Feb 16, 2010 | No Comments | ByBirds Eye View
Marion Davies in The Patsy
The Birds Eye View Sound and Silents Retrospective this year features three delightful blonde and boisterous stars. Kelly Robinson, BEV retrospective programmer, gives her insights into these actresses and the flaxen-haired characters they play. The Musicians: Patti Plinko, Gwyneth Herbert and Jane Gardner, who will be putting their own spin on the films with specially commissioned original scores, tell us how it’s going and what their personal take is. Read the full story
Dec 16, 2009 | No Comments | BySophie Ivan
Sam Taylor-Wood in action:directing Nowhere Boy
About a third of the way into Nowhere Boy, there’s a moment which snaps the viewer back to director Sam Taylor-Wood’s debut short, Love You More: a close-up of a needle being delicately settled on a vinyl groove, an audible crackle which sparks an electric sense of silent anticipation and sexual tension… And then a rock ‘n’ roll record lets rip. Except, this time round, it’s not 1978 and it’s not the Buzzcock’s unrestrained ‘Love You More’ providing both foreplay and soundtrack to the teenage protagonists’ charming, fumbling, randy lovemaking; it’s the fag end of the 1950s, it’s Screamin’ Jay Hawkins howling, thrilling ‘I Put a Spell on You’ on the stereo, and the two thumping hearts trying not to be heard over it belong to a teenager called John Lennon and his estranged mother. In essence, it’s a tad more complicated this time round. Read the full story
Sep 10, 2009 | 2 Comments | BySophie Mayer
Sally Potter
Rage (2009) is the sixth feature film in Sally Potter’s long and varied career. Having burst onto the scene with her short film Thriller in 1979, she broke new ground for women in film with her first feature The Gold Diggers (1982), with its all-female crew. A brilliant adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s “unadaptable” classic, Orlando (1993) thrilled critics and audiences alike with its zeitgeist-tapping androgynous cool, and led to offers from Hollywood. But Potter has stayed resolutely true to her indie roots – which stretch back to mid-1970s performance art “happenings” in evening wear with the Limited Dance Company. Like her film-in-verse Yes (2005), Rage was made swiftly on a shoestring budget with a small cast of dynamic actors. It’s the most immediate of Potter’s films, resonating with our current focus on consumption, whether it’s the credit crunch and bankers’ kickbacks, obesity and anorexia, carbon footprints and wars for oil. What Potter calls her “barefoot cinema” is the perfect response to excess – set in the fashion world, the film strips away labels and hysteria to reveal beauty.
BEV asked Sophie Mayer, author of The Cinema of Sally Potter to interview Sally about Rage. Read on for the full interview. Read the full story
Jun 30, 2009 | No Comments | ByMarcie Maclellan
Marcie MacLellan reviews…
American Teen
Dir, Nanette Burstein, USA, 2009, 97 mins
Starring: Hannah Bailey, Colin Clemens, Jack Tusing
DVD out now
Some people loved high school. I was not one of them. Not because I didn’t fit in. I did. Not because I didn’t have a boyfriend. I did. Not because I didn’t do well in school. I did. In fact, I couldn’t really tell you why I didn’t like high school. That is, until last night, after watching American Teen.
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May 13, 2009 | 2 Comments | ByMelissa Silverstein
Star Trek film, directed by JJ Abrams
Didn’t you just love Startrek? Our friend Melissa Silverstein from the fab blog Women and Hollywood was all excited to see it, but had some serious frustrations about the missed opportunity to bring women into the future (as anything other than mothers or sex symbols, that is)…
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Apr 24, 2009 | 1 Comment | ByWendy Roby
As we wave a sad goodbye to our very favourite music website, The Lipster, founded by the fabulous Jude Rogers, we asked co-editor Wendy Roby to tell us how it has been for her.
The LIPSTER: good at music, rubbish at photoshop
Rebecca Nicholson (my co-Editor) and I closed down our music website The Lipster this week. With a shrug and a sigh, we’ve set the alarm, swizzed the sign round to ‘Closed’ and skipped off down the high street, the final pennies from the till jangling in our pockets. [Becca: You made money out of it? Me: Shhh, of course not, everyone knows there is no money in music journalism. I am merely painting pictures with words]. Anyhoo, though this may sound like a sad old tale, it isn’t. Because doing a music website with a brilliant friend is one of the best and goodest things you can ever do. Read the full story
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