I’ve not run too many giveaways on this blog…and this is no exception as it’s actually being carried out via Twitter. I have a copy of Pontypool, one of my favourite films of 2009, to give away on DVD and Blu-ray.
Set in the small, snowy Canadian town of Pontypool, the movie centres on radio DJ Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) as he and his colleagues battle zombies from the confines of their underground studio.
In my review I said “Pontypool is something of a grower, an always entertaining little film which stays in the memory long after you’ve seen it and improves with age, which is more than can be said for some of its flashier counterparts.” I also quoted a few other reviews when it seemed Pontypool needed help at the box office.
Stephen Mallatratt’s adaptation of Susan Hill’s best selling novel The Woman in Black comes to Edinburgh’s King’s Theatre from Monday 15 – Saturday 20 February.
Said to combine the power and intensity of live theatre with a cinematic quality inspired by the world of film noir, audiences are provided with “an evening of unremitting drama as they are transported into a terrifying and ghostly world.”
A lawyer obsessed with a curse that he believes has been cast over him and his family by the spectre of a Woman in Black, engages a sceptical young actor to help him tell his terrifying story and exorcise the fear that grips his soul.
Northern Ballet Theatre’s Wuthering Heights returns to Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre from Thursday 11 to Saturday 13 March.
A creative collaboration between composer Claude-Michel Schönberg and NBT Artistic Director David Nixon, the production is inspired by Emily Bronte’s 1847 novel.
The ballet was created in 2002 when Claude-Michel Schönberg, known throughout the musical-theatre world for his West End hits Les Miserables, Miss Saigon and Martin Guerre, made contact with David Nixon within weeks of his arrival at NBT.
One of the greatest love stories in the world, the ballet focuses on the powerful bond that grows between Catherine Earnshaw and the foundling Heathcliff; their lives inexorably linked for eternity in a darkly haunting tale, as bleak and beautiful as the Yorkshire moors that surround them.
Another cult movie event is on its way to Edinburgh, courtesy of the Jekyll & Hyde pub and Cult Fiction Movies: an evening in the company of David Hess, star of the infamous video nasty Last House on the Left on Sunday 14 March, from 6pm.
Also in attendance will be Giovanni Lombardo Radice, star of Cannibal Ferox, House on the edge of the Park (Alongside David), City of the Living Dead and many more. Finally, actress Catriona Maccoll, who starred in numerous italian horror films by the director Lucio Fulci, will be the final guest.
There will be movie showings in the crypt bar all evening with intros from Hess himself, who will be partaking in a Q&A session on the balcony section of the pub along with an opportunity to get your favourite movies signed.
The event will be brought to a close with Hess playing a live set featuring songs from the soundtrack of Last House originally composed by the actor.
Impeccable choreography and a note-perfect performance from actress Joanna Tope help grip the audience throughout a 90-minute monologue in Douglas Maxwell’s new play.
Teacher Maggie Brodie (Tope) has seen and done it all, her 35 years in the classroom the only constant in a life full of learning about what it means to be a woman first and educator second.
Although effectively retired from the classroom, Maggie’s close proximity to a local school means that when a teacher goes off sick it’s her the headteacher decides to come running to for help, even if he is aware of a couple of “situations” from her past.
As Maggie settles into her new routine, she’s introduced to Rosie, a six-year-old Somalian girl who won’t speak but whom the older woman feels a connection to. As religion enters the classroom and Maggie reflects on how she arrived here, the past appears to catch up with her in more ways than one.
Set against the backdrop of her primary school classroom, slats in the back wall rotating at various points to depict a cloakroom or toilets, Promises, Promises is a play of many strands, all converging on the ageing, proud and stately figure of Miss Brodie, now slightly past her prime.
I have something of a soft spot for the legend of Shangri-la, the idea that there’s a mystical city nestled somewhere in the Tibetan mountains where man can live an eternity in peace appealing to that little bit of Indiana Jones hidden somewhere inside me.
Never mind that the “legend” was invented in 1933 by author James Hilton for his novel Lost Horizon: it’s an enduringly romantic idea that still gives travellers inspiration today.
So I was pleased to see that the BFI (British Film Institute) are currently touring a new film around the country, one which this week offers film fans in Glasgow to take a trip back to another time, and another continent, to witness life in Tibet between 1922 – 1950 in The Search for Shangri-la.
Footage, shot by British explorers and dignitaries who passed through Tibet in the years leading up to the area’s occupation by the Chinese in 1950, has been pulled together into a stunning film which is part history lesson and part travelogue.
Starting with the first filmed record of Tibet, taken during the 1922 attempt to climb Everest, the British party responsible were permitted by the Dalai Lama to travel through Tibet en route to the fabled mountain.
Accompanied by a new score, evoking the music of the region, we watch as the explorers traverse crevasse and river in an attempt to ingratiate themselves with the locals, always careful to respect their customs.
Last weekend I was lucky enough to attend Slapstick 2010, the UK’s only (as far as I’m aware) festival dedicated to screenings of silent films alongside guest talks and special events.
Over four days I recorded some of my thoughts of the event for BBC Radio Scotland’s excellent Movie Café programme, and the episode is now up for seven days on the BBC iPlayer.
While I’d recommend listening to the full programme, my segment begins around 25.47 minutes in and features an interview with actor Paul McGann and Aardman Animation’s Peter Lord.
You can also read a review by fellow Slapstick 2010 attendee Walter Dunlop over on my other blog, Adventures in Primetime.
Glasgow’s Tron Theatre presents the World Premiere of Promises Promises, the new thriller from award-winning Scottish playwright Douglas Maxwell, from Wednesday 3 – Saturday 6 February.
Inspired by true events, ‘Promises Promises’ is a one-woman show revolving around the cynical character of Maggie Brodie.
Maggie (Joanna Tope) is a retired teacher who has been dragged back to her local primary school for a reluctant day of supply teaching. Her craving for alcohol is strong and her opinion of her colleagues is rock bottom, so it’s going to be a tough day.
As I mentioned briefly late last year in the Edinburgh Evening News, I was lucky enough to catch a performance of David Allison’s brilliant reworking of FW Murnau’s 1922 horror classic, Nosferatu – now you can too as it comes to Edinburgh’s Filmhouse on Sunday 21 February.
Allison has added his own score to the film, sitting underneath or beside the screen with an assortment of instruments and playing them live to the picture. He also throws in some sound effects and overlays the ‘voice’ of long deceased Scotswoman Emily Gerard, the person who it is thought coined the term Nosferatu in the west.
Here’s a clip to illustrate what happens on the night:
In Spymonkey’s Moby Dick, a slightly off-kilter retelling of Herman Melville’s epic coming to Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre (10 – 13 February), four actors find themselves trapped in the belly of a literary monster.
As they ponder the irony of their fate they recount a story of Moby Dick, sparkling with their own fantastical flourishes. The novel’s epic examination of good, evil, fate and obsession is lost on them. And then, mysteriously, found on them again.
Will Ahab’s thirst for revenge be unhinged by the well-meaning but staggeringly inept attentions of his crew? Now that he has found true love, is Ishmael still fated to be the sole survivor of the Pequod?
Can a mermaid figurehead get pregnant? And what does a cannibal harpoonist from Bavaria eat?
Funny: Don’t Make Me Laugh, a terrifying new play based on real reports, is an ambitious project that sets out to explore the power of humour as torture.It comes to the Brunton Theatre in Musselburgh on Saturday 6 February as part of a Scottish tour.
A young Army officer perfects his comic techniques as a tool to extract information from Middle Eastern terror suspects who are trained to resist torture by way of meditation. As traditional interrogation methods fail, the UK Security Services enlist him along with a veteran comedian to use humour as a means of unsettling the detainees’ resolve.
Written by Tim Nunn, Funny was inspired by his experiences as a human rights campaigner, and stars Black Watch actor Jonathan Holt, Donald Pirie (Mancub, National Theatre of Scotland, River City) and Paul Cunningham (Macbeth, National Theatre of Scotland).
For all the romantics out there Edinburgh’s Filmhouse are vying for your time and money this Valentine’s day with a screening of that classic (?) romantic comedy: Moonstruck.
Loretta Castorini (Cher), a 38-year-old widow, works as a bookkeeper and lives in Brooklyn with her very Italian-American family: her father, Cosmo (Vincent Gardenia), a prosperous plumber; her mother, Rose (Olympia Dukakis); and her grandfather (Feodor Chaliapin). Her boyfriend, Johnny Cammareri (Danny Aiello), proposes to her; although not passionately in love with him, she accepts.
However, Johnny must travel to his mother’s deathbed in Sicily before the wedding. Meanwhile, Loretta meets Ronny (Nicolas Cage), Johnny’s brother, to whom Johnny hasn’t spoken in five years, and they are instantly attracted to each other…
Lee Mead, winner of the BBC’s hit show Any Dream Will Do, makes his drama debut starring in Bill Kenwright’s production of Oscar Wilde’s Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, which appears at the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh from Monday 22 to Saturday 27 February.
Lord Arthur Savile is deliriously happy: a pillar of Victorian society on the verge of marriage to the lovely Sybil Merton, when a brief departure from late Nineteenth century convention leads him to an encounter with a chilling clairvoyant called Podgers.
Podgers secretly reveals that at some point in Arthur’s life, he is destined to commit murder. To protect his future wife, Arthur decides he must commit this bloody deed before he marries.
Continuing their run of Arthur Miller plays (this is the fourth in five years), Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum brings director John Dove’s latest adaptation to the stage in the shape of The Price, 1968’s investigation of family and society in early 20th century America.
Returning to his late fathers soon-to-be-demolished apartment to sell what remains of his furniture collection, police sergeant Victor Franz (Greg Powrie) discusses his upcoming retirement with wife Esther (Sally Edwards) as antique dealer Solomon (James Hayes) arrives.
As Victor and Solomon work on a deal for the complete collection, Victor’s older brother Walter (Aden Gillett) turns up, prompting memories of the past to resurface in both brothers as the spectre of their father hangs over them.
As with many Miller scripts, family, loyalty and memory are crucial elements of The Price. From the opening moments, as Victor stalks the room where he and his father spent so much time eking out a living after the 1929 Wall Street Crash, we’re can see the past colliding with the present.
The furniture piled high around the set and the music on the gramophone reinforces Victor’s memories of his youth, the arrival of Walter and his remembrance of the past yet another blow to Victor’s somewhat fragile grasp on his own recollections.
Reuniting many of the team behind 2000’s Sexy Beast, actor/producers Ray Winstone and Ian McShane working from a script from Louis Mellis and David Scinto, 44 Inch Chest begins with Winstone flat on his back, though this time he’s far from the beating sun of a Spanish poolside.
Reeling from the news that his wife, Liz (Joanne Whalley), is leaving him for a younger man (Melvil Poupaud), Colin Diamond (Ray Winstone) decides to take revenge upon the pair in the only way he knows how: with extreme violence.
Roping in his best friends – Meredith (McShane), Archie (Tom Wilkinson), Mal (Stephen Dillane) and Old Man Peanut (John Hurt) – Diamond must decide exactly what form his revenge on Loverboy will take, a decision informed by the experiences and unique viewpoints of his peers.
Opening on the face of a sweating and exhausted Ray Winstone, it’s immediately clear that what we’re about to watch isn’t going to be an easy ride: Diamond is a force of nature, enough suppressed energy coursing through his veins to power the National Grid for at least a week.
John Hillcoat’s film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, arrives in UK cinemas with the weight of expectation heavy on its shoulders: can it possibly live up to the hype which sold the novel, words such as “masterpiece” and “classic” thrown at it like confetti?
The Road introduces us to the Man (Viggo Mortensen) and the Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) as they forage through the sodden remains of a post-apocalyptic future for food, shelter and some kind of future.
Convinced that the pair should head for the coast, the Man pushes a shopping cart full of their worldly possessions as they dodge groups of scavengers intent on attacking anyone who gets in their way.
As they encounter the dead and dying remnants of humanity, the question of what is good and bad hangs heavy over the two, their resolve tested as the need for food and water grows.
Clearly, no version of The Road was never going to be an easy watch and it’s to Hillcoat’s credit that his direction, working from a script by playwright Joe Penhall, tries hard not to soft peddle McCarthy’s vision of this degraded future world.
In fact this is very much Hillcoat’s film, the viewer drawn into a dreary, dirty and decidedly damp world which it’s far too easy to believe has resulted from some unnamed global disaster. We’re never allowed to forget that this a Bad Place, Hillcoat ramming the message home with every painstakingly grim shot of ruined skylines and dead trees.
Six out of ten! That was my response to the list of films served up by Filmhouse programmer Rod White as part of his 10 from 09 season (Sat 9 January – Thurs 4 February) which starts in a few days at the cinema.
White has picked his favourite films from 2009 and used his not insubstantial sway to have them all screened for our enjoyment over the coming weeks. I’ve been lucky to see six of them and could be tempted to see at least one more – Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno – as part of this season.
One of the main reasons for starting this blog was to highlight events that might only be around for a short time, one-off film screenings or plays that might be here today then…gone.
One upcoming event manages to mash both these things together rather wonderfully, providing Edinburgh film and theatre-goers with the chance to see a live play taking place at London’s National Theatre in the comfort of the Cameo Cinema, live by satellite – boggles the brain a bit really.
The play in question is Terry Pratchett’s Nation (and it’s not one of his Discworld novels) on Saturday 30 January and it goes something like this:
A parallel world, 1860. Two teenagers thrown together by a tsunami that has destroyed Mau’s village and left Daphne shipwrecked on his South Pacific island, thousands of miles from home.
One wears next to nothing, the other a long white dress; neither speaks the other’s language; somehow they must learn to survive. As starving refugees gather, Daphne delivers a baby, milks a pig, brews beer and does battle with a mutineer.
From day one of itsonitsgone’s existence I’ve tried hard to search out the rarest screenings of the best cult films being shown locally – I Bury the Living at the Cameo was one of the first – and 2010 is already shaping up to be a good year for aficionados (or, to be more precise, geeks).
The Glasgow Film Theatre are proud to announce the launch if their Cult! USA strand, a chance to see some rarely screened gems from the various decades. Though the title suggests the films are all American, at least one of the offerings appears to be Italian which is slightly confusing.
The season opens on Monday 25 January (also being shown on Tuesday 26) with Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) starring Donald Sutherland in a tale of paranoia and horror.
Next up on Sunday 31 January is 1968’s Theorem from director Pier Paolo Pasolini and starring Terence Stamp – according to IMDB the film’s tagline was “There are only 923 words spoken in “Teorema” – but it says everything!”.
If 2009 was a bumpy year for Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre – and judging by the reviews and comments on this blog and around the net for their “interesting” adaptations of well-known plays it certainly was – 2010 looks to be starting a bit more sedately with The Price (Fri 15 January – Sat 13 February).
In Arthur Miller’s play, described by the New York Times as ranking alongside “if not above, Death of a Salesman”, Victor (Greg Powrie) and Walter (Aden Gillet) are estranged brothers, called upon to sort through the belongings of their long-dead father. Victor is weary and defeated, his brother happy and successful.
The paths of their lives split because of one crucial decision made in their past – a decision which will come back to haunt them both, bringing long-held resentments to the surface and exposing painful truths.
Said to be “pithy, funny and deeply moving”, the new trailer tells us a bit more about the production:
