Festival preview
Features
Bath Festival, Bath
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 17, 2008
Hip-hop preview
Features
Raekwon, London
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 17, 2008
Jazz preview
Features
Jason Moran, on tour
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 17, 2008
Pop preview
Features
Martha Wainwright, on tour
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 17, 2008
ASIMO conducts The Detroit Symphony Orchestra
Features
Classical goes electro as metal maestro leads a far from robotic performance.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 16, 2008
A festival where cinematic craft rubs shoulders with money
Features
· An impossibly glossy Brangelina, actors Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, have appeared on the red carpet; the streets are throbbing with scantily clad wannabes; restaurants are heaving with empurpled critics; hotel lobbies are echoing to the baying of movie execs. It must be the Cannes film festival, with the assertions that "it's all about cinema" sitting uneasily beside the knowledge that it's also all about the money - and the festival's annual flirtation with Hollywood blockbusters.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 17, 2008
Romanians buy distributor
Features
Metrodome, the Aim-listed film distributor whose releases include the Oscar-winning The Counterfeiters and Away From Her (with Julie Christie, who was nominated for an Oscar), has become majority owned by one of the largest entertainment companies in eastern Europe.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 17, 2008
Charlie Bartlett
Features
Taking its cue from Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Rushmore, this strives to create an angelic but savvy teen hero for the medication generation, but it lacks the freewheeling charm or acerbic wit of its predecessors. Played by fresh-faced Anton Yelchin, Charlie Bartlett is a troubled, intelligent eccentric from a wealthy, dysfunctional family who's expelled from his elite private school and forced to cope with the commoners. His survival tactic is to acquire prescription drugs from his many psychiatrists and dispense them to students in the toilets, along with preternaturally sage advice. The promising themes peter out as the film loses direction, though, and Bartlett is neither sympathetic enough to root for nor dumb enough to laugh at.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 16, 2008
Films we forgot to remember
Features
No one who lived through the 1970s in Britain is ever likely to forget the experience or wish to revisit it. The three-day week, endless strikes, power cuts, the two narrow Labour election victories of 1974, the IRA's mainland bombing campaign, political stasis and deadlock under Heath-Wilson-Callaghan: the decade saw the excruciating demise of one political dispensation, and the violent birth-pangs of another.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 16, 2008
Heartbeat Detector
Features
The nearest equivalent to this cerebral corporate thriller is Michael Clayton, but don't expect an easy ride, or even many thrills. This juggles some heavy themes - the decay of language, the hidden hand of history, the power of music, and several more - and it takes its time to pull them together, regularly wrong-footing the viewer along the way. Mathieu Amalric plays a suave, confident lone wolf - a company psychologist at a German petrochemical giant, who's assigned to subtly monitor the CEO, who has been behaving erratically. Delectably played by Michael Lonsdale, this leonine boss turns out to be cryptically super-sane, like Brando's Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. And with good reason, it transpires. As Amalric delves deeper into the company's history, he discovers its chilling Third Reich connections, and realises the equivalence of his own present-day position to those who "just followed orders", often using the same depersonalised language he does. There's no killer revelation, just
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: May 16, 2008
