With a single dessert and just two glasses of wine our bill was kept in check - but the effort of doing so was not much fun
Babbo
Film
This is a film with beautiful performances and a visual style that urges you towards reflection
Bright Star
Theatre
Although the first half of Kwei-Armah’s production is pacy, funny and intelligent, the energy level then drops off
Seize The Day
I loved this film from start to finish. Take the girlfriend, tell your mum - I'd see it again tomorrow and will buy the dvd.
I saw this last night and can't remember the last time I was so moved in the theatre.
I have been to many of London's so-called best Japanese restaurants and none have been as good as the food that I've had at Aqua Kyoto
London,
Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Stephan Elliott.
Cast: Jessica Biel, Ben Barnes, Kristin Scott Thomas, Colin Firth, Kimberley Nixon, Katherine Parkinson, Kris Marshall
Description: Prodigal son John Whittaker returns to his family's stately pile with his new bride, American racing car driver Larita in tow. His sisters Hilda and Marion are terribly impressed by the glamorous, out-spoken new addition to the clan, and his war-wounded father Jim seems charmed too. However, John's neurotic mother Veronica is horrified that her golden boy has married... an American, when he could have proposed to one of the neighbours' daughters, thereby ensuring their social standing within the local community. Tensions escalate as Veronica blatantly tries to drive a wedge between John and Larita.
Country: UK. 2008. 96mins
Meet the parents: John Whittaker (Ben Barnes) and his new wife Larita (Jessica Biel)
Noel Coward’s early play was written in 1924 when he was 23 and isn’t an overly obvious candidate for a 21st-century film revival. Undeterred, the Australian Stephan Elliott, the director of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, has festooned it with able players, made it look splendidly in period and hoped for the best.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work out. Some of the casting is odd, Elliott’s screenplay doesn’t have much of Coward’s baleful and ironic wit and the film-making itself lacks the required precision.
Jessica Biel plays a beautiful American racing driver who marries into the Whittakers, an aristocratic British family, visits the ancestral pile with her new husband John (Ben Barnes) and finds his cash-strapped mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) unable to cope with her. Everyone else views her more favourably, including the older Mr Whittaker (Colin Firth) and the butler (Kris Marshall), who both seem to fancy her.
Easy Virtue purports to be about the fading aristo lifestyle after the First World War and the injection into it of American flash. It is certainly dressed to kill. But we’ve seen this so often before that it has to be done exceptionally well to take hold. While Biel is fine, Scott Thomas is largely wasted as the nasty but rather desperate old bird who commands the family, while Firth does a kind of downbeat Mr D’Arcy as her war veteran husband.
The play hardly seems the “psychological study of sexual repression, guilt and revenge as the old certainties crumble at the advance of the jazz age” that one critic appraised in a recent theatrical revival. In fact, it amounts to much ado about almost nothing. But that may be the result of Elliott’s attempt to make it entertaining rather than plausible.
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