| Film4 budget to rise to £15m a year Channel 4 confirms budget rise of 50% from 2011 for division responsible for hits such as Slumdog MillionaireChannel 4 is to increase the budget of Film4, the division responsible for hit movies including Slumdog Millionaire, by 50% to £15m per year.The rise will take effect in 2011 and is guaranteed for the next five years. Channel 4 has pledged to boost its total programming budget by £50m following a double-digit increase in TV ad spend so far this year.David Abraham, the Channel 4 chief executive, has timed the announcement to coincide with the premiere of Never Let Me Go, a dystopian drama starring Carey Mulligan and Keira Knightley which is financed by Film4. The film will open the London film festival, which begins tonight."Film has a special and unique role in UK culture, promoting a wealth of extraordinary British talent from storytellers and producers to directors and actors," said Abraham."I have been determined during the current process of creative renewal to ensure that it plays a commensurate part in Channel 4's public service delivery."Abraham said the increased budget will provide the domestic film industry with a financial boost following the government's decision to close the UK Film Council."At a time when funding is increasingly difficult to access it will allow us to extend our reach further towards new voices and new audiences," said Tessa Ross, the controller of Film4 and Channel 4 drama. "It is wonderful to be able to deliver some good news to our industry, most importantly because we believe that there is a wealth of great talent here in the UK that this extra money will allow us to support."Since 1982 Film4 has developed and produced films including My Beautiful Laundrette, Trainspotting, Shallow Grave, East is East, The Motorcycle Diaries, Touching the Void, This is England and The Last King of Scotland.• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.• If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".Channel 4Television industryTelevisionMark Sweneyguardian.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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Carlos – review Olivier Assayas's engrossing movie traces the life of one of the 20th century's most notorious terroristsConventional wisdom suggests that we look to America for the essential models of the crime movie, but in fact, in addition to providing a name for that most respected of Hollywood genres, the film noir, the French were way out front when, early in the last century, Louis Feuillade directed a succession of sophisticated, surreal serials of underworld activities that remain unsurpassed, among them Judex, Fantômas, Les vampires and Tih Minh.This tradition was carried on in Marcel Carné's classics of the 1930s and after the second world war by Jacques Becker with Touchez pas au grisbi (based on a Série noire novel by Albert Simonin that was accompanied by a 14-page glossary of underworld argot) and Jean-Pierre Melville, who specialised in gangster movies of a purity unrivalled by Hollywood.Numerous petits-maîtres have enriched the genre over the years, including a couple of expatriate Americans (Jules Dassin's Rififi, Bob Swaim's La balance), and lately there have been some heavyweight crime movies that have given Hollywood a run for its grisbi, most notably Jean-François Richet's four-hour Mesrine and Jacques Audiard's Un prophète.Now we have Carlos, directed by Olivier Assayas, a former critic and editor of film magazine Cahiers du cinéma, once the cradle of film-makers who set out to subvert established genres. His long, detailed chronicle of the 20th century's most famous terrorist follows the traditional narrative arc of the classic Hollywood gangster movie as studied in American film schools, from tentative beginnings through hubristic heights of conquest to destruction and rejection.Assayas's Irma Vep paid tribute to Feuillade's Les vampires, and in his most ambitious film, the stately Les destinées sentimentales, he recounted the fortunes of a rich Protestant dynasty in the porcelain business negotiating the first 40 years of the 20th century. Carlos (released in two versions, the five-and-a-half-hour one I saw, originally made as a TV mini-series, and an abridged edition at 158 minutes) covers rather less sedately the last three decades of the century through the career of Ilich RamÃrez Sánchez, born in 1949 to a Venezuelan lawyer, a romantic, middle-class Marxist who christened his sons Vladimir, Ilich and Lenin.The handsome, unruly Ilich was the product of the confused 1960s zeitgeist, a time of euphoric idealism, bad faith and excess, and the movie picks him up in the early 1970s after he's been kicked out of the Patrice Lumumba Peoples' Friendship University in Moscow for "anti-Soviet" activities and has been searching for a direction into which he might channel his revolutionary energies. He's thrown himself into the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, been given the nom de guerre "Carlos", and seen action with Black September in the Middle East.The movie starts with a bang as Mossad kill the PFLP's Paris organiser with a car bomb and Carlos, looking for a big job, is assigned to exact revenge by assassinating the wealthy British Zionist Joseph Sieff in London.From here on in, we're involved with the mercurial Carlos, played with brilliance and conviction by Venezuelan actor Edgar RamÃrez, as for the next two decades he bounces explosively around Europe and the Middle East like a loose cannonball in a pinball machine.He's a revolutionary, a playboy, a terrorist, a mercenary, an arrogant charmer, a megalomaniac. He's cold-blooded, yet capable of terrifying rages, never without a cigarette in his hand or far from a bottle of whisky, shuffling false passports like a pack of cards, and seemingly irresistible to women whom he frequently abuses. Sex and guns are closely linked in his mind. He demands absolute obedience from his followers, yet invariably disobeys the orders of his principal boss and despairing father figure, the PFLP co-founder Wadie Haddad, a steely performance by Lebanese actor Ahmad Kaabour who, in the context of the film, is far more sympathetic than Carlos.The ascent of Carlos from minor assassin to terrorist superstar is charted with dramatic lucidity, and there are some remarkably staged set pieces. The latter include the night in 1975 when he kills two French policemen and seriously wounds the head of French counterterrorism, and the smoothly executed invasion of the 1975 Opec meeting in Vienna which resulted in the taking of hostages from all the oil-producing nations, including the Saudi celebrity diplomat Sheikh Yamani.Along the way the cynical secret diplomacy of the cold war era is unveiled as the KGB hire Carlos to assassinate the Egyptian president Anwar el Sadat, the Iraqis smuggle the weapons into Vienna for the Opec siege, and the Syrian secret service provide the wherewithal for Carlos to create a network in Europe. He gains enough power to treat the Stasi with disdain and to browbeat the Hungarian secret police into submission.It's a revealing story, and what is most astonishing is how incompetent Carlos is. Almost everything goes wrong, from the failed assassination of Sieff to the frighteningly comic attempt to destroy El Al airliners with badly aimed rockets at Paris-Orly airport. By the late 1980s, having achieved nothing but notoriety, he had become persona non grata everywhere.Eventually, as a pathetic, bloated alcoholic hiding under an alias in Khartoum, he's a commodity for sale and betrayal. Now in his early 60s, unlikely ever to be released from incarceration in a French jail, Carlos is a figure on the bleak landscape of our terrible times, and the viewer of this engrossing film is left to judge whether he's a tragic one.Period and historicalPhilip Frenchguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Stage Marathon: Is Seven Hours of The Great Gatsby Too Much? An F. Scott Fitzgerald fan braves Gatz, the marathon dramatic reading of The Great Gatsby, in a personal test of endurance feedproxy.google.com |