Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is about the pursuit of female pleasure. Pleasure without guilt, in which the transaction isn’t just financial. It is also about the danger of being a surrogate mother in the bedroom experienced by the protagonist, fifty-something widow, Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson). Reconciled to never having an orgasm, Nancy wants to experience sex with a much younger man and hires a male prostitute, twenty-something Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack) to please here. Structured around a series of meetings in a luxury hotel in Norwich, the film ‘written and created’ by comedian Katy Brand and directed by Sophie Hyde, explores the tension between buttoned-down former Religious Education teacher Nancy and easy-on-the-eye fantasy plaything, Leo. The performances by Thompson and McCormack are terrific, but what catches the eye are the open curtains in the hotel room, allowing them to be seen from the outside. The curtains are only closed when – well, that would be telling. ...

  Watching Late Night I had a hard time accepting Dame Emma Thompson as a network talk show host using her English accent. It isn’t that Thompson is a bad actress – she’s won two Oscars. She was also the go-between for James Ivory and Anthony Hopkins on the set of Howard’s End , Schlegal very much. Talk show hosts are supposed to cajole their guests into a state of convivial bonhomie, as if they have just made their new best friend – what do you mean, I can’t use the green room? Thompson radiates intelligence and an air of ‘I will only tolerate your company for six minutes between commercials then it is back to the egg’. I can imagine Thompson running up and down a first class aircraft cabin and reproaching fellow passengers for snoring. Lately, she’s been making principled stands, turning down voice work on an animated feature and pledging solidarity with climate change protestors in central London – hang the round trip from Los Angeles. Above all, Thompson has been schooled like...

  The Bridget Jones trilogy ( Diary, Edge , Baby ) is the only franchise to be directed by a woman. A woman director can set up a franchise (Catherine Hardwicke, Twilight ; Sam Taylor-Johnson, 50 Shades of Grey ; Anne Fletcher, Step Up ) but if it makes money, a fella gets to take over. Maybe these directors wanted to develop their respective franchises in exciting ways, only for the money men to say, ‘forget it, we want the same movie, only sexier’. Channing Tatum owes his career to Anne Fletcher; without Step Up , there would be no Magic Mike . That might be one of the reasons that Magic Mike has been embraced as a feminist text. The money men should trust the smarts of woman directors a little more – they cast men exceptionally well. This brings us to Bridget Jones’s Baby in which the eponymous diary writer hasn’t become an author. I was surprised. You write a diary – a novel is the next logical step. Salman Rushdie, who appeared in the first movie, could have been a major h...