Hollywood
sarvenaz.sheybany
The Los Angeles Film Festival would seem to have everything going for it. There's the perfect Californian weather, the vast number of stars who live and work in the city, and this year there’s been a glamorous new venue in downtown Los Angeles. The 16th festival has also brought in an ambitious new artistic director, former Newsweek film critic David Ansen, who hopes to unite high and low, screening both crowd-pleasers with major Hollywood talent and small, finely crafted foreign films. And yet something has been amiss.The new broom brought new disorganisation. At the festival village ticket Read more ...
neil.smith
Creative rebirth or belated midlife crisis? That is the question that hovers over Francis Ford Coppola’s decision to turn his back on lucrative studio fare in favour of personal pet projects with an arthouse bent. The director of The Godfather trilogy has been here of course, his 1982 flop One From the Heart leading him to declare bankruptcy and spend a decade or more doing derivative hack work to pay off his debts. This time around, though, he has taken a self-sufficient route, using profits from his Californian vineyard and other businesses to finance modestly budgeted indies that enable Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As cinematic landmarks go, Kutcher Speaks French may not quite be up there with Garbo Talks. But there's a certain pleasure to be had in the opening sequences of the otherwise dismal Killers to find that so quintessential a movie dude can actually manage the word "bonjour". Small wonder that a vacationing, newly single Katherine Heigl falls for this clearly keen linguist in a lift in Nice. His bared torso has nothing to do with it - surely, not! After all, a fella's skills with the bench press look even better accompanied by a self-evident immersion in the back catalogue of Berlitz.If only Read more ...
Graham Fuller
For the second time in four years, John Ford’s Stagecoach - the epochal black-and-white 1939 B-western that made a star of John Wayne and an icon of Monument Valley, and anticipated Ford’s unequalled run of westerns over the next quarter-century and the psychological westerns of the Fifties - has been remastered and reissued in a substantial two-disc DVD package. The eyes of Ford and Wayne completists should thus light up like those of the alcoholic Doc Boone (Oscar-winner Thomas Mitchell) relishing a couple of days’ proximity with the milquetoast whisky drummer Samuel Peacock (Donald Meek) Read more ...
anne.billson
Hollywood westerns and Japanese samurai movies have long been generic companions. Akira Kurosawa borrowed from the films of John Ford for his chambara (a term referring to period drama with swordfighting), while Hollywood borrowed back again by remaking The Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven, and Sergio Leone launched the spaghetti western subgenre by remaking Yojimbo as A Fistful of Dollars.Toshiro Mifune, star of both The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, was the only Japanese actor of his era who might have been reasonably described as world-famous; he had already appeared in Grand Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Has modern cinema ever arranged quite so fetishistic an entrance? She’s blonde, she’s beautiful, and needless to say busty - a benign pneumatic deity who, gliding in slo-mo across a crowded screen, induces males of every age and hue to turn and gawp in frank, unreconstructed appreciation of her sheer unblemished wondrousness. Hollywood is zip-all without dream retail and the shameless objectification of women. But surely – surely – this is too much.The joke of She's Out of My League – let’s call it a joke, because it’s sometimes almost funny – is that romantic compatibility can be organised Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For many years the composer who made his name with Little Shop of Horrors abandoned the theatre to work in Hollywood. He returned to Broadway in 2008 with an enlarged songbook for The Little Mermaid, but it closed within a year. Later came the gospel-tinged Leap of Faith, based on the 1992 film starring Steve Martin as a faith-healing charlatan, and the stage version of the Whoopi Goldberg vehicle Sister Act (pictured below right). Menken’s contribution was a parody of Seventies disco kitsch, a delicious palette stretching from Barry White to the Weather Girls, plus an eponymous ballad, which Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There was a celebrated two-word come-on to 1930s movie-goers. “Garbo Laughs!” was a poster strapline calculated to seduce fans of the mournful Swedish star to Ninotchka, in which her character had an unwonted fit of the giggles. Audiences were rather more conflicted when another cinematic embargo was ended. In The Great Dictator, Chaplin talks.He took his time: 1940 was 13 years after The Jazz Singer. The greatest star of the silent age chose to stick with what he knew, and cast Luddite aspersions on the new-fangled talkies. It was the rise of Nazism which persuaded him to succumb fully to Read more ...
David Nice
Let me confess immediately: Debbie Reynolds didn't mean a great deal to me beyond Singin' in the Rain, warbling "Tammy" and Being Princess Leia's Mother (and believe me, she gets plenty of comic mileage out of the Carrie Fisher connection). But I knew she had a fabulous Hollywood history, and having been smitten by old troupers Elaine Stritch and Barbara Cook in London, I wondered if she could match them. Half-sashaying, half-tittupping on to deliver her own abbreviated, adapted version of Sondheim's "I'm Still Here", she immediately provoked the comparison. Did she compare? Nowhere Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In a stone-faced analysis of the political and historiographical connotations of action hero films, the Guardian’s Film Blog found Iron Man 2 to be “a throwback to a Cold War sensibility,” as well as “the first post-Bush superhero movie.” However, a reader known as Corrective suggested that, au contraire, “perhaps it’s just something dumb to look at while you munch your popcorn.”As I munched my popcorn, I saw Iron Man 2 becoming dumb and dumber before my eyes. It presents the grim symptoms of Sequel Bloat, where a successful first outing of a potential franchise is hosed down with even more Read more ...
graeme.thomson
“Marc Wootton is playing characters in real situations with real people” read the message that followed the opening credits of La La Land, as though Wootton were a comedic Archimedes unveiling his Eureka moment, rather than simply the latest “provocative” British wit to go panning for comedy gold in the murky waters of American embarrassment. La La Land premiered in January on US channel Showtime to fair-to-middling reviews and a thumbs-up from Larry David, and has now been given an Anglicised voiceover by Mighty Boosh star Julian Barratt and sent out to battle on BBC Three.The six-parter Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jazz enthusiast Clint Eastwood, who co-produced this film with the BBC's Arena, clearly harbours a particular regard for songwriter, singer, impresario and record company mogul Johnny Mercer. When Eastwood made his film of John Berendt's book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which was set in Mercer's home town of Savannah, Georgia and partly shot in Mercer House, built by Johnny's grandfather, the accompanying soundtrack was a newly recorded collection of some of Mercer's most celebrated songs.Happily, where Midnight in the Garden... was, even in the most rose-tinted view, a grotesque Read more ...