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MIDSUMMER MOVIE ROUND UP/ “RADIOACTIVE” & “HELMUT NEWTON: The Bad and the Beautiful”
Author:
Joyces Choices
Joyce Kulhawik, best known as the Emmy Award-winning arts and entertainment critic for CBS-Boston (WBZ-TV 1981-2008), is currently lending her expertise as an arts critic/advocate, motivational speaker, and cancer crusader. Kulhawik is President of the Boston Theater Critics Association, a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, and Boston Online Film Critics Association. Kulhawik has covered local and national events from Boston and Broadway to Hollywood, reporting live from the Oscars, the Emmys, and the Grammys. Nationally, Kulhawik has co-hosted syndicated movie-review programs with Roger Ebert and Leonard Maltin. Look for her arts & entertainment reviews online at JoycesChoices.com
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MIDSUMMER MOVIE ROUND UP/ “RADIOACTIVE��� & “HELMUT NEWTON: The Bad and the Beautiful”
Comments:
Toxic and intoxicating: two films to consider this midsummer weekend!
RADIOACTIVE: Beware its unstable script and the resulting half life
it sketches of one of the world’s great scientists and the first woman
ever to win the Nobel Prize. Rosamund Pike stars as Marie Curie, the
pioneering scientist who along with her husband Pierre discovered
radioactivity by way of two new elements: radium and polonium. But first
she had to break the scientific community’s toxic male logjam and get
herself a lab, a collegial husband, and taken seriously–though it was
only her husband who was initially credited by the Nobel committee for
their groundbreaking work in physics. The film is hobbled by director
Marjane Satrapi and Jack Thorne’s awkward screenplay. Jarringly edited,
the film hurtles back and forth in time with the finesse of an atomic
bomb. I suppose the intent was to show the repercussions of Curie’s work
on the 20th century, but these scenes from the 1950’s pop out of
nowhere and feel like they’re part of another movie. After her husband
died, Curie’s scandalous affair with a married man takes center stage,
while little energy is spent on her inner life and character. Pike’s
portrayal toggles between icy cold stares and fiery flare ups. And then
there’s her subsequent work. Curie went on to become the first person
ever to win a second Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry. RADIOACTIVE
could be one of the worst biopics ever made. It is most certainly a
wasted opportunity to expand what we know about one of the few female
greats heretofore recognized in the field of science, whose
contributions were, among many other things, seminal to cancer treatment
in the atomic age.
Available on Amazon Prime 7/24, Rated PG-13, 109 minutes.
Now for the most fun you’ll have at the movies all weekend! If you
love the female form and are familiar with the famous German
photographer/provocateur known for equal parts eroticism, wit, and
social commentary watch HELMUT NEWTON: THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL. He
died in 2004 in a car accident in front of L.A.’s infamous Chateau
Marmont, but his photos live on in the annals of fashion and in this
documentary directed by Gero von Boehm. It’s a feast of flesh and
fantasy with an engaging array of models, muses, and admirers weighing
in on his Helmut’s subversive genius.
We hear from giant blonde supermodels Nadja Auermann and Claudia
Schiffer, actresses Charlotte Rampling, Isabella Rossellini, and German
arthouse diva Hannah Schygulla who talk easily about how he worked with
them and to what end. Marianne Faithfull and Grace Jones sing his
praises (“He’s a little bit pervert but so am I…”). I swooned over
footage of the young supermodel Cindy Crawford and the face that
launched a thousand French coins, Catherine Deneuve. Though he was
obsessed with the female form, all agreed they felt safe with him, that
he was unrelentingly funny and unpretentious enough to declare that the
dirtiest words in photography were “art” and “good taste.”
Click here to continue reading on Joyce’s Choices
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7/25/2020