Guest Picture: Philomena

Drawing a picture about Philomena – the real-life bittersweet account of an Irish pensioner’s search for the son taken from her 50-years beforehand, reviewed here – was always going to be an unenviable task. So that’s why I gave it to an unenviable gentleman…Mr Si Hill.

“Just do a picture of Alan Partridge shoving a blind Judi Dench into an American-style breakfast buffet”, I suggested.

But what he came up with may be even more moving…

www.SiHill.co.uk – @Siiighhill

Courtesy of Si Hill – http://www.SiHill.co.uk – @Siiighhill

And Simon produced this heartfelt Guest Picture for Silver Linings Playbook last year.

Philomena; 2013; Dir: Stephen Frears; Stars: Judi Dench; Steve Coogan; Anna Maxwell Martin; 98 mins; 8/10; 4 nominations: Best Picture, Best Actress (Judi Dench), Best Adapted Screenplay (Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope), Best Original Score (Alexandre Desplat)

Bloscars’ Best Picture chart

1.  American Hustle

2.  12 Years a Slave

3.  The Wolf of Wall Street

4. Captain Phillips

5.  Philomena

6.  Dallas Buyers Club

7.  Nebraska

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Guest Picture: Dallas Buyers Club

“Do a picture on the film about the homophobic Aids cowboy, Jayne”, said I. “It’s got a name, you dreadful idiot”, responded she. “Good point”, I retorted, “do a picture on Dallas Buyers Club“. And she said, “Yes”.

And then this absolute beaut landed in my inbox.

‘Nuff said really. But if you disagree (rude!) then take a look at my review of the film and at Jayne’s shit-hot tumblr site thingy:

http://www.jaynelikestodraw.tumblr.com

Courtesy of Jayne Pankhurst – http://jaynelikestodraw.tumblr.com/

And Jayne produced this doe-eyed Guest Picture for Les Misérables last year.

Dallas Buyers Club; 2013; Dir: Jean-Marc Vallée; Stars: Matthew McConaughey; Jared Leto; Jennifer Garner; 117 mins; 7/10; 6 nominations: Best Picture, Best Actor (Matthew McConaughey), Best Supporting Actor (Jared Leto), Best Original Screenplay, Best Adapted Screenplay (Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack), Best Editing, Best Makeup and Hairstyling

Bloscars’ Best Picture chart

1.  American Hustle

2.  12 Years a Slave

3.  The Wolf of Wall Street

4. Captain Phillips

5.  Dallas Buyers Club

6.  Nebraska

7.

8.

9.

For Your Consideration: Dallas Buyers Club

Dallas Buyers Club (2013)

Finally, the Hollywood plot that the world’s been waiting for. You know, the one about the Aids-riddled homophobic bucking bronco rider. Starring Matthew McConaughey. And Jared Leto. In a dress. Finally.

And yet Jean-Marc Vallée’s biographical-ish account of Texan Ron Woodroof’s affliction avoids most of the traps that you might imagine it leaping straight in to. It lacks the mawkishness, insensitivty and ‘freak’ voyerism that I, for one, had expected to be showered with.

In fact, any preconceptions about this being a weekday afternoon human interest story about a terminally ill man hitting back at the medical industry that’s failing him, are thwarted within the first ten minutes. Woodroof’s seedy world is a suffocatingly nauseating place to be thrust into; unctuously sweating over with unprotected sex, casual drug taking and the odd smatter of fisty cuffs.

The Last Week Ends: Backing Singers and Old Sports

Huzzah! A whole week in this year’s Oscar run-up without a single Oscar themed death. Well done Hollywood and beyond…you’re true blue lust-for-living troopers.

Unless, conversely, you’re one of those mean-spirited old miseries who insist that Stephen Fry died on stage at the Royal Opera House last Sunday evening. Personally, I thought his Bafta presenterage lived up to the heights of his usual effortless brilliance in the job. And anybody who believed his hostmanship to be found wanting, I suggest they compare it directly with that oaf Corden’s massacring of the Brits.

Steve McQueen picking up the Best Film Bafta for ’12 Years a Slave’

At this stage, it’s looking like the results in most of the big categories will be more than likely carbon copied this time next week. 12 Years a Slave must be hot favourite with Cuaron picking up the consolation prize for directing. Blanchett and Lawrence are looking good for the lady trinkets and warp in those two Bafta-unnominated gentlemen from Dallas Buyers Club and that will probably be the set. David O. Russell should pick up his first Oscar by replicating his win for Best Original Screenplay and I’ve been pulling all along for Adapted winners Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope for Philomena, although it seems doubtful that the Academy will look any further than John Ridley for 12YaS.

But for all the excitement of the Baftas now being the last service station on the way to destination Oscar, I find it a dreadful shame that it’s no longer an utterly bias Anglophile love-in. The one-sided British bonanza that allowed Four Weddings and a Funeral to win Best Film and Director, and gave leading actor nods to Robert Carlyle for The Full Monty and Pauline Collins for Shirley Valentine. Under the old less showy regime, Dench, Fassbender, Hawkins and McQueen would all be walking away with those ghastly statuettes.

For Your Consideration: Nebraska

Nebraska (2013)

Perennial Oscar favourite Alexander Payne’s black-and-white tale of an alcohol riddled geriatric returning to his childhood town en route to collecting a fortune that doesn’t exist, bagged Bruce Dern the Best Actor award at Cannes and has been a big hit with the Academy, garnering six nominations.

Some things just sound better on paper. Like Lampard and Gerrard playing in the same England midfield, ham and pineapple on a pizza, and France. Actually, that’s not fair…I love Hawaiian pizza.

So the notion of Alexander Payne making a humour tinged piece on an elderly Bruce Dern in the first throws of Alzheimers making a thousand mile voyage with his son to collect a phoney million-pound jackpot, has all the signs of a good thing. With the promise of self-reflection, contemplation and brutal home truths to be discovered along the way, there are all the makings of an Oscar favourite.

But alas, Nebraska falls a country mile short on almost every level. The director has delivered a painfully broad cartoon of a movie, jam-packed with laughable caricatures and a script that should never have seen the light of day.

Guest Picture: The Wolf of Wall Street

I was going to do a gag about how I describe all the Guest Pictures I feature with such perennial hyperbole that it would be 100% apt to label me as the boy who cried Wolf of Wall Street. But the joke doesn’t work. At all.

So I’ll shut the heckings up and let Lydia Fee’s most splendid shapes, colours and dimensions speak for themselves.

She has produced an image so layered with meaning and symbolism, I challenge any of you to identify all of the metaphors she’s teemed the picture with. At my count, there are half a dozen Easter eggs to find. I, of course, know all of them – which owes in equal parts to my vast intelligence and the fact that Lydia told me what they are.

Check out Lydia’s hot deets below, and take a look at my review of Scrosese’s debaucherous and divisive epic here.

www.lydiafee.co.uk

@lydiafee

Courtesy of Lydia Fee – http://www.lydiafee.co.uk – @lydiafee

Lydia also produced this birdacious Guest Picture for Amour last year.

The Wolf of Wall Street; 2013; Dir: Martin Scorsese; Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie; 180 mins; 8/10; 5 nominations: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Leonardo DiCaprio), Best Supporting Actor (Jonah Hill), Best Adapted Screenplay (Terence Winter)

Bloscars’ Best Picture chart

1.  American Hustle

2.  12 Years a Slave

3.  The Wolf of Wall Street

4.  Captain Phillips

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

The Last Week Ends: Frozen, Feasts, Folk and the Good Ship Lollipop

Could this week’s Oscar news be any worse? Even in light of last week’s two deaths, I can’t remember feeling a sensation of loss that matches the depths I’ve endured today. All that potential for pure, blissful happiness, snatched away from me without warning. As I write this from my sordid pit of despair, I can but try to soldier on notwithstanding the chasm of emptiness that now pervades my very being.

But that’s enough about Ellen Page announcing that she’s a lesbian.

Shirley Temple receives the Juvenile Oscar from another human being who is also pictured

This week bore witness two another duo doing their damnedest to make it on to this year’s Academy Awards ‘In Memoriam’ segment. And I can, to a degree, make light of the matter as both of this week’s candidates were of a ripe old vintage. Shirley Temple was the name of note; that cute child star of 193os films like Bright Eyes, Curly Top and Heidi, and who became the youngest ever Oscar winner when, aged 6, she was granted a Juvenile Oscar. Yep, not even those kids from Look Who’s Talking Too managed to break her record.

The other codger to croak was Danish 95-year-old Gabriel Axel, who’s moment in that bright yet fickle Oscar sun came when his charming Babette’s Feast scooped the Best Foreign Language Film in 1988. The story of two elderly sisters, living spinsters’ lives in a remote 19th century Scandinavian village, having spent a life rejecting potential eligible suitors in favour of their love for the Lord. When their maid Babette, a French exile, wins the lottery she repays them by preparing a lavish Gallic feast for the siblings and their geriatric disciples. The likes of turtle soup, quail vol-au-vents and Veuve Clicquot are a world apart from the usual gruel and water the villagers are used too. Set against a palate of omnipresent grey, it is up to the viewer to decide whether Axel is highlighting the beautiful hues of human kindness or a gently attacking the feckless shackles of religion.

For Your Consideration: The Wolf of Wall Street

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

So much has already been written about Martin Scorsese’s ostensible tribute to 80s Wall Street hotshot Jordan Belfort, that a regular review seems to me rather redundant. But – never one to refuse to write a bunch of words that nobody wants to read – I’ve decided that my time would be far better spent responding to the views of others on The Wolf of Wall Street.

– It’s too bloody long

Considering that I have the approximate attention span of a particularly recalcitrant toddler, trust me when I say that no matter the scenario, I find the prospect of a 3 hour film a galling one. Yet WOWS (an acronym I care for so deeply, I’m completely comfortable with the fact that it’s slightly erroneous) rattles along at such a breathless pace, its running time poses no problem.

On the contrary, owing to the extreme gulf in emotions that Jordan experiences through the film, the marathon length contributes to the immersion. From the rapidity of his rise to the toast of the New York Stock Exchange to that of his status as number one target of baying FBI agents; from the narc-fuelled, whore-laced, dwarf-degrading dizziness of Belfort’s office parties to debilitating, spasticating drug trips gone wrong; from being seduced by stunning models to the lows of divorce papers, absented children and domestic abuse: the result is thoroughly exhausting. In a good way.

– “Bloated piece of shit or wot?”

Say what you want about Joseph Blakey’s eloquence and/or spelling, he runs the marvellous Hellfire Video Club and so is worth sitting down and listening to.

Yet I (entirely dis)respectively disagree with his opinion on this one. Whether you watch WOWS as a biographical window into the nut-house that was 1980s Wall Street, or a hilarious fantasist comedy jam-packed with caricatured gargoyles, then the film rifles a thunderbastard into both goals.

Guest Picture: 12 Years a Slave

Considering that Steve McQueen, director of 12 Years a Slave, is a former Turner Prize winning artist, today’s Guest Picture may well be the most apposite yet…it’s on 12 Years a Slave you see.

Now some people would say that my review of said film is a work of art in its own right. Alex Dimond however, sought to rudely disagree. He did so with such vehement ferocity indeed, that I couldn’t not let him put together his very own image.

Now Alex is a curious fellow (just take a look at the way he spells his surname). His loves include vinyl, sandwiches, Ric Flair and Frank Sidebottom (not necessarily in that order) and, regardless of what you think of that, it would be churlish to deny that he’s one hell of an artist.

If, for some reason known only to God Himself, you don’t wish to trust My word on the matter, then down a carton of truth juice by checking out Alex’s blog and the below triptych triumph.

www.alexd.co.uk

@alexplosion

Courtesy of Alex Dimond – http://alexd.co.uk – @alexplosion

12 Years a Slave; 2013; Dir: Steve McQueen; Stars: Chiwetel Ejiofor,Michael Fassbender, Lupita Nyong’o; 134 mins; 9/10; 9 nominations: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Best Supporting Actor (Michael Fassbender), Best Supporting Actress (Lupita Nyong’o), Best Adapted Screenplay (John Ridley), Best Editing, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design

Bloscars’ Best Picture chart

1.  American Hustle

2.  12 Years a Slave

3.  Captain Phillips

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Guest Picture: Captain Phillips

You can throw a lot of clichés at Captain Phillips (the film, not the man) and I imagine that I probably did in my review; ‘nail biting’, ‘edge of the seat’ and ‘dead ruddy tense’ would be among the throng.

And I felt similar tension as my snail-like computer struggled to open Martin Jones’s’s’s’s artwork for Paul Greengrass’s’s’s’s’s’s’s’s’s’s’s film.

A recent father, I feared Smart Mart’s (co-founder of Torchy Design http://www.torchydesign.co.uk/) pictorial adaptation would be a sugar-coated cluster of fluffy bunnies, googly-eyed teddy bears and, I dunno, let’s say Teletubbies thrown in for garish measure.

You’ll imagine my delight then, when this beaut was then eventually revealed:

Courtesy of Martin Jones – http://www.torchydesign.co.uk

And here’s Smart Mart’s OBL-smashing Zero Dark Thirty pic from last year.

Captain Phillips; 2013; Dir: Paul Greengrass; Stars: Tom Hanks; Barkhad Abdi; Barkhad Abdirahman; 134 mins; 8/10; 6 nominations: Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Barkhad Abdi), Best Adapted Screenplay (Billy Ray), Best Editing, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing

Bloscars’ Best Picture chart

1.  American Hustle

2.  Captain Phillips

3.

4.

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8.

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