The pioneering online series “Doctor Hoo” is taking America by storm, as it is released in the US and over 82 countries worldwide.  Lord Entertainment alongside MO Film will deliver this cult series to viewers around the world through the platforms iPhone/iTouch application, Google Android Market and Java handsets.

Millions of viewers will get the chance to watch the series which the UK’s prestigious Daily Telegraph claims “could provide a glimpse of how cult TV shows are developed in the future”.   With busy lives and careers, mobile applications are fast becoming the way of the future and with such easy accessibility “Dr Hoo” could be on lips of those in countries as diverse as Cambodia, Korea and New Zealand.

Dr Hoo was filmed in secret locations in Los Angeles, Canada and the UK with an all star cast.

Ian Hart, best known for US drama “Life” and “Dirt”, stars in the title role of Dr Hoo as an environmentally conscious, vegetarian Welshman with a multiple personality disorder whose real name is Mr David Raymond Hugh.

Believing the world is coming to an end, he enlists the help of his “sexy bombshell” assistant Zara, played by Elaine Cassidy (CBS’s “Harpers Island”). She is relying on Dr Hoo to help her “find herself” – but she appears to exist only in his head.

While Richard Burgi stepped away from his role as Karl Mayer in “Desperate Housewives” to play the shadow is this quirky and exciting series.

Stephen Lord (“Until Death”, “The Shepherd”,  new film with Ewan McGregor “Jackboots of Whitehall”) the producer and director who also appears in the drama as the mysterious Agent Smart, described the offbeat series as a character-driven show that “allows an audience to think and get what they want from the show – or not, which is liberating”.

Struggling NHS Wandsworth paid boss £370K

4:30pm Thursday 16th December 2010 (Wandsworth Guardian)

As health budgets across the borough look likely to be frozen, it has emerged NHS Wandsworth paid one director £370,000 last year – making him one of the highest-paid employees across the NHS.

Professor Salman Rawaf, director of public health, received the payment for work last year, according to NHS Wandsworth’s annual report.

Monopoly Man

Earlier this year we revealed plans for Putney Hospital, which stood vacant for a decade, had been shelved because of an NHS budget freeze – and that NHS Wandsworth spent £2.6m on securing the troubled site.

Current plans for new health centres in north and south Wandsworth also face being shelved or watered down.

The salary revelation was disclosed in a “Rich List” compiled by the Taxpayers’ Alliance this week.

It showed Mr Rawaf’s package included a basic salary of £195,000 to £200,000, “other remuneration” of £170,000 to £175,000 and benefits in kind of £550.

Councillor Ian Hart, chairman of Wandsworth Council’s health and overview committee, said: “For the role of public health director, it’s way too much. I can’t see what a public health director could do for that money. If you were to ask me if NHS Wandsworth got value for money for him, I’d probably say no.”

Councillor Hart said Mr Rawaf did not regularly attend the council’s health overview and scrutiny committee meetings – instead sending his deputy.

He eventually retired on December 31, 2008, with his replacement, Houda Al Sharifi, now being paid between £95,000 and £100,000.

John O’Connell from the Taxpayers’ Alliance said: “It’s time NHS trusts showed restraint when it comes to big pay-offs. Frontline workers in Wandsworth are being asked to take a pay freeze while the top brass continue to see their salaries shoot up, it seems to be one rule for the boss and another for everyone else.”

Mark Clarke, Conservative parliamentary candidate for Tooting, added: “This is why our country is broke. Public sector staff should not be earning more than the Prime Minister”

A spokesman for NHS Wandsworth, formerly Wandsworth PCT, said £175,000 of Mr Rawaf’s pay constituted pension payments for early retirement and other end-of-employment payments.

He added salaries were set by Department of Health pay frameworks.

Mr Rawaf was not available to comment.

It’s probably a good thing that nobody relies on this blog for recommendations as my current approach seems to be to see plays right at the end of their run, first Public Property, then this; I’m not seeing The Priory until the penultimate night and my Sweet Charity tickets are booked for the end of February.  I truly am at the cutting edge of theatre.

Speaking in Tongues sees four actors playing nine characters in two separate but intertwined stories.  In the first, two couples contemplate adultery with each others’ partners – one goes through with it whilst the other doesn’t – and in reconciling with their respective husband and wife, they recount events which set the scene for the second, a mystery surrounding a missing woman.  It feels a little like two plays bolted together, and you need a PowerPoint presentation to fully understand the links between the different characters. 

The opening couple of scenes are noteworthy because the separate interactions between the two couples take place in the same space, with clever blocking and dialogue delivered by turns overlapping and in unison.  If this is intended to suggest that people contemplating infidelity conform to a pattern of behaviour and speak in clichés, it works, but it does mean that the actors are forced to deliver slightly flat performances as they have to concentrate on getting the timing right.  A similar approach is taken to better effect at the opening of the second half as the new characters are established and light is shed on the stories told in the first act monologues.  But this theatrical jiggery pokery contributed to the dialogue and performances feeling a bit mannered, making it difficult to believe in the characters and their emotional connections.

John Simm is the only actor who appears as the same character in both halves of the story; he is the adulterous husband, a policeman, who later investigates the disappearance of the woman.  Simm has most of the comic lines and delivers them very well, as anyone who saw his performance in Elling would expect, and the troubled relationship with his wife (played by Lucy Cohu) feels genuine.  Ian Hart plays three characters and it is only the final one, the missing woman’s husband, that really gives him the chance to flex his acting muscles – the moment where he tries to hide his tears from the policeman was the only time I felt emotionally involved with any of the characters.  However, this is then turned on its head by the ending, which left me feeling slightly bemused – I wasn’t sure if the final revelation of the connection between Ian Hart and Kerry Fox’s characters was supposed to be a shock as even I, who never sees these things coming, had guessed at it.  There is a real sense of tension in the second half, enhanced by the use of underscored sound and projections, but it doesn’t really lead anywhere; it felt like the play didn’t really conclude, it just sort of stopped. 

I didn’t dislike it as much as all this might suggest; it was an entertaining enough evening, but if Speaking in Tongues is supposed to deliver some universal truths about modern relationships, then I just didn’t get it.

O ator inglês Ian Hart, 45, “explodiu” de raiva num teatro em que estava atuando e atacou um espectador que, segundo ele, passou toda a peça conversando. As informações são do jornal britânico “Daily Mail”.

Divulgação

O ator Ian Hart, que faz o professor Quirrell no filme “Harry Potter e a Pedra Filosofal”

Nas telas, um dos principais papéis de Hart foi o de Quirinus Quirrell, o professor de defesa contra as artes das trevas, no filme “Harry Potter e a Pedra Filosofal”, o primeiro da série.

O espectador contou ao jornal que Hart mandou ele “calar a boca” logo depois do intervalo, mas afirma ter achado que aquilo fazia parte da peça. Ao final do espetáculo, o ator teria ido até a ponta do palco e começado a gritar, acusando o homem de ter passado a peça inteira falando.

O homem disse que não chegou a ser agredido fisicamente, mas porque outras pessoas da produção seguraram Hart. Ele afirma não ter falado durante a peça. “Sou um espectador regular de teatro. Já vi atores pedindo para desligar o telefone celular, mas nunca vi isso”, afirmou ao jornal. Agora, ele estuda processar o ator.

Segundo o “Daily Mail”, os representantes do ator e da peça não quiseram comentar o ocorrido.

ELIZABETH MOREHEAD "Noel"

When Elaine Benes broke up during a piano recital because Jerry Seinfeld had put a Pez dispenser on her knee, Noel the pianist played on. Oh, she was plenty upset, but she didn’t acknowledge the distraction and continued to play.

Not every artist has that kind of composure. About 45 years ago, I was at a concert at Seton Hall University at which Leopold Stokowski was conducting the American Symphony Orchestra. Some people came in after the concert had started. I guess we were all aware of the doors opening and closing and the latecomers making their way into the gymnasium, but — hey — it happens.

Well, tell that to Stokowski.

LEOPOLD STOKOWSKI

He stopped the orchestra in the middle of the first piece, turned around and glared into the darkened gym. When the place had settled down, he went to the microphone and said, “You have to excuse me. When one comes to a place of learning one expects to find intelligence.” Then he returned to his place and started the concert again.

Of course, that’s a reasonable expectation on both sides of the footlights, so to speak. But the principle apparently is lost on Ian Hart, who went to pieces during a performance of “Speaking in Tongues,” a play on London’s West End for which he has gotten good notices. And, according to an account in The Times of London, witnesses say Hart’s threatening verbal abuse of a patron in the theater was without any basis except in the actor’s imagination.

Gerald Earley — the target of Hart’s ranting — said that a certain point in the proceedings, the actor had become “pretty feral,” which I thought was a delightful choice of words. Hart brushed off the incident as silly, but he also admitted he doesn’t like acting in the theater because he doesn’t “enjoy the relationship between the audience and the actor,” and, may I say, there’s a simple solution to that.

For The Times’ account of Hart’s outburst, click HERE.

Ian Hart and John Simms in "Speaking in Tongues"

i can't believe you forgot to tape X Factor

It takes two to tango, or in the case of Speaking in Tongues, four. The play tells the story of two couples who unknowingly switch partners. Andrew Bovell adapted the work from his award-winning screenplay for the 2001 film Lantana. Bovell also wrote When the Rain Stops Falling that played at London’s Almeida Theatre in May, and co-wrote Strictly Ballroom with Baz Lurhman.

The action begins with two scenes happening at the same time in one seedy, darkly lit hotel room. Both couples go through the motions, the men asking in unison “have you done this before?”, the women answering in unison either the same or different answers. It shows that they are not only all capable of committing infidelity, but that they all have the same desires, fears, and guilt, which makes them all human. It’s quick, clever, and instantly compelling.

Under Ben Stone’s direction the play is film-like with its tango-dancing interludes, slick scene changes, and visual backdrops. Excellent performances come from John Simm, from the television drama Life on Mars, as the confused cop Leon and Kerry Fox, from Shallow Grave, who plays “plain Jane” with low self-esteem.  

The first half is full of deep emotion and the second half turns into a whodunit. Complications arise by having the actors take on multiple parts and the plot’s heavy reliance on chance encounters. It manages to keep you hooked however through its intensity, suspense, and fine performances. A hit. 

Runs till 12 December.

To see or not to see: * * * *

John Simm and Lucy Cohu as a mistrusting married couple in Speaking in Tongues

Which is a more interesting – that is to say, least overdone - theme? That trust between people  has been eroded to the extent that you cannot count on your wife/husband not sleeping with another man/woman? Or that human beings have such amazing emotional resilience and generosity of spirit that despite extreme testing, they can ultimately get over it? The first is the nub of Speaking in Tongues, the revival of a 1990s play by the Australian Andrew Bovell just opened at the Duke of York’s in Theatreland, or the good old West End as everyone except the ticket brochure writers call it. For the second, I give you every soap opera in the land.

Speaking in Tongues is one of those self-consciously tricksy pieces of theatre, the title superficially relating to the manner in which several separate scenes take place on stage simultaneously, with the dialogue niftily intercutting between each scene. The cast of four take on nine characters. Small screen regular Lucy Cohu switches from confident flirt in act one to terrified, mistrusting therapist in act two; the wonderful Kerry Fox metamorphosises from nervy housewife to Cohu’s brash, diffident patient. John Simm, who I’ve loved since The Lakes, gives a flash of how good he is playing angsty underdogs; for the most part, he plays a suave, guarded, adulterous cop. And Ian Hart takes on three characters: would-be adulterer, broken-hearted loser and cold, closed-off husband.

The cast is almost too good to be true, in other words. They pretty much could be coming out with any old rubbish and I would have been fully entranced by the fact that here was Simm in the flesh, his low voice emanating from a stage just a few metres away. This was lucky, as the play is far from perfect. As any two characters mostly get just one scene together, and some couples only appear separately, there is little development in their relationships; the play just riffs along its trajectory of broken trust, broken people; societal breakdown exemplified by these edgy, hurt, scared people. It ends with that definite “hmmm” feeling.

It’s a question of form. Almost every night in people’s homes for as long as people have had televisions, viewers can catch couples like Coronation Street’s Ken and Deirdre (the saga that never ends), or my personal all-time favourites, Susan and Dr Karl from Neighbours, suffer the fallout from (multiple) affairs; it’s nothing new, though it’s always painful. But then, comes the richer, more delicate part: the slow recovery of trust and affection, as played out over the months, years and decades. The rebuilding of their connections is rooted in the properly realised mundanity of urban/suburban life, not the unrelatable, anonymous world of Speaking in Tongues  or its film version, Lantana. Soaps may be the conveyor belt of drama, but these long-running soap performances are a real artistic achievement of much greater pathos than Bovell’s two-act exercise in wordplay.

Although theatre and soap opera are very different cultural forms, they do both mine a seam of melodrama, and for me, the particular joy of soap is the open-endedness of its stories. Their structure better reflects reality, as our relationships are never over, even when they are. As soon as I hear an actor is leaving a show, I immediately lose interest in their character. Grand exit storylines are all very well, but they’ve got nothing on a story arc that lasts a lifetime.

From a description–not even from a few minutes–Wonderland might appear to fit into (or create again) the British realism movement. It’s shot on video, natural lighting, natural make-up, no visible tripod shots, all hand-held, all very cinema verite. There’s no artificiality to it. Except the artificiality of being a filmed narrative.

Wonderland even visibly bucks against the idea of cinema standards–the easy comic scene of an expectant father encountering a troublesome newborn is instead everyday, one of the things Eddie (John Simm) sees as a kitchen salesman. Lawrence Coriat’s script is set on a weekend, starting with Thursday night–the weekend’s special, by the end of the film, because of the events transpired during the running time, but initially, it’s special–and Wonderland is presented as the slice of these characters’ lives to present to an audience–because of absent brother Darren (Enzo Cilenti), his birthday and his visit to London.

He’s not there to visit his sisters, Debbie (Shirley Henderson), Nadia (Gina McKee) or Molly (Molly Parker)–though it’s seriously implied the only one he had any sort of significant relationship with is Nadia. Nor is he there to see his parents, Bill (Jack Shepherd) or Eileen (Kika Markham). He’s there with his girlfriend Melanie (Sarah-Jane Potts), who’s apparently in the financial position to throw him a great birthday weekend.

There’s no glorious family reunion. There are no tearful, heartfelt moments where Darren and Bill talk. Winterbottom and Coriat enjoy dangling possible cinematic melodramas in front of the viewer, only to dismiss such events, sometimes not unkindly–like when Debbie’s son, Jack (Peter Marfleet), gets mugged. It’s a huge moment, the culmination of everyone concerned’s fears, yet it’s barely shown. The villains are not emphasized and if one were to look away for a moment, he or she could miss it.

But there is glory to Wonderland and that glory is where the film doesn’t just earn its title, but its place alongside Tati’s Play Time. Wonderland is a celebration of Londoners and an exquisitely discrete one. Winterbottom’s London doesn’t come alive until after dark, when it’s awash with lights. Though he’s shooting with digital cameras and using natural light, Winterbottom emphasizes how the artificial lights of the landscape–whether cars’ headlights or shopfronts’ fluorescents–create the vibrant backdrop for the wonderment.

One of the things Tati did with Play Time and, to a somewhat lesser extent, M. Hulot’s Holiday, was draw attention to the generic beauty of people through music. There’s a compilation of Tati’s film’s themes out and if one listens to it when observing the common–people playing frisbee in a park, people walking through an urban center–everything becomes beautiful. To some degree–and it’s a little measured, because Winterbottom and composer Michael Nyman are conservative with it–Wonderland does the same thing. It shows the viewer how beautiful life can be, how wondrous it can be, all while acknowledging its subjects might only be experiencing this beauty and wonder for a moment.

Wonderland’s interpretation of beauty and wonderment in the common world–because there’s nothing fantastic about the plot, about the setting–even the “melodramatic” moments are completely reasonable, whether it’s Nadia meeting ex-brother-in-law Dan (Ian Hart) on a blind, dating service date or Molly and missing husband Eddie meeting up in the metropolitan hospital–these moments play out without melodrama, without acknowledgment of the possibility of Coriat contriving them. Instead, they’re part of the tapestry, part of the web–they’re part of these characters’ lives. That coincidence–without Coriat or Winterbottom ever drawing attention it or the general artificiality of the motion picture scenario–is one of Wonderland’s greatest beauties. As the events pass in the running time, as people argue or people cry, it immediately becomes something in the memory of the characters experiencing the events. It’s a crazy idea–if the film doesn’t slow down to acknowledge contrivance or melodrama, do the characters themselves experience it?

But if Wonderland is moving too fast to let its characters catch on, it’s also moving so fast it begs to have the viewer slow it down, to consider each day (separated by title card) or even further–to look at how Winterbottom and Coriat juxtapose the characters with one another. Nadia and Eileen, who have no scenes, don’t even talk about each other–one of the stranger and more realistic facets of Wonderland is how the daughters’ stories, with the exception of Molly, could be separated from the parents and they’d be narratively sound–have this stunning juxtaposition in terms of camera placement. And camera placement means more in Wonderland, something where camera placement and composition should seemingly be more environment defined. When Winterbottom places an actor in the same place as another actor, it isn’t a cute transition, it’s a silent, telling comment on the relationship between the family members, between the people.

And Wonderland really does–like all great stories–bring Faulkner’s point about literature discussing people, not characters, to the fore. It’s impossible to think of Nadia as Gina McKee, even though–at the time–she was the most famous (at least to American audiences) actor in the film. Nadia, with her goofy hair and dating problems, is definitely the protagonist for a lot of the film, but it’s all so fluid, the film moves away from her. Her story is the most cinematic… but not really. All of the sisters–Debbie, Nadia, Molly–go through an incredibly cinematic story during Wonderland’s running time. How Coriat found time to include Debbie’s son or Molly’s husband or their parents in this story–which only runs an hour and fifty minutes–is incredible. Wonderland begs for narrative deconstruction, not just for Coriat’s plotting, but for how Winterbottom films it.

The last sibling, Darren, is different from the rest. He’s living–with girlfriend Melanie (I’m not sure Potts’s character ever gets named in the film)–the life his family dreams of. He’s out in that exciting, Technicolor, neon London nighttime landscape his sisters only can look at. Molly doesn’t even realize she has anything to do with it, which makes her both sympathetic and sad. Her husband, Eddie, can clearly see what they’re missing and longs for it. Debbie tries to straddle it and being a single mother, but finds both difficult. Nadia, who should move through it with the greatest ease, stumbles. The scene where Nadia falls for a guy–the first time–is devastating, because it reveals this character, this protagonist, in a way the viewer never before saw.

Like I said before, Wonderland begs a certain amount of analysis–why do the colors of Eddie and Molly’s apartment match the colors of the title cards, why does London only come to life on film at night, why does the viewer get a closer look into Nadia’s life than any of the other sisters–but it resists any analysis. It’s a distant film–there’s not a single pay-off moment in the whole thing; it’s populated with unhappy people struggling.

In the end, not everyone gets a reward, nor should they.

But some do and they deserve it.

And so does the viewer.

CREDITS

Directed by Michael Winterbottom; written by Laurence Coriat; director of photography, Sean Bobbitt; edited by Trevor Waite; music by Michael Nyman; production designer, Mark Tildesley; released by PolyGram.

Starring Shirley Henderson (Debbie), Gina McKee (Nadia), Molly Parker (Molly), Ian Hart (Dan), John Simm (Eddie), Stuart Townsend (Tim), Kika Markham (Eileen), Jack Shepherd (Bill), Enzo Cilenti (Darren), Sarah-Jane Potts (Melanie), David Fahm (Franklyn), Ellen Thomas (Donna) and Peter Marfleet (Jack).

Stanley Kubrick’s film “2001: A Space Odyssey” is famous for among other things, its innovative use of classical music. Traditionally, film scores had been composed of music written specifically for the film itself. But in an interview with writer Michel Ciment, Kubrick stated, “However good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music available from the past and from our own time? When you are editing a film, it’s very helpful to be able to try out different pieces of music to see how they work with the scene. . . . Well, with a little more care and thought, these temporary tracks can become the final score.”

Well for my money there’s never been music by any classical music composer let alone any other film composer that matched the beauty of film composer John Barry’s score for “Out of Africa”. So take that Stanley Kubrick.  Nevertheless, here’s a quiz that celebrates the use of classical music in some classic movies.

Answers to this quiz will appear next Monday, but if you just can’t wait to find out the answers til then, you can go to this page: http://www.sploofus.com/triviaquiz/classic_cinema_that_uses_classical_music.html 

It’s a great trivia web site. If you sign up with them, don’t worry I’ve found that  I don’t get any spam as a result. But please tell them “billkozy” sent ya. That’s my user name there. That way I’ll get lots of points worth no cash value whatsoever. Now on to this week’s quiz:

1. In that score for “2001: A Space Odyssey” the music from composers such as Aram Khachaturian and Johann Strauss II (“The Blue Danube”) is used, but it is especially famous for “Also sprach Zarathustra” by Richard Strauss, a musical piece now inexorably linked to the film’s depiction of the wonder and awe of space. Kubrick had at first hired a very well-respected film composer to write original music for the film, but wound up not using it at all and then sneakily not telling the composer. The composer only discovered this when he finally saw the movie. Who was this 15-time Oscar nominated composer whom Kubrick had actually worked with on a previous movie?

2. Stanley Kubrick’s next film, “A Clockwork Orange” also employed classical music. Coincidentally, composer Wendy Carlos had already been writing a score to the Anthony Burgess novel when a friend of hers alerted her to a London newspaper article mentioning that Kubrick had begun filming an adaptation. Wendy was already famous because of her electronic music album “Switched-On Bach” that adapted various famous classical music pieces, and when she learned after more time passed that Kubrick had  finished shooting, she contacted him and offered her work. They met and Kubrick liked the combination of a classical sound with a futuristic sound that the score suggested. What name was Wendy Carlos recognized as on the film credits?

3. Bach’s music is used again in the 1973 Ingmar Bergman film classic “Cries and Whispers”: “Suite No. 5 for solo Cello in C Minor, 4th mvt ‘Sarabande’”. One of the most cinematically influential scenes in the film occurs when two of the sisters in the story share the inner thoughts that they’d kept secret for so long, but without any dialogue, just the music “Mazurka in A minor, Op.17/4″. Who is the famous classical music composer of this piece?

4. Five years later, in 1978, Ingmar Bergman used the same two composers in his film “Autumn Sonata”: Bach’s “Suite Nr 4, Ess-dur” and “Préludium Nr 2a, a-moll” by Chopin.  Frédéric Chopin was played by actor Hugh Grant in what live action feature biographical film of Chopin’s life that naturally uses his music in the score?

5. Ludwig von Beethoven himself is portrayed in no less than two autobiographical films: by Gary Oldman in 1994’s “Immortal Beloved” and by Ian Hart in the 2003 TV movie “Eroica,” both films benefitting from a score of Beethoven’s fantastic music. All of the following films are biographies of classical music composers except for one. Which is the film that doesn’t exist?

A. Jim Broadbent as W. S. Gilbert and Allan Corduner as Sir Arthur Sullivan in “Topsy Turvy”
B. Richard Chamberlain as Pyotr Tchaikovsky in “The Music Lovers”
C. Robert Alda as George Gershwin and Darryl Hickman as Ira Gershwin in “I Got Rhythm”
D. Robert Powell as Gustav Mahler in “Mahler”
E. Roger Daltrey as Franz Liszt in “Lisztomania”

6.  The Gershwin Brothers movie is the bogus film above, although Woody Allen’s classic film “Manhattan” makes exquisite use of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Coincidentally, director Ken Russell directed three of the films in the previous question, including “Mahler”. Gustav Mahler’s music (“Adagietto From Symphony No.5″ and “Sehr Langsam Misterioso From Symphony No.3″) provide the score to the classic Italian cinema adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novel “Death in Venice” (1971). What famed Italian director helmed that movie?

7. We turn to another Italian artist, this time a composer instead of a filmmaker: Antonio Vivaldi’s “Mandolin Concerto”  provides the score for what classic French cinema film by classic film director Francois Truffaut?

8. Truffaut’s fellow Frenchman Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” features prominently in the Dudley Moore/Bo Derek comedy “10″ by Blake Edwards, but it provides the more prominent overal soundtrack to what worldwide classic film of the Japanese cinema?

9. Milos Forman’s Academy Award winner for Best Picture “Amadeus” is a biodrama featuring the music of its subject Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In 1984, when the great film composer Maurice Jarre accepted his Academy Award for “Best Original Score” he jokingly thanked the Academy for not nominating “Amadeus” in the category, which of course it couldn’t since none of the music in the film is original but is instead that of Mozart’s. For what film did Jarre win his Oscar for Best Original Score that year?

10. For many people, the first time they heard Johann Pachelbel’s “Canon in D major” was in this classic movie, an Academy Award winner for Best Picture featuring this hauntingly melancholy piece throughout.

11. An Academy Award winner for Best Actor was Geoffrey Rush in 1996’s “Shine”. Rachmaninoff’s Rachmaninoff piano concerto 2 was part of the soundtrack along with the well-known “Flight of the Bumblebee.”  We’re all familiar with “Flight of the Bumblebee” but who was its composer?

12.   Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor” plays eerily in the classic Billy Wilder film “Sunset Boulevard.”  That same famous musical piece is featured in the classic animated feature film “Fantasia.” That very entertaining film features a few other of the classical music genre finest and most well-known works. Which of the following pieces is NOT part of the “Fantasia” soundtrack?

A. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by Felix Mendelssohn
B. “A Night on Bald Mountain” by Modest Mussorgsky
C. “Ave Maria” by Franz Schubert
D. “Rite of Spring” by Igor Stravinsky
E. “The Nutcracker Suite” by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

ANSWERS TO LAST MONDAY’S QUIZ OF THE WEEK, “Tune a Fish on Wry”:
1. I Am The Walrus
2. Vanilla Sky
3. Creeque Alley
4. Dolly Parton
5. Honky Cat
6. Jimmy Webb
7. Irving Berlin
8. Tangled Up In Blue
9. Stone Cold Crazy
10. Led Zeppelin

“Born Romantic” will air on Saturday August 1st, on Channel 7 (Australia) at 1.45am.

Neil Jordan presentó esta curiosa cinta en 2005, Breakfast on Pluto (basada en la novela de Patrick McCabe), continente de esos componentes (repitiendo las temáticas de la transexualidad y del  terrorismo del IRA, como en Juego de lágrimas).  

Cartel oficial del film

Ambientada a comienzos de la década de los 70’s, Desayuno en Plutón relata a modo de capítulos la vida y tribulaciones del joven Patrick “gatita” Braden (soberbia actuación de Cillian Murphy), desde que es abandonado siendo un recién nacido a la puerta de una iglesia en un pueblecito del norte de irlanda, hasta su transformación de hombre a mujer en las calles de Londres, a la búsqueda de su madre biológica. Por el camino Patrick se encontrará con los más singulares personajes: grupos de glam rock, prostitutas, sádicos, magos, terroristas del IRA, policías, moteros, soldados británicos…

Neil Jordan (Juego de lágrimas, Entrevista con el vampiro…) cuenta para este trabajo con un buen equipo de actores, como Cillian Murphy (El Viento Que Agita La Cebada, Cold Mountain), Liam Neeson (Michael Collins, La Lista de Schindler…), Stephen Rea (Juego de Lágrimas, V de Vendetta…),  Brendan Gleeson (Cold Mountain, El Bosque…), Ian Hart (Suavemente me mata, Descubriendo nunca jamás…), y hasta con dos músicos: el cantautor irlandés Gavin Friday y el legendario Bryan Ferry (vocalista de Roxy Music). 

Patrick "Kitten" Barden intrepretado por Cillian Murphy

Jordan equilibra en este film lo cómico con lo trágico, desde el punto de vista del protagonista, refugiado de la intolerancia, agresiones, etc en su propia forma de enfocar los acontecimientos, a base de optimismo, perseverancia y sarcasmo.

Lo que más me ha gustado: los actores, la fotografía, el guión, la verdad es que todo en general pero estoy obligado a hacer una mención especial a la banda sonora (elegida por el propio Jordan) cargada de grandes temazos de la época a cargo de grupos como T-Rex, The Rubettes, Dusty Springfield, Harry Nilsson, Patti Page…

Lo que menos me ha gustado: en un film como este, con más de dos horas de duración, se corre el riesgo de perder dinamismo en algunas partes del mismo, sobre todo hacia la mitad del mismo, con una ligera pérdida en el ritmo narrativo, aún así logró retomar mi atención.

Cómo adoro la estética glam de los 70’s…

After spending six paragraphs letting everyone know how distracting I think Tony Scott’s visual style is from the stories he is attempting to tell, here is a film where his style perfectly fits the story being told and actually helps create the sense of paranoia which is essential for the story’s success. While the end is a pretty simple cop-out, Scott effectively manages his reliable leads with a number of charming character actors– some of whom provide consistent comic relief– and keeps the tension high for over two hours. If the current action movies in the multiplex aren’t running on all cylinders (and aside from Star Trek, they’re not), Enemy of the State delivers all the thrills and laughs that you would possibly want from a summer flick.

Congressman Thomas Reynolds (Jon Voight) murders a fellow Congressman who is going to fight him regarding a bill that Reynolds wants to push through, expanding the surveillance abilities of the government. Unfortunately for Reynolds, a wildlife researcher (Jason Lee) was doing some surveillance of his own and got the murder on video. When the existence of this video is discovered, Reynolds sends a crew of NSA agents (played by Barry Pepper, Seth Green, Jack Black, Scott Caan, and Ian Hart) to find the video and kill the man who has it. Unfortunately again for Reynolds, before they catch up with him, he runs into Robert Dean (Will Smith) and passes the video off to him. That’s where the action starts– the NSA frames Dean for murder in an attempt to bring him to them. With the help of an underground fugitive named Brill (Gene Hackman), he sets off trying to expose Reynolds as a murderer while proving his innocence and avoiding joining the increasing list of murdered people.

Will Smith is his usual charming earnest self, a terrific lead actor for a Hitchcockian thriller like this. Gene Hackman oozes cool every second he’s on the screen– few 70-year-old actors could pull off the badass underground technologically-savvy Brill. I feel particular fondness for Reynolds’ toadies, the NSA agents, who provide the most original twist in the film: funny, nerdy, likable villains who make you laugh while also emitting a certain sense of menace. The script by David Marconi (who also wrote the terrific government-surveillance thriller Live Free or Die Hard) is tightly knit, but Tony Scott keeps it all moving forward at a fast if not frantic pace. His usual quick edits, fast forwards, spinning cameras, etc., work here, as the camera bounces up to a satellite and back to Robert Dean’s location. It enables us to keep an eye on all of the characters the same way that the satellites are constantly keeping an eye on everyone as well. The end is too tidy– it’s the usual Tony Scott shootout where certain characters conveniently die in order to wrap everything up neatly. However, it’s easily better than every film he’s made since and it’s more satisfying than most thrillers of the past eleven years. In a post-9/11 world, this film plays even more realistically and holds even more tension than it did at the time.

Ripley Under Ground (2005) directed by Roger Spottiswoode stars Barry Pepper as Ripley, Jacinda Barrett as Heloise, Tom Wilkinson as the detective John Webster. The other principals are Douglas Henshall as Derwatt, Alan Cumming as Jeff Constant, Claire Forlani as Cynthia and Ian Hart as Bernard Sayles. Willem Defoe plays the art collector Neil Murchinson.

The story begins with Ripley on his way to an art gallery to see the exhibition of Derwatt’s work. Due to unfourtionate circumstance, a marriage proposal untimely delivered and then refused by Derwatt’s gold digger girlfriend Cynthia and a bad car crash, Ripley becomes involved in an art scam.

The idea is simple. Derwatt’s body is stashed in Jeff, the gallery owner’s country house, in a big freezer. The four friends Jeff, Cynthia, Bernard and Ripley decide to withhold the news of Derwatt’s death until all the paintings have been sold.

On the same night Ripley meets the lovely Heloise, a french student, and falls in love. Or what you will. He is after all supposed to be a psychopath, and if you look at the pathology that is supposed to be a tricky proposition.

The rest of the movie is one long complicated series of circumstance and accidents and bloody deaths all very neatly contrived to increase the sense that maybe Ripley won’t get away with this at all.  He is portrayed as more misfourtionate than mischevious.

The 1999 movie The Talented Mr. Ripley was to my mind a neat, stylish and very dark movie. It had a much more serious tone. I liked it well enough to venture into this one as well.

My response to this movie is not surprising if you take that into account. I find myself watching with a slightly inquisitive tilt to my head. This is a comedy. A very dark, messed up and bloody comedy, but a comedy none the less. Despite the cast, which contains some very good actors, the it feels hectic and contrived. Barry Pepper with his shirt off holds very little fascination for me, and yet the viewer is graced with that view quite a lot. Enough that I would remark on it as being gratuitous.

Not only is it a comedy, but it reverts to slap-stick in a couple of scenes. Ripley going at Derwatt’s frozen corpse with various implements to get him out of the freezer and then falling down the stairs with the corpse in his arms so that various appendages break with a popsicle crunch is a dark kind of slap-stick.

It’s not what I expected, nor frankly, what I wanted out of this movie. Assumptions are of course never a good thing, but like I said I had The Talented Mr. Ripley in the back of my head when I picked this movie up.

I don’t mean to convey that I was not entertained.

But if you want dark, bloody and funny I suggest you watch the TV-series  “Dexter” instead, with the far superior quality psychopath Dexter played by Michael C. Hall. It is put together in a much sharper and frankly more intelligent way.

All in all I find the performances cartoonish and the acting constantly on the verge of being down right silly. There are moments, of course, when it all seems solid, but on the whole I recommend you stick to the first movie.

Mule

We were seated at the breakfast one morning, my wife and I, when the maid brought in a telegram. It was from Sherlock Holm es, and ran in this way: “Have you a couple of days to spare?…”

"We had the carriage to ourselves"

‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery‘ acts as an antidote to the story immediately preceding it. If ‘A Case of Identity’ feels narrow and slight, this story sets Holmes free in a variety of ways: it further expands our understanding of his methods, adds some real and passionate human feeling to the characters around him, and, crucially, gets him out of Baker Street.

If Conan Doyle mines the ’shady foreign past’ trick of his own ”A Study in Scarlet, he at least does so with a new bravura. When a murder takes place in rural Herefordshire, and Holmes is called in to exonerate the at first glance hopelessly guilty accused, he and Watson travel to Ross and seem infused with the energy of country air: “Sherlock Holmes was transformed when he was hot upon such a scent as this. Men who had only known the thinker and logician of Baker Street would have failed to recognize him. ” If Sidney Paget gave us in this story Holmes’s deerstalker, Conan Doyle gave us his famous physicality, which would so influence the protrayals of Rathbone and Brett and endow Holmes with the vitality and dynamism which is such a part of his longevity.

As Holmes bounds around the countryside searching for the footprints and cigarette ash which will solve the case, Watson, too, shows his mettle.  In a lovely scene, alone in a room Watson reenacts the murder and makes some useful conclusions on the basis of his own medical training. It is a shame that, in a story so influential on screen adaptations, it is this evidence of Watson’s intelligence and perspicacity which went unmined for so long. (Not until the Granada adaptations starring Jeremy Brett did Watson truly get his due. More recently, in two adaptations for the BBC, Ian Hart has also done sterling work with the character.)

There’s some great sparring with Inspector Lestrade, a character who will recur throughout the canon, and which really highlights Holmes’s position as an unofficial agent. There are also some wonderful instances of Holmesian impatience (“Oh, tut, tut! I have no time.”), and, as in The Blue Carbuncle, a welcome grace note of humane mercy at the close (though here, perhaps, the culprit is more wronged than wrong-doing). Holmes complains at the start of the story that his method, being based on the unusual, suffers in cases without surface wrinkles, but his skill is shown to be to unearth them. “I find it hard enough to tackle facts, Holmes,” exclaims the less energetic Lestrade, “without flying away after theories and fancies.” If Conan Doyle habitually renders Holmes amazing by not clueing us into his thinking until the last minute, this technique is held together by the fact that the reader colludes by being more like Lestrade than his better: we are happy for Holmes to do the work for us, to find the details the newspaper reports miss.

“I watched my friend with the interest which sprang from the conviction that every one of his actions was directed towards a definite end.” Watson time and again the voice of the reader. If we too develop such faith in the great detective, we do so in no small part because, here and elsewhere, Conan Doyle was game to expand him ever outwards. ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’ serves a grand purpose.

I have a real soft spot for B. Monkey, Michael Radford’s adaptation of the Andrew Davies novel about a retired thief’s attempts to leave her criminal past and settle down with a jazz-loving teacher.

Admittedly I do have a huge (LLF-approved) crush on Asia Argento, who plays Beatrice, but I think it is a genuinely sweet, low-key little film. Rupert Everett is marvellous as B’s doomed drug fiend pal Paul, and Jared Harris is convincing as Alan, the straight man who can’t really believe that a woman like her could fall for him. (Perhaps it’s identifying with Alan that makes me like the movie ).

The turning point of B’s relationship with Alan is when he takes her to Paris for the weekend. Previously he has been struck impotent by his own insecurity and her beauty – this is his final throw of the dice. She is wanton and decadent, a risk taker; he is almost too gentle, passionate only about his music, and he finds it difficult to express his feelings for her or to her. In a restaurant a drunken B provokes an argument, questioning Alan’s virility whilst gorging on oysters. Unfortunately they are bad, or simply too rich, and she falls quite ill almost immediately on returning to their hotel on Alan’s shoulder. He comforts her and washes her and puts her to bed. When she wakes, days have passed, and a connection is made in his quiet, diligent, tender care for her.

“There’s a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they’d eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we know this isn’t true.” -Ian Hart

I was debating about buying it or not. My mentor, Dianne told me, “For crying out loud (I might have embellished here), for $5, if this makes you smile and brings you joy each day, get it.”

And so I did.

This was a very complex and interesting play.  I heard someone in the audience say that you had to really concentrate, so I did and was really prepared for the twists and turns. 

I tend to agree with Michael Billington’s review that the play seemed to be set in  time and no where, and I found this made the play a little old-fashioned in feel.  It was a dark play and the auditorium was really dark when we took our seats.   I’m not sure if that was to get us into the feel of the play, but it’s hard to settle into a seat in the dark.

The play opens in a dingy bar and moves to a hotel bedroom.  We soon realise that this is two hotel rooms and these are interconnecting stories.  The play reveals relationships between different characters.  We hear fragments of stories that we are then as an audience asked to piece together.  The actors all play more than one role.  John Simm is an unfaithful policemen and the unemployed Nick.  Ian Hart plays three roles, the cheated husband, the cheating husband and the jilted lover.  We as an audience are invited and directed to fill in the blank.  The therapist is at the bottom of hill and we can work out it is her client at the top in the dream. 

Speaking in Tongues is short and the second half is particularly short, but it is intense as well.  I really enjoyed watching John Simm in the two different roles.  I am particulary looking forward to seeing his Hamlet in Sheffield next year.

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