UK+IRELAND

the last one is by Terry Gilliam again.

Nicolas Roeg's first film shot in America, The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976) is a complex, difficult film which is as much about the reactions of a foreigner to the country as it is a traditional narrative. Typically, Roeg takes a straightforward source - in this case, Walter Tevis' novel - and cuts it up to suit his favoured style, which proceeds through the non-linear connection of images and ideas.

As with Mick Jagger in Performance (d. Donald Cammell/Roeg, 1970), Roeg uses David Bowie as much for his stage persona as for his acting abilities, although Bowie gives a fresh, naturalistic performance. The qualities of aloofness, strangeness and sexual androgyny which Bowie projected in his stage persona are integral to the scheme of the film, which demands Newton to be both recognisably human yet entirely alien.

Assisted by a script from his recurring collaborator Paul Mayersberg, Roeg uses his typically dazzling editing style to mix past and present, deliberately disrupting a traditional sense of time passing. He also makes notable use of the recurring images of water and, memorably, of Newton sitting, drugged, in front of a wall of television sets, whose programmes often ironically counterpoint the storyline.

Underneath the surface, this is a hackneyed moral tale of purity corrupted by experience, but it is distinguished by its style and the extraordinary images concocted by Roeg and his cinematographer Anthony Richmond. America seems a rich and strange country, impossibly overwhelming. The deserts of New Mexico are a potent image of aridity, reflected in flashbacks to Newton's planet. However, the repetitive use of explicit sex, although often amusing, seems included more for commercial than artistic reasons.

In its examination of loneliness and lost love, this is Roeg's most moving film. Like Chas in Performance and John in Don't Look Now (d. Roeg, 1973), Newton is an outsider in an alien world, whose inability to understand his new environment seals his fate. His quest for water is destined to fail because, to the outsider, America is too much of a distraction, and human frailty seems to infect everything it touches.

Don't Look Now (d. Nicolas Roeg, 1973) is a beautifully restrained horror film. Superficially calm, it is underpinned by a constant sense of foreboding which erupts into bloody horror only at the climax. It is a love story with only one love scene and a study of grief during which nobody cries. This sense of restraint makes the film characteristic of the same peculiar 'Englishness' which informs films as different as Brief Encounter (d. David Lean, 1945) and The Innocents (d. Jack Clayton, 1961).

Often remembered solely for its final bloody confrontation, it is Roeg's careful pacing and the dread of what will happen next which make the film genuinely frightening. Beginning with every parents' nightmare, the tragic death of a child, the film builds towards a climax which is inevitable from its first moments. John's second sight is reflected in Roeg's characteristic use of fast cutting, which brings disparate images together in a suddenly meaningful fashion and which plays with past, present and future to disorientate the viewer, just as John is disorientated by his visions.

The film is also deeply moving, examining how grief can overpower the emotions. Christine's death casts a shadow over the relationship of her parents as it does over the entire film, and the different responses of John and Laura suggest the ways in which people try to overcome the loss of a loved one. Equally, the film is cautiously optimistic in its portrayal of how intense love can transcend death. The brilliantly edited love scene, contrasting tender physical union with the banality of dressing for dinner, is vital to this aspect of the film.

Donald Sutherland is entirely believable as John, the sceptic forced to become a believer during his final moments of life, and his performance is matched by that of Julie Christie. The script, largely faithful to Daphne du Maurier's original story, allows time for sardonic asides from Massimo Serato's ambivalent Bishop and memorable hysteria from Hilary Mason as Heather.

Venice appears as a character in itself, caught in faded off-season grandeur and turned into a labyrinth of dead-ends and winding back alleys. The use of colour is especially notable, with all but red being muted, and icy blues and greys becoming prominent as John's search becomes more frustrating. Pino Donaggio's lush score captures the film's poignant tone with the florid romanticism of his later collaborations with Brian De Palma.

The second one is VERTIGO-1958 by Alfred Hitchcock.

Kim's reputation has been restored in recent years partly by the re-issue of some of her films on DVD, but mainly because of the re-emergence of "Vertigo" which is now widely regarded as a masterpiece whereas it was dismissed as botchwork when first released. Originally critics sniped at Kim's performance, but now decades later, it is much admired.

An unemployed writer (Jeremy Theobald) randomly pics people in the streets of London and follows them as a source for inspiration. But when he breaks the rules he has set for himself and starts to follow people over a longer period of time, things begin to go wrong. He teams up with the burglar Cobb (Alex Haw) and breaks into the apartment of a mysterious blonde (Lucy Russell), of whom he is fascinated. But slowly he finds out that things may be different than they appear.

Memento Trivia

Teddy's phone number is 555-0134, the same as Marla Singer's in Fight Club.


The tattoo parlor "Emma's Tattoos" was named after Emma Thomas, the associate producer of Memento and Nolan's wife.


Memento was shot in only 25 days.


When the shell casing rolls into frame in the opening scene, Chris Nolan really blew it out of frame. Since the camera had the film running backward for the filming of this scene, this particular shot later had to be reversed. So it's actually a shot of a simulated reversal, recorded backwards, and then manually reversed to get the desired effect.


Chris Nolan's white Honda Civic can be seen parked next to Leonards Jaguar at the motel in one of the first scenes.


The camera Leonard Shelby uses is a Polaroid 690.


Christopher Nolan wanted to cast Alec Baldwin as Leonard Shelby, but Baldwin wanted too much money.

Insomnia is the remake of the equally-named 1997 norwegian thriller:
Veteran police officer Will Dormer (played by Al Pacino) is sent from the city to a small Alaska town to investigate the murder of a teenage girl. While chasing a suspect (Robin Williams) through the fog, Dormer accidently kills his partner. Instead of admitting his guilt, Dormer is given an unexpected alibi. But despite this he is looked after by the local idealistic detective Ellie Bur (Hilary Swank) while he himself has to find the murderer (Robin Williams). But the murderer knows of Dormer's guilt and starts to blackmail him and forces the detective into a cat-and-mouse game.

Notes on the Adaptation of the Book Orlando by Sally Potter

My task with the adaptation of Virginia Woolf?s book for the screen was to find a way of remaining true to the spirit of the book and to Virginia Woolf?s intentions, whilst being ruthless with changing the book in any way necessary to make it work cinematically.

It would have been a disservice to Virginia Woolf to remain slavish to the letter of the book, for just as she was always a writer who engaged with writing and the form of the novel, similarly the film needed to engage with the energy of cinema. And although the book was already a distillation of 400 years of English history (albeit an imagined view of that history, told with a liberal amount of poetic license), the film needed to distill even further.

The most immediate changes were structural. The storyline was simplified?any events which did not significantly further Orlando?s story were dropped.

The narrative also needed to be driven. Whereas the novel could withstand abstraction and arbitrariness (such as Orlando?s change of sex) cinema is more pragmatic. There had to be reasons?however flimsy?to propel us along a journey based itself on a kind of suspension of disbelief.

Thus Queen Elizabeth bestows Orlando?s long life upon him ("Do not fade, do not wither, do not grow old . . .") whereas in the book it remains unexplained. And Orlando?s change of sex in the film is the result of his having reached a crisis point?a crisis of masculine identity. On the battlefield he looks death and destruction in the face and faces the challenge of kill or be killed. It is Orlando?s unwillingness to conform to what is expected of him as a man that leads?within the logic of the film?to his change of sex. Later, of course, as a woman, Orlando finds that she cannot conform to what is expected of her as a female either, and makes a series of choices which leave her, unlike in the book, without marriage or property?and with a daughter, not a son.

These latter changes seemed to me entirely consistent with Virginia Woolf?s views in her other works on the condition of women?s lives (especially A Room of One?s Own) and crisply logical within the framework set up in the earlier part of the story.

Orlando is at its heart a story of loss?the loss of time as it passes?a meditation on the impermanence of love, power, and politics. I simply carried that logic through to include Orlando?s loss of property and status in the 20th century. Whilst the loss of property in the story is a symptom of the second class status of women, there is also an aspect which is worthy of celebration: the loss of privilege and status based on an outdated English class system.

Orlando was of course originally written as a spoof biography of Vita Sackville-West. Where the book holds most tightly to apparent biographical facts it occasionally loses its power as a story (such as Orlando?s "keeping" the house at the end of the book?which was a way for Virginia Woolf to restore the lost Knole to Vita Sackville-West).

I tried to restore Orlando on film to a view more consistently detached and bitingly ironic in its view of the English class system and the colonial attitudes arising from it.

At the same time I needed to ensure that Orlando was a loveable character. The clue was to highlight Orlando?s essential innocence. He happens to have been born into a class, a place and time, and is shaped by it?but as the essential human being remains; the patterns of behaviour and attitude are transformed.

Other obvious changes from the book include dialogue (and poems) which have been invented from sometimes slender clues on the page?and Orlando?s words and looks to the camera which were intended as an equivalent both of Virginia Woolf?s direct addresses to her readers and to try to convert Virginia Woolf?s literary wit into cinematic humor at which people could laugh out loud.

Finally, the ending of the film needed to be brought into the present in order to remain true to Virginia Woolf?s use of real-time at the end of the novel (where the story finishes just as she puts down her pen to finish the book). Coming up to the present day meant acknowledging some key events of the 20th century--the two world wars, the electronic revolution?the contraction of space through time reinvented by speed. But the film ends somewhere between heaven and earth in a place of ecstatic communion with the present moment.

A nutty fairy tale about a displaced Jewish girl who must find her place in a hostile and often surreal world. 1927, rural Russia: Little Fegele (Claudia Lander-Duke) adores her father (Oleg Yankovskiy), a cantor, and is bereft when he leaves their small town to find his fortune in America. Soon after, Fegele's grandmother hears rumors of an impending pogrom and tries to send the child to join her father. Instead, Fegele winds up alone in England, where her name is changed to Suzie. Taken in by a foster family, the withdrawn child scarcely speaks but communicates through her lovely singing voice. Years pass, and the adult Suzie (Christina Ricci) still burns with the desire to find her father in America, to which end she joins a traveling cabaret troupe. That takes her to Paris, where she meets flamboyant Russian showgirl Lola (Cate Blanchett), also an expatriate. The worldly Lola, who cultivates a flighty image but lives by the practical motto "Never look back; always go forward," takes Suzie under her wing, finding her a job at the opera and sharing tips for getting ahead. Lola sets her sights on the opera's self-centered Italian star, Dante (John Turturro), while Suzie falls for a Romany horse trainer named Cesar (Johnny Depp). Suzie feels a deep kinship with the perpetually homeless gypsies, but when Paris falls to the Nazis she's forced again to flee. It's astonishing to watch English filmmaker Sally Potter suggest lavish production values with impoverished means. Her WWII saga, which suggests the German occupation of Paris with little more than the amplified sound of marching feet, and the destruction of a luxury liner with an explosion in the ship's swimming pool, stands in stark contrast to the absurdly over-budgeted spectacle of PEARL HARBOR, which opened in the US on the same day.

It's not just any illicit affair, this passionate liaison between an Irish American married woman (Joan Allen) and a Lebanese surgeon (Simon Abkarian), who are both living in London. In Sally Potter's "Yes," their relationship becomes the jagged interface between two clashing worlds, cultures, genders and personalities in the post-9/11 universe.