Very best movie i ever watch

Pretty Good

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This was such a revelation to me, I never knew Gloria Grahame even came to England. The actors all gave convincing performances in what is an intimate story. I loved the line which Peter gave when he said, 'I'm just a guy who can't say no' as it is a direct reference to the song which Gloria sang in 'Oklahoma!' - 'I'm just a girl who can't say no'! I will watch this again.

I remember the first time I saw Gloria Grahame on screen it was in the theater in Oklahoma where she played goodhearted good time girl Ado Annie. She played a lot of good time girls in more serious films as well. My best memories of her on the screen were in The Big Heat and Not As A Stranger. During her peak years in the Fifties Gloria Grahame got the first call when one had to cast a woman of easy virtue. She won an Oscar for The Bad And The Beautiful for a woman who is led astray. Usually Gloria did the leading.Annette Bening did a good job interpreting Gloria Grahame best as she could and she got it 3/4 right. There was only one Gloria and she was unqiue. This shows the sad last two years of her life when her career was pretty well over, but she had hopes of a comeback. She was living in the United Kingdom and hardly a big name any more.But whatever she had in the way of happiness came from a May/December romance with young actor Peter Turner played by Jamie Bell. It wasn't easy at times because Grahame still thought of herself as a big star. Lots of Norma Desmond in that woman.The two best scenes in the film are Gloria's meeting with her mother Vanessa Redgrave and a most jealous sister who tried and didn't have the career Gloria did. The classic has been versus a never was. The sister is played with real bite by Frances Barber. The second is Gloria with her doctor saying she had rejected chemotherapy because she was afraid of losing her hair and she wanted to be castable still. Offers were not really coming the late 70s.The ending is similar to Frances Farmer's end in Will There Ever Be A Morning, poignant and sad. Won't reveal, you have to see it and I defy anyone to have a dry eye.A great tribute to a great star.

"Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool" (2017 release; 107 min.) is a movie about the last years in the life of actress Gloria Grahame. As the movie opens (and Elton John's "Song For Guy" plays in the background), we are told it's "Liverpool, England, 1981" and we see Gloria applying make-up and getting ready for a theater performance. But she falls ill. She reaches out to Peter Turner in nearby Liverpool and asks if she can come stay at his mum's house. Peter agrees. We then go back in time to "Primrose Hill, London, 1979", and we see Peter running into Gloria for the first time. At this point we are 10 min. into the movie, but to tell you more of the plot would spoil your viewing experience, you'll just have to see for yourself how it all plays out.Couple of comments: this is latest from Scottish director Paul McGuigan, best known for "Victor Frankenstein". Here he brings the real life memoir of Peter Turner to the big screen. Turner met faded film star in the late 70s when he was 28 and she was twice that age. i shan't say more (biting my lips). Let's be very clear about one thing: leading actress Annette Bening is absolutely fantastic in this movie. You might think that, having been criminally overlooked in last year's Oscar nominations for he outstanding work in "20th Century Women", the Academy would be a bit more careful this time around. But no. Bening is once again robbed by the Academy, which instead once again lazily gave another nomination to Meryl Streep for her ok (but by no means outstanding) work in the very medicore "The Post" (an "All President's Men" wanna-be that is nowhere close to that gold standard). Jamie Bell is equally up to the task, but has nowhere near the stature or screen presence of Bening. Vanessa Redgrave appear in one scene. The movie's set production (recreating the late 70s/early 80s) is immaculate. Last but not least there is a lot f great music in the film, both as to the score and the song placements."Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool" has been gradually expanding over the last 2 months, and it finally opened last weekend at my local art house theater here in Cincinnati. The Sunday early evening screening where I saw this at was attended okay (about 15 people or so). Other than the very basic premise of an older woman's relationship with a younger guy, I knew nothing about the movie beforehand, and I ended up enjoying this quite a bit more than I had expected. But it the end, this film is really about Annette Bening's outstanding performance, and that alone is worth checking this out, be it in the theater, on VOD, or eventually on DVD/Blu-ray.

When Gloria considers playing Juliet she is not just playing for her lover's confirmation of her youthful beauty. She still craves her mother's approval, unsatisfied despite her huge past stardom. The two mothers may center this film. Peter's working-class Liverpool mum Bella (Julie Walters) works the kitchen and has a fully maternal relationship with her three hearty sons. She dreads the 24-hour stopover in Manilla required for her to see her Asian-posted son for possibly the last time. A close family themselves, they can't fathom Gloria's desire not to inform hers of her fatal disease. When Gloria's mother Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave) brings her other daughter for dinner chez Gloria and Peter, there is none of that rough warmth. Jeanne's pride in Gloria drowns in her own eagerness to recite Shakespeare, from Henry V. Clearly feeling the undervalued child, Gloria's sister seethes in bitter silence and then erupts in insult. Gloria should have played more Shakespeare, her mother avows, effectively disdaining her entire Hollywood career. Her Brit's snobbery contrasts to Bella's immediate and unconditional warmth. Indeed the most intimate bed scene here may be the one where Bella lies beside Gloria, drinking tea, embraces Gloria's casting her as her mother in the last act of her life. Only when she sees the family division she has unwittingly cost does Gloria ask for her son to be called, for her fatal flight back to America. Given the usually egocentric film star, this Gloria is remarkably careful for others. The narrative leaves us sharing Peter's suspicion about her morning "meeting" and then throwing him out. We later see she has been protecting him from her mortal diagnosis and pushing him to return to Liverpool for an audition. Annette Benning draws her Gloria out of her screen and personal persona. She catches the star's sultry voice, cheeky manner, resignation to betrayal and abandonment. This Gloria alternates between a cocky coquettishness and a will of cold steel when aroused, between the B-girl she commonly played and the strong woman who fashioned herself a career in an uncompromising industry, between the black-and-white world of most of her films and the colour of real life. Peter meets that steel when he opines she should play the nurse not Juliette, the bawdy old woman not the young lover. The passions aroused in that exchange light their love affair. She's again offended when his "Stella!" quote implies Gloria is a pathetic drunk, all beauty lost. Her insecurity makes her take his jokes seriously. In their first meeting Gloria asks Peter in to help her practice the Hustle for her dance class. At the tail end of a long career she's still trying to keep up with the times. And she can, as they prove fine partners. They are decades apart in age and in career. When they meet she's touring as the gracelessly aging Amanda in The Glass Menagerie; he is a supporter player in a current farce. But offstage they dance and love well together. So she wants to die in his and Bella's care, The narrative structure shifts between Gloria's last days and Peter's memories of their past. This allows for a scene's replay, as in the different perspectives we get on their break-up in New York. But it also catches the doubled lifespan of a film star. The actor may die but the roles live on in celluloid. Film stars don't die in Liverpool - or anywhere else - so long as their roles replay. There's a cost. The star may age as a woman but she stays ever young onscreen. So Gloria needs constant assurance she's still beautiful. She remains in competition with her past self. Bella may dye her hair but she has none of Gloria's need for that constant reassurance. She earlier refused cancer treatment because she needed her hair to extend her acting career. Aptly the film's last image of Gloria is touchingly bathetic. She appears in the grainy black-and-white of the Oscar telecast, receiving from the unblushing Edmund Gwenn her Best Supporting Actress Award for The Bad and Beautiful. That one was in colour, but here we only see her noirs. Her brisk, no-nonsense character is epitomized by her thank-you speech: "Thank you." Even in that early period, before the current long windy pages of thanks, emcee Bob Hope is still taken aback by her efficiency. This film is a worthy, nuanced addition to our pantheon of mythologized aging screen goddesses. This Gloria didn't ascend to a wealthy marriage like Joan Crawford (Mrs Pepsi Cola) or Grace Kelly (Monaco). She didn't dissolve into an inculcated addictiveness like the real Judy Garland or follow her faithful supportive wife role in A Star is Born. She didn't resurrect herself in grand guignol like Bette Davis or retreat into delusions like the Gloria Swanson character in Sunset Boulevard. She wasn't subverted or overthrown as in All About Eve. Gloria kept her self-respect and independence, risking her life to keep working as she had to, welcoming a new love, then setting him free to protect him. She happened to find through him the mother's unconditional love she hadn't known.