Once he has read the letters, he just delivers them, tatty and stained, to the rightful owners. He also disposes of the stacks of circulars and junk mail that he can't be bothered to stuff through letterboxes, which very nearly redeems him in my book. Watching this dog-end of a man bringing disgrace onto his profession, I had a glimpse of how much fun The Postman might have been if this chap had been the hero rather than Kevin Costner.Roy (Robert Skjaerstad) is only able to save Line (Andrine Saether) because he is creeping through her apartment, having stolen her keys and decided to make himself at home. The hearing-impaired are a gift to suspense, as Hitchcock demonstrated in Marnie, but in Junk Mail you're more likely to find Line using her disability against others - pretending that her hearing-aid has packed up when someone is saying something she doesn't care to hear, or lip-reading strangers' conversations, a habit she likens to reading other people's mail.That's something that her unlikely saviour, Roy, knows all about. Such an occurrence wouldn't be out of place here: this is a film where a man finally gets to hold the woman of his dreams, only for her to vomit all over his jacket.But then she has just overdosed and nearly drowned in her bath, and he has rushed to revive her She is Line (pronounced Lena), a deaf dry-cleaner. Along with estate agents, cabbies and smokers, they are one of the few groups against whom it remains socially acceptable to be prejudiced. A film like the Norwegian black comedy Junk Mail isn't likely to find favour with the campaign for the promotion of postmen, if such a thing exists. It only perpetuates the notion that the people who deliver our mail are zombies with no ethics, even less charisma, and an idea of good fashion sense that extends to allowing just one inch of white towelling sock to show between hem and Hush Puppy.The Oslo postal service could well be able to sue for the way it is represented in Junk Mail.
Its employees are portrayed as scraggly layabouts indistinguishable from the local tramps and louts; they sport slicks of greasy hair and the dead, sleepless eyes of smack addicts. A senior manager with folds of skin bulging over his collar has a crunchy cough that threatens to dislodge a lung. Junk Mail (15) Directed by Pal Sletaune Postal workers are part of a rapidly diminishing species. As if kicking into gear, a torrent of energy springs from the man, breaking up sentences with missile noises as he demonstrates the adrenalin rush that performing live gives him."I don't know what acting is I haven't a clue, mate," he concedes "It's being honest with feeling One of the joys of acting is looking at parts of yourself. You personalise that and then look at the circumstances around you... but I'm not very good at talking about acting."`Different for Girls' opens today. `The Iceman Cometh' runs at the Almeida Theatre until 23 May..
1 Air Force One (15) 2 My Best Friend's Wedding (12) 3 Contact (PG)4 Event Horizon (18)5 The Full Monty (15)6 Men in Black (PG)7 Conspiracy Theory (15)8 Speed 2 (PG)9 187 (15)10 The Lost World - Jurassic Park (PG)Thanks to Blockbuster Video. To come is The Revengers' Comedies, alongside Sam Neill, Helena Bonham Carter and Kristin Scott Thomas, as well as Dreaming of Joseph Lees, a love story set on the Isle of Man, in which he plays "a one-legged geologist". The role allowed him the opportunity to work with Samantha Morton, recently lauded for her part in Carine Adler's remarkable Under the Skin. Playing the son of an anarchist, later racked by guilt for sending his mother to the electric chair, Graves saw the role as a chance to consolidate what he had learnt from working on Hurlyburly. "I think that's how the business works," he says, emphasising the point by warning a passing luvvie to never again call him "Rupey".Forthcoming projects show no sign of change. Untrained, he became a staple element to late-Eighties English period drama, featuring in Where Angels Fear To Tread, A Handful of Dust and, memorably, as gamekeeper Scudder in Maurice. Keeping up appearances in the early Nineties, with his cuckolded son of Jeremy Irons in Louis Malle's Damage, and the King's Equerry in Nicholas Hytner's The Madness of King George, Graves has continued to manipulate misinterpreted perceptions of him."Because I'm called Rupert and I'm not from public school, at the time of A Room With A View and Maurice, people assumed I was, which was why I got called into Merchant/Ivory.
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