At the Guardian, Andrew Pulver laments the fall Derek Jarman (and the personal, high-art cinema he made and represented) from cinephile fashion. He blames this in part on the revival of the commercial British film industry:
One problem is the seismic shift of the cinematic landscape since Jarman’s death in 1994, the same year that saw the release of Four Weddings and a Funeral. One of Jarman’s main weapons had been that, in the Thatcher era, there was no one else putting out Britain-centred product so enthusiastically. His small-scale, personalised vision undoubtedly helped him survive the 1980s and, to some extent, prosper. But with the revival of the commercial end of the British film industry, the very people who most resented Jarman’s productivity regained the initiative. After his death, his cinematic influence virtually vanished.
The idea of Jarman as a “Britain-centred” filmmaker reminded me of one of the things I found most frustrating about Derek, Isaac Julien and Tilda Swinton’s collaborative, impressionist doc on their late friend, which I saw at Sundance last month (Pulver mentions both Julien and Swinton but not the film, although I have to imagine this post was in part motivated by Derek’s premiere this week in Berlin).
“In theory,” writes Adam Dawtrey in Variety, script scribes based in the UK are “still free to work on movies backed by the U.S. studios,” WGA strike be damned. Meanwhile, the WGA is adamant that they won’t return to the bargaining table until the studios respond to the last proposal left on the table when talks broke down on Sunday.
“UA faces a daunting challenge in managing expectations and trying to educate the public and consumer press that box office grosses aren’t what United Artists is about; rather, Cruise and Wagner want to continue the company’s legacy of nurturing talent and creativity.” Variety looks at how the resurrected studio is struggling to position itself in the marketplace.
Twelve films are eligible for the Best Animated Feature Oscar nomination, including Beowulf, TMNT, Persepolis, The Simpsons and Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters.
Last week Graham Linehan (above), writer and creator of the nerd-friendly British sitcom The IT Crowd, was pleased to announce that he had made it onto a list of the “Top 100 living geniuses,” landing at number 83. Not surprisingly, Linehan’s writings about the list are hilarious.
I’m fascinated by the fact that people actually think they can rate things like who’s the biggest genius, so I decided to look into this list a bit more. Linehan provided a link to an article about the list in the British Newspaper the Telegraph. The few sentences explaining the creation of the list are maddeningly simplistic. The main thrust seems to be to point out that Britain has the highest per capita representation on the list, but then goes on to explain, “The top 100 living geniuses was compiled by a panel of six experts in creativity … The company emailed 4,000 Britons this summer and asked them to nominate up to 10 living people who they considered geniuses.” Gee, I wonder why these “4,000 Britons” picked a disproportionate number of British geniuses? Unabashed nationalism aside, I was curious to see which other geniuses of film and television made the list.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
“In theory,” writes Adam Dawtrey in Variety, script scribes based in the UK are “still free to work on movies backed by the U.S. studios,” WGA strike be damned. Meanwhile, the WGA is adamant that they won’t return to the bargaining table until the studios respond to the last proposal left on the table when talks broke down on Sunday.
