Paul McGann

The Undertaker

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Paul McGann

The Undertaker has a novel suggestion for gangsters needing to dispose of dead bodies in a hurry. Instead of going to all the fuss of running a waste disposal business, why not just bury the bodies in a the ground, beneath the coffins of legitimate new arrivals at their final resting place? Who’s going to look in a cemetery? And if you can’t be bothered with the rigmarole of being an undertaker yourself, just get a real one to play along, and pay him handsomely to keep his mouth shut. That is the simple and effective premise of Michael Wright’s debut feature, which he wrote and directed. Wright started out in the world … Read more

Gypo

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Chloe Sirene, Pauline McLynn and Rula Lenska in Gypo

Gypo is a Dogme film, the 37th made according to the strictures of the protocol dreamt up by a group of Scandinavian film-makers, including Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, in 1995. Naturalism is the stated idea, but Dogme could also be seen as an extension of Ikea flatpack design principles into film-making, or those of no-smells, no-bells Nordic Protestantism, or the “form follows function” of the Bauhaus, or fellow Scandinavian Carl Theodor Dreyer’s spare aesthetic. Take your pick. What’s unusual about Gypo is that it is a British film, a kitchen-sinker set in the bleak coastal town of Margate. It tells the story from three different angles of a mother/daughter pair of … Read more