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Letter: Jim Goddard gave me the coat off his back, writes Robin Ellis
30 June 2013 5:49 AM, PDT
People are sometimes defined by a single instinctive gesture, made off the cuff. In the late 70s, I was recording a TV drama at London Weekend's headquarters on the South Bank in the bleak midwinter. We were working on a scene that required me to be in shirtsleeves.
Suddenly a voice announced over the loud speaker system: "Clear the building immediately!" It was a bomb-scare. Out we all trooped into a dank street on a freezing night. A large figure appeared behind me and draped something over my shoulders. It was Jim Goddard, the director, with a broad smile on his face – it was his coat. Perhaps his need was not as pressing as one of his actors in the middle of a recording that would be resumed asap – nevertheless the moment has stayed with me.
DramaTelevisionDramaRobin Ellis
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- Robin Ellis
Susan Sarandon: 'Feminism is a bit of an old-fashioned word'
30 June 2013 4:38 AM, PDT
Susan Sarandon on portraying strong women, the dearth of young Susans – and her recipe for barbecued chicken
In Arbitrage, you play the wife of a multi-millionaire hedge fund manager who is stronger than she first appears. It's not the usual character arc for a female support role – was that part of the appeal?
Absolutely and I was also taken by Nicholas Jarecki's enthusiasm and passion, and Richard Gere, I've known forever and I got to work with him. I got to wear nice clothes and film in New York, so it was very seductive.
I think that what happens in a long relationship [like the one in the film] – and the longest I've ever had was 23 years – is that people have assumptions and firm habits in the way they relate to each other. He [the Richard Gere character] has made certain assumptions about her but when she gets the upper hand, it makes him reload. She has made certain »
- Elizabeth Day
Why we're watching… Katie Chang
30 June 2013 12:00 AM, PDT
The 17-year-old actor on starring in the Bling Ring, her Korean heritage and wondering where it all went right
Who's this button-bright prim thing? The breakout star of The Bling Ring.
Bling Ring? Another cosmetic trend from Hollywood? It's Sofia Coppola's new film, which portrays the real-life gang that broke into celebrities' La houses to loot drugs and luxury goods. They got Orlando Bloom's rug, you know.
Oh. And she looks like such a nice girl. She is. And talented. Pre-release buzz was all about co-star Emma Watson, but with her icy performance as alpha bitch Rebecca, it's 18-year-old Katie Chang who's the hot ticket now.
She gives great "shallow Valley girl". Are you sure she's acting? Although they share a sharp eye for designer fashion, Katie couldn't be less Rebecca. Having moved from Illinois to La for filming, she's off to New York to study creative writing at Columbia University. »
- Rhik Samadder
Orson Welles' criticisms of actors found
29 June 2013 4:44 PM, PDT
Director's sharp criticism of Hollywood stars emerges following publication of previously unpublished recordings
He is one of cinema's giants, but Orson Welles looked down on many of his fellow actors and directors, viciously denigrating some of the biggest names of his day, previously unpublished private conversations reveal.
Laurence Olivier was "stupid", Spencer Tracy "hateful" and Charlie Chaplin "arrogant", and he could not even bear to look at Bette Davis. James Stewart was a "bad actor", Joan Fontaine had "two expressions, and that's it", and Norma Shearer was "one of the most minimally talented ladies to appear on the silver screen".
His criticisms have emerged from long-lost tapes in which he chatted unguardedly to a friend, never expecting them to be made public. He died suddenly in 1985 before he could edit them into a planned autobiography, and the tapes have been in the friend's garage until now.
As an actor, director, »
- Dalya Alberge
Did studio bosses bow to the Nazis?
29 June 2013 4:08 PM, PDT
Book by a Harvard scholar argues that Us producers in the 1930s 'collaborated' with the Nazis with cuts to films and self-censorship
The author of a controversial book causing a stir in Hollywood for exposing collaboration between the major studios and Nazi Germany in the runup to the second world war has defended his claims to the Observer.
Harvard scholar Ben Urwand, who spent a decade sifting through German and American archives, said: "I want to bring out a hidden episode in Hollywood history and an episode that has not been reported accurately."
Urwand's interpretation of the relationship is disputed by other scholars of the period. He claims that Hollywood studio chiefs, many of them recent eastern European Jewish refugees, enthusiastically worked with Hitler's censors to alter films or even cancel productions entirely in order to protect access to the German film market. "In the 1930s the Hollywood studios not »
- Edward Helmore
Luther's back… and this time he's on the wrong side of the law
29 June 2013 4:08 PM, PDT
Idris Elba is the alpha cop. But what he really wants is to sing and dance in a stage musical
Film and television star Idris Elba is back on the small screen this week in his role as the obsessive detective John Luther after a break of two years. However, he told the Observer what he would really like to return to is his first love, the theatre, and he would particularly like a role in a musical.
"I do want to walk the boards again – I started in theatre and want to do it again very soon," he said. He hopes this might happen when he next has a break in his schedule, in 2015. He confirmed that his voice is still in fine fettle; he won a place at the National Youth Music Theatre in 1988, assisted by a Prince's Trust award, which was the launch of his acting career. »
- Maggie Brown
Hummingbird – review
29 June 2013 4:06 PM, PDT
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"I'm going to kill you… with this spoon." Although it won't be his highest-grossing movie, this flawed but ambitious (and rather peculiar) London-set thriller finds Jason Statham once again broadening his dramatic palette while retaining his trademark homoerotic action base. He plays special-forces soldier turned street-bum "Crazy Joey" who stumbles into a swanky Soho flat that becomes a base from which to rebuild his life, avenge a murder, and play games with his (sexual) identity.
After the lascivious oil-wrestling and male striptease of the Transporter series, the Stath here finds himself surrounded by prominently displayed photos of bound penises. "Are you exclusively gay?" asks a neighbour, to which our hero replies: "Recently I've found myself attracted to nuns" – his relationship with Agata Buzek's Sister of Mercy being one of the film's many oddly upturned generic tropes.
Although the narrative entanglements »
- Mark Kermode
The Battle of the Sexes – review
29 June 2013 4:06 PM, PDT
In 1973, tennis star Billie Jean King agreed to face 1940s world champion and self-proclaimed "male chauvinist pig" Bobby Riggs in what became the most watched tennis game in history. Whether you're familiar with the story or not (and I confess I wasn't), this riveting documentary will have you on the edge of your ringside seat as a civil-rights battle is played out on court.
In terms of the characters, you couldn't make them up: King is both a brilliant athlete and an increasingly articulate advocate, demanding gender equality through thought, word and deed; Riggs is a caricature, a public buffoon whose goofy exterior masks a steely devotion to winning. That tennis would become a sport in which men and women are equally rewarded in terms of prize purses is all traceable to the extraordinary chapter of social history documented here. Anyone watching Wimbledon will only have their enjoyment of the »
- Mark Kermode
Stories We Tell – review
29 June 2013 4:06 PM, PDT
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Sarah Polley's slippery investigation of her uncertain family history and personal lineage is predicated on the unreliability of memory; written, spoken, filmed. Through interviews with brothers and sisters, aunts and fathers, friends and colleagues, she attempts to reconstruct the presence of her mother, an aspiring actress lost to cancer, captured on camera, brought to life through recollection and reminiscence. At first, the grainy Super 8 home-movie footage seems to offer verification of the "facts", but as the nature of intertwined relationships grows more complex, so the evidence becomes increasingly fluid. Far from being an exercise in navel-gazing, Polley's portrait of modern family life is a playfully profound discussion of narrative forms – the way in which we each construct our own reality through stories, part truth, part invention. It helps that these particular lives have been so eventful, and that the players are all likable, »
- Mark Kermode
Despicable Me 2 – review
29 June 2013 4:06 PM, PDT
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Funnier – and perhaps cuter – than its predecessor, this blockbuster animation finds jam-making adoptive parent Gru (Steve Carell) being reluctantly recruited by the Anti-Villain League to bring down a rival fiend. His mind, however, is elsewhere – on the growing pains of his young charges and the wily charms of a fellow agent (Kristen Wiig). The real joy, however, is in the increased role of the goggle-eyed Minions, who outdo Ice Age's Scrat in the scene-stealing stakes. Voiced by the directors in babbling helium-fuelled goobledegook, these yellow weebles are comedy gold, their slapstick antics blending a simplicity of form with a complexity of expression rooted in the traditions of silent cinema. Having laughed my way through pretty much the entire film (including an ace end-credits sequence that will delight aspect ratio nerds), I left the cinema to the sound of a child »
- Mark Kermode
The East – review
29 June 2013 4:05 PM, PDT
Building on the success of their Sundance hit Sound of My Voice, rising star Brit Marling and director Zal Batmanglij reunite on this co-written eco-thriller about the infiltration of radical anarcho-hippy cells. Marling plays Sarah, an ex-fbi agent sent by a private security firm to track down and identify the titular anti-capitalist enclave promising poisonous corporations a taste of their own medicine.
More mainstream than its festival-favourite predecessor yet still retaining an indie edge, The East trips enjoyably between cyber-conspiracy thrills and alt-lifestyle spills – Mission Impossible meets Martha Marcy May Marlene. Marling is suitably brittle as the square peg in a round hole, torn between identities; Ellen Page is terrifically spiky as the hard-core activist fiercely advocating an eye for an eye; Patricia Clarkson is scarily charismatic as Sarah's boss about whom the softest thing is her teeth. It all adds up to an intelligent romp which keeps one eye »
- Mark Kermode
How black-and-white movies made a comeback
29 June 2013 4:05 PM, PDT
The past two years has seen an unprecedented resurgence in black-and-white movies, from Oscar-winning silent film The Artist to Ben Wheatley's forthcoming A Field in England. So what's the sudden appeal for directors?
When Ben Wheatley was preparing to make A Field in England, his mind-altering foray into the English civil war, released 5 July , he took a lot of test shots to help him determine how the film should look. Some of the shots were in colour, others were in black and white, and Wheatley recalls being struck by the disparity between the two. With the colour shots, he says, "it was all about the colour of a character's clothes and the grass and the sky. It was really distracting. Whereas in black and white, it was all about his face and his hair and the lace and the texture of the grass. That's what drew us to it. »
- Killian Fox
Mark Kermode's DVD round-up
29 June 2013 4:05 PM, PDT
Stoker; Cloud Atlas; Maniac; Oz the Great and Powerful; The Guilt Trip
With Spike Lee's Us remake of Park Chan-wook's Oldboy due in cinemas this autumn, the Korean maestro makes his own English-language feature debut with Stoker (2013, Fox, 18). Adapted from a long-admired script by Wentworth Miller (with contributions from Erin Cressida Wilson), this tale of innocence lost and power regained is a skin-prickling symbolic treat. When a mother (Nicole Kidman) and daughter (Mia Wasikowska) lose their husband and father respectively, the deceased's creepily seductive brother (Matthew Goode) arrives to fill the gap in their lives, and bring out a darkness lurking in the shadows of their relationship. Soon enough, boys are disappearing, the police are asking questions and the family is undergoing a generational shift. While the title and brooding imagery signal toward the vampirism of Dracula, Miller cites Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt as his touchstone text. Park »
- Mark Kermode
Massive Attack meet Adam Curtis: the unlikely double act
29 June 2013 4:05 PM, PDT
At July's Manchester festival, the boundary-breaking band and radical film-maker will tackle the perilous state of democracy in a show that redefines the notion of a gig
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Back in May 1991, Massive Attack released a groundbreaking single called Safe from Harm. It merged sampled beats, a definably British rap style and a stirring soul vocal into a radical musical collage that resonates throughout pop music to this day. Twenty-two years later, the song's title has also become a kind of shorthand for the central theme of the group's most ambitious project to date: their imminent live collaboration at Manchester international festival with the radical documentary film-maker Adam Curtis.
"We are exploring a subject that has long interested us both and that we have been talking about, on and off, for two years," says Curtis, whose vision is driving the project, at least »
- Sean O'Hagan
The Act of Killing – review
29 June 2013 4:05 PM, PDT
Joshua Oppenheimer's bloody documentary restaging a wave of mass killings in 1960s Indonesia leaves our critic dumbfounded
This bone-chilling documentary opens with a quote from Voltaire ("All murderers are punished, unless they kill in large numbers, and to the sound of trumpets"), which gives way to the sight of dancers emerging from a giant fish, a black-clad priest and man in garish electric-blue drag conducting some ecstatic service at the foot of a waterfall, while a directorial voice commands: "Smile! Don't let the cameras catch you looking bad!" The film ends with the sound of someone retching up their tortured soul, an awful, growling, vomitous howl, like an anguished demon being wrenched from a fragile body. In between, we find ourselves looking long into an abyss in which unspeakable horror and utterly mundane madness are thrown together in the existential equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider – fact and fiction »
- Mark Kermode
Underground – review
29 June 2013 4:05 PM, PDT
(Anthony Asquith, 1929; BFI, PG)
Educated at Winchester and Oxford, lifelong socialist, closet gay, son of a Liberal prime minister, Anthony Asquith (1902-1968) is a currently undervalued film-maker whose career began in the silent era when he studied American cinema in Hollywood and German expressionism in Berlin. The British character in its various forms fascinated him, especially the middle classes, and he found an important collaborator in Terence Rattigan. Their association lasted from 1937 to the mid-1960s, resulting in numerous crucial works, including the wartime morale-booster The Way to the Stars and that masterpiece of stiff-upper-lip repression, The Browning Version.
Just before the coming of sound Asquith made two silent classics, A Cottage on Dartmoor and Underground that put his rival Hitchcock into the shade in the way it absorbed foreign influences and experimented with new styles. Underground is an exhilarating celebration of modern city life as embodied by the London underground system, »
- Philip French
This Is the End – review
29 June 2013 4:04 PM, PDT
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Predictable levels of self-indulgence in this bloated and only sporadically chucklesome vanity project from Hollywood's new generation of superannuated frat boys. Co-director/writer Seth Rogen plays (a version of) himself, holing up with assorted sublebrity friends in James Franco's modernist bachelor pad when the apocalypse comes to Hollywood.
While a sweary mash-up of The Rapture and Ghostbusters (with riffs from Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist) probably made a great dope-fuelled party pitch, the reality is more sobering; a collection of the usual dick-and-spunk gags with added CGI monsters. The best thing in the movie is a short-lived appearance by Michael Cera as a coke-snorting creep whom everyone hates – thus making him by far the most likable presence on screen.
ComedySeth RogenJames FrancoMark Kermode
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- Mark Kermode
Rewind TV: Andy Murray: The Man Behind the Racquet; Secrets from the Workhouse; Hannibal; India: A Dangerous Place to Be a Woman – review
29 June 2013 4:04 PM, PDT
The rebranding of sulky-drawers Murray got off to an unpromising start, while a timely reminder of workhouse inhumanities made powerful viewing
Andy Murray: The Man Behind the Racquet (BBC1) | iPlayer
Secrets from the Workhouse (ITV) | ITV Player
Hannibal (Sky Living)
India: A Dangerous Place to Be a Woman (BBC3) | iPlayer
Andy Murray - The Man Behind the Racquet seemed to be part of the ongoing drive to reframe Murray, from number two-seeded, Us Open-winning, sulky-drawers face-ache, to someone, well, nicer, or at least more marketable.
Presented by Sue Barker in the wistful preoccupied way of a woman who finds it hard to forget how fine Jimmy Connors once looked in his tight white shorts, it wasn't entirely unconvincing. Though I'm still not persuaded that crying because you've lost a Wimbledon final means you're any "nicer" than you were before you became publicly emotionally incontinent. Nor am I convinced that »
- Barbara Ellen, Tim Henman
Trailer Trash
29 June 2013 4:03 PM, PDT
The critics are plied with foaming ale for Ben Wheatley's English civil war movie, athletic-looking leads are sought for the film version of the Ovett-Coe battle – and everything's in place for a brilliant Suite française
Ben's Beers
Ben Wheatley's new film, A Field in England, is chalking up several firsts. It is the first to be released in cinemas, on Blu-ray and DVD, shown on TV and across on-demand platforms on the same day (5 July). Perhaps more interestingly, it is also the first film to have its own beer. Specially brewed by Weltons in Horsham to mark the occasion, the limited edition ale will only be available in cinema foyers where the film is playing. The tagline on the bottle is "Open Up and Let the Devil In", chiming with the film's psychedelic theme, based as it is around civil war-era soldiers ingesting mushrooms in a field after a battle. »
- Jason Solomons
What Fresh Lunacy Is This? by Robert Sellers – review
29 June 2013 4:03 PM, PDT
The warts-and-all authorised biography of Oliver Reed proves both wildly funny and strangely moving
Robert Sellers's authorised biography of the actor Oliver Reed is both a frustrating and gripping read. Eschewing wider cultural analysis, Sellers writes about the life and career of one of Britain's most notorious actors in a laddish style that takes prurient glee in discussing Reed's many episodes of drunkenness with the lowbrow humour that seems more suited to the pub than the bookshelves. If you enjoy stories about inebriated people urinating on one another's heads, this will be the best book you read all year.
On the other hand, if you can stomach much of the detail, Sellers has managed to piece together a fascinating tale of how Reed, once regarded as Britain's most promising young actor, managed to throw his undeniable talent away. In a career which began with bit parts in Hammer horrors, »
- Alexander Larman
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