Tag: oscar
In Bruges
Director: Martin McDonagh
United Kingdom, 2008
In Bruges tells the story of two hitmen who lie low after a contract in the picturesque Belgian city. This is McDonagh’s first feature-length effort, having started out writing award-winning plays and then winning an Oscar for his short Six Shooter in 2006. Unsurprisingly then, the film is full of superb …
Atonement
Director: Joe Wright
United Kingdom, 2007
When a young girl uses a series of events to doom the romance of the housekeeper’s son and her elder sister, the course of each of their lives is changed beyond foresight. So goes the story of Atonement, an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s manipulative novel by upcoming British director Joe Wright.
Whilst …
Buena Vista Social Club
Director: Wim Wenders
Germany, 1999
Ry Cooder visited Cuba in 1996 to record sessions for an intended Afro-Cuban collaboration. The Africans never made it out of Mali leaving Cooder and World Circuit’s Nick Gold high and dry. What followed was pure serendipity: within three days Juan de Marcos González managed to put together an extraordinary collective of …
The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen)
Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Germany, 2006
Crass Hollywood remakes of European art film aren’t often successful. The big budgets, the bigger country and the biggest names tend to kill off every single cell of zeitgeist in the original. And I can see that happening here, when they get sad-jowled Nicolas Cage to emote all over this …
Double Indemnity
Director: Billy Wilder
United States, 1944
In some life insurance policies, where the policyholder dies in untypical circumstances, the policy pays out double. It’s called double indemnity, and when old Mr Dietrichson gets bumped off in revenge for the heinous crimes of being cranky and middle-aged, it’s made to look like he fell off a moving train.
It …
The Last King of Scotland
Director: Kevin Macdonald
United Kingdom, 2007
James McAvoy’s turn as leading man here is a superb mix of naïveté, youthful exuberance and abject fear. It’s perhaps unfortunate then that Last King will always be remembered – pretty much to the exclusion of everyone and everything else – for Forest Whitaker’s career-defining performance.
As General Idi Amin Dada, the …
Howards End
Director: James Ivory
United Kingdom, 1992
There’s something grating about the bourgeois self-sufficiency of the upper middle class during Forster’s era, as it sits around babbling blithely about suffrage and philosophy. Yet for all its self-professed modernism, it took two World Wars to truly change the character of English society.
Nevertheless, Forster is documenting progress here and Ruth …
Buena Vista Social Club presents (2007 Tour)
In my second year at University, among others I shared the house at 69 Harcourt Road with Bing, a Maths undergraduate of a certain culture who ate a lot of tinned salmon.
Bing and I both frequented the Showroom Cinema opposite the railway station. One day he returned from one particular screening raving about what he’d …
The Apostle
Director: Robert Duvall
United States, 1997
It’s amazing The Apostle isn’t better known, despite an Oscar nomination for Duvall’s intense, virtuoso acting performance. Duvall also wrote and directed his labour of love, and financed it himself, having been unable to find a backer throughout the 80s.
Perhaps the material scared them away. A denizen of the weird and …
Crash
Director: Paul Haggis
United States, 2004
Paul Haggis is one of those people who was obviously born to make movies. Already a decorated screenwriter of note, his mainstream directorial debut landed Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Editing at the Oscars.
Choosing Los Angeles to tell a series of interrelated stories (see also: Magnolia, Short Cuts), Haggis’ defining …
Elsewhere on MikePadgett.com …
Hot blog with mustard
Isn’t it warm right now? I resigned from my job this week. Caught myself wondering whether my next place of work might have air-conditioning! I’ve been really busy the last few weeks, moving …
- Originally published: 17 Jun 2005 in Personalia
Salsa Celtica
I first heard of Scottish band Salsa Celtica back in 2004, courtesy of WFMU radio’s Doug Schulkind. I was just starting to get interested in latin and world music at the time and …
- Originally published: 28 Apr 2008 in Concerts
Culture and Columbus in the Canaries
We took a short but very welcome trip to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in the third week of November. Las Palmas is Spain’s seventh largest city and the administrative capital of …
- Originally published: 3 Dec 2007 in Europe
The Departed
Director: Martin Scorsese United States, 2006 Scorsese has finally won a Best Director Oscar for The Departed. What a shame he didn’t win for one of his earlier and better efforts, because this one …
- Originally published: 26 Feb 2007 in Film
Pepi, Luci, Bom
Director: Pedro Almodóvar Spain, 1981 This is where it all began, the first in a long line of zany, colourful and passionate tales whose collective carnival forms the prodigious output of Almodóvar. Pepi, Luci, Bom …
- Originally published: 21 Aug 2006 in Film
Who is that guy?
Hello you. I'm Mike Padgett and I work in the technology sector as an Information Designer.
I also enjoy travel, concerts, films and walking.
I'm based in Brussels, Belgium. My current favourite Belgian beer is St Feuillien Brune.