Capital Celluloid 2012 - Day 270: Thu Sep 27

Lovely And Amazing (Holofcener, 2001): Hackney Picturehouse, 6.30pm

This is a fascinating one. A subjective and personal study, I am Dora is a publication and series of screenings that explore how and why women identify with one another and what this means when the identification is with a flawed or misunderstood character. Their first screening was at the ICA and here they've found an intriguing American indie movie.

This screening is a collaboration with British actor Romola Garai (from Atonement, Glorious 39, Amazing Grace and The Hour). Romola has chosen to screen Nicole Holofcener's second feature Lovely and Amazing, starring Catherine Keener and Emily Mortimer. Here is the Facebook page for tonight's event.

Chicago Reader review:
'Given her interest in women's lives and everyday neuroses, Nicole Holofcener (Walking and Talking) could easily be lumped with the Ephron sisters, but that would undersell her strengths as a writer and director. Lovely and Amazing, her second feature, revolves around a mother (Brenda Blethyn), her two biological daughters (Emily Mortimer and Catherine Keener, the movie's anchor), and the African-American preteen (Raven Goodwin) she's adopted as a sort of late-life project. Each of these women deals in very different ways with seemingly trite self-help-magazine issues—all have body-image problems, all have thwarted artistic aspirations, all worry neurotically about their relationships with men and one another. Keener's character uses lah-di-dah flipness as a defense, but when she drifts into a crazy fling with a teenager (Jake Gyllenhaal) we see how broken and desperate she really is. What keeps all this from being trite and self-indulgent is Holofcener's willingness to make her characters' neuroses unattractive and self-destructive instead of cute and endearing.' 

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