Newsnight Review 15 February, 2008
- 15 Feb 08, 04:22 PM
Mark Kermode predicted on Review last week that Julie Christie wouldn't win an Oscar but she would get a Bafta for her performance in .
In fact, the surprise Bafta winner was the French star of La Vie en Rose, Marion Cotillard. This is the fourth time that Julie Christie has been nominated for a leading actress Oscar - she won for Darling in 1966.
Now she is playing a woman who is struck down by Alzheimer’s and decides to move into a home. The first-time director Sarah Polley co-starred with Christie in The Secret Life of Words.
This week's panel - , and - will be discussing Away From Her which has been re-released as a result of the Oscar nomination.
Art v commerce
By the way, one journalist blogged recently that they play Review roulette each week, predicting who will be on the panel. Guess they never read the email. Other people have told me they play Fantasy Guests. Do let me know who are yours.
Meanwhile, our real panel will also be discussing , a Mamet revival on at The Old Vic in London. It stars the theatre's artistic director Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum as two Hollywood producers confronting the age old clash of art versus commerce.
Our third item is a work which was voted best novel of 2007 by Time magazine in the States. It took Junot DÃaz 11 years to write after his highly acclaimed short story collection Drown.
The language of the book is bizarrely imaginative, switching between the Spanish of Oscar’s native Dominican Republic, the fantasy speak of Tolkien, sci-fi and street slang.
Amy Winehouse did brilliantly at the Grammys this week even though her visa came in too late for her to travel to the States. Whether down to her success or not, there is now a real vogue for young British women singer-songwriters.
We'll be looking at that new generation - Laura Marling who at 18 is picking up comparisons with Joni Mitchell; Adele whose album 19 is named for her age; and , the Welsh singer whom experts have picked as one of the key sounds of 2008.
Martha Kearney
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I was very diappointed in the panel's comments about the film "Away from Her", as I think they missed the point of the film completely.
I watched it earlier this week and thought it was really good.
I think that the key to understanding this film is to realise that it is NOT really about Alzheimers Disease or about nursing homes. It seemed to me that the film was more about human relationships and growing old and how things that happen in old age - illness etc can change and influence relationships with family and others outside the family.
Someone, (I think it was Rosie Boycott), said that it was ridiculous to have the man whose wife had Alzheimers saying that he thought she was behaving the way she did because she wanted to punish him for his infidelities earlier in their marriage, and this was not the way Alzheimers affected people. Surely this was a subtle point indicating that this was how it seemed to him because of his guilt feelings and the difficulty he had in understanding the disease, and his selfishness in only being able to see things that affected his own world. She seemed to me to have completely missed this point, and the others seemed to agree with her.
The film was excellent in showing how people react to changes in their lives and how essentially we all live in our own world and don't seem to really take on board how our family and friends are affected by things - just looking at the world through our own eyes and feelings.
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