Scott treads warily in the footsteps of Norman
Sunday 10 April 2011
No Australian has ever won the Masters. The names of the six runners-up are a painful reminder of 75 years of Aussie hurt among the Augusta pines. Please bow your heads and shed a tear for: Jim Ferrier (1950), Bruce Crampton (1972), Jack Newton (1980) and poor old Greg Norman (1986, '87 and '96).
Kate Hudson and Matt Bellamy buy £4m home
Monday 28 February 2011
Kate Hudson and Matt Bellamy have purchased a £4 million home in the UK.
Kate Hudson thinks she's having a girl
Thursday 27 January 2011
Kate Hudson thinks she is expecting a baby girl.
DVD: Knight and Day, For retail & rental (20th Century Fox)
Sunday 12 December 2010
A limp romantic comedy that copies The Bourne Identity might sound like an ideal vehicle for, say, Gerard Butler and Kate Hudson.
Trident decision delayed until after the election
Tuesday 19 October 2010
Arguments about the need to replace the Trident nuclear weapons system will continue to rage until the next general election after the Prime Minister announced a delay of at least six years.
DVD: The Killer Inside Me (18)
Friday 01 October 2010
Adapted from Jim Thompson's 1952 novel of the same name, The Killer Inside Me follows Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford (superbly played by Casey Affleck), a reliable member of the small Texan town community who hides a dark secret, which slowly reveals itself.
What Casey did next: the insider at Hollywood's dark heart
Friday 06 August 2010
John Walsh: A film fails if the viewer turns away
Tuesday 15 June 2010
I don't know when a mainstream film sparked off so much argument as The Killer Inside Me, the noir thriller by Michael Winterbottom. I've had so many heated conversations about it, my head is spinning. The film, as you must surely have read, features two scenes in which women (played by Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson) are viciously attacked out of the blue by the baby-faced, castrato-voiced, faux -charming cop, played by Casey Affleck, with whom they've become sexually involved. The violence is extremely graphic, relentless, shocking and hard to watch; but should we criticise Winterbottom for the extreme quality of his depiction? If he were depicting an earthquake, wouldn't we applaud him for making it as graphic and bone-rattling as he, and the sophisticated resources of a film studio, can make it? Isn't there a post-feminist case, that the more realistically you portray violence against women, the more you'll show complacent people how disgusting it is?
The Killer Inside Me (18)
Sunday 06 June 2010
Cameras in pursuit of the unfilmable: Hollywood's impossible dreams
Sunday 06 June 2010
Tom Sutcliffe: What a Carrie on: will we ever agree?
Friday 04 June 2010
Another week, another cinematic misogyny row. Last week the silt was stirred up – in a rather intriguing way – by Sex and the City 2, a franchise extension which seemed to unleash an informal contest amongst largely male critics to come up with the most scathing dismissal. I think Philip French probably took gold with his, perhaps debatable, suggestion that "most reasonable people would probably prefer to be stoned to death in Riyadh than see this film a second time". But it wasn't just men who hated the movie. Women writers also weighed in, to lament the way that the characters they loved had been reduced to air-headed clothes-horses capable of nothing more creative than swiping a credit card. The charge of misogyny was aimed squarely at the film itself, with some ingenious bloggers introducing an extra triangulation, pointing out that the writers of series and film are gay, and that this might have fed into less than enlightened views about what women really care about.








