| Dannii's embarrassing street name mix-up SHE may be a one of the UK's biggest stars but Dannii Minogue's spelling needs a little polish. news.com.au |
The greatest films of all time: Romance • Datablog: download the full listRomantic longing has provided the cinema with some of its most glorious and idealistic movies: Casablanca and Brief Encounter are films with an unabashed, unironic passionate flame at their centre. Movies such as Gone With the Wind and Doctor Zhivago lent something grand and epic to romantic love, but it was perhaps the much-loved weepie An Affair to Remember that did the most to introduce us to the more domestic idea of the chick flick or the date movie – the romantic film adored by women and tolerated by their husbands and boyfriends.The romantic comedy was a further refinement, almost invented in its modern sense by Woody Allen and revived by Rob Reiner with his smash-hit, When Harry Met Sally, a success that has spawned a thousand sucrose imitations. Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood For Love is probably the most potent, old-fashioned romance of recent times. Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung have that seductively heartbreaking self-sacrifice shown by Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman or Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard. Love will never go out of fashion.RomancePeter Bradshawguardian.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 best arthouse film that makes no sense? Problematic, directionlessness or just plain nonsensical – here are the inexplicable arthouse films you love to hate @DrGiggles Without a doubt Primer is the most obtuse film I've ever seen – it was as entertaining as reading a book on advanced calculus.@SladeKincald For me it has to be Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man. Love it, no idea what it's about. Death, maybe?@dothestrand Andrzej Zulawski's Possession … Isabelle Adjani's Cannes-winning performance was described by Time Out as like that of a rabies victim. Wonderful film, though.@DrJackDevlin Pirates of the Caribbean III. Completely baffling. Radical stuff.@DrTumnus Thomas Vinterberg's It's All About Love reeks of folly, but I find it oddly compelling: glistening in the memory bank are Sean Penn literally phoning in his performance from an orbiting jumbo jet and an ice rink full of dead clones. Fab.@jaiebey Delicatessen – featuring a circus performer, cannibalism and radical vegetarian-terrorists, as well as a great violin-accompanied, mattress-squeaking sex scene@owaingr I had to have The Draughtsman's Contract explained to me but I liked it not making sense.@RHJoseph My vote goes to La Moustache from 2005. Neither my wife nor I have any idea what it was about. I asked the theatre attendant whether it was enigmatic or elliptical. His response: "Yeah."@LizHi No I didn't love Japón. The Guardian still owes me three hours of my life I'll never get back.@misima Brotherhood of the Wolf. It's not arthouse? But it's French and has Monica Bellucci in a mask and makes no sense whatsoever.@fandango87 Stalker, just watched it again last night. I still have no idea if I am meant to understand what is going on or even if Tarkovsky knew what it was totally about. Especially with the last scene I'm beginning to wonder if I'm having my chain pulled.@tarragoncusp It has to be Godard's Weekend. I have absolutely no idea what it's all about, but it is perfect in every single way. I'd also recommend Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain for exactly the same reasons.@Chewtoy I recently did an extensive but unfruitful online search trying to find an analysis of Sergei Paradjanov's The Colour of Pomegranates. It seems no one has dared to explain the intricate symbolism of this beautiful masterpiece. Pure poetry.@The Kernel The whole of Donnie Darko (notwithstanding the director's cut, which is bloody rubbish and totally destroys the enigmatic mystique of the far superior cinematic version).@Shamharga El Topo for sure. Absolutely no idea what is going on. Closely followed by Mullholland Dr.@PolishMark The Happiness of the Katakuris. A family run a guest house, whose guests begin to die. With musical numbers and zombies. And random animated sequences.@kolf Synechdoche, New York. Nearest thing to a Thomas Pynchon novel on screen.@DontCallMeShirley The Saddest Music in the World is a wonderfully ridiculous film. I'm not entirely sure if I like it, mind. But if drinking beer out of a prosthetic leg is the sort of thing you're into, then that film is perfect.@iwouldprefernotto Björk and Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9. It opens with a big musical number, very grandiose, very Björk. The next three hours involve a series of very stylised movements taking place in a series of weird rooms on a whaling ship. The film ends with 20 minutes of Björk and Matthew Barney hacking at each other with ceremonial swords underwater. It made me feel genuinely queasy.World cinemaDramaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Halloween film seasons and all-nighters It's that time of year when the vaults are prised open, the cinematic nightmares of the world are unleashed, and movie houses across the land compete to present the scariest horror-themed festival with the corniest name. Halloween festivals have been steadily multiplying, like marauding zombies or Tesco Metros, so here's a handy breakdown …The cheesiest name award has to go to Derby's Dead And Breakfast (Quad, 30 Oct), although the title does at least make sense as it's an all-nighter. And after sitting through the likes of Evil Dead II, Halloween, Night Of The Demon and Bubba Ho-tep, who wouldn't fancy a bacon butty, if not some black pudding? The other hot all-nighter tickets are the Electric's Vintage 80s Horror All-Nighter (31 Oct, Electric Cinema, W11) which has The Thing, Evil Dead II, Re-Animator and Poltergeist, washed down with Michael Jackson's Thriller. The BFI IMAX Scary 3D Halloween all-nighter (30 Oct, BFI IMAX, SE1) rounds up recent in-your-face horrors like The Hole, Piranha and My Bloody Valentine. And the Frightfest all-nighter (30 Oct, Empire Leicester Square, WC2) promises seven UK premieres from around the world, including top-notch Japanese revenge thriller Confessions, Finnish evil-Santa oddity Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, and Ivan Reitman's tacky 70s atrocity Cannibal Girls.Still in London, the BFI's Halloween Screen season (Fri to 5 Nov) is led by a screening of the new Psychoville Halloween special and a Q&A with the creators and cast members. In Islington, Chills In The Chapel (Fri to 31 Oct) brings Quatermass And The Pit, Amityville Horror and Psycho to the hushed Union Chapel.Outside London, Nottingham has the succinctly titled Mayhem (Broadway, Thu to 31 Oct), which boasts a director-attended preview of exciting Brit sci-fi Monsters, and several previews also at other horror festivals around the country: Mexico's We Are What We Are threatens to do for cannibals what Let The Right One In did for vampires, The Reef and Altitude provide good reasons to never go anywhere near the sea or the sky respectively, while gory Hong Kong property horror Dream Home suggests it's not safe to stay at home either.Moving northwards, Manchester's Grimm Up North (Thu to Sun, Dancehouse) boasts an array of horrors with suggestive one-word movie titles: Slice, Chop, Primal, Fragment, Macabre, and Outcast (James Nesbitt's new Irish social-realist horror). Down the M62 in Liverpool, if it's atmosphere you're after, Jameson's Cult Film Club is hosting the Christopher Lee Dracula at the allegedly haunted St George's Hall this Thursday, with actor Stephen Graham as host.Sheffield's Celluloid Screams (Showroom, Sat & Sun) includes the remade I Spit On Your Grave and 1980s favourite Critters.And northermost, and possibly most gruesome, Glasgow's Sinister Sunday Of Shock (Glasgow Film Theatre, Sun) celebrates the golden age of the video nasty, with a doc on gore-merchant Herschell Gordon Lewis, excessive 70s Greek epic Island Of Death, Lamberto Bava's cinema-set bloodbath Demons, and Stalker, a remake of Exposé, starring Jane March (one of several special guests) and directed by Martin Kemp – be afraid!HorrorHalloweenSteve Roseguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Leslie Nielsen obituary Canadian actor whose reputation was transformed by his deadpan comic persona in Airplane! and the Naked Gun seriesFew people watching the career of the tall, husky and fair-haired Leslie Nielsen, who has died aged 84, could have predicted that the stolid actor who specialised in authority figures would become known as a comedy star after two and a half decades in show business. His reputation was transformed by playing Dr Rumack on board the threatened airliner in Airplane! (1980) and Frank Drebin, the hilariously inept plain-clothes cop, in three Naked Gun films.What the writer-directors Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker saw in Nielsen, silvery grey and in his mid-50s, was his previously po-faced persona. "They spotted me for being what I really was, a closet comedian," he said. "And how lucky can you get? It's like they said to me, 'Leslie, come out and play.' Thank God for them."In fact, Nielsen's acting style altered not one iota from when he played a man in jeopardy in a couple of disaster films, the ship's captain in The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and the mayor in City On Fire (1979), which led to Airplane!, a take-off of the very films in which he had been appearing. The success of Nielsen's latter performances derived from his playing it straight, as if he believed in the crazy goings-on around him. "Surely, you can't be serious," a pilot says to him in Airplane! "I am serious, and don't call me Shirley!" he replies.Nielsen, of Danish ancestry, was born in Regina, in Saskatchewan, Canada, to a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and a Welsh mother. His uncle was the celebrated actor Jean Hersholt. His brother, Erik, became deputy prime minister of Canada. After finishing high school in Edmonton, Alberta, Leslie joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, training as an aerial gunner in the second world war. Nielsen, who was legally deaf and wore a hearing aid for much of his life, began working as an announcer and a disc jockey at a Calgary radio station. He soon moved to New York to seek employment and to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse.More than 20 years before he first played Drebin, Nielsen was third-billed as a serious policeman in his big screen debut, Ransom! (1956), helping Glenn Ford and Donna Reed recover their kidnapped child. In the same year, for the same studio (MGM), Nielsen played an astronaut whose spaceship invades the realm of Walter Pidgeon and his daughter, Anne Francis, in Forbidden Planet, an entertaining science-fiction version of The Tempest. He was also one of the intrusive men introduced into The Opposite Sex (1956), a feeble musical remake of George Cukor's all-female classic The Women (1939).Nielsen exuded a certain weary charm playing a wealthy pilot who crashes in Mississippi and is nursed back to health by backwoods girl Debbie Reynolds in Tammy and the Bachelor (1957). But despite the huge box-office takings of this whimsical picture, Nielsen plodded on in bread-and-butter roles for a number of years. These included a cattle-baron villain opposing Ford in the title role of The Sheepman (1958); an ineffectual lieutenant in the third (and worst) version of Beau Geste (1966); and, briefly, as Colonel Custer in The Plainsman (1966), another inferior remake.Nielsen was also in a number of dire comedies, playing straight man to Don Knotts in The Reluctant Astronaut (1967) and to Bob Hope in How to Commit Marriage (1969), continuing to make little impression throughout most of the 1970s, during which time he did not seem to have a humorous bone in his body. He was kept busy on television as policemen in The New Breed (1961-62) and The Bold Ones: The Protectors (1969-70), among scores of other series. Then came Airplane!, after which it was impossible ever to take him seriously again, even in horror movies such as Prom Night (1980), a Halloween ripoff with Jamie Lee Curtis, and George A Romero's Creepshow (1982). Drebin first appeared in the short-lived but funny TV series Police Squad! (1982), Abrahams and the Zuckers' clever parody of TV cop series from Dragnet onwards. The episodes always ended with Nielsen caught in a freeze frame while everyone else moved. The series used many of the gags that were repeated and expanded in The Naked Gun (1988) and its sequels, The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991) and Naked Gun 33â…“: The Final Insult (1994).Nielsen's deadpan acting as the incompetent cop character, completely unaware of the chaos he causes, rescued the films from crassness. Drebin is frequently caught in misunderstandings of language. ("Can I interest you in a nightcap?" "No thanks, I don't wear them"; "Cigarette?" "Yes, I know.")Unfortunately, Nielsen's comic persona did not stretch very far beyond Drebin, although he was better than his material in Repossessed (1990), a parody of The Exorcist; as the suave count in Mel Brooks's Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995); and as agent WD-40 in Spy Hard (1996). However, he hardly raised a smile in the misconceived Mr Magoo (1997) or the horror spoofs Scary Movie 3 (2003) and Scary Movie 4 (2006), although Nielsen's appearances as an even dimmer version of President George W Bush, at one stage appearing in the nude, slightly redeemed them. In contrast, he successfully toured the US in a one-man show as the great American lawyer Clarence Darrow, proving that, surely, Nielsen could be taken seriously.He is survived by his fourth wife, Barbaree, and two daughters, Maura and Thea, from his second marriage.• Leslie William Nielsen, actor, born 11 February 1926; died 28 November 2010Leslie NielsenComedyRonald Berganguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |