I’ve been watching movies as long as I can remember.
Silent clowns Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton; classic Westerns (all of them!), visionary science fiction from Forbidden Planet to The Day the Earth Stood Still.
I thrilled at Errol Flyn as Robin Hood and the Sea Hawk; Jimmy Stewart maturing from honest everyman to gritty cowboy. I was captivated by Connery as Bond, touched by John Mills in Great Expectations. …
Cruise, Smith and Pitt have all flopped this year, but when the cries about expensive overpaid stars no longer opening movies die down, the next wave of ‘bankable certs’ should arrive in two years time.
Oblivion, After Earth and the troubled World War Z are the latest high-concept movies to have mangled the scripts in favour of big action set-peices and dodgy dialogue.
Oblivion steals from every sci-fi flick in decades, After Irk, the Smith family project from M. Night Shame-about-the-last-one makes no sense and WW-Zeeee departs so far from the lauded source material you wonder why they bothered. …
“In a Culture Show special, Oscar winning director Danny Boyle talks to Mark Kermode about his new film Trance, London 2012’s afterglow and the highs and lows of an extraordinary film-making career.”
Danny Boyle began his career in subversive agit-prop theatre at the Royal Court and went on to be equally subversive in TV.
Breaking into feature films, his back catalogue includes the violent, kinetic, anarchic as well as touching, satirical, philosophical and romantic. From iconic counter-culture Trainspotting, frenetic horror 28 Days Later, to eight-Oscar triumph, the brutal romance Slumdog Millionaire, Boyle is at his best when he refuses to compromise. It was something he acknowledged in less successful projects – Hollywood excesses A Life Less Ordinary and The Beach. …
Review: Danny Boyle – Man of Wonder (BBC Culture Show Special)Read More »
There’s a 1966 Peter Sellars movie, After the Fox, in which Sellars’ master criminal Aldo Vanucci (aka the Fox), posing as a famous director, persuades the entire population of a coastal village that they are the stars of his latest art-house movie, the cover story for smuggling the “gold of Cairo” abroad.
Exit Through the Gift Shop is a documentary centred on the apparent friendship between British street artist ‘Banksy’ and obsessive super-fan Thierry Guetta, an LA-based Frenchman with a lucrative ‘retro’ clothing business and a compulsion for videoing his life. …