Pink smoke, pigs and Pixar: a dozen movie Easter eggs to feast on

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Hidden references and in-jokes in cinema can be an acquired taste, but here’s a festive selection of the best arch nods for aficionados to enjoy One of Hollywood’s most durable Easter eggs debuted in Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday (1940) when Cary Grant’s character says: “The last man who said that to me was Archie Leach just a week before he cut his throat!” And in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) his character sits pensively in a cemetery where Archie Leach’s gravestone is to be seen. In Charles Crichton’s A Fish Called Wanda (1988), John Cleese’s character is called Archie Leach. Leach is, of course, the real name of Cary Grant – a very goofy and unglamorous sounding name compared with the sonorous “Cary Grant” – and a rare example of Hollywood alluding to the open secret of rebranding its stars and effacing the bland ordinariness of their origins. Peter Bradshaw Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/ubNDLiM via IFTTT
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Streaming: the best biker movies

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The Bikeriders, Jeff Nichols’s drama starring Jodie Comer, Austin Butler and Tom Hardy, follows in the leather-clad slipstream of Easy Rider, Quadrophenia and more

At 41, there’s still time for my midlife crisis to take an unexpected turn, but as yet I must confess that I have never known the pleasure of riding a motorcycle. As a London cyclist I can’t exactly claim danger avoidance as a reason, and as a keen driver I’d love to feel the open road minus the sensation barriers of doors and a windscreen. Still, biking is one of those things that movies have rendered so untouchably cool that real life can only make it less so – and even on my best day I’m not going to resemble midcentury Marlon Brando in head-to-toe leather.

Nor Austin Butler and Tom Hardy, for that matter, though while Jeff Nichols’s very entertaining The Bikeriders, now on VOD, to some extent continues cinema’s love affair with handsome, squinting men astride their two-wheel steeds, it deromanticises the scene a bit. Set between the mid-60s and early 70s, it chronicles the evolution of a Chicago biker gang from a mindset of simple, stick-it-to-the-man rebellion to a more directionless, Vietnam-soured atmosphere of crime and violence – and the dogged efforts of Jodie Comer’s disillusioned biker wife to domesticate her tarmac-addicted man. Whatever macho wish-fulfilment The Bikeriders offers is laced with melancholy.

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