October | 2021 | the m0vie blog

254. All About Eve (#134)

Posted on October 2, 2021 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, with special guests Donald Clarke and John Maguire, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every Saturday at 6pm GMT.

This time, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve.

Late one evening, after a performance of Aged in Wood, Karen Richards find young Eve Harrington waiting outside the stage door. Taking pity on the young girl, Karen invites Eve backstage to meet her idol, the actor Margo Channing. Even very quickly insinuates herself into Margo’s life and it becomes clear that the young woman has ambitions that extend beyond mere fandom.

At time of recording, it was ranked 134th on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

Continue reading →

Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: acting, all about eve, betty davies, celebrity, cinema, Citizen Kane, Cold War, donald clarke, fame, fandom, feminism, hollywood, homophobia, john maguire, mank, mankiewicz, marilyn monroe, paranoia, replacement, Theatre | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On “No Time to Die”, and the Daniel Craig Era’s Understanding of James Bond as a Performance…

Posted on October 1, 2021 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the looming release of No Time to Die, it seemed like a good opportunity to reflect on the larger Daniel Craig era of James Bond.

One of the more striking aspects of Craig’s enure as the suave secret agent has been an understanding that James Bond is a performance as much as an actual human being. Bond is set of mannerisms and conventions, coming with a set of expectations and weight. Throughout Craig’s time playing the secret agent, there has been a fascination with that level of performance, and the question of what it entails to be trapped within that framework. It’s a very clever and very self-aware approach to a franchise that is almost sixty years old at this point.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.