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idris elba

RNZ Widescreen: a week of updates

By Asides

This week at my new Radio New Zealand (sorry, RNZ) gig, we star­ted post­ing some actu­al content.

First up we star­ted our “Best of the web” fea­ture, fea­tur­ing links to inter­est­ing online art­icles about “what ‘cine­mat­ic’ means in rela­tion to TV”, an essay about Spielberg and ‘fath­ers and sons’, and the ori­gins of Del Toro’s Crimson Peak.

Then on Tuesday we pos­ted our first video review: Cary Fukunaga’s new fea­ture (made for Netflix), Beasts of No Nation.

 

It’s worth going to the actu­al page at RNZ because I add some extra links there but the video plays big­ger here (at least until the RNZ redesign arrives).

On Wednesday, we learned of the death of crit­ic Philip French and assembled links to some of the best art­icles about one of the greatest film crit­ics ever.

On Friday, we pos­ted our second video review: Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, star­ring Tom Hanks.

 

Again, there are some links to extras on the page itself.

And this after­noon, I put up our “Best of the week” fea­tur­ing a couple of art­icles about Daniel Craig as Bond, Andrew Todd on Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession, just in time for Halloween, and a fas­cin­at­ing art­icle on how to get silent film frame rates right in the digit­al age.

Review: The Skin I Live In, Martha Marcy May Marlene and Ghost Rider- Spirit of Vengeance

By Cinema and Reviews

The Skin I Live In posterAnyone won­der­ing wheth­er the great Pedro Almodóvar had lost some of his edge at the ripe old age of 62 should imme­di­ately check out his new film The Skin I Live In which is as deranged as any­thing else he has pro­duced in more than thirty years of fea­ture film mak­ing. Puss In Boots him­self, Antonio Banderas, plays a suc­cess­ful plastic sur­geon with a dark secret. Many of his greatest med­ic­al achieve­ments are a res­ult of the exper­i­ments he con­ducts on a beau­ti­ful woman (Elena Anaya) held cap­tive in his mansion.

Who is she? Why is she there? These ques­tions are answered in the film but have to be skir­ted around here for even the tini­est hint at spoil­ers will wreck some of the twisti­est (in all senses of the word except per­haps con­fec­tion­ary) sur­prises you will exper­i­ence all year. It’s enough to say that if this film had been made in the 1950s then Banderas’ char­ac­ter would have been played by Vincent Price (think House of Wax) and that every­one involved would have been run out of town by the authorities.

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Review: Thor, Fast 5, The City of Your Final Destination and Mozart’s Sister

By Cinema and Reviews

There are two main­stream com­ic book pub­lish­ing houses, DC and Marvel, and choos­ing between them as a kid was a bit like choos­ing between The Beatles and the Stones. They had dif­fer­ent styles and sens­ib­il­it­ies (and philo­sophies) and after a little bit of exper­i­ment­a­tion you could find a fit with one or the other.

DC had Superman and Batman – big, bold and (dare I say it) one-dimensional char­ac­ters with lim­ited or opaque inner lives. When Stan Lee cre­ated Spider-Man, a teen­age pho­to­graph­er with powers he neither asked for nor appre­ci­ated, he cre­ated a soap opera – a soap opera with aspir­a­tions to high art. As you might be able to tell, I was a Marvel kid.

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