Just For Lookin' Thru

This doesn’t sound like an interesting premise for a film; an unsuccessful writer faking the autobiography of Howard Hughes and getting caught, but it’s gripping, and true. Clifford Irving’s breathtaking audacity is so outrageous and implausible that you have to keep watching because you can’t believe he’ll pull it off, and he nearly does. Richard Gere plays Irving with what looks like a dodgy black perm and he looks so unlike the Gere we know that he manages to convince. Although the film is about the trickery involved in fooling his publicist, the publishers and their legal advisors, it is also a close study of friendship and relationships. Irving’s friend joins him rather reluctantly in the venture, which is a sort of literary hussle, but fails to put a brake on the increasingly complicated and unnerving fraud, while Irving’s wife has concerns about his easy lying in his private life. Irving’s obsession with Hughes grows, and threatens to disrupt his life; he becom...

Alan Bennett wanted to write about a charismatic schoolmaster and has come up with Hector (Desmond Barrit) whose approach is to teach the boys poetry and songs; Hector’s view is that learning moving, insightful or just plain silly texts provide the antidote to the earnest love of 'words'. He has the boys acting, singing from musicals and speaking French rather than studying History, and his unorthodox style aims to provide them with cultural awareness and breadth. These boys are ambitious and their Headmaster wants them to get into Oxford which will give the school a better ranking in the league tables so he brings in a young teacher, Irwin, to prepare the boys for the examination board by challenging the way they think about history. The play is about teaching, the way to open up young minds balanced against exam training, and Bennett’s play shows how a teaching career can be fulfilling but also limiting; the school is a nation in microcosm: flawed individuals doing their best...

A confection of a film this one, featuring no end of sickly pies baked by Jenna (Keri Russell) in a small town diner. She puts everything she has into the buttery crusts, creamy fillings and marshmallow toppings; it’s all melted bitter chocolate and caramel, but her life is lacklustre and unhappy, her husband is an insecure control freak and he is the obstacle to her creative and emotional fulfilment. Funny and charming, the film’s humour surprises and delights whenever her git of a husband’s behaviour becomes too oppressive, and the story achieves a nice balance between eliciting sympathy and laughter. Having said that, husband Earl is nasty but not too nasty, and there are times when we wonder why she doesn’t tell him what a prat he really is. Jenna is horrified to find she is pregnant and her real ambition is to win the pie making competition and open her own pie diner. The pregnancy and her medical consultations with a new doctor bring unexpected benefits. Charming and...

Marion Cotillard is outstanding as Edith Piaf in Dahan's biography. Piaf’s classic songs are terrific and passionately delivered, and the film feels like a cinematic roller coaster ride of emotions and fragments from Piaf's life. The effect is of vivid but random memory recall, as though we are seeing moving snapshots taken through her life. Dahan serves up a visual maelstrom, from Piaf as a small child left with her grandmother to be brought up in a brothel, through her years of success and arrogance, to her death, ravaged by drugs and alcohol. Loss follows loss, first her father takes her away from her mother, then she is torn from the arms of the prostitute she comes to love, and finally she is grief stricken at the death of her lover, boxer Marcel Cerdan. She never recovered from her broken heart, which caused her addiction to morphine, and her physical degeneration is shocking. Cotillard's Piaf is outspoken and rough, drunk and mouthy, but occasionally vul...