Jackie.

Chilean filmmaker Pablo Lorrain has made some very good movies including Tony Manero in 2008, Post Mortem in 2010 and No in 2012 but his latest movie, his first in the English language, is certainly not up to the standard of these three and to my mind nowhere near as good as the hype would have you believe. Jackie (2016) has been nominated for three Academy Awards including Best Costume Design, Best Original Score and a Best Actress Nomination for Natalie Portman, if this years BAFTA's is anything to go by, will probably manage to win Best Costume Design and certainly not Best Actress for Portman who mumbled her way through the talky role making it very difficult to understand what she was saying.

This biographical drama, originally conceived as a HBO miniseries, basically deals with the week between John F Kennedy assassination on the 22^nd November 1963, his burial and when his wife and two children Caroline and John Jnr, who died in a plane crash in 1999 at the age of 38, leave the White House for the last time. Noah Oppenheim's lack lustre screenplay is partly based on Theodore H White's Life magazine interview with Jackie Kennedy a week after her husband’s death. It was during this interview that inappropriately the delusional ex First Lady compared the Kennedy years with King Arthur's mythical Camelot - the first American president to encompass the celebrity culture and to spend $2 million on the restoration of the White House, not quite the Knights of the Round Table.

 

The fatal last journey.

Larrain's movie is a rather hollow look at the period and at times minds numbingly boring not helped by the Journalist (Billy Crudup) interview that adds nothing to the film and would have been better without it. The drama is non-existent only the scene in Dallas when JFK gets shot during the motorcade shows any pretence of the story coming to life.

 

The infamous blood stained pink suit.

The film also stars Peter Sarsgaard as Robert F Kennedy with whom Jackie seems to have a rather intimate relationship, although who can blame her when her husband spent a minimal amount of time sharing her marital bed and John Hurt as Jackie's father confessor, this was his final film release before his death in January 2017and shows why he will be missed and to be quite honest the only actor in this charade to earn his salary.

Leon

What can you say about a film that has as its main character a man whose best friend is a houseplant and takes under his wing a 12-year-old orphan and teaches her the intricacies of ‘cleaning’? Think Luc Besson at his violent best, think La Femme Nikita (1990) and the role Jean Reno played in that film, move the location to New York where Reno plays the American based equivalent of Victor – Leone ‘Leon’ Montana a professional hit man, a job generally referred to in the trade as a ‘cleaner’, but one with ethics, he refuses to kill women and children.

 

The Hit Man....

....and his Apprentice.

Here we have an English language French relationship drama between a sad eyed lonely hit man and a 12 year, played in her feature film debut by the young Natalie Portman, who wants nothing more than to avenge her 4 year old brother’s death at the hands of the psychotic killer Norman Stansfield (Gary Oldman) one of cinema’s great villains. It’s when Stansfield, a very bent police officer, visits Mathilda’s family apartment to resolve a problem with some missing drugs that he and his men kill her father, stepmother and sister, and her wee brother during a particularly bloody confrontation. The only reason she is not in at the time of the visit is that she is out shopping. On her return she continues past her flat, that is now full of bodies and gunmen, to Leon’s apartment on the same floor, after some debate he lets her in and consequently saves her life and changes his.

 

A really nasty piece of work!!

Luc Besson wrote and directed Leon (1994) as an affecting comic book type fantasy crime thriller where every body involved is in top filmic form. This movie that has lost none of its appeal since its original release over the 20 year’s ago. I can’t imagine that most film lovers would have never have seen the film but I can assure you that this riveting action movie is well worth your revisit.

Black Swan

Performing ballet is a very high risk way of earning ones living even excluding the obvious stress and the backstabbing there’s the physical injury to the dancer’s body and like some performance sports you can only “play” for so long. At the heart of Darren Aronofsky sensational fifth movie Black Swan (2010) is Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake where it’s expected that the same dancer would play both the White Swan and the Black Swan. This is the dilemma that confronts Nina Sayers, told by impresario Thomas Leroy that she is obvious choice for the role of the White Swan but her frigid sexual nature precludes her from playing the Black Swan. Nina’s obsession with playing the Swan Queen forces her to go deep into her psyche to discover her inner Black Swan, she begins to experience unknown aspects of her personality all mirrored by this almost gothic world of dance.

On one level it is a terrifying psychological thriller; on another it shows brilliantly the world of the ballerina from inside the mind of one of its performers. A study of insanity and obsession seen through the eyes of a young woman who has a driving ambition but a low self esteem. This superb piece of modern film making stars Natalie Portman as Nina Sayers, who quite rightly won the Oscar for Best Actress at the 83rd Annual Academy Awards in February, the great Paris born actor Vincent Cassel as Thomas Leroy, with Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey and Winona Ryder in major supporting roles.

This film completely blew me away and I seriously think this is the best English language film after Winters Bone (2010) and I’m surprised it did not win Darren Aronofsky the Oscar for Best Director. This sensual and somewhat erotic movie harps back to the ethos of the Thatcher era when success must be achieved at all costs. All of us are flawed and we all have split personalities to some degree which I think is why Aronofsky allows us empathies with the Nina Sayers character even when she plummets to the depths of her own personnel darkness. Powell and Pressburger raised the bar for ballet films with their 1948 masterpiece The Red Shoes but Aronofsky has taken the “bar” out of sight with his best film to date.