Just filed my latest movie reviews for Plan B magazine. These include Notes On A Scandal, which is already one of my favourite films of 2007. Not least for quotes like these:
“You’ve got a basement flat off the Archway Road and you think you’re Virginia frigging Woolf!”
(Archway Road is my local high street)
“Her fetish for the boy was simply her snobbery manifested. ‘He’s Working Class and he likes Art’. As if he were a monkey who’d just strolled out of the rain forest and asked for a gin and tonic.”
I heard a critic on the radio the other day bemoaning the casting of Rene Zellweger as Beatrix Potter in the new film Miss Potter. His point was that she was stealing work from perfectly good British actresses. Well, Cate Blanchett isn’t British either, but I defy anyone to see her as the trusting if pretentious schoolteacher Sheba Hart in Notes On A Scandal and come to the same conclusion.
As for Miss Potter, it’s fluffy and visually sumptuous fare but has more modern substance than appearances suggest. Beatrix, Frederick Warne (Ewan McGregor) and Millie Warne (Emily Watson) are all careerless thirty-somethings dismissed by their families as aimless wastrels best kept on a leash. Rather reminds me of a few people I know in 2006. Though the film does move away from such issues to ultimately resemble an advert for the Lake District Tourist Board, I found it perfectly enjoyable. And Ms Zellweger’s casting is fine. Her accent may be a slightly posher Bridget Jones, but it works. Ewan McGregor twinkles sensitively behind his Christmas Cracker moustache, and all is well.
