Tag Archive: orson welles


THE SILENT SUNRISE EFFECT

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August 22, 2012

SUNRISE: A SONG OF TWO HUMANS directed by F.W. Murnau (USA, 1927)

Sunrise

The girl from the city leads the man from the country astray.

Some have called ‘Sunrise’ the Citizen Kane of the silent era. Like Orson Welles, F.W Murnau was given free rein and a stack of cash to realise his vision and it’s all up there on-screen to marvel at.

The German director fills the story with, for the time, innovative effects and bold studio trickery. It was also one of the first movies to be released with a specially recorded score of music and sound effects.

Is this enough to merit it being voted the greatest silent movie ever made by BFI/Sight & Sound critics, programmers and all-round cinematic smart asses?

Not in my view. Personally I’d give this honour to King Vidor’s The Crowd or Buster Keaton’s The General, but what do I know?

That said, ‘Sunrise’ does deserve a high standing for its sheer technical virtuosity and for the way it tells a simple story with such pizzazz. Continue reading →

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CINEPHILES PUT ART ABOVE ENTERTAINMENT

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August 18, 2012
Hitchcock

The BFI poll gets James Stewart in a spin.

Every ten years since 1962 the British Film Institute (BFI) via Sight & Sound magazine has published a list of the fifty greatest movies ever made. This is based on the votes of critics, programmers, academics and distributors.

This decade’s poll sees Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo in the top spot, the first time that Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane has not been number one.

When any list like this is published, the first thing I look for is how many of these films I have  seen.

As I write, this totals just 23 so I have set myself a personal goal of seeking out the other 27 over the next few months to see what I have been missing and be in a better position to criticise the critics.

Watch this space. Continue reading →

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IRVINE WELSH’S BEDROOM SECRETS

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March 6, 2012

THE BEDROOM SECRETS OF THE MASTER CHEFS a novel by Irvine Welsh (2006)

212534Irvine Welsh is destined to be forever introduced as ‘the author of Trainspotting’.

He has been fairly prolific since he burst on the literary scene so memorably in 1993 but none of his novels or short story collections have captured the public imagination like his audacious and inspired debut.

To date his career mirrors that of Orson Welles in that he started at the top and has been steadily working his way downhill ever since.

‘The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs’ is his sixth full length novel and ,confusingly, neither of its main two characters are chefs. Danny Skinner and Brian Kibby are both twenty something employees of Edinburgh’s Environmental Health Department and thus responsible for ensuring that correct hygiene standards of the city’s restaurants are maintained.

The title is the same as a book within a book by an unsavoury celebrity chef named Alan De Fretais, a work that Skinner unreservedly judges “the biggest pile of bullshit imaginable”.   His harsh judgement Is supported by the brief extracts we are presented with. One of these reads: “I have long held  the belief that the only pleasure to rival making love is the eating of good food. The twin arenas of the true sensualist must, by extension, be the bedroom and the kitchen, and such a person must strive to be a master of both environments”. 

You might expect from this that Welsh would play more on this food-sex equation but he is more preoccupied with booze (or in the Scottish vernacular ‘peeve’) and bonking.

Drawing together these twin themes, Skinner notes that “being off the peeve makes you much better at shagging” but this insight doesn’t convert him a life of sobriety. While Skinner pursues an insatiable quest for erotic enlightenment, bars always seem to get in the way.

With the exception of  brief excursions to Ibiza and San Francisco the novel’s key events are set in the “cold”, “dark” city of Edinburgh where Skinner finds “perfect conditions for hours of self-destructive heavy drinking”. Continue reading →

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NEIL YOUNG – GOLD AND BLACK

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January 2, 2010

Neil Young has always been one of those artists who is a benchmark for integrity; a performer who, like Dylan, has always remained aloof from the bullshit that goes with success and stardom.

Sure, he’s had some lean years and released some dud albums, particularly during the Reagan years, but he’s always  kept moving and been motivated by being true to himself rather than adapting to fit in with any one particular style or image.  In an interview with Nick Kent in the early 1990s , he said: “I’m someone who’s always tried systematically to destroy the very basis of my record-buying public…..that’s what’s kept me alive. You destroy what you did before and you’re free to carry on”. Continue reading →

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BEST INTERVIEW ON YOU TUBE

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September 5, 2008

Here’s a poser. What is the best interview on You Tube?

By now there are thousands to choose from and more being added daily. Many of these are light hearted chats or mere publicity slots used to plug albums, books, movies etc.

An exception I recently discovered is a good series called The Alcove which may be old hat to you but is new to me.

It features an earnest, but very bright, interviewee Mark Molaro who, get this, wants his subjects to talk rather than being concerned to impose his own personality on the show.

They are a decent length too so come across as much more in depth. In other words the speakers can talk in a relaxed style without feeling they’ve got to come up with smart ass one liners all the time. There’s also no studio audience to try to impress. The success or failure of the interview depends on the wisdom and articulacy of the speaker. So far I’ve watched interviews with Naomi Klein and Greil Marcus, both of which were genuinely illuminating.

Described as “smart talk for a new global generation” the show’s other guests on an impressively diverse list include: Mark Pesce (Web technology expert); Helen Epstein, (HIV/AIDS expert & author); Byron Hurt (“Hip Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes”) and Naomi Wolf (“The End of America”). Interviews can also be seen on Mark Molaro’s website.

But for my money the best interview ever is a show I remember being entranced by when broadcast in the BBC Arena season in 1982. Over the course of about two hours, Orson Welles talks to Leslie Megahey about his extraordinary career which by his own admission is largely one in which he started at the top (with the Mercury Theatre and Citizen Kane) and worked his way down thereafter. Continue reading →

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