From this year's Sundance Film Festival in snowy Utah, here's our verdict on The Doors documentary, When You're Strange, from Living In Oblivion director Tom DiCillo.
I happened to be at Chalk Farm tube yesterday, waiting for a train. As a bus user, I’m always curious to see what kind of ad campaigns studios are running on the underground for their current releases. At the moment, as a right-thinking film fan, you might be in a state of near-priapic delight at the wealth of prestige movies in cinemas. There’s posters up for The Wrestler, Slumdog Millionaire, The Reader, Milk and Frost/Nixon, breathlessly described with attention-grabbing quotes like “the feel-good film of the decade”, or “a contender for Best Picture”. It is, of course, January, and rather shamelessly the studios are chucking out their high-calibre movies as we pile headlong into Awards season.
This late period in Clint Eastwood’s career is a source of pretty endless fascination for me. At a time when most filmmakers have either called it a day, or are spoiling their reputation with increasingly disappointing movies, Eastwood has proved, conclusively, that he’s still capable of greatness as he nears 80. The run that started with Million Dollar Baby shows no signs of abating, and this slew of movies are among the best of his career.
A sad start to the day, then, to be woken by news on the Today programme of Oliver Postgate’s passing. For anyone in their late thirties and early forties, Postgate’s wonderful and vivid animations were an indelible part of our childhoods. As a spokesman for BBC’s children’s channel CBeebies noted, Postgate’s great strength lay in his ability to create “worlds within worlds”, the kind of places populated by talking dragons, sentient trains, pink woollen aliens and crotchety, intellectual woodpeckers.
It’s just gone 10.27pm, and the guy standing next to me turns to his friend with a big smile breaking across his face and says, “I can go home now.” Wild Beasts have just finished playing “Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants”, their debut single, and possibly the only song I can think of that contains the word “moribund”. In fact, “Clairvoyants” is anything but moribund – it’s a great, joyous conflation of high end Johnny Marr-style melodies (I’m thinking particularly of his playing on Talking Heads’ “Nothing But Flowers”) and the more life-affirming side of Arcade Fire, maybe something like “Wake Up”. It’s a high point, certainly, of what’s proved to be another excellent night at the Borderline.
Gentle readers of UNCUT, you can rest easy. While large chunks of the Internet seem obsessed with quite how slavishly close to the original Zack Snyder’s treatment of Watchmen, the Holy Grail of modern comics, will be, I think we can permit ourselves a small smile. Bob Dylan, it seems, is a fan.
Bob Dylan is everywhere and nowhere here at the Viennale, Vienna’s annual film festival, where your Uncut reporter has spent another arduous week slurping free champagne and scoffing luxury cakes on your behalf. Dylan was invited as guest of honour but, of course, declined. All the same, hardcore fans have gorged on a wide selection of Dylan-themed films, photo exhibitions, talks and concerts. There is even a “Bob burger” on sale in one of the festival’s main cinemas.
In 2005’s Brick, Rian Johnson played a cute twist on the high school movie genre, importing the tropes of film noir for a murder thriller set in the halls of academe. The Brothers Bloom, last night’s premier at the London Film Festival, is a similarly knowing piece of work. On face value, it’s a movie about two con men brothers, played by Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody; but, more than that, it’s also a movie about the act of fiction itself.
QUANTUM OF SOLACE
HHH
DIRECTED BY Marc Forster
STARRING Daniel Craig, Matthieu Amalric, Olga Kurylenko
OPENS October 30 CERT 12A 105 MINS
Cumbersome title aside, it would be churlish to underestimate the amount of goodwill directed towards what, for brevity’s sake, we’ll stick to calling Bond 22.
To London’s glamorous Leicester Square, then, and the opening night of this year’s London Film Festival. Sitting inside the Odeon cinema, watching a live feed of the red carpet activity outside, a brief if slightly disorientating Hall of Mirrors moment unfolds on the big screen. Frank Langhella, who plays the former American President in Frost/Nixon, is being interviewed on screen, while, about two feet away from him, the real David Frost is working the crowd.
