documentary
Jasper Rees
For most of us, life is what happens to you when you’re looking the other way. For the participants in 7 Up it’s what happens in seven-year segments between the visits of Michael Apted. First interviewed in 1964, they are all 56 now, and as usual the questions loom. Who is still turning up for these things? Who has thrown in the towel or, as will now become a more urgent issue, has anyone shuffled off their mortal coil?Television’s magnificent grand projet crops up every seven years to rebuke modern broadcasters with the accusation that they don't make documentaries the way they used to. The Read more ...
graeme.thomson
My, what strange and wondrous treasures await the record producer given exclusive access to the private vaults of a Beatle. He will, for instance, find entire radio programmes preserved on multi-track tape, and recordings of F1 cars roaring past at some unspecified race track. He will stumble upon a humbled Fab being given his very first sitar lesson by Ravi Shankar, and be privy to a brief musical moment beamed in across the decades from a room at the Jaipur Palace Hotel. There will be a few decent songs, too.One day every last 1/4 inch of this eccentric audio trove may well be exposed to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s a funny old game. Sport rewards the talented when they are young and their bodies responsive. A profession which requires the reflexes to work in instant harmony with the brain means that beyond a certain age, the gifted become instantly unemployable the moment they lose their magic powers. A case of they don’t think it’s all over: it is now. Michael Vaughan, the England cricket captain whose body decided to retire before he did, embarked here on a thoughtful trawl through the sporting world to ask a poignant question: how do you cope when the crowd has stopped applauding, the accolades Read more ...
ash.smyth
He trudges about in the snow somewhere. He cooks. He sleeps. He chops wood and saws branches. He reads. He looks like Darwin. He makes hot drinks. He does not do spring cleaning.This is a more-or-less complete synopsis of Ben Rivers’ Two Years at Sea, a “study” (I think is the correct technical term) of some bloke, somewhere, living in the wilderness, who clearly does not hold down a day-job.He takes a shower.It’s shot on old cameras – in black and white, naturally – for the flickery, old-fashioned look, and in that arty thin-screen ratio. All terribly prize-winny and Jim Jarmusch, of course Read more ...
howard.male
Apart from the fact that it’s a razor-sharp piece of writing, what most delights and impresses me about Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion is how it gets under people’s skin. It has generated several books in fevered opposition to it and, needless to say, countless abusive emails land in the poor man’s inbox every day. If it wasn’t such a lucid, incisive and relentlessly powerful piece of work I doubt it would have got such fierce and sustained opposition.But what poor Richard needs now is not some other despiser of organised religion like myself singing his praises, but a well conceived Read more ...
howard.male
It would be an impossible to do a comprehensive global history of cinema in just 15 hours. You could attempt it by throwing hundreds of thousands of second-long clips at the viewer in a firework display of celluloid. But film-maker and critic Mark Cousins opts for gentle hypnotism over dazzling pyrotechnics. In the opening episode alone, in a lucid correlation of words and images, he shows us how filmmakers evolved a grammar for this new medium which took full advantage of an intrinsic plasticity which theatre, photography and painting lacked. The close-up, the flashback, the move from one Read more ...
ash.smyth
Next week sees the release of Shimon Peres, the second instalment in Spirit Level Film’s The Price of Kings series. A president of Israel who refers to leadership as “not a very happy engagement,” a Nobel Peace Prize-winner who says he has never slept easy, Peres is about as good a subject for a political doco as you’re likely to get. He’s the world’s oldest elected head of state (his political career having begun in the early Fifties!) and the only Israeli PM (two-and-a-half times) to have made it to the top step in their political pantheon. Most famously, though, he shares his Nobel laurels Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
In Louis Theroux: Extreme Love, a film about the realities of looking after children with autism, a mother of twin girls from New Jersey confessed: “I just try and make them happy because, God forgive me, I don’t get a lot of enjoyment from them.” Meanwhile Josephine, the relentlessly cheery mother of 20-year-old Brian, remarked: “To be afraid of your child is a terrible thing.”Brian’s extreme autism had caused him to burn down the family home at the age of eight, and repeatedly attack his mother, pulling her hair out in clumps. On one occasion he tried to strangle her so she called the Read more ...
howard.male
I’ve long held the belief that much of what is wrong with the human race stems directly or indirectly from religion. But while this subject has had something of a renaissance in recent years, thanks to the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the absolutely central story of the global banishment of the Goddess - in all her many forms - has largely remained untold. So it was with some excitement that I sat down to watch the first instalment of this three-part documentary series.Historian Bettany Hughes' ebullience about her subject was immediately palpable. In the opening minutes Read more ...
ash.smyth
As a prelude to last night’s John Sergeant Perspectives doco, I made a note of the four things I thought I knew about Spike Milligan. He was the writer and star of the Goon Show, on which my brothers and I were weaned (the grammar of the humour being obvious even to 10-year-olds, but the subject matter almost totally wasted); he was the author of a decreasingly-witty shelf of literary parodies; he once appeared on Paul Merton’s Room 101 and put his own home in the sin-bin (an early twinge of startled sympathy, there); and then his famously brilliant epitaph – “I told you I was ill” – Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Fifteen years after I first saw Andrew Kötting’s Gallivant (1996), I’m still haunted by its depiction of the pilgrimage Kötting made around the coast of Britain with his 85-year-old grandmother Gladys and his seven-year-old daughter Eden (pictured together below right). Lyrical but not sentimentally scenic, it paid homage to folk customs that contain the spirit of ancient communal life while pointedly spurning the commercial culture that characterises resort towns.The best-known movie by the film-maker and installation/performance artist Kötting, it was a psychographic fin-de-siècle Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It's about as close to a spiritual awakening as I’ve had in my entire life,” said Lionel Richie. He was standing close to the unmarked grave of his great-grandfather, in the pauper’s section of an overgrown Chattanooga cemetery. Richie began the search for the man he’d discovered was called John Louis Brown thinking he was on the trail of a scoundrel. He ended it discovering Brown was a former slave who had become a pioneer of the American civil rights movement. Throughout the programme, Richie wasn’t given to emotional displays and wasn’t verbose. His usual comment as each discovery was Read more ...