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

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

The Kitchen review – high-energy drama of near-future rundown housing estate

Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya co-direct a drama about a funeral-service worker looking for a way out of the chaotic housing block of the title

There’s a rich mix of ingredients in this heartfelt and likably acted film from co-directors Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya, set in a chaotic, favela-type London housing estate of the near future, nicknamed “the Kitchen”. It takes something from the French banlieue movies of Mathieu Kassovitz and Ladj Ly, while running a seedier and more downbeat version of the postmodern alienation of Total Recall or Blade Runner. But it is also a slightly sentimental-realist family drama, and I felt that for all its high-energy pyrotechnics, in its final moments The Kitchen paints itself into a bit of a narrative corner.

The Kitchen setting itself is tremendously fabricated on screen, with top-notch special effects work; it is a spectacularly rundown housing block surrounded on all sides by glitzy new apartment buildings for the heartless better off. The city authorities have in fact decided on the Kitchen’s demolition and high-handedly ordered residents to leave, but the people are refusing on the grounds that this is where they have built their community and homes – for all its poverty, there is a bustling, vivid atmosphere.

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