Film review: REBECCA (Ben Wheatley, 2020)

A young woman (Lily James), working as a paid companion to the snobby Mrs. Van Hopper (Ann Dowd) is swept off her feet in Monte Carlo by Maxim de Winter, who is out there holidaying alone following the death of his first wife, Rebecca. After a whirlwind romance, the two marry, and return to his handsome estate in Manderley.

10 Most Attractive Men in a 2019 Film

2018's list, in case you wanted to get a flavour for Emsy's taste in Hollywood hunks!

10. Lakeith Stanfield, Knives Out (new entrant)

The 10 Fittest Chaps in Film, 2017.

Although I'm yet to see quite a few of the major Oscar contenders, I've had a peruse of the list of films, and, eye candy-wise, I think I've seen everything I need to see to compile this list. 2017 was an extremely fine (in more ways than one, ehehe) year for handsome men in film. 

I could even compile a top 10 hottest from men who didn't make the list, as some men who didn't quite make the cut but were certainly not difficult on the eyes include: Oscar Isaac in The Last Jedi,  Luke Evans as Gaston in Beauty and the Beast (shite film tho), Dave Franco and Zac Efron in The Disaster Artist, Sam Claflin in My Cousin Rachel, Armie Hammer in Call Me By Your Name (tbf, if it was on hotness alone, he'd make the list, but his thirsty Oscar-begging kept him off the list, haha),  Jay Hernandez in Bad Moms 2 and Leslie Odom, Jr in Murder on the Orient Express.

So, without further ado, the babes!

10. Harry Styles, Dunkirk

09. John Boyega, The Last Jedi

08. Nick Jonas, Jumanji

07. Tom Hardy, Dunkirk

06. Domhnall Gleeson, American Made

This dishy Irishman won this competition in 2015 for The Revenant, when he also graced the list a whopping three times.

05. Cillian Murphy, Dunkirk

04.  Timothée Chalamet, Call Me By Your Name

03. Fionn Whitehead, Dunkirk

2017 has been dubbed by some randy film critics as the 'Year of the Twink', and with Styles, Whitehead and Chalamet on this list (and a bunch of Dunkirk boys who I omitted), it's not hard to see why!

02. Taron Egerton, Kingsman 2: The Golden Circle

01. Chris Pine, Wonder Woman 

Professor Marston and the Small Screen.

I'm very excited about Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. Luke Evans aka Gaston plays the title character, a psych professor who created the Wonder Woman character, who was inspired by two women: his wife, and his wife's girlfriend. 

His missus is played by the fierce Cambridge alumni Rebecca Hall, and their lover is played by Bella Heathcote, who's striking good looks were one of the few redeeming factors of that trashy The Neon Demon.

The film opens in UK cinemas this Friday, and in booking my seat, at one of Leicester Square Odeon's studios, I was struck by how tiny the cinema (and thus, the screen) was!

5 x 6 = 30, + 3 = 33.

A cinema which seats merely 33 people!

Is that the smallest cinema you've seen, or can you go even lower?

My Seven Favourite Songs from Disney Musicals

I’ve restricted the options to just songs from Disney musicals, as opposed to songs that appeared in Disney non-musicals, such as ‘When She Loved Me’ from Toy Story 2, otherwise it would have made a hard task even harder (I love ‘Le Festin’ from Ratatouille)!

07. Hellfire – The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)

A left-field shout, given the crux of this song is about the sexual frustration a pious priest feels towards the beguiling gypsy Esmeralda. But I had to nominate Hellfire because it’s memorable, taboo, and tonally, so recherché (what other Disney film features the line ‘he made the Devil so much stronger than the man’?)

Essentially, the message of Hellfire is ‘if I can’t have her, no-one can’. It’s every possessive ex-boyfriend, immortalised in a Disney song, and fits in neatly with the plot, as dastard Claude Frollo’s unsatisfied urges are his motivation for a Domino effect that leads to Paris burning. The religious imagery employed in Hellfire only go to compound Frollo’s sense of sinful lust for a woman he both despises, yet will do anything to possess.

I like songs which shine a torch onto the hypocrisy of religion, and Hellfire offers an insight to this holier-than-thou priest’s mindset. Turns out, his thoughts aren’t so holy, and the choir-like vocals accompanying Frollo’s disturbing soliloquy underscores this irony nicely.

(On a slight film ratings tangent, the likes of fluffy Frozen and Tangled getting rated PG when The Hunchback of Notre Dame, by far one of their darkest films, was only a U, is mighty misleading. It ought to be at least a 12 for the creepy overtones in this song alone).

06. Prince Ali – Aladdin (1992)

My five favourite songs from FROZEN (2013).

A good musical has to have more than just one big marquee song. Frozen has several great ones, so I thought I’d do a top 5 of the ones that I liked the most. After all, it's a musical who's soundtrack I'm fairly well acquainted with, shall we say!

For there's no club in town quite as manly...

Four months on from seeing Beauty and the Beast at the cinema, I'm still absolutely obsessed with the 'Gaston' song. Even the most tenuous thing, such as the club photographed above, gets me breaking out in song. It might just be my second-ever favourite Disney song (second only to 'Let it Go', obviously).

Oh, and say hello to what will almost certainly be one of the worst films of 2017: