I know my screwball comedy, from "It Happened One Night", through "The Lady Eve" to "Arsenic and Old Lace" ; the double takes of Cary Grant, the rapid -fire dialogue of Ros Russell, the blonde perfection of Carole Lombard. And this is no screwball comedy.

This is a giant turkey.

It wants to be "The Philadelphia Story"with guns, Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn sparring back in to love while being effortlessly elegant and desirable and incredibly funny.

But it comes across as an embarrassing seventies sitcom with Patrick Clancy giving a nauseatingly dated stereotype of a peformance as the gay (maybe too evolved a word) PA to Josefina Gabrielle's fast talking but hardly wise-cracking New Orlean's judge. Ben Jones as the Brazilian love interest seems to have escaped from TV's least proud moment "Mind Your Language", while the Kojak look-a-like gangster turned effete luvvie of Matt Healy ........well, I can't go on, which is something I wished he had said in rehearsal.
As to the voice of Timewatch, Mr Praed was perhaps the least objectionable and certainly the easiest on the eye element of the piece. He knows how to wear a suit, has a boyish twinkle in his eye, and employs the loveliest hair since Doctor McDreamy .

The author of this " how did my agent talk me into it?" is an attorney, a political consultant and presumably a Republican, having thanked Newt Gingrich for his support in the progamme.His name is James Farwell, and would you believe it....this is his first play. One doesn't want to stamp on an emerging artist but judging from his picture he's old enough to know better.

The Silver-Fox and I made it to the end but only because, as my beloved said at the interval "It's so stupid it's impossible not to see if it get's any worse". It did.

We crawled home trying to come up with analogies for the sound of jokes falling so flat you could iron your shirt on them.

The worst GOP decision since Sarah Palin.

Review - The New Electric Ballroom , Riverside Studios

So long and thanks for all the fish!

I know it's poetic, the wordplay dazzling, the playing wonderfully committed and the Beckettian resonances undeniable but someone make it stop!

I left Enda Walsh's play last night feeling like I'd been punished. Enda why do you want to hurt me?

Is it because I got out of my small town, have managed to enjoy a reasonable sex-life and have never baked or even wanted to bake a cake!

The New Electric Ballroom is referred to as a companion piece to The Walworth Farce , last seen at The Cottesloe, but in reality Enda ( or would he prefer in this case Edna?) has merely gender swapped the roles. Where there were three emotionally batty Oirishmen holed up in a room in South London, their daily routine of manic story re-telling interrupted by a woman from the local superstore, now we have three equally batty ,but not as amusing, sisters visited by a gentleman caller delivering fish.

It's all about family, and memories and thwarted sexuality and was funnier when it was men wearing the frocks and the Margo Leadbetter wigs.

Rosaleen Linehan, Catherine Walsh, Ruth McCabe and Mikel Murfi, giving fantastic performances, remembering a lot of words, all strip down to their gender-appropriate underwear at some point, the only male member ( a word I use with intent) of the cast is tenderly hosed down in a plastic bowl before donning a shiny suit and giving a spirited rendition of the Billy Fury hit "Wondrous Place". And yet not even a surprise occurence of on-stage urination, last seen performed by Jane Horrocks in Macbeth could spoil the tedium.

One brave member of our audience attempted a break for it at about an hour in, (no interval, perhaps a tip picked up from The Walworth Farce - which had one) but was foiled by the Riverside's one sided exit policy, and ended up running round the auditorium like a character caught in an Enda Walsh play.

The Silver-Fox, having accompagnied me to TWF and declaring he'd rather watch Bobby Sands paint his cell with his own excrement again than revist Mr Walsh's brand of Irish whimsy, was happily curled up at home, so my fellow inmate for the night was the Unconfirmed Bachelor . When asked to comment on the entertainment Unconfirmed moaned slightly and asked to be returned to The Norman Conquests where he had been happy and he had cared what happened to the lovely people on stage.

On a brighter note we did have a lovely converstaion with Grumpy Old Woman and Camberwell novelist Jenny Eclair who gave us a head up on Dido Queen of Carthage at The National which she disliked so much that her only memory was the three hour duration and a tacky yellow curtain badly pinned to a clothes rail. The world's biggest brain Sir Jonathan Miller was sitting three seats along from Unconfirmed and myself and with some skilful hanging around afterwards UB was able to get exclusive access to some overheard dialogue that went something like:

Lady Sir Jonathan Miller: "they were all very good weren't they"

Sir Sir Jonathan Miller: " lot's of energy, yes"

Maybe there will be another opera that we'll have to avoid coming to the ENO shortly!

Out Considining Considine

An amazing thing happened during episode 2 of Channel 4's Red Riding. The scariest man in British film went nose to bristling moustache with an actor called Sean Harris and was made to look like a pussy cat.

Mr Harris went so far as to turn his back on Mr Considine and relieve himself leisurely in the urinal before delivering his exit line and walking out, into my heart.

clearing my throat

ahem! just testing