Film
Fr/m news just to keep you amused
I So, ex US Vice President Al Gore is coming to Scotland to champion his new environmentally concerned film/documentary The Inconvenient Truth as part of the 60th Edinburgh International Film Festival. He will introduce the film and hang around for a Q&A afterwards on 27 August at 3.30pm. Let's just hope he doesn’t bring his censorious wife with him. The EIFF programme has been announced and - though not everything is confirmed yet - tickets for many of the films are now available online at www.edfilmfest.org.uk (50p off each ticket if you book before 14 August) and by phone on 0131 623 8030. See main news story, page 7.
I With the recent sale of New Yorker Theatre and the demise of the Anthology Cinema signalling a sad downturn in the New York independent film scene. news that a possible new independent cinema may be rising from the ashes of the Cowgate fire in Edinburgh needs to be welcomed. Rough Cuts feels a campaign coming on. Watch this space.
WIN Forbidden Zone on DVD
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Reviews
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SUPERHERO ACTION ADVENTURE SUPERMAN RETURNS (12A) 154mm .000
. . . and his arrival is, in every sense of the dictionary definition of the word, ‘sublime’. Like the Man of Steel himself, Superman Returns is at once awesome, inspiring, grandiose and supremely graceful. It's hard to imagine a more perfect big screen realisation of a literary creation that surely represents the purest and most fabulously imaginative incarnation of the hero in all of fantastic fiction.
Having done a marvellous job bringing the X-Men to the big screen, director Bryan Singer jumps ship, re- starting the DC Comics/Warner Bros franchise where the second Christopher Reeve film left off in 1980. Actually, five years have passed since the events of Superman II, during which time the Son of Krypton (Brandon Routh, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Reeve but who nevertheless makes the part his own) has been absent from Earth on a quest to find far flung surviving fragments of his long since destroyed home world. Returning home empty handed and heavy of heart, Kai-El (Superman’s Kryptonian name) finds everything and nothing has changed on his adoptive planet. Humans need a hero to look up to (literally and
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metaphorically) more than ever. Archenemy Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey having a great deal of fun clowning about) is out of prison and hatching another murderous, moneymaking scheme. But most troubling of all for Kai-El, love of his life Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) is married with a child.
Singer and his X-Men 2 writers Dan Harris and Michael Dougherty have, wisely, focused on Superman‘s emotional concerns. The Man of Steel might be the most physically powerful being on the planet, but love. hope and despair aren’t edifices that can be vaulted in a single bound. Fantastic as the superhero milieu may be it’s the juxtaposition with domestic detail that makes Superman so compelling, a fact his creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster knew only too well.
Not that Superman Returns, budgeted at a staggering $250 million, short changes audiences when it comes to spectacle. From the micro-feat of a bullet bouncing off his impervious retina to the sight of Superman lifting a whole continent on his back. this film’s wow factor is sensational. You won’t just believe a man can fly; you'll be soaring straight up into the clouds with him.
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