Is this the scariest movie ever?
One of my favourite almost-local north London cinemas is the Phoenix in East Finchley and I attended last night a special gala screening of the Coen Brothers’ new movie, No Country for Old Men. This was no country for weak hearts.
It is an absolute masterpiece, not least in its subversion of all the Western movie conventions, but also in its realism, its sustained tension, its photography and its performances.
Tommy Lee Jones as the gnarled old sherriff with a conscience, Javier Bardem as the baddest psychopath in cinema history and Josh Brolin as the Vietnam vet who gets caught up in the abandoned stash of a drugs heist massacre, all deserve Oscars. And our own Scottish actress Kelly MacDonald shows up superbly as Brolin’s wife.
Local Phoenix regulars Juliet Stevenson and League of Gentlemen’s Steve Pemberton were on hand to support the re-launch campaign — new cafe, more facilities, an expanded education programme — in a build up to the centenary in 1910.
It’s the first purpose-built cinema in the country and not only retains a magnificent barrel-vaulted roof (one of only five still extant) but also the glorious 1938 panel friezes along the inside walls.
The Phoenix’s patrons include Mike Leigh, Maureen Lipman, Bill Paterson and Victoria Wood, so there is plenty of theatrical muscle in its campaign — with Michael Palin and Ken Loach thrown in for good measure.
I was pleased to see that Sally Hawkins — about to be acclaimed as a major star in the new Mike Leigh film, Happy-Go-Lucky — has added her name to those of the on-the-staircase-to-the-theatre protestors at the Bush.
Another neat cinema/theatre crossover point was made to me the other day by Kenneth Cranham, soon to open as the mighty Max in The Homecoming at the Almeida.
Playwright Martin McDonagh was so impressed by a long-ago BBC TV production of Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter starring Cranham and the late Colin Blakely (Cranham’s absolute hero) that he never forgot it.
The upshot is that when two bungling assassins in McDonagh’s upcoming new film, In Bruges, played by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleason, sign in at a hotel reception desk, the aliases they employ are “Cranham and Blakely.” Even the most unsavoury types among us are obviously into the Pinter hinterland.
January 18th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
It is a great cinema, Michael, but sometimes the clientele are a bit odd. Many’s the time I’ve had a film ruined by someone eating a salad out of a Tupperware box, which they’ve removed from a rustly carrier bag which they’ve banged on the back of my head as they took their seat; or a couple muttering that ‘That’s just the sort of armoire we want for the bedroom’ as they point at the screen during a French film.