Film and Musical

GFF 2012 - Day planner

Our highlights for each day of the Glasgow Film Festival

6 Feb 2012

It can be difficult, when any festival rolls around, to decide which events to skip in favour of others. Searching rigorously through the programme, referring back to the calendar, trying to fit in as much as possible - it's a painstaking piece of work…

Glasgow Film Festival: Why I love Gene Kelly

Miles Fielder makes a song and dance about the charismatic movie star

3 Feb 2012

For a film lover who hates musicals (this writer), the GFF’s Gene Kelly retrospective ought to be a hard sell. Telling stories through song and dance, Kelly’s forte (the latter of which endeavours earned him a special Oscar in 1951), is anathema to this…

Toy Story 3 and The Illusionist among Edinburgh International Film Festival 2010 highlights

5 May 2010

With The Edinburgh Film Festival 2010, which runs between 16-27 June, only a matter of weeks away, the red carpets are getting waterproofed and the popcorn machines are getting serviced. Now in its 64th year, the twelve day festival, packed with…

Meet Danny Wilson

11 Jun 2009

This lesser known 1951 Frank Sinatra film was made at the time his career had stalled, two years after his only role of note at that point, in the Gene Kelly musical On the Town, and two years before he won an Oscar for From Here to Eternity, the film…

Edith Piaf: Le Concert Ideal/The Documentary

19 Feb 2009

(E) 110min (Acorn DVD retail) MUSIC/BOXSET The life of legendary chanteuse Edith Piaf was the stuff of melodrama, which, along with her incredible talents, accounts for her enduring appeal and status as a kind of deity in her native France. The…

Shakalaka Boom Boom

DVD

19 Jun 2007

MUSICAL/DRAMA Suneel Darshan’s Bollywood remake of Milos Forman’s Amadeus modernises the story in a transatlantic setting, where naturally gifted but arrogant young upstart Reggi (Upen Patel) challenges experienced champion of Indian pap/pop AJ…

Andrzej Zulawski's cult horror hybrid Possession released on DVD

22 Oct 2010

It certainly ranks as one of the most surreal moments in my life. I’m sitting in a Polish restaurant, having dinner (before a scheduled Q&A at the Filmhouse) with one of my all time favourite film directors, who is standing behind me, giving me a…

Can't Stop The Music

21 Jun 2010

(PG) 118min (Optimum) This fictional Village People biopic/musical was released in 1980, and flopped dramatically at the box office, winning ‘Worst Picture’ at the first Golden Raspberry Awards. Blame it on America’s lack of tolerance at the…

The Kreutzer Sonata

18 Mar 2010

(18) 99min Having discarded cumbersome period trappings for his superb, stripped down, contemporary Los Angeles-set Tolstoy adaptation Ivansxtc, writer/director Bernard Rose does the same with another story by the Russian master, the second in a…

Hipsters, Bad Lieutenant and a Frightfest at GFF

Glasgow Film Festival blog

1 Mar 2010

Friday afternoon. I decide to brave the vertiginous screens at Glasgow’s Cineworld Renfrew Street where some festival films are also showing. I make the perverse choice of Hipsters, a Russian film with no current UK distributor about a group of post…

Chess in Concert

Video footage of the Abba/Tim Rice musical

27 Aug 2009

Filmed performance of the blokes from Abba and Tim Rice’s musical about the sex lives of chess players. (It’s actually slightly more complicated than that, but who cares really?) Filmed at the Royal Albert Hall in 2008 with a full orchestra and chorus…

Bandslam

Todd Graff's take on the teenage rock star dream

12 Aug 2009

‘This is sick!’ says budding impresario Will Burton (Gaelan Connell) as he constructs a rock’n’roll band from his fellow high school students to take part in a battle-of-the-bands competition. The description ‘sick’, obviously meaning, that his band are…

Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience

28 May 2009

(U) 75min New Jersey’s most popular rockers get the 3D concert treatment. No, sadly this isn’t The Boss and his E Street Band in all their blue collar glory, but Disney Channel-derived band the Jonas Brothers – a power pop threesome who make the…

Interview: Repo's Darren Lynn Bousman and Terrance Zdunich

18 Mar 2009

Repo: The Genetic Opera is a truly unique film mixing rock opera with lashings of gore and dark sci-fi. Set in a world where transplanted organs are repossessed if you fail to meet your payments. Director Darren Lynn Bousman (who also directed Saw II…

The Ruling Class

22 Jan 2009

COMEDY/MUSICAL Olivier Award-winning dramatist Peter Barnes’ adaptation of his own acclaimed play, directed for the screen in 1972 by Hungarian émigré Peter Medak (The Krays, Let Him Have It), was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes and secured…

Film - Also Released

11 Dec 2008

White Christmas (U) 120min New digital print of this Christmas staple. GFT, Glasgow and Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Fri 12-Wed 24 Dec. North Face (12A) 121min Exciting historical adventure recounting the dangerous ascent of the Eiger in 1936 by two…

Summer scoops top prize at Bafta Scotland awards

10 Nov 2008

Summer, Grand Theft Auto, Gary’s Wrr and Lorraine Kelly were amongst the winners last night at the Lloyds TSB BAFTA Scotland Awards. The ceremony, at Glasgow’s City Halls with an audience of over 800, was broadcast live online worldwide.

Lou Reed's Berlin

17 Jul 2008

CONCERT MOVIE (12A) 85min In 1973, Lou Reed was primed for a stellar pop career, following up the success of Transformer’s glam pop thrills with Berlin, an ambitious rock opera showcasing Reed’s versatile capabilities. But Berlin tanked, both…

Mamma Mia!

3 Jul 2008

Set on a sun-kissed Mediterranean island, musical blockbuster Mamma Mia! features Meryl Streep as the mother of Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), a bride-to-be trying to identify her natural father amongst three wedding guests, played by Pierce Brosnan, Colin…

Also Released - Film

10 Apr 2008

Leatherheads (PG) 113min •• Directed by and starring George Clooney, Leatherheads is a wannabe Preston Sturges-style romantic comedy set against the backdrop of the burgeoning American football league in 1925. Dodge Connolly (Clooney) is a cocky but…

Opera Jawa

14 Feb 2008

MUSICAL (12) 120min (Yume Pictures DVD retail/rental) One of a handful of films commissioned to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, this generally hugely successful project (other films in the series have included Syndromes and a…

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

17 Jan 2008

MUSICAL/HORROR (18) 116min Stephen Sondheim’s landmark 1979 Broadway musical has now been given the Tim Burton treatment. The director’s favourite actor, Johnny Depp, ditches the cutesy mannerisms he brought to Edward Scissorhands and Pirates of…

Across the Universe

29 Nov 2007

When Julie Taymor’s musical homage to the hippy era came out at the end of September it received terrible reviews and slipped off cinema screens quicker than you could say ‘all you need is love’. Taymor has previous form for daring to film the…

Hairspray

16 Jul 2007

MUSICAL HAIRSPRAY (PG) 110min Director Adam Shankman appears at last to have found his niche after bestowing clangers The Pacifier and Cheaper by the Dozen 2 on this world. With his feeling for good choreography (in a previous life he…

Dreamgirls

(12A) 130min

29 Jan 2007

DRAMA/MUSICAL 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…