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Filth
The last film I saw that had any Irvine Welsh involvement was The Magnificent 11, a comedy so peculiarly inept that I started to think it was deliberate, a tax write-off perhaps, or a spoof of depressing British comedies of the early 1970s, in which girls with blue eye-liner would shed an ill-fitting bra to reveal dog-eared breasts. Jon S Baird’s adaptation of Welsh’s 1998 novel is far more what we expect from the writer of Trainspotting. Welsh has been out of fashion just long enough to be due a comeback, but is this what our New Puritan age is clamouring for – the sweary, druggy, skanky story of a very naughty Edinburgh copper? … Read more
Cosmopolis
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 17 September Occupy Wall Street starts, 2011 On this day in 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement, unable to set up its protest against US financial institutions in its original two preferred locations, took over Zuccotti Park, New York. With its rallying cry “We are the 99 per cent,” it made reference to the growing disparity in income distribution in the US (back more or less to its levels around the time of the Wall Street Crash of 1929, in spite of more than 80 years of relative prosperity) and set off a wave of similar protests all over the world. … Read more
An Inconvenient Truth
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 16 September Signing of the Montreal Protocol, 1987 On this day in 1987, the Montreal Protocol in Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer was signed. It was designed to eliminate from use substances, largely chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which were deemed to be damaging the atmosphere, most particularly by destroying ozone, which absorbs large amounts of the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. It is the most universally ratified treaty in world history, Kofi Annan has called it “perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date”. Under the terms of the protocol, the use of CFCs – a propellant in aerosols, a coolant in fridges … Read more
Murder at the Gallop
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 15 September Birth of Agatha Christie, 1890 On this day in 1890, one of the greatest writers of detective fiction was born. Agatha Christie’s two most famous creations are fastidious Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and the prim but indomitable Miss Marple. Christie is the best selling novelist of all time and has the longest running play of all time – The Mousetrap – still playing to full houses in London’s West End after more than 60 years. Her stories were being adapted into films already by the end of the 1920s, and continue to this day – Crooked House is just … Read more
16 September 2013-09-16
Out in the UK this week Fast & Furious 6 (Universal, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD) Having started as a “hot cars, even hotter girls” kind of affair, the F&F franchise is morphing as it goes into something more like an Oceans 11 heist series, with Vin Diesel and the still-pointless Paul Walker increasingly being called on to do jobs that are only tangentially related to driving in increasingly exotic parts of the world. Dwayne Johnson is back in F&F6, and it’s a welcome return (unless your name is Paul Walker, I imagine) to share badassery and bromantic backchat between action sequences expertly handled by director Justin Lin, who has become a master of the … Read more
Dirty Dancing
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 14 September Patrick Swayze dies, 2009 On this day in 2009, Patrick Swayze shimmied off to the great dance studio in the sky. 1991’s “sexiest man alive” (according to People magazine) had been propelled to that position by 1987’s Dirty Dancing, a position he reinforced with the ridiculous 1989 bouncer movie Road House – in which he plays the sensitive PhD slumming it as the hired muscle in a one-horse town. Not forgetting 1990’s Ghost, in which his spirit threw beautiful clay pots with Demi Moore. Or Point Break, playing the Buddhist surfing bank robber. A dancer by training, with the … Read more
The Gatekeepers
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 13 September Rabin shakes hands with Arafat at the White House, 1993 On this day in 1993, Itzhak Rabin, Prime Minister of Israel, and Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, shook hands at the White House after signing the Oslo Accords. It was a historic moment. These modest proposals put in writing agreements about mutual recognition, the formation of a provisional Palestinian government, and Israel’s agreement to withdraw from some parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. They wisely left thornier issues (the Jewish settlements, the future of Jerusalem, the fate of Palestinian refugees) off the agenda. … Read more
Walk the Line
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 12 September Johnny Cash dies, 2003 On this day in 2003, Johnny Cash died, aged 71. A star from the mid-50s, after discharge from the army, until his death, the baritone Cash was known as a country singer though unlike many a country act he was a Christian who aligned himself with the sinners rather than the saints. Dressing in black rather than the more ostenatious garb favoured by country compadres, he was also unusual for the way he publically acknowledged the breadth of his taste – he made an album with Bob Dylan in the 1960s, his two-season TV show … Read more
Scarface
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 11 September Brian De Palma born, 1940 On this day in 1940, Brian De Palma was born. De Palma is one of the key figures in the New Hollywood group that stormed the citadel in the 1970s. If 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde marked the beginning, 1977’s Star Wars saw the beginning of the end for the golden ten-year run of the New Hollywood gang, after which 1940s Hollywood certainties seemed to re-establish themselves and the selling of spin-off action figures became too lucrative to ignore. In that short sweet flowering, the careers of Scorsese, Coppola, Bogdanovich, Spielberg, Lucas, Rafelson and Schrader … Read more
Quiz Show
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 10 September The “Coughing” Major, 2001 On this day in 2001, Charles Ingram, a former major in the British army, won £1,000,000 in the UK TV gameshow Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. But before the payout could be made, accusations were already flying that he’d been tipped off as to the real answer to various questions by two plants in the audience – his wife, Diana, and a friend, Tecwen Whittock – who would cough when the right answer was read out. Ingram did not cough himself, nor was he any longer a major, but tabloid newspapers, preferring a story … Read more
Ivansxtc
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 09 September Leo Tolstoy born, 1828 On this day in 1828, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born. A gambler, womaniser, brawler and university dropout in his youth, he took a turn to the spiritual as he got older, sometime after having already written War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). Indeed, he became something of an ascetic anarchist, choosing to live a life of simplicity and pacificism. He was an advocate of non-violence and extremely influential on Mohandas (ie Mahatma) Gandhi, who named his second ashram in South Africa the Tolstoy Colony, and on Martin Luther King Jr. A prodigous essayist … Read more
A Serbian Film
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 08 September Stephen Dusan declares himself King of Serbia, 1331 On this day in 1331, after a brief war with his father, Stephen Dusan, aged 23, tall, handsome, intelligent and of “kingly presence”, was crowned King of All Serbian and Maritime Lands. Also known as Dusan the Mighty, the king initiated Dusan’s Code, a legal and constitutional framework of governance, later established himself Emperor of the Serbs and Greek, and went on to conquer large parts of Southern Europe. Under Stephen Dusan, Serbia became as powerful as it ever would be and acted as a bulwark against the advance of the … Read more
