myfriendogri Reviews

Victoria Cross Heroes (2006)

Just About Summaries It.....

[6 January 2013]

Interesting to see that no credits are given for any of the actors who worked on this.

I worked on it, though I'm not an actor. I was one of the extras.

This documentary series was financed by Michael Ashcroft as part of his mission to acquire every VC that comes on the market when a family has to raise money. (Yes, he's the Michael Ashcroft who finances the Conservative Party).

Took 6 months to get paid by this bunch.

Utterly disgraceful, I was totally impoverished at the time.

I needed that money just to eat.

Andrew Preston

ITV Playhouse: Last Summer (1977) Season 9, Episode 9

Thieving

[1 January 2007]

Yes, I remember this . Particularly as Richard Beckinsale was cast very much out of type, compared with his work up till then, in for example 'The Lovers'.

I particularly recall a scene in , I think, a supermarket car park. The car thief has chosen his target. Walks casually towards the car, takes only a few moments and he's into the Ford Cortina, swiftly bends his head down under the dashboard to hot-wire it..., and... there's someone already there, from the passenger side.., stretched out doing just that.

I believe this TV film was broadcast just the once.

Andrew

The Model, the Poster and 3,000 Women (2004 TV Movie)

Worth watching, made me think

[19 May 2006]

This is only the second comment I've ever posted here, so am not too sure if any of it counts as a 'spoiler'.

I watched this a few nights ago on Channel 4 TV. Mesmerised by the stream of good looking women who had had it away with Adam Perry. He clearly has rather good taste. And as he pointed out.., "Women like sex."

Today, a couple of days later, I wasn't too sure whether I had been watching a morality tale, or...?

The ending, a re-enactment of the 'L,Enfant' photo-shoot looked to me very artificial. Spencer Rowell didn't sound awfully sympathetic to Adam Perry's long-standing complaint about only having earned 100 pounds shoot fee, whilst just about everyone else... Spencer had the air of "Well, it was all a long time ago". Plus, unspoken, the attitude of someone raised with the idea that a model is just someone, anyone, for a photographer or art director to exercise their talents.

For me the dialogue that stuck was when Spencer, playing with his son, said that growing up, being a man , was when you are able to accept the responsibilities of being a parent. Even though he had always felt that he would be an abysmal father.

And Adam, when asked if he felt that sleeping with 3,000 women had damaged him, replied no, the damage had been done long before that.

Andrew Preston

Blow-Up (1966)

Of its time, but much more

[16 May 2006]

I'm not sure if my comment at the end is or isn't a spoiler.

I watched this film when I was 16 I think, 1968. For me it seemed to represent everything that, as a country boy, my life wasn't. The 'London Scene'. It was about 20 or 30 years later, that I read an interview with the photographer David Bailey in which he said that in the whole of London there was probably only about 2000 people who were actually involved.

The film doesn't feel 'Made in UK', which I suppose is really what Antonioni brought to it. Yes, David Hemmings character, Thomas, isn't too admirable. But to this 16 year old he had money, access to beautiful women, creative fashionable work. And as at the time I was earning money washing dishes in the workers camp of an under-construction nuclear power station, I wasn't looking too closely at Thomas's cynicism. It probably matched my own.

I just believe this was a great film. Quite disturbing..., probably something also to do with an apparent murder without resolution.

It's a very long time since I watched it so I might be wrong in the exact frame sequence, but when I first saw the film..; right at the end, either just before or after the tennis court scene.. The camera pans across the grass of the park. And pauses. And I was always certain that I could see the tiniest outline of a shallow grave.