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Screensize: 640 x 480 800 x 600 1024 x 768 1280 x 1024 UserName: Password: Format Mode: Basic  Help  Prompt  Format: Font Andale Mono Arial Arial Black Book Antiqua Century Gothic Comic Sans MS Courier New Georgia Impact Lucida Console Script MT Bold Stencil Tahoma Times New Roman Trebuchet MS Verdana   Size 1 2 3 4 5 6   Color Black Red Yellow Pink Green Orange Purple Blue Beige Brown Teal Navy Maroon LimeGreen Message: Smilies [quote][i]Originally posted by BaftaBaby[/i] [br][url="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1266029/"]Nowhere Boy[/url] I guess most of the buzz about this dramatization of John Lennon's life before the Beatles revels in the speculation of when 1st-time features director Sam Taylor-Wood and Aaron Johnson got it on. She's twice his age and they're now engaged. He's a maturing former child star, far more experienced in drama than Turner prize winning conceptual artist Taylor-Wood. Only they know when their professional relationship wound up in nookie-land, but what's undeniable is Johnson's screen command as the emerging rock legend. The film covers the period before the Beatles trolled off to Hamburg to launch their seminal career. Based on the memoirs of Lennon's half-sister Julia, the film tries to demystify John's complex family relationships, primarily those between his bi-polar mother Juia and his aunt Mimi who raised him. Whether John ever truly recovered from the pain and confusion or was able to channel most of it into his music is for us to conclude. What Taylor-Wood, and especially the three main actors do, is shower us with scenes simmering with repressed and misdirected raw emotion, leavened with a wit you feel captures post-war Liverpool. In that sense Taylor-Wood is driven by the transition from grey wartime austerity to a world that promised color and technology and a morality keen to shed its metaphorical corsets. And, of course, to a world destined to change the direction of popular music. More than a match for Johnson's charisma -- which has more than a whiff of Caine's Alfie -- both Anne-Marie Duff and Kristen Scott-Thomas as Julia and Mimi strike you like lightning. But perhaps contributing more than anyone to the film's success in truth and conviction is Matt Greenhalgh's screenplay. Fresh from his powerful Control, dramatising Ian Curtis's life and pain in music, he not only handles Lennon's similar journey with empathy, but brings shape and structure to real life. Whether, like me, you rate Lennon & McCarthy alonside Mick Jagger as the sine qua nons of popular music in the last half of the 20th century, this is a poignant, exacting film which you will feel before you begin to analyze. [/quote]    -  HTML is OFF | Forum Code is ON   Check here to include your profile signature.