| Winner of Booker Prize to be announced in London By JILL LAWLESS 2010-10-12T11:23:01ZLONDON (AP) -- Six writers, including two-time winner Peter Carey and bookies' favorite Tom McCarthy, were in the running Tuesday for literature's prestigious Booker Prize.... hosted.ap.org |
The Apartment: No 6 Billy Wilder, 1960Fresh off Some Like It Hot, the director, Billy Wilder, his co-writer, IAL Diamond, and their star, Jack Lemmon, bowled straight into making The Apartment. Two perfect comedies in a row: how's that for a double whammy? The germ of the idea for The Apartment had actually sat in Wilder's notebook for many years, ever since he watched Brief Encounter and scribbled down the words "Movie about the guy who climbs into the warm bed left by two lovers." CC "Bud" Baxter (Lemmon) is the poor sap in question. He's rising fast at work, one promotion after another, but the secret of his success is that he loans out his apartment to the company executives for their trysts, one 45-minute slot at a time. It's a sleazy little set-up, and Wilder keeps the movie galloping along so briskly that we can overlook the unpleasantness at first. But then reality starts to creep in as Baxter realises that the woman he longs to bring home in his arms – chirpy elevator assistant Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) – has already been to his apartment, in the company of his boss (Fred MacMurray). The question of how Baxter finds out allows Wilder and Diamond to demonstrate their knack for succinct storytelling: one broken compact mirror is all it takes to make his heart break. They're unbeatable at turning out these "moments" – witness also Baxter's classic straining-spaghetti-through-a-tennis-racket scene, born out of Diamond's realisation that "Women love seeing a man trying to cook in the kitchen."Such stand-out scenes never impede the film's precise, fluid rhythm. Wilder shot the picture in 50 days flat, and edited it in under a week. "We had three feet of unused film," he said proudly. This is funny, fat-free film-making, expertly paced and played, ending in a romantic flourish to swoon over. It won five Academy Awards, including best picture, best director and best screenplay. Wilder said it was "the picture [of mine] that has the fewest faults." Everyone else knows it as a masterpiece.RomanceBilly WilderRyan Gilbeyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Fanny and Alexander: No 8 Ingmar Bergman, 1982Ingmar Bergman's self-styled farewell to cinema is an opulent family saga, by turns bawdy, stark and strange. For novices who are put off by the director's reputation as a dour, difficult doom master, the film provides a good introduction. But it may also count as the ideal final destination: the picture in which Bergman took hold of his demons and forged a kind of truce. The plot, in a nutshell, goes like this: two wealthy siblings, Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) and Alexander (Bertil Guve), grow up in the bosom of a lovingly dysfunctional home. Following their father's death, their mother marries the bishop (a superb performance from Jan Malmsjö) and an Oedipal struggle breaks out between Alexander and his icy new stepfather. Matters are resolved in a devastating final section inside an old curiosity shop in which Alexander is shown "the swift way that evil thoughts can go". Along the way we run across an androgynous madman, a bloated, bedridden aunt and a lecherous uncle who lights his own farts. Few films boast as many indelible supporting characters as Fanny and Alexander.Bergman diehards usually cite this as the director's most user-friendly film, as though that's somehow a bad thing. True, it contains more in the way of light and warmth than some of his more nakedly anguished masterworks. But light does not necessarily mean lite, and certain sections are as harrowing and profound as anything you find in Cries and Whispers or Through a Glass Darkly. In fact, by the time this film pitches towards that astonishing climax (bedsheets burning; magic working) one might even make a case for Fanny and Alexander as Bergman's most mature, clear-sighted and fully realised work. It strikes me that the director spent the bulk of his career tackling the notion of a world without God (how liberating this is; how terrifying, too), only to arrive at the conclusion that we are all God, and that man makes God in his own image, for better or worse. Significantly, the God who crops up in these final moments is represented by a cheap dummy, jiggled into life by an untrustworthy puppet-master. He is also embodied by an overimaginative child, still smarting from his father's death and sending malign thoughts out into the ether. And then he is, by implication, the director himself; a man who spent a lifetime conjuring entire worlds on a black-and-white screen and yet who never managed one as beguiling, as terrible and true as the one we see here. DramaIngmar BergmanXan Brooksguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Cajun singer Richard recovering from stroke By 2010-10-23T18:32:12ZLAFAYETTE, La. (AP) -- A friend says Cajun singer and songwriter Zachary Richard (ree-SHARD') is recovering from a stroke but may have to cancel or postpone a Canadian tour scheduled to start Oct. 29.... hosted.ap.org |
New music: David Lynch – Good Day Today The cult director branches further into the world of music with this satisfying slice of electro-pop. Christmas No 1, anybody?This isn't cult director David Lynch's first foray into music – he's worked on soundtracks to his own films as well as collaborating with producer Danger Mouse and the late Mark Linkous on Dark Night of the Soul. Good Day Today – streamed here for the first time and released on iTunes today – shows Lynch dipping his toe into the pop mainstream. After an explosive opening, the song settles into a minimal electro groove that recalls Crystal Castles, before Lynch's heavily treated vocals continue the sense of emotional detachment. The track finds Lynch in a pleading mood, just wanting to have a pretty good day, which seems fair enough. There's a brilliant bit where his downbeat robot voice sighs "send me an angel, save me" and then intones "so tired" before sudden bursts of gunfire and explosions. While probably not catchy enough to be Christmas No 1 (although, if we can start a Facebook group, who knows?), Good Day Today is a surprisingly immediate and satisfying slice of electro-pop.David LynchPop and rockElectronic musicMichael Craggguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |