Mansel Stimpson, co-author of the Film Review yearbook, has written a memoir, a memoir where he states that ‘he was born in 1978 at the age of 40.’
The Film Review yearbook is the world’s longest-established movie guide and is the only guide that provides essential credits and reviews for all theatrically released films in the UK. Stimpson began co-authoring the book in 2007, but his own memoir, titled ‘No Drum to Beat’, was actually written thirty years ago. It’s not about Mansel’s life as a writer, nor is it about film, it’s about him recognising his sexuality for the first time, at the age of 40, and then embracing it, and immediately seeing it as an opening to the possibility of loving.
Mansel says that ‘when I recognised that I was gay I immediately saw it not as a problem but as a solution to a problem.’
‘No Drum to Beat’ tells an extraordinary and unique story of one man’s realisation that he was gay a bit late in life, but it’s also a record of gay life in London from 1978 to 1981, a time when London was going through a significant period of social change.
Mansel mentions that his book ‘was written for men who thought being gay was a problem, and it’s also written for women and straight men in the hope of promoting greater understanding.’
Mansel Stimpson has previously written for the British Federation of Film Societies, What’s On in London, Capital Gay, Gay Times, and the Pink Paper. Throughout his career he has interviewed countless singers, actors, conductors, and directors.
There’s a lot of hype surrounding the new film Interstellar, which opens on Friday.
It’s directed by Christopher Nolan, the man who brought us the billion-dollar grossing films (each!) The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Returns. He also brought us 2000’s smart and highly intellectual film Memento and 2010’s highly confusing Inception. Also upping the hype around Interstellar is that it stars recent Academy Award winners Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway, multiple Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain, as well as Oscar winners Michael Caine, Ellen Burnstyn, and in an uncredited/unbilled but pivotal role in the film, Matt Damon. Also by the look of the trailer, it looks visually and experimentally stunning. It’s on the path to be this year’s Gravity.
Interstellar is a lot of things. But according to Nolan, it hinges on the provocative question of humanity’s place in the stars. Interstellar means ‘occurring or situated between stars,’ and that’s basically what the movie is all about. It’s also about Black Holes, distance galaxies, uninhabitable and habitable planets, spaceship travel, and what drives the plot is the relationship a father has with his daughter.
Set in the near future when an agricultural crisis has hit Earth and there is not enough food to eat and the population is slowly dying. The land is very dry and there are massive sandstorms that engulf the planet. With the possibility of the extinction of humans, a dangerous and daring mission takes place to look for planets outside of the universe where humans can move to, survive, and most importantly, reproduce. It’s a mission that goes above and beyond the barriers of time and space, defying not only gravity but inter-galaxy travel as well. It’s an experimental mission that’s not only very dangerous, but life altering as well.
Cooper (McConaughey) is a former test pilot and engineer who’s now a farmer because that is what is needed in this decaying, dry new world. The only crop that is left on earth is corn, so this is what he grows at his vast farm, with the help of his father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow) and his two children – teenage son Tom (Timothee Chalamet) and daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy). Cooper hears of some sort of experimental space project going on in his area, so he drives off attempting to find it, at the same time finding Murph in the back of the car when she was told to stay home. She’s as much of a space geek as her father.
They find the compound, or actually, the compound finds them, and they both get whisked into the underground bunker. It’s actually a fortress made up of scientists and engineers, led by Professor Brand (Caine). He leads the project for the search of a planet in perhaps another universe that can sustain the human race. A project which includes a newly built spaceship.
So Cooper (without the blessing of his daughter) and Brand’s scientist daughter Amelia (Hathaway) and two others blast off into space, into the darkness, on a mission that seems impossible. But what Cooper doesn’t know is that 13 other astronauts had previously attempted the mission, and all have not been heard from since. And to add drama to the story, Amelia was in love with one of them.
It’s the space mission (and Cooper and Murph’s relationship) that drives Interstellar. And what a drive it is. Nolan takes us into space and beyond like no other filmmaker has. We are transported into another universe, through black holes, to other planets. One planet has waves the size of the Empire State Building, while another is caked in ice, where they find one of the 13 astronauts alive – Dr. Mann (Damon). And this is when Coopers’ and Amelia’s mission strays off it’s course, in a detrimental way. One hour on this planet equals 20 years on Earth, so the more time spent there, the more time Cooper’s children grow up, and old, without him.
What Interstellar tries to do is use the magnitude and grandeur of space as a backdrop for exploring the relationships that Cooper has with his children, especially his daughter. It’s also about all kinds of things – our lives on earth, what will happen when our earth can no longer sustain us, who are are, and it makes us look at the relationships we have. It basically asks us to examine, all this, and more, in its 169 minutes. London-born Nolan successfully puts the audience into space, and McConaughey successfully makes us believe that he’s got the passion for being in space, but Interstellar leaves us mere mortals behind in a film that is a bit overwhelming, mind-bending, demanding and a bit confusing. And the sound quality is not the best, the music and noise at times drown out what the characters are saying in a few crucial scenes. And with two recent air space accidents in the last couple weeks, no one is really in a rush to get to space.
Written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, Interstellar is a movie bigger than it can handle, and what we can handle.
The directorial debut of Gia Coppola, Palo Alto is an exploration of high school teenagers experimentations with sex, drugs, and alcohol, and it’s an impressive debut.
Coppola, the granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola and niece of Sofia Coppola and Nicholas Cage, turns James Franco’s book of the same name into a gritty yet honest movie of a bunch of teenagers in a Palo Alto, California High School. Franco’s book was a series of stories, and Coppola’s film links them up beautifully to create a film that flows, with characters who we could all relate to.
April (an amazing Emma Roberts) is the class virgin. April’s popular amongst her peers and is a star soccer player. She is also being chased by her creepy soccer coach Mr B., whom she babysits for (Franco, in one of his best roles in years). But Mr B. just doesn’t like April, he also ‘likes’ other girls at the school – he’s a paedophile.
Meanwhile, Teddy (Jack Kilmer), and Fred (Nat Wolff) are the best of friends, yet it’s Fred unpredictable behaviour that at times becomes explosive and dangerous. And Teddy has a huge crush on April, and he is unaware of her relationship with Mr B.
Zoe Levin plays Emily. She’s basically the school slut and sleeps with Fred. Teddy, taking a page from Fred’s book, is caught drunk driving and has to perform community service, in a library where Fred visits and proceeds to deface a book. Throw in a mix of more parties and more romances and what you have is a teenage high school film that is made for grownups.
Coppola gives us a film that is seen through the eyes of the teenagers; their angst, their anxiety, semi-innocence, boredom and excitement. It’s a movie that feels real, with performances to match. Roberts, the niece of Julia, was the perfect choice for the role of April. She’s 23 years old but in the film looks like she’s 16. Kilmer (son of actor Val Kilmer, who has a cameo in the film as a stoned-out stepfather), is also very good as Teddy, tight friends with Fred yet trying to win April’s affections. And Franco is perfect as the lecherous soccer coach – his guilty smile and glint in his eyes say it all – he’s very handsome yet very dangerous. Franco trusted his book to Coppola to turn it into a movie, and she does a fantastic job. Not bad for a first-timer. Francis Ford and Sofia Coppola should watch their back, another Coppola family member is on the way up.
Maps to the Stars can be described as a take-off on Hollywood and celebrity and the people who inhabit this world, and boy what a world it is.
It’s a world created by David Cronenberg, who also directed. He’s the man who last brought us 2012’s Cosmopolis but he is more well known for the much better received A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. Maps to the Stars is not a normal movie, in other words, it’s not what it says on the tin. It’s surreal, dark, black, and intense. It’s a movie that is desperately trying to show us the inhabitants of Hollywood, and their dreams, and their need for fame and validation.
There are several lead characters in the film, but it mostly belongs to Julianne Moore. She plays ageing actress Havana Segrand. While she’s not that old, she can’t get the parts she used to get, but one part that she really wants is to play a part her late mother once played. Segrand seems to live in the shadow of her more legendary mother, who died in a mysterious fire, yet is not a stable woman – though she lives in a huge house that befits a famous film star. Even though Segrand is surrounded by people all the time, including her agent, her personal assistant Agatha Weiss (Mia Wasikoska), and her visits to self-help guru Dr Sanford Weiss (John Cusack), she sees the ghost of he mother as a young girl around the house, and she doesn’t know why. Segrand is just one of the many strange characters in the film.
There’s also the already-mentioned Agatha Weiss. Her story is even more bizarre. She’s been kept in a psychiatric asylum in Jupiter, Florida since she was a young girl, after a horrible fire that left her with scars on her hand (she wears gloves) and face. It was a fire that appears to be one that she started, as she has been ostracised and totally rejected by her family. This includes her father, who happens to be Dr. Sanford Weiss. She’s obsessed with trying to re-enter the family circle, which she does, and on top of all this, there’s something really strange about her.
Dr Sanford Weiss is a famous television psychologist who offers New Age advice to his followers, as well as performing intimate bodywork on his celebrity clients, the rich and famous. He stars in his own television program that is constantly on in his household; he’s a strange egotistical man. He is also the author of best-selling self-help books with analysis for the troubled, which doesn’t help his 13-year old teenage son, Benjie Weiss (a very good Evan Bird).
Benjie Weiss is a teen sensation, a Beiberesque movie star who is making way to much money. He’s spoiled and screwed up. He’s a teen heartthrob (having starred in the big hit ‘Bad Babysitter’ and fresh from rehab – at the tender age of 13). He visits a sick girl in a hospital, to boost his reputation, and is told by his agent that the girl in dying of AIDS, but actually she tells him that she’s got Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. He’s pissed off and tells his agent off for providing him with the wrong information. The girl eventually dies and Benjie is haunted by her ghost – a ghost that he sees almost everywhere he goes. It’s a metaphor for his stardom, an attempt to bring him back down to earth perhaps? But it doesn’t, it makes him a lunatic to the point where he thinks he’s strangling her but he actually strangles the co-star of a new film that he’s doing. He’s jealous that this co-star is stealing scenes from him. The strangulation is a chilling scene, and all too surreal by the reaction of his mother, Cristina Weiss (Olivia Williams). She’s not your typical celebrity mother; she’s a bit backwards and emotionally unstable, paranoid if you will, who is more concerned about her son’s ability to make more money than for his personal well-being.
The Weiss family is one screwed up family. Robert Pattison shows up as perhaps the only sane person in the movie. He’s Jerome, a limo driver who happens to pick up Agatha when she arrives in Los Angeles. He’s not just a limo driver, he’s also a part-time actor and has fallen for Agatha, but also gets seduced by Havana. After their sexual romp all hell breaks lose and Agatha goes on a rampage.
Maps to the Stars is an exaggerated take off on Hollywood and it’s denizens. It’s a film that is a distorted view on celebrity culture, but to the extreme, with highs and the very lows, with ghosts from their past thrown in for scary effect. It’s a film where the characters are all very unlikeable, so unlikeable that you sort of wish they would all kill themselves. Maps to the Stars uses Los Angeles and Hollywood as the backdrop, with parts of the film shot on the Hollywood walk of fame and under the famous Hollywood sign, to give it an authentic feel.
Most people say that Hollywood is fake and artificial, which is observed well in this film. It’s fake, dark, make believe, artificial and over the top, with celebrities swallowed up by their obsessions with success, celebrity and money, and perhaps this is what Hollywood is all about?