julianaguirreps

It has a slow start but the atmosphere drags you in and before you know it, you're in. I felt trapped I couldn't walk away. Fascinating in a way that was totally new to me and at the same time it felt disturbingly familiar. It seems that it's only financial reasons that forces Colin Firth to rent a room in his apartment but underneath there is something else, something deeply personal. He doesn't seem comfortable in his own skin. He is at ease (if you can call it that)only with the things he knows intimately but there is very little he knows intimately and what he does know, doesn't really exist. Am I confusing you? Good. That's part of the pleasure. Certain things about the film I don't know if they are part of the filmmaker's master plan or it's just me. Two opposites colliding out of need. What about that? None of the two are aware of that need, discovering it together but from entirely different angles. Colin Firth is amazing, amazing! And Hart Bochner? Who knew? Fantastic in a performance so complex and seductive that I wonder why we haven't seen more of him on the screen. There is a very funny moment in which Colin Firth confesses to Hart Bochner, that he can't talk to one of his neighbors because "he doesn't know who Geraldine Page is" After I stopped laughing I realized that Colin Firth's character is very similar to Geraldine Page's Alma in "Summer and Smoke". Awkward, old fashioned, sexually repressed but with cravings battling inside her. Hart Bochner's character could be linked to Laurence Harvey's in the same movie. It may just be my imagination but that thought made me see and live "Apartment Zero" under a different light. I'm not going to say that the film is perfect. Too long at times for its own good but "Apartment Zero" will do things to you that very few other films have done to me. After seeing it, it stayed with me obsessively. Images came to distract me during my ordinary day. I want to see it again and I will, the only difference will be I won't see it again on my own. For some reason there is something terrifying about the film. 9/10

What a terrible misfire. Not only the title but the idea is the same as that Jane Fonda, George Segal vehicle of a few decades ago. Why? I wonder, someone with the clout of Jim Carrey will, not only star, but also produce this tired, ugly, pointless excuse for a comedy. He could be taking comedy to a whole new level, instead, he goes for what he may assume is safe territory. Money, money, grosses, Christmas. But I'm sure this uncomfortable mess will have very short legs. I call it uncomfortable because that's how I felt. Aware as I was of the desperate attempts tried out on the screen to be funny. And failing, miserably. It could have been an outrageous, politically incorrect, mirror comedy of the post Enron days but no, that would be pointing too high, too risky. What a shame!

I went into the Paris Theatre in New York last night, more as a refuge from the merciless weather that anything else. What a wonderful and unexpected surprise. Joan Plowright plays a widow who decides to live her last years of her life as an independent woman in a small retirement hotel in London. I'm not sure if she knew that independence sometimes means loneliness but she learns soon enough as loneliness becomes her constant companion. Her only grandson never calls, in fact nobody ever calls her. A fortuitous encounter with a young struggling writer will change her life as she will change his. This beautiful and seemingly simple story is filled with startling gems. Joan Plowright very much at the heart of the piece gives a multi-layered performance that never falls into sentimentality. Rupert Friend (Ludo, the struggling writer) is a perfect foil for the world she protectively stores in her brain and in her heart. The humor and the superb performances by the elderly guests of the hotel is a breath of fresh vintage air. When Ruper Friend meets Dame Joan's friends at the hotel, he exclaims "We're trapped in a Terence Rattigan play" Yes you are, beautifully so