Human Nature (2001)
Just when it seemed that Charlie Kaufman could do no wrong, along came Human Nature - a picture that took a long while to come out and then left audiences in little doubt why they’d had to wait so long for its arrival.

Puff (Rhys Ifans) is a human who was raised in the wild as a chimpanzee. Discovered by Lita (Patricia Arquette), a kindly woman with an unfortunate excess of body hair, Puff is introduced to her boyfriend Nathan (Tim Robbins), a scientist bent on civilising beasts.

Initially supportive of Nathan’s efforts to reintroduce Puff to the world of men, Lita becomes increasingly concerned with preserving the wild man’s inner chimp. So begins a power struggle that will lead to love, betrayal, bestiality and death.

With plenty to say about everything for nurture to inertia, Human Nature isn’t short of ideas. And since it’s scripted by Kaufman, it’s also quirky (the story is told in three-hand flashback) and - occasionally - comic. But while Adaptation and Being John Malkovich trod a fine line between the odd and the entertaining, Kaufman and French director Michel Gondry seem a little too keen to court contrariness, leaving the film reeking of forced eccentricity.

It’s not all bad news, however. Besides featuring a rare non-annoying performance from Rosie Perez, Human Nature showcases a very sexy turn from Miranda Otto as Nathan’s French assistant. Ifans, Arquette and Robbins also fair well, although the general air of mean-spiritedness makes their performances hard to fully embrace.

Would that the good turns were married to better lines. instead, Human Nature demonstrates that Hollywood’s latest boy wonder is fallible after all.

Read more

Niv by Graham Lord
For many film’s quintessential Englishman, David Niven chronicled his life quite fantastically in The Moon’s A Balloon and Bring On The Empty Horses.

‘Fantastically’ is the operative word here since, from reading Graham Lord’s biography, it’s apparent that the Academy Award-winner wasn’t above bullshitting about his life and career.

Anecdote-heavy and written with the full cooperation of Niven’s children, a good smattering of star interviews - Lauren Bacall, Johns Hurt, Mills and Mortimer - make this a fine addition to the star’s own sparkling, if slightly suspect, memoirs.

Read more

Mr Strangelove by Ed Sikov
There’s no shortage of decent peter Sellers’ biographies on the market. Mr Strangelove’s author Ed Sikov admits as much in the acknowledgements to his study of the bizarre but brilliantly talented comedy actor.

Sadly, the book’s revelations about Sellers being an emotionally stunted oddball with a massive ego and a weak heart are hardly news. The attempts to draw parallels between Sellers’ life and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland also feel rather forced.

If it doesn’t break a lot of new ground, Mr Strangelove recounts an oft-told tale in an engaging manner that brims with wit and vibrancy. And while he’s unsparing in his criticism of Sellers, Sikov not only mentions the actor’s good points but also sets about guilty parties like Sellers’ fourth wife Lynne Frederick, a greedy woman deserving of Sikov’s rough-tongued treatment.

Alec Guinness: The Unknown - A Life by Garry O’Connor
Was Ben Kenobi bisexual? That’s one of the questions Garry O’Connor ponders in this, his second biography of the Academy Award-winning actor.

The evidence the author presents, which includes Guinness’s arrest for homosexual soliciting in the 1940s, certainly paints an unfamiliar picture of the star of The Lavender Hill Mob and The Bridge On The River Kwai. Why, it’s even revealed that Obi-Wan had a crush on C-3PO!

That O’Connor is careful to title the chapter about Guinness’s sexuality ‘Queer - Why, So What?’ points up that this is less a lurid scandal sheet than a terrific mix of prize anecdotes - the story about the actor predicting James Dean’s death is trotted out yet again in entertaining fashion - and interesting insight.

Best of all, O’Connor doesn’t simply assume that his subject was a major talent; rather he thoroughly examines the matter and extent of Guinness’s greatness in the final compelling chapter.

Pocket Essentials: Carry On Films by Mark Campbell
One of Britain’s longest-running film series, the Carry On comedies spanned 31 movies and 36 years. Mark Campbell’s brief but bracing read analyses each film, throwing up plenty of surprises along the way (he talks-up the often-derided Carry On Emmanuelle but has unkind things to say about such series sacred cows as Carry On Nurse).

Campbell also profiles the key members of the CO team (we learn that, before he embraced acting, Sid James was South Africa’s top ladies’ hairdresser) and reviews the series’ flirtations with television and the stage.

An impressive amount of information packed into an improbably small space, the success of Campbell’s book stems from his overlooking the trivial in order to provide the reader with reminders of fine actors and priceless lines - to wit. the last words of Kenneth Williams - as Julius Caesar, no less - in Carry On Cleo. Altogether now: ‘Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me!’

Earthquake (1974)
With Irwin Allen making millions out of mayhem for Fox, Universal hired producer-director Mark Robson to make them a mint by reducing San Francisco to rubble. Big names were brought on hoard (Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, George Kennedy, Richard Roundtree) and state-of-the-art effects were employed. But while it shook things up at the box-office, Robson’s feature is really only remarkable for being presented in ‘Sensurround’ - a low-frequency bass audio system so powerful, it cracked the walls of cinemas who used it - and for featuring a brief turn from Walter Matthau, here billed as ‘Walter Matuschanskayasky’.

Read more

The Servant (1963)
Exiled from Hollywood in the 1950s because of his left-wing leanings, Joseph Losey relocated to the UK. There, he collaborated with the playwright Harold Pinter.

The Servant represented the high point of this working relationship. Adapted from Robin Maugham’s novel, it’s the story of Barrett (Dirk Bogarde), butler to the upper-crust Tony (James Fox), who uses his position to assume control of the richer man’s property and personal life.

Characterised by Bogarde’s superbly sinister turn, The Servant begins life as a class study only to then veer off into a far darker realm, courtesy of an air of sexual frankness that’s quite astonishing made before the ‘60s started to swing.

Further edge is added by Losey’s camera work which is more in keeping with a New Wave director rather than a Hollywood filmmaker who cut his teeth on B-pictures like The Prowler (1951).

An unnerving examination of power and personality, it’s tempting to draw parallels between The Servant and another James Fox picture, 1970’s Performance. This is no mere companion piece to a classic movie, however. Losey’s films stands up as an example of quality British cinema in its right.

Fingers (1978)
Jimmy ‘Fingers’ Angeli (Harvey Keitel) is a gifted pianist who also happens to be a dab hand as a hard-hitting repo man. Tortured by his peculiar double life, matters are made ever more complicated for Jimmy by his overbearing parents, his gangland connections, his complicated girlfriend (Mia Farrow’s sister Tisa) and a black stud called Dreams (gridiron legend Jim Brown).

It is upon this sparse story that writer-director James Toback hangs one of the great films of the 1970s. Overshadowed by Martin Scorsese’s work from the same era, it’s Fingers many peculiarities - it was produced by the Faberge perfume company and shot on a ridiculously short schedule - that might explain why it was initially ignored,

Read more

The Sand Pebbles (1966)
Although he appeared in a number of classic films, Steve McQueen received his sole Academy Award nomination for this Robert Wise epic about a US patrol boat on manoeuvres in 1920s China.

Cast as anti-authoritarian engineer Jake Holman, McQueen’s performance is a reminder that, besides being incredibly cool, he was also a graduate of the esteemed Actors Studio. He receives excellent support from fellow Great Escape-ee Richard Attenborough as gruff serviceman Frenchy, and Candice Bergen (in only her second movie) as the missionary who wins Holman’s heart.

Sadly, these fine turns are a little wasted on a film that hasn’t aged too well. Dating back to the time when movies were desperate to outdo television, The Sand Pebbles features an overture, an intermission and a running time approaching three hours - standard elements of what were known as ‘Roadshow’ productions.

But while these additions provided the audiences of the day with elements beyond the scope of the small screen, they actually do great damage to the picture. The film’s length, in particular, renders dull a movie that ought to be exciting.

It could be argued that the rebellious Holman seems a little out of place in a movie that feels like the product of an earlier decade. But while it is peppered with holes, McQueen’s performance ensures that The San Pebbles never capsizes.

Note - Back when I worked for the Australian version of Empire, I’d occasionally have to choose the Classic Scene which closed out the issue.

Director Bruce Robinson
Starring Richard E Grant, Paul McGann, Richard Griffiths, Michael Elphick, Ralph Brown, Daragh O’Malley, Llewellyn Rees
Screenplay Bruce Robinson
In Short England 1969. Out -of-work actors Withnail and Marwood (aka ‘I’) live a life of degradation and drunkenness. Sick of their squalid London lodgings, they persuade Withnail’s flamboyant Uncle Monty to lend them his country cottage. Our heroes head to Cumbria where they find nothing except terrible weather, ill-tempered bulls, and stuffy rural folk…

Well-oiled after a swift session in a village pub, Withnail (Grant) and Marwood (McGann) kill time before Uncle Monty (Griffiths) picks them up with a quick feed at the gentile Penrith Team Rooms. Marwood plonks himself down at a table and starts buttering teacakes. Withnail, still standing, points to the table and addresses an elderly waitress Miss Blennerhassit (Irene Sutcliffe).

Withnail: Alright here?

Miss Blennerhassit: No, we’re closing in a minute.

Withnail: We’re leaving in a minute. Alright here?

Miss Blennerhassit: What do you want?

Withnail sits down at the table a makes a rater perfunctory examination of the menu.

Withnail: We’ll have tea and cake.

An elderly man, the proprietor (Rees), comes over.

Proprietor: Did you hear her? She said she’s closed. What do you want?

Withnail: Cake and tea. What’s it got to do with you?

Proprietor: I happen to be the proprietor. Now, will you leave?

Withnail: Ah good. I’m glad you’re then proprietor. I was going to have to have a word with you anyway. We’re doing a film up here, locastion see. We might want to do a film in here.

Proprietor: You’re drunk!

Marwood: Just bring out the cake.

Withnail: Cake and fine wine.

Miss Blennerhassit: If you don’t leave we’ll call the police.

Withnail: Balls! We want the finest wines known to humanity! We want the here and we want them now!

Proprietor: The police, Miss Blennerhassit.

Marwood breaks off from eating his roll.

Marwood: [Speaking with his mouth full] Don’t do that, Miss Blennerhassit! I’m warning you, Miss Blennerhassit, if you do - you’re fired. We are multimillionaires. We’ll buy this place and fire you immediately.

Withnail: Yeah, that’s right. We’ll buy this place and install a fucking jukebox and [bursts into laughter] liven all you stiffs up a bit!

Proprietor: The police, Miss Blennerhassit. Just tell them there are a couple of drunks in the Penrith Tea Rooms and we’d like them removed.

Marwood: We are not drunks, we are multimillionaires!

Proprietero: Come on, Mabs, we’ll keep them here until they arrive.

Miss Blennerhassit starts to dial.

Withnail: You won’t keep us anywhere!

Miss Blennerhassit: (On the phone) Police please.

Withnail: We’ll buy this place and have it knocked down.

Marwood: It’s alright, it’s alright, our car has arrived.

He pulls back a net curtain to reveal that Monty’s car has pulled up outseide the tea rooms. Withnail and Marwood get up and stagger towards the door.

Withnail: We’re coming back in here…

Withnail tires to lean on a convenient post but misses and staggers a bit. He points meaninfully at various customers as he leaves, shutting his coat in the door.

Adaptation (2002)
For all the talk about its post-modern approach, intelligent writing and faux credits, the most remarkable aspect of Spike Jonze’s drama remains’ Nicolas Cage’s turns as Charlie and Donald Kaufman.

Playing twins has long been considered one of the great tests for an actor. To accomplish the feat, performers tend to either overplay one character or insist on distinct hair and wardrobe. Cage will have none of this. The brothers he creates both sound and look alike, but we are never in any doubt which is which. It’s a further measure of Cage’s success that, when ‘on-set’ photos were issued of Donald and Charles, it took a minute or two to remember that such a feat was impossible.

Almost as astonishing as Cage’s tour-de-force is the fact that his performances don’t overshadow Adaptation. Of course, it helps matters that Cage’s co-stars are Meryl Streep and Chris Cooper. The former plays Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief, a plot-free study of renegade botanist John Larouche (Cooper).

Read more

Donnie Darko (2001)
Twenty-eight days, six hours, 42 minutes, 12 seconds - that’s how long there is left of October 1998 before the world ends. Troubled teenager Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) knows this because he’s been told as much by his friend Frank. Frank is a six-foot tall rabbit.

A film quite unlike any other, Richard Kelly’s debut surprised us not just with the revelation that the depressive Donnie is best mates with a very big bunny but that he’s also the product of loving parents who happen to be fans of George HW Bush. If this notion of nice Republicans is weird, it’s nothing compared with the jaw-dropping interface between an aircraft engine and the young man’s bedroom that occurs following Donnie’s first encounter with Frank.

Read more

Airplane! (1980) & Airplane II: The Sequel (1982)
In 1957, author Arthur Haley (creator of Airport’s source novel) co-wrote Zero Hour, a tense TV drama about a stricken aircraft. Twenty-three years later, brothers David and Jerry Zucker with collaborator Jim Abrahams bought the rights to Zero Hour and used the plot, the character names and some of the dialogue as the basis for Airplane!, one of the funniest movies ever made.

Proof positive that spoofs used to be hilarious, Airplane!’s brilliance extends beyond brilliantly sending-up disaster movies and their bombastic dialogue (“Do you know what it’s like to fall in the mud and get kicked in the head with an iron boat?” beefs Robert Stack’s Captain Rex Kramer, before adding, ‘Of course you don’t. No one does. It never happens.’).

The film that depicts Mission: Impossible’s Peter Graves as a pederast pilot and Lloyd Bridges as a glue-sniffing air traffic controller, gags have rarely come quicker or funnier. Credit too to Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty for playing it fairly straight while all around are overplaying, and to Stephen Stucker as the ultra-camp Johnny (‘The tower, the tower, Rapunzel!’).

If Airplane! showed what it takes to make the genre work, its sequel (a Z-A-Z-free affair written and directed by Ken Finklemen) reveals what can happen when spoofs go bad. Set aboard a sun-bound space shuttle, some of the jokes in The Sequel rival the material in the original movie, but there’s also lots that are obvious and some that’s unnecessarily course.

Meanwhile, the absence of Leslie Nielsen is badly felt, with William Shatner proving no substitute. Robert Hayes, however, remains very winning and it’s still one of Hollywood’s great mysteries why this likeable actor never quite made the grade.

Black And White (2002)
Craig Latiff’s Black And White isn’t quite the compelling tale of social injustice is could have been.

Centring around the 1958 trial of Aboriginal Max Stuart (David Ngoombujarra) for the murder of a white girl, there’s plenty of opportunities for great drama, with crusading lawman David O’Sullivan (Robert Carlyle) and ambitious newspaper owner Rupert Murdoch (Ben Mendelsohn) fighting for the convicted man’s life.

Read more

It began in a video store in Venice Beach, Los Angeles. That was where Quentin Tarantino, store clerk, actor and former jailbird (he served time for unpaid parking tickets) took home all the films in the shop’s heist movie section and decided that it might be fun to tweak the genre.

The end result was Reservoir Dogs, a film that thrilled audiences, riled censors, paved the way for a fresh wave of independent cinema and made Tarantino an unlikely household name. How incredible, then, that this essential movie very nearly didn’t come into being. Having had his fingers burnt over his scripts for True Romance and Natural Born Killers, Tarantino nearly gave up on the picture. Enter dancer-turned-producer Lawrence Bender…

As Luck Would Have It is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribed

Puppy Love
Lawrence Bender (producer): I first met Quentin standing in line for a 3-D movie. He said, ‘I got this great idea for a movie. It’s about these criminals who hang out in a garage after a jewelry heist - it’s a one location movie. They come back to the garage and one guy’s been killed and one guy’s a traitor.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, this is a really good idea!’

Quentin Tarantino (writer, director, Mr Brown): I gave Lawrence two weeks to raise the money. He said, ‘That’s impossible!’ I said, ‘I know,’ but I’d been jerked around so much with True Romance and Natural Born Killers, I was sick of waiting. And that’s when it turned out Lawrence’s acting teacher knew Harvey Keitel.

Lawrence Bender: I got the script to my teacher and she gave it to Harvey, who liked it so much, he phoned up. As soon as I heard his voice, I said, ‘This is going to get bigger than we thought.’

Harvey Keitel (co-producer, Mr White): From the script, I guessed that Quentin or his father knew guys like those in the script. But it turned out he was a kid with a great ear for dialogue an a love of crime movies. It was the ‘authenticity’ that sold me on making the picture.

Let’s Go To Work
Tim Roth (Mr Orange): Quentin had a tough job from day one as he was having to direct 10 different guys each with very different styles.

Harvey Keitel: By the end of the first day of shooting, Quentin had won the trust of all his actors - incredible but true.

Tim Roth: The hard things for me were the accent and the blood. The accent was tough because you don’t want to get something like that wrong, especially when you’re working with such great actors. As for the blood, the crew literally had to scrape me off the floor every night. That stuff was like glue.

Michael Madsen (Mr Blonde): You know what the hardest thing about the ‘ear scene’ was? It ‘s when the cop says ‘I gotta kid!’ That wasn’t in the script - it came out in rehearsal. I turned to Quentin and said, ‘He can’t say that to me.’ And Quentin replied, ‘No, I think it’s great! It brings a whole new element to it.’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to go that way.’ But, of course, we did go that way.

(Post)Modern Romance
Quentin Tarantino: I don’t do in-jokes. ‘Hey, Detective Romero, meet Commander Argento.’ That stuff gives me a headache.

Eddie Bunker (Mr Blue, author and ex-con): It isn’t that Quentin has seen a lot of films that’s incredible. It’s the fact that he remembers everything he’s seen - shots, scenes, music.

Quentin Tarantino: I steal from everything. Great artists steal, they don’t do homage.

Eddie Bunker: When we first met, I thought that Quentin was a doofus but he isn’t. I’ve learned things from him about dialogue and movies - and I’ve been writing for over 40 years.

Monte Hellman (executive producer, cult director): During the car scenes, if you look closely, you’ll see that the car is above the level of the other vehicles. This is because, instead of being towed, it was put on the back of a trailer and driven along. That disturbed me because I felt the audience would notice it and it would lessen the effect of the movie.

Quentin Tarantino: Sometimes, I like things to be a bit unreal.

Monte Hellman: It turned out Quentin didn’t mind at all. And later on, I saw his point. In the great scheme of things, who cares whether these guys are driving or being towed? They kill people. That’s what’s important.

Dog Fight
Lawrence Bender: It’s not cool to get killed in this movie. When people get killed, it hurts. And you’re right there hurting with them.

Quentin Tarantino: I’m not going to be handcuffed by what some crazy fuck might do who sees my movie. The minute you put handcuffs on artists because of stuff like that, it’s not an art anymore. If a kid reacts harshly and it gives them nightmares, so what? Part of being a kid is having nightmares!

Tim Roth: If it was killed ‘Reservoir Bitchs’ and it was about women, then it would be controversial.

Quentin Tarantino: As a director, when you deal in violence, you’re penalised for doing a good job. They talked about Dogs as if it was the most violent movie ever made. Now, I may make the most violent movie ever, and I won’t mind people saying it. But I didn’t do it with Dogs.

The Barking Continues…
Eddie Bunker: I don’t get a lot of fan mail, but that which I do get is virtually always about Reservoir Dogs. And I only had three lines!

Michael Madsen: For the rest of my live, I’m going to be Mr Blonde.

Quentin Tarantino: If I hadn’t made Dogs and someone else had made it and I went and saw it, I’d still think it was the best fucking movie of 1993.

Read more

It began in a video store in Venice Beach, Los Angeles. That was where Quentin Tarantino, store clerk, actor and former jailbird (he served time for unpaid parking tickets) took home all the films in the shop’s heist movie section and decided that it might be fun to tweak the genre.

The end result was Reservoir Dogs, a film that thrilled audiences, riled censors, paved the way for a fresh wave of independent cinema and made Tarantino an unlikely household name. How incredible, then, that this essential movie very nearly didn’t come into being. Having had his fingers burnt over his scripts for True Romance and Natural Born Killers, Tarantino nearly gave up on the picture. Enter dancer-turned-producer Lawrence Bender…

Puppy Love
Lawrence Bender (producer): I first met Quentin standing in line for a 3-D movie. He said, ‘I got this great idea for a movie. It’s about these criminals who hang out in a garage after a jewelry heist - it’s a one location movie. They come back to the garage and one guy’s been killed and one guy’s a traitor.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, this is a really good idea!’

Quentin Tarantino (writer, director, Mr Brown): I gave Lawrence two weeks to raise the money. He said, ‘That’s impossible!’ I said, ‘I know,’ but I’d been jerked around so much with True Romance and Natural Born Killers, I was sick of waiting. And that’s when it turned out Lawrence’s acting teacher knew Harvey Keitel.

Lawrence Bender: I got the script to my teacher and she gave it to Harvey, who liked it so much, he phoned up. As soon as I heard his voice, I said, ‘This is going to get bigger than we thought.’

Harvey Keitel (co-producer, Mr White): From the script, I guessed that Quentin or his father knew guys like those in the script. But it turned out he was a kid with a great ear for dialogue an a love of crime movies. It was the ‘authenticity’ that sold me on making the picture.

Let’s Go To Work
Tim Roth (Mr Orange): Quentin had a tough job from day one as he was having to direct 10 different guys each with very different styles.

Harvey Keitel: By the end of the first day of shooting, Quentin had won the trust of all his actors - incredible but true.

Tim Roth: The hard things for me were the accent and the blood. The accent was tough because you don’t want to get something like that wrong, especially when you’re working with such great actors. As for the blood, the crew literally had to scrape me off the floor every night. That stuff was like glue.

Michael Madsen (Mr Blonde): You know what the hardest thing about the ‘ear scene’ was? It ‘s when the cop says ‘I gotta kid!’ That wasn’t in the script - it came out in rehearsal. I turned to Quentin and said, ‘He can’t say that to me.’ And Quentin replied, ‘No, I think it’s great! It brings a whole new element to it.’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to go that way.’ But, of course, we did go that way.

(Post)Modern Romance
Quentin Tarantino: I don’t do in-jokes. ‘Hey, Detective Romero, meet Commander Argento.’ That stuff gives me a headache.

Eddie Bunker (Mr Blue, author and ex-con): It isn’t that Quentin has seen a lot of films that’s incredible. It’s the fact that he remembers everything he’s seen - shots, scenes, music.

Quentin Tarantino: I steal from everything. Great artists steal, they don’t do homage.

Eddie Bunker: When we first met, I thought that Quentin was a doofus but he isn’t. I’ve learned things from him about dialogue and movies - and I’ve been writing for over 40 years.

Monte Hellman (executive producer, cult director): During the car scenes, if you look closely, you’ll see that the car is above the level of the other vehicles. This is because, instead of being towed, it was put on the back of a trailer and driven along. That disturbed me because I felt the audience would notice it and it would lessen the effect of the movie.

Quentin Tarantino: Sometimes, I like things to be a bit unreal.

Monte Hellman: It turned out Quentin didn’t mind at all. And later on, I saw his point. In the great scheme of things, who cares whether these guys are driving or being towed? They kill people. That’s what’s important.

Dog Fight
Lawrence Bender: It’s not cool to get killed in this movie. When people get killed, it hurts. And you’re right there hurting with them.

Quentin Tarantino: I’m not going to be handcuffed by what some crazy fuck might do who sees my movie. The minute you put handcuffs on artists because of stuff like that, it’s not an art anymore. If a kid reacts harshly and it gives them nightmares, so what? Part of being a kid is having nightmares!

Tim Roth: If it was killed ‘Reservoir Bitchs’ and it was about women, then it would be controversial.

Quentin Tarantino: As a director, when you deal in violence, you’re penalised for doing a good job. They talked about Dogs as if it was the most violent movie ever made. Now, I may make the most violent movie ever, and I won’t mind people saying it. But I didn’t do it with Dogs.

The Barking Continues…
Eddie Bunker: I don’t get a lot of fan mail, but that which I do get is virtually always about Reservoir Dogs. And I only had three lines!

Michael Madsen: For the rest of my live, I’m going to be Mr Blonde.

Quentin Tarantino: If I hadn’t made Dogs and someone else had made it and I went and saw it, I’d still think it was the best fucking movie of 1993.

A History Of Britain (2000)
Five thousand years crammed into 15 hours, it’s a good job history and documentaries remain two of the UK’s strong suits otherwise A History Of Britain could have ended up a terrible mess.

That it is, in fact, one of the most remarkable series of the 21st century has only so much to do with a budget sufficiently large to accommodate soundtrack contributions from Elvis Costello and readings courtesy of Jonathan Pryce, Richard Griffiths and Charles Dance. No, ultimately it’s the presence of writer-presenter Simon Schama that makes A History Of Britain required viewing.

Smart in his decision not to declare the series definitive (he insisted it not be called ‘The History Of Britain’), Columbia University professor Schama examines the nation’s extraordinary origins in a charmingly camp fashion that’s as heavy on theatrics as insight. It all adds up to a form of teaching that’s far more engaging than that which most encounter in the classroom.

A distinctly personal journey, A History Of Britain finds Schama overlooking certain personalities (Richard III and the Duke Of Wellington are both given short shrift) in order to celebrate unsung heroes and heroines such as Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of modern feminism.

Which isn’t to suggest that the programme adopts a revisionist approach to the past. Naturally, Britain’s many skeletons receive an airing although Schama distances himself from the growing ranks of Churchill bashers and goes to great lengths to explain that the countless tragedies of the British Empire are compounded by the intended nobility of its aims.

Always fascinating, Schama’s lessons are often audacious with the decision to draw parallels between the lives of Winston Churchill and George Orwell proving inspired if initially baffling. He also revels in retrieving characters from the footnotes of history such as Tostig, Harold II’s half-brother whose desire to destroy his sibling indirectly brought about the death of Anglo-Saxon England.

Schama’s musing are bolstered by terrific reenactments, a sensitive score and the clever use of source materials such as portraits and diary entries. The end result is a captivating series that proves history is as much the province of the present as the past.

He appears in the film, he co-wrote the screenplay and the movie’s dedicated to him. However, had Adaptation converted its Academy Award-nominated for Best Original Screenplay into an Oscar, Donald Kaufman wouldn’t have been standing alongside his ‘identical twin’ Charlie. The reason? Donald is a figment of his ‘brother’s’ over-active imagination.

But while Adaptation’s authors didn’t win the big one, this was by no means the first time a fictitious character found himself up for a major prize. Indeed, Hollywood has quite a long tradition of handing out gongs to people who don’t exist and folk who contributed next to nothing to the films for which they received acknowledgment.

In Rod We Trust
Roderick Jaynes has edited over a dozen movies for the Coen Brothers and was Oscar-nominated for his work on Fargo and No Country For Old Men. That he wasn’t present either Oscar night is hardly surprising given that he was conjured up by Joel and Ethan in the early 1980s. Not that this has stopped the boys from running with the joke - Jaynes (an Englishman of advancing years, according the Coens) writes the introductions for the boys’ published screenplays. Roderick’s ‘son' Reginald took over editing duties on Joel’s production of Macbeth.

Read more

Puberty Blues (1981)
Oh, to be young and living in Sylvania Heights in the early 1980s. Comfortable suburban living, long days on Cronulla Beach, a casual attitude towards education - on the outside, things couldn’t be better. But for best mates Debbie (Nell Schofield) and Sue (Jad Capelja), awkwardness, the search for acceptance and the all-consuming obsession with boys keep things far from straightforward

You could be forgiven for thinking Bruce Beresford’s adaptation of Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey’s novel has aged horribly, but while you only need to look at the fashions and the furnishings to be reminded that this an ‘80s movie, Puberty Blues actually plays like a period movie, and a very good one at that.

Perfectly capturing the traditional manners of the time, its pleasure are more than merely nostalgic. The delights include the young cast’s incredibly naturalistic performances. Beresford too is to be admired for the fact he really gets behind the kids and doesn’t make light of their problems.

Indeed, Puberty Blues is proof positive that while your teenage years aren’t necessarily the happiest time of your life, they’re certainly among the most important.

Note - It should have been a better film, Ned Kelly (2003). Then again, it wasn’t based on the best of the Kelly books (Our Sunshine is no True History Of The Kelly Gang). And besides, it was nice to interview Messrs Edgerton and Bloom…

Joel Edgerton As Aaron Sherrit
Joel Edgerton has clearly relished playing Aaron Sherrit, the Ned Kelly cohort who, depending upon your point of view, was either a rotter who dobbed his mates in or a naïve guy in an impossible position.

“It’s a great part to play,” laughs the actor. “Aaron’s very complex. I think he acted as a go-between between the Kellys and the cops. He’s certainly not straightforward which is great from an acting point of view as it gives you plenty to play with.

“I didn’t envy Aaron his life,” continues the man forever destined to be remembered as the young Owen Lars. “He probably felt that, if he didn’t collaborate with the cops to some extent, he’d have been jail-bound.”

For Edgerton, the challenge of playing Sherrit was compounded by having to master both an Irish accent and a horse. It’s a measure of his talent that neither proved too difficult.

“The riding was great,” he grins. “My skills were certainly a lot better than some of the other blokes. Needless to say, I’ll spare them their bushes! I actually got so used to being on horseback, I became convinced that every scene should be set on horseback!”

Read more

Smoke (1995)/Blue In The Face (1995)
On Christmas Day 1993, director Wayne Wang (The Joy Luck Club) read Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story, a short tale the author Paul Auster (The Music Of Chance, The New York Trilogy) had written for the festive edition of The New York Times. Enchanted, Wang contacted Auster in the New Year with an eye to turning the story into a screenplay. Six months later, the pair were making Smoke.

While that’s a great yarn, it pales next to the tale the pair spin in Smoke, a picture far more than the sum of its parts. Auggie Wren (Harvey Keitel) runs a Brooklyn tobacco store. His customers include Paul Benjamin (William Hurt), a bereaved author who’s befriended Rashid (Harold Perrineau Jr), a black kid with a bag of cash. While Rashid heads upstate to buddy-up to one-armed motor mechanic Cyrus (Forest Whittaker), Auggie is confronted by his ex-lover Ruby (Stockard Channing) with the news that the daughter he never knew he had (Ashley Judd) is a pregnant drug addict.

It sounds like the stuff of soap opera but in the hands of great actors and superb storytellers, it is the basis for great cinema. By collaborating on both the writing and directing fronts (Auster had an uncredited hand in the shooting), the pair eliminated one another’s weaknesses - Wang can be sentimental, Auster can be a bit austere - to create a film that deserves to be savoured like the finest tobacco.

Blue In The Face isn’t a sequel to Smoke but it’s very nearly it’s equal. Created in five days after Wang and Auster wrapped early, this charming folly comprises improvised scenes involving members of the original cast, celebrity cameos (Madonna, Roseanne, Michael J Fox) and interviews with real Brooklynites.

Naturally it doesn’t all work but Jim Jarmusch’s hymn to the humble ciggie (‘Coffee and cigarettes, that’s like the breakfast of champions”), Lou Reed’s essay on smoking as a health tool, and a brief history of the Belgian waffle make you glad that Wang and Auster decided to light up again.

Forget the potency of cheap music - it’s the time-travelling capabilities of so-so sci-fi that amazes me.

Last night for the first time since the last time, I watched Slipstream, famous as the film that bankrupted producer Gary Kurtz and curtailed the promising career of director Steve Lisberger (Tron). If it rings a bell it’s probably because it stars Mark Hamill in a rare villainous role, alongside Bob Peck, Bill Paxton Kitty Aldridge (Mrs Mark Knopfler) and a relatively fresh-faced Robbie Coltrane.

Made without enough money, Slipstream underwhelms like many a British science-fiction film of the 1980s. That said, it makes brilliant use of settings such as Yorkshire’s Malham Cove and Gordale Scar, not to mention the Turkish troglodyte city that inspired the dwellings in the original Planet Of The Apes. There are also satisfying cameos from relatively recent Oscar-winners Ben Kingsley and F Murray Abraham.

My reason for writing about Slipsteam, though, has everything to do with something that happens in the third act, when our heroes stumble upon a wealthy elite who have gathered together the artistic and zoological wonders of the world. The art department achieves this in part through clever use of the cast rooms at the Victoria And Albert Museum. More remarkable still is a sequence set in one of the galleries of The Natural History Museum.

When I was a young lad, I’d spend many a time in the Rowland Ward Pavilion, a small gallery consisting of three African dioramas. From a family giraffe, a kudu and a troop of baboons at a waterhole, to a Bongo, a Chevrotain and an Okapi in the depths of the jungle and a Sable Antelope, a pair of Impala and a Gnu investigating a termite mound of the Serengeti, there were few better places for a young chap to sit and dream of Africa.

The Rowland Ward Pavilion closed to the public in the 1990s - I believe - along with the NHM’s excellent Evolution gallery. Given how special a place it was to me, I was as sad to see it go as I was resolved to never seeing it again. But then I sat down and watched Slipstream, a film made for sixpence that nevertheless accomplishes an extraordinary feat of time-travel.