In 1996, Jan de Bont’s tornado-chasing adventure Twister revived the disaster movie by using computer-generated imagery (CGI), at the time a relatively new technology. Now, in the belated follow-up – strictly neither a sequel nor a remake – the tornadoes have become more deadly and more frequent. But Twisters shows another perilous phenomenon: the trend for promising directors of independent films to be swept up in the whirlwind
There are over 3,700 missives collected in the six-volume edition of The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Some are fairly dull (like an exchange with Vanessa Bell about milk) but some are deliciously bitchy (E M Forster is ‘limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow’), while others – those addressed to Vita Sackville-West – […]
The latest film by Bertrand Bonello, The Beast, is inspired by Henry James’s 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle. The setting has been changed from England to Paris in 1910, Los Angeles in 2014 and an unnamed Francophone locale in 2044, and the genders of the two central figures have been transposed. John Marcher, […]
The great superpower of Dune is its prescience. In 1959, Frank Herbert walked the sand dunes of Florence, Oregon, and saw the future: aridity and riches, sand and spice. Strong coastal winds were pushing the dunes east, towards the city, and the US Department of Agriculture decided to intervene, planting sedge and beach grass to halt the sand’s advance. This battle for the environment
When Winston Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples was published between 1956 and 1958, Clement Attlee quipped that Churchill should have called it ‘Things in History That Interested Me’. The same might be said about David Thomson’s new book, The Fatal Alliance. Although ostensibly about war movies, the book includes digressions on Robert Falcon […]
Biographies of film stars generally fall into three categories: hagiographies written for the most admiring fans, exposés fuelled by gossip and scandal, and scholarly tomes centred on archival research or cultural theory. Roger Lewis makes it clear that his lengthy book about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor belongs to none of these categories. Indeed, he […]
Cape have timed the re-issue of Lowry’s masterpiece to coincide with the release of the film; but re-issue and reappraisal have long been overdue in any case. Under the Volcano, despite steady sales, has never been much more than a cult, and the time has come for it to be generally acknowledged as one of […]
Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993) is a wonderful, horrible film. It follows the adventures of Johnny, a Mancunian Raskolnikov, introduced to us in the first scene committing a vicious rape. Repellent yet fascinating, Johnny – played with almost unhinged brilliance by David Thewlis – is presented as an emblematic antihero for our times: rootless and loveless […]
Munich, Thursday 7 July 83 The BBC has booked rooms for us in the Hotel Bundesbahn, which is virtually part of the main railway station. You don’t hear the trains, and it’s quite comfortable, but in this city there must be places with more character. I’ve arranged to see Fassbinder’s composer, Peer Raben, when he […]
Like most people of my approximate age and general outlook, I fell upon a book called Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when it appeared in 1971 and devoured it at a single sitting. These were early days in university and people hobbled around campus with Lord of the Rings in their smelly bags. Hunter […]
In his first film role after the war, Christopher Lee was required to act being shot. His performance, based on his wartime experience, was badly received and he was told to try again. Obstinately, he stuck with his realistic approach. But when he saw the result on screen: ‘It was plain to me that there […]
One of David Cronenberg’s favourite poems is The Flea by John Donne: ‘Marke but this flea, and marke in this, How little that which thou deny’st me is; It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee, And in this flea, our two bloods mingled bee.’
The day Gandhi died my father spent a sleepless night worrying not about the future of India but about the identity of the assassin. His great fear was that he would turn out to be a fellow Bengali, a province which had been cruelly divided between India and Pakistan and where Gandhi’s attempts to bring […]
Herzog first uses the image of a ship stranded in the branches of a tree, high above the waters, in Aguirre, Wrath of God. It reappears in Nosferatu when a ship brings the vampire from Transylvania to wreak vengeance on the civilised burghers of Western Europe and infest their town with plague. In Fitzcarraldo this […]
At the opening of the 27th London Film Festival, its director, Ken Wlaschin, claimed that ‘if you had been living in a hole for the past twelve months, you could come to the festival and still see the best of the world’s cinema’. If anyone had been living in a hole for the past twelve […]
SCOTT BERG IS a superb biographer. I first read his biography of Max Perluns (the brilliant ehtor at Scribner who worked with Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald), then Goldwyn, and then Lindbergh, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. At the start of their twenty-year friendship, Katharine Hepburn promised to tell him everything but made one […]
DO WE GET the life we deserve or is it all completely random and out of our hands? If you have lots of really good stuff happen to you at the beginning, does that mean you can expect to have things evened out with lots of bad stuff later? Do only shits prosper or do nice […]
Have You Got Time? would have been a more apt title. Like his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson’s Have You Seen…? is a book for getting lost in. You pick it up wondering whether you really want to set the video for that late-night showing of Beat the Devil, and you put it down […]
Every Johnson needs his Boswell. Woody Allen’s seems to be a man called Eric Lax, who has so far given us Woody Allen: A Biography and On Being Funny: Woody Allen and Comedy, and may conceivably have another half dozen or so such titles up his sleeve. One day it might be quite interesting to […]
Douglas Fairbanks was one of the great stars of silent movies and in many ways encapsulated all that was best and most intriguing about Hollywood cinema before the coming of sound. Highly acrobatic – he performed all his own stunts – he had a screen persona for which the word ‘swashbuckling’ was virtually invented. The […]
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Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm