Movies

Films like High Heels, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! were funny, transgressive, full of life, a bold rewriting of Spanish national identity, but in his middle years, once Pedro had made his point, he settled into stronger, less showy but more profound dramas (Talk to Her, All About My Mother, Bad Education, Volver) that mixed the grit of Italian neo-realism with the lush melodrama of Douglas Sirk. Autobiographical elements were always present, but as he's gotten older, the Spanish master has plunged ever deeper into himself. His latest film, Pain and Glory, is his most overly personal yet, and stars his old friend and most frequent collaborator Antonio Banderas as Salvador Mallo, an ageing Madrid film-maker whose chronic back and ear problems have put paid to his once stellar career. Depressed and increasingly isolated, Salvador starts smoking heroin to dull the pain, unleashing visions of his rural childhood and his fiercely pragmatic and … [Read more...] about ‘I asked him to be the opposite of what he was famous for doing’

After criticising the media for attacking him and the film during its notoriously troubled production, he said "there were too many of us, we had access to too much equipment, too much money, and little by little we went insane". Then he added darkly, "my movie is not about Vietnam - my movie is Vietnam". The real war had only ended four years earlier, and his statement was deemed shockingly insensitive by some American critics, but Coppola's hyperbole was perhaps excusable given the trauma he'd endured. Though so far as we know no one actually died during the making of Apocalypse Now, its star Martin Sheen nearly did, Coppola threatened suicide, while Dennis Hopper's herculean cocaine consumption would have finished off a lesser man. And all of that was before Marlon Brando showed up to waddle around stubbornly ad-libbing and refusing to cooperate. Storms, bad luck, accidents, war and a constantly spiralling budget almost sunk the production on numerous occasions. Coppola was never … [Read more...] about Apocalypse how?

Packed from end to end with throwaway film references and loving recreations of 1960s TV crime shows and westerns, it is a very conscious attempt to capture the zeitgeist of an era that was about to end. That would be classic Hollywood, the version run mercilessly by charlatan studio bosses who treated actors like cattle, lived like kings and pumped out movies like there was no tomorrow. By the late 60s, their jig was up, and Tarantino's film in one sense revolves around the incident often cited as old Hollywood's death knell - the Tate murders. After that, many a hack writer has declared, without apparent irony, that Hollywood lost its innocence. The idea that it ever had any is hilarious: this, remember, is the prototypical gated community that brought you hushed up rapes, forced abortions, Fatty Arbuckle, Errol Flynn and poor old Lupe Vélez, the silent-era starlet whose attempt to create the perfect, headline-grabbing suicide ended in ignominy with her head in a toilet bowl. … [Read more...] about Film of the week: Tarantino’s ode to Hollywood is cult fiction