Tag Archives: British film

RIP Norman J. Warren (1942 – 2021)

Amateur Norman J. Warren documentary by Ben Simpson

Norman J. Warren was an English film director known for such films as Satan’s Slave (1976), Prey (1977) and Terror (1978).

He is also credited with one of the first narrative sex films, Her Private Hell.

Doing Rude Things 1995 documentary

He is interviewed in the Doing Rude Things 1995 documentary from 28:45 onwards.

RIP Michael Apted (1941 – 2021)

Michael Apted is a British director famous for a body of diverse films.

Up

I give you Up (1964 – today).

The Up Series is a series of documentary films that have followed the lives of fourteen British children since 1964, when they were seven years old.

So far the documentary has had eight episodes spanning 49 years (one episode every seven years).

The children were selected to represent the range of socio-economic backgrounds in Britain at that time, with the explicit assumption that each child’s social class predetermines their future.

“The Double’ is World Cinema Classic #218

The Double is a 2013 dark comedy written and directed by relative newcomer Richard Ayoade, starring Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network) and Mia Wasikowska. The film is based on the novella The Double by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It is about a man driven to mental breakdown when he is usurped by a doppelgänger.

“Ayoade has cited Orson Welles’ Kafka adaptation “The Trial” as a key influence, with its similarly labyrinthine sense of entrapment, along with “Alphaville,” “Eraserhead” and the dry Nordic comedies of Roy Andersson and Aki Kaurismaki; the latter’s imprint is particularly apparent in “The Double’s” regular eruptions of deadpan humor and its rich, almost Sirkian color palette. And so long as there are cinematic references to be footnoted, it’s hard not to flash back to “Rear Window” when Simon uses a telescope to spy on Hannah in her apartment — at first with longing, then with frustration as he bears helpless witness to her trysts with James.” –Justin Chang [1]

The Double is World Cinema Classic #218.