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Features Live Action Movies Music

Once

Director – John Carney – 2006 – Ireland – Cert. 15 – 90m

*****

Two musicians fall for each other on the streets of Dublin… – review originally published in Third Way magazine, October 2007

UK release date 19/10/2007

This brilliant film is a reviewer’s nightmare because a thumbnail synopsis on paper sounds incredibly bland and clichéd – something the actual film isn’t. A busker meets a girl on the street in Dublin. He fixes her vacuum cleaner. Being a pianist, she gets involved in his newly formed band. Romantic entanglements might ensue, but they don’t because she has a husband. The band’s demo sounds impressive, and the former busker departs for London to seek his fortune – without the girl. And that’s it.

However, the above outline doesn’t tell you two things.

One, there are a lot of songs. As in, the narrative stops so a character or characters can sing a song. This is not the case of, as in the classic movie musicals, the invisible orchestra swells and the character or characters can sing, but something more naturalistic. For instance, the first song occurs when the busker, on the street, picks up his guitar and sings a song.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies Music

Slade in Flame

Director – Richard Loncraine – 1975 – UK – Cert. – 91m

****

Slade play Flame, a small-time rock band who cut their musical teeth managed by lowlife crooks before going on to a meteoric rise and fall managed by corporate suits– 2K Remaster for the film’s 50th Anniversary Re-release is out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 2nd following BFI Southbank premier on Thursday, May 1st

In the early 1970s, four-piece pop act Slade (singer-guitarist Noddy Holder, bass player Jim Lea, guitarist Dave Hill and drummer Don Powell) were a British pop phenomenon. They clocked up six number one singles, with three going straight to the number one position. To capitalise on that success, the band’s manager Chas Chandler, previously Jim Hendrix’s manager and, before that, the bass player with The Animals, decided Slade should make a movie; the band, however, didn’t want to make light, upbeat, whimsical fantasies like The Beatles vehicles (A Hard Day’s Night, 1964; Help!, 1965, both Richard Lester; Yellow Submarine, George Dunning, 1968); they wanted instead to make something darker, reflecting the experience of trying to make it in a band in England in the late 1960s.

First-time feature director Richard Loncraine proved to be an inspired choice, confirmed both by the gritty, urban nature of his many subsequent films (The Missionary, 1982; Bellman and True, 1987; Richard III, 1995) and for his signature compositional style (letterbox frame, sepia-dominated palette), developed with cinematographer Peter Hannan (The Missionary, not to mention Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, Terrys Gilliam and Jones, 1983).… Read the rest

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies Music

Pink Floyd at Pompeii

Director – Adrian Maben – 1972 – UK – Cert. PG – 93m

*****

Around the time of Meddle, Pink Floyd perform in the amphitheatre at Pompeii and in a Paris sound studio; later, at EMI Abbey Road, they work on their next album The Dark Side of the Moon – Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII is out in UK cinemas on Thursday, April 24th

This review is of the Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii – The Director’s Cut version that came out on DVD in 2003. There have been various versions over the years; indeed, that DVD release also contains the 62-minute cut which excises all the Abbey Road material. The newly released version (as yet unseen by this writer) boasts a 4K restoration and a new sound mix by Steven Wilson. Even without these new enhancements, the film is pretty impressive some fifty odd years on.

It starts and ends with a version of Echoes (which originally took up the second side of Meddle and is here conveniently broken up into a part one and a part two). This is followed by Careful With That Axe Eugene and another lengthy opus A Saucerful of Secrets. Three more numbers are recorded in Studio Europa-Sonor in Paris: the shorter, punchier (to give it its long title used in the film, which also constitutes the song’s entire vocal lyrics) One of These Days I’m Going To Cut You into Little Pieces, a blues called Mademoiselle Nobs similar to Meddle’s Seamus without lyrics but with a dog (the eponymous Nobs) howling along, and Set The Controls for the Heart of the Sun.… Read the rest