Rehab people will tell you there are three stages to drug abuse: fun; fun with problems; problems. There’s also a fourth phase, where there aren't any problems, because you’re dead.
It’s not often we hear barely a single gunshot in a movie set amid Mexican drug cartels, but that may be the way it is for people who actually live amid Mexican drug cartels.
In Sujo, Mexico’s bid for the next foreign feature Oscar, we experience violence the way many who inhabit violent places actually experience it – mostly embedded in the fabric of life, only occasionally directly.
Judging by a Sunday Times interview last weekend, Daniel Craig now enjoys wearing brilliantly-coloured sweaters and extraordinary trousers, very much like a man running as fast as possible in the opposite direction to James Bond. He has goodbye-Bond-esque quotes to go with it.
A Mexican drugs cartel boss. A transitioning man. A strikingly beautiful woman lawyer risking all against corruption. Bittersweet songs that the characters suddenly break into, and occasionally dance to. A film in praise of women. And it’s not by Pedro Almodovar.
No film tackles the knotty topic of inherited mental illness with as much gleeful abandon as Smile. Mental health has been a popular subtext in contemporary horror for the past decade, but Parker Finn's Smile felt refreshing in how unsubtle it was. The premise was a curse that drives you mad with violent hallucinations that eventually force you to kill yourself, passing the curse on to whoever witnesses your death.
There’s a moment in writer/co-director, Jonathan Brown’s, gritty new play, Knife on the Table, that justifies its run almost on its own. Flint, a decent kid going astray, is "invited" to prove he’s ready for the next step in his drug-dealing career by stabbing Bragg, another "soldier", who has become more trouble than he’s worth.
There’s been a lot of early 90s rave aesthetics in popular culture lately, but an awful lot of it has been at the level of signifiers. Fila, Stüssy, Air Max 90s, smiley faces, sirens, rewinds, crowd noises, hop in a Ford Cortina, tribes coming together, dancing at dawn, baggy hoodies for goalposts, isn’t it, wasn’t it, hmm? There’s been a little less discussed, though, about what raving actually felt like, and in particular that it its revolutionary character came from everyone having the same feeling of being on the same drug at the same time.
SUNDAY 30th June 2024
It’s late. But not really. Not by the standards of this place. Photographer Finetime and I are in Block9 in the South-East Corner. The so-called “naughty corner”. We take turns juggernauting quomble off a pinecone. Finetime’s right eyelid is twitching. This tic developed today. Nearby is a gigantic head. About the size of a large Victorian house. It’s at an acute angle to the ground. Instead of eyes it has a kind of welders’ mask blitzing white-noise light. Like the haunted, detuned television in the 1982 film Poltergeist.
Sam Taylor-Johnson’s biopic Back to Black, written by Matt Greenhalgh and starring Marisa Abela (Industry) as Amy Winehouse, has been criticised for its soft-focused approach.
And its sympathetic portrayals of Blake Fielder-Civil (a punchy Jack O’Connell) and Amy’s dad Mitch (Eddie Marsan) are very different from those in Asif Kapadia’s damning 2015 documentary Amy. The possibility of the famously protective Mitch having any editorial control is denied by Taylor-Johnson, but one wonders.
Memory is a confounding thing. By way of proof, just ask the Mary Tyrone who is being given unforgettable life by Patricia Clarkson in London's latest version of Long Day's Journey into Night, which has arrived on the West End (and at the same theatre) a mere six years after the previous version of Eugene O'Neill's posthumously premiered masterwork; that one headlined a top-rank Lesley Manville in the same part.