Popular Reviews
Shorts
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 13 June Kat Dennings born, 1986 On this day in 1986, Katherine Litwack was born in Philadelphia to a scientist father and a speech therapist/poet mother. Home-schooled, she graduated high school aged 14, four years after her first acting role in a commercial. By age 13 she’d turned up in an episode of Sex and the City, then had supporting roles in films of increasing weight until she got her own starring role in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, alongside Michael Cera. Bright and feisty, since then she’s specialised in the sort of girl who can go from geek to goddess … Read more
Pink Flamingos
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 19 October Divine born, 1945 On this day in 1945, Harris Glenn Milstead, aka Divine, was born, in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Six months older than fellow Baltimore native John Waters, he became involved with Waters’ acting troupe the Dreamlanders in the mid 1960s and starred in Waters’ first four films, Mondo Trasho (1969), Multiple Maniacs (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974). In fact it was Waters who gave Harris (or Glenn as he was known to family and school friends) the name Divine, after a character in Jean Genet’s debut novel, Our Lady of the Flowers. Waters was intent … Read more
Computer Chess
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 9 March Bobby Fischer born, 1943 On this day in 1943, the future chess grandmaster Robert James Fischer was born in Chicago, Illinois, USA. The son of a communist teacher and of either the physicist Paul Nemenyi or the biophysicist Gerhardt Fischer (the FBI believed it was the former), Bobby learnt to play chess aged six and became immediately fascinated with the game. He played against his first master, Max Pavey, aged eight and though he lost it led to an introduction to the Manhattan Chess Club, where he was tutored by William Lombardy, and then the Hawthorne Chess Club, where … Read more
13 Going On 30
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 30 November Thriller released, 1982 On this day in 1982, Michael Jackson’s album Thriller was released. As I write, it is the biggest selling album of all time. And with unified collections of music now a “take it or leave it” item displaced by technology it is likely to remain so. Thriller has sold around 60 million copies worldwide (estimate) and continues to sell. It was Jackson’s sixth solo album, his second as a mature artist in charge of his career, and because Jackson had renegotiated his royalty rate with his record company only the year before (after the success of … Read more
Double Blind
Irish horror movies have a tendency to be inventive, ingenious and out there, and Double Blind ticks all those boxes. I told a mate I was watching an Irish horror movie and he wondered what categorised a horror movie as Irish. “Is it,” he ventured, “killer potatoes?” No, Mark, no. Like 2012’s massively underrated Stitches, or The Canal, or (for the more comedically inclined) Grabbers, this is a horror movie made in Ireland, written and directed by Irish talent, with a few Irish actors in the cast, though the lead role in this case (as in Stitches and The Canal) goes to a Brit, Millie Brady, who plays a young woman called Claire … Read more
The Others
Oddly, quite a few people hated this atmospheric ghost story when it came out. It’s a tale with a twist, set just after the end of the Second World War and it’s directed by the Spaniard Alejandro Amenábar. He was a cult name back then, thanks to Tesis and Abre Los Ojos and perhaps he was a bit too out there for some tastes. Nicole Kidman plays the woman waiting for her missing husband to return from the war, a too-dutiful mother who keeps their kids locked away from the light (they’re allergic to it, she says) in a weird dark house kept functioning by a trio of servants. They, we have seen, turned up … Read more
The Avengers: Series 4, Episode 20 – The Danger Makers
The Danger Makers is the 13th episode of The Avengers written by Roger Marshall, the amazingly prolific writer of scripts for everything from 1959’s William Tell to 1992’s London’s Burning by way of Public Eye, The Sweeney and Lovejoy. And it’s a bizarre and fascinating story, of men doing massively foolish things in an attempt to put the fizz back into an existence made flat by the advance of technology. All this Marshall summarises neatly in an opening sequence about a man trying to commit suicide on a motor bike by engineering a crash. We know it’s a suicide attempt – or looks like it – because when he fails the first time, … Read more
The Charge of the Light Brigade
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 28 March Crimean War escalates, 1854 On this day in 1854, Britain and France declared war against Russia. Russia and the Ottoman Empire had been at war since October the previous year, when conflict had broken out ostensibly about the rights of Christians in the Holy Land – being restricted by Muslim Ottomans and being protected by Orthodox Russian if you accept the Russians’ diplomatic rhetoric. In fact the war was about territory, the Turks being on the decline after centuries of dominance in the region, the Russians keen to continue their expansion west into Europe and particularly south to the … Read more
The Razzies – Winners Who Showed Up
One supposedly represents the best of the best and the other the worst of the worst. In theory the Oscars and the Razzies are polar opposites, yet they have something in common. Each loves a pile-on. Every year as awards season comes around again, a fog seems to descend on the members of the voting academies, groupthink sets in and some perfectly OK but largely unremarkable movies start mysteriously migrating – up to become Academy Award contenders, or down to where the Razzies await. If a bona fide celebrity is involved, the movement can be quite dramatic. Was Driving Miss Daisy really the best picture of 1990? Against, say, Do the Right Thing? Did … Read more
Undergods
A strange and evocative film, Undergods is a portmanteau fantasy horror with the seams sanded flat and then caulked in an attempt to hide the joins. Even so, it falls into clearly discernible distinct chunks, which seemingly bear little relation to each other. First up, K and Z, a pair of post-apocalyptic dealers in humans, dead for meat, live as slaves. Then on to the story of a man whose life is invaded by a stranger, who is soon sleeping with his wife in his own home. Then on to a bedtime story told by a father to his daughter. The story itself comes next, of a “merchant” stealing a mysterious thin man’s … Read more
The Silent Twins
The Silent Twins tells the true story of June and Jennifer Gibbons, twins who grew up in Wales in the 1970s and who refused to speak to anyone except each other. The girls’ lives of withdrawn silence and solitary apartness changed radically when they became teenagers, discovered boys and, after a spree of petty crime mutated into arson, ended up in Broadmoor, the UK’s most notorious high-security psychiatric hospital. Eventually, investigative journalist Marjorie Wallace learned about the twins and started to campaign on their behalf, leading eventually to their release after 11 years of an indefinite sentence (ie they could have remained inside for the rest of their lives). How the hell do … Read more
Memory
There are issues in Memory, and memory itself has something to do with what’s going on. But it’s the small things rather than the big ones that give the film its grip and punch. The many social-realist auteurs pushing our faces into the raw meat of life could learn a lot from Michel Franco’s remarkable film. It starts out like many a kitchen sinker – at an AA meeting where Sylvia, its hero, is just one of many unfortunates trying to put life back together after getting too friendly with the bottle. Then it follows her to her workplace. A day centre for adults with learning difficulties, a job that seems to be … Read more
