The Brain

The Brain, head titled, with a passer-by

If you haven’t heard of The Brain (Le Cerveau), then you’ve missed the biggest box office hit in France in 1969 and a film that the New York Times described as “one of the freshest, fastest, nimblest and funniest comedies to hit town… in a long, long time.” I’ll just quickly add that the Times is overselling, massively, and that for a good long chunk of it, until it gets into the home straight in fact, The Brain is very unfunny, mostly unthrilling and largely unglamorous. But once it does it miraculously shifts gear, or maybe by that point I’d just given up and yielded to it. The vibe is The Pink Panther … Read more

The Holiday

Jude Law and Cameron Diaz in The Holiday

The rom-com has traditionally featured an alpha couple and a beta couple. This allowed the alpha couple do the serious mooning about, while the beta couple handled the comedy and dispensed sound, often snarky, advice. However, since Richard Curtis’s successful if frequently painful Love, Actually, there’s been an attempt to get more people in on the act. Which brings us to one of those transatlantic rom-coms with a couple of Hollywood stars and a couple of Brits, each side playing to the other’s stereotyped view of what an American/Brit is. The Brits are a journalist at the tweedy Daily Telegraph (Kate Winslet) and a book editor (Jude Law); meanwhile, from California, USA, we … Read more

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Original art for the poster of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 9 January Lee Van Cleef born, 1925 On this day in 1925, Clarence Leroy Van Cleef Jr was born, in New Jersey, USA. Best known for his portrayal of baddies, Van Cleef served on submarine chasers in the Second World War before becoming a time and motion man after the war ended. Not looking enough like a traditional penpusher to satisfy his colleagues, Lee was persuaded by them, and his friends, to give the stage and film world the benefit of his hawk nose and eyes, each of which was a different colour, thanks to the heterochromia iridium mutation. Van Cleef’s … Read more