Wish You Were Here

Wish You Were Here

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Charlotte and Adam

So you’re Julia Stiles and you decide to have a crack at directing a feature film. Wish You Were Here is the result, and, well well, if it isn’t a mash-up of precisely the sort of films Stiles used to star in when she was starting out, rom-com, girl-next-door, travails-of-the-teen-spirit-y kind of stuff – Ten Things I Hate about You most notably. She also wrote Wish You Were Here so this choice is clearly deliberate. Possibly Stiles is laying ghosts to rest or laughing at herself, it’s hard to say. What is clear is that her film is a mess until it properly works out which of the various early-Stiles-adjacent genres it really … Read more

19 May 2014-05-19

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Margot Robbie and Leonardo DiCaprio in the Wolf of Wall Street

Out in the UK This Week The Wolf of Wall Street (Universal, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) Scorsese’s best film since Casino also continues his trend towards flabby films. Twenty minutes can, and let’s hope eventually will, be trimmed from a film with a Goodfellas arc – we start with a voiceover of Leo Di Caprio saying, in effect, that for as long as he could rememeber he’d always wanted to be a richfella. And off we go into a roaring rush of the true story of Jordan Belfort, who became a licensed Wall Street broker on the day the market crashed in 1987, then started at the bottom all over again, selling penny stocks to … Read more