What a deceptively slippery customer Clint Eastwood can be at times. There we were musing his latest film, the Oscar-nominated Invictus, was simply a burnished cenotaph to the magnificence of Nelson Mandela when it turns out to be a person of consequence more besides. Invictus, it transpires, is also a handy yardstick against which to measure the current US president. And sad to say he comes up wanting.
Invictus
Production year: 2009
Country: USA
Cert (UK): 12A
Runtime: 133 mins
Directors: Clint Eastwood
Cast: Julian Lewis Jones, Matt Damon, Matt Stern, Morgan Freeman, Patrick Mofokeng, Tony Kgoroge
PG-13 | 1 hr 48 mins | Drama Movie Director Lasse Hallström and scenario writer Jamie Linden worked together to adapt Nicholas Sparks’ novel relating to a young soldier who falls as being an idealistic college girl Synopsis: Savannah Curtis (Amanda Seyfried) was on spring enervate when first met John Tyree (Channing Tatum), who temporarily house. The soldiers fell in love with it practically love at first sight. In the nearest seven years, which time each of the deployment was more dangerous than the last, the delight letters that were sent to Savannah, John is the excepting that thing that makes him go. However, they love and sincere correspondence will ultimately result in consequences the couple good and brave soldiers of true love never be predicted.
Director: Lasse Hallstrom Starring: Channing Tatum, Amanda Seyfried, Henry Thomas, Richard Jenkins, Keith Robinson
Cast: CCH Pounder, Giovanni Ribisi, Michelle Rodriguez, Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Zoe Saldana
More on this thin skin
It was already the biggest ever hit at the US and global box-offices (beating Titanic in both cases), so Avatar ascending to the top of the all-time UK chart arrives as a disdainful anti-climax. But it’s worth recording the performance: at the weekend, its eighth on release, Avatar overtook Mamma Mia! (£69.17m) to become the biggest-ever grosser at UK cinemas.
If Avatar has taught us anything, it’s that making a film that’s both critically acclaimed and commercially successful takes years of work, hundreds of millions of dollars, cutting-edge technology and a script about a Jesusy blue chap who rides right and left attached a flying spoontoon and gets off by sexy aliens whenever he can.
School for Scoundrels actor Ian Carmichael, who has died aged 89. Photograph: Duffy/Getty Images
Ian Carmichael, who has died at the age of 89, was each actor with some incredible work ethic and appetite as being the acting life: he filmed his last episodes of the period TV hospital theatrical piece The Royal just last year.
Before he became a TV regular with his performances as Bertie Wooster and Lord Peter Wimsey, he had been established as one of Britain’session biggest post-war box office stars through innocent, ingenuous roles in classic Boulting Brothers films such as Private’s Progress (1956) and I’m All Right Jack (1959). My favourite Carmichael thin skin is also one of my favourite British films, and by chance favourite films abounding stop. It is that tremendous 1960 comedy School for Scoundrels, the last thin skin by the great, troubled director Robert Hamer (who made Kind Hearts And Coronets).
The winner Avatar knocked off top spot scandal! After seven weekends of continuous rule, Fox and James Cameron’s king of the world was reduced to the role of mere commoner at the US box office. The culprit – or saviour, depending on your view forward these matters – was a romance called Dear John, which debuted in first place onward some estimated $32.4m through Screen Gems.
Channing Tatum, whom you may have seen in the fight club drama Fighting and should be destined for greatness, appears opposite Amanda Seyfried from Mamma Mia. The film was adapted from a Nicholas Sparks novel, which possibly explains in what manner it managed to open at number one over Fox’s glance at sci-fi drama. It was Sparks, you may recall, who wrote The Notebook, which New Line turned into a movie back in 2004 and made more than $115m worldwide with it.
There have been spells when this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) has felt like glimpsing a blueprint for the future – or at smallest more provisional soon sketches. The festival has offered ideas, experiments and proofs of how the digital cinema world might look, from pre-production to shooting to exhibition, as well considered in the state of some playful reminders of past times when the movie industry has faced challenge and change.
Cinema Reloaded, an experiment in raising produce funds through crowd-sourcing, has been the festival’s flagship online programme this year. The aim was to arouse 30,000 euros for one of three proposed short films through virtual donations – an intriguing if in some degree gimmicky notion that does not look to have caught fire in practice: at the time of caligraphy, even the most popular project, from British director Alexis dos Santos, had not yet attracted a 10th of the total target. Nevertheless, it exemplified an bring near being discussed elsewhere at the festival of “tribal” production, in which social networking is fundamental to a project’s funding and development, ensuring a built-in audience for theatrical, retail or online exposition.
It’ll be a screech … will there be rollercoasters at the Avatar amusement park? Photograph: Chad Slattery/Getty Images
This Sunday, fans of tediously that keeps his own counsel recreation will get to enjoy their first glimpse of a magical new cosmos. Yes, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park in Florida, which opens in the recoil, will air its first televised commercial during the Super Bowl.
From the trickle of online information that’s been officially released so far, there’s more to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter than exactly a startlingly dreadful name. Visitors will be apt to buy fish and chips from the Three Broomsticks chop-house, bob around without ceasing the wicker-and-feather Flight of the Hippogriff ride and purchase something called U-No-Poo from Zonko’s Joke Shop. It sounds delightful, even although anyone who bought the first Harry Potter volume at the age of 11 is now probably a jaded 24-year-old with a do job-work so crappy that they could never possibly afford to go there.
That wasn’t me, not one matter how hard I wished it … Mickey Rourke in Rumble Fish. Photograph: Kobal
If movies really do possess heavy-duty powers of seduction (they don’t call us film lovers for nothing), then it’s their characters we tend to fall for hardest and fastest. While it’s currently de rigeur to giggle at the Avatar devotees struggling to rectify to life away from Pandora, which of us has never, in a moderate recess of our psyches, had a similar pang of wanting to be or to befriend the fictional lead of a much-loved film? And yet for me, and I surmise others, there is one type of character to whom our response is usually particular degrees less than warm – the ones who jog the memory of us of ourselves.
It’s a beneath that came to mind this week while reading US journalist Glenn Kenny describe his attendance at an unacknowledged press junket “for the first time in 20 years” at his blog Some Came Running. For the rarely less than caustically honest Kenny, the experience was wholly a bit sobering. His former gig as Premiere magazine’s chief critic felt a mighty long time agone being of the class who he lurked waiting for his nanosecond slots by the talent – so much so that he admitted to feeling “like Tyrone Powers at the end of Nightmare Alley”. Now for anyone who hasn’t seen that particular grisly treat, I can only maintainer Kenny’s recommendation to do in this way, space of time anyone who has demise know what a potent personal admission it represents. Like I say, seeing your own personality or circumstance perfectly laid bare up attached screen can be conscious of being beautiful unsetlling.
Many plates in the air … The Princess and the Frog’s diligent Tiana
The Princess and the Frog, Disney’s animation about a girl who falls for a prince one time they’ve both turned green, has rightly been identified being of the kind which a peering blend of the old-fashioned and the radix. The hand-drawn animation is shamelessly retro: its matt detail and static pastels entirely the more startling in an age of pixels.
The Princess and the Frog
Production year: 2009
Country: USA
Cert (UK): U
Runtime: 97 mins
Directors: John Musker, Ron Clements
Cast: Angela Bassett, Anika Noni Rose, Bruno Campos, Jim Cummings, John Goodman, Keith David, Oprah Winfrey, Terrence Howard
