There are so many good things about Hallam Foe that the feeling of dissatisfaction one feels on leaving the cinema is particularly perplexing.
First and foremost in Hallam Foe’s appeal is Jamie Bell, last seen in a leading role as a 13-year-old in Billy Elliot. Since then there have been minor parts in King Kong (2005) and Jumper (2008), about which the less said the better. In Hallam Foe he has a worthwhile role, and shows himself to have survived his stint as a child actor and carried his talent into maturity. He plays the title character, the sensitive son of a wealthy architect who has become somewhat unhinged by his mother’s death. He develops a rather unsavory skill as a picker of locks and Peeping Tom, goes on to suspect his father’s new wife of murder and then stalks and eventually seduces a woman he sees on a Glasgow street because she looks like his mother.
To some extent, it is Bell’s success in realizing the character of Hallam Foe and his ability to bring his psychosis to life that is the undoing of this film. The problem is that Hallam is just not a very nice boy, and when, midway through the film, director David Mackenzie decides to change tack, swerving drunkenly for psychological thriller to romantic comedy, the mood is just way out of kilter. Mackenzie’s attempt to turn Hallam’s paranoia against his stepmother and his systematic prying into the life of a young woman to fulfill ill-defined Oedipal longings into something of a lark comes off as more queasy than quirky.
This change of direction wrong-foots Bell and sends Sophia Myles, who plays Kate Breck, the object of Hallam’s infatuation, reeling, the underpinnings of her character knocked out from under her. Myles conveys a lovely combination of toughness and vulnerability in the first half of the film, but both these qualities are stretched to breaking point when stalker turns lover after a rude uncovering of Hallam’s unsavory pastime of watching Kate her in her bedroom through the skylight. This plays off against a subplot, never quite fully realized between Hallam and Kate’s occasional lover, Alasdair. Hallam tries to blackmail Alasdair, who sets up a scenario in which Hallam, in his role as Peeping Tom, is made to watch him have sex with Kate. Mid-coitus, Alasdair looks up to the skylight behind which he knows Hallam is hiding and gives him the finger.
These dark themes of sexual need and exploitation drive the film along at a steady pace and are given context by a couple of lovely cameos by Maurice Roeves and Ewen Bremner as less-than-lovable below-stairs types in the hotel at which Hallam works. Claire Forlani is wonderful as Hallam’s stepmother, full of dignity but not above turning vicious when her position is threatened — there is a hint, if nothing more, that she would be capable of murder.
One gets the idea that Mackenzie wants to make a neat little knot from the two strands of Hallam’s relationships with Kate and his stepmother, but instead these two strands slip through his hands and wander off in separate directions. To solve the problem, Mackenzie opts for the easy payoff of a romantic comedy, and even this is handled with delicacy, but by this point the film is going in too many directions at once.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would