Film
Sarah Kent
A friend of mine has an Eames lounge chair that he treats with enormous reverence and claims is the comfiest seat ever made. I simply don’t get it; with its bent plywood shell and black leather upholstery, this 1956 American design classic looks to me dark, clumsy and uninviting – especially when compared with Eileen Gray’s Bibendum chair of some 50 years earlier or the delicate designs produced in the 1920s for the Bauhaus by Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe.Since the Eames phenomenon didn’t readily cross the Atlantic and we are not overly familiar with their achievements, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Hitchcock’s penultimate film was the grubby, squirm-inducing Frenzy, and Barry Foster's depiction of the grim killer Robert Rusk is central to the disquieting aura it casts. The film’s production was problematic enough, having been cut by the BBFC before release. It also had casting problems – Michael Caine turned down the lead role. Hitchcock dismissed composer Henry Mancini from soundtrack duties after having commissioned him. Hitchcock’s first British production for two decades wasn’t an easy ride for the director or audiences.Students of London history can look to Frenzy as a time capsule Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It’s always a thrill watching The 39 Steps’ Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) doing daredevil feats on the Flying Scotsman as it speeds across the Forth Bridge, kissing a Scottish crofter’s jealously guarded wife, and bringing down the house with an inane extemporized speech at a constituency meeting.A passive ex-Canadian rancher in London, Hannay must extricate himself from a murder rap and expose a spy ring by revealing unexpected daring, physical agility, and mental resourcefulness. Wrongly suspected of murdering a Mata Hari type (Lucie Mannheim) he thought was a prostitute but had no interest Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Seth MacFarlane is the equal opportunity offender responsible for a trio of animated sitcoms: Family Guy, American Dad! and The Cleveland Show. The hardest-working man in TV comedy is known for his colourfully un-PC style and agreeably obnoxious humour, marrying American brassiness with sharp satire, and for turning a baby into a maniacal genius. Ted, his largely enjoyable film debut, focuses on a man held in a state of arrested development by his bad-influence buddy, the twist being that said buddy is a teddy bear. Teddy Ruxpin he most certainly isn't.In last year’s child-friendly Hop the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Football and film: what is that? Let’s agree that it has not always been the happiest relationship. If you’ve observed Brian Clough’s brief encounter with the Leeds squad in The Damned United, you'll get the picture. They really ought to be best mates, both being forms of mass entertainment. They have the same values, dreams and indeed time frame: 90 minutes or thereabouts (depends who's reffing/directing). And at their most venal they both pray at the altar of profit. Somehow, though, they just don’t click.Why? Time for a bit of punditry, Ron. The main problem is no scriptwriter can make up Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Is that a sabre you see before you? It could be if you’re talking any of multiple stage and screen versions of Hamlet, the Shakespeare play that puts centre-stage arguably the most esoteric of all Olympics activities: fencing. (Well, OK, beach volleyball is possibly just as rarefied, though it’s hard to imagine Hamlet and Laertes having much truck with that.)Hamlet may in fact represent most culture vultures’ first (only?) exposure to a sport that seems to belong to a select few, bringing with it a self-enclosed language that left even the BBC flummoxed one recent evening as a commentator Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
You’d have to have a heart of coal not to be moved by Aki Kaurismäki’s celebration of tolerance, redemption and the goodness that people can do. Le Havre isn’t quite It a Wonderful Life, but it’s not far short. The sensitivity with which the Finnish – now resident in France – director brings together unlikely elements makes him more than a humanist and takes him further into the political than any of his previous films.Le Havre is the story of shoe-shine man Marcel Marx (an impressively ragged but still noble André Wilms). He scrapes a living in Le Havre, where the real focus of his life is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Uncontrollable mirth is the response of many onlookers to the Olympic spectacle of synchronised swimming, though it is (they say) a discipline which demands formidable strength and technical accuracy. Be that as it may, it probably wouldn't exist without Australian swimmer, vaudevillian and movie star Annette Kellerman, who was credited with inventing synchronised swimming after she performed the world's first water ballet in a glass tank at the New York Hippodrome in 1907.Kellerman's career was celebrated in the 1952 biopic The One Piece Bathing Suit - originally titled Million Dollar Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
What of the star sportsman whose glory days are behind him? It seems an absurd question to pose, with the sun barely set on the theatrics of Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony, but for Randy “The Ram” Robinson it’s everyday existentialism.Of course it's a bit of a stretch for our series of Olympic-themed posts to equate wrestling in the form practised during the competition with the slightly seedy world inhabited by Mickey Rourke’s Ram and his contemporaries - roles which, in many cases, were filled by real-life characters from the US professional wrestling circuit. It’s unlikely, for example, Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The tone of these two new Pier Paolo Pasolini's re-releases couldn't be more different. The Hawks and the Sparrows stars the Italian prince of laughter Totò and one of Pasolini's most popular Calabrian peasant-actors (and lovers) Ninetto Davoli, and ambles gently through the Italian countryside in a surreal and inventive and Last of the Summer Wine-ish way. Pigsty, on the other hand, is the kind of Pasolini film where, when two boys meet, you have no idea if they're going to fight each other, fuck each other or eat each other. Mostly, they eat each other - and anything else that they can lay Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The British new wave came ashore with its angry young men – foremost among them those played by Laurence Harvey in Room at the Top (1959), Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1962), and Richard Harris in This Sporting Life (1963), all but Courtenay’s rebellious Nottingham borstal boy bloody-minded Northerners.With the exception of Rita Tushingham’s character, pregnant and single in A Taste of Honey (1961), and Leslie Caron, pregnant, single, and French, in The L-Shaped Room (1962), the movement’s Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A football team normally heads out onto the pitch determined to win – unless, perhaps, the match has been fixed. Or unless they’ve been under Gestapo pressure to lose. That was what happened at the legendary “Death Match” in Kiev in August 1942. A team of Ukrainians - eight drawn from previous Dynamo Kiev sides and three from local Lokomotiv - playing under the moniker FC Start had reassembled after the Nazi invasion of the city. Most of them had been working in a local bakery.The controversy surrounding the events hasn’t gone away. A recent Russian film Match of Death (main picture) has Read more ...