Movie Review Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool

Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool (2017) 

Directed by Paul McGuigan

Written by Matt Greenhalgh

Starring Annette Bening, Jamie Bell, Vanessa Redgrave, Julie Walters, Stephen Graham

Release Date November 16th, 2017

I fell in love with Gloria Grahame, as so many movie fans did, in her pitch perfect performance in In a Lonely Place, one of my all-time favorite films. Grahame plays one of those self-possessed, take-no-crap dames that always seemed to play opposite Bogart. He loved strong women, breaking down their defenses was what made him a screen icon, and them the envy of women everywhere. Grahame stood out, however, as she allowed herself just a little more vulnerability than the others, a note of extra sadness to go with the sass.

Gloria Grahame was rushed out of Hollywood before we truly got to know her. Her crime? Growing older and refusing to play along with Hollywood executives eager to capitalize on her beauty without respecting her talent. Screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce recalled in a piece he wrote about the movie Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, how Grahame lost the iconic role of a gangster’s moll turned lady in Born Yesterday when she refused to ride alone in a limo with producer Howard Hughes. That’s Gloria Grahame in a nutshell, beautiful and uncompromising.

Annette Bening stars as Gloria Grahame in Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool and she nails the beautiful and uncompromising parts of Gloria Grahame while also exploring that vulnerability and sadness that marked the Grahame I remember from In a Lonely Place. Jamie Bell co-stars in the film as Peter Turner, an aspiring Liverpool stage actor who lived in the same rundown tenement building as Grahame while she starred in one of the few stage productions in the world that would have her.

The two met and forged a relationship that might seem icky from the outside, a May-December romance that one might assume was about an older woman’s desire and a young man’s egotistical notion of ladder climbing. That’s not this story. That’s not this couple. In the hands of director Paul McGuigan and writer Matt Greenhalgh, there appears to be little age difference at all, but rather a meeting of twin spirits, genuinely excited to find one another.

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Movie Review Season of the Witch

Season of the Witch (2011) 

Directed by Dominic Sena 

Written by Bragi F. Schut

Starring Nicolas Cage, Ron Perlman, Claire Foy, Stephen Graham, Christopher Lee

Release Date January 7th, 2011 

Published January 7th, 2011 

Nicolas Cage has made some seriously awful movies, like Fire Birds, Bangkok Dangerous or Knowing. Despite the quality of his films though, Nicholas Cage has never been boring, until now. Season of the Witch is Nicolas Cage being boring. As a noble, god fearing Knight on a quest to save a village from an allegedly plague inducing witch, Nicolas Cage offers a stalwart hero so tediously heroic that nothing stands out about him.

Behman (Cage) and his loyal pal Felson (Ron Perlman, Hellboy) have been fighting on behalf of the church in the crusades for more than a decade when suddenly killing the innocent loses its taste. Abandoning their duty, the two set off for freedom but are waylaid at a village overcome by the plague. Found guilty of desertion, Behman and Felson are offered a choice; death by hanging or a Knightly quest. Not hard to guess that choice.

The quest has the Knights, along with a priest, a con man, a teenager and a widower, transporting ‘The Girl’ (Claire Foy), who is suspected of being a Witch, to a monastery where she is to be executed. Behman however, pledges that ‘The Girl’ will not be harmed unless she actually is a Witch, something that the priest, the Widower and the Con Man, simply cannot abide. In short order they will try to kill the Witch and face a dastardly fate. But, is it Witchcraft or worse?

The idea of Nicolas Cage, underneath yet another one of his famously odd hairdos, playing a 13th century Knight battling a Witch and a corrupt Church would seem to have potential for some classic Nicolas Cage weirdness yet somehow it never comes. Sure, Cage and Ron Perlman‘s casting alone, along with Dominic Sena‘s ludicrous modern action beats against a 13th Century background, are odd in their own right but Cage plays Behman with such stalwart, heroic intensity that he seems stunningly normal under the circumstances.

Cage plays Behman just as any other actor without Cage’s flair might have played him. Viggo Mortenson or Keanu Reeves could have played Behman and given just the same stolid yet gallant performance. Where is the weirdness? Where is that extra something behind the eye that makes Nicholas Cage unique? It’s shocking and disappointing to watch Nicolas Cage play a hero whose eyes aren’t bugged out and ready to leap from his fiery skull and instead are sleepily focused and determined.

If Season of the Witch wanted to be just another action movie the makers could have hired any other actor. They hired Nicolas Cage to bring the weird. It’s fair, in fact, to wonder if director Dominic Sena, who watched Cage bring the weird to his car junkie action flick Gone in Sixty Seconds, was also waiting for his star to emerge and thus ended up making a dull, straight arrow action movie when he had hoped he was making a Nicholas Cage movie.

Would weirdo Nicolas Cage make Season of the Witch a good movie? Likely not but, Nicolas Cage in a bad movie is at the very least always interesting. There is always so much to see when Nicolas Cage finds that odd beat he wants to play. In Peggy Sue Got Married Cage adopted a voice he compared to Gumby’s pal Pokey and nearly got himself fired because he wouldn’t drop the voice. In other films he channels Elvis Presley for reasons only he understands.

It’s weird and it can ruin a movie but it’s always intriguing as we search Cage’s face and manner for that little inflection, that idea that struck only him and reveals his fascination with a role. Sadly, in Season of the Witch that little flavor of Nicholas Cage, that revealing little tick or inflection, that idea that is solely his never emerges and instead we have a bored Nicolas Cage delivering a boring performance in a boring movie.