Everyman Hampstead - Last Chance Harvey

A trip to North London to see a romcom flick yesterday did not sound a hugely attractive idea for a grey and wet friday evening immediately after a hard day's work. Still maytrees max. had bought two tickets for mrs maytrees' birthday treat
so we set off to celebrate. I'd forgotten that some of N London's tubes still had lifts but Hampstead was as pretty as ever.

The Everyman cinema is thankfully not part of a huge chain. Their films are watched from comfortable sofas rather than the usual upright cinema chain type seats. Being served glasses of wine, hot sticky toffee puddings, ice cream and olives at our sofa also made for a great idiosyncratic atmosphere for watching a film.

Last Chance Harvey was a treat to watch. Filmed in London by Director Joel Hopkins
when he lived in USA at a time when he felt homesick for his home city, meant that the scenes he shot did not depict the typical tourist view of Town. Somerset House fountains at dawn when the road sweeper was doing a round, buskers in the
book mart on the South Bank and through a window of the National Theatre, to name but a few. And we learned about the home sickness part from Joel Hopkins himself. The Everyman had arranged for the film's Director to be introduced by a film critic to give a small talk at the end of the show and to answer questions from the audience. He spoke about writing thescript, trying to get it accepted, working with Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson and the interplay between playright (also Joel Hopkins) and famous actors in script wrting and editing. He mentioned his wish next time to direct a film that someone else had written.

One girl in the audience who like us, very much enjoyed the film, asked Joel Hopkins how he had managed to depict in such accurate fashion, the relationship between a single woman of a certain age (Emma Thompson) and her mother (Eileen Atkins). This elicited comment from Mr Hopkins that he got on well with his own mother - there was laughter from the circle seats and it then transpired that his mum and other family members were present - and that he was self evidently not a single girl.

After taking that lift again down to Northern Line platform level I happened to bump into the film review critic who had facilitated the discussions with Joel Hopkins.
Upon my congratulating him for enabling such interesting views and information about the film to be brought out he, ever the pro, asked if I had enjoyed the film to which I replied with a resounding 'yes'.