| OK Go win video award Cult band OK Go last night landed an accolade for video of the year for a mind-boggling one-take film which created a YouTube sensation. feeds.breakingnews.ie |
Double Indemnity: No 6 Billy Wilder, 1944Cameron Crowe called Double Indemnity "flawless film-making". Woody Allen declared it "the greatest movie ever made". Even if you can't go along with that, there can be no disputing that it is the finest film noir of all time, though it was made in 1944, before the term film noir was even coined. Adapting James M Cain's 1935 novella about a straight-arrow insurance salesman tempted into murder by a duplicitous housewife, genre-hopping director Billy Wilder recruited Raymond Chandler as co-writer. Chandler, said Wilder, "was a mess, but he could write a beautiful sentence". Noir's visual style, which had its roots in German Expressionism, was forged here, though Wilder insisted that he was going for a "newsreel" effect. "We had to be realistic," he said. "You had to believe the situation and the characters, or all was lost." And we do. Fred MacMurray, who had specialised largely in comedy until that point, was an inspired choice to play the big dope Walter Neff, who narrates the sorry mess in flashback, and wonders: "How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?" Edward G Robinson is coiled and charismatic as Neff's colleague, a claims adjuster who unpicks the couple's scheme.But the ace in the hole is Barbara Stanwyck as Phyliss Dietrichson, a vision of amorality in a "honey of an anklet" and a platinum wig. She can lower her sunglasses and make it look like the last word in predatory desire. And she's not just a vamp: she's a psychopath. There are few shots in cinema as bone-chilling as the close-up on Stanwyck's face as Neff dispatches Phyliss's husband in the back seat of a car. Miklós Rózsa's fretful strings tell us throughout the picture: beware. Stanwyck had been reluctant to take the role, confessing: "I was a little frightened of it." Wilder asked whether she was an actress or a mouse. When she plumped for the former, he shot back: "Then take the part."CrimeBilly WilderRyan Gilbeyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Film Weekly unlocks Conviction with Sam Rockwell In a bumper edition of Film Weekly, Jason Solomons meets Anglophile actor Sam Rockwell (Moon, Frost/Nixon, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) who's in London to promote Conviction, in which he stars alongside Hilary Swank as a man wrongfully imprisoned for murder. Rockwell talks sibling love and justice in a film tipped for Oscar success.Plus, director Clio Barnard speaks about her much-acclaimed hybrid of documentary and fiction, The Arbor. Xan Brooks clocks on to review some of this week's other releases including Olivier Assayas's epic Carlos, the star-studded Red and Mary and Max, a downbeat Aussie animated drama featuring the voices of Toni Collette and Philip Seymour Hoffman.Finally Jason meets director Debs Gardner-Paterson and the cast of Africa United which premiered at the London film festival this week, telling the story of a feisty troupe of African children and their 3,000-mile journey to the 2010 World Cup in Johannesburg.Jason SolomonsXan BrooksJason Phipps guardian.co.uk |
The disquieting sound of The Great White Silence A live musical performance to accompany a restored print of a film of Captain Scott's tragic polar quest highlights the shattering impact of noiselessnessReal silence, by all accounts, is an unpleasant sensation. "Forty years after entering an anechoic chamber for the first time, I still remember my strange feelings of pressure, discomfort, and disorientation," said Barry Blesser, co-author of the book Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson summed up the same experience more succinctly as "hell". Against that kind of absolute quiet, Watson's recording of the "silence" of Captain Robert Falcon Scott's cabin in the Antarctic, taken while on location there with David Attenborough earlier this year, seems quite busy – despite being nothing but ambience, a gently tinted quiet.It's a recording that features in Simon Fisher Turner's partly improvised score for the beautifully restored print of The Great White Silence, Herbert Ponting's account, as official photographer and cinematographer, of Scott's tragic quest. The new film premiered last week as part of the London film festival. Turner provided the score live, with the Elysian Quartet, Sarah Scutt and Alexander L'Estrange in his band.In some ways silence is the most appropriate score for the film. Even Ponting describes the quiet as "appalling" on one of his intertitles, which otherwise often have a jolly-jape feel. (He gets very into anthropomorphising penguins, which he imagines are arguing over who is going to do the shopping.) The film itself, footage from which had already been seen during Scott's quest in 1911 under the title With Captain Scott to the South Pole, also followed a silence: a respectful period of quiet following news of Scott's death, which reached England on 11 February 1913.With all that hush, adding sound must have felt like planting a big clumsy foot in the middle of a perfect sheet of untouched snow. One of the musicians told me after the show that an agreed silent opening seemed to stretch on and on, as if Turner was aware of what a monumental step that first sound would be. In the end it was skilfully judged, and the blend of real sounds – such as the gramophones that would have played on the ship, the Terra Nova, as well as a recording of the ship's bell – and sparse musical scoring seemed to respect the idea of silence while making sound (even during the passages of pizzicato playfulness while Ponting did his Johnny Morris routine with the animals).I wonder how hard it was to conceive of a score for The Great White Silence with the knowledge of its slide to catastrophe at the end. Often the sound seemed to be pointing in that direction while, on screen, everything seemed dandy and the ship's cat (whose name, Nigger, got a tense silence from the audience) was performing for the camera. It's a mix that at times became dramatically queasy: in the screening, when Scott discovers he is not the first to reach the south pole, his diary entry: "Good God, what an awful place this is," got a big laugh, as if everything Ponting was writing on the screen had been infected by his jokes along the way. "The pole yes," says Scott with a stiff frost-bitten upper lip. "But under very different circumstances to those expected."Apart from the beginning of the film, that was, incidentally, the one moment Turner and the other musicians opted for absolute – and deafening – silence.• The Great White Silence film will be released in cinemas in Spring 2011 and on dual format edition DVD/Blu-ray in May 2011London film festivalAntarcticaFestivalsPascal Wyseguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Bieber shocks fans with new hairdo THE teen sensation's new look causes hysteria at a New York book signing to promote his memoir. news.com.au |