documentary
howard.male
Joe, Sam and Bruce may be three callow teenagers from southern Utah but they’re still smart enough to realise that the only world they have ever known is wrong, deeply wrong. So wrong, in fact, that they make the hardest decision of their lives by leaving their family, friends and community behind forever, as this is the only way to escape the madness. Directors Tyler Measom and Jennilyn Merton deserve credit for being such invisible presences in a film which simply bears witness to the lives of the boys once they have escaped the sinister-sounding “crick”, a Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints Read more ...
howard.male
Appropriately enough, Forever Young began with the primal beat of Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life". What I consider to be Mr Pop’s “My Way” seems to perfectly sum up the pumped-up and apparently unstoppable forward momentum of the man himself and his against-all-the-odds lengthy career. But it could just as easily represent many of the world-weary yet resilient musicians interviewed in this unexceptional but nevertheless diverting documentary.Along with Iggy was the always-available-to-reminisce-to-camera Rick Wakemen, plus Robert Wyatt, Robin Hitchcock, Eric Burdon (or was it Fungus the Bogeyman’s Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If you happen to be in Trafalgar Square in London any time soon, you should take a close look at the friezes that adorn the ground portion of Nelson’s Column. For there you will find, most unexpectedly, that one of the sailors depicted is a black man, one of 1,400 non-British seamen among the 18,000 who took part in the Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October, 1805.That striking factoid comes from The Untold Battle of Trafalgar, the first in a four-part season, Bloody Foreigners on Channel 4, which aims to show how foreigners were at the heart of some of Britain’s most important historic events. Read more ...
fisun.guner
We know the format: take a bunch of posh, privileged types - held up as examples of cluelessness when it comes to how “ordinary” people live by privileged, overpaid TV executives - and plonk them down in the middle of some dodgy council estate. Remove their credit cards and give them £6.50 to last a week. Watch as they baulk at the amount of cash their new, jobless neighbour manages to spend on fags, kebabs and the occasional drug habit. Watch as they wonder how to react to the plight of a harassed single mother in a mouldy one-bed flat who’s railing against immigrant families being given“ Read more ...
howard.male
With the last ever series of Big Brother dominating Channel Four’s schedules for the rest of the summer, the first TV screening of this Sundance Film Festival award-winner couldn’t have been better timed. Because the chillingly disconcerting “art project” that dot-com pioneer Josh Harris devised back in 1999 (just before Big Brother came on air for the first time) made the world’s most controversial reality TV show look like Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation, by comparison. American film director Ondi Timoner’s documentary is an unsettling look at Harris’s struggle to find himself which could be Read more ...
graeme.thomson
American television's desire to upgrade the BBC’s Who do You Think You Are? into a prime piece of emotional real estate was never likely to meet any serious resistance. Even stripped of the stridently Hollywood voiceover that teed up the US version of the show when it first aired on NBC back in March - “To know who you are, you have to know where you came from”, it boomed over a slo-mo montage of Olympian hugging - last night’s tweaked version, with a new, subdued British narration, told us more about US TV and America’s relationship with its own history than it ever did about its subject, Read more ...
howard.male
My excuse is that I was comfortably settled on the sofa next to my wife when the first episode of Glee aired, and I just got drawn in. I know, it’s not much of an excuse - and it hardly explains the fact that I then went on to watch the next 20 episodes - but there we are. And as a heterosexual middle-aged ex-punk rocker, I’m certainly not the obvious target demographic for this latest American television phenomenon, so perhaps I should explain further.Glee is probably the most aptly named TV show ever devised, in that the dictionary defines “glee” as “open delight or pleasure; exultant joy; Read more ...
graeme.thomson
I’m just back – goodie bag gripped greedily in paw – from this morning’s launch of the 64th Edinburgh International Film Festival, which runs in the Scottish capital from 16-27 June. Since breaking away from the over-crowded August festival calendar and establishing itself in an early summer slot, the EIFF has become a much more robust stand-alone event, and 2010 looks like throwing up another fine mix of international premieres, new works by established US directors, superior art-house flicks from renowned auteurs and several interesting-looking debuts from talented young British movie- Read more ...
william.ward
The worldwide anti-Berlusconi lobby has made much of the fact that the state-owned (and government-controlled) RAI TV channels declined to screen trailers for Italo-Swede Erik Gandini’s 2009 documentary film Videocracy. But It's hard to think what exercised Berlusconi's place men there so much. Anyone hoping to sit down to 85 minutes of harsh political polemic will be disappointed. Michael Moore it is not.Presented in the UK for the first time at the London Documentary Film Festival at the Barbican in April, followed by a debate with the director in person, Videocracy is a highly engaging and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Are you looking forward to Christmas?” was always going to be a difficult question. Anthony looked forward to spending it with his daughter and grandchild – as long as he kept taking the medication that allowed him to stay out of hospital. Andrew should have had a happy gathering lined up, except his latest bout of mania had seen him leave the family home. Richard was wrapping presents. A whisk for his mum, because she’d stopped eating; some liqueur chocolates for his gran, the only way to get a drop of alcohol into the old girl. Trouble was Richard had something else to look forward to: the Read more ...
josh.spero
Television schedules are set months in advance – susceptible only to royal fatalities or political earthquakes (as would-be viewers of EastEnders found out the other night) – but the timing of Behind the Scenes at the Museum could not be more perfect. In our tight economic circumstances, departmental budgets are going to be cut sharply, and there will be no exception for culture and heritage projects, which is why a series about failing museums and attempts to rescue them is right for this moment. The first programme, directed by Richard Macer, is set in the British Commercial Vehicle Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If I had a fiver for every time I have heard a comic described (usually by the comic himself) as “the new Bill Hicks”, I would be rather comfortably off. It’s tosh, of course, and, as his brother astutely says in American: The Bill Hicks Story, only Bill Hicks could be Bill Hicks, because what you saw on the outside was what was on the inside. Hicks himself is in no position to argue either way: he died, aged 32, from pancreatic cancer in 1994. Those who die at the height of their powers are usually conferred icon status; some deserve it; many do not. On balance, Hicks almost certainly does, Read more ...