Sam Taylor-Wood Movies
The true story of John Lennon's troubled childhood and difficult relationship with his family is brought to the screen in this period drama. Young John (Alex Ambrose) is a bright but sharp-tongued boy living in the coastal town of Liverpool during the 1950s with his aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas) and uncle George (David Threlfall). John's father walked out on the family when he was four years old, and the boy was given to Mimi to raise, even though his mother, Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), was still alive. While Mimi's straight-laced nature runs counter to John's more reckless personality, they clearly love one another and the household is thrown into chaos when George dies suddenly. At the funeral, teenage John (now played by Aaron Johnson) sees Julia, and learns to his surprise that she lives only a few blocks away from Mimi. John pays her a visit, and Julia gratefully welcomes him back into her life. Julia's personality is a much closer fit to John than Mimi, and she encourages his love for writing and music, teaching him to play the banjo. However, John's renewed relationship with Julia brings up a number of unanswered questions, and causes new tensions between Mimi and John. And as rock & roll becomes the hot new sound of the day, John falls in love with the bold new music and makes a friend who is interested in forming a band, Paul (Thomas Brodie Sangster). The first feature film from artist-turned-director Sam Taylor-Wood, Nowhere Boy was the closing night attraction at the 2009 BFI London Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
- Starring:
- Kristin Scott Thomas, Thomas Sangster, (more)
- 2006
Part of the hardcore-sex art anthology Destricted, Sam Taylor-Wood's short film Death Valley concerns a man's exploration of self-pleasure. Other segments of Destricted feature the work of such filmmakers as Larry Clark and Matthew Barney. ~ Matthew Tobey, Rovi
As helmed by a series of avant-garde performance artists and provocateurs, the seven-episode omnibus picture Destricted both pays homage to classic porn and deconstructs the concepts of obscenity and voyeurism, with a series of extreme tonal variations on the sexual act. The premier episode, artist Matthew Barney's "Hoist" (which is laced with transsexual metaphors) depicts a bizarre mating ritual between a man with a giant cucumber for a penis and a 50-ton deforesting Caterpillar truck. For the second go-round, House Call, notorious still photographer Richard Prince (best known for "re-photographing" the Garry Gross nudes of Brooke Shields) re-shoots to the point of graininess (and re-dubs) images from a "classic" hardcore sequence involving an encounter between a stud (John Saint John) and a chesty woman (Kora Reed), and their kinky games with a thermometer. Commercial veteran Marco Brambilla authored the third episode, "Sync" - a kind of "teaser" - by splicing together thousands of split-second sequences from sex scenes in both hardcore and mainsteam features, and "matching up" the action (creating a sequence with it of the various film segments), from foreplay to climax. Controversial director Larry Clark (Kids, Ken Park) authored the fourth (and longest, at 38 minutes) segment, entitled "Impaled"; it begins with a series of spontaneous, one-on-one interviews with adolescent boys, where Clark asks them intimate questions about their sexual fantasies and sexual desires, and indicates that he plans to select one to undergo an unsimulated, hardcore sex scene with an actual porno actress. The film then cuts to the "act" itself, which proves ironically mechanical and untitillating for its male participant. Sam Taylor-Wood' "Death Valley" constitutes the fifth segment and offers an extended (voyeuristic) glimpse of a man in the desert who masturbates to ejaculation. The sixth segment, Marina Abramovic's much-acclaimed "Balkan Erotic Epic," provides a riotous parody of ethnic sexual rituals, in which women expose their breasts and "mate" with the ground, and men fertilize gardens with their semen. And Gaspar Noe's closer, "We Fuck Alone," combines the influence of Tamaño Natural and Flicker by depicting copulation between a man and an inflatable sex doll - as filmed beneath an alienating strobe light. As a measure of U.S. society's love-it-or-hate-it conservatism, this picture ran at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival but skipped U.S. arthouse distribution (to say nothing of a mainstream American release). It did, however, receive a European theatrical run. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi
- Starring:
- Ana Vukovic, Natasa Vukovic, (more)
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