‘Forced to preserve a monument’: how the fate of Marilyn Monroe’s LA home became a legal saga

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House where Monroe died, which hasn’t been occupied in seven years, is in limbo after current owners wanted to demolish it but were stopped by a public campaign Marilyn Monroe is said to have had more than 50 addresses in her lifetime, but only once, in the final months before she died from a drug overdose at the age of 36, did she have a house she could call fully her own. The Hollywood star, burned out by the failure of her marriage to the playwright Arthur Miller and by health problems that prompted a year-long hiatus from acting, bought herself a quintessential hacienda-style Spanish bungalow with a pool at the foot of the Santa Monica mountains in February 1962. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/QbvRndl via IFTTT
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Chuck Chuck Baby review – whimsy and realism combine in big-hearted romance

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Louise Brealey is put-upon Helen, a chicken factory worker who gets a second chance at love, in Pugh’s generous and gritty film

Here’s a rousing empowerment-anthem of a movie that’s not afraid to paint its romance plotline in big, bold brushstrokes; occasionally it overdoes things but the rush of emotion carries everything along in its path, helped by the deployment of radio-friendly standards by Neil Diamond and the like that turns the film into an impromptu musical and allows writer-director Janis Pugh to stage (relatively) elaborate dance sequences and big emotional scenes.

The central figure is put-upon chicken-processing factory worker Helen (played by Louise Brealey) who has a complicated domestic situation: she lives in the same crummy terrace as her oafish husband Gary, from whom she is separated but seemingly not actually divorced, and shares the place with his new, much younger, girlfriend Amy (Emily Fairn) and their newly arrived baby. Also on the premises is Gary’s terminally ill mother Gwen (Sorcha Cusack), for whom Helen acts a carer but is the quasi-maternal figure that Helen appears to long for. There’s also a rowdy Greek chorus of Helen’s fellow factory workers who are perhaps designed as a counterpoint to Helen’s introverted, clenched unhappiness, at least at first.

Chuck Chuck Baby screened at the Edinburgh film festival

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