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.
I guess the fashionable buzz around acid-folk or whatever we chose to call it has passed now – in fact it probably passed sometime last year when all the lifestyle hacks got fed up with Devendra Banhart and turned on the (sorely underrated, I’d say) “Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon”.
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.
To be honest, I was expecting a brand new studio album. The release dates for “Sugar Mountain” and the behemoth of “Archives” have been pinging around the calendar for so long now, it seemed reasonable to suspect that Neil Young had been distracted from his librarian duties once again by a sudden urgent rush of new music: a follow-up to “Looking For A Leader” and its Obama reference in time for the election, perhaps?
Apologies for the lack of action round these parts this week; we’ve been finishing off the next issue of Uncut, and starting fairly intensive preparations for the one after that. We have, though, still been working our way through the new arrivals, and I guess this week’s big one is the Neil Young “Sugar Mountain” live set.
