Shameless Self Expression

On a train to England, Margaret Lockwood strikes up a friendship with elderly passenger Mrs. Froy (Dame May Whitty, quite lively for a woman of 73, and it was only her sixth of at least 27 films until her death a decade later, in 1948 at age 83!) who all of a sudden appears to go missing- on a moving train! And none of the other passengers claim to have ever seen her! Michael Redgrave is the charming musician who dearly wants to believe Lockwood’s story, possibly just because he fancies her. Paul Lukas is a wealthy doctor on board, Mary Clare a baroness, Cecil Parker (one of his earliest roles) is a politician who is travelling with his mistress, and Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne play Charters and Caldicott, a pair of proper English idiots who are obsessed with cricket and ignorant to all other matters. Australia’s own Googie Withers has a small, inconsequential role too. Jolly good 1938 Alfred Hitchcock-directed ( “The 39 Steps” , “Strangers on a Train” , “Lifeboat” , “Verti...

Three mates (science-fiction geeks Chris O’Dowd and Marc Wootton, and their sceptical and sarcastic pal Dean Lennox Kelly) meet up at the local pub to find a leak in time in the men’s toilets (leak? Get it?!). Yes, you read that correctly. O’Dowd (who has just been hilariously fired from his gig at a spacey theme park) runs into Anna Faris, a hot chick who says she’s from the future and apparently her job is to fix such holes in time, though she doesn’t seem to be very good at it. She also tells O’Dowd that he and his mates will become famous in the future for some idea that Wootton apparently came up with. Needless to say, his pals don’t initially believe him, but when one of them takes a piss and walks out to see dead bodies everywhere (including his own), the others wise up pretty quickly. The question is, what idea is it that has influenced the future so much? Given that Wootton has written an exercise book full of ideas, all of them apparently awful, they haven’t a clue. Meanwhile...

A film charting the disintegration of a marriage between laidback wannabe artist Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams. We see them in their more jovial courting phase as well as the dissolution of their marriage as the characters enter their midlife period (or at least their 30s. She’s closed-off and dissatisfied with how things have turned out and what he has become. Maybe she should’ve stayed with her old flame, played by Mike Vogel. Gosling has taken to drink, treats their kid as a playmate, and is fairly content with his modest existence as a house painter, a supportive husband to Williams, and doting father of their kid. He’ll do anything to make it work, but for Williams it’s just not working. I have to say that I’m not quite as enamoured with this 2010 rise and fall of a marriage from director/co-writer Derek Cianfrance as other people seem to be. But this is definitely a better-than-average film that many people out there will get something really meaningful and resonating ...