Tag Archive: Steven Knight


The girl with the royal thorn in her side

Filed under: Movies — Leave a comment
March 27, 2022

SPENCER directed by Pablo Larraín (UK/USA/Germany/Chile, 2021)

With ‘Diana – The Musical’ winning this year’s Razzie for the worst movie of the year, I approached a viewing of a biopic of Diana Spencer with a certain degree of trepidation.  Fortunately, this fine movie presents a more nuanced and challenging portrait of the ill-fated princess.

It’s a tough project to take on because, since her passing, Lady Di’s image has become almost uncorruptable.  Being dead gives her a unique advantage. The fatal car crash in Paris means she is forever young; an English rose that never wilts. As Shakespeare wrote of Cleopatra : “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale”. The same most certainly cannot be said of Camilla – the current Queen in waiting. At 74, she is reasonably well preserved by can’t hope to hold a candle (in the wind) to the permanently glowing image of Diana who at 36 was more than half her age when she died in 1997.

I was curious to see if Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín would dare to challenge the myth that has built up around the so-called ‘people’s princess’. His brilliant reappraisal in 2016 of Jackie Kennedy (Jackie) showed that Larraín was prepared to take an unconventional approach to storytelling and present an outsider’s pov. With ‘Spencer’ he shows that this was no one-off.

Continue reading →
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Read More & Comment

LOCKE – Fuck Chicago

Filed under: Movies, Parenting — Leave a comment
November 4, 2019

Screen shot 2019-11-04 at 22.15.46LOCKE directed by Steven Knight (UK, 2013)

Locke is Samuel Beckett in a BMW X5. From the creator of Peaky Blinders. A riveting one man show. Tom Hardy brilliant as Ivan Locke. A Welshman who works in construction. Concrete is his speciality. He’s good at his job. A fixer. He gets things done. He knows that details matter. A huge Chicago contract is worth millions. Everything depends on him. Everything must be in place. He knows one mistake can be catastrophic.Sooner or later cracks appear if anything goes wrong. Even the most stable structure will eventually fall.
Locke is driving from Birmingham to London. On the motorway he makes calls by speakerphone. To business associates. To his two sons. To his wife. To Bethan. Locke is the only face we see.
Ivan Locke’s life is built on firm foundations but is falling apart. His job and marriage are on the line. A one-night stand was all it took. An error of judgement. A moment of weakness. The woman is no oil painting. Not young either. Bethan.
She was lonely. He was too that night. He felt sorry for her. He still does. They drank wine. They had sex. One time only. Enough for her to get pregnant. She decided to keep the baby. It could be her last chance to be a mother.
Locke is a father already. His sons are home watching a big match. He is supposed to be there watching with them. But Bethan’s waters have broken. Two months early. He is the father. He feels responsible. He is not her partner. She is nothing to him. But he caused the situation. Now he needs to fix it. To make it right. He will be with her when she gives birth. His father abandoned him. He will not do the same. He imagines his father in the back seat of the car. Mocking his predicament.
Locke is not a bad man. He has everything to lose.
His son has taped the match. He says he they will watch pretending not to know the result. When he comes home. But life has no replay options. We live with the choices we make. What is done cannot be undone.
Owning up to the truth means confessing to infidelity. It means risking the Chicago contract. He could lie. He could say he’s sick. He does neither. Fuck deception. Fuck Chicago.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Comment