Hollywood
The CounsellorFriday, 15 November 2013
The Counsellor is a cinematic room divider: some people will like it, saying it is stylish and daring. Others will find it truncated, slick and pretentious. Whichever room you end up in, The Counsellor has a tang of its own. This violent, colorful... Read more... |
The ButlerThursday, 14 November 2013
As a movie it’s a little too neat and a little too worthy but as a benchmark The Butler is a triumph with a strong cast. Director Lee Daniels doesn’t get arty with this story of racial divide and American unrest. Roughly based on the real-life story... Read more... |
Seduced and AbandonedMonday, 04 November 2013
The 65th Cannes film festival acts as the backdrop for this compelling, if somewhat misguided documentary from James Toback. Accompanied by Alec Baldwin, Toback sets out to shame Hollywood for its decision to continually churn out megabuck... Read more... |
RIPDFriday, 20 September 2013
Sometimes, a little bit of everything amounts to a whole lot of nothing. RIPD features a standard buddy cop caper bolted on to a heaven-can-wait drama channelling a body swap comedy also starring a CGI cartoon element. There’s even a heavy dollop of... Read more... |
Listed: The 20 best movie songsSunday, 15 September 2013
Seeing and hearing A Field in England's Richard Glover sing "Baloo, My Boy" while in bedraggled character reminded me of the power often exerted by songs explicitly or implicitly germane to a movie's narrative. They tend to have far greater... Read more... |
Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies, BBC FourFriday, 13 September 2013
BBC Four’s new series Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies is shocking. The overwhelming majority of arts-based TV consists of programmes consigning specialist knowledge/presenters to the sidelines in favour of dumbed-down, easily... Read more... |
Prom 59: Hollywood Rhapsody, John Wilson OrchestraTuesday, 27 August 2013
Proms enthusiast that I am, it still isn't often that I leave the Royal Albert Hall with a face that aches from smiling for hours on end. But judging by the endlessly ecstatic applause that greeted John Wilson and his orchestra at the end of every... Read more... |
Rhapsody! How to programme a Hollywood PromSunday, 25 August 2013
Fingers on buzzers: which piece of music at this year’s Proms boasts a percussion section including glockenspiel, xylophone, five pitches of cowbells, car horn, taxi horn, anvils, revolving door noise, smashing glass, bubble-wrap-popping, pistol-... Read more... |
The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable, Temple StudiosThursday, 18 July 2013
A decaying London outpost of the Hollywood movie-making machine, where dreams are spun on celluloid, and reality and fantasy intertwine in a nightmarish danse macabre of desperation and dark desire... that’s the concept behind this new immersive... Read more... |
Much Ado About NothingThursday, 13 June 2013
Ever wondered what Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel creator, not to mention superhero movie A-lister Josh Whedon, does during his down time? Well, apparently he gets his pals together to have a go at the Bard. And by way of proof, along comes... Read more... |
Cloud AtlasThursday, 21 February 2013
Skipping across time and place – South Pacific 1849 to Cambridge/Edinburgh 1936 to San Francisco 1973 to UK (looks like England) 2012 to Neo Seoul 2144 to Earth’s post-apocalyptic Hawaii 2321 – Cloud Atlas is like a scary old punk who's actually... Read more... |
A Good Day to Die HardThursday, 14 February 2013
There was a time, a couple of aeons back, when Bruce Willis wanted to get in touch with his thespian side. Tinseltown kept casting him, he complained, as rubberised lunks rippled in gore (pictured below) who always revert to the vertical after yet... Read more... |
