| Great casting in authentic ‘Mr Nice’ Never an obvious leading man, Ifans grabs the opportunity to take centre stage as the real life Howard Marks, one of the foremost drug dealers of the 1960s-70s – during which he is said to have controlled 10% of the international hashish market - and a bit of a fantasist (references to him being a spy and a music promoter). feeds.breakingnews.ie |
Digital technology rebuilds Bridge on the River Kwai David Lean's anti-war epic may be about to spark another battle as a digitally restored version screens at the London film festivalTwo movies at this year's London film festival are emerging as strong contenders for Oscars, if the persistent whispers in the opening week are to be believed.But Danny Boyle's 127 Hours and The King's Speech are still expected on Oscar night to fall well short of another LFF film, made over half a century ago, which premieres in a newly restored version and was awarded no less than seven Oscars in 1957, including best picture, director and actor.David Lean's controversial anti-war epic The Bridge on the River Kwai has been the site of numerous battles since its release, but the festival's archive section consultant, Clyde Jeavons, is in no doubt about the significance to the film industry of both Sunday's screening and the latest skirmish to surround the movie."Kwai is the first ever full-blown example of digital restoration we have shown in the treasures from the archive strand at the London film festival. And, inevitably, [digital] is the shape of film restorations to come," says Jeavons, who is also acutely aware of deep misgivings in some quarters at the development.No one would be able to see Lean's take on the famous Japanese prisoner-of-war camp story again the way the director intended, or many other classic films for that matter (Taxi Driver will be the next for Sony-Columbia's care and attention), were it not for recent developments in digital technology.Sony Pictures senior vice-president for film restoration, Grover Crisp, supervised the reconstruction. He discovered dirt, torn frames and scratches that run for hundreds of feet in every Kwai reel. The flaws are typical of an age when film stock had an in-built obsolescence, and ones that, when movies were first restored, were subjected to traditional photo-chemical processes. Now, increasingly, a high-resolution scan is made of every frame, and the repair work is done digitally."There were also issues related to defects with the camera they were using at the time, and some of the processing of the film in post-production," says Crisp. "Image jitter, flicker and image misregistration are impossible to fix other than through digital means."Jeavons is thrilled that the film will be seen as it was meant to be, for the first time since its initial release – every single frame of its 161 minutes. "Kwai was meant to be seen in the old cinemascope ratio, instead of widescreen, which meant the loss of some of the picture. Digitally, they can now reshape the film by reducing the aperture slightly during the process. One of Lean's great virtues was composition: particularly on the big screen, composition was everything, and Lean certainly knew how to fill it."Established fans are clearly in for a treat. But those coming fresh to the work will also be fascinated by what this film tells us about British attitudes to war in the immediate post-Suez era. Lean's is not a traditional combat film. The motives of the characters – from Alec Guinness's archetypal stiff upper lip, Colonel Nicholson, to William Holden's jaded US Commander Shears and Jack Hawkins's enigmatic Major Warden – are not in the least straightforward. The famous final reel, with Guinness inadvertently aiding the enemy and with the allies (whom the audience would be expected to be rooting for) firing on their own side, leaves viewers both dazed and, to say the least, confused.Jeavons and Crisp, who is travelling from Los Angeles for the European premiere, will certainly be closely gauging reactions at the festival, knowing how lucrative the DVD and Blu-ray re-release market is for studios and how unhappy some people are about what some films look like after digital restoration.The premiere, in Bologna, of Jean Renoir's 1932 Boudu Saved from Drowning, which is the other complete digital restoration to be shown in London's festival, horrified cinema purists. "They found it too clean and too crisp, and to them it didn't look like a film of its period," Jeavons says."There can be many drawbacks to digital restoration," admits Crisp. "The downside is that the digital tools can also be used to substantially alter the look and feel of what the film really is. We try to restore a film so that it still looks of its time and place."Of course, some things can't be changed. The final overhead shot in Kwai of the British medical officer exclaiming "madness ... madness" at the carnage he has witnessed was filmed with a stand-in for absent actor James Donald at parsimonious producer Sam Spiegel's insistence. Biographer Kevin Brownlow revealed that the shot "angered Lean to his dying day".• The Bridge on the River Kwai digital restoration screens on 17 October at 5.15pm as part of the 54th BFI London film festival. Details: bfi.org.uk/lff/node/1020London film festivalFestivalsTony Paleyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Deliverance: No 5 John Boorman, 1972Warner Brothers originally fancied Roman Polanski for director. The novel's famously macho author, James Dickey, wanted Sam Peckinpah. And originally under consideration for the leads (later taken by Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight) were Lee Marvin and Marlon Brando. But Deliverance as it was finally made is so indelible, even after 38 years, and its impact has been so lasting, that even those mouthwatering possibilities are obliterated by what John Boorman finally wrought. Depending on your viewpoint, Deliverance is the first eco-thriller (Dickey's novel was published in 1970, the year of the first Earth Day celebration, and remained a bestseller throughout the 70s), or a meditation on American machismo in its suburban, postwar variant. The thoughtful, sedentary adman Ed (Voight) must find it in himself to embrace the hunter-warrior ethic of his tougher friend Lewis (Reynolds) when the latter is crippled by his injuries, and Ed both loves and hates what he becomes – which is to say, more of a man than Lewis, but perhaps less human.If you're from rural America, however, particularly from Appalachia, chances are you still hate Deliverance for the powerfully negative effect it has had (and still has) on outsiders' perceptions of this embattled region, presenting it as all hookworm and incest, buckteeth and bluegrass. "Squeal like a piggy, boy!" is a phrase that can still get you beaten up south of the Mason-Dixon line. And, being an eco-thriller, this is one of the greenest movies ever made – green always looked good on Boorman, especially in his riotously verdant Excalibur and The Emerald Forest. Working with a narrow palette here, he excludes most non-natural tones, making the blood that finally flows all the more vividly scarlet and shocking.For all the furious excitement of its river-rafting sequences, and the harshness and humiliation of its explosive central rape scene, Deliverance is an elegiac movie, mourning the rural mountain culture soon to be inundated by a new hydro-electric dam. A people is displaced, churches are uprooted and coffins disinterred, so that Atlanta, home of our four suburbanites, can have power and light. Karma demands payment for that, and takes it, brutally.Action and adventureJohn Pattersonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Mel Gibson film cameo cancelled after protests from cast and crew New setback for troubled actor as Warner confirms he won't appear as a tattoo artist in The Hangover 2Mel Gibson's professional resurrection has suffered another setback after the troubled actor's mooted cameo in the sequel to The Hangover was cancelled following apparent protests from the some of the film's cast and crew.It emerged this week that Gibson, 54, had been chosen to play a tattoo artist in director Todd Phillips's follow-up to the 2009 comedy blockbuster.But Warner Bros Pictures and Phillips have now confirmed that he won't be appearing in The Hangover 2.The director said yesterday that although the producers had been behind his decision to cast Gibson, the move "ultimately did not have the full support of my entire cast and crew".Despite earning considerable critical acclaim for directing such films as The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto, Gibson's off-screen antics have attracted more attention than his cinematic efforts over the last few years.In 2006, when he was arrested for drink-driving, he told the police that "the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world" and addressed his arresting officer as "sugar tits". He later apologised for his "despicable" remarks, adding: "I have battled with the disease of alcoholism for all of my adult life and profoundly regret my horrific relapse."Gibson's reputation took a further drubbing this year when audio recordings emerged in which he ranted at his estranged ex-girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva. He was also dropped from the talent agency William Morris Endeavor in July.Gibson, who returned to acting after more than five years away with the thriller Edge of Darkness, is next due to appear in The Beaver, directed by Jodie Foster.Some had seen his Hangover 2 cameo as a chance for rehabilitation; Mike Tyson's bit-part in the original film was credited with improving his damaged reputation.The new film, which is set to reunite Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, Justin Bartha and Ed Helms, is scheduled for release next year.Mel GibsonUnited StatesSam Jonesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Joseph Stein obituary Broadway musical theatre writer who wrote the libretto for Fiddler on the Roof and the screenplay for the 1971 filmJoseph Stein, who has died aged 98, was the last of the great Broadway musical theatre writers coming out of New York revue and television comedy after the second world war. Most famously, he wrote the book, or libretto, for Fiddler on the Roof (1964) and Zorba (1968). "There are no limitations to the subject for a musical," Stein once said, "just as there are no limitations to the subject for a play or a novel. The only limitation that I can see is that it has to have an honesty about the relationship of people to each other."He cast his net wide, shaping not only the Ukrainian shtetl stories of Sholom Aleichem into the tale of Tevye the milkman and his five daughters in Fiddler on the Roof, but also drawing, perhaps surprisingly, on the work of Sean O'Casey, Eugene O'Neill and Lorraine Hansberry for musical theatre treatment. Not all of these forays were successful, but they certainly undo the idea that the great Broadway musical was a superficial art form.Fiddler on the Roof, with Zero Mostel originating the role of Tevye, was a hit from the start, though Broadway critics never rated Jerry Bock's score (lyrics by Sheldon Harnick) alongside the "greats". Jerome Robbins's production has been embalmed inside his estate's insistence on replica staging, so that even Henry Goodman's outstanding recent West End performance as Tevye was hampered by an old-fashioned look.But Stein's writing has charm and simplicity, and the plotting remains perfect, forming a seamless narrative, with beautiful songs such as If I Were a Rich Man, Sunrise, Sunset and the rousing Anatevka. The New York run of 3,242 performances was the longest running production (musical or non-musical) in theatre history – eclipsed only by Grease in 1979 – in the days BC, Before Cats, when everything changed. Stein also wrote the screenplay for the 1971 film version of Fiddler, which starred Topol (who had first played Tevye in the 1967 London stage production at Her Majesty's theatre).Stein was a humorous, thoughtful man, the son of Polish immigrant parents (his father made handbags) who grew up in the Bronx, New York. He graduated from the City College of New York in 1935 and then took a master's degree in social work at Columbia University in 1937.Throughout the war years in New York, he was a psychiatric social worker. After a chance lunchtime meeting with Mostel, he began writing material for various stars on radio – Tallulah Bankhead, Phil Silvers, Jackie Gleason – and then on television in the early 1950s for Sid Caesar; he joined an elite writing team of Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner and Larry Gelbart on Caesar's groundbreaking Your Show of Shows.Stein's Broadway debut comprised writing sketches for a 1948 revue, Lend an Ear, featuring Carol Channing. But his breakthrough show was Plain and Fancy (1955, music by Albert Hague), which placed a pair of New York sophisticates in a quaint rural setting, an Amish community in Pennsylvania, and was a deliberate response to both Lerner and Loewe's Brigadoon and Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! It ran for 461 performances. The cast featured a young Barbara Cook, just before her career took off in Candide and The Music Man.In the next year, Stein scripted a showcase for Sammy Davis Jr, Mr Wonderful, and was soon renowned not only as a deft and superior book writer, but also as a craftsman to be called on in a crisis.There were two unusual shows in 1959: Take Me Along, starring Gleason in a version of O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness!, Stein co-writing with Robert Russell, lyrics and music by Bob Merrill; and Juno, based on O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock, music and lyrics by Marc Blitzstein. Stein was particularly fond of this latter show, but it bombed badly at the box office.Zorba, with music and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb, was a sort of Aegean sequel to Fiddler on the Roof, and less successful, and did not really transcend the 1964 movie starring Anthony Quinn and Lila Kedrova, which had its own memorable music by Mikis Theodorakis. Long after the premiere, Quinn and Kedrova joined a Broadway revival in 1983, an unusual instance of film stars reproducing their work on stage, resulting in a longer Broadway run than the original.Stein's other credits included the book – co-authored with Hugh Wheeler and Harry Rigby – for Debbie Reynolds's 1973 Broadway debut in Irene, a re-jigged version of a 1919 hit musical. Irene, without Reynolds, in yet another re-revision, played successfully at the Adelphi theatre in London in 1975. In the mid-1970s, Stein embarked on another unlikely project, The Baker's Wife, an adaptation of Marcel Pagnol and Jean Giono's delightful 1938 film, La Femme du Boulanger. Teaming with Stephen Schwartz, the talented composer and lyricist, Stein fashioned an affectionate hymn to the Provençal countryside as well as a robust love story which reunites the baker and his wife after she has run off with a lover.Topol toured America as the baker, but the show never hit Broadway and had to wait until 1989 for a London premiere, when Trevor Nunn directed Alun Armstrong and Nunn's then wife, Sharon Lee Hill, at the Phoenix theatre. The reviews were mixed, and the run was curtailed after just 56 performances.Stein's last Broadway show, Rags (1986), in which Teresa Stratas starred as a young immigrant in a sweatshop on New York's Lower East Side, was a cruel flop and closed after just four performances. Undaunted, Stein made anonymous textual contributions to the show Jerome Robbins' Broadway (1989) and wrote the book for All About Us, based on Thornton Wilder's Skin of Our Teeth, with songs by Kander and Ebb, which was produced at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut in 2007.Stein never stopped working, but he had trouble, like most of Broadway, in following Fiddler. Alan Jay Lerner hailed Fiddler as "the triumphant finale to the glorious belle epoque that began with Oklahoma! – but the key word there is 'finale' ".Stein's first wife, Sadie Singer, died in 1974, and he is survived by his second wife, Elisa Loti, their daughter, and three sons from his first marriage.• Joseph Stein, writer and librettist, born 30 May 1912; died 24 October 2010BroadwayTheatreUnited StatesMichael Coveneyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |