documentary
Upside Down – The Creation Records StoryMonday, 25 April 2011
“I thought I was creating metaphysical history by running Creation,” says the label’s Alan McGee in Upside Down. Seconds later the meat-and-potatoes rock of Oasis blasts from the soundtrack. The drug-assisted disconnect between such lofty aspiration... Read more... |
SweetgrassSaturday, 23 April 2011
The monumental documentary Sweetgrass captures the back-breaking final sheep drives by the herders of the Raisland-Allestad Ranch, Montana, into the vertiginous heights of the Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains, which lie north of the Yellowstone National... Read more... |
Director Lucien Castaing-Taylor on the Making of SweetgrassSaturday, 23 April 2011
I grew up in Liverpool, but my grandmother was from the Lake District - Wordsworth country, and about as rural and remote as could be. We used to stay with her on weekends, and I still remember the sense of freedom as we escaped the post-industrial... Read more... |
DVD: Two in the WaveThursday, 21 April 2011
At the heart of the creative orgy that was the Nouvelle Vague was one key love affair. A love affair so passionate it wasn't long before it turned into a full-blown hate affair. The friendship and fallout of directors Jean-Luc Godard and François... Read more... |
Little Eagles, Hampstead TheatreThursday, 21 April 2011
Space is a great subject for theatre. I’m not sure why but it might be something to do with the contrast between the irreducible groundedness of live performance and the imaginary flights of fancy that the audience yearns to take. Whatever the... Read more... |
Q&A Special: Film Director Wim WendersTuesday, 19 April 2011
Wim Wenders (b 1945) is one of the great travellers of contemporary cinema. Multi-disciplinary and theme-driven, his work often asks questions about memory and identity, and pulsates with the strong spirit of very particular places. The worldwide... Read more... |
Filthy Cities, BBC TwoTuesday, 19 April 2011
Dan Snow's toxic trilogy climaxed in New York, where he crawled voyeuristically through the rotten core of the Big Apple. It was part Discovery Channel documentary, part Gangs of New York dirty realism, as Snow took a frankly indecent relish in... Read more... |
If Walls Could Talk: The History of the Home, BBC FourThursday, 14 April 2011
I prefer "living room", but I have a friend who insists on "lounge". For some reason that probably goes deep into the psyche, I cringe at "sitting room". Same goes for "front room". As for "reception room", I’ve only ever seen that in the windows of... Read more... |
The Great Estate: The Rise and Fall of the Council House, BBC FourMonday, 11 April 2011
In 2004 Michael Collins wrote a fascinating book, The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class. It was part memoir of his south-London childhood, part history of the area and part polemic. Two-thirds was an excellent read, a thoroughly... Read more... |
ArmadilloMonday, 04 April 2011
If war is such hell, why do we keep doing it? This may be one of the questions you'll be asking yourself after sitting through the taut and gruelling 100 minutes of Armadillo, Janus Metz's remarkable account of a six-month tour of duty in... Read more... |
Imagine: The Trouble with Tolstoy, BBC OneMonday, 04 April 2011
Trouble? What trouble? There may be the odd reader who doesn't get past the Austerlitz sequence of War and Peace, and many who don't brave the master's last big novel questioning church and state, Resurrection, but that's their problem, not Tolstoy'... Read more... |
Top of the Pops: The Story of 1976, BBC FourFriday, 01 April 2011
Thank goodness for selective memory, because although I remember that pop music had something of a mid-life crisis between the sequin explosion of glam rock and the spittle tsunami of punk rock, I had been blissfully spared comprehensive recall of... Read more... |
