Latest Posts
Theatre of Blood
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 21 May Sam Jaffe born, 1901 On this day in 1901, one of the great characters of Hollywood was born, in Harlem, New York. Sam Jaffe, not to be confused with the actor of the same name, dropped out of high school and, thanks to his brother-in-law being a producer, got a job as an office boy at Paramount. He rose quickly and by 22 was production manager on films directed by such luminaries as Lubitsch, Von Sternberg and Mamoulian. Having dated Clara Bow and saved Paramount studios financially by inventing the “night for day” system of shooting – which used … Read more
The New World
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 20 May Christopher Columbus dies, 1506 Start typing “Christopher” into Wikipedia and , after getting to “Christo…” it will auto-suggest Christopher Columbus. This man who died over 500 years ago, on this day in 1506, still has an immense hold over the imagination, though he wasn’t the first person to discover the New World, nor even the first European, as is commonly held, nor did he even accept that he had found it, preferring instead to believe that he had arrived in the East Indies (which is why he called the natives Indians). And he was an Italian, sailing under the … Read more
Platoon
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 19 May Ho Chi Minh born, 1890 On this day in 1890, Nguyen Sinh Con, later known as Ho Chi Minh, was born, in Hoang Tru, in Vietnam. One of four children, he got an education thanks to the colonial French, at a local lycée, and under the direction of his father, a Confucian scholar. Realising there was little future for him in Vietnam after his father lost his administrative position – influence was everything – he boarded a ship for France, working as a ship’s cook, where he failed to get work in Marseille. Over the next few years he … Read more
Russian Ark
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 18 May International Museum Day Today is International Museum Day, held annually by museum professionals as a way of highlighting the work that museums do in preserving the past. It was created in 1977 and has gained in popularity ever since, participating numbers rising from 20,000 museums in 2009 to 30,000 in 2012. Each year a theme is chosen: in 2002 it was “Museums and Globalisation”; in 1993 it was “Museums and Indigenous Peoples”. In 2012, the organisers, the International Council of Museums, encouraged people to take selfies of themselves at their local museum, under the rubric “Me and My Museum”. … Read more
Brokeback Mountain
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 17 May First same-sex marriage in US, 2004 On this day in 2004, Bostonians Tom Weikle, 53, and Joe Rogers, 55, became the first same sex couple to marry in the United States. They had been together for 25 years and were taking advantage of the change in legislation, Massachusetts being the first state in the US to allow marriage between people of the same sex. Though the US constitution was clear in its position on the “unalienable right… to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, many states had started countering the change of opinion in favour of same-sex marriage … Read more
The Artist
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 16 May First Academy Awards, 1920 On this day in 1929, the first Academy Awards presentations were made, at a private dinner hosted by Douglas Fairbanks at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Louis B Meyer had created the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences two years earlier, and later stated that “I found that the best way to handle [filmmakers] was to hang medals all over them… that’s why the Academy Award was created.” These were the only Academy Awards not to get radio (later TV) coverage. The awards covered the years 1927 and 1928 and had been announced three months … Read more
19 May 2014-05-19
Out in the UK This Week The Wolf of Wall Street (Universal, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) Scorsese’s best film since Casino also continues his trend towards flabby films. Twenty minutes can, and let’s hope eventually will, be trimmed from a film with a Goodfellas arc – we start with a voiceover of Leo Di Caprio saying, in effect, that for as long as he could rememeber he’d always wanted to be a richfella. And off we go into a roaring rush of the true story of Jordan Belfort, who became a licensed Wall Street broker on the day the market crashed in 1987, then started at the bottom all over again, selling penny stocks to … Read more
There Will Be Blood
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 15 May Standard Oil declared a monopoly, 1911 On this day in 1911, the American oil company Standard Oil was ruled to be a monopoly by the US Supreme Court. Set up only in 1870 by the industrialist John D Rockefeller and his associates, the company was efficient and focused and had grown rapidly, first becoming dominant in refining, where it used its early lead to price competitors out of the market or buy them up, before moving on to production and distribution, where it used similar tactics to squeeze out or buy out competitors. By 1882 the company was already … Read more
Catfish
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 14 May Mark Zuckerberg born, 1984 On this day in 1984, Mark Zuckerberg was born, in White Plains, New York. The son of a dentist and a psychiatrist, he came into the world on the day that Lionel Richie’s “Hello” was the number one in the USA – appropriate, considering that he’d make his fortune introducing people to each other. Zuckerberg was a computer nerd at school, having learnt Atari BASIC from his father, and his precociousness encouraged his parents to get him a tutor. Interestingly, Zuckerberg was also into sport (he was fencing captain) and was interested in the arts … Read more
The Social Network
It’s often said that Kids Today can’t concentrate, that they don’t love words the way their parents did. Well, they flocked in the droves to see The Social Network, an old fashioned, plot driven, very talky film that seems aimed at people capable of mastering fine detail, people with an almost legal mindset. Regardless of the true state of the ADHD generation – isn’t it obvious that anyone who sits and plays a computer game for hours on end demonstrably has no problem with concentrating? – The Social Network tells the story of one of its generation’s figureheads, for good or ill: Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder. In particular it spins on the relationship … Read more
Séraphine
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 13 May Julian of Norwich’s visions, 1373 On this day in 1373, a woman who lived in Norwich recovered from an unspecified illness during which she had started seeing visions of Jesus Christ. The illness had been serious and she had not been expected to survive. As a result of making the unexpected recovery the woman became an anchoress (ie a hermit who lived in a cell attached – anchored – to a church). No one knows what her name was, but because the church she was anchored to was called St Julian’s, she became known as Julian of Norwich. She … Read more
Mean Streets
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 12 May Exile on Main Street released, 1972 On this day in 1972, one of the cornerstone rock albums of all time was released. Exile on Main St was the Rolling Stones’ follow-up to Sticky Fingers and the first album they had produced since extricating themselves from their contract with manager Allen Klein. The Stones had recently become tax exiles from the UK – and recorded much of the album in the south of France, at a villa Keith Richards was renting. Richards was a heavy user of heroin at the time, and his villa became a hub for visiting fellow … Read more
