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Review: A Prophet
3rd March | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree
Where James Toback’s 1978 drama Fingers was the inspiration for Jacques Audiard’s celebrated 2005 film The Beat That My Heart Skipped, for the pulsating, brutal and achingly tense prison drama A Prophet the French director has mined the likes of Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jules Dassin and Jean-Pierre Melville to create a instant genre classic and an audacious piece of cinematic story telling. It is the standout film of the... -
Album review: Gil Scott-Heron: I’m New Here
9th February | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree
Gil Scott-Heron, arguably the most influential poet to come out of America in the last fifty years, the master chronicler of American mistrust and arch social provocateur, has released his first album since 1996’s Spirits and twenty-eight years after his last release for Arista Records, Moving Targets. The great pioneer of socially conscious soul and rap has emerged from this extended hiatus, part spent incarcerated on Riker’s Island for cocaine... -
How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell
9th February | 4 comments | 1 person likes this
In Sarah Bakewell’s versatile, brilliant and joyful account of Michel de Montaigne’s life and work there is a quote from poet and author Leonard Woolf proposing the 16th century French philosopher to be “the first completely modern man” with an “intense awareness of and passionate interest in the individuality of himself and all other human beings.” Reading Bakewell’s book, and Montaigne’s Essays themselves, one becomes acutely aware of exactly how... -
44 Inch Chest
19th January | 2 comments | 1 person likes this
44 Inch Chest is the new shouty, faakin’, Cock-er-nee tear up from the writers of Sexy Beast. There are enough “f***s” and “c***s” to make an Amsterdam stag party blush, a heavy dose of East End ribaldry and plenty of bone-cracking and blood-spilling to lightly scratch the itch of a certain kicking-out time demographic. It also stars two very, very fine actors from that earlier film, Ray Winstone and Ian...
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The Road - a gruelling journey
14th January | 0 comments | 1 person likes this
John Hillcoat’s grueling, faithful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 post-apocalyptic novel of the same name is a bleak and authentic exercise in cinematic stamina that leaves you emotionally drained and adrift. It is set entirely within a destroyed landscape and if there is more than an element of Beckettian hopelessness, and helplessness, to the narrative then, the wavering and oft tested moral impulsion of the protagonists aside, we are left...
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And now for something a little different…
9th January | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree
Ever get the feeling that life is just one spirit-crushing, face-slapping calamity after another?
I was ambling happily along Camden High St on my way back from lunch today, running the usual gauntlet of heroin addicts, charity muggers and Kestrel drinkers and dreaming lazily of nothing much in particular, when I skidded wildly across a particularly fruity patch of ice and landed squarely on my coccyx. As I writhed limply on... -
Precious - a difficult film?
7th January | 1 comments | 1 person likes this
Precious, Lee Daniels’s screen adaptation of the 1997 novel, Push, by New York poet Sapphire, is less a rollercoaster of emotion than a nine-pound sledgehammer of unrelenting torment that hits you right between the eyes. From a critical perspective this is both a curse and blessing. Indeed, so disturbing are some of the key moments that, dare I say it, by the final quarter one starts to become relatively inured... -
Nine
5th January | 1 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree
First a confession. I dislike musicals. No, that’s untrue. I loathe musicals. I loathe them in much the same way that I loathe Ryanair baggage charges. Or root canal surgery. Or the post-pub, Cro-magnon wank-a-thon, Danny Dyer's Hardest Men. I just cannot see the appeal. All that breathy over enunciation. The razzle. Yeah! The dazzle. Yeah! YEAH! The big, lungy singing and the high kicking and the weary and ultimately...
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The Master Trickster
18th December 2009 | 2 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree
While on holiday last week I re-read the toast of the Signifying Monkey (here), an African-American reworking of African mythology depicting the survival strategies of the trickster (the titular monkey) attempting, in the face of oppression and discrimination to defuse the powers of exploitation and undermine (racial) misrepresentation. He does so not through violence or aggression but cunning and wit. It is a powerful poem with a strong resonance in... -
Top 10 films of 2009
11th December 2009 | 1 comments | 1 person likes this
What’s in a list? Probably little more than an opportunity to show off, indulge in a some lazy cultural showboating and maybe even a chance to stir up a dash of barroom provocation. Perfect. So, in no particular order, here is my attempt to do just that. Any disagreements, disputes, outraged contempt, please feel free to comment.....
1. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)Haneke’s latest masterpiece. Beautifully scripted, shot and acted it...
CONTRIBUTOR
Nick Clarke
Working in advertising, writing for a number of national newspaper and magazine titles and currently clawing his way through his PhD in film, Nick has nurtured a passion for media and the arts for over a decade. He tries not to take himself too seriously but finds it difficult. As such he harbours the faintly ridiculous belief that one- day he will write a definitive, universally lauded book on a subject that he thinks he knows something about. Given that he is fanatical about Soul music, 1970s cinema and boxing, it might be about one of those. Given that he also is very indecisive and non-committal it also might not be.
