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Reviews
The Mother (2003)
your mission 007...
Watched this as a late TV movie last night purely by chance. The blurb for the film said something to the effect of mother stays with daughter and goes on romantic journey, as I tuned in there's the carpenter hard at work on a new conservatory - played by Daniel Craig no less - so the plot was immediately apparent.
It turns out that eponymous mother's carpenter love interest is also the daughter's boyfriend, so there's trouble brewing and not too many surprises. But I'd been caught by Anne Reid's compelling performance and I was hooked. The direction allows her plenty of space for staring into mirrors and adjusting scarves, when she exudes sadness.
The sex scenes were fascinating and taboo-breaking. Shouldn't older women's bodies remain covered up? Not here and we're treated to a delicious reawakening in the Mother's sexuality. Even more startling are the drawings she's made that (SPOILER!) once discovered confirm her daughter's suspicion that something's going on here.
Cathryn Bradshaw as the daughter didn't convince me quite as much as the rest of the cast, but that could be me. With her waves of pre-Raph locks I kept expecting to see Julia Sawahla, whose more intense face would have suited the confrontations better to my mind. Bradshaw has a rounder happier face that didn't carry the anger that emerges as the film progresses.
The ending is weak. If the goodbyes for Mother as she leaves in disgrace are so indifferent then perhaps we could see some close-ups of those waving goodbye and see something of their individual reasons. Whatever she's done, she's a recently bereaved widow leaving for the lonely home she shared with her husband for 30 years, and I found the lack of sympathy jarring. For a film so full of emotion (and be warned it's like opening champagne, you'll never get the lid back on) the ending is a cold contradiction.
The Steal (1995)
British cinema, alive and well...?
It was already late and I should have gone to bed after the football but I saw Alfred Molina's name in opening credits, soon realised this was a British made film of recent vintage and stayed watching. It wasn't a complete waste of 90 minutes but it wasn't very good either. It seems as if someone made the decision to shorten the film at the edit stage because a lot of it didn't really make sense, although the plot was predictable enough to know exactly where it was heading. Molina's character, a slightly anal town planner, couldn't be more of a mismatch for Slater's renegade computer hacker, but the final scene - SPOILER coming - despite almost no romantic build up and no chemistry between the leads, has them together on the the veranda of their luxury beach front villa. Curiosity value in appearances by Jack Dee (valet, errant son or toy boy, couldn't work out which) and the Philadelphia girls.