Wednesday 8 July 2009

Esquire (August 2009) now on stands: Harry Potter assaulted

Per my previous Wimbledon-inspired comments on the slow ebbing-away of summer once the Longest Day has gone by - there's something additionally dispiriting on that score about the standard one-month-on cover-dating of monthly magazines. So (wistfully) here we now have the August Esquire, just in time before we're all back to school... On the upside, the as-ever excellent content includes tips on how best we should kit ourselves out in all this blazing weather...
The cover star is Daniel Radcliffe. The special subscriber's cover (above) has a 50s-era Hollywood head-shot feel to it, but for the cover that's actually on the newsstands Radcliffe has been made up with blackened eye and bloodied nose, as if some wizard-hater had just knocked seven bells out of him on the street.
Elsewhere, my column is given over to the 2-part French film Mesrine: to be precise, Mesrine: Killer Instinct & Mesrine: Public Enemy No.1, both due for UK release in August. "Both films were big hits on French soil", I write, "and Mesrine is surely the most boldly and peculiarly French anti-hero the cinema has shown us in recent years."
Vincent Cassel plays the eponymous anti-hero, and it's a genuine balls-out big-movie-star performance from him, though I was just as interested in Cecile De France as his female doppelganger Jeanne, whom I decided to call "a kick-ass, gap-toothed bombshell who spurs [Mesrine] to new heights of infamy. De France, one of those mutable beauties who never looks the same in any two photos, is perfectly suited to the shady glamour of this project..."

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