Tag: Renée Zellweger

Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy

GoMovieReviews Rating: ★★★1/2Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy

Rated: M

Directed by: Michael Morris

Screenplay by: Helen Fielding with contributions by Abi Morgan and Dan Mazer

Based the Novel Written by: Helen Fielding

Produced by: Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Jo Wallett

Starring: Renée Zellweger, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Leo Woodall, Jim Broadbent, Gemma Jones, Isla Fisher, with Colin Firth and Hugh Grant.

‘It’s not enough to survive; you’ve got to live.’

Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy shows Mrs. Darcy (Renée Zellweger) at home with her two children, nine-year-old Billy (Casper Knopf) and four-year-old Mabel (Mila Jankovic).

Bridget is now a widow, coping with the chaos of raising two kids on her own.

In classic style, Bridget struggles with her zipper, the kids need their dinner and the house is about to catch fire.

Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) to the rescue.  To babysit the kids.

There’s still the same gang:  Shazzer (Sally Phillips), Jude (Shirley Henderson), Tom (James Callis) and Miranda (Sarah Solemani) to help remember Mark (Colin Firth) on the anniversary of his death.

Her friends help Bridget through, Jude weirdly licking the slice of orange on the side of her drink, all giving advice or saving her from advice or warning her about the dangers of labial adhesion from lack of use.

It’s time for Bridget to start again.

So when Miranda loads Bridget’s profile on Tinder, Bridget realises flirting is fun.  Particularly when a toyboy, enter Roxster (Leo Woodall), saves her kids from a tree.  And Bridget from her grief.

It’s all romance and funny moments; constantly giving the science teacher, Mr. Wallker (Chiwetel Ejiofor) the wrong impression like buying an assortment of condoms because who know what to buy after all this time, so why not a variety?

What I didn’t see coming were all the tearjerking moments.

Director Michael Morris states: “How do you make a movie that is quintessentially Bridget Jones, but which also engages with issues and emotions that these movies haven’t engaged with before? I latched onto the question of how Bridget, or how any of us, overcome something that feels unimaginable. I had this notion of creating a ‘comedy of grief.’ This is a film that wants to honor an experience that all of us are inevitably touched by.”

The film’s a roller coaster of emotions with notes of nostalgia.

The characters have grown older so there’s change, there’s life with children; there’s the unpacking of what’s important, still being naughty while being a mother, working, grieving and new beginnings.

The humour felt heavy handed at times, but that was the beginning, that opening of forced jovial moments with the kids.

But I was won over with Daniel’s naughty nun comments.

And although the humour was still there, (fuck, I mean fuck-catia…  Did you eat all the focaccia?) this instalment of Bridget Jones was more about the change in Bridget’s life.  There’s antics, but it’s the emotional change that was the overriding feeling.

 

Judy

Rated: MJudy

Directed by: Rupert Goold

Written by: Tom Edge

Produced by: David Livingstone

Starring: Renée Zellweger, Finn Wittrock, Jessie Buckley, Rufus Sewell.

I’ve often wondered how those lucky souls who have an inborn gift, the ones who are so effortlessly feted and adored, so often come undone. So badly.

For Judy Garland (Renée Zellweger) there was a price for ‘earning a million dollars before you’re twenty one’, and the dark side of her gift slowly becomes apparent as she vainly searches for a way to leave London and return home to her children.

Shown in a combination of flashbacks and flash-forwards, the movie alternates between a fifteen-year-old Garland filming, The Wizard of Oz and the final months of her life spent performing in London at the height of the swinging 60s, with surprisingly close parallels between the two very distant eras of her life and her role in the famous film.

When the Judy opens, Garland is strolling through the set of ‘the yellow brick road’ with a faceless studio executive. She’s not sure that she is ready to take on the role of Dorothy Gale and the man in the grey suit, while appearing to have her best interests at heart, is slyly grooming her, as he both soothes and at the same time subtly threatens: ‘Judy, you give those people dreams . . . ‘The rest of America is waiting to swallow you up’.

Winning the role away from Shirley Temple, Garland finds that her contract has reduced her to nothing more than studio property, at times working up to eighteen hours a day and watched over by a pair of the studio’s henchwomen. Beneath the pair’s unforgiving gaze, even sneaking a single fried onion ring, or maybe two, as she sits in a café attempting to flirt with Mickey Rooney is taken as a serious breach of the rules. Lonely, sleep deprived and starving, the price of Garland’s success is to wage a war on her body that denies the most basic of human needs. And to ensure that her needs stay denied, the Wicked Witch of the West and her eagle-eyed sister are prepared to do whatever it takes: whisking away hunger with amphetamines and granting sleep with barbiturates.

In any contest, the man in the grey suit was always going to win.

Flash forward thirty years and Garland is alone in the bathroom of her hotel suite, unable to finish dressing and barely able to raise a croak from her damaged vocal chords. She is a broken woman. It takes a fairly brutal shove from her production assistant Rosalyn Wylder (Jessie Buckley) to get her onto the stage. But when the lights come up and the beat counts in, Judy sings. And the audience is entranced. Until the lights are dimmed, when once again she is a broken woman surviving on pills and unable to sleep.

While Garland might have been one of the first to succumb to America’s amphetamine epidemic, that’s not the focus of this drama.

Woven through the story of Garland’s titanic struggle with her gift is a very personal search to find love and her pursuit of it eventually does bring a sense of what love is for her. In the title role, Renée Zellweger is unflinching and her portrayal of Judy Garland deeply affecting, while Finn Wittrock is irresistible as Garland’s dashing lover and husband number five.

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