STAYING IN
STAYING IN REVIEWS DVDs to enjoy from the comfort of your sofa INTERVIEW IAIN DE CAESTECKER Hot Another Happy Ending (Kaleidoscope Home Entertainment), Mon 10 Feb
To say Scottish actor Iain de Caestecker had a good 2013 is a bit of an understatement. ‘You don’t notice it as much when you’re in amongst it, but like anything you do I try to make myself aware that there are tens of thousands of people that are just as capable or more capable of doing it than I am, so you have to keep reminding yourself how lucky you are,’ explains de Caestecker. And if you missed any of de Caestecker’s
big screen outings now is the perfect time to catch up as Not Another Happy Ending hits DVD. Starring Karen Gillan, this breezy romcom also closed last year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival. ‘I played Roddy, who was designed to be the comic relief,’ adds de Caestecker. ‘I read the script and knew they were filming in Glasgow which was a big influence on me so I said “yes” quite quickly.’
De Caestecker also took on a smaller role in gritty drama Filth (coincidently released on DVD on the same day as NAHP). ‘I’m a big fan of Irvine Welsh and obviously Trainspotting is such a big institution in Scotland. I got to play all my scenes with James McAvoy which meant a lot to me. He’s very giving in rehearsals, very humble with it and happy to give everyone else ideas which was great.’ However it’s not just about cinema: de Caestecker also landed a lead role in the highly anticipated
Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, the first TV show directly linked to Marvel’s superhero blockbusters (which returns to our screens on Channel 4 this March). ‘The origin of the show is tied into the movies but we’re also trying to establish ourselves as characters in our own right, even though we are heavily based within the Marvel world. There’s some really exciting stuff coming up and I’m excited to see how people react.’ (Henry Northmore)
DVD BOXSET BATES MOTEL (Universal) ●●●●● DVD WINGS (Eureka) ●●●●●
lot of what’s fun and entertaining about this show is that, when you cut to 17 years later, he and I as characters are both wondering what happened in the interim to these two men,’ says McConaughey in a recent interview with collider.com. ‘Then, you’re going to slowly i nd out what happened. You’re going to i nd out if what I’m telling is the truth. Where are our stories the same? Where do they veer from what really happened? What happened in that 17 years and how we’re connected is really the fun of the eight episodes.’ There is also plenty of fun to be had on rewatching those eight episodes with tiny details being revealed on closer inspection. But don’t get too attached to the Woody / Matthew chemistry, as the proposed second series will start from scratch with a completely new case and a different set of actors and characters. It’s merely another innovation in a show that delivers a further piece of evidence in the argument that television continues to out-run cinema when it comes to putting epoch-shaping art on our screens.
True Detective starts on Sky Atlantic, Sat 22 Feb, 9pm.
Alfred Hitchcock’s proto-slasher Psycho is rightly considered a celluloid classic, so it’s unsurprising that the film’s legacy has been plundered on more than one occasion including three sequels, a shot-by-shot remake and now a TV spin off, Bates Motel. The series takes place in the modern world but to all intents and purposes works as a prequel to the original 1960 film. The real key to the show is seeing the relationship between ‘Mother’ (Vera Farmiga) and the young Norman (Freddie Highmore) that sets the fledgling serial killer on a path to madness. We watch them move into the dilapidated motel and become embroiled in the criminal underworld of White Pine Bay, a town steeped in drug money and human trafficking. And if you can get past the sacrilegious idea
of meddling with Hitchcock’s sublime thriller, you’ll find plenty to enjoy in Bates Motel’s twisting narrative. It might play fast and loose with the source material (did you know Norman had a brother?) but Farmiga and Highmore are particularly strong. We all know where this is heading but they make it an intriguing road to travel on nonetheless. (Henry Northmore)
From Bobby De Niro’s weight gain in Raging Bull to Oscar Isaac learning a few folk tunes for Inside Llewyn Davis, much can sometimes be made of an actor’s obsessive commitment to a particular role. Yet surely nothing can quite match the feat of Buddy Rogers and Richard Arlen, whose many scenes in the cockpit for William Wellman’s World War I-set silent classic Wings are the result of bypassing the stuntmen and literally learning how to fly a plane. This fact certainly adds an extra frisson to a movie that already has much about it to admire. In 1929, it won the inaugural Best Picture
Oscar and helped make an international star out of Clara Bow, who plays the gutsy girl-next- door holding a candle for one of the men sent to bomb the Germans out of the skies above France. The flight sequences are still highly impressive today and when tragedy strikes our heroes, it is genuinely moving. Of course, some of it is a bit over-wrought and the elongated drunk-hallucination scene could have happily been chopped down to about 20 seconds, but Wings is testament to a bygone age’s ability to make powerful art. (Brian Donaldson)
23 Jan–20 Feb 2014 THE LIST 31