Issue 578

Laid-back bikes

18 Jun 2007

Remember that ad from the early 80s flogging the Yellow Pages where the kid asks for a bike for his birthday? The grim up north dad is banging on about a saddle looking like a razor blade but buys his lad one anyway, mumbling, ‘Well, I were right about…

Charlotte Gainsbourg

19 Jun 2007

Charlotte Gainsbourg is alluring. Tall and lithe with dark long hair dropping past her visage she’s far from a classic beauty. What she does have is a sense of mystery, and it’s this quality that Italian filmmaker Emanuelle Crialese makes use of in The…

Shutter

19 Jun 2007

In lieu of a forthcoming US remake, this half arsed 2004 Thai ghost story is getting an overdue and limited release. Driving home after getting drunk with a few of his old friends, photographer Tun (Ananda Everingham) and his girlfriend Jane…

Franz Ferdinand

18 Jun 2007

NEW WAVE At the first of this intimate, exciting two-night warm-up residency for their continental summer festival dates, Franz Ferdinand served notice of a dramatic change in style to compensate for the rather underwhelming fare which made up most…

Antiworld 070707 Festival

29 Jun 2007

If, like many others, you have missed out on tickets to T in the Park, or if it just dosn't have the electronic line up you crave... Get yourself down to Aldershot for Antiworld's debut 070707 festival of live electronic music and arts. This massive…

T in the Park 2007

19 Jun 2007

In a matter of months Dumfries shelf-stacker Calvin Harris has taken the MySpace-sensation route to universally lauded electro producer, touring with Faithless and being linked professionally and romantically with pop icon Kylie Minogue along the way.

Nightshade

19 Jun 2007

It’s an intriguing premise: commissioning seven of the most exciting young choreographers in Europe to create a striptease, working with real strip artists rather than professional dancers. Definitely worthy of a few good tabloid headlines...

Home games

19 Jun 2007

Criminals, genetically modified super-cops and a bunch of kids sniffing out crime with their wisecracking Great Dane. When thinking about Scotland these aren’t the first things to spring to mind, but for game fans this is what we’re all about. Here in…

News round-up

19 Jun 2007

Visual artist Matt Patinson, aka Culprit, who suppiled the artwork for The List’s feature on artists with interesting day jobs a few issues back, is putting on a show of screenprints at the new Hula juice bar/gallery in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket this…

Eat - Smooth sailing

19 Jun 2007

The Ocean Mist’s story is long and colourful. A steamer-trawler fitted out by the Royal Navy at the tail end of the Great War, she arrived too late for active service, and seemed fated to rust on the dockside. Thanks, however, to KE Guinness (a member…

Eat - Mrs Majhu's

19 Jun 2007

The Meal Byres Road, the undoubted focal point of Glasgow’s West End, is a celebrated street for dining out. With the venerable No Sixteen near its base and the long-popular Café Antipasti nearer the top of the street, there is strength and…

Bollywood round-up

19 Jun 2007

In director R Balki’s Cheeni Kum (PG) 139min (3 Stars) 64-year-old temperamental London chef Bhuddadev (Amitabh Bachchan) falls for 34-year old modern Indian sophisticate Nina (Tabu). Comedy and drama arise from the age difference. Initial comparisons…

DVD - Round-up

19 Jun 2007

‘Spring being a tough act to follow, God created June.’ The great American writer, actor and boxing analyst Al Bernstein wrote that. But then he also said, ‘A fool and his money get a lot of publicity’ so perhaps we shouldn’t pay too much attention to…

The Flying Scotsman

19 Jun 2007

Riding your bike fast doesn’t make you a hero, but Graeme Obree’s well-documented battles with the external and internal pressures of professional cycling put him firmly in the Lance Armstrong class. As depicted in Douglas Mackinnon’s long-delayed…

Also Released

19 Jun 2007

Hostel: Part II (18) 93min (3 Stars) Further exercises in extreme horror from Tarantino acolyte Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel). This time three young Americans studying in Rome set off for a weekend trip with a beautiful model from one of their art…

LongPen technology brings Mailer and Munro to Edinburgh

19 Jun 2007

Words: Allan Radcliffe (Image: left to right - Ben Okri, Norman Mailer, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro) With the announcement of its programme for August 2007 an intriguing new chapter has opened for the Edinburgh International Book Festival. The…

Film Books Round-up

19 Jun 2007

In Talking Movies (Wallflower, 4 Stars) Jason Wood interviews more than 30 contemporary filmmakers including Carlos Reygadas, Richard Linklater, Atom Egoyan, Lucrecia Martel, Elia Suleiman and Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Wood’s project is wonderfully…

La Vie en Rose

19 Jun 2007

French singer Edith Piaf’s real life was the stuff of turbulent melodrama: she was abandoned by her mother and spent some of her impoverished childhood in a brothel, and she was discovered singing on the streets by an impresario, whom she was later…

Eat - Side Dishes

19 Jun 2007

• The Grill Room at Edinburgh’s Sheraton Grand has raised the ‘beef stakes’ in Scotland by introducing Australian prime Wagyu beef [pictured] to its menu. A version of the vaunted Japanese Kobe, it’s hand-massaged and fed on a diet of grain and beer.

Paris, Je T'Aime

Short-film anthology

19 Jun 2007

For this portmanteau work, 21 directors from around the world have contributed five-minute shorts, which are set in 18 of Paris’ administrative districts. The project was intended as a cinematic valentine to the French capital, with the theme of love…

Captivity

19 Jun 2007

Since she stopped watching the clock as Kim Bauer in 24, Elisha Cuthbert has been typecast on the silver screen as the archetypal damsel in distress. In Captivity she plays the kind of girl that, if she weren’t already famous, would be auditioning for…

Music lovers asked to walk on fire for charity

19 Jun 2007

Music lovers heading for this summer’s Belladrum festival are invited to take part in an exciting challenge - a fire walk across hot embers to raise funds for the Highlands’ Cancer Caring Centre. The Maggie’s Blaze Firewalk Challenge will take place…

Moloch

DVD

19 Jun 2007

Where his mentor Andrei Tarkovsky would often take the ordinary and turn it into the extraordinary, filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov frequently works a partial reverse. In his trilogy of ‘dictator’ films, Tauras (about Lenin), The Sun (about Hirohito) as…

Lucky You

19 Jun 2007

From The Cincinnati Kid to Casino Royale, a game of cards with heavy emotional stakes can make for high tension cinema, but auteur Curtis Hanson (LA Confidential, The Wonder Boys, 8 Mile, In Her Shoes) loads the decks far too heavily in Lucky You. Las…

The Beast Must Die

DVD

19 Jun 2007

HORROR Made in 1974, this British monster movie produced by Hammer-alike outfit Amicus attempted to bridge the transatlantic divide by capitalising on the post-Shaft blaxploitation craze and casting handsome African-American actor Calvin Lockhart in…