| Twitpitch challenge: the winning poster We know who won our Twitpitch Challenge. But what does the poster look like?You are Hollywood's top movie mogul. Infinite cash is at your disposal. Ditto stars – even the dead ones don't dare refuse your casting call. Now: what film would you most want to make? That's the question we asked readers for our Twitpitch Challenge as part of the Guardian and Observer's Film Season. We invited you to pitch your dream film, were death and cash and genre no obstacle, in 140 characters or less. Our panel, including Jonathan Meades, Richard Eyre and Frank Cottrell Boyce, chose their favourites. And here we present thereddress's poster for the winning entry -@johnbodkinadams's "To the Manor Bourne: Jason Bourne retires to the countryside. With violent consequences". Note Penelope Keith, fleeing on the right, plus Timothy Spall on the left - the casting choice of judge Meades, who extrapolated the plot. "There's a memorable scene in which Damon is laughed at for using the wrong knife and fork and exacts a terrible retribution by flicking a lethal pat of organically sourced butter at Timothy Spall's sinister majordomo."Here are the rest of the top five2) @mrWormold – "Jean-Pierre Melville directs Borges's Death and the Compass. Lönnrot: Alain Delon. Scharlach: Klaus Kinski. Screenplay: Alain Robbe-Grillet"3) @bloatboy – "Chas and Dave: The Movie. Nick Nolte as Chas, Paul Giamatti as Dave. Soundtrack by Jimi Hendrix. Directed by Alan Smithee"4) @Copthat – "Bollywood remake of Watership Down – rabbits played by England footballers, score by Leonard Cohen, filmed on old Brookside set"5) @MrWormold – "Carry on Mein Kampfing. With the usual cast, screenwriter and director"Catherine Shoardguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Hit film gives Italy chance to close north-south divide Box office success of the film Benvenuti al Sud suggests Italians can overcome Northern League-style separatist prejudiceIt is shamelessly unoriginal. None of the actors is a front-rank star. And it was the director's first solo feature movie.Yet a new Italian comedy, Benvenuti al Sud (Welcome to the South), has achieved box office success by getting Italians to laugh at one of their most deeply held convictions: that an unbridgeable divide separates the rich north of their country from the poor south.Released on 1 October, Benvenuti al Sud grossed €3.8 million (£3.3m) in its first weekend, pushing the US sci-fi blockbuster Inception into second place at the box office. Cinema managers reported the sale of tickets per screen was at levels usually only seen at Christmas.The film is an acknowledged remake of a French movie, Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis, which told the story of a southern postal employee unhappily transferred to the north. But in an Italian context, and with a self-pitying northern hero dispatched to the Mezzogiorno, the plot acquires more political bite.Italians are flocking to see the movie as their country prepares for the 150th anniversary of unification next year, at a time when the notionally separatist Northern League has never been stronger.The League already has enough parliamentary clout to bring down Silvio Berlusconi's government and polls suggest that, in the event of a snap election, it would increase its share of the vote by half. Days before the release of Benvenuti al Sud, the Northern League leader, Umberto Bossi, described the Romans as "pigs".That is a view that would no doubt be endorsed by the wife of the film's hero. She is the leader of a thinly disguised Northern League vigilante patrol with a sense of civic duty so strong she will not let her son accept a balloon from a street trader unless it is accompanied by a valid tax receipt. When her husband, played by Claudio Bisio, is posted south of Naples, she buys him a flak jacket.What he finds is something at odds with his prejudices. The people of the hilltop town of Castellabate are admittedly incomprehensible. And they eat disgusting things (he is served sanguinaccio, a blend of pig's blood and chocolate, for breakfast).But they are friendly, honest and live in a place of heart-stopping natural beauty. Even the rubbish gets sorted (although it is disposed of by being hurled through a window into a passing handcart).Bisio called the movie "my way of celebrating the unity of Italy". Its director, Luca Miniero, said its success "shows there's a desire to make peace, to overcome the confrontation".That would seem to be true. But his film also succeeds by offering an entrancing vision of a Mezzogiorno wiped clean of its blemishes. Towards the end, when the camera tracks along the coast, it takes in the port of Acciaroli, the birthplace of a brave mayor, Angelo Vassallo, who refused to bow to the demands of property developers in league with organised crime. On 5 September, Vassallo was shot dead.As one of the characters in Benvenuti al Sud remarks, in the film's most memorable line (also lifted from the French original): "When an outsider comes to the south, he cries twice – when he arrives and when he leaves."ItalySilvio BerlusconiJohn Hooperguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Ran: No 12 Akira Kurosawa, 1985Kurosawa's last great film was made after many years in the wilderness. His star had fallen in Japan after a period of extraordinary artistic fertility ended in the mid-60s. His eyesight was failing; he'd attempted suicide. In 1980, he returned to favour with Kagemusha, which was seen as a rehearsal for his long-planned adaptation of King Lear. Ran finally appeared in 1985, and in its portrait of a great man who has lost control of his offices of power, critics were quick to read the experiences of the director himself.Appropriating Lear gave Kurosawa scope to meditate on man's diminishing through age, but, in so doing, he produced, at 75, a film of breathÂtaking power and scale, and one of the most visually arresting war films ever made. The title translates as "chaos", and this is what erupts when Hidetora (Tatsuya Nakadai), the patriarch of the Ichimonji clan, attempts to divide his kingdom between his three sons. The youngest son, like Cordelia, alerts the father to his folly and is banished. Accompanied by his fool Kyoami (played by the Japanese pop star Pita), Hidetora stumbles from one catastrophe to the next, watching powerlessly as his realm burns around him. The silent battle scene at the centre of the film, set to Toru Takemitsu's funereal score, has to be seen to be believed.Action and adventureAkira KurosawaKillian Foxguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
What's the most inventive death in horror movies? Death by catflap and other heinous ways to go … here are your suggestions for the genre's most creative demise@alexito Bill Pullman being buried alive in a coffin full of blood in The Serpent and the Rainbow. With a tarantula on his face. It's the little details that count.@Sokket The bed eating a victim in the original Nightmare on Elm Street@mcragg Scream. Death by catflap.@theythinkitsallover Meaning of Life – exploding fat man.@gembird My favourite is the one in The Happening where a man starts his lawnmower and then lies down in front of it so it chews him up.@Sipech I think drowning in sand in The Omen. It made me aware of a phobia I never realised I had. Surely, the worst possible way to die.@ATG66 I'll never forget the scene in Dr Phibes Rises Again where the man is trapped by a huge scorpion statue that pins his arms with huge nails between its claws. The only way out is to get to the key that is in a vase. The man breaks the vase open to unleash hundres of scorpions, which then proceed to sting him to death as he's trapped, unable to move ... awesome!!@Fumblebuck Arthur Lowe's daintily surgical decapitation (under anaesthetic, while asleep in bed next to his drugged wife) by Vincent Price and Diana Rigg in Theatre of Blood, culminating with the maid finding Lowe's head the next morning stuck on top of a milk bottle on the doorstep!@CaptainDeadly The mouth in the stomach biting the doctor's arms off in John Carpenter's remake of The Thing.@neil886 Theatre of Blood! Of course! Robert Morley being fed his "babies", and Eric Sykes's walkie-talkie commentary on his own impending death.@startchoppin Not sure if RoboCop counts as horror but Emil's death, where he literally liquifies on impact, has always gone down well in these parts.@misma Being eaten alive from the inside by slugs in Slither.@grahamw How about the scene in which Sam Neill murders his wife's former lover using only a feather and an old shoe he finds in a bin in Possession? Utterly revolting ...@AbelWhittle The death of Pat and her friend 12 minutes into Suspiria (1977). A celebration of style over substance. Argento shows his true misogynist self in these few minutes of depravity as he rips the heart from one woman and leaves the other hanging, sliced by sheets of glass, high above the beautifully decorated floor of an art deco building. Wonderful.@PatriciaSB Ray Liotta being fed his own brain in Hannibal.@MrArchitect Death by being filmed (and impaled by the camera) in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom.@YummieMummie I do have a soft spot for the decapitation scene in The Omen.@EnthusiasticKnights Deaths by cats in The Uncanny.@DrGiggles Body turned inside out by head being pulled inwards via hand through rectum (Society).@leoniebahri In Happy Birthday to Me a character gets killed by having a shish kebab shoved down his throat.@maid2 The Company of Wolves. The mono-browed huntsman/werewolf aims a karate chop at Angela Lansbury and her head sails off, shattering against the wall like a porcelain doll. Surreal, symbolic, weirdly beautiful and almost upsettingly abrupt all at the same time.@Bartel Dracula: Prince of Darkness – the count is killed by running water (a rare use of this arcane piece of vampire mythology).@jadders2010 My personal favourite would be from The Fountain in which Tomas drinks the sap of the tree of life before bursting into flowering shrubs, eventually being consumed by the ground.Horrorguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
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