Just For Lookin' Thru

The Frames’ front man Glen Hansard plays a wounded busker singing songs of heartache and heartbreak on the streets of Dublin. He is spotted by a young Czech immigrant who loves his songs although they are pretty maudlin. She is the driving force that shakes him out of his inertia, prompts him to pick up the pieces and follow his dream, and it’s interesting that she is making such a success of her life in a new country whilst he is floundering in his own. Without her inspiration he'd still be fixing vacuum cleaners in a back street shop. They recognize each other as a pair of love casualties and this film is a touching study of two people meeting at a vulnerable time in their lives and making a deep connection. It shows how even a transitory relationship can have a profound effect on our lives, without the obvious outcome, and avoids the cliché of boy meets girl. Despite the hand held camerawork being a bit jerky at times, intentionally arty but disconcerting, and the poor

Newton Faulkner’s returned to Truro after visiting Europe this autumn. He’s a sell out in most British venues and his last date is back in Cornwall where, only in March, he was the support for James Morrison. Since the success of his single Dream Catch Me with its summer sound that gets right in your head and stays there, he’s also getting plenty of airtime for his new single, Teardrop. Relaxed and easy on stage, Faulkner chats between numbers, his long dreads swinging in front of his face. He goes into a soft reggae song, just off the beat, for ‘People Should Smile More’ and the warm crowd of 1700 go crazy for him, cheering, waving and calling out, ‘I Love You.’ Strumming and banging, using his guitar as percussion, he’s backed up by bongos and a bassist, and moves from ballad to funk. He’s got such a great voice it seems he can’t make an ugly sound, then he shifts into a stomping rhythm for ‘UFO.’ Whatever he does the crowd love it, and he’s having fun. He raises a finger - they chee

Writer David Stuart Davies has created a superb one man show, and the script is spot on, combining humour and pathos with drama and keeping the tension throughout. Sherlock Holmes returns to Baker Street after the funeral of his old friend, Watson and, from the moment he appears on stage Roger Llewellyn is riveting. It is impossible to tear your eyes from him as he talks to Watson, or to the memory of him, recalling their first meeting, reminding him of conversations past, and recreating the cases and the stories they worked on together. He demonstrates a tender and regretful affection for Watson which is often poignant, but also amusing. Llewellyn’s performance is spellbinding. He plays a whole host of characters, switches accents and posture with bewildering ease, and terrific direction from Gareth Armstrong keeps him moving around the stage in surprisingly physical theatre. He is both fit and graceful. The pace is fine tuned so that moments of high melodrama move seamlessly into tou

Written in 1621, The Changeling requires a modern audience to cast aside twenty-first century social and sexual politics. A pre-show talk by Nottingham Playhouse Theatre Company’s Steve Unwin explains that, far from being distressed, Beatrice-Joanna would have been honoured to have her husband chosen for her by her father, and that her disobedience would have struck contemporary audiences as deeply shocking. Days before her wedding to an unwanted suitor, the apparently indulged Beatrice-Joanna instead falls for Alsemero. An awkward situation, further complicated by her father’s devoted servant de Flores, who is obsessed with her. She repels de Flores until she decides to make him useful, asking him to kill her bridegroom and leave her free to marry Alsemero. It has not occurred to her that she has made a deal with the devil. To her horror, he refuses money but claims her as his reward, switching her from privileged and headstrong young woman to hapless victim. Not only a Jacobean reven

Clooney is mesmerizing as smooth, smart fixer for a large corporate law firm in New York. He’s brought in to tidy up the mess when friend Arthur (Tom Wilkinson) appears to have a breakdown whilst working on a lengthy compensation case for an agro-chemical corporation. The case stinks; small farmers and their families have been poisoned by the company’s carcinogenic weed killer, and Arthur switches sides. He’s up against Karen (Tilda Swinton), ruthless boss of the agrochemical company. There are no caricatures and no clichés in this cracking, believable, suspense movie. It’s a fine character study of Clayton, who operates alone using an extensive network of legal contacts. Cool and adept on the job, he is distracted and inattentive when he’s with his bright and thoughtful son, and the boy provides a nice counterbalance to Clayton’s worldly effectiveness. Wilkinson is on superb form as a clever lawyer, suffering from mental health problems and overcome with guilt. The hi

Desperately slow moving focus on Alain (Depardieu) and Marion (Cecile de France), with the camera lingering particularly lovingly on the latter. Her beautiful eyes are almost spellbinding but that doesn’t make for enough of a story. Alain is a singer and the cheesy material and excruciating lyrics are difficult to sit through. The film quality is grainy which makes it look like a home movie but does add to the seventies, downbeat, dance hall atmosphere. However, this simple drama about an older, fading, local celebrity, falling for a young, enigmatic woman is touching at times, mortifying at others, and Alain’s dogged pursuit of the obviously reluctant Marion is embarrassing. You just want to tell him to stop it and leave her alone. She is deeply troubled, suffering from a recent relationship break-up, and hardly ready to be wooed and won by an older, overweight man. Alain persists, is rejected, then seemingly toyed with as Marion develops an affection for him. Both charac

Gripping quarry and pursuit movie for landscape junkies. Quality cinematography and direction keep the tension going throughout the lengthy chase after Gideon (Pierce Brosnan) by Carver (Liam Neeson) and his men. Starting high in snow covered mountains, the relentless hunt continues downriver as Gideon evades his pursuers, determined to survive not only them, but an embedded bullet, freezing, near drowning, starvation and thirst. He comes up with some ingenious but brutal survival techniques. The squeamish may need to look away at times; the camera spares no detail in this visceral and thrilling adventure. However, when Gideon gets down to a dried up riverbed in an arid landscape, (which looks like seasonal confusion, but is possibly symbolic) the story dries up too. There are some surreal references to Eastwood’s classic ‘The Outlaw Josey Wales’ in the inexplicable appearance of a medicine seller and a wise Indian in the desert which are plain silly. Possible nods to Josey Wa

Some of these musicians are massive, I mean American massive. One of them forces his bulk through the coffee shop holding a piece of cake and a drink, and drops his napkin. It is returned to him with the comment, ‘You may want to get a fresh one.’ He doesn’t respond, even with a glance, but collects another and sits down with his co-singers exuding the attitude of a spoilt child. Moments later, when one of the other band members asks what the cake’s like, he says, ‘It’s sum kinda baaaed sheeeit.’ He doesn’t finish it. Who would have expected black Americans to be so precious but it’s the Health and Safety culture that’s to blame, when a perfectly good piece of cake is simply not good enough and a paper napkin that has touched the floor is a noxious thing. On stage, the Stylistics exude professionalism and charm. The huge guys are the Style Orchestra; the Stylistics are up front in matching suits, shirts and shoes and look in pretty good shape for a band that’s been together for 39 year

Ryan Phillippe plays Eric, a young, bright, FBI employee whose IT skills and quick thinking get him a job spying on Robert Hanssen (jailed for life in 2001 for providing the KGB with military secrets for 15 years.) Ambitious and motivated, Eric takes it on, hoping for fast track promotion to agent. Hanssen’s certainty that he is smarter than anyone else is what drives him, but Eric’s smart too, and this suspenseful, intelligent film keeps us guessing as to which one will outwit the other. Eric keeps his cool despite his prey becoming his predator when Hanssen (Chris Cooper) monitors him just as closely, turns up at his house, anticipates every move Eric makes, and is aware of every level of FBI surveillance. He’s a hard man to dupe. Alongside their egos clashing, the story covers the moral dilemmas of both men. Hanssen is a devout Catholic who fantasizes about Catherine Zeta Jones and sells movies of himself having sex with his wife, while young Eric isn’t happy with the w

It’s unclear whether this film is supposed to be a romance, a road trip, or a creative documentary, and the result is a bewildering series of unconnected scenes. A disturbed French girl, Zingarina, arrives in Transylvania with her anxious sister as carer, and an interpreter, and the trio are searching for Zingarina’s absconded lover. She finds him, he rejects her, and she descends into a prolonged schizophrenic episode and, because we know nothing about these characters and have been shown nothing to evoke our interest or sympathy, it’s meaningless and irritating. Zingarina whirls around in her own misery, messing up a really interesting carnival procession of national costumed musicians and singers when, as a documentary, this could have been fascinating and illuminating. At various times during the film there are tantalising glimpses of local performers but there is little dialogue and no insight into either gypsy or local culture, leaving the impression of a film shot o

This doesn’t sound like an interesting premise for a film; an unsuccessful writer faking the autobiography of Howard Hughes and getting caught, but it’s gripping, and true. Clifford Irving’s breathtaking audacity is so outrageous and implausible that you have to keep watching because you can’t believe he’ll pull it off, and he nearly does. Richard Gere plays Irving with what looks like a dodgy black perm and he looks so unlike the Gere we know that he manages to convince. Although the film is about the trickery involved in fooling his publicist, the publishers and their legal advisors, it is also a close study of friendship and relationships. Irving’s friend joins him rather reluctantly in the venture, which is a sort of literary hussle, but fails to put a brake on the increasingly complicated and unnerving fraud, while Irving’s wife has concerns about his easy lying in his private life. Irving’s obsession with Hughes grows, and threatens to disrupt his life; he becom

Alan Bennett wanted to write about a charismatic schoolmaster and has come up with Hector (Desmond Barrit) whose approach is to teach the boys poetry and songs; Hector’s view is that learning moving, insightful or just plain silly texts provide the antidote to the earnest love of 'words'. He has the boys acting, singing from musicals and speaking French rather than studying History, and his unorthodox style aims to provide them with cultural awareness and breadth. These boys are ambitious and their Headmaster wants them to get into Oxford which will give the school a better ranking in the league tables so he brings in a young teacher, Irwin, to prepare the boys for the examination board by challenging the way they think about history. The play is about teaching, the way to open up young minds balanced against exam training, and Bennett’s play shows how a teaching career can be fulfilling but also limiting; the school is a nation in microcosm: flawed individuals doing their best

A confection of a film this one, featuring no end of sickly pies baked by Jenna (Keri Russell) in a small town diner. She puts everything she has into the buttery crusts, creamy fillings and marshmallow toppings; it’s all melted bitter chocolate and caramel, but her life is lacklustre and unhappy, her husband is an insecure control freak and he is the obstacle to her creative and emotional fulfilment. Funny and charming, the film’s humour surprises and delights whenever her git of a husband’s behaviour becomes too oppressive, and the story achieves a nice balance between eliciting sympathy and laughter. Having said that, husband Earl is nasty but not too nasty, and there are times when we wonder why she doesn’t tell him what a prat he really is. Jenna is horrified to find she is pregnant and her real ambition is to win the pie making competition and open her own pie diner. The pregnancy and her medical consultations with a new doctor bring unexpected benefits. Charming and

Marion Cotillard is outstanding as Edith Piaf in Dahan's biography. Piaf’s classic songs are terrific and passionately delivered, and the film feels like a cinematic roller coaster ride of emotions and fragments from Piaf's life. The effect is of vivid but random memory recall, as though we are seeing moving snapshots taken through her life. Dahan serves up a visual maelstrom, from Piaf as a small child left with her grandmother to be brought up in a brothel, through her years of success and arrogance, to her death, ravaged by drugs and alcohol. Loss follows loss, first her father takes her away from her mother, then she is torn from the arms of the prostitute she comes to love, and finally she is grief stricken at the death of her lover, boxer Marcel Cerdan. She never recovered from her broken heart, which caused her addiction to morphine, and her physical degeneration is shocking. Cotillard's Piaf is outspoken and rough, drunk and mouthy, but occasionally vul

Vincenzo Amato leads the cast in this story about leaving your homeland and dreaming of a golden future. Opening in Sicily, onto a landscape made up of nothing but stones it’s not much of a surprise that the farmers there are barely able to scrape a living. It’s an arid, barren, uncomfortable place, and the locals are firm believers in superstition; the biblical reference to seeds falling on stony ground is picked up later with the idea of being transplanted into more fertile soil in the United States. Widower Salvatore Mancuso (Amato) and his little group are lured to America by doctored photographs of gigantic chickens and enormous vegetables. Crialese uses surreal sequences such as Mancuso swimming in a river of milk while a carrot bigger than himself floats by as relief from the scenes of difficulties and discomfort. Mancuso leaves with his aged mother, a healer and symbol of the Old World, his sons and two young women who have been ‘sold’ to wealthy Americans. These girls

Twenty-one directors contribute a short film each to make up this homage to Paris, and the international cast make this a cosmopolitan collection. There are cranky American and British divorcees (incl Bob Hoskins), a grieving Frenchwoman (Juliet Binoche), a stoned actress (Maggie Gyllenhaal), amongst the characters, and there is more than a hint of the mystical in many of the shorts. They range from the comic and surreal to the poignant, and there’s even a vampire romance. Watching these quite different films one after another plays havoc with the emotions; each film draw you in, absorbs you in its mini drama, then abandons you, only for you to be picked up by the next story and manipulated all over again, twenty-one times, with no time to let the sensations settle. So much material, so many storylines, baffling, charming, quirky and delightful.

No posts for so long? Bin’ working innit? Deadlines, you know the drill. Okay, I just need to whine now, for quite some time. Can’t print, won’t print? Phone the helpline. Spend the next forty minutes moving all your furniture, pulling out your printer and your computer, disconnecting cables from the back, trying to find numbers that are unreachable and, when you find them, are printed so small that they are indecipherable to the naked eye. The man in Delhi or Bombay may have a little trouble understanding RP English but it doesn’t matter if he thinks your name’s Samantha when it’s Amanda, or that everything you say has to be spelled out using the phonic alphabet: name, address, serial numbers, ad nauseam, because he’s been trained to say, “Thank you for your patience,” at frequent intervals. He can’t see me crawling round on the carpet with my office in a state of chaos, and so 'impatient' I am almost in tears. His advice: to unplug cables and plug them in again. I could have

Four married couples feature in this play which presents their very different relationships over the course of one farcical evening, on into the early hours. Delia and Ernest are celebrating their wedding anniversary while Malcolm and Kate are having a housewarming party. Nick has a bad back so has to stay at home in bed; his wife Jan goes to the party without him, where she bumps into old flame Trevor who is having a row with his depressed and distracted wife Susannah. The stage set cleverly presents three bedrooms; lighting and action moves audience attention from one to another, and there is an intelligent use of space and timing. Moments of intensity from neurotic Trevor and Susannah are relieved by comedy, while Jan and Nick’s bickering and jibes are also offset with some humour. Herford directs a well known cast but it is always apparent that they are acting. Only James Midgley and Natalie Cassidy work with perfect comic timing, which makes an audience forget they are delivering

Atkins weaves graphics, documentary and news footage, personal stories and information about legislation to expose the deeply disturbing changes that have come about in the UK over the last ten years. Comments are from human rights organizations, politicians, academics and lawyers, and the film focuses on ordinary people who have had enough. They feel compelled to protest and complain about the loss of civil liberties such as freedom of speech, (which has always been sacrosanct in Britain), being presumed innocent until proven guilty, our rights to privacy, the illegality of torture, and the rest. The Police are used as Government tools to control the unruly population who, when peacefully protesting, are now considered a security risk and a terrorist threat. One busload of women on their way to a peaceful protest were imprisoned in their coach and escorted back to London by a motorcade of police outriders and vans. They were unable to get off the coach for a toilet or dri

Just spent a happy few days at the Festival of Words and Ideas at Dartington. Hard to know whether the talks are more fascinating than the audience. Am sated with stimulating conversation. Heaven on earth to spend time with other writers and avid readers, people of passion. On Resurgence Day we were treated to talks by Brian Goodwin and Satish Kumar. Goodwin says he is ‘embedded in the evolutionary process’ and his desire is to articulate that ‘culture is embedded in nature’ not something separate, a construct, apart from it. He emphasizes that, at Schumacher College, study is focussed on the ‘meaning’ in the natural world, which is different from studying the natural world in order to control it. In nature, all is death and transformation. His argument that meaning tends to be associated with language and culture rather than the existence and life of things implies a chasm between the two, that thought and the intellect have moved to inhabit a separate sphere from nature. He says ‘we

Okay. Another interest rate rise. The market has ground to a halt here. The smart people had put their properties on the market in May, to avoid having to have the HIP. If they accepted offers then, they’re alright now. The market has become saturated with properties. Overpriced, unattractive properties down here. So, it’s a buyer’s market. There’s so much to choose from that no-one’s choosing. However, in an auction I attended last week, a 3.8 acre parcel of pasture land sold for 60K. Buy land, they ain't makin' it anymore. In fifty years you could maybe get planning permission for your grandchildren. I’ve only been in this job for nine months and, in that time, we’ve gone from being rushed off our feet and selling houses before we’ve had a chance to get them advertised in the paper, to being stuck with hundreds of them. My own job, doing all the Saturday viewings, has changed from racing about like a headless chicken to try and fit in all the appointments, missing l

Set in Australia and based on a short story by Raymond Carver, ‘So Much Water So Close To Home,’ Jindabyne is a slow moving psychological drama. The town of the title is small, enclosed, and stifling. Everyone knows everyone’s business yet there is sense of real unease percolating through every piece of dialogue from the beginning. There is no soundtrack; the film is shot in silence and minimal dialogue, but singing overlaid on the landscape shots is very disturbing. Hostility is everywhere. Stewart and his friends go off on a weekend fishing trip, and, on the Friday, find the dead body of a murdered woman floating in the water. Their decision to leave her there, and not report the crime until they return is a mistake in judgement that has repercussions which reverberate throughout their community on their return. Misunderstanding, failure to tell the truth, and the apportionment of blame are the themes here. Laura Linney is superb as Clare, Stewart’s wife, who has also ma

There’s a lot of excitement in the Press just now, with two car bomb threats averted in London and another at Glasgow Airport. It strikes me as deeply chilling that the London bomb attempts were targeted near nightclubs where hundreds of young people and, in particular, slags (sic) would have been killed or maimed. This is not a terrorist attack against capitalism or even Christianity, or a general lack of faith in the UK but an attack on our women. In the same newspaper I read an article about a magistrate who is apologizing for his unprofessional conduct when he walked out of the Courtroom because a young Muslim woman appeared before him in a hijab with a mere slit for her eyes to peep through. I have no idea what she had done to require a presence before the beak, but identity must surely be called into question in Court. She is apparently hurt and outraged at being asked to unveil where men are present. However, anyone could have been under that veil, her uncle for instance, sent a

Fiona and Grant have been married for 44 years. Filmed in Canada, the beautiful snowscapes, sunlight on snow, and red tinted sunsets, make a fitting backdrop to Julie Christie’s cool, elegant beauty. She plays the wife of a retired University lecturer Grant, (Gordon Pinsent), who succumbs to the early onset of Alzheimer’s. At first it troubles her, then it intrigues her and she says she feels as though she is ‘disappearing.’ It is she who decides when it is time for her to go into a home, who instigates the process and, when they arrive, who determinedly checks herself in. She bravely comments that it will be like staying at an hotel. What other line can she take? Grant’s quietly desperate attempts to dissuade her only threaten her fortitude. She has to be strong for them both. It is hard for her to say goodbye too, but it is so much harder for Grant to go home and be without her. It is always hardest to be the one left behind. The unkindest cut of all is that the home

I am getting to know Ella a little bit. I have been out to the rambling old cottage quite a few times now, showing folks round. She usually keeps out of the way, as though she doesn’t want to be involved in the process. Today, she’s inside with her family, and we pass through the rooms as respectfully as we can, aware of her sensitivity towards the old house. With a cup of tea, her daughter and her grandchildren, she is confined to one small room while we have free range of her home. After the first couple have left I go in and sit down to talk to her. They have made an offer of 500K and want to go for an immediate exchange of contracts, legals permitting, with a completion date set for September. This is a reasonable timescale. She looks worried, unhappy. “I don’t know.” She says. She tells me she wants her original buyers to have the house although they are now unable to proceed because their own sale fell through. She says that she ‘clicked’ with them; that they fell in love w

This is a remake of a 1934 classic starring Greta Garbo and is based on a novel by Somerset Maugham. Kitty is a bored, rather empty, piano playing socialite with an overbearing mother who wants her to get married because that’s what girls do (it's set in the 1920s). Kitty likes dancing, playing tennis, and has never been in love. Along comes a rather serious but unexciting bacteriologist to woo her; Kitty accepts his proposal, and they leave for Shanghai. Kitty has escaped from her mother only to succumb to a deeper boredom amongst the colonial set. She embarks on a passionate affair with a diplomat, is discovered, and she becomes victim to the intensity of her husband’s feelings of rejection, pain and anger at her infidelity. His punishment is to take her into rural China where there is a severe cholera outbreak. It is a study of repressed emotion and correct behaviour, and it makes horribly uncomfortable viewing with its sense of being trapped in a loveless marriage,