MERYL, YOU REALLY ROCK
Meryl Streep is a hoot as an ageing rock chick (even if she does look ridiculous!)
Ricki And The Flash (12A)
Verdict: Meryl Streep meets Suzi Quatro
Me And Earl And The Dying Girl (12A)
Verdict: Quirky and delightful
Cartel Land (15)
Verdict: Brilliant documentary
PICTURE, if you can, what Suzi Quatro might have become had she never had any success, and was eking out an existence as a supermarket cashier, properly coming alive only at night when playing with her motley band in a blue- collar California bar a quarter full of devoted fans.
In essence, that’s the character a leatherjacketed Meryl Streep plays in Ricki And
The Flash; an ageing rock chick who long ago walked out on her husband and three children in Indianapolis to pursue her dream of a career in music. The motley band is called The Flash, and her boyfriend is the lead guitarist, nicely played by once-famous (-ish) musician Rick Springfield.
Meanwhile, the family are now all grown up and suitably resentful, starting with daughter Julie (Mamie Gummer, perfectly cast, since she can not only act but is also Streep’s real-life daughter).
She is so distraught following the break-up of her own marriage that her well-heeled father (Kevin Kline) invites ex-wife Ricki back to the mid-West for a last-ditch attempt at some mothering.
With Jonathan Demme (Married To The Mob, The Silence Of The Lambs, Philadelphia) directing, and a script by Diablo Cody (who wrote the excellent 2007 comedy Juno), not to mention The Great Streep firing on all synthesizers, Ricki And The Flash has a great deal to recommend it.
I wish I had liked it more, but I couldn’t help having to suppress a slight feeling of embarrassment at the spectacle of Streep, fine singer though she indubitably is, doing her washed-up rock-chick thing.
I also remain to be convinced by Kline as a dramatic actor; he always seems to be on the verge of comedic mugging, and although this film is billed as a comedy, it’s really a melodrama. For me, it doesn’t fall between those two stools so much as sag, slightly. But there are some terrific, uplifting moments.
ME AND Earl And The Dying Girl
stars rising British actress Olivia Cooke as the last of the title characters: a teenager, Rachel, with leukaemia.
However, if you’ve only just re-stocked the Kleenex drawer following The Fault In Our Stars, don’t recoil at the prospect of yet another movie about a cancer- stricken
American high-school kid. Adapted by Jesse Andrews from his own novel, and directed by one of Martin scorsese’s proteges, Alfonso Gomez-- Rejon, this is a quirkily delightful film, crafted with meticulous care and humour, and lifted further by a marvellous lead performance from Thomas Mann. he plays the bright, wisecracking Greg, who has grown up trying desperately to fit in with all the disparate elements at his Pittsburgh high school, but is only really happy when making parodies of famous movies (such as A sockwork Orange, with socks playing all the characters) with his best friend Earl (R. J. Cyler, also very good).
GREG only starts spending time with Rachel because his conscience- stricken mother (Connie Britton) has forced him into it, but gradually they bond, leading to the inevitable three-tissue denouement, though this thoroughly engaging film is anything but predictable.
MEXICAN drug cartels in acclaimed TV drama Breaking Bad were scary enough, and they were played by actors. Matthew heineman’s remarkable documentary
Cartel Land offers us the real thing, beginning in a desert clearing where a masked man cooking crystal meth depressingly cites the Almighty as his justification. ‘We will do this as long as God allows it,’ he says in spanish.
heineman has secured incredible access in this film, not only to the cartel members but also to the self-styled vigilantes on both sides of the border who, fed up with their respective governments’ inability to deal with the so- called Knights Templar (the grandiose name the cartel have adopted), have taken up arms themselves.