Category Archives: Film

Toy Story 2 casting couch ‘blooper’ deleted by Disney after #MeToo movement

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Now removed scene features Stinky Pete engaging in sexual misconduct with Barbie dolls

A fake blooper scene from Toy Story 2 featuring a “casting couch” scenario has been quietly deleted by Disney from the latest home releases of the animated film.

A running gag in Pixar’s films are the faux outtakes that play alongside the closing credits, depicting the animated characters making mistakes, pulling pranks on each other, fudging their lines or speaking directly to camera as if they were real actors. The outtakes regularly make fun of Hollywood and the film industry more broadly.

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Netflix’s Murder Mystery under fire for Spain cliche portrayal

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Málaga authorities complained about ‘retrograde’ scene of Gypsy woman in flamenco dress

Tourism boards in Spain have said the portrayal of the southern city of Málaga in Netflix’s hit film Murder Mystery is riddled with cliches and 50 years out of date.

The film centres on an American couple, Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler, travelling around Europe. When they arrive in Málaga they are greeted by a Gypsy woman wearing a flamenco dress, a man with a guitar and a guide decked out in the red and yellow of the Spanish flag.

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The Edge of Democracy review – to the heart of Brazilian politics

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Petra Costa’s powerful documentary charts the state’s descent into populism and the fraying of its democratic fabric

Brazilian actor-writer-director Petra Costa is known for mining her personal and family history for material. Her first feature, Elena, turned her search for her absent older sister into a deeply evocative documentary about loss, familial love, rivalry and displacement as it flutters between São Paulo in Brazil and New York City.

Costa’s latest documentary, The Edge of Democracy, finds her intersecting the personal and political on an even bigger public stage, and in the process documents a crisis erupting in slow motion at the heart of Brazilian politics. Thanks to extraordinary access to figures at the centre of the story – former leftist Workers’ Party presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (AKA Lula) and Dilma Rousseff, as well as rightwingers Michel Temer and current president Jair Bolsonaro – Costa manages to craft an intimate primer about the state’s descent into populism and the fraying of the country’s democratic fabric.

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Romanian immigrant elected German mayor after anti-AfD alliance

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Actors and directors called on Görlitz voters to not succumb to far-right party’s ‘hate and enmity’

A 51-year-old immigrant has been elected mayor of a town in eastern Germany after beating a candidate from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in a campaign that drew international attention.

Octavian Ursu, a classical musician who came to Germany from Romania in 1990s, stood for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union party, receiving 55.1% of the vote in Sunday’s election in Goerlitz. Preliminary returns showed his AfD opponent, Sebastian Wippel, an ex-policeman received 44.9%.

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The year of Akira: how does 2019 Neo-Tokyo compare with today’s city?

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From architecture to highways and the Olympic stadium, how does reality shape up against Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 animated dystopia?

It’s 2019 and Tokyo is a sprawling megalopolis preparing for the 2020 Olympics. The city is crowded, fraying at the edges. The young are aimless and underemployed, obsessed with cars and clothes. Cynical new religious movements are on the rise. Motorcycle gangs race at night on the expressways. There is a worrying trend of militarism after years of peace. The government is showing signs of corruption. And everyone seems terrifyingly eager to ignore the lessons of a recent nuclear catastrophe.

The real city of Tokyo and the imagined Neo-Tokyo of the 1988 anime film Akira are nearly indistinguishable. 2019 is the “year of Akira”: the date the apocalyptic science fiction film was set, a couple of decades after a mysterious nuclear-esque disaster had wiped out the original city.

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Franco Zeffirelli was a master charmer – no wonder we all fell for his Romeo and Juliet

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His take on Shakespeare’s tragedy tapped the zeitgeist, but Zeffirelli’s whole body of work pulsated with an irresistible camp and romanticism

Franco Zeffirelli was the mainstream maestro of high culture on screens big and small who dashingly made his international movie reputation with an exuberant and accessible adaptation of Romeo and Juliet in 1968; this had some pretty trad doublet-and-hose stuff and featured the syrupy “Love” theme composed for the film by Nino Rota which was to become notorious as the music for Simon Bates’s regular tearjerking Our Tune feature on Radio One.

But there were also muscular and athletic performances from a bright-eyed young cast, vigorous and enjoyable playing all round and bold location work. The year before, Zeffirelli had directed Richard Burton and Liz Taylor in another Shakespeare adaptation: The Taming of the Shrew: clever casting of course, but it was the honeyglow-sunlit romanticism of young love in Romeo and Juliet — not cynical middle-aged love — which caught the public imagination, tuned into the zeitgeist and gave Zeffirelli his massive hit.

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Backlash in Samoa over ‘hypocritical’ Rocketman ban

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Activists accuse censors of ‘selective morality’ in nation where transgender women are widely accepted

The banning of Rocketman, a biographic film about the life of musician Elton John, in Samoa has prompted criticism by human rights activists of “selective morality” in a country where transgender women are widely accepted.

The public found out about the ban through the cancellation of a screening by the only theatre in the country, Apollo Cinemas Samoa, on Monday.

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Samoa bans Elton John biopic Rocketman over gay scenes

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Pacific nation’s censor says homosexual activity depicted on screen violates its laws

The Pacific nation of Samoa has banned the Elton John biopic Rocketman because of its depictions of homosexuality.

About 97% of people in Samoa identify as Christian, and the society is generally considered conservative and traditional. Under Samoa’s 2013 Crimes Act, sodomy is deemed an offence punishable by up to seven years in prison, even if both parties consent.

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Laura Dern: ‘I feel like I’m ready to try anything – and to dive deeper’

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Laura Dern decided to become an actor when she was just six. But it’s only now, with 55 films under her belt and as Big Little Lies returns to our screens, that she really feels free to ‘try anything’

To hear her mother tell it, it’s a miracle that Laura Dern exists at all. In the early 1960s Diane Ladd and her then husband, Bruce Dern, suffered an excruciating loss when their 18-month-old daughter drowned. The trauma was not just emotional but physical, and doctors told her that she would be unable have another child. But they were wrong, and the proof was Dern. One confounded doctor travelled to the hospital to witness “the miracle child”. From her home in Ojai, California, Ladd’s smoky southern voice over the phone ripples gently with emotion as she talks to me about her daughter.

The miracle child, now 52, grew up to be a great actor in her own right, sometimes even appearing alongside her mother. In 1991, Princess Diana was so taken by the idea that a real-life mother and daughter could play alternative versions of themselves on screen that she flew them both to London for a royal premiere of their garlanded film, Rambling Rose. Ladd recalls “pouring sweat” as she sat next to the princess. Dern was struck by the ways in which her host connected to her character. “She was empathy in cellular form.”

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70s Bond girl Caroline Munro: ‘I loved Roger Moore. His knitwear was classic’

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She spent her career being chased by vampires, 007 and David Hasselhoff. And she also found time to sing with Cream and Gary Numan. Was it all as much fun as it looked?

One day, 50 years ago, a solicitor walking to work through Waterloo station in London noticed a 30ft-tall woman. She was dressed in an unzipped scuba top and was brandishing a knife drawn from a scabbard strapped to her bare thigh. It was his daughter. “Dad knew I was going to be the Lamb’s Navy Rum girl, but not that I would be on a billboard,” says Caroline Munro. “He said it was a bit of a shock.”

Over the next decade, Munro’s parents got used to seeing their daughter writ large and wearing smalls. There she was on the cover of the Music for Pleasure Hot Hits 11 album, practising archery in a bikini and knee-high suede boots. There she was with Peter Cushing, exploring the underworld, in minimal clothes but lots of eyeliner, in At the Earth’s Core (1976). And there she was opposite David Hasselhoff in the 1978 movie Starcrash, her limbs swathed, but only in cellophane.

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Russia cuts Rocketman scenes citing ‘homosexual propaganda’ law

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Elton John biopic’s gay sex and kissing footage edited out in effort to play down singer’s sexuality

A Russian media company has reportedly cut all scenes featuring gay sex and men kissing from the Elton John biopic Rocketman because of laws banning “homosexual propaganda”.

An estimated five minutes of footage have been cut from the film in an attempt to play down the sexuality of one of the world’s most famous gay celebrities for a conservative Russian audience.

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‘You get used to the gunfire’ – filming the Libyan women’s football team

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Denounced on TV, they train at secret locations watched by armed guards. We meet the woman from Hastings who made a fascinating film about Libya’s guttsiest football squad

‘Just what our country needs!” rails the imam sarcastically on Libyan TV. “A women’s football team! And what’s more, they chose tall, young beautiful girls for the team – and for months their legs will be exposed.”

Women’s football may be getting its moment in the spotlight with the World Cup about to kick off. But, as the absorbing new documentary Freedom Fields reveals, the Libyan women’s national team has some way to go. As well as that imam, the film also features this statement from extremist group Ansar al-Sharia: “We strongly refute what the supporters of immoral westernisation are doing under the pretext of women’s freedom. This might lead to other sports with even more nudity, such as swimming and running.”

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It Must Be Heaven review – Palestine’s holy fool lives the dream

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The latest satire-fable from Elia Suleiman is as droll as ever, but while there’s a kernel of seriousness here it too often lapses into elusive mannerism

The Palestinian film-maker Elia Suleiman, dishevelled yet dapper at all times and never without his hat, saunters across continents in this new movie, fixing the amusingly surreal tableau scenes he comes across with a mildly perplexed gaze. He doesn’t talk and smiles just once, when a tiny little bird (a digital creation) flies into his hotel room and drinks water from a cup while is working at his laptop. Suleiman is the holy fool who is no fool.

The premise for this film that he is playing himself: travelling abroad from Nazareth, coming first to Paris and then to New York, trying to speak to producers about getting his latest film made. (In real life, he must surely be more diplomatic and persuasive than his alter ego here, the Suleiman who maintains an enigmatically satirical silence in the face of one producer’s obtuse idiocy.) Everywhere he looks, often in eerily deserted streets – surely Suleiman was shooting on very early summer mornings – he finds scenes of choreographed absurdism, gently but pointedly ridiculing the pomposity of uniformed officialdom. The title itself sounds like some lost Talking Heads track describing a place where things happen in a dream.

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Matthias & Maxime review – Xavier Dolan’s heartfelt tale of male longing

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Two friends’ playful kiss rekindles suppressed feelings in a film swept along by rattling dialogue and simmering tensions

Xavier Dolan’s unstoppably garrulous, sweet-natured new movie is a coming-of-age film, or possibly an approaching-thirtysomethinghood film. Or perhaps it’s a portrait of a bunch of friends for whom things would never be the same again after that summer. It is not exactly a sexual awakening tale because the sexuality in question never really went to sleep. But it is a love story.

Related: Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood review - Tarantino's dazzling LA redemption song

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‘I even loved his Twankey’: Dench, Hopkins, Mirren and more on Ian McKellen at 80

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Wild parties, stunning performances, silhouette erections and marrying Patrick Stewart twice. As the actor turns 80, friends including Derek Jacobi, Janet Suzman, Michael Sheen, Bill Condon and Stephen Fry pay tribute

Ian has been been very important in my life, even before we became good friends. When I was a young teen I remember watching Walter on the TV and being hugely affected by it. Then at Rada in the early 90s, I finally saw him live, in Richard III at the National. I was blown away. I remember him doing the opening speech while lighting a cigarette one-handed. It was brilliant, so understated. It exemplified his mastery – and his work ethic. To do something so difficult and complicated and make it look so easy. Ian has an innate sense of theatrical audacity, something I think he shares with Olivier. They both did things that would make the audience gasp self-consciously.

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Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood review – Tarantino’s dazzling LA redemption song

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With Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt playing a TV actor and stuntman who cross paths with the Manson cult, Tarantino has created outrageous, disorientating entertainment

Quentin Tarantino’s exploitation black-comedy thriller Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood finds a pulp-fictionally redemptive take on the Manson nightmare in late-60s California: a B-movie loser’s state of grace.

It’s shocking, gripping, dazzlingly shot in the celluloid-primary colours of sky blue and sunset gold: colours with the warmth that Mama Cass sang about. The Los Angeles of 1969 is recovered with all Tarantino’s habitual intensity and delirious, hysterical connoisseurship of pop culture detail. But there’s something new here: not just erotic cinephilia, but TV-philia, an intense awareness of the small screen background to everyone’s lives. Opinions are going to divide about this film’s startling and spectacularly provocative ending, which Tarantino is concerned to keep secret and which I have no intention of revealing here. But certainly any ostensible error of taste is nothing like, say, those in the much admired Inglourious Basterds. And maybe worrying about taste is to miss the point of this bizarre Jacobean horror fantasy.

Quite simply, I just defy anyone with red blood in their veins not to respond to the crazy bravura of Tarantino’s film-making, not to be bounced around the auditorium at the moment-by-moment enjoyment that this movie delivers – and conversely, of course, to shudder at the horror and cruelty and its hallucinatory aftermath.

Our first non-hero is Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, a failing cowboy actor and alcoholic going to seed in the autumn of his career and in moments of bad temper beginning to resemble Jack Black. His best friend – pathetically, his only friend – is Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt in his Ocean’s-Eleven mode of easygoing competence and imperturbability. Cliff is Rick’s stunt double and has an awful secret in his life: a grisly event for which he may or may not be guilty. Cliff has to drive Rick everywhere because he has lost his licence, and he is Rick’s best pal, assistant, factotum, and the person who has to straighten Rick when he bursts into boozy tears of self-pity.

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Argh, me back: Arnold Schwarzenegger OK after South Africa flying kick

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  • Film star struck at Arnold Classic Africa bodybuilding event
  • Former California governor reassures fans after incident

Arnold Schwarzenegger was struck by a flying kick at a sports event in South Africa on Saturday, though the actor and former California governor later reassured fans there was no need to worry.

Schwarzenegger, 71, was kicked from behind while chatting with fans at the Arnold Classic Africa, an event showcasing bodybuilding and other sports, in Johannesburg.

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