Those who know the work of illustrator Dave Shrigley will understand how easy it is to fall into cliché when describing his work. Words such as ‘twisted’, ‘dark’ and ‘disturbing’ seem inadequate to express his truly warped view of the world and the people who inhabit it. Now, with the aid of Chris Shepherd who directed the wonderful short film Dad’…

  It seems that DVD companies have decided to educate us in cinema history as they’ve gone ‘auteur crazy’ with a number of box sets and new releases containing the greatest work of some of the most famous and influential directors of the past hundred years. So if your DVD collection is mostly populated by the films of Steve Guttenberg and Pauly Shore, then you&rsq…

Last night I rewatched Tarsem's, The Fall. I first saw it at Edinburgh Film Festival in 2008 amidst a dreamy stream of great films. Starting with a bong toking Ben Kingsley going through a breakup in The Wackness, to a man named Nick discovering the delights of Swedish spiritualism through the painfully funny Three Miles North of Molkom, onto Wayne Wang's 1000 years of Good Prayers, taking its ti…

Shame there weren't as many celebrity mags back in Joan's day, as she would've provided them with endless fodder: casting couch connoisseur, a sideline in prostitution, four marriages, Mommie Dearest... and a few films.   Shame there weren't as many celebrity mags back in Joan's day, as she would've provided them with endless fodder: casting couch…

  CAUTION: SPOILERS AHEAD You've heard about it, Chris Morris' jihad comedy, making terrorism funny and all that. How does he do it? Well the Dad's Army influence is certainly there: the comedy is in the power play and false grandeur of some deluded blokes who want to show the world what for. Four young men with very similar accents to those of the lead characters here managed just t…

As the  50th London Film Festival gets underway, a new update from Suchandrika Chakrabarti, with previews of Penny Woolcock's Mischief Night, the Spanish Dark Blue Almost Black and a real-life Argentine horror story, Buenos Aires 1977.             Mischief Night (Penny Woolcock, UK, 2006)   The third part o…

If Grizzly Man was too scary, but you still haven't had your Dr.Doolittle fix, this documentary might be the one for you.   Director: JUDY IRVING Starring: MARK BITTNER, JUDY IRVING, LOADS OF PARROTS Unemployed 'dharma bum', Mark Bittner, has become the modern-day 'St Francis of San Francisco', by tending to the squawking parrot population. The director, Irving, dia…

Director Jason Reitman's debut feature somehow manages to make a sympathetic character out of a tobacco spokesperson...  Surprisingly, for a film whose main character works in the tobacco industry, no one lights up at all in Thank You For Smoking. As the director has put it, to have lots of people smoking in the movie would distract the audience from his intended aim: to satiris…

  Stranded on that no-man's land between graduation and a media career? So was Engish Television and Film graduate Sabrina Ferro, but no more. Instead she's launched a high quality glossy mag aimed at people like herself and at those on the lookout for rising talent. Media Directions, as the director's chair on the front cover exclaims, is dedicated to showcasing…

      Which is to avoid this self-important, uninspiring look at the effect of police incompetence upon race relations.   It's a shame, as the film begins so intriguingly. It opens with a disturbed young woman, Brenda Martin (Julianne Moore), from a posh suburb in New Jersey, who stumbles into hospital with injuries to her hands. She…

Given that he's written more than 30 novels and numerous short stories it's surprising that the works of Philip K. Dick haven't been adapted more in Hollywood. Yet, from 1982s Blade Runner to the just released A Scanner Darkly there have only been 5 films based on the work of the celebrated science fiction author. In Counterfeit Worlds Brian J Robb examines Dick's career and the H…

Life is a strange thing. It keeps interfering when you want to do a DVD column. Yes, due to lots and lots of things, Special Edition has been away for a long time. But it’s never been forgotten and Laurence Boyce returns with Special Edition # 29 complete with lots and lots of discs, including an absolutely ton of British cinema, that you can get to keep you entertained whilst you absolutely igno…

Television interviews for set-piece programmes somehow always get everything just right; the framing of the subject on screen, the facial modelling that gives definition to the features without making the face into something more like a silhouette. In the best interview examples, the lighting camera operator’s skill appears to put an apparently 3-D image on to a 2-D television screen – and in HD…

It’s starting to become an interesting time to be a DVD fan. With an increasing number of movies being released on the format for a second time (watch out in the next column for a review of the upcoming ‘Definitive Edition’ of Fight Club which might gall the thousands who bought the already extra laden DVD only a – comparatively - scant few years ago) and talk of B…

This book’s subtitle is The Power of Color in Visual Storytellling, but it’s also something of a tribute to the power of a good title. I would defy anyone to spot this in a bookshop and not have their curiosity aroused. Publisher: Focal Press ISBN: 0-240-80688-3 Published date: Current Country of origin: US Subject area: Colour in Film Design price: £24.99 Personally, I’ve know all about the i…

Whether it’s the fountain where Anita Ekberg frolicked in La Dolce Vita, the scuzzy convenience store where Dante wasn’t even supposed to be that day in Clerks or the hotel where Jack Nicholson went a little bit bonkers in The Shining, there are plenty of movie locations that remain a source of pilgrimage for holiday makers, movie buffs and – on occasion – completely bar…

Is the end of February already. It only feels like five minutes ago when the tinsel was all around and the Xmas decorations were up. Actually, it was, but that’s because Laurence Boyce has been dead busy watching a new batch of DVDs for you to all enjoy. Let Special Edition # 37 take you on its usual journey through some of the best shiny discs for you to enjoy from brand new feature films to the…

  There are plenty of surprises cooking up in the Shah family's Indian restaurant in Pratibha Parmar's debut feature, Nina's Heavenly Delights. Described by one of the cast as "My Beautiful Restaurant," the film's director acknowledges that ground- breaking launderette drama's influence upon her colourful and amusing romp across some of the boundaries that c…

  Reviewed by James MacGregor Publisher; Wildeye      ISBN 978-0-9541899-3-8 It has the elements of all good screen stories; the long slow build of anticipation, the tension, the frustrations and finally, the reveal. Yet the wildlife film is film art in a class all of its own, requiring painstaking research and endless patience, often in less than com…

It’s the time again to move your eyes away from the screen and let them drift over to the printed word. In Page To Screen # 3, those books that are influenced by – and, indeed, influence - the worlds of film and television are brought to the fore as Laurence Boyce examines how someone is making a monkey out of biographies, someone else is making us nostalgic for classic Saturda…

  Starsuckers is the second feature-length documentary from writer/director Chris Atkins, who made the BAFTA-nominated Taking Liberties in 2007. The film takes an in-depth look into celebrity culture - and sleb journalism - and the results are both laugh-out-loud funny and worrying. The issue of made-up stories making their way into showbiz gossip columns was discussed by George Clooney and…

Here's some picks of filmmaker owned and distributed free (as in lunch) feature films you can download or watch online that really stood out over the last year. Most of them are 'pay what you want' and as ultra-indies they are produced, distributed and promoted by the filmmaker - so anything you donate goes to help them pay off their debts and make more. Nasty Old People Hanna Sköld, Sweden, 20…

The Lives of Others, which won the Best Foreign Language Film at this year's Oscars, will be available to buy next Monday. The critically-acclaimed film, which was nominated in an unprecedented 11 Deutsche Filmpreis categories (German equivalent of the Oscars), is set in East Germany in 1984. It follows a member of the Stasi, the secret police force of the German Democratic Republic, wh…

Subtitled "The Oil Crash," this is, as co-director/producer Basil Gelpke puts it, "A film that promises to be a bit of a downer." He isn't  really joking: the documentary looks at the amount of oil likely to be left in the ground (not much) and what preparations have been made for a post-plentiful-oil society (not many). It's a wake-up call that comes without t…

My very first encounter with a full feature film budget was quite terrifying, simply on grounds of complexity and sheer weight and volume of paper.  There were lots of  “line items” all number coded, running down the left margin. Thousands of them. The bundled pages would pass muster for a telephone directory. I felt the urge to run, but I swallowed, stayed and sent for a bo…