I’m interviewed today at the Nerd Girl Power website. The piece is called Every Gunslinger Needs a Companion.
We saw The Lady in the Van this weekend. The obvious pun is that it’s a vehicle for Maggie Smith. It’s about an old woman who lives in a van that she parks on the street in a residential London neighborhood. She has a colorful past as a pianist, ambulance driver during the war and a nun, but now she’s haunted and tormented, as well as crotchety and foul, both of mouth and of bodily odor. She befriends (as much as that is possible) a writer named Alan Bennett, a man who struggles with his sexuality and with his relationship with his mother. He sees the lady as a model for his mother and decides to write about her. The interesting thing the movie does is to split him into two: there is the version of Alan who lives life and observes, and the version who writes about things, and they banter with each other. It’s a visually interesting way to show a person talking to himself. The story is mostly true (and one Bennett comments to the other in passing when they put something on the page that didn’t really happen), and Maggie Smith first portrayed the woman in the van in the stage version 15 years ago. She’s a hoot as this uncouth Dowager Countess. A real delight.
Watched a BBC series called London Spy, which stars Ben Whishaw from The Hour (and also from Suffragette) as a guy who gets romantically entangled with a man who has created something that no one wants publicized. There’s sex and murder and intrigue, all in a somewhat leisurely John Le Carré vein. It’s five episodes and features the likes of Jim Broadbent, Charlotte Rampling, Mark Gatiss, as well as a brief appearance by Clarke Peters (The Wire). Some of it is highly improbable, but it’s a compelling drama about families and secrets and the surveillance state.
Speaking of Suffragette, we finally saw that this weekend, too. It’s an interesting story, and I always like Carey Mulligan, but it plods a bit. Hard to believe the state of things just a hundred or so years ago, though. Not only couldn’t women vote in the UK, they didn’t have any ownership of their children.
I’m up to the “Mulder’s back” section of the eighth season of The X-files. I probably saw these episodes before, but I don’t have a very strong memory of them. Also saw the fourth episode of the new season, which was very good. I think someone got the wrong end of the stick last year when they saw the episode title “Home Again” and assumed that the show would be revisiting the “Home” plot. That wasn’t it at all. This was a monster-of-the-week episode, but also a very personal one for Scully. Very well done, I thought. People in Philly probably aren’t very happy by Mulder’s thoughts on their basketball team, though.
