Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler on saving Christmas: ‘We don’t usually meet people who hate our books’

Posted on December 16, 2021 by Admin

The Gruffalo creators are back with Superworm, their ninth festive special – that’s one more than Eric and Ernie. The Christmas TV royalty talk tinkering with Olivia Colman’s script … and the perils of mega success

Meeting Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler is a little like meeting the royal family. To learn anything about them is to be bombarded with an avalanche of statistics. In this country alone, a Julia Donaldson book sells every 11 seconds. In 2014 it was reported that 40p in every pound spent on children’s picture books went on a Donaldson title. And her work with Scheffler has taken on a rabid life outside of literature, too. Go to the woods and you’re likely to discover a Gruffalo trail. Chessington World of Adventures theme park is essentially a Donaldson/Scheffler temple, brimming with themed rides and marauding characters.

And, let’s not forget, they are also the reigning king and queen of Christmas Day. Starting with The Gruffalo in 2009, one of their books has been sumptuously animated and proudly placed in every BBC One Christmas schedule. This year, Superworm – about an earthworm superhero captured by a wizard lizard – has received the treatment, narrated by none other than Olivia Colman and with Matt Smith as the titular creepy crawly. In grand Donaldson/Scheffler tradition the animation is bright and tactile, and the storyline has been augmented with a rich seam of festive melancholy. On a Christmas day dripping with repeats, this will not only go down as the BBC’s stand-out offering, but is also their ninth Christmas special. If you’re counting, Morecambe and Wise only managed eight.

Last Night in Soho review | Peter Bradshaw’s film of the week

Posted on October 28, 2021 by Admin

Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy and Matt Smith star in a horror-thriller that takes a trip to the sleazy heart of London’s past

A trip to the dark heart of London’s unswinging 60s is what’s on offer in this entertaining, if uneven, film from screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns and director Edgar Wright, serving up a gorgeous soundtrack and some marvellous re-creations of sleazy Soho and the West End. There’s a tremendous image of the marquee for the 1965 Thunderball premiere in Coventry Street, and a show-stopping crane shot of Soho Square, apparently filmed from where the 20th Century Fox sign is now no longer to be found atop that company’s former premises.

Last Night in Soho is a doppelganger horror-thriller about a wide-eyed fashion student called Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) who has brought her mum’s old Dansette record player and Cilla Black and Petula Clark LPs up to London from Cornwall on the train. Eloise has a fetish for the lost innocent glamour of the 60s but, moping all alone in her manky bedsit, finds herself stricken with neon phantasms. Like a ghost from the future, Eloise dreams her way through a portal in time back into 60s London clubland, where she witnesses Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), a blonde singer – exactly the kind of retro showbiz princess Eloise moonily idolises – who is being forced by her slick-haired manager Jack (Matt Smith) into having sex for money with creepy old men. Gradually, Eloise feels her identity merging with Sandie’s. Is she having a breakdown, or is this nightmare really happening?

Last Night in Soho review – a gaudy romp that’s stupidly enjoyable

Posted on September 4, 2021 by Admin

Edgar Wright’s time-travel film plays like a 60s pop song building towards a big climax

The nostalgia gauge is code-red on Last Night in Soho, a gaudy time-travel romp that whisks its modern-day heroine to a bygone London that probably never existed outside our fevered cultural imagination. It’s the era of Dusty Springfield and Biba; great music, cool threads. British writer-director Edgar Wright takes a grab-bag of 1960s ingredients, paints them up and makes them dance to his tune. His film is thoroughly silly and stupidly enjoyable. To misquote William Faulkner, the past isn’t dead, it’s propping up the bar at the Café de Paris.

“You like that retro style, huh?” a classmate remarks to Eloise Turner, a 21st-century design student – and you can bet your house she does. Eloise is up from deepest Cornwall to attend the London College of Fashion, still haunted by her mother’s suicide and struggling to find her feet in a city that’s not like the one she expected. Thomasin McKenzie plays her as your classic fairytale ingenue, guileless and wide-eyed, entirely out of her depth. She’s eyeing the future but her feet are stuck in the past.

Behind the bloodshed: the chilling untold stories about Charles Manson

Posted on May 15, 2019 by Admin

Tarantino’s epic is the big draw at Cannes. But there are other Manson movies around – including one about what ultimately happened to the young women who fell under the murderer’s spell

Over the last half century, one villain has loomed large over Hollywood. The gruesome murders committed by Charles Manson and his followers in the summer of 1969 have filled countless films and documentaries about stardom and the debaucheries of the 1960s. But his malign influence extends far beyond the screen. Aside from murdering eight people, Manson and his disciples – the Family – have been blamed for wiping out the counterculture, free love, communes and hippies.

Three new films are making fresh attempts to reckon with “the symbol of animalism and evil”, as Rolling Stone magazine called him. The biggest is Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, about to premiere at the Cannes film festival. Set in Los Angeles during the Manson era, the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a fading TV western star and Brad Pitt as his stunt double, both attempting to make the leap to the big screen. Margot Robbie plays Sharon Tate – the actor and wife of director Roman Polanski – who was brutally murdered by the Family. Manson, a background figure in the film, is played by Damon Herriman.