The Herald - The Herald Magazine
SCREEN SHOT
What’s the story?
Style Fixers.
I’ll need more information.
Style Fixers – which aired as a pilot on the BBC Scotland channel last year – has now been commissioned as a sixpart series.
It charts the adventures of an intrepid and energetic duo who love rummaging in second-hand shops to unearth style gems.
According to the blurb: “They live for repurposing and upcycling, turning the drab and dated into fabulous and on fleek.”
The elevator pitch?
A fun fashion version of Bargain Hunt meets Money For Nothing. With drag queen sass. And a keen magpie eye.
Describe the format?
By day, best friends Alannah Carson and Jamie Grandison are make-up artists. By night, they rustle up glam costumes for drag shows where Grandison is the star act.
The TV series sees the pair go head-to-head (“we thrive on drama … and competition”) as they share styling tips with viewers and show off their skills.
Anything else?
With a £30 budget to fund their thrifty finds and using some innovative upcycling (hot glue guns are go!), their goal is to prove that you don’t need oodles of cash to create a chic and confident look.
Each week, their clients will help decide who has done the best job and declare a winner.
When can I watch?
Style Fixers begins on BBC Scotland, Monday, 11pm.
Secrets of the Krays (BritBox, from Thu)
The streaming service’s first original factual commission offers an in-depth profile of arguably the most notorious criminals in British history. Much has been said and written about Ronnie and Reggie Kray since they were incarcerated in the late 1960s, having built an empire via murder, armed robbery, arson, protection rackets and assaults. But they were famous before then thanks to their West End nightclub, where celebrities including Diana Dors, Frank Sinatra and
Judy Garland would hang out when they were in London. Here, relatives of the twins, as well as family friends, their lawyers, police officers and photographer David Bailey discuss their memories of the duo. Also featured is Micky Fawcett, a key member of the Krays’ ‘firm’, who has never spoken publicly before.
Halston (Netflix from Fri)
Does Ryan Murphy ever sleep? TV’s super-producer seems to be behind every other show on the box these days, including this new mini-series. He is, however, only its executive producer; writing duties have been taken by playwright Sharr Wright, who is also the drama’s creator. Based on the book Simply Halston by Steven Gaines, it stars Ewan McGregor as iconic fashion designer Roy Halston Frowick, who was known by his middle name – the moniker became synonymous with luxury, sex, status and fame during the 1970s and 1980s. His rise to prominence and dramatic fall from grace are charted, with Rory Culkin, Bill Pullman and Vera Farmiga joining McGregor on screen. The series is directed by Daniel Minahan, who has such series as Game of Thrones, True Blood and Deadwood on his CV.
Time Is A Killer (Walter Presents/All 4, from Fri)
Michel Bussi’s bestselling novel has been turned into an eight-part crime drama. A quarter of a century after surviving the tragic accident that killed her brother and parents, Clotilde, now in her early forties, returns to her Corsican hometown for the first time. She and her husband Franck and their 16-year-old daughter Valentine are planning on starting a new life, but almost immediately, the past begins rearing its ugly head when Clotilde receives a letter from her supposedly dead mother. Unable to let it lie, she begins delving into her family’s history, determined to find out what really happened on that fateful day all those years ago. Mathilde Seigner heads the cast, which also includes ex-Bond girl Caterina Murino and former Spiral and Mr Selfridge star Gregory Fitoussi.
The Underground Railroad (Amazon, Fri)
Barry Jenkins is best known for directing the Oscarwinning drama Moonlight, but now he’s turning his attention to TV for the first time. He’s directed all 10 episodes of this adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Newcomer Thuso Mbedu leads the cast as Cora Randall, a slave desperately trying to escape the horrors of life on a Georgia plantation. She’s heard of an underground railroad that could help, but doesn’t really expect to find an incredible subterranean network populated by engineers and conductors. However, Cora’s journey is far from easy – a bounty hunter is on her trail... Joel Edgerton, Will Poulter and Scotland’s Peter Mullan also star.
Film 4, Friday, 7.10pm
IT’S Tom Cruise week on Film 4 but relax, there’s no Vanilla Sky. Unhappily there’s no Top Gun or Eyes Wide Shut either, the line-up sticking mostly to Cruise’s action movie output from the Noughties and 2010s. So there are two Mission: Impossible offerings (Rogue Nation and Fallout, both excellent), Doug Liman’s comedy thriller American Made, Bryan Singer’s Second World War drama Valkyrie, and Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of War Of The Worlds.
The joker in the pack (or the fool in motley if you prefer) is Legend, from 1985. Why Ridley Scott chose to follow Alien and Blade Runner with a film in which Cruise plays a forest sprite leading a team of elves, fairies and Blarney-talking dwarves against the Lord of Darkness in the shape of Tim Curry (Frank-N-Furter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show) is one of moviedom’s great imponderables.
Perhaps it looked good on paper – there are unicorns! – though if it did it must have been that special magic paper which tricks directors into taking on projects they should run a mile from. And yet the film has slowly acquired the tag ‘cult classic’, a combination of the nostalgia veiling everything produced in the 1980s and (not unconnected) some determined critical reappraisals from Reddit users and fantasy geeks.
News flash: there’s no case to be made for Legend being a great film. Sorry. The plot is thin, Cruise is under-used and he hasn’t yet acquired (or isn’t showing) the easy confidence in front of the camera that would make him one of the most charismatic and bankable stars of the modern era.
But there’s still plenty here to admire, notably Curry’s sexualised performance as the Satanic Lord Of Darkness and the sumptuous image-making which does at least recall Blade Runner and Alien. Fans of the work of Scottish artist Rachel Maclean or French pair Pierre and Gilles will love the look of the kitsch opening scenes, while cineastes will appreciate the nods to Jean Cocteau and the German Expressionists.
And if Film 4 have laid their hands on the American edit – there are three different versions, including a Director’s Cut – then the orchestral Jerry Goldsmith score has been swapped for one by synth-heavy German prog rockers Tangerine Dream. Note the writer, too: William
Hjortsberg, whose novel Falling Angel would later be adapted by another British director, Alan Parker, and filmed as Angel Heart. In tandem with Scott, he takes a basic hero-on-a-quest story and bolts on a range of influences from Tolkien and Swan Lake to Midsummer Night’s Dream and MTV pop videos. The result is a glorious, fascinating mess.
THE TURNING Amazon Prime, Nos streaming
AMAZON’S streaming rival Netflix is currently airing The Haunting Of Hill House and The Haunting Of Bly Manor, based on (respectively) the eponymous 1959 Shirley Jackson novel and Henry James’s 1898 novella The Turn Of The Screw. Now comes The Turning, notionally an adaptation of the James story though there’s a smidgen of the Jackson in here too – or at least a smidgen of The Haunting, Robert Wise’s terrifying 1963 screen
adaptation of it. As well as those reference points, ItalianCanadian film-maker Floria Sigismondi adds a handful of wellexecuted horror tropes straight from the Stephen King playbook, and drapes over the whole thing some of the same Gothic sensibility she has shown as an artist, photographer and director of pop promos for musicians such as David Bowie, Bjork, The White Stripes and (particularly relevant here) Marilyn Manson.
Choosing to make The Turning neither contemporary nor exactly period, she opens with a news report about the funeral of Kurt Cobain which drops us into the mid-1990s – though for some viewers, especially those thrilled by the presence in the cast of Stranger Things star Finn Wolfhard, 1994 will feel like a period drama.
Mackenzie Davis is Kate Mandell, who leaves a teaching job in Seattle for a sumptuous country house where she’s to become live-in-tutor to two rich orphaned children, Miles and Flora Fairchild (Wolfhard and Brooklynn Prince). She also leaves behind her mother Darla (Joely Richardson), who is delusional and lives in some kind of institution where she sits in a drained swimming pool and paints weird stuff.
The only other inhabitant in the Fairchild pile besides Miles and Flora is severe housekeeper Mrs Grose (Barbara Marten), however there is dark talk of a former employee called Quint who was involved with the previous tutor, Miss Jessel. She disappeared, he died after falling off his horse when he was drunk.
After Kate starts seeing ghostly reflections in windows and mirrors and Miles reveals his creepy side it all ticks along scarily enough, though Scottish actor Niall Greig Fulton is wasted as Quint. Still, with good visuals and a great soundtrack it’s a diverting enough watch.
The film has slowly acquired the tag ‘cult classic’, a combination of the nostalgia veiling everything produced in the 1980s