politics
Veronica Lee
Jon Robin Baitz learnt his craft writing on big American television shows including The West Wing and he created Brothers & Sisters, and Other Desert Cities - his first Broadway play - is another family drama with a political edge. The title comes from the signs saying “Palm Springs/Other Desert Cities” on motorways leading into the Coachella Valley, a vast sprawl of nine cities that have a profusion of resort hotels, spas and golf courses. A two-hour drive from Los Angeles, the area is both a playground for Angelenos, and the place where many choose to live when they retire.So Read more ...
ellin.stein
If Errol Morris lived in Middle Earth he’d make a documentary about Sauron. If he taught at Hogwarts, he’d be turning his cameras on Voldemort. You get the idea. Morris is drawn to Dark Overlords, powerful men of steely ambition and ego, convinced of their own rightness even after events have proven that their wrong-headed ideas have demonstrably contributed to the sum of human misery.He can also claim to be the only person to have made documentaries about not one but two former U.S. Defense Secretaries (Ministers), the pinnacle of the Pentagon. The first was 2003’s Oscar-winning The Fog of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“You can never embarrass politicians by giving them publicity.” Michael Heseltine’s verdict on Spitting Image – he claimed, of course, he never watched it – was surely one of the truer things said in last night's Arena memorial Whatever Happened to Spitting Image?, marking the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the satirical puppet show. It certainly seemed balanced when set alongside an apoplectic Ted Heath, who accused those behind it of being, basically, a bunch of jealous, irresponsible losers.Antony Wall’s film did achieve a nice sense of balance about a programme that went from Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Thirty years ago this month, the National Coal Board announced the closure of 20 pits that were deemed "uneconomic", a decision which would incur the loss of 20,000 jobs. Arthur Scargill, president of the National Union of Mineworkers, responded by calling a strike that would become the longest industrial dispute in British history. It was also probably the most bitter, as the recollections of the former miners and their wives assembled for this documentary painfully demonstrated.Even with its furry low-definition quality, the 1980s news footage of the striking miners and their clashes with Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It is the fate of political leaders to be played by actors. In the circumstances Richard Nixon hasn’t been dealt a bad hand. He has been portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, by Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon on stage and screen and by tall handsome Christopher Shyer in Clint Eastwood’s J Edgar. But towering over them all is Harry Shearer, who has been impersonating Tricky Dicky since Nixon was actually president.Shearer is best known in the UK for his voicing of Montgomery Burns and other characters in The Simpsons, and for Spinal Tap’s priapically challenged bass player Derek Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For a film that opened with Ai Weiwei’s statement, “Without freedom of speech, there is no modern world, just a barbaric one,” there was an irony in the fact that Andreas Johnsen’s Big Brother Watching Me… started practically without words. When the artist was freed in June 2011 following 80 days in prison, one of the conditions of his release was that he would not talk to journalists. For a while we wondered if this Storyville film might be purely observational, without an utterance from its central character.However it happened exactly – presumably the concept of documentary was eventually Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having brought us to the end of Homeland, Channel 4 are hoping lightning will strike twice by introducing another American series based on an Israeli original. Where Homeland was the American version of Hatufim, Hostages is derived from Bnei Aruba, made by Israel's Channel 10, who sold the format to CBS before the original had even been completed.Not that this is another war-on-terror saga, unless a theme of that nature should happen to pop up later in the series. This time, the plot revolves around an elite surgeon, Dr Ellen Sanders (Toni Collette), and her family. As the first episode opens Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It took the last 16 years of Nelson Mandela’s life, almost to the day, to bring his autobiography to the screen. South African producer Anant Singh eventually handed Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom to British director Justin Chadwick and screenwriter William Nicholson to make a film for international audiences. The iconic weight of a violent rebel who became a living saint can’t wholly be thrown off in this authorised (though freely made) biopic. It does, though, remind you that Nelson Mandela was very far from Mother Teresa. Rough and earthy struggle preceded his Robben Island refinement into Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s been a confusing week for British fans of Borgen. As they prepared to say farewell to Birgitte Nyborg and co, their beloved statsminister’s factual avatar was trending in the global media. If you know your Borgen, Danish PM Helle Thorning-Schmidt’s selfie with a President and a Prime Minister looked more like a brilliant script idea than a pesky news item. As outlets in Denmark and beyond devoted pages of print and hours of screen time to unpicking the semiotics of the moment, you can bet series creator Adam Price kicked himself he hadn’t thought of it as a storyline.Anyway, Birgitte Read more ...
kate.bassett
This political satire is hardly a case of rapid-response playwriting. Opening in London's West End last night, after a month touring the regions,The Duck House is a farce about a fictional MP caught up in the parliamentary expenses scandal which hit the headlines way back in 2009. One certainly might have expected Dan Patterson (of TV’s topical Mock the Week) and Colin Swash (from Have I Got New for You) to have been swifter out of the blocks in co-authoring the script. Or have they just belatedly extracted it from their bottom drawer (adding a prologue wherein the MP looks back on the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Special Dialogue is a frothy, lunchtime news-and-chat programme on Indonesia's national television channel. One day – not a special day – its bubbly female anchor hosted three older men. One was called Anwar Congo. She smilingly introduces them by saying “Anwar and his friends developed a new, more efficient system for exterminating communists. It was more humane, less sadistic and avoided excessive violence.” It’s one chilling moment amongst many in a powerful film.Congo (pictured below right) was an executioner for the Suharto regime which took power in 1965. Before turning to contracted- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is a wonderful play to be written about the month in 1502 when Cesare Borgia was holed up in a castle in northern Italy with Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolò Machiavelli. Which of these two was working for the fearsome Borgia? Wrong. It was the creator of the Mona Lisa, not the author of The Prince. Machiavelli was a young diplomat of the new Florentine republic without a thought of realpolitik in his idealistic young head. Meanwhile back in Tuscany another young republican was working on that symbol of civic liberty, the statue of David.It would be 10 years later that the Medicis grabbed Read more ...