amphitheatre Archives - Jeremy C. Processing

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

Gladiator
(2000)

Director – Ridley Scott – 2000 – US – 15 – 155m

*****

UK Release 12th May 2000.

Initiated by screenwriter David Franzoni (Amistad, Steven Spielberg, 1997) at DreamWorks, this picked up definitive cinematic stylist Ridley Scott, who created the seminal futuristic cityscape of Blade Runner (1982). Elsewhere, Scott’s downside is that his visuals notoriously swamp character and plot. Thelma & Louise (1991), his best film in the interim eighteen odd years, sidestepped precisely this pitfall. Gladiator, however, is more like Blade Runner. The plot is fine as far as it goes – which is far enough to deliver a halfway decent, engaging dramatic potboiler – but far more importantly it gives Scott the perfect peg upon which to hang another superlative cityscape. In short, Ridley Scott does ancient Rome.

Set-up, plot resolution, characters and even the leading man’s look are borrowed wholesale from The Fall Of The Roman Empire (Anthony Mann, 1964). Russell Crowe (looking remarkably like the original’s Stephen Boyd) plays Roman general Maximus, unhappy that the late Caesar Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) has been succeeded by his unsatisfactory son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). Treachery is afoot as Maximus is sold into slavery as a gladiator to compete in Commodus’ lavish games at Rome’s amphitheatre.… Read the rest