Film and Issue 568

Glasgow Film Festival

Best of the fest

31 Jan 2007

GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL Cashback The opening night gala revolves around a heartbroken insomniac and his quest to find new love - through nightshift work. See Sean Biggerstaff interview. GFT, Thu 15 Feb, 7.30pm; Cineworld Renfrew Street, Fri 16…

Glasgow Film Festival - horror movies

Day of the dead

31 Jan 2007

The all-day marathon is a right of passage for any horrorphile; a chance to wallow in the garish glory of the most extreme cinematic genres. For the second year, GFF features FrightFest in association with Zone Horror.

Cate Blanchett interview

Woman of note

30 Jan 2007

‘If I knew that my son’s art teacher was banging his brains out in the art room, I’d be in there with a meat cleaver.’ Cate Blanchett is reflecting on her new film, Notes on a Scandal, in which she plays an art teacher who has an affair with one of her…

Glasgow Film Festival - best of the fest

Best of the fest

30 Jan 2007

Cashback The opening night gala revolves around a heartbroken insomniac and his quest to find new love - through nightshift work. See Sean Biggerstaff interview. GFT, Thu 15 Feb, 7.30pm; Cineworld Renfrew Street, Fri 16 Feb, 6.30pm. A Guide to…

Fast Food Nation

Food for thought

30 Jan 2007

Eric Schlosser touched a nerve with the public when he exposed the unethical and unhygienic practices of America’s junk food industry in his book Fast Food Nation. It swiftly became an international bestseller and required reading for anyone concerned…

Glasgow Film Festival - Half Nelson - Ryan Gosling interview

School daze

30 Jan 2007

GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL Named after a wrestling hold in which an opponent’s strengths are turned against themselves, the US indie Half Nelson is undoubtedly one of the highlights of the Glasgow Film Festival. The directorial debut of Ryan Fleck, whose…

Glasgow Film Festival - Cashback - Sean Biggerstaff interview

Money talks

30 Jan 2007

GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL Sean Biggerstaff has just returned from the seventh annual British Film Festival in Israel where Cashback was screened simultaneously in Haifa, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. But though the film was well received, Biggerstaff wasn’t…

Glasgow Film Festival - Mira Nair interview (The Namesake)

A tale of two cities

30 Jan 2007

GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL After her sojourn into the upper echelons of British society with her adaptation of Vanity Fair, Mira Nair returns to the multicultural themes that established her reputation with The Namesake. It’s a cinematic rendition of…

Glasgow Film Festival - John Wayne tribute

Shooting star

30 Jan 2007

GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL Asked towards the end of his life why he had never written an autobiography John Wayne replied, ‘Those who like me already know me, and those who don’t like me wouldn’t want to read about me anyway.’ Modern day celebrities would…

News in brief

30 Jan 2007

Al Gore’s climate change film, An Inconvenient Truth, is to be shown in all of Scotland’s secondary schools. Friends of the Earth Scotland’s Chief Executive, Duncan McLaren, said of the Executive initiative: ‘For the sake of future generations we hope…

John Huston retrospective

A drunken god

29 Jan 2007

The prolific, gifted and deeply eccentric writer/director John Huston preferred to think that ‘God is not dead, just drunk.’ It’s a cute quote, which fits in with the air of Irish whimsy that Huston attempted to generate around himself and his uprooted…

DVD Round-up

29 Jan 2007

Shy, prone to stage sickness, deep depression and melancholia the British comedian Frankie Howerd was still the funniest man ever tp have been born in the city of York, England. A brilliant, stammering pontificate of a stand-up comedian, Howerd’s talent…

Dreamgirls

29 Jan 2007

Dreamgirls has made Oscar history and the ceremony hasn’t even taken place yet. It is, allegedly, the first picture to have the most Academy Award nominations in a given year and still not be nominated for Best Picture. And, for once, the Academy seems…

Notes on a Scandal

29 Jan 2007

Barbara Covett (Judi Dench) - note that grasping surname - is not a popular figure at the North London comprehensive where she teaches history. To the staff and the students she is, in her own words, ‘a battleaxe’, and to the headmaster, she is an…

Running with Scissors

29 Jan 2007

Nip/Tuck writer/executive producer Ryan Murphy does a very fine job of cutting/pasting onto the big screen the horrific and hilarious teenage memoir of journalist Augusten Burroughs. Abandoned first by his alcoholic father Norman (Alec Baldwin) and then…

Play

29 Jan 2007

‘Times were hard but they were modern’ runs the unattributed Italian proverb at the beginning of this vibrant debut feature from young Chilean writer-director Alicia Scherson, which provides a real tonic for jaded cinematic palates. Described by its…

Belle de Jour

(18) 99min

29 Jan 2007

The very great Spanish filmmaker and surrealist Luis Buñuel wrote in his fantastic autobiography My Last Breath that Belle de Jour was ‘my biggest commercial success, which I attribute more to the marvellous whores than to my direction.…

For Your Consideration

(12A) 86min

29 Jan 2007

The law of diminishing returns finally hits Christopher Guest and the team who have worked together since This Is Spinal Tap reconfigured the rockumentary back in 1984. Encouraged by the success of that film, which, despite being directed by Rob Reiner…

Arthur and the Invisibles

(U) 93min

29 Jan 2007

If Luc Besson (The Big Blue, Leon) is to be believed, this, his tenth film, will also be his last as director. In adapting his own children’s book, Besson mixes live-action and CGI animation with decidedly patchy results. It’s heavy on style but light…

Charlotte's Web

(U) 96min

29 Jan 2007

As a farmyard community story, EB White’s much loved kids story fits somewhere between cutesy fantasy Babe and Orwell’s bleak political parable Animal Farm, with cheery talking animals sugar-coating a bittersweet finale that touches on practical matters…

Dirty Dancing: 20th Anniversary Edition

(15) 100min

29 Jan 2007

For the few who don’t know the plot of Emile Ardolino’s 1987 romantic musical: it’s the summer of 1963 at Kellerman’s Holiday Resort. Misunderstood, frustrated in-house dance teacher, Johnny (an unconvincingly teenage Patrick Swayze), meets…

Grand Illusion, La - DVD review

La Grand Illusion

29 Jan 2007

WAR After La Grande Illusion won a prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1937, the Nazis declared it ‘cinematic enemy number one’, and when Germany invaded France a couple of years later Goebbels had prints of the film destroyed. Jean Renoir’s…

Angel-A - DVD review

Angel-A

29 Jan 2007

FANTASY DRAMA For Berlin, read Paris. For Wings of Desire, transpose Angel-A. But while Wim Wenders’ 80s classic still sparkles, this occasionally charming Luc Besson effort instantly pales by comparison. The problems are several fold, but the jovial…

Passenger (Pasazerka) - DVD review

Passenger (Pasazerka)

29 Jan 2007

DRAMA Passenger is one of the great, overlooked films to deal with the Holocaust. Andrzej Munk’s film stands alongside Night and Fog and Shoah as a seminal examination of this crater in 20th century life and thought. Unlike those films, however, this…

Avenge But One of My Two Eyes - DVD review

Avenge But One of My Two Eyes

29 Jan 2007

DOCUMENTARY Avi Mograbi’s tough-minded documentary on the horrors of today’s Israeli-Palestine conflict looks at events not from the point of view of Palestinian fanaticism and Israeli brutality, but chiefly from the long established fanaticism…