Already the subject of three landmark documentaries – not least the BBC’s seminal 1989 short John’s Not Mad – the remarkable and often gut wrenching story of John Davidson finds dramatisation this week in Kirk Jones’ I Swear. All emotion lives here. The tears, both joy and despair, are constant. Sure enough, this is a film that grabs you by the heart with astonishing ease and offers little let up. A deeply human script from Jones himself is triumph enough but it’s the powerhouse performances before the camera that nail the landing.
Richard Osman’s “The Thursday Murder Club” screams – or, rather, ahems – Sunday night on the BBC. It’s so obvious that a character in the erroneous, Netflix-funded, Chris Columbus movie that has actually been produced even jokes about the consanguinity. This is not to demean the quality of Osman’s, deservedly popular, storytelling but to acknowledge the extreme particularity of his prose. Hollywood cannot hope to tap into Osman’s very British niche and so Columbus’ film is fine watch but bland and transparently softened for international sensibilities.
There’s a generation out there for whom a sequel to 2003 body swap comedy Freaky Friday enjoys the same nostalgia premium as did the return of Star Wars in 2015’s The Force Awakens to most of the then adult population. That shouldn’t be too surprising. The force is with few in Hollywood as it is with Jamie Lee Curtis. It was, as word has it, only pressure from Curtis that saved Freakier Friday from the same disservice of a streaming debut as befell 2022’s Disenchanted. And why should such sequels be relegated so? Throwing back to the sort of comedy froth that ruled the noughties’ multiplex, Freaky Friday belongs on the big screen. There’s an audience for it and you can bet they’ll show.
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