Film

Facebook: The misogynist with 500 million friends

"I want to take the entire college experience and put it online". That's what Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) says in The Social Network when he is outlining the idea for "the Facebook" in 2003. The Social Network is a complicated and amusing look at the conception and development of the world's most popular social networking site - now, with more than 500 million users in 207 countries, worth a cool 25 billion dollars. The story starts off with a boy and a girl, as most stories do. On an evening in 2003, Zuckerberg, then a student at Harvard University, USA, got dumped by his...

Hillbilly noir

Winter’s Bone is a thriller: a detective story in which a girl must find her drug-dealer father to prevent the repossession of her family home to pay his bond. Were it set in some urban future dystopia and populated by gun-toting pneumatic blondes, it would be heralded, like Sin City, for its noir echoes. Set instead among meth-cooking hillbillies in contemporary Missouri, Debra Granik’s striking third movie has instead been criticised as “poverty porn,” a term which, post Slumdog Millionaire, self-satisfied critics use offhand when they are made to think, against their will, about what life...

"Made in Dagenham" - Women workers making history

The strike for re-grading and equal pay organised by women sewing machinists at Ford Dagenham in 1968 is one of the heroic episodes of British labour movement history. In terms of both working-class militancy and women’s self-assertiveness, it was a product of movements that were already on the rise, and an important catalyst for further struggles and gains in the period that followed. The machinists originally called for their jobs to be re-graded from unskilled (Grade B) to semi-skilled (Grade C), but it soon became clear that a big underlying problem was the existence of a ‘women’s rate’...

Trevor Griffiths: from stage to screen and back again. An Interview

The screenwriter, director and playwright Trevor Griffiths is 75 this year. His latest play, A New World: A Life of Thomas Paine, was produced at the Globe Theatre in 2009, while The Wages of Thin, his first stage-play, was revived in London this spring. He spoke to Pat Yarker about his background, his enduring political concerns and his current work. Trevor Griffiths worked as a teacher, a liberal studies lecturer and a further education officer for the BBC before becoming a full time writer in 1970. His best-known stage play was Comedians (1975). For his film Reds, co-written with Warren...

Film Review: Bungling Jihadistas

This film about a small cell of Sheffield-based terrorists who conspire to wage Jihad against the West by slaughtering innocent civilians is, believe it or not, extremely funny. The film follows the group of suicide bombers as they attempt to hatch their plan, undergo training in Afghanistan, dodge the police and execute their attack. The process is chaotic, marred by constant bungling, stupid arguments and slapstick farce. But writer and director Chris Morris underlines that what interests him is the human reality of terrorist groups: “Terrorist cells have the same group dynamics as stag...

Film Review: "The Ghost Writer"

During the Moscow Trials in the 1930s, a story circulated that Stalin had never been a Bolshevik, but was an old Tsarist spy who had escaped detection after the revolution and remained in the party. Discussing the story, Trotsky rejected it, and said: even were it shown to be true, it would add nothing to our political and social understanding. It would only confuse the issues posed by Stalinism, seen in Marxist terms as a social and political phenomenon that had arisen as a counter-revolution against a working-class regime in an isolated and backward country whose development towards...

If Virginia Woolf wrote movies...

Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love defies expectations. British ice-queen Tilda Swinton shows unprecedented emotional range as Emma Recchi, a working-class Russian woman, married to an Italian entrepreneur. Perhaps it is a game of stereotypes: there is a strong expectation that the orthodox, Catholic Italian family would be unable to accept their daughter’s homosexuality (the daughter, played by Alba Rohrwacher is herself a stereotype: an Electrelane-listening short-haired art student) but the oppressed, passionate Russian is able to break this model, and loves her daughter unconditionally. This...

Hurt Locker: all pressure and action

At this year’s Oscars Kathryn Bigelow became the first female director to be given a gong — for her film Hurt Locker . It was a worthy winner in a crop of “Iraq war flicks”, but it is not political film. Hurt Locker follows an Army Bomb Squad unit during their last six weeks on tour in Iraq. The film begins with the death of their old commander, Sergeant Thompson (Guy Pearce), and the arrival of their new boss, Staff Sergeant Will James. The main plot follows the tension that arises between James and his crew, Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), over...

Only the Goddess and the UN...

These two recent films provide conflicting visions of the future. They are both set on mining outposts, a century or two in the future, but the conclusions of both films are rubbish. Neither film does what science fiction is supposed to do — tell a story of a possible future, whilst providing ideas that are relevant and useful to our current situation. Good science fiction is not utopian — it attempts to extrapolate current developments in human history and to speculate what might actually happen in the future. This may be through a metaphor, or through an alternate history that never occurred...

'Trainspotting': an endlessly innovative film

Possibly the most hyped British movie ever, Trainspotting is also one of the best British movies of recent years. From the team who made the unusual thriller Shallow Grave , and based on Irving Welsh’s cult novel, the film follows a group of Edinburgh skag-heads, and in particular Renton (Ewan McGregor), who wants to kick the habit. After a couple of false starts, he moves to London and is doing okay until two of his mates turn up, one of them on the run following an armed robbery. They drag him back down, until he gets involved in a big heroin sale which, if they get caught, would mean a long...

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