Miles Fielder

Good Dick

2 Oct 2008

DRAMA Glasgow-born, Los Angeles-resident 27-year-old filmmaker Marianna Palka has written, directed, co-produced and taken the leading role in her feature debut, which she is currently self-distributing in America. That’s an impressive achievement in…

Tilda Swinton

2 Oct 2008

It says an awful lot about the rise and rise of Tilda Swinton that, during the course of the teaser trailer to one of her forthcoming films (the Coen brothers crime comedy Burn After Reading) three legends are flashed up on the screen: ‘CLOONEY’…

CHEETA - Me Cheeta: The Autobiography

2 Oct 2008

SHOWBIZ SATIRE At first glance it might sound as daft as a bag of monkey nuts. But this ‘autobiography’ of the septuagenarian chimpanzee who became world famous as the companion of Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan is actually a brilliantly conceived and…

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People

2 Oct 2008

COMEDY Toby Young’s semi-scandalous memoir about the period the gobby English journo spent carousing with the rich and famous, while working at Vanity Fair magazine in New York is given a mainstream movie makeover with this enjoyable enough romantic…

Nate Powell - Swallow Me Whole

2 Oct 2008

DRAMA Although Nate Powell’s graphic novel about the growing pains of a pair of step-siblings living in small town America is in the magic realist mould, the fantastic elements here are definitely – and in no way contrarily – of the mundane variety.

Various (Ed: Paul Gravett) - The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics

18 Sep 2008

ANTHOLOGY Lead by Frank Miller’s nightmare-noir Sin City series, crime comics are enjoying a resurgence in creativity and popularity the like of which hasn’t been seen since the genre dominated the American newspaper ‘funnies’ in the 1930s. Which…

A night in - Upcoming film highlights on TV

15 Sep 2008

After a month of hitting the best nights in town, Miles Fielder hand picks the films worth staying in for.

All the world’s a stage

15 Sep 2008

Merchant City Festival (25-28 Sep) www.merchantcityfestival.com Located in the heart of old Glasgow, this event locates a programme of film, theatre, comedy, visual arts, street theatre, live music, food and fashion within an area of real…

Big screen - Upcoming film releases

15 Sep 2008

Same, same but different is a pretty accurate way to describe the coming year in cinema. There's the annual mix of blockbusters, prestige Oscar-bait and offbeat cult movies, but, of course, you haven't seen the new crop of films yet. There are franchise…

Film spotlight: Horrors

15 Sep 2008

Like the living dead, horror movies may not be popular with everyone, but there are enough shock and gore fans out there to ensure that they're continually being resurrected. Generally speaking, you need to look beyond Hollywood for innovations in…

Spotlight on: Film festivals

15 Sep 2008

In addition to the plethora of film seasons on offer throughout the year at Scotland's art house cinemas, the country boasts not one but two great annual events: the Glasgow Film Festival, which operates out of the Glasgow Film Theatre and will be held…

The Coen Brothers - Brother, thou art great

15 Sep 2008

As the screwball Kings of comedy, they have written, directed and produced some of Tinsel Town’s finest. Miles Fielder gets up close to the masters of mayhem, the Coen Brothers This past year was the Coen brothers' year. Following the release to…

The name’s Bond

15 Sep 2008

It's been a big year for Bond. Celebrations for the 100th anniversary of 007's creator Ian Fleming have included everything from centenary stamps to a new novel by Sebastian Faulks. But what everyone's really waiting for is the next Bond film, Quantum…

Tropic Thunder

Reality bites

4 Sep 2008

Shaping up as this season’s most riotous comedy, Tropic Thunder casts Ben Stiller, Jack Black and Robert Downey Jr as three self-important actors making a movie in a real war zone. They talk to Miles Fielder about satirising Hollywood and scandalising…

David Simon - Man on Wire

4 Sep 2008

With his true crime books and epoch-forming TV shows, David Simon has painted a bleak picture of modern America. Miles Fielder hears him pray that it all turns out OK

Calexico

4 Sep 2008

‘It’s not what some people have called a return to form, because there are new elements on the record,’ says Joey Burns, singer, songwriter and co-founding member (with percussionist John Convertino) of the idiosyncratic alt.country outfit Calexico.

David Holmes - The Holy Pictures

4 Sep 2008

According to Holmes his fourth solo album began as a cluster of instrumental tracks which lead him into a creative cul-de-sac until seismic events in his life – becoming a dad, the death of his parents – inspired him to pen some personal lyrics and…

Marianna Palka

Interview

4 Sep 2008

To get her first film made Glasgow-born Marianna Palka had to do it all herself, she tells Miles Fielder. Talk about indie spirit. In order to make her first feature, the low-budget, highly offbeat and very accomplished romantic comedy Good Dick…

About Benson & Hill

21 Aug 2008

This likeable double act play tag, so you get Geordie comic Luke Benson's audience-based improvisations and clever wordplay followed by his Leicestershire counterpart Martin Hill's observations about everyday life laced with surreal…

Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame

21 Aug 2008

DRAMA Teenage Hana Makhmalbaf, the youngest of the Iranian filmmaking family that comprises famous father Mohsen (Kandahar), mother Marzieh (Stray Dogs) and sister Samira (At Five in the Afternoon), follows in the footsteps of her relations to make a…

Etcetera

Weird and wonderful - but what's it all about?

21 Aug 2008

No strings attached (well, not many) in this experimental piece of puppet theatre from avant-garde Polish company K3. Three puppeteers, dressed from neck to ankle in black, animate a series of string-free two-foot tall magnolia-coloured cloth mannequins…

Mike Mignola & John Byrne - Hellboy: Seed of Destruction

21 Aug 2008

Cinema-goers flummoxed by the lack of backstory in the new Hellboy film should take the chance to go back to the supernatural hero’s origins, with this timely re-release of a four-part comic first published in 1993. Without spoiling the plot, it…

Simon Callow - A Festival Dickens

A rich performance of moving, entertaining tales

21 Aug 2008

Having taken his celebrated one-man show The Mystery of Charles Dickens around the world, British thesp Simon Callow is no stranger to the Victorian writer and philanthropist. Here, Callow performs his second solo Dickens show under the sure-handed…

Somers Town

21 Aug 2008

DRAMA Shane Meadows’ seventh feature takes its title from the working class residential area situated between London’s Euston and King’s Cross railway stations. Originally financed by Eurostar as a short film to promote the service’s new terminus at…

Stephen Weiner, Mike Mignola & Various - Hellboy: The Companion

21 Aug 2008

In the 15 years since the very first Hellboy story was published the supernatural strip has spawned an ever-growing franchise: eight graphic novels and short story collections, various spin-off titles, prose novels, animated films and two Hollywood…

The Lion in Winter

21 Aug 2008

DRAMA Still looking good 40 years on, this bawdy, witty chamber piece confined within a medieval French chateau revolves around King Henry II’s obsession with choosing an heir to his throne, and the efforts of his scheming wife Eleanor of Aquitaine…

The Self-Murder

21 Aug 2008

This physical theatre show from Russian company Stop! See! Sense! Russia! is a well-intentioned attempt to address the problem of suicide among the nation's youth. The show, which employs a daily revolving cast and multimedia, dramatises an encounter…

Vladimir McTavish

21 Aug 2008

In addition to generating plenty of laughs, the oddly monikered Glasgow-born comedian's new list-based show makes for a very serviceable and satirical potted history of Scotland. By nature of being a top 50 (Greatest Scots Ever!), McTavish's list is far…

AL Kennedy

14 Aug 2008

Those familiar with Kennedy's profound award-winning fiction will be surprised by her style of stand-up. Affable, enthusiastic and a little amateurish, Kennedy's routines revolve around commonplace subjects ranging from a visit to the dentist to pulling…

Arnold Brown

14 Aug 2008

Quite why this veteran comic needs a warm-up act is anyone's guess. Irish stand-up Ian Macpherson has got a perfectly fine line of patter, but Brown is such a consummate and idiosyncratic comedian you want a full hour of him. Nevertheless, the impish…

Boys of the Empire

High-camp boy’s own comedy deserves six of the best

14 Aug 2008

This self-consciously silly, satirical stab at the boy’s own adventure wants to be Just William with a nod towards The History Boys by way of Michael Palin’s Ripping Yarns. Set between an English boarding school in the late 1930s, and the newly re-named…

Frank Miller & Jim Lee - All Star Batman and Robin

14 Aug 2008

COMIC (DC/Titan) Frank Miller and Jim Lee tackle the world’s greatest detective and the boy wonder in this sister title to Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly’s All Star Superman. The first nine issues of the ongoing series are collected here, and like…

Frank Satan In Person

Beguiling and bawdy drinking songs

14 Aug 2008

If you dig Tom Waits, Dean Martin and Hank Williams, then Frank Satan (pronounced ‘Say-tan’) is your man. The long-time alter ego of the Cameo Cinema’s general manager Ian Hoey is back after a lengthy break to regale audiences with a bawdy combo of…

George Orwell's Coming Up For Air

Funny, tragic stage adaptation of little-known text

14 Aug 2008

What swiftly becomes apparent about this adroit adaptation of George Orwell’s lesser-known 1939 novel is how powerfully it resonates today. Written on the eve of World War II, while the author was in Morocco recovering from an injury sustained fighting…

Jimeoin

Refining a lost art of the commonplace

14 Aug 2008

Less is definitely more with this Irish comic. Although he's playing to a packed house, Jimeoin eschews the customary mic-stand and bellowing delivery and instead wears a discreet ear-piece, talks softly, mumbles quite a bit and relies on facial…

Lies Have Been Told: An Evening with Robert Maxwell

Reviled figure rebuffs his critics

14 Aug 2008

The tremendous performance by Phillip York in this one-man show about Robert Maxwell is so impressive you’re likely to find yourself admiring, and even feeling sorry for the once reviled late media mogul. But as towering a performance and uncannily…

Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About A Girl He Once Loved

Bold, original show from sickeningly talented young performer

14 Aug 2008

Stefan Golaszewski’s a sickeningly talented young man. Squished into a sweaty attic in the Pleasance and armed with nothing more than a handful of props and some banging techo music, the young London lad is bowling over audiences with his first solo…

Death Defying Acts

7 Aug 2008

ROMANCE/THRILLER (12A) 97min Freely mixing historical fact with fictionalised biography, this Brit-Aussie co-production turns on a fascinating premise: a battle of wits and wills between world-famous escapist and sceptic of all things supernatural…

Nick Doody

Merging satire with daftness

7 Aug 2008

A technical hitch during the previous show delays the returning Fringe comedian's show by 15 minutes, but soon the relatively substantial crowd sits in the dark watching Nick Doody's entree, a stereo slideshow of global news horror stories intercut with…

Before the Rains

31 Jul 2008

DRAMA (12A) 98min Inspired by Israeli short Red Roofs, scripted by the late American Cathy Rabin (to whom the film is dedicated), directed and photographed by Bollywood filmmaker Santosh Sivan, starring Brit Linus Roache, yank Jennifer Ehle and…

Flash Gordon

31 Jul 2008

SCI-FI/ADVENTURE (PG) 106min (Optimum DVD retail) Given director Mike Hodges once admitted to an Edinburgh International Film Festival audience that his 1980 blockbuster version of Alex Raymond’s comic strip was made up as he went along, it’s all the…

George Orwell's Coming Up for Air

Adaptation of overlooked novel by born again Fringe virgin

31 Jul 2008

On the eve of its 70th anniversary, one of George Orwell’s lesser-known novels has been adapted as a one-hour monologue to be performed by veteran Fringe actor and stand-up comedian Hal Cruttenden. Set in England in 1938, Coming Up For Air dramatises…

Surviving Spike

The tortured genius behind the inspired comic lunacy

31 Jul 2008

Surviving Spike promises to reveal the ‘tormented character that hid behind the public facade’. Audiences could be forgiven for assuming the blurb refers to the show’s star, Michael Barrymore, whose career was all but destroyed by revelations of the…

The Wilders

Honky-tonk storytelling with added goatee

31 Jul 2008

As Ike Sheldon, the Missouri-born lead singer and guitarist of the country four-piece The Wilders, likes to say, ‘you can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.’ Sheldon’s got the hillbilly sound in him. He can’t…

What's up doc?

31 Jul 2008

Borrowing from a classic heist movie, Man on Wire is the latest documentary to take its cue from the art of the feature film. Miles Fielder looks on as the line blurs between fact and fiction It's supposed to be a documentary about a daredevil…

Video nation - Looking at Tazieh

Edinburgh International Festival

22 Jul 2008

Aiming to debunk some of the cruder myths of Iran and its people, acclaimed director Abbas Kiarostami brings us a filmed account of an ancient drama. Miles Fielder talks to him about universal themes.

In Which They Serve

17 Jul 2008

The British Film Institute’s re-release of the rarely seen and now beautifully restored David Lean film The Passionate Friends is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the celebration of the centenary of the great British filmmaker’s birth. In…

Thomas Hettche - What We Are Made Of

17 Jul 2008

CINEMATIC THRILLER (Picador) The blurb on the flyleaf of Thomas Hettche’s German Booker prize-shortlisted novel likens his page-turning thriller to the films of David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino. Certainly, Hettche’s prose style is cinematic, not…

Antony Moore - The Swap

3 Jul 2008

COMIC NOVEL (Harvill Secker) Cartoonists have for years been creating humorous/nostalgic stories about the obsessive pastime of comic book collecting: see Joe Matt’s confessional memoir The Poor Bastard and the eccentric whimsy of Seth’s Wimbledon…

Bob Levin - Most Outrageous

3 Jul 2008

NON-FICTION/BIOG (Fantagraphics) Looking for a suitable subject for the follow-up to his book The Pirates and the Mouse – a wickedly funny account of a gang of comic book creators who satirised themselves into court with the Disney Corporation, Bob…