Mr. Nice

It was another really dull day at work, and not a particularly good one. It was one of those days where I just couldn't wait to get away.

When I left work I went up to the Cineworld cinema to see my next Film Festival movie which was Mr. Nice, directed by Bernard Rose and based on the autobiographical book by Howard Marks. The film opens with Marks (played by Rhys Ifans) taking his first experiemnts with drugs in the early 1960s at Oxford University and follows his eventful life as he becomes a notorious marijuana smuggler and sometime spy. The movie was often very funny and packed with incident, although due to the nature of it being a biographical film, there wasn't really a proper storyline just a succession of incidents. It was very stylishly made and unusually, instead of using captions to denote the passage of time from the early 1960s until the mid 1990s, the look of the movie changes to mirror the look of movies that were being made at the time the action is set. I've never read the book, although I have heard that it's very good. I'll have to check it out now I've seen the film.

At the screening were the actors Rhys Ifans and David Thewlis along with the director, Bernard Rose (who directed Candyman among many others), and also Howard Marks himself, who has become a real cult figure following the huge success of the book and often goes on speaking tours and which made for the unusual experience of watching a film biography of someone and knowing that the film's subject is there in person. The four did an entertaining question and answer session with the audience afterwards. Thewlis mentioned that he was genuinely worried that the person he played, a violent killer, was still on the loose and was unlikely to be particularly thrilled with the movie. Apparently Thewlis had been warned that he "might receive death threats... but not to take them seriously".