Our Ladies is a film about a convent school choir, let loose on the town (Edinburgh) before their big competition. What could possibly go wrong? Everything! The great thing about this movie is that it is so well written. Based on the book "The Sopranos" by Alan Warner, and Lee Hall's stage play "Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour", it has been adapted here by director Michael Caton-Jones and the late Alan Sharp. Everything about is brilliant. It is so emotional, even those times it seems unreal. It is great bawdy fun. Would a female team behind the camera have done any better? I doubt it. Maybe they should have had a chance.
One critic called it "an exquisite slice of sweet ache and compassion amid the mounting chaos. What ensues is rude, funny and occasionally rather sweet". The stage play actually won the Olivier Award for best new comedy in 2017. That would be worth seeing if it returned to theatres. All the cast are excellent, I particularly liked Kate Dickie as the harassed "nun in charge". There is a karaoke version of "Tainted Love" that is alone worth the price of admission. Unforgettable.
A very different film is Shang-Chi. An expensive Marvel blockbuster that I only went to see because many reviews said the first two thirds was a good story. Well, the story was OKish, the dialogue was ordinary and the cast were wooden. Except for two. Awkwafina showed what a good actress she is, and to my surprise, who should turn up but Ben Kingsley. Both were head and shoulders above the rest of the cast. At least the CGI is limited for the first two thirds of the film, but I could have done with missing the last part.
I cannot remember watching the whole of A Clockwork Orange before. Certainly not on the big screen. There are bits that seemed familiar, but the original release was fifty years ago. Here we have a new 4K restoration to celebrate it's half century. However, it still looked like a seventies movie with it's gratuitous violence and classical music soundtrack, mostly Ludwig Van. I guess that it was true to the novel by Anthony Burgess, except the end was apparently the American version of the book. What was most interesting for me were the exterior shots of London, and how the landscape has changed so dramatically over the years. There is one particular scene on the Chelsea Embankment next to the Albert Bridge. On the other side of the Thames are run down or derelict buildings when today, the South Bank is a prosperous location. The BFI have an article looking at the changes:
Another Chelsea location Kubrick selected was Albert Bridge. It’s the place where the homeless man takes his revenge on Alex. When Alex strolls along the riverside, newly reformed, you can see the south side of the river behind him, industrial towers looming in the distance. Four decades later, that skyline has completely transformed. Huge glass office buildings now line the river. No smog, no visible redbrick chimneys. The whole of Chelsea and the surrounding area has been cleaned up beyond recognition
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