Maggie Cheung knows how to smoke a cigarette. It is not clumsily stuck between her lips, cheeks desperately sucked in, in search of the great hit. Maggie Cheung determinedly puts the cigarette between her teeth in one, swift movement, closing her lips around the filter in a perfect match.
Some actors are very good at smoking. De Niro. Penn.
Some actors, you can tell, don't smoke but pretend to.
Some actors, you can tell, smoke, but pretend to be people who don't and then do.
And some actors not only smoke convincingly, but ever so attractively. One of these actors is Maggie Cheung.

Clean is not a bad film. But it doesn't know what it wants and how it wants to do it - what's the point of Tricky? Having him in the film, 'playing' himself is neither tongue-in-cheek nor does it enhance the film in any way.
Nick Nolte is obviously brilliant - I guess that's what he does - and the storyline with Cheung, Nolte and the boy is very, very good - I wish they would have explored that more, and celebrity cameos less.

Anyway - Mike writes about these things much better than I, so check out what he has to say about Raindance and LFF over at Cinema Minima.
posted by charlotte at 18:20 - comment