| Cox, Arquette split after 11 years FRIENDS actress Courteney Cox and David Arquette have separated after 11 years of marriage. news.com.au |
The romance 25: do you agree with our rankings? The list of our critics' picks of the 25 best romantic movies has been released. Tell us what we left out here, and vote for your favourite of the ones we did mention here guardian.co.uk |
The greatest films of all time: Arthouse This is a red rag to a number of different bulls. Lovers of what's called arthouse cinema resent the label for being derisive and philistine. And those who detest it bristle at the implication that there is no artistry or intelligence in mainstream entertainment.For many, the stereotypical arthouse film is Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin was a classic art film from the 1920s and Luis Buñuel investigated cinema's potential for surreality like no one before or since. The Italian neorealists applied the severity of art to a representation of society and the French New Wave iconoclastically brought a self-deconstructing critical awareness to film-making. Yasujiro Ozu conveyed a transcendental simplicity in his work. Andrei Tarkovsky and Michelangelo Antonioni achieved a meditative beauty, while David Lynch and John Cassavetes demonstrated an American reflex to the genre. Arthouse is dismissed as the connoisseur's elite fetish; others find it, in the dumbed-down cinema jungle, to be an endangered species.DramaPeter Bradshawguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Guilty Pleasures - review London film festivalAs I watched George Osborne's slow strangle of the welfare state on Wednesday, I wondered – how many Mills & Boon novels will have been sold by the time he finally winds up? The answer is 1,240, because they sell a copy every three seconds, plus no doubt a few more when the chancellor is speaking.Along with lipstick, Smarties and almost anything that fits in a handbag, romance fiction, the biggest sector in British paperback publishing, is depression proof. It is probably apocalypse proof too. And, to remind us why, Guilty Pleasures, a feature-length documentary about Mills & Boon, had its world premiere at the London film festival last night.Guilty Pleasures bills itself as a "real life romcom" and it is – in the way that Triumph of the Will was Zionist propaganda. It follows five people absorbed in the Mills & Boon world: Roger, the man who writes them, Stephen, the man on the cover, and three female fans. They are all in swaying carriages on the train to mental breakdown. But it does explain why people read – or, as I prefer to put it, gobble – these novels.And so Hiroko is a Japanese Emma Bovary, who dreams of The Beatles and looks at her husband as if he is an incurable disease. "My marriage is less passionate than the relationships in the novels," she says, then takes up ballroom dancing, paints her eyes a violent shade of tangerine, and makes the husband dance too. They win a competition and Hiroko forgives him, because he is now "like George Harrison", except a little less dead.The next woman is Shumita, whose husband left her because, after obsessively reading Mills & Boon, she became "a militant feminist" (his words). So she buys new bras, vowing to get him back. Eventually, the camera follows her to a reconciliation meeting, where he talks about his Porsche as if it were his only love. "What happened to all the promises these books made to me?" she says, and decides to try internet dating instead.Shirley, meanwhile, lies in bed reading Mills & Boon's Do You Take This Cop? Phil, her husband, lies beside her, reading a book called Unnatural Death. Phil comes across as horrible in the film: his view on courtship is: "You have to know a little about the animal you're dealing with before you commit. You wouldn't just walk up to a strange dog in the street and stroke it."And what does the dog/Shirley think? "You can just indulge yourself in these books and say, 'I wish it was me.'"But Guilty Pleasures is not just a psychological case study of fandom. It also has Roger, who writes Mills & Boon novels under the pen name Gill Sanderson.For most of the documentary Roger, who speaks in the over-calm voice of a control freak, acts pretty normal. But, like everyone who has ever been in front of a camera for more than 10 minutes, he cracks at last. Does he believe in love? "I prefer to be in complete solitude if possible," he says.And then comes Stephen. He is a human doll, cursed with beauty. His photograph is on the cover of 200 Mills & Boon novels and he is, therefore, the man they think they want.But it has not made him happy, or even functional. He has more self-hatred than the average teenage girl. He is obsessed with food and the denial of food. Even his own sexual organs seem to disgust him; he talks about his genitals as if they were a forest inhabited by evil pixies. The end sees him spouting his mantras: "You are good enough. You are lovable. You are worth it."As I said — not romcom.Guilty Pleasures is showing today and tomorrow at the National Film Theatre, London (returns only)London film festivalFestivalsTanya Goldguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Irvin Kershner obituary Chosen to direct The Empire Strikes Back, he turned in one of the best sequels – and highest box-office earners – of all timeThe film director Irvin Kershner, who has died aged 87, was known in the trade as a hired gun. His most famous film, The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the fifth episode in the Star Wars saga, is most commonly linked to its executive producer, George Lucas. Never Say Never Again (1983) is celebrated as the film in which Sean Connery made his comeback as James Bond after 12 years away from the role, the director merely providing the vehicle. Kershner's first feature, Stakeout On Dope Street (1958), was made under the aegis of Roger Corman, who usually gained the main credit for the films he produced. Yet, eclectic as Kershner seemed, his best films reveal a visual flare, with an eye for the telling detail and a sympathy for the rebel.The Philadelphia-born Kershner's background was in painting, photography and design. He took a degree at Temple University's Tyler School of Art in his home town. He studied painting under Hans Hoffman in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and photography at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. During the second world war, he served in the US air force as a flight engineer on B-24 bombers.After the war, Kershner began his film career at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television, teaching photography and taking film courses under Slavko Vorkapich, the great montage artist. Kershner next accepted a job as still photographer for the US state department in the Middle East, which eventually led to an assignment as a director and cinematographer of documentaries in Iran, Greece and Turkey with the United States Information Agency, including titles such as Malaria, Locust Plague and Childbirth. When he returned to the US, he acted as writer, director, cinematographer and editor on Confidential File (1953-55), a documentary television series that recreated the events behind contemporary news headlines.Kershner and his cameraman Haskell Wexler experimented with a mixture of cinéma vérité and narrative conventions in Stakeout On Dope Street, about a trio of youths who discover a cache of uncut heroin and try to sell it. Despite the heavy warning against the evils of drug peddling, the film, shot on location using handheld cameras and a cast of unknowns, was a lively feature debut.Kershner followed it with another taut low-budget crime story, The Young Captives (1959), whose publicity shrieked "Teenage elopers' love turns to terror as they battle crazed killer!" The plot concerned a couple who pick up a psychopathic hitchhiker. The Hoodlum Priest (1961) was, despite its mildly provocative title, a mostly routine crime melodrama based on a true story about a Jesuit priest known for his work among ex-cons. Well photographed by Wexler, Kershner's restrained documentary approach counteracted Don Murray's movie-star good looks and the dollops of do-good philosophy.Kershner's use of locations, such as a wintry Montreal in The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1964), which starred Robert Shaw and Mary Ure as an Irish immigrant couple coping with unemployment and separation, and New York in A Fine Madness (1966), was particularly effective. In the latter, a sour screwball comedy, Sean Connery rants and raves as a radical poet, telling a group of women: "Open your corsets and bloom, let the metaphors creep above your knees."Kershner continued to get fine performances from stars such as George C Scott, turning on the charm in The Flim-Flam Man (1967), and George Segal in Loving (1970), a touching and sharp drama of a commercial artist rebelling against the routine of marriage and career. In Up the Sandbox (1972), Barbra Streisand rebels against her domesticity by having garish fantasies, one involving seduction by Fidel Castro.In 1970, Kershner was to have directed A Man Called Horse, about an Englishman captured and ultimately converted by the Sioux, but he was taken off the project, without even receiving credit for his work on the screenplay. However, he got to direct the sequel, The Return of a Man Called Horse (1976), which, while subtly avoiding the exploitative aspects of the original film, still has Richard Harris, in the title role, suspended by clamps to his pectoral muscles, in a 20-minute sequence. The film, which gets closer to the Native American experience than most previous attempts, also has one of the longest pre-credit sequences ever at 17 minutes.Subsequently, Kershner's films got flashier and more expensive. Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) was glossy gore, with Faye Dunaway as a chic New York photographer who is psychically linked to a murderer. When George Lucas decided not to direct The Empire Strikes Back himself, he chose Kershner out of a possible 100 directors. He felt that Kershner, who had remained apart from the Hollywood system and was a student of Zen Buddhism, would appreciate the film's philosophical implications, and would be able to explore mythology and the subconscious fantasy life of children. Besides, Lucas thought The Return of a Man Called Horse was one of those rare sequels that was actually better than the first movie.Kershner's contribution to The Empire Strikes Back was considerable. He spent several hours a day for a year storyboarding the action himself, getting his perspective on each scene. "According to the books, I didn't even exist," Kershner said. "Of course, I couldn't have made the movie without George; on the other hand, they couldn't have made that movie without me." The Empire Strikes Back, much darker and more realistic than the first Star Wars film, became one of the highest box-office earners ever, as well as being considered one of the best sequels. The same could not be said of RoboCop 2 (1990), a violent, humourless and ugly sequel."Kersh", as the tall, bald and goateed Kershner was known to his intimates, appeared in a number of his friends' films: as Zebedee in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and in a small role in Steven Seagal's On Deadly Ground (1994). In 1997, he produced an interesting independent film for a first-time British director, Paul Chart, called American Perfekt.In his last years, Kershner kept active by lecturing at various universities throughout the US, and planning a number of projects, few of which saw the light of day. "My career is a disaster," he remarked. "After The Empire Strikes Back, I got to make big films that I didn't care about, Never Say Never Again and RoboCop 2, and then I got too old. I love my early movies, but naturalism is an artist's early style. Now I want to deal with feelings, dreams, an acceptance of irrationality. I want films to haunt an audience, to give them something to remember and be able to talk about."• Irvin Kershner, film director; born 29 April 1923; died 29 November 2010Star WarsScience fiction and fantasyGeorge LucasRonald Berganguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |