FILM REVIEW: Charlotte Church in ‘I’ll Be There’

Posted on June 13, 2003 by admin

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By Ray Bennett

LONDON – “I’ll Be There” follows the Elvis Presley pattern of how to introduce a hot young musical talent to the movies – in this case, Welsh classical singer Charlotte Church – and it’s the right way to go.

Like “Love Me Tender” all those years ago, it’s a lightweight picture about a love triangle with sturdy character actors, and the young star sings just four songs including the title number.

As a result, there’s little resting on Church’s shoulders and as she’s an immensely appealing teenager who can walk and talk, and especially smile, on camera at the same time, “I’ll Be There” will do her no harm.

This is a small family film, however, and unless director, co-writer and leading man Craig Ferguson’s “Drew Carey Show” fan base rallies around, it’s unlikely to excite moviegoers as much as Church excites record buyers.

Fans of the “Voice of an Angel,” whose Sony debut album of that name shipped 10 million copies around the world and was followed by three more hit releases, may even feel cheated that she doesn’t sing more.

But even though it’s innocuous and unmemorable, the film shows that Ferguson has promise as a director. It’s his first directing stint, having co-written and co-exec produced “The Big Tease” and co-written and co-produced “Saving Grace” (2000).

Ferguson (pictured with Church) plays Paul Kerr, an ’80s Scottish rocker who lives a lonely, self-destructive life in a very fancy pile in the Welsh countryside. In a nearby town lives a woman named Rebecca (Jemma Redgrave) who has a fiery old Ronnie Hawkins-style rocker named Evil Edmonds (Joss Ackland) for a father and a sweet-faced daughter named Olivia (Church) whom she has raised alone. When Kerr makes the papers for an apparent suicide attempt driving his motorcycle out of a second story window, Rebecca has to face the question of telling Olivia that her father is a drunken rock star.

Thus the love triangle as sweet Olivia and her dad meet and make up while fiercely protective mom fights to keep the girl away from the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll that made her own life so hard. But her daughter has kept a secret from Rebecca too, and of course that’s her extraordinary voice. The outcome is entirely predictable and only a likeably quirky script by Ferguson and Philip McGrade and some naturalistic playing redeem the saccharine sentiments.

Ferguson’s ageing rock star is appealing in his wasted self-regard that begins to change in a cuckoo’s nest psych ward when he leads the fellow patients in a raucous piano-led jam. As the stalwart mother, Redgrave (Corin’s daughter, of the famous dynasty) is pleasingly unglamorous and she captures Rebecca’s ambivalence toward her old love effectively.

In a story close to her real life, Charlotte Church has no great stretches to make and she handles lines and movement with the aplomb of the outstanding concert performer that she is. As the old-time rock’n’roller, Ackland is a revelation viewers will either find quite captivating or maddeningly over the top.

In the end, the film exists to set the stage for Church to sing and she does, wonderfully, Gershwin’s “Summertime” and a new tune by multi-Oscar nominee Diane Warren titled “Would I Know?”

Veteran music supervisor Budd Carr’s savvy song choices help things greatly and Ferguson shows that he has a true director’s eye with more than a few subtle touches that make the film quite endearing for all its blandness.

In the opening sequence, Church sings a gorgeous Celtic song alone in a beautiful old church and on the lectern the briefly seen text is “Apocrypha.” At the end, when all the principals get up on a pub stage to bang out the Four Tops’ “Reach Out (I’ll Be There),” the clashing styles are noisily and engagingly out of tune, just as they would be.

We can hope that having made a benign start Church will find success in films but won’t churn out the kind of movie musical pap that trapped Presley, but we can also hope that Ferguson’s next gig gives him much freer rein.

Opens: UK June 20 (Warner Bros.); Cast: Charlotte Church, Craig Ferguson, Jemma Redgrave, Joss Ackland, Ralph Brown, Ian McNeice, Steve Noonan,  Imelda Staunton, Marion Bailey, Anthony Head; Director: Craig Ferguson; Screenwriters: Craig Ferguson, Philip McGrade; Director of photography: Ian Wilson; Production designer: Tim Harvey; Music: Trevor Jones; Costume designer: Stephanie Collie; Editor: Sheldon Kahn. Producer: James G. Robinson; Executive producer: Guy McElwaine, Executive music supervisor: Budd Carr; Production: Morgan Creek; MPAA rating PG-13, running time, 102 minutes.

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THEATRE REVIEW: Toyah Willcox in ‘Calamity Jane’

Posted on June 13, 2003 by admin

Toyah Calamity Jane 1 x325By Ray Bennett

LONDON – When Doris Day blew in from the Windy City as the buckskinned tomboy in the movie “Calamity Jane,” she was ornery but toothsome and it didn’t take much for handsome Howard Keel to figure out that under all that trail dust and chapped leather was a darned tootin’, fine lookin’ gal.

That was in 1953 and times have changed although not on the stage of the Shaftesbury Theatre. The denizens of Deadwood City still sing about the Black Hills of Dakota, ogle showgirls at the local saloon and listen to Calamity Jane’s tall tales of fighting Injuns, shooting gunfighters and riding the pony express.

The show is “Annie Get Your Gun” and “Kiss Me Kate” all over again except the former had songs by Irving Berlin and the latter by Cole Porter. “Calamity Jane” has songs by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster. At their high end, Fain and Webster could turn out Oscar-winning numbers such as “Love is a Many Splendored Thing” from the 1955 film of the same name, and “Secret Love” from “Calamity Jane.” Webster won a third Oscar for the lyrics to Johnny Mandel’s “The Shadow of Your Smile” from “The Sandpiper” in 1965.

“Calamity Jane” also boasts lively show pieces in “The Deadwood Stage (Whip Crack Away)” and “Windy City” and a lyrical ballad, “Black Hills of Dakota.” After that it all gets a bit grim and with 11 other songs in the show, it’s no wonder the movie is best recalled for Day’s zestful performance and lovely singing.

In this stage version, most of the weight falls on Toyah Willcox, a former U.K. pop and soap star, and it’s a testament to her sheer determination to ingratiate that she just about carries it. Employing an accent that combines cornpone with grits and bits of Strother Martin, Willcox bounces onstage and, leaving no surface untouched whether verticle or horizontal, keeps bouncing until the final curtain.

Ed Curtis’ lighthearted and engaging production gives Willcox lots to bounce off including two leading men, Michael Cormick, a laconic, slow-moving Wild Bill, and Garry Kilby, as a handsome cavalry officer. Cormick wins the day and the singing honors with a fine tenor voice deep enough to suggest echoes of Keel’s rich baritone.

Kellie Ryan is appealing as the maid who Jane brings back from Chicago to perform in Deadwood thinking she is a top showgirl and who promptly falls for Jane’s beloved. Secret love doesn’t stay secret for very long, though, and it’s thanks to a cast of enthusiastic pros and the tireless Willcox that what should seem tired and dated ends up simply oldfashioned and charming.

Venue: Shaftesbury Theatre, runs through Sept. 20; Cast: Toyah Willcox, Michael Cormick, Kellie Ryan, Garry Kilby, Duncan Smith, Abigail Aston, Phil Ormerol, Ahmet Ahmet; Music: Sammy Fain; Lyrics: Paul Francis Webster; Adapted for the stage by: Charles K. Freeman; Based upon the motion picture produced by: Warner Bros.; Director: Ed Curtis; Designer: Simon Higlett; Choreographer: Craig Revel Horwood; Lighting Designer: James Whiteside; Sound designer: Simon Whitehorn for Orbital; Musical director: Robert Cousins; Presented by Tristan Baker.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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MUSIC REVIEW: George Fenton and ‘Blue Planet’ in Hyde Park

Posted on September 16, 2002 by admin

blue planet 1 x650By Ray Bennett

LONDON – They call Hyde Park the lungs of London and on Sunday evening there, 10,000 people took a collective deep breath and metaphorically plunged into the ocean depths to experience the marvels of “The Blue Planet.”

The occasion was an outdoor concert featuring the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by George Fenton, playing cues from his score to the worldwide hit natural history series as scenes from the show were played on giant screens.

“The Blue Planet” is one of the most successful documentary series ever produced by the BBC. First broadcast in the U.K. last September, it has been seen in more than 50 countries including the United States where it has been a hit on the Discovery Channel.

The 9-episode series, narrated by David Attenborough, cost $11 million and took more than four years to make. It has turned into a marketing phenomenon for BBC Worldwide, the U.K. pubcaster’s commercial arm, which has exploited it in a dozen different media streams.

Through television, video, publishing, records and now concerts, “The Blue Planet” has pulled in more than $23 million, with more to come. It has already been adapted for a theatrical short, which ran in the U.K. and Australia accompanying the feature “Help! I’m a Fish,” and there are plans to adapt the series into a 90-minute feature film.

blue planet 2 x650The idea of a “Blue Planet” concert came from Jane Carter who is classical acquisition and development manager for BBC Music. “I make records, basically,” says Carter. The idea struck while attending a recording session for the series. “I saw George conducting in the studio and the image on a huge screen of a Blue Whale’s tail coming out of the cascading water, and it was so overwhelming that I said: ‘People have to see this,’ ” she recalls.

It fell to Fenton, whose recent film scores include Ken Loach’s “Sweet Sixteen” and Andy Tennant’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” to select which pieces of his “Blue Planet” score to play. He had four hours of music to choose from and the first concert at London’s Royal Festival Hall last September was a sellout.

Participation in an event on Santa Monica beach on May 29 for the Heal the Bay charity led to the Hyde Park show, and there are plans to take it to the Hollywood Bowl next year as well as the Sydney Opera House and Hong Kong.

Alastair Fothergill, the series’ executive producer, was onstage for the concert feeling like a fish out of water. “It was extraordinary,” he says. “But I’m more at home in submersibles.”

For Fenton, who conducted while glued to a video that displayed the images, it was hard work but a lot of fun.

He told me, “It’s a really good way for people to endorse what it’s ultimately all about, which is understanding the oceans and that they need to be protected.”

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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‘Dallas’ star Linda Gray on being nude in ‘The Graduate’

Posted on January 18, 2002 by admin

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By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Linda Gray walks quickly along the crowded streets of the British capital. “I smile, I wave, I move on,” says the actress, as eyes widen, fingers point and people whisper delightedly around her, “Sue Ellen. It’s Sue Ellen.”

Thirteen years after departing the worldwide hit “Dallas,” Gray is still remembered fondly for playing the long-suffering, hard-drinking Sue Ellen Ewing, wife of Larry Hagman’s swaggering, philandering oil man J.R.

She has kept a low profile mostly since then, doing the occasional television show (“Models Inc.,” “Melrose Place”), acting and directing in the theater and serving as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations.

For the past few months, however, she has been the toast of London, starring as Mrs. Robinson in the boxoffice record-breaking run of the play “The Graduate” by Terry Johnson. Adapted from Charles Webb’s novel and the screenplay for the 1967 Mike Nichols motion picture, written by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry, the comedy has been running at the Gielgud Theatre in the West End since April 5, 2000.

Productions are planned in some 20 countries, and Kathleen Turner, who opened the play in London, will take it to Broadway later this year. Gray’s West End run concludes Saturday.

The show received raves from the British critics when it opened, and Turner has been succeeded by model Jerry Hall, Amanda Donohoe, Anne Archer and, in September, by Gray, of whom BBC London radio said, “At last, ‘The Graduate’ gets the Mrs. Robinson it deserves.”

graduate posterFor Gray, it was a triumph with more than a touch of irony. To begin with, the sensuous female leg that dominated the key art for the original film was one of hers. She was modeling at the time, trying to break into acting, and the image was taken from a library of images she had posed for. “It was a day’s work,” she says now, though she agrees that figuring in one of the iconic images of ’60s movies is “kinda cool.”

When the play was announced, Gray asked her agent to let the producers know she was interested. She was turned down as too old. Four months later, they changed their minds: “I was stunned. I said, ‘I thought they said I was too old?’ I got a little feisty about it. People are so focused on age, and it’s a shame. You dishonour your uniqueness doing that. I’m sick and tired of women worrying about age and wrinkles and scars. It’s so unfair.”

Gray, who turned 61 in September, leapt at the part, although she admits to being “scared to come to the West End” to play the role of an older woman who seduces a young man and is seen fleetingly, in half-light, naked. She says, “Remembering to drop the towel was the big thing. I didn’t think about the critics. I thought, ‘If I do my best, some people will like it.’ ”

The tabloid Daily Mail sent not only its critic, it also sent a surgeon, a nutritionist and a therapist. Gray laughs: “They wanted to see what my body looked like, or if I’d had plastic surgery, or how I was holding up, I guess. At the end it was OK. They didn’t say a whit about my performance.”

'The Graduate' Linda Gray x600This story appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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FILM REVIEW: Robert Carlyle in ‘Black and White’

Posted on January 9, 2002 by admin

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By Ray Bennett

LONDON – In a remote desert town in South Australia in 1958, a 9-year-old girl is found raped and murdered. On the flimsiest evidence, local police almost immediately arrest a young Aboriginal man and obtain a confession. Only the efforts of a stubborn, inexperienced Adelaide lawyer stand between the accused and the hangman.

Craig Lahiff’s sturdy courtroom drama, based on real events, follows a predictable path and is unlikely to make substantial gains at the box office but it’s a laudable effort and certain to please fans of Robert Carlyle.

The “Full Monty” star plays the obstinate lawyer David O’Sullivan whose dislike of the antiquated British-based Australian judiciary drives him to take seriously a case he’s obliged to take without a fee. He quickly learns that the Aboriginal Max Stuart, played with unsentimental grace by David Ngoombujarra, is illiterate and put his mark on a confession he couldn’t read.

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When it turns out that Curtis was in police custody for being drunk at the time the murder took place, it appears a dismissal is inevitable. But the pathologist changes her mind and fixes the death outside the timeframe of his alibi.

Only when he’s sent for trial does Curtis claim that the police beat him in order to obtain the confession. By now, O’Sullivan is going head-to-head with a pillar of the judicial establishment, Roderic Chamberlain, played with typical elegance and power by Charles Dance.

More evidence emerges that tends to suggest Curtis’ innocence when a compassionate priest becomes involved but he is convicted and sentenced to hang. O’Sullivan’s fight to win appeals goes all the way up to a Royal Commission, putting Curtis near the hangman’s door seven times while the local newspaper, published by one Rupert Murdoch, gets on the bandwagon to defend him.

Ben Mendelsohn plays the young Murdoch as a callow opportunist and the film suggests his enthusiasm for the campaign swiftly ended when he was threatened with prosecution for seditious libel.

The film dips a toe into the role of newspapers influencing trials but drops it as topic to focus on O’Sullivan’s class struggle with Chamberlain. Screenwriter Louis Nowra and director Lahiff develop that theme effectively and take the trouble to invest Chamberlain with considerable human dimension.

There is a clever scene in which the aristocratic hopeful for the Chief Justice’s chair snarls out his view of the case to his wife and their genteel friends, sparing them no brutal detail of the rape and murder as he believes they happened.

O’Sullivan runs into almost uniformly supercilious representatives of the British legal establishment, however, all with condescending stares and snooty voices. But the lawyer’s dependence on his reluctant but loyal partner, played sympathetically by Kerry Fox, is well drawn and at no point does Carlyle allow himself to showboat. His is a fully professional performance that shows no strain from the fact that he carries the film on his shoulders.

Lahiff shows little visual flair and the film will fit nicely on the small screen. It’s a grim tale not told in a grim way; an honorable argument not angry enough. A bit more of Chamberlain’s superb self-belief might have given the piece a lot more power.

Opens: UK Jan 9 (Tartan Films); Cast: Robert Carlyle, Charles Dance, Kerry Fox, Colin Friels, Ben Mendelsohn; Director: Craig Lahiff; Writer: Louis Nowra; Director of photography: Geoffrey Simpson; Production designer: Murray Picknett; Costume designer: Annie Marshall; Editor: Lee Smith; Producers: Helen Leake, Nik Powell; Not rated; running time, 100 minutes.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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Stanley Kubrick: on living the good life

Posted on September 14, 1999 by admin

By Ray Bennett

Most celebrities say they want to be judged only by their work and they are happy to repeat that at length whenever “Entertainment Tonight,” Vanity Fair and Hello! magazine call.

Stanley Kubrick apparently meant it and preferred to stay home. Because he seldom, if ever, did interviews, the media pouted and branded him a mad recluse. Continue reading →

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