I'd say the key moment in Cloverfield -- just the very monster movie the post-9/11 world has been crying out for -- occurs while a giant creature of unknown origin lays spectacular waste to New York City, and one of the characters screams: "I AM SEEING THIS SHIT RIGHT NOW!"
Just as I started writing this blog, an email pinged into my inbox to let me know that Juno has now taken $60 million at the US box office and kept the Nic Cage blockbuster National Treasure 2 off the top spot.
Watching TV over the Christmas and New Year period, chances are you might have caught Johnny Depp in a number of films. I'm pretty sure I spotted all three Pirates Of The Caribbean movies spread out across various terrestrial and satellite channels, plus the overlooked Secret Window and -- a personal favourite -- Finding Neverland, a very moving take on the relationship between author JM Barrie and the children who inspired him to write Peter Pan.
In a way, these films are emblematic of the Depp's dualistic approach to his movies. In Pirates, he's performing; in Window and Neverland, he's acting.
It occurred to me, as I stumbled somewhat exhausted out of last night's screening of Paul Thomas Anderson's epic movie about oil, greed and murder, that both this film and The Assassination Of Jesse James seem to be a return to the kind of filmmaking not seen since Heaven's Gate.
While John and Farah were riffing it up at Led Zeppelin last night, I went to see Ridley Scott's latest and, presumably, Final Cut of Blade Runner, one of my favourite films. For a cold and drizzly Monday night viewing at the Screen On The Green in Islington, it was remarkably busy -- unsurprisingly, the audience conspicuously all male, pretty much all of them, like me, glued to the screen.
You may have noticed that the big movie for this Christmas period is The Golden Compass, a $90 million adaptation of the first volume of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.
It's got talking bears, witches on broomsticks and Nicole Kidman, as the film's villain, Mrs Coulter. It's the best performance in a film that has many surprisingly smart casting choices (Tom Courtenay, Daniel Craig, Jim Carter, Derek Jacobi), despite its rather hamfisted handling of the source material.
The stories, of course, are pretty familiar by now. In 1974, tensions within the Faces were, as they say, running high, Rod Stewart’s increasing solo success causing much friction apparently. The situation doubtless exacerbated by the band’s predilection for “relentless, boozy madness”, as Ronnie Wood described it in UNCUT last year.
Anyway, so what does Ronnie do? He gathers together some of his famous pals, records his own album and goes out on tour as The First Barbarians.
Here's Stephen Dalton's final report from this year's Vienna Film Festival...
Ah, Vienna. Welcome to Uncut’s final dispatch from this year’s extended Viennale, which finally closed on Friday with Vic Chesnutt howling grainy, ragged, alt-folk Americana to a packed house in the Austrian capital’s deluxe Gartenbau cinema. A splendidly soulful finale to Europe’s most elegant film festival.
Because you can never attend enough international film festivals, here's STEPHEN DALTON's report from this year's VIENNA FILM FESTIVAL.
Tanks and armoured cars rumble ominously through the centre of Vienna. The streets are eerily empty, as all civilian traffic has been removed from the city’s main inner ring road. It looks like a military coup is underway.
