Not that I would even consider my humble little journal in the same company, but I gotta tell ya, I really do like discovering blogs and sites along the way that are attuned to my way of thinking and that also cover the same material.
PopMatters is one such site. Covering media across the world of film, TV, books, comics, music and the internet, like most sites of this kind, its best features is often found, well in its features – ie reviews and columns etc.
Take the following as an example. I absolutely adored Notes on a Scandal when it first came out. A tour de force by two actors at the absolute peak of their powers, Dench I think even more so, partly as she had the meatier role. This is the very nifty little capsule review for Notes on a Scandal they presented as part of their “Dark Side” of 100 Essential Female Film Performances.
Sheer delight – although what’s wrong with calling it “camp trash”? You gotta love a subgenre with a name like that.
At age 72, Dench reinvented herself as obsessive lesbian stalker Barbara Covett in this gripping study of two very desperate women (the other is Cate Blanchett’s Sheba Hart) who have nowhere to turn except to one another. Barbara is an institution at her school, students fear her, and the other teachers hate her. She is a mouthy loner that is just unpleasant in general to everyone. She finds everyone dull or stupid except Sheba, who (unfortunately for her), brushes the cobwebs from Barbara’s eyes and virtually illuminates her face and thoughts with her presence alone. Once Barbara sets her sites on a special friendship with a certain young (targeted) lady, things can get a tad nasty, a tad tawdry, even. Couple this obsessive love with the fact that Barbara has, coincidentally, stumbled by accident onto some choice evidence to use in bribing Sheba to be her companion. Filled with one-liners you will use for the rest of your life (“you’re not young, sneers Barbara in one scene), Eyre’s depiction of sexually threatening, corpulent evil lurking in the most unseemly of places, like in the person of sweet little Dame Judi Dench, is a nail-biter. The veteran actress goes for broke in a way that hasn’t been seen since Beryl Reid chortled and smoked her way through The Killing of Sister George 40 years ago. Only here Dench brings an unquestionable theatrical pedigree along with her to quiet any detractors that dismiss this as camp trash.