Speechification

A lovely programme about tiny things. And about Percy Smith - one of the pioneers of natural history film-making. MP3 here. You can watch an example of his films here.

Something from Radio 3 in mid-2007: Mark Kermode in the Charlie Chaplin archives, uncovering the filmmaker’s connections to celebrity (he invented the whole thing) and modernism (he inspired pretty much everybody, especially the Dadaists). MP3.

Steve recently posted an episode of the Reunion. It’s a great show and the most recent episode, which reunites the creators of Withnail and I (surely one of the best British films of all time), is possibly the best yet. [MP3]

Sue MacGregor introduces and interviews Richard E Grant (Withnail), Paul McGann (Marwood), Ralph Brown (Danny) and Bruce Robinson (the writer & director) as well as an interview with Richard Griffiths (Monty).

I’m only putting this up because I was goaded to by ‘Birmingham: It’s Not Shit (mildly sarcastic since 2002)’. The best bit of this essentially indescribable doc is the laughter of a contemporary Brummie audience at the 1980 vision of their city presented in ‘Telly Savalas looks at Birmingham’. You can see parts of the film itself here and here. (MP3)

And to finish the sequence, here’s Hardeep Singh Kohli’s funny, chatty and illuminating doc about Indian independent cinema (MP3). This is also part two of a two-part series.

Paul Gambaccini seems to have become the Beeb’s unofficial historian of 20th Century pop culture. He’s got a new four-part series about the Oscars which has got off to a good start with a show about the 1962 best picture Lawrence of Arabia. Contributors include David Thomson, Kenneth Turan, Bob Osborne and - my favourite - Kevin Brownlow.

Actually David Thomson is my favourite really (his Biographical Dictionary of Film is a genuine wonder) but I needed a reason to link to an exceptional Brownlow programme from March 2005 featuring his interviews with artists of the silent era. So here (for the podcast) is the Gambaccini programme (MP3) and here (for later) is the Brownlow (MP3).

How could I resist this one? It’s got Brezhnev’s favourite American TV serial, the inhospitable Central Asian desert, laconic Red Army cowboys and a liberated harem. And cosmonauts. It’s about Russia’s favourite ‘Western’ (Eastern really) White Sun of the Desert - a film I would now very much like to see (MP3).

It’s the weekend, so my dog walking is accompanied by a new edition of Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo’s weekly film review.

(Image taken from the BBC user on YouTube. Thank you, BBC, for sharing interesting clips)

My early teenage years were informed by Mark Kermode on the Mark and Lard show on Radio 1, where he introduced me to a wide range of cult movies. In fact, I still can’t watch Blue Velvet without hearing his voice.

These days, the Good Doctor works well when paired with Simon Mayo, who does a great job of popping Kermode’s pretension and dropping in his own interpretations and insights, balancing Kermode’s often over-the-top rants (both for and against) recent films.

Kermode, normally very eloquent, is particularly enraged by ‘Good Luck Chuck’ in this week’s episode.

Kermode: And I’m literally sitting there thinking, I’m getting ill. It’s like, it’s infecting me, it’s like this…
Mayo: There’s a Woody Allen impression coming up now.
[...]
Kermode: This thing is eating my soul from the inside. I can actually feel my soul being sucked out through my ears. I can feel everything starting to shut down…

This began to remind me of an earlier review; Mark famously hates ‘Little Man’.

Kermode: I have seen some films that I consider to be grotesque, but I struggle to think of one more grotesque than ‘Little Man’. It is, in every way, an evil-minded, bad, profoundly depressing indictment of the way the modern movie industry works. … It is the most horrible, retrograde, nauseating, inward-looking, smug, repulsive, grotesque, ill-advised, badly judged…
Mayo: Patronising?

If you like Kermode’s reviews as much as I do then you’re probably already subscribed to the podcast. You’ll really enjoy the archive of his reviews going back to April 2005 too.

We love Jacques Tati in our house. Well, I suppose it’s mostly me that likes him. My kids put up with him but only because they think he’s a sort of bleached Mr Bean. Mr Bean’s creator Rowan Atkinson makes an appearance in Rory Bremner’s half hour about the French genius - Atkinson reckons Bean isn’t as nice a person as Tati’s creation Hulot.

I like the part about Tati’s pioneering and inventive use of sound: the distinctive (and inexplicably hilarious) sound of that hotel swing door in M. Hulot’s holiday and the quite brilliant ’silent door’ in Playtime, for instance (MP3, Real)

The pic is a still from Mon Oncle, which I think is the best of Tati’s films.