Hollywood
Graham Fuller
A nostalgified panacea of pine, tinsel, and tintinnabulation? Or a black hole of loneliness, bitterness and melancholy? Films about Christmas, wholly or partially, have straddled both polarities over the years, producing a surprising number of classics. In compiling this list, I hummed and hahed over Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa (2003), starring Billy Bob Thornton as a hard-drinking (if redeemable) misanthrope who poses in the red suit and white beard to get at a department store’s Christmas takings. It's wicked fun, but to have included it would have been disingenuous: at the time of writing [ Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Show a little more, show a little less. Add a little smoke – welcome to burlesque.” The coy, wittier sister of stripping, and first cousin to musical theatre, the 19th-century art of burlesque is currently enjoying a revival. With comely champions in Dita von Teese and our own gloriously named Immodesty Blaize, the art has shaken off its cruder associations and shimmied into the diamante-studded mainstream. Naughty enough for a red-cheeked thrill, wholesome enough for a BBC documentary, the paradox of burlesque is made for Hollywood and its contradictory values. Add one ex-Mouseketeer, an Read more ...
neil.smith
One would like to think a great deal of thought goes into which leading man pairs up with which leading lady in a big-budget Hollywood product. Yet the practicalities of Hollywood movie-making – scheduling, financing, availability and so on – mean it’s far more likely you cast whoever you can get, and afford, and hope for the best. One can only assume it was random happenstance which saw Johnny Depp combined with Angelina Jolie in The Tourist, there being little else to connect them beyond their status as slightly left-of-centre box-office draws.He, after all, is Mr Eccentric – a bag of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Sofia Coppola proved, with Lost in Translation from seven years ago, that there’s hardly a better location for showing the nuances of emotional dysfunction than the anonymity of an international hotel. No surprise then that much of her new film Somewhere, winner of the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival, is set in the characterless corridors and rooms of the celebrity hang-out Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, though her investigation here of a central father-daughter relationship delivers a stronger emotional reflection than in the earlier film. Understatement remains the key in a Read more ...
neil.smith
It is not uncommon for opportunistic film-makers to put together a flashy promo in the hope it will attract enough investors to turn it into a full-length feature. When Robert Rodriguez made the Machete trailer for 2007 double-bill Grindhouse, though – an all-action spoof featuring striking bit-part actor Danny Trejo as its titular knife-wielding protagonist – he had no intention of taking this parodic in-joke any further.Watch the original Machete trailer:Three years on and countless fan entreaties later, Rodriguez has expanded that earlier gambit into a 104-minute opus whose “strong bloody Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Although there are thematic links between many of the movie posters designed by Bill Gold between 1942 and 2003, especially in the talismanic use of telephones (Dial M for Murder, Klute, The Front Page) and guns (Casablanca, Deliverance, the Dirty Harry films), what’s remarkable is the range of styles he used in creating numerous iconic works. It seems unlikely that the designer responsible for the conventional rendering of James Cagney in patriotic garb in Yankee Doodle Dandy (Gold’s debut) could have conceived the frilly pink collage of My Fair Lady, the blobbed, multicoloured hippie images Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Todd Phillips’s interest in road trips as a hook for 90 minutes of male bad behaviour continues with this virtual remake of Planes, Trains and Automobiles. For mismatched couple Steve Martin and John Candy, read Robert Downey Jr and Zach Galifianakis. “I despise you on a cellular level,” Downey Jr tells the latter, whose boundless stupidity directly causes him to be banned from plane travel by Homeland Security, battered by a wheelchair-bound Iraq veteran, have his arm broken in a car crash, shot (twice) and arrested by Mexican border guards. You can’t blame him.Phillips’s films are slowly Read more ...
edward.seckerson
John Wilson and the orchestra which bears his name created an absolute sensation at the 2009 Proms with their celebration of 75 years of MGM musicals. A total of 3.5 million people watched the broadcast live; countless more all over the world will relive the experience on DVD. Wilson has made a speciality of restoring and recreating great movie scores and presenting them in all their very particular glory in concert halls up and down the UK.He is about to embark upon a national tour of the now celebrated MGM Prom hitting Manchester, Gateshead, Glasgow, Birmingham, Cardiff, Bournemouth, and Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
I would call them burglars: musicians from the experimental rock, electronica and sound-art traditions who cross the genre divide, sneak into the world of classical music, pillage its more easily pillaged valuables, thieve its respectability, filch its original ideas, and sprint back breathlessly to their wide-eyed fans to show off this brilliantly clever "new" classical music (much of which is made up of techniques that George Benjamin would have grown out of by the age of six) in double quick time lest someone from classical music pins them down for long enough to inform them how rubbish Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The long-delayed sequel has earned no more than a small, insignificant footnote in movie history. Psycho II, Gregory’s Two Girls and Texasville, to name only three disparate examples, were all superfluous post-scriptums to much venerated, much earlier films. There is at least a pretext for another trip to Wall Street. Since Gordon Gekko last blew the fumes of his fat Havana in your face, money has learnt to talk louder than ever. But there’s another reason why, 22 years on, Oliver Stone’s sequel to his portrait of Reaganomics in action counts as much less of a despoliation: the original was Read more ...
Nick Hasted
He’s six feet under from the start. Paul Conroy is in a wooden coffin a dead-man’s distance beneath Iraqi soil when the flick of his Zippo illuminates him in the darkness where we’ve heard thudding and screaming. His oxygen, like the film, will last 90 minutes. A mobile phone connects him to his kidnapper, family and would-be rescuers. It’s the ultimate locked-room mystery, told from inside the room. But Buried is a curiously unclaustrophobic experience, instead opting to skip down sprightly, satirical tracks.Spanish director Rodrigo Cortés wisely honours Chris Sparling’s script by never Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Actors and musicians are always trying to swap places, often with hilarious consequences (as long as you didn't pay for a ticket). Madonna in Body of Evidence? Keanu Reeves in his inexcusable band Dogstar? I think not. But Tim Robbins is a thoughtful, conscientious kinda guy, and he can even claim a bit of a folk-singing heritage via his father, Gilbert. And he put together the impressive soundtrack for his movie Dead Man Walking. And he played a right-wing folk singer in the political satire Bob Roberts.Nevertheless, there's no point denying that his new album, Tim Robbins and the Rogues Read more ...