Watched Anora on the weekend. The movie which won Mikey Maddison the Oscar for best actress. Nothing trans-ish there, she’s a she-Mikey, don’t get your placards out and cancel me. Not for that anyway.

I did a(nother) thing that I swore I’d never do. Like reading from a Kindle, like looking at my phone at dinner, like breaking the speeding laws on the road; I watched a movie on the tv. Like, a new movie. Paid for it an’ everything. And… I didn’t die. The world didn’t end. But it (obviously) lacked the cinema-experience, which I love. To make it into more of an ‘event’, like going out to a movie, we drove round the block 3 times first, then spent 10 minutes looking for a parking space, even though we have a driveway, queued up for 20 minutes to get a coke from Mel (£12.75) and a cup of popcorn (£22.50), then turned all the lights off, tripped over the coffee table and sat on the sofa making loud apologies. We even turned our phones onto silent. It was like ‘being there’, but only cost 4.99 from Amazon Prime.

Anora is just my kind of girl. (When I was young enough to have ‘my kind of girl’). She’s quirky, gobby, swears all the time, smokes like a chimney and rents by the hour. The ‘perfect woman’. And that’s before she gets on the pole. Because Anora is a sex worker. Most of the other… dancers? escorts? hookers?? are ‘real life’ sex workers because Anora was made on a budget of just $6mil. The same amount that Tom Cruise spends on botox, fillers and hair dye during the shooting of Mission Impossible.

The film starts off as a kind’a Pretty Woman for Generation X or possibly Z or possibly ‘millenials’, I lose track and don’t give a shit. And as Pretty Woman was just a re-make of My Fair Lady, itself a re-make of Pygmalion, its not new. But it feels it. And its funny. By the middle of the movie it is no longer anything Richard Gere would recognise and it is really REALLY funny. Then it ends and if anything, the ending possibly lets it down a bit.

But not our Mikey. She doesn’t let you down at all. She’s fierce, funny and pretty gorgeous all the way through, spending most of the movie in her underwear. For that alone she could have won an Oscar. The acting was a bonus.

So (almost) full marks for Anora, but not sure I’d repeat the ‘home cinema’ thing because… its not the cinema. Fine for old flims. Ok, fine for: Blazing Saddles, The Producers, Die Hard, Terminator, The Fast and the Furious, The Great Escape, but for a new, pristine, out-the-box movie, I’d rather have the real deal. And the popcorn’s cheaper there.

Happy Monday

A xxxx