Posted on Sep 30, 2009 under Main |
There Will Be Blood … and there will be requital
Is there anything additional welcome than a good revenge flick? Whether eaten hot, cold, al dente or through fava beans and a nice Chianti, it be possible to be the most delicious dish. Partly, it’s the investing. involved: we agree to endure maybe each hour or more of pain and suffering alongside our protagonist, largely for the brief catharsis of that brutal final stagger. For non-violent types, our demons are exorcised by those minions on the big screen, so – hopefully – safeguarding that annoying guy in the supermarket queue. A valve is opened, pressure released.
The cross format of chronology-shuffled Memento leaves a more empty feeling. We view our revenge in the first scene and then be necessitated to relive the original crime without the following catharsis of retribution. Most films offer closure; this one presents excepting that an endless search – more realistic, possibly, on the contrary inevitably less satisfying.
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Posted on Sep 30, 2009 under Main |
Not to have existence mistake for falafels … Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
So far, Cloudy through a Chance of Meatballs, the food-dropping family animation, has taken around £3.5m at the UK box office. And forecasts are good for it to continue such a bounty.
- Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs
- Production year: 2009
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): U
- Runtime: 89 mins
- Directors: Chris Miller, Phil Lord
- Cast: Andy Samberg, Anna Faris, Bill Hader, Bruce Campbell, James Caan, Mr T, Tracy Morgan
- More upon the body this film
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Posted on Sep 30, 2009 under Main |
The one with the on-off drama … Friends. Photograph: Channel 4
If you’ve been bored or unaccompanied enough to follow the saga that is the Friends movie, there’s a good befall you are feeling confused. First it was on. Then it was on the farther side. Then it was on again, and then off. Then on. Then opposite to. And now it’s back on again. Or at minutest it was for hind part before five minutes this weekend, before everyone suddenly decided that in fact it had been over all along.
On Sunday, in any of his biannual reminders to the world that he still exists, James Michael Tyler – who played Gunther – said a Friends movie was “definitely on”, adding that it would be in cinemas by dint of. 2011. “I still keep in touch with a lot of the cast,” he uttered, “and they say that they are veritably keen.” However, almost before he had finished speaking, Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow and Courteney Cox all got their representatives to declare to be untrue any involvement in the movie.
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Posted on Sep 29, 2009 under Main |
Pimp my panniers … Made in Queens, one of the films shown at the Bicycle film festival
Nigel is stacking BMX bikes on the pavement opposite the Barbican. There are 300 in all, so he’s arranging them alternately upside-down and right-way-up to maximise space in the venue’s before that time stuffed bike racks. Inside the cinema, cyclists watch Made in Queens and The Scraper Bike King, two of 23 new films being shown at the London leg of this year’s Bicycle film feast, a mobile, international event that aims to promote the best in cycle cinema.
Both Made in Queens and The Scraper Bike King are about kids that have renovated their revolutions. The Queens teenagers of Joe Stevens and Nicholas Randall’s documentary – all immigrants from Trinidad and Tobago – transform old bikes into mobile soundsystems through loading them by sub-woofers, laptops and lighting rigs, then christening them “Tinnitus Rex” and “Basszilla”. Their modifications are farther more ambitious than those of the riders in Rafael Flores’s The Scraper Bike King but the two groups share that powerful unity when coterie riding.
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Posted on Sep 29, 2009 under Main |
The camera loves you … Action Diana. Photograph: Centre of Attention
Last month, Ben Child went to Bute to watch the filming of Action Diana, a remake of John Schlesinger’s Darling, no more than starring random strangers, rather than Julie Christie and Dirk Bogarde. Here, he assesses the finished pellicle.
- Darling
- Production year: 1965
- Country: UK
- Runtime: 127 mins
- Directors: John Schlesinger
- Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Julie Christie
- More on this film
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Posted on Sep 29, 2009 under Main |
Roman Polanski in front of a giant chessboard in Munich in 1972. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
The surprise detention of Roman Polanski has been met with indignation in Hollywood and sparked a flurry of media speculation over the absolute reason at the back Saturday night’s arrest in Zurich.
Film mogul Harvey Weinstein has got at the back a campaign through French film-makers calling on US authorities not to extradite the Oscar-winning Polish director in connection through a charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor dating back more than three decades.
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Posted on Sep 28, 2009 under Main |
Relished … Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
The winner
It’sitting a pretty dull forecast when Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs corsets on top at the box office, but that’s the person of the game this unoccupied time of year. Late September/early October is a strange period of changeable weather when Hollywood staggers hither and thither in a post-summer stupor while the marketing mavens finetune their autumn and awards season fare. All credence to Sony towards finding a hiatus and slipping this single in kind lacking. It’s well made and children seem to still love it after it earned a further $24.6m (£15.5m) in its second weekend to raise the cumulative total to $60m. But couldn’t anything else have come along to blow away the clouds? Well, not any, actually. The Bruce Willis sci-fi, Surrogates, opened in second place on $15m, that suggests it have a mind struggle to gross more than $50-60m at a push – especially then the corresponding; of like kind audience may well be lured away next week by Zombieland, which stars Woody Harrelson and looks like it could be merriment. And that brings us without interruption to…
- Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs
- Production year: 2009
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): U
- Runtime: 89 mins
- Directors: Chris Miller, Phil Lord
- Cast: Andy Samberg, Anna Faris, Bill Hader, Bruce Campbell, James Caan, Mr T, Tracy Morgan
- More on this film
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Posted on Sep 28, 2009 under Main |
In the quagmire of despond … Paul Bettany in the same manner with Charles Darwin in Creation
Perhaps it was really resistance to evolution that consigned Creation to a mere five US screens. By suggesting as much, producer Jeremy Thomas certainly found a receptive audience. In Canada in the manner that in Europe, nothing prompts rueful head-shaking like the supposed idiocy of profoundly ignorant Yankee creationists. Nonetheless, the thin skin does Charles Darwin’s momentous doctrine few favours. Were anti-evolution pastors to take a chance to see it, even the most rabid of them might find comfort in its word.
- Creation
- Production year: 2009
- Country: UK
- Cert (UK): PG
- Runtime: 108 mins
- Directors: Jon Amiel
- Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Jennifer Connelly, Jeremy Northam, Jim Carter, Paul Bettany, Toby Jones
- More on this thin skin
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Posted on Sep 25, 2009 under Main |
No monkey business … Paul Bettany in a scene from Creation
So Americans will get a chance to escort the Darwin biopic Creation after all. But not various of them at first. The film behest be released by Newmarket in only five cinemas this December, in the hope of catching the eye of Oscar voters.
- Creation
- Production year: 2009
- Country: UK
- Cert (UK): PG
- Runtime: 108 mins
- Directors: Jon Amiel
- Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Jennifer Connelly, Jeremy Northam, Jim Carter, Paul Bettany, Toby Jones
- More on this film
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Posted on Sep 25, 2009 under Main |
The good, the bad … West Side Story and Star!, both directed by Robert Wise. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
Consistency, as Oscar Wilde put it, is the last refuge of the unimaginative. And yet, for the most apportionment, modern audiences be possible to use a mentor’s name to guarantee a certain stylistic approach and a incontestable adapt of quality. A Michael Haneke film will not bear been made with an excess of gooey sentiment; not at total one expects nuance from the work of Paul WS Anderson. But amid entirely this tedious reliability, I think a small toast might be in order to the film-makers who have bucked all sense of the predictable. These are the directors who accept, at different points of their career, and sometimes back-to-back, produced the one and the other giddy cinematic highs and frankly unspeakable lows.
Let’s take as our first example Robert Wise – a hugely successful Hollywood jack-of-all-trades whose course of action was towards entirely defined by a frantic veering between the glorious and the direful. From the very beginning that was his path. As a young ascendant film editor, his work on Citizen Kane helped make it everything it’session always deservedly cracked up to be. Yet, barely a year later, he was one of the studio-backed crew members responsible for slicing up so infamously Orson Welles’s ill-starred follow-up The Magnificent Ambersons.
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