Film
Jasper Rees
There’s a new British film coming soon called Dead Man Running. It features the rapper 50 Cent (aka Curtis “No Relation of the King of Pop” Jackson) as an American loan shark who, suffering in the financial downturn, visits these shores to lean somewhat heavily on a couple of defaulters. The film includes the obligatory flavourings for this sort of cheerful low-life caper: a dog track, and Danny Dyer. But in case you think you know exactly where you are with Dead Man Running, wait up. At the bottom of the press release it says this: “Produced by premiere league UK stars Ashley Cole and Rio Read more ...
michael.palin
This second volume of my diaries covers my life from the beginning of the 1980s to the night before I set out from the Reform Club in September 1988 on Around The World In Eighty Days, the journey that was to change my life.For me the 1980s was the decade when I could have become a Hollywood star, but didn’t. I made plenty of films, seven in seven years, but they were all incorrigibly British. Two were with Terry Gilliam. Time Bandits, British to the core, nevertheless topped the US box-office charts for five weeks. Brazil is constantly voted one of the world’s favourite movies. The diaries Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Last night I was drinking cappuccino with Britain's answer to Robert Redford in a Soho coffee bar. Elliot Grove and I go back a long way: we first met in 1993 when Grove launched Raindance, London's version of Sundance, the premier American independent film festival founded by Redford. Since then Sundance has increasingly been attacked for selling out to Hollywood. By contrast Raindance, now in its 17th year, is still going strong and retains an air of authentic independence.The festival opens on September 30 with the mumblecore comedy Humpday and closes with Steven Soderbergh's The Read more ...
james.rampton
Nigel Tufnel is alive and well and living three miles north of Molkom. That’s not strictly true, of course – the guitarist with the legendary rock band Spinal Tap is on an endless global tour promoting the album “Smell the Glove” and still seeking an explanation for the death of the group’s first drummer, who perished in a “bizarre gardening accident”. However, the mumbo-jumbo spirit of the man who famously declared that the dials on his amplifiers “all go up to 11” certainly hangs over this weird and wonderful location, which lies three miles north of Molkom in Angsbacka, Sweden.This is the Read more ...
sheila.johnston
A thorny dilemma looms for Robert Guédiguian's French Resistance drama, the British premiere of which opens the Cambridge Film Festival tonight in the presence of its director (it was released in France yesterday and opens wide in the UK on October 2). Namely: are such fearless freedom fighters in reality the good guys? Or are they, on the other hand, terrorists and murderers?A wave of recent movies has wrestled with this question in a very broad swathe of contexts. They include Flame and Citron (Danish underground fighters in World War Two); The Baader Meinhof Complex (German anarchists in Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Chances are you have either read the 1978 illustrated children’s book this film was based on, or have read it to your offspring, in which case you will know it’s a charming story told with frequently absurdist humour and visual invention - perfect inspiration for an animated film in 3D.And so it proves, as writer-directors Christopher Miller and Phil Lord bring Judith Barrett and Ron Barrett’s work to life on the big screen. Judi Barrett’s story is set in the small, all-grey town of Swallow Falls, where sardines are the staple diet and fishing for them the only pastime. Then one day nerdy Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Away We Go is the name of Sam Mendes's fifth film, released in Britain this week. But the title could also serve as the buccaneering mantra of a Cambridge-educated Englishman whose career continues to shed any whiff of his home country. On stage or screen, the director is continually drawn to stories culled from across the Atlantic, where he now lives. And why not? If you had directed a first film called American Beauty that would lead to five Oscars and America eating out of your hand, you, too, might well return for more. Mendes's output isn't merely a reflection of his taste, although that Read more ...
sheila.johnston
The tourist cruise boat chugging up the Amazon pauses for another photo opportunity. A dozen or so tribesman with clay-daubed faces and loincloths are discovered posed like a tableau: a colourful addition to the rainforest fauna. The boat marks time for a beat till the natives, glowering resentfully, fire off a stream of half-hearted arrows. Then it quickly revs up and motors on. But wait: a reverse angle shot shows the action from another perspective. The rubberneckers barely out of sight, the naked savages hurriedly swop their loin cloths for t-shirts and trainers, and flock to collect Read more ...
sheila.johnston
As graceful in his approach to death as he was in life, Patrick Swayze died yesterday at the age of 57. I met the actor in 1995 at a turning point in his career, just as the sexy lustre of Dirty Dancing and Ghost was beginning to wear thin. It would have been easy to mock Swayze as a crank for his New Age eccentricities, but his charm, his ingenuousness and his can-do ebullience - a determined energy that also distinguished him in his fight against pancreatic cancer - all proved irresistible. Here is a slightly edited version of that encounter.Before starting a film, Patrick Swayze likes to Read more ...
sheila.johnston
It is, as the best cinema should be, always all about the image. Andrea Arnold's films are born, she says, with just this: a visual imprint - strong, unsettling, inexplicable. The stories then slowly unfurl in her mind from that starting point. On paper, they sound grim: the director goes for terse, no-nonsense titles, and her working-class world seems at first unforgiving. On screen, they are thrilling, intriguing, instantly gripping, the work of a natural-born, utterly original director.Distinctively female in perspective, there's generally a woman at their centre and a rugged piece of male Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Oscar Wilde was once bossing a high-society drawing-room with swishes of his rapier wit when someone else had the temerity to mint an aphorism. “I wish I’d said that,” intoned the great man. Back came the devastating retort: “You will, Oscar, you will.”Wilde was in fact a keen recycler of his own bon mots. Many of those clever-clever inversions that ornament the plays first did service in The Picture of Dorian Gray. The author’s pragmatic calculation was that if they worked on the page, why not the stage? But for some reason, not a lot of them seem to have made the onward journey to the Read more ...
ryan.gilbey
Superbad was a modern-day coming-of-age comedy with inexplicable 1970s trimmings (the title, groovy credits sequence, Richard Pryor references and so on). Now its director, Greg Mottola, has made a period piece proper in the form of Adventureland, set in the mid-1980s in a cheesy, dilapidated Pittsburgh theme park where the rides make you throw up, and the stalls are rigged against any customer hoping to win more than a dying goldfish.The movie is breezy and well-observed, but also deeply conventional. It may poke fun at a tacky nightclub called Razzmatazz, which bills itself as “A Read more ...