Dirk’s Five: Robin Williams
If you’re in the UK you probably woke up on Tuesday to the sad news about Robin Williams (followed this morning by Lauren Bacall, it seems the grim reaper has switched to […]
Author Archives: Andy
ANDY: Scarecrow (Schatzberg, US, 1973)
SCARECROW is the textbook example of a film that was overshadowed even before it was released by the projects its cast were working on either side of it. Al Pacino […]
Dirk’s Five: Going Postal
I’m not sure what exactly this is commemorating, perhaps they’re trying to use pictures of Keira Knightley to divert attention away from selling off Royal Mail for half its market […]
ANDY: Alice (Švankmajer, Czechoslovakia, 1988)
Inspiration behind hundreds of terrible amateur attempts at stop-motion on youtube, Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer painstakingly combines a mixture of animated clay and ordinary household objects with live action to […]
Dirk’s Five – How do you solve a problem like Mike Leigh (ah)?
In the comments to my piece on NAKED (1993), an issue was raised that comes up a lot when discussing Mike Leigh’s films. Chris said: I sometimes find that his […]
ANDY: Naked (Leigh, UK, 1993)
NAKED is unique amongst the films I have or will be picking for this list, in that I once spent an evening with its director, Mike Leigh. At the time […]
Starburst Memories: Robert Mitchum “Calypso – is like so…”
The OED defines “completist” as “An obsessive (and often indiscriminate) collector”. The key word here is “indiscriminate”. I have amassed some crap in my time. The gap in my Bowie […]
Dirk’s Five – Gotta Mitchum All
He’s one of the finest actors I’ve ever had anything to do with. His air of casualness, or rather, his lack of pomposity is put down as a lack of […]
ANDY: Out of the Past (Tourneur, US, 1947)
In the interests of full disclosure, Robert Mitchum is my all-time favourite screen actor. No one else has ever been able to turn in such a run of ground-breaking performances […]
Starburst Memories: How To Write Groundhog Day by Danny Rubin
The rumor is that I wrote Groundhog Day very quickly. That is entirely true, if you don’t count most of it. ‘How To Write Groundhog Day’ by Danny Rubin is […]
The Dirk Malcolm Alternative 