- So it turns out Guy Ritchie is making a King Arthur movie. If you have ever nursed a secret guilty soft spot for a film, you will understand why yours truly is distressed by this: the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced King Arthur is camp as anything, and it features Clive Owen wearing the same tortured smoulder for nearly two hours straight as the eponymous chivalric hero. But Mads Mikkelsen is also in that movie. It was made before he narrowed his remit to (emotionally/physically) scarred psychopaths, and it’s really, really satisfying to see him hunk it up with shaggy hair on horseback. Apparently the schedule for the newbie has been pushed back, and we won’t see more of it until 2017. That may be time enough for me to let go of the past and welcome Ritchie’s inevitably metrosexual update. But I think I’ll only warm to it if he casts Jude Law in the lead role; and we should get at least one scene where Arthur and Lancelot joust, after a heated debate about whether a doublet should be Gucci or Burberry spins out of control…
- Stills from Bridget Jones’s Baby have been released! Hurrah! Renee Zellweger’s bumbling heroine is back for the third time, to make me feel better about how ordinary I’ve become post-adolescence. Jones is the essential balm for all the young women who ever grew up expecting to turn out looking like Cindy Crawford, only to get stuck below five foot five while never getting smaller than a size ten and never having people faint at the sight of your face (for any good reason, anyway). I thank Helen Fielding for creating a woman who fucks up as much as I do but who still gets a happy ending with a nice man, who really ought to just run for the hills. In the words of the kids today, Bridget’s life (ok, Bridget’s luck) is my Hashtag Goals. And she looks like she’s having a good time these days — she’s getting lifted on a sea of raving shoulders! The new project has a few promising things going on: Patrick Dempsey! The return of the first movie’s director Sharon Maguire! The fact that David Nicholls has helped to write the script! The fact that Helen Fielding has realised you can’t just kill Mark Darcy and has thus rewritten everything so cinema audiences are spared the misery which confronted those who actually read the third book! But I’ll be honest. I’m a Daniel Cleaver girl. I think Fielding and I have had similar experiences of softly-spoken megalomaniacs in our youth, because she writes him to be adored for his dastardly ways, and the only time I’ve ever considered Hugh Grant sexy is through Bridget Jones’s eyes. I’ll miss him. I really will.
- If, like me, you enjoy reading about the world of movies as much as watching them (any takers; no; none whatsoever?) then pop over to The Atlantic, who recently published a very interesting extended feature about the relationship between the internet and the decline of female film critics. It’s a very observable trend, and bizarre considering the fact that — as the article rightly points out — the legacy of film criticism as its own art form depends historically on formidably talented women. So even if you’re the kind of (terrible) person who balks at recent attempts to redress gender imbalance in the movie industry, on all sides of the screen, consider this a tutorial in an oft-forgotten bit of cinema history as much as it is contemporarily polemical. It will lead you to the names of some of the greatest writers on film that ever were. Most famous of course is Pauline Kael, the New Yorker‘s one-time long-serving doyenne of the pen; but look beyond Her Majesty and you’ll find C.A. Lejeune and a whole host of other female critics whose words shimmer on the page (or screen). It’s an education in excellent critical writing, and should convince even the most sceptical individuals that more needs to be done to make space for women in the film journalism industry.
- They’re making a Kindergarten Cop 2. WITHOUT ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER. I kid you not. Who the hell even is Dolph Lundgren? I know it’s straight to video, mercifully sparing cinema screens the torture, but even so. I’m game for a protest if you are.
