A Week Is a Long Time for a Third Assistant Director

I went to see My Week with Marilyn with E on Saturday, although the fact that I haven't blogged about it until now is probably indicative of my relative ambivalence towards the film. I had been looking forward to seeing it since it was suggested as a possible surprise film at the London Film Festival. Since then, however, I've made the mistake of reading and listening to too many reviews of it, most of which describe it as fun and frothy but overly ambitious. This seems fair to me, although as these reviews lowered my expectations, they may well have reduced my enjoyment as well.

As the film opens, it is 1956 and, we are told by the title cards, Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) is at the peak of her career. The ink still damp on the certificate for her marriage to Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott), she is all set to come to England to film The Prince and the Showgirl, directed by and starring the imposing Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh); Marilyn's role was portrayed on stage by Olivier's then wife, Vivien Leigh (Julia Ormond), but Viv was deemed too old to play the eponymous showgirl on camera.

Meanwhile, in a castle/posh estate somewhere in the English countryside, Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) is lamenting his fate as his family's 'spare' rather than its 'heir.' But this status does mean that his family can humour Colin's desire to work in the movie business and they help to put him in touch with Olivier's production company. Through sheer persistence and some quick thinking, Clark manages to talk his way into the role of third assistant director on TPATS; task one: find a big house near the studios for Marilyn and her entourage (including her acting coach Paula (a very funny Zoë Wanamaker) and her manager Milton (Dominic Cooper, whose Noo Yawk accent could have been better)) to inhabit during filming.

Clark is terribly excited driving into the set on his first day, loves every bit of his job and promptly starts seeing the wardrobe assistant Lucy (Emma Watson). But the rest of the crew despair Marilyn's inability to: a) turn up to the set on time, b) learn her lines, and c) show suitable respect to her eminent co-cast members like Dame Sibyl (Dame Judi — a casting that wouldn't be out of place in a Private Eye parody). 

She does rather take a shine to young Colin, however, and before long, he's standing up Lucy and sneaking out with Marilyn to show her his old school (Eton, natch) and his godfather's place of employment (the library at Windsor Castle), and to go skinny dipping in the Thames. He soon realises just how troubled the actress is, even if he is rather flattered to know that he is the only person on set who can encourage Marilyn to do her job — and show up on time.

Perhaps fortunately, the film doesn't focus too much on Marilyn's problems, focusing instead on the fun and frolics of the film set and the unlikeliness of a young, green 'second son' becoming her closest confidant for one week only. Williams looked stunning and her performance was solid (she seemed to be channelling Jen Lindley in the Dawson's Creek finale). Redmayne was also charming as the eager beaver Clark (I first saw him playing Jack in Pillars of the Earth and he'll soon be in an adaptation of Birdsong, and E and I were worried that he was way too young for us but apparently, he's nearly 30). 

Their friendship (or romance, or whatever it was) was convincing and they had good chemistry. MWWM is also a nice film for would-be film buffs like me — it's always fun to see what might have been going on behind the scenes in movies like TPATS. Many cast-members are, of course, somewhat underused but that's OK.

My most important question is: how do I get to become the third assistant director on Clive Owen's next film?

Truly Blue

When it comes to movies, I don't tend to watch a lot of comedies but even so, Terence Davies' The Deep Blue Sea is seriously bleak, with only the slightest glimmer of hope at the end of 100 minutes of despair. 

As the film opens, it is London in the early 1950s and Hester (Rachel Weisz) is composing a suicide note. Apart from Hester reading the note aloud, we don't get any dialogue for a good five or ten minutes. Instead, we see Hester turning on the gas and lying down, slowly shutting her eyes. She is "saved", in the end, by her landlady and one of the other tenants but as they warily leave her alone, she starts to reflect on some of the events of the previous few years.

Her husband William (Simon Russell Beale), a successful judge, cares for her deeply but their life lacks passion and they disagree over the importance of this. "Beware of passion, Hester," William's humourless mother tells her, "it always leads to something ugly." But Hester just runs upstairs and makes a call to her RAF pilot lover Freddie (Tom Hiddleston) and tells him she will be, "back in the city soon, darling." Of course, William overhears and wants to know who else she calls darling and when he finds out, he refuses to give her a divorce and tells her he doesn't want to see her ever again.

In most other films of this ilk, you would expect to see a decent chunk of the film showing Hester and Freddie being happy together but in The Deep Blue Sea we get about 90 seconds in a pub in Oxford, most of which is taken up with Freddie and his friend Jack (Harry Hadden-Paton) doing comic interpretations of their glory days in the war. 

Instead, from Hester's flashbacks and from the 24 hours that follow her suicide attempt, we see that although Freddie is the love of her life, she may not, perhaps, be his as he proves unreliable, forgetting her birthday, and is prone to loud, furious rages in inappropriate situations. 

In the present day, William, caring as ever, finds out about the suicide attempt, and tries to be helpful, offering to give Hester the divorce and begging her to come home. She is caught between the devil and the eponymous deep blue sea. It is only later that she realises that the way she feels about William, is probably the way Freddie feels about her (minus the sex and passion and all that).

So, not one for a grand happy ending then. The performances of the three lead actors are all very strong, Weisz's sad voice catching in almost every line she speaks, conveying Hester's desire and desperate need for more than just a platonic love and her despair at her impossible position. Russell Beale's William is very sympathetic, while Hiddleston is, by turns, charming and funny and then cruel, thoughtless and insensitive. 

The film itself seems to alternate between a somewhat melodramatic Brief Encounter (complete with haunting strings music (Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto, I think)) and a very quiet, serious stage play (with no music and no background noise). To paraphrase Brief Encounter, The Deep Blue Sea wasn't a very happy movie but it was well executed and with very good acting.

Is It a Bird?

After aeons of construction, King's Cross, where I work, is finally starting to get a little bit more interesting. First, came the art students from Central St Martins. Then, came eat.st, N1's (small) answer to Exmouth Market, with a selection of different food stalls every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. The Red Herring Smokehouse's bacon sarnies and Homeslice's pizzas have been my favourites so far.

Then last week, a giant birdcage appeared. This is art, apparently — the Identified Flying Object, more specifically — and eventually, the cage will have a swing inside and will, once a month, be lit up and suspended from a crane. And yes, the artist is French (a nicer sight for French visitors entering St Pancras than the smug Olympic rings, I suppose!).

Inevitably, I had to take advantage of the birdcage with a few leaps, some of which look like some seriously advanced pole-dancing. The other advantage of having the art students around is that you're never going to be the weirdest person on eat.st...

Coming Back to Haunt You

A few busy weekends in a row have meant that I'm behind on movies at the moment, as well as blog posts. I did get the chance to see The Awakening this afternoon, in the poky little room upstairs at the Mayfair Curzon (the one that makes you feel like you're in the private screening room of one of the area's mansions). This turned out to be quite atmospheric because as well as the main door to the screen, there is a little staff-only back door and throughout the movie, there were little noises and voices filtering through.

I thought about seeing The Awakening at the London Film Festival because a) I like a good scary movie and b) with Mad Men still not back on TV, six episodes of Dominic West in The Hour wasn't quite enough of a Don Draper substitute for me. Rebecca Hall stars as Florence Cathcart, who is a kind of 1920s, female Jonathan Creek. 

After debunking a seance séance at the start of the film, she returns home to find Robert Mallory (West), a teacher at a northern boarding school, waiting for her. He has been sent to persuade her to come to investigate the recent death of a young boy at the school and to banish the ghost everyone thinks was responsible (supposedly another young boy, who died a few years earlier when the school was still a private house). Mallory himself remains skeptical of Florence's skepticism and it is clear that they both have troubled pasts.

Reluctantly, Florence agrees and off they yomp to Cumbria, where she whips out her ghost-busting equipment. The boys are a little reticent about her presence but at least matron (Imelda Staunton), is glad Florence is there—she keeps a copy of Florence's book next to her Bible, she says. After a few days, Florence thinks she has solved the mystery, identifying the real 'ghost' and explaining the circumstances surrounding the boy's death. But as half-term arrives and most of the boys return to their homes, the spooky happenings continue, pushing Florence to question whether her rigid, rational world-view is in fact valid. Meanwhile, she must fight demons from her own past and deal with her growing feelings for Mallory.

With strong performances from the three leads and a strong sense of unease and tension throughout, I thought The Awakening worked well as a fairly straightforward ghost story. There is a big twist, which I half-anticipated (although I thought it was going to go in a different direction), and I think it worked well enough. Daniel Pemberton's score was also suitably haunting. A good film to see on a cold night, before hurrying home to warm up and unwind in front of a fireplace!

Faulks-ed Up

I like most of Sebastian Faulks's novels, Birdsong and The Girl at the Lion d'Or being my favourites, and I thought it was odd that I hadn't yet read A Fool's Alphabet, but when I was prowling my library looking for unread books to take to Morocco, I happened upon it and took it with me. Slightly embarrassingly, it took me 50 pages to realise that I had, in fact, already read it two years ago. 

Obviously, then, the opening wasn't that memorable and the two things that I did remember reading before were a) a reference to the protagonist living in a flat on a mansion block off Baker Street (as was I two years ago) and b) two errors, one of which was a misspelling of Bleecker Street in New York, and the other which had a California radio station saying that it was a scorching day with a temperature of 25 degrees — presumably not in Fahrenheit, one would imagine.

I did enjoy the book more on its second read and hope it will be more memorable this time. It tells the story of the life of Pietro Russell, a photographer born in 1950 to a young Italian mother and an English war hero father. Each chapter is named after a different location in the world and they progress through the alphabet — each place represents a story in the chapter of Russell's life, some significant (the meeting of his parents in Italy, for example) and others more random and they are presented achronologically, which I rather like. 

Having now read One Day, it reminded me in some ways of David Nicholls' book in that we drop in and out of the characters' lives, with much of the detail left to be inferred or discovered later on in the story. It's still not my favourite of Faulks's works, but A Fool's Alphabet is still worth a read.

That's Enough Birthdays (Ed)

I'm not the biggest fan of birthdays--not when they're my own, anyway — but although this year, it feels like mine ran on for days, it wasn't so bad (almost as good, even, as last year's in New York).

I celebrated with friends on Saturday, hosting a small gathering in my flat. The cocktails were pretty successful (you should be able to guess what I made based on the ingredients in the photo) and I managed to avoid buying any beers, which, if undrunk at the end of the night, would remain undrunk until I got around to chucking them out.

Birthday burger

Monday was my actual birthday and it was mostly spent working, but did involve a brief escape for some tasty pizza and a chocolate éclair from Exmouth Market and also some lovely gifts from Kate Spade and elsewhere. 

After work, I met my parents at Kettner's for a cocktail (their special Movember cocktail was surprisingly fruity and sweet) and then we went for a birthday burger at Byron. As she wasn't sure whether I'd manage a pudding, Mum arranged for the waitress to put some candles in my burger, which was definitely unique. I did, inevitably, find room for half a brownie. Finally, we went to see Tabloid, which was a very funny — but also scary — look at the case of the utterly bonkers Joyce McKinney.

Cocktails at the Savoy

Mum's birthday was on Tuesday, so we went out for breakfast at Le Pain Quotidien. Nothing like a boiled egg and posh soldiers to set one up for a long day's work (especially if the bread can be coated with LPQ's praline spread — not the slices that were dunked in the egg, I add). 

My parents had some vouchers for Gordon Ramsay's restaurants so we went to the Savoy Grill. After a cocktail in the hotel's classy bar, we went into the restaurant for dinner. Six rock oysters and a fillet steak had more than filled me up and as none of the puddings contained chocolate, I couldn't be tempted by a third course. Perhaps this was fortunate given that my second candle-clad food item in as many days was then brought out in the form of a chocolate panna cotta-like cake.

Now Now

I've been out every night this week and I'm a bit behind on blog posts but I just got back from a recording of The Now Show and I wanted to write down my thoughts while they are fresh. It was a fun evening but clearly, I should have read my own advice from the last time I went because we made some of the same old n00b mistakes.

Poor photo of Hugh Dennis and Steve Punt

We got there earlier than I did last time — 6.45 (when the front doors open) rather than 7.15 (15 minutes before the studio doors open) — but there was a big queue outside Broadcasting House, with about 200 people ahead of us. 

Random security checking of my friend's bag delayed us and meant we were the first people to enter the second holding room, rather than the last people to enter the first room. As all of the first room people got to go in first and there isn't a queuing system inside the rooms, this didn't work out too well for us, and we ended up in the second row on the balcony with two tall guys in front of us. 

We also missed out on getting to fill in an answer to the audience question: the woman in charge of our room asked why no one was giving her the answers and we explained we hadn't been given the sheets but apparently they had run out. The funniest answer (which probably won't get included in the show when it airs) was a hilarious example of someone missing the point of the question — or maybe just wanting us to think that...

That aside, it was a good show, with a couple of good songs, a reference to research I publicised, and plenty of naughtiness, although as ever, I found Henning Wehn's segment a little boring. One part, which described a wonderful new variety of a class A drug in the style of a Christmas advert for a popular, middle-class retailer, involved Pippa Evans reading out a number of long, jargony, science words, such as mesolimbic and "exogenous catecholamine transporter ligand" (straight from Wiki, I see). During the "retakes" at the end, Steve Punt made the mistake of asking if there were any chemists in the audience and of course there were, one of whom took the joke far too far by loudly correcting Evans's pronunciations four or five times, until the chemist was persuaded to pipe down. I know it's the Year of Chemistry, but still...

And yes, next time I really will try to arrive a bit earlier so that I can finally get to provide a supremely witty answer to the audience question of the week.

Some Methods in the Madness of Marrakesh

The souks

I returned home from Marrakesh this evening and was amazed that on my walk back from Paddington, not a single motorbike tried to run me over; nor did anyone try to sell me something! I don't think it will be too hard to adjust back to London life but here are some of my tips for making the most of a stay in the red city.

Marrakesh: Atlas Leaped

Yesterday, we rose soon after the first call to prayer and headed off on our excursion into the Atlas Mountains. It was a gorgeous day and the sun was so strong that even after we passed the 2,000-metre mark, I was too hot in my jeans and t-shirt. Our route took us into the High Atlas, over the Tizi N'Tichka pass and into the Ouarzazate region, with plenty of stops en route for potential retail opportunities, photos and, in my case, leaps.

Marrakesh: Quel Gommage!

We accomplished two very Moroccan things today: haggling and a hammam. The first took place mainly in the souks and I am now the proud owner of a pretty, stripy scarf in four of my favourite colours (teal, turquoise, purple and pink) and some colourful pottery bowls, one of which is for my mum.

Marrakesh: Burn, Baby, Burn

Today was Eid al-Adha and, for a few hours at least, Marrakesh's tempo slowed down to a moderato pace. For the past few days we had seen sheep being carried around on motorbikes and today, all that remained were their heads being barbecued on street corners in the medina.

Marrakesh: The Girl Who May Have Eaten Goat

We finally made it to our riad at about 5.30 last night, where mint tea awaited. I was exhausted and a bit under the weather so it was lucky we had ordered a meal in the riad — both opting for chicken with pickled lemons. Instead, after soup and some spicy aubergines, along came a tagine with something else. Initially, I thought it was lamb but it may have been goat (in which case, goat tastes "like lamb").