A mother to love, and squirm from
Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami Available now
My friends and I were licking our chops when this appeared in the cinema last year; Grace Jones is an icon and disco queen who still cuts a charismatic, outrageous otherworldly figure decades after she scored hits like Pull Up the Bumper and Slave To the Rhythm that made her a star.
Unfortunately we came away mainly disappointed. It’s a sort of free-form meandering documentary piece in which Jones is presented completely without context.
There are no talking-head experts and no archival footage or photos.
No background whatsoever is provided when an apparently infamous incident is discussed in which Jones slapped Russell Harty live on air in 1980.
Clocking in at two hours it feels like a lot longer and besides the concert footage — which is admittedly epic — a golden opportunity was wasted.
The Story of God with Morgan Freeman Three seasons, available now
While Kevin Spacey and others accused of sexual harassment have been banished from the streaming service, 80-year-old Morgan Freeman, who recently faced decades-old allegations published in a CNN report, has thus far survived (and in fact has come out fighting, threatening to sue the network).
Justice, whatever that is, must be served but it would surely be a shame if his mellifluous speaking voice was taken from the airwaves.
The programme which originally aired on the National Geographic channel in the US again follows the Academy Award winner on an international journey as he discovers the power of religion and how it touches all of our lives. Freeman travels to some of the world’s holiest sites and speaks to religious leaders, scientists, historians and archaeologists to try to shed light on questions about the divine that have puzzled us from the beginning.
The Meddler (2015) Available now
From the moment we meet Marnie, the interfering matriarch at the heart of this film, it’s clear she can’t be totally made up.
Everything about her has the ring of reality, from her meandering voicemails to her habit of beginning most sentences with “You should”. Marnie is based on director/writer Lorene Scafaria’s own mother, of course, and what comes through is the filmmaker’s abiding love for her.
Our love is helped by the fact that Marnie is played by Susan Sarandon, fabulous as ever, as a widow who relocates across America to “help” her daughter, Lori (Rose Byrne), a struggling television writer. Lori, too, is pining for a lost love, Jacob (Jason Ritter). Sarandon and Byrne are terrific as two women who are grieving and doing a fairly bad job of it.
Lori exhausts herself with work while Marnie intrudes ever further into her daughter’s life. Marnie casually delivers the film’s funniest (and most quietly terrifying) line: “Oh, and remind me to tell you what your therapist said.”
There’s a lot of archetypes here and not much of a plot but it’s so well written and well acted that these seem like quibbles.
The Edge of Seventeen (2016) Available today
This is very definitely ‘a movie about a teen’ rather than a teen movie per se. It’s a portrait of a girl, Nadine, caught in the thick of adolescence — she’s 17 — and dealing with all of the emotional confusion and accelerated growth that comes with the territory.
Nadine has a bit of a dark edge, partly because her father (Eric Keenleyside) died a few years earlier, but, she bitterly notes, that trauma seemingly drove her football playing brother Darian (Blake Jenner) to become even more popular. Nadine’s best friend Krista (Haley Lu Richardson) helps keep her afloat, but then they fall out over a boy.
It’s a sort of acerbic comedy, not miles away from Ladybird in tone, with a similarly strong ensemble cast. The film doesn’t have any unforeseen twists or moments of huge tension.
Instead, it tries to put the viewer firmly into Nadine’s head as she lashes out — not because she’s in the right, but because most people felt the same at some point in their youth.