Film
Jasper Rees
It was down to technological error that Spielberg couldn’t show you much shark. The mechanised rubber fish wasn’t working properly on set, but the studio told the director to carry on shooting anyway. Result: a genuinely terrifying film. Filmmakers have always known that the thing unseen is exponentially more unsettling that the unveiled object, there for all to gawp at. Filmmakers don’t always go by what they know. Hence Benicio Del Toro’s werewolf with its remarkable physical likeness to Dave Lee Travis.It’s a sign of real power in Hollywood when actors are given the money to pursue a pet Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Do the words “British film comedy” cause your heart to sink as deeply as they do mine? Thought so. I wish I could say Beyond the Pole, which is perhaps the first eco-comedy and was made with the intention of raising awareness about polar melting while making us laugh, was worth the effort. Sadly, it wasn’t. It may throw up the odd chuckle, but mostly it’s predictable and unoriginal. The scenery, however, is stunning.Beyond the Pole was originally a Radio 4 series and its co-writer Neil Warhurst wrote the screenplay. The film's co-writer and director David L Williams, who filmed it on the Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Tucked away down a sleepy residential back alley in suburban Tokyo, Studio Ghibli, the headquarters of Hayao Miyazaki, is designed - by the visionary animator himself - in the shape of a boat. When I visited it five years ago, just before the release of his last film, Howl's Moving Castle, the team of young animators all had bowls of fish and terrapins on their desks. The result, Ponyo, is at last about to open in Britain: Miyazaki is a famously slow worker, and the delay has been compounded by a hold-up with distribution. But this irresistible marine fairy-tale is worth the wait.Some of the Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Pop-up cinemas, like restaurants, shops and galleries, are, well, popping up all over the place these days, but one of the pioneers has been Secret Cinema. This outfit claims, grandly, to have been "revolutionising the traditional cinematic experience" ever since December 2007 and its Facebook page boasts over 26,000 fans. It would seem that the secret is out.Previous venues have ranged from the Royal Academy of Arts (Funny Face) to a disused railway tunnel in South London (Gus van Sant's skateboarding movie Paranoid Park) and the events aim to recreate the spirit of the movie being screened Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Although the UK Film Council lost no time in firing out the usual self-congratulatory press release, it has been a thin year for British nominees at this year's Oscars. And, as Kim Newman, my colleague from the London Film Critics' Circle, points out, there is worse, much worse: home-grown talent is virtually absent from the list of nominees for the Razzies, or Golden Raspberries, the parallel event dedicated to celebrating the very worst of the cinematic year. Only Robert Pattinson, from the Twilight films, is bravely flying the flag for Blighty at the 30th Razzies which are announced on 6 Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is a problem with Nelson Mandela. He is, it is universally agreed, a remarkable man. His profound humanity is undoubted. He is on first-name terms with saintliness. When eventually he shuffles off his mortal coil, every newspaper on the planet will hold the front page. The problem comes when you stick him in a drama. Drama calls for its characters to go on a journey, to be visited by doubts, to overcome demons, to keep an audience guessing. Madiba, to use his Xhosa clan name, is all things to all men and women. Apart from scriptwriters.Not that that stops them. He has cropped up in Read more ...
ryan.gilbey
With a wackiness rating of 7.5 and a subject-matter (precocious teens coming of age over one long summer) that scores off the chart for over-familiarity, there seems every likelihood that Youth in Revolt will inspire audience revulsion. Luckily the film has on its side the unfussy directing style of Miguel Arteta (who has the warped buddy movie Chuck and Buck, as well as several episodes of Six Feet Under, in his favour), as well as a lively if not-as-smart-as-it-thinks-it-is script adapted by Gustin Nash from C D Payne’s novel (the first in the “Journals of Nick Twisp” series). The clincher Read more ...
anne.billson
Who doesn't like watching funny-looking fish? There are some doozies in Océans, the new film from Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzard, the duo that brought us Winged Migration. There's one creature with a mug like the Elephant Man and another which disguises itself as a rock, all the better to leap out on its unsuspecting prey. There are jellyfish like mushrooms, anenomes which look like sinister black spiders and an invertebrate which looks like a floating cassock, dropped into the water by some absent-minded Pope.Like Winged Migration, this Franco-Spanish-Swiss coproduction gives us nature Read more ...
sheila.johnston
To accompany Anne Billson's review of Océans, the new documentary from the men behind Winged Migration, we present a line-up of fishy customers from the film, including the two directors, the Jacques Cluzaud and Perrin. Real or fake, verité or Photoshop? Click on the images below to enlarge them and draw your own conclusions.[bg|/THEATRE/Sheila_Johnston/Oceans] 1. Aurelia jellyfish 2. Green turtle 3. Ball of mackerel 4. The co-directors of Océans, Jacques Cluzaud (left) and Jacques Perrin 5. Bottle-nosed dolphin 6. Adelie penguin 7. Walruses 8. California sea lion 9. Weddell seals Read more ...
howard.male
Dr. Feelgood was the first band I ever saw live, and I can still remember that frisson of expectation queuing up outside the Cambridge Corn Exchange in 1975. I didn’t even know who they were or what they sounded like, I simply had some pals who were soon-to-be-punks who’d got wind of the fact that these Canvey Island ne’er-do-wells were the harbingers of something new, something borrowed, and something blue. But the blues were only the starting point for "Feelgood" as we, necessarily, truncated their name.By the summer of 1976, Feelgood had become the best live band in the land. But by the Read more ...
sheila.johnston
"Plays about cinema tend to be written by people who have done some movies, come back and filled their fountain pens from their spleen," the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Larry Gelbart once told me. David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow is probably the best-known example, followed by such works as Christopher Hampton's Tales From Hollywood, Martin Crimp's The Treatment and, most recently, last week's The Little Dog Barked. Oliver Cotton's diverting comedy (they are invariably comedies) sits very snugly in that long dyspeptic tradition, bringing few fresh insights to the party but lifted by some sharp Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Whoever first made the observation - some say Winston Churchill, others Ronald Reagan - there is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man, and a woman. On stage these noble beasts have inspired some highly successful plays, including Peter Schaffer's Equus, recently revived with Daniel Radcliffe, and War Horse, still living up to its name in the West End after over two years (panto horses probably don't count). In cinema, the legacy is more mixed; but not for nothing is the Western, arguably the greatest of film genres, also known as the horse opera. Horses Read more ...