Hugh Grant says fourth Bridget Jones film will be ‘funny but very sad’

-
Actor reprises character of Daniel Cleaver but says he won’t play role of ‘60-year-old wandering around looking at young girls’ It is a universally acknowledged truth that Bridget Jones films are packed with humour and comedic scenes that attract viewers in their droves. However, in a slight departure, Hugh Grant has revealed that the fourth film in the series will also be “very sad”. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/ZJoB2VO via IFTTT
Post a Comment

Hellboy: The Crooked Man review – sputtering mess even a metric ton of makeup can’t conceal

-

A boring nemesis in a top hat bops around cackling while a wan Hellboy is enlisted to save a local man’s sweetheart in this inexplicable successor

Fans of comic books, 00s horror and Guillermo del Toro will recall the latter’s crack at launching a mass-market franchise with Hellboy in 2004, a peppy blend of pulp genre thrills, wisecracks and old-school effects with a very del Torovian occult-vibe. The casting in the title role of Ron Perlman as the half-demon/half-human shorn-horned, red-skinned, wisecracking, cigar-smoking good guy, along with Selma Blair as his pale but decidedly interesting sidekick/love interest Liz, is what made the first film, and to a lesser degree its successor Hellboy II: The Golden Army, sing. But the unholy mess of a reboot from 2019, this time with a not-unlikeable David Harbour in the massive Right Hand of Doom glove, barely made coin, which makes this even lower-budgeted successor somewhat inexplicable. Just as Hellboy can smell evil in the forest air where others catch only the scent of pine, there’s a whiff of creative accounting about this effort.

This time, the man under the metric ton of makeup is Jack Kesy, a pretty wan replacement for his predecessors who doesn’t even look convincing while smoking. Set in the 1950s, Hellboy is working for the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense alongside agent Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph, the best thing in the film), an eager beaver in contrast to Hellboy the cynic. An escaped CGI spider (don’t ask) causes the two to rock up somewhere in the forests of Appalachia where the search for a phone gets them mixed up with hillbilly witches and gateways to hell. Local guy Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White), newly returned from war to find his parents are seemingly dead, enlists Hellboy and Bobbie Jo to help him save his old sweetheart Cora (Hannah Margetson), who has been bewitched by local enchantress Effie (Leah McNamara, who is at least having fun with the ham serving). And bopping around the place cackling is nemesis the Crooked Man (Martin Bassindale), who is a pretty boring foe apart from the dapper top hat.

Continue reading...

from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/Y4Rq5oz
via IFTTT

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

‘I lied to get the part’: Melvyn Hayes on his ‘angry young man’ beginnings – and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum

-
He was tipped to be the next Richard Burton – but ended up as crossdressing Gunner Gloria in the now controversial sitcom. As his breakthrough classic returns to the screen, Hayes looks back One day in 1957, Melvyn Hayes was on the set of a film called Woman in a Dressing Gown when a man sat down next to him. “I was getting paid £5 a day and I’d been on location for three days,” the actor recalls. “All I had to do was walk up to a house and put a newspaper through a letterbox. That was my part. Finished. I said to this bloke, ‘I can’t believe the waste of money on this film. Take me. You could have got a newspaper boy on £1 a day to do what I’m doing.’ Then I said, ‘What do you do then, you lazy bugger?’ And he said, ‘I’m the producer.’” Hayes, now 89, giggles at the memory of the cheek of himself at 23. Back then, £5 a day was a decent whack. His first job in showbiz, in the early 1950s, was as assistant to The Great Masoni, a magician who tasked Hayes with “disappearing twice daily
Read more

Elaha review – sex, patriarchy and second-generation identity

-
A sexually candid, seriously intentioned drama about a young Kurdish woman who feels she has to surgically ‘restore’ her virginity before her wedding There is a heartfelt and courageous performance from 28-year-old Syrian-born, German-based actor Bayan Layla in this drama about sex, patriarchy and second-generation immigrant identity. It is a drama which hits the buttons squarely and efficiently, but might perhaps have played better as a three-part TV drama. Layla plays Elaha, a young woman of Kurdish family background in a German town (director Milena Aboyan is herself German-based and Armenian-Kurdish). She has finished high school and is now attending classes on how to apply for jobs, picking up skills she uses mainly to help her dad find employment. There seems to be no discussion about university, despite her obvious intelligence. Her mum works hard minding Elaha’s younger sister and disabled kid brother, and Elaha has part-time work at a dry-cleaners; she is saving for her wedd
Read more

Gasoline Rainbow review – a free-ranging coming-of-age ode to the curiosity of youth

-
Billed as a gen Z road trip film, the Ross brothers’ first fiction feature offers more than you’d expect from the genre, with a focus on human interaction over plot In the opening seconds of the Ross brothers’ new film, a teenager professes his hope to discover a place “weirdos” like him can call home. The opening raises doubts about the novelty of what might follow: the trope of the high school outsider has been endlessly revisited. Gasoline Rainbow – billed as a gen Z road trip movie – starts off by replaying familiar images. As new high school graduates Makai, Micah, Nathaly, Nichole and Tony hit the road across Oregon for one final adventure together, we see the usual trappings of the genre: sing-alongs, parties by the campfire, and leaning out of car windows to enjoy the breeze and sweet call of freedom. We move into welcome new territory when a mishap leaves their van out of action, and the group are left in the hot desert trying to scrounge a path forward, meeting strangers al
Read more