Stephen Fry adapts Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies as a rom-com. Great cast of luvvies (notably Peter O'Toole), but the central romance between Emily Mortimer and Stephen Campbell Moore evokes no more sympathy than the endless parade of aristocratic jazz babies subsisting on champagne and "naughty salt". A lively mess.
Originally released in September 1969, left Beck's second album read like a superstar summit meeting, but for the guitarist it was just another day at the office. He'd already replaced Eric Clapton in The Yardbirds, supported The Beatles in Paris, and appeared in Antonioni's movie Blow-Up, livening up the psychedelic club scene with some extreme axe-mangling GBH.
The great French director Jean-Pierre Melville understood American movies better than the majority of Hollywood, and devoted himself to a remarkable series of terse tough-guy thrillers which claimed the term "noir" back for France. Shot on the streets of Paris dressed to look like Manhattan, this spare, razor-sharp 1962 affair has Jean-Paul Belmondo looking great as the doomed stool-pigeon at the centre of a web of deceit.
BUSH HALL, LONDON
Monday March 1, 2004
Rouse closes the first of two nights here with a version of Neil Young's "For The Turnstiles" so intense and intimate that when he sings the line "though your confidence may be shattered" we all inwardly go "uh-oh",and when he adds "it doesn't matter" we all go "phew, what a relief". His crowd are rapt throughout, whooping at every intro like he's just won the Superbowl.
