YOU HURT MY FEELINGS**

Nicole Holofcener (ENOUGH SAID) returns to our screens with her brand of low-key rich white people dramedy. At its worst its tone deaf and deeply annoying. At its best it can be pleasantly surprising.  YOU HURT MY FEELINGS is mildly entertaining while also being a giant nothingburger.  I didn't hate it. I immediately forgot about it.  

The movie stars Seinfeld and Veep's Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Beth, a rich white person with rich white people problems. Her psychologist husband Don (The Crown's Tobias Menzies) is deeply loving but one day she overhears him saying he doesn't really like her new book. She reacts childishly. Rather than discuss it, she passively aggressively punishes him for something he doesn't even know he did.  Meanwhile their son Eliot (Owen Teague) is left third-wheeling their infantile psychodrama. The moral of the film seems to be that happy relationships involve some measure of deceit and that we should just get on with it. Okay. Cool. Mind blowing. It's all well enough acted and produced. It just feels so meh.

YOU HURT MY FEELINGS has a running time of 93 minutes and is rated R in the USA and 15 in the UK. It played Sundance 2023 and opened in the USA in May. It was released in the UK on Amazon Prime next week.

Random DVD round up 2: PERSUASION (2007)

Anne Elliot is a well-born woman who is persuaded not to marry her poor lover Frederick Wentworth. Years later he returns from the Napoleonic wars a rich and eligible match, while her own family has frittered away its fortune and moved to Bath. Anne feels sure that Wentworth will not forgive her and is pained by his new attachment to her young cousin. Meanwhile, Wentworth is still drawn to Anne despite his broken heart and her vain, proud, disdainful family....

I am a great fan of Jane Austen, and of Persuasion in particular. I prefer the modulated tone of the novel and the idea that a heroine can make a profound mistake and suffer, not for a short while, but for many years. Austen goes beyond witty portraits of weak-minded people to show just what profound harm can come of well-meaning prejudice. In earlier novels, Austen mocks society but never questions the fundamental rules by which it operates. In PERSUASION, she shows us an older heroine who knows her mind, is more pro-active, and resolves upon an action against society's guidance.

Simon Burke's adaptation of the novel is disappointing. I have no objection to curtailing the action to 90 minutes - it is, in fact, a rather simple story - but he could easily have done without some scenes and characters and gone for a distilled rather than rushed feel. (Why, for instance, did he not dispense with Mrs Smith and Nurse Rook - especially when he has communicated the essence of the side plot already through Anne and Lady Russell's prescient suspicions?) I also think that Burke's alterations to the script are unsuccessful. In particular, Wentworth resolves to propose before he even arrives in Bath, substantially reducing the dramatic effect of the concert scene and the letter-writing.

Adrian Shergold's direction is also misguided. He wants the movie to appear modern and immediate and so opts for hand-held cameras and straight-to-the-camera glances. Yet this is undermined by his over-lit, sterile sets and the actors' stilted line-readings. Anthony Head and Julia Davis have no idea how to read Austen's lines - and their attempts at comedy have all the subtlety of pantomime. Amanda Hale puts on a ghastly accent as Maria Musgrove, Tobias Menzies camps it up with an over-elaborate drawl, and most of the rest of the cast are largely forgettable. True, Sally Hawkins and Rupert Penry-Jones show real emotional depth as Anne and Frederick, but they are rather swamped by the surrounding mediocrity, I'm afraid.

PIERREPOINT took my breath away

PIERREPOINT is the kind of movie that leaves you struggling to articulate your emotions when the lights go up in the cinema. To paraphrase my friend, Swedish Philip, with whom I saw this movie, "it affected me inside." I can think of no higher recommendation for any film.

PIERREPOINT is a multi-faceted portrait of England's most prolific executioner, Alfred Pierrepoint. Pierrepoint executed over 600 people in his career in the 1940s and 1950s including Lord Haw Haw, various Nazi war criminals and, perhaps most controversially, Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis. He was essentially a good and decent man who had a strong sense of duty and service to his monarch and state. He was also a quietly religious man. He was entirely uninterested in what his victims had supposedly done. It was enough for him that the State had judged them guilty. His vocation, as he saw it, was to deliver them the most efficient, humane and merciful death. And, once they had atoned for their sin, to treat their bodies with dignity and care. Pierrepoint certainly took a sort of school-boy pride in being the quickest to take his victim from cell to noose, or in being picked by "Monty" to administer swift British justice to Nazi war criminals, but somehow his pride does not seem selfish. Indeed, it can be selfless. In the most affecting scene of the movie - moreso because it is factually correct - Pierrepoint has to execute a man for whom he feels a great deal of affection. He knows this will plague his conscience for the rest of his life - despite the fact the man is uncontrovertably guilty - but goes through with the execution anyway. He knows that he can reassure the man, and ensure that his death is painless.

But PIERREPOINT is about more than one man's psychological and emotional journey. It is about the great social change that took place in British society in the 1940s and 1950s. At the start of the film, Pierrepoint is a man who administers Edwardian justice in a world that treats him as a war hero for it. By the time the film closes, the calls for an end to capital punishment are gathering sway and both Pierrepoint and his wife are no longer able to repress the emotional and physical reality of what he has done.

To my mind, this is one of the most amazing scripts that I have seen brought to the screen. The screenwriter lures us into Pierrepoint's world and psyche. I felt that I could finally understand why a good, affable chap could be an executioner, and why, in the end, he could not. Praise must go to every single member of the cast but especially to Timothy Spall, who plays Pierrepoint, Juliet Stephenson, who plays his wife, and to Eddie Marsan who plays "Tish". The production design, photography and score all combine to create the claustrophobic, repressed world of the 1940s and 1950s. (The movie is shot by Danny Cohen, who also shot the wonderful DEAD MAN'S SHOES.) The achievement is all the greater when we learn that the film was shot in four weeks on a shoe-string budget, and on 16mm film.

What more can I say? This is movie making at its finest with real creative talent and artistry devoted to bringing the singular life of a singular man to the screen. Please, do try to see it.


PIERREPOINT: THE LAST HANGMAN premiered at Toronto 2005 and goes on release in the UK today. It goes on limited release in the US on September 15th 2006.