Have agreed to do another movie review column for Plan B Magazine. May as well be voluntary work (all they can afford to pay me barely covers half my travel costs getting to the screenings), but it helps pad out the file of published writings, on real paper. And I do like to go to the movies.
Tonight’s film was Evening, a lachrymose drama where women get upset over something that happened one fateful night in 1952 (or whenever), and ‘their lives are changed forever’. That sort of film. Sails rather close to the TV Movie world at times, despite the screenplay by the man behind The Hours. In fact, one aged version of a character suddenly turns up at the end to make a little speech, tying everything up. Which is exactly what happens at the end of The Hours. So Evening is essentially The Hours without the suicides, musings on literature, or Philip Glass on the soundtrack. Instead, there’s the usual nondescript echoey piano tinkings common to such dramas. And it’s all filmed beautifully: you come out whistling the sunsets.
Vanessa Redgrave and Claire Danes are both great, but miscast as old and young versions of the same character. It’s not just the lack of physical resemblance (Ms Danes is half a foot shorter than Ms Redgrave – was her character stretched on a rack between the ages of 35 and 70?), but their acting styles and mannerisms couldn’t be more different. Even when Ms Redgrave was Ms Danes’s age in films like Blow-Up and Morgan: A Suitable Case For Treatment, she was still aloof, starchy and brittle. Ms Danes is gregarious, sweet and quirky. It’s like comparing an angsty stick of celery to an angsty strawberry.
That said, I think it’ll fare well with fans of well-made female melodramas. There were more than a few snuffles in tonight’s audience, so I suppose Evening can be safely filed away under Actorly Weepies.
***
Am collared in Leicester Square by a woman brandishing an Amnesty International clipboard, after my Direct Debit details. Very much a sign of the times: these aggressive figures are also known as ‘charity muggers’, or ‘chuggers’. Usually students, I think. Either way, I find them immensely objectionable. In fact, I make a mental note to boycott all charities that stoop to employ such depressing tactics. Which is ironic, as it’s often charities that ask you to boycott various firms and organisations for their unethical practices.
So no more Amnesty International donations from me. Not until they stop leaping out at people on the street with clipboards and shouting at them for daring to walk away. It’s arguably a kind of oppression of one’s human rights, curtailing the ability to walk around freely without having to dodge clipboard fiends. I’ve a good mind to write to Amnesty International about themselves.
***
Funny how during these busy days people either have no time at all, or devote too much time to things they probably don’t need to do. Harry Potter fans are camping outside bookshops three days before the new novel comes out. I can understand the camaraderie of fans together, standing in the same place, for maybe for an hour or two at the most. And dress-up parties at midnight sound fun enough. But when I see people camping in the rain for days, I feel like John Lennon did in the Imagine documentary, confronting a fan camping out on his doorstep, politely asking him to desist, inviting him inside for a cup of tea, then sending him home.
Still, I suppose it has precedence in the times of Dickens, when his novels were published in installments. The story goes that people standing at New York harbour asked passengers arriving from England if Little Nell was okay. Now it’s the welfare of Little Harry that their descendents are seeking to know.
