Something to watch tonight: Thursday 15 February

When Did You Last See Your Father? (Tucker, 2008)

While I was trawl­ing through my greatest hits yes­ter­day, look­ing for Guy Ritchie reviews, I came across this rave and thought it should be today’s recommendation:

Finally, there’s not many films that wouldn’t be improved with the addi­tion of the won­der­ful Jim Broadbent, and he really shines in And When Did You Last See Your Father?, a worthy brit-lit adapt­a­tion that also stars Colin Firth. Broadbent plays the fath­er in ques­tion, a jovi­al egot­ist who doesn’t real­ise that his over-abundant joie-de-vivre is crush­ing the spir­its of those around him. Firth is poet Blake Morrison, com­ing to terms with his father’s ter­min­al ill­ness with the help of plenty of flash­backs to his 60s child­hood. Director Anand Tucker builds his case care­fully until a splen­didly mov­ing finale draws a line under a very sat­is­fy­ing film.

That Capital Times review also included Anthony McCarten’s Show of Hands, Ricky Gervais as a dent­ist in Ghost Town, Be Kind Rewind (iron­ic­ally unavail­able digit­ally), Kiefer Sutherland Japanese hor­ror remake Mirrors, Simon Pegg and Jeff Bridges in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People and Guy Ritchie’s Rocknrolla.

Where to watch When Did You Last See Your Father?

Aotearoa, Australia: Digital rent­al from Apple

USA: Streaming on Prime Video* or digit­al rent­al from Apple

UK: Currently unavail­able online

*Prime Video has star­ted list­ing all their digit­al rent­als under the Prime label so you don’t know until you go there wheth­er it’s part of your sub­scrip­tion or not. Add to that, the new addi­tion of advert­ising on their stand­ard sub­scrip­tion plan and it’s hard not to see them as a pretty shabby out­fit. I have a US Prime Video account and have checked that When Did You Last See Your Father? is val­id for US Prime mem­bers but I won’t be able to do that every time, sorry.

Further reading

Last year was the 25^th anniversary of Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and – to coin­cide with the spe­cial edi­tion Blu-ray that came out just before Christmas – I wrote an re-appreciation of it for RNZ here:

Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was Guy Ritchie’s first fea­ture film as dir­ect­or, Matthew Vaughn’s first film as pro­du­cer, and both Jason Statham and Vinnie Jones’ first act­ing roles. The first three have gone on to become pil­lars of the British film industry while Jones has used his ‘hard man’ per­sona to com­bine act­ing with real­ity tele­vi­sion presenting.

So, the suc­cess has been good for them, but has the impact of Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels been good for audi­ences … or for the culture?