Movies at Home: North by Northwest, Pixie and The Eternal Daughter

 

Despite seeing numerous extracts from North by Northwest, I don't think I had ever seen the full movie. This Alfred Hitchcock classic from 1959 did not disappoint. When David Thomson in his book Have You Seen ..... talks about the director's film Vertigo that he loves to death, but then now "realised, for the first time, that North by Northwest is better". I have to agree. Here "fears are rendered as comedy". The all star cast are superb, as is Bernard Herman's score.

Olivia Cooke is excellent as Pixie in this comedy thriller set in the west of Ireland. She is the stepdaughter of a small time gangster and teams up with a couple of useless young men when a bag of loot falls into their laps. Pixie is attractive and cunning in a film that is described as "Father Ted meets Tarantino". Yes, there is violence and the shoot out is straight from one of the latter's movies.

The real gangster is Father Hector played by Alec Baldwin as a rogue criminal with a gang of hoodlums. Directed with gusto by Barnaby Thomson and quite well written by his son Preston, Thank goodness for something original and witty. 

The Eternal Daughter is the first film I have seen by writer/director Joanna Hogg. (Her two films called The Souvenier are on BBC iPlayer). Tilda Swinton plays both filmaker Julie and her mother Rosalind who arrive at this isolated hotel in the dead of night. Rosalind remembers it as a mansion where she stayed as a young woman. But not everything seems right. Are there any other guests or is this all in someone's imagination. There seems to be just the receptionist, but who does the cooking? 

The film is very slow, but somehow has its' moments. When the mother and daughter talk it is much more interesting. The mother can be a little fractious and the daughter seems on edge. But the scenes with the two are fine. Julie is here to write her next film, but hardly gets a word down on her laptop. There are strange noises in the night that gets her out of bed.  Is this a kind of ghost story? The ending tells us all.