Stephen Arnell

'There’s no such thing as bad snow, just bad skiers' (Popular skiing saying) The 2022 Olympics have to an extent been overshadowed by diplomatic boycotts over host nation China’s alleged human rights abuses. The US, UK, Canada, Australia, Lithuania, Kosovo, Belgium, Denmark, and Estonia will not be sending any ministers or officials. Other countries (New Zealand, Austria, Slovenia, Sweden, and the Netherlands) cite Covid concerns for the lack of official representation. Whether boycotting the event will have any discernible effect is debatable. France’s President Macron certainly doesn’t think so: 'I don't think we should politicise these topics, especially if it is to take steps that are insignificant and symbolic.

Are black and white films making a comeback – or did they ever really go away?  With Belfast, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Passing, Mank and Roma all generating critical buzz, they are certainly having a moment. Even after the advent of colour motion pictures, black and white movies continued to be made, chiefly for economic (lower cost stock) and aesthetic reasons. Some present-day directors have even released monochrome versions of their colour movies, including The Mist (Frank Darabont, 2008) Logan: Noir (James Mangold, 2017) and Guillermo del Toro’s remake of 1947’s Nightmare Alley (2021). Why is the Black and White format growing in popularity?

After some lengthy troughs and fallows, iconic Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar is enjoying a purple patch with critical acclaim for 2019’s autobiographical Pain & Glory and his new picture Parallel Mothers. Star Penélope Cruz is tipped to have a good chance of winning the Best Actress Academy Award for her performance as middle-aged mother-to-be Janis Martinez. But if anyone believes that advancing years (he turned 72 last September) have tamed the provocateur, they should think again, as the film’s theatrical release poster (featuring a lactating nipple) was temporarily censored by Instagram.

With Russia back in the news yet again, it’s interesting to note how comparatively few English language movies set in the country there actually are. Admittedly in TV there’s been an uptick, with two recent series on Catherine The Great in youth/middle age, the Andrew Davies Pass Notes version of War & Peace, McMafia and the multi award-winning Chernobyl.

Netflix’s adaptation of Robert Harris’ political thriller Munich – The Edge of War attempts in part to rehabilitate the reputation of former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (played by Jeremy Irons), popularly believed to be the architect of appeasement in relation to Hitler’s Germany. Nick Cohen, in the pages of The Spectator attempted with some success to rebut the revisionist apologia for Chamberlain. To my eyes, the crux of the matter is whether taking stronger measures against Hitler at the beginning of his dictatorship would have deterred him – or that Chamberlain’s accommodations with the Nazis provided vital time to build up Britain’s armed forces and acclimatise public opinion to conflict with Germany.

Billionaires (especially of the tech variety) are constantly in the news. From the ‘space’ exploration antics of Messrs Bezos, Musk and Branson to the guilty verdicts recently handed out to Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and of course, the possibility of criminal charges against former POTUS Donald Trump (who still claims billionaire status, despite wife Melania’s current yard sale). Elizabeth Holmes will be the subject of Adam (Don't Look Up) McKay's upcoming biopic Bad Blood, with Jennifer Lawrence playing the suspiciously baritone-voiced grifter. Incidentally, Mark Rylance played tech billionaire Peter Isherwell in Don’t Look Up (2021), a character owing an obvious debt to the oddly enunciating trio of Musk, Zuckerberg, and Holmes.

The 79th Golden Globe Awards take place on Sunday 9th January at The Beverly Hilton, Beverly Hills, California. The awards this year are not without controversy. The Golden Globes usual U.S. broadcaster NBC, together with various media outlets, actors, and other creative types say that they will shun the ceremony over the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s failure to increase the diversity of the organisation’s membership. Most notably Tom Cruise handed back the Golden Globes he achieved for Magnolia, Jerry Maguire and Born on the Fourth of July. In response to this and other criticisms, in early May 2021, the HFPA announced a plan to increase membership with a 'specific focus on recruiting Black members' and resolving assorted 'ethical lapses'.

As we count down the remaining days and hours to 2022, a cinematic tour through ten motion pictures when midnight has special meaning. Since Midnight Mass is celebrated on the evening when Christmas Eve gives way to Christmas Day, it makes sense that the hour is not associated with evil or supernatural goings on – except, that is, for St George’s Eve. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Jonathan Harker is warned: 'It is the eve of St. George’s Day. Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?

The Harper Lee quote ‘You can choose your friends, but not your family’ never appears more apt than during the Christmas season. Movies about family dysfunction often follow a familiar pattern, with grievances aired, secrets revealed, lessons learned and (eventually) fences mended: The Family Stone (2005) Disney+, Amazon Rent/Buy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xcax2cwxuBg The Family Stone has snuck up on us as a contemporary semi-Christmas classic, aided by a fine cast and acerbic one-liners. It’s culture clash time again, as conservative New York career woman Meredith Morton (Sarah Jessica Parker) spends Christmas in rural Connecticut with the bohemian family of boyfriend Everett Stone (Dermot Mulroney).

According to Collins English Dictionary, a ‘Feel-Good’ movie is one 'which presents people and life in a way which makes those who watch it feel happy and optimistic' Of course, one person's feel-good picture could be another's syrupy turn off. I have yet to see The Sound of Music (dubbed by star Christopher Plummer as ‘The Sound of Mucus’), Frozen or ET, and have no plans to do so. With this in mind, here’s my selection of movies that should keep the whole family watching together, with enough knowing humour or inadvertent yuks to engage the adults. Stardust (2007) Amazon Rent/Buy https://www.youtube.com/watch?

‘Timing is everything’, as the saying goes. The death of West Side Story composer Stephen Sondheim must have seemed especially poignant to Steven Spielberg coming as it did a week before the premiere of the new film version of his acclaimed musical. The composer surely would have delighted in the critical acclaim being accorded to Steven Spielberg’s remake. 'He and I became good friends,' the director told reporters at the film's premiere. The musical famously updates Romeo & Juliet to 1950s New York City. Spielberg keeps the action in the 1950s, with his recreation of the city at the time earning special praise.

This week, the southern counties of England were treated to the rare sight of November snow. The beauty of tla (Inuit for snow) is that it can render the most prosaic locale picturesque. Snow is an impossible element to control of course – especially in the movies, but the fake stuff is usually on hand for when Mother Nature fails to deliver. Before the era of CGI, cotton was famously used on Hollywood film sets in the 20s, until it was deemed too much of a fire risk. A mix of salt and flour was favoured in Charlie Chaplin's Gold Rush. In It's A Wonderful Life, foamite, sugar and water were put through a wind machine to create the wintry scenes of Bedford Falls, while Dr Zhivago favoured marble dust.

Ageing screen siren Norma Desmond’s lament that 'it's the pictures that got small' in Billy Wilder’s classic black comedy doesn’t appear to apply to the Hollywood stars of today, who only a decade or so ago saw acting on TV as the sign of a career in box office free fall. The warning signs were there for all to see; when oldsters Charlton Heston and Barbara Stanwyck starred in the 1980s Dynasty spin-off The Colbys, no-one imagined they were doing it for anything other than pecuniary reasons. More recently there has been a rash of US actors appearing in British shows, although admittedly not quite the stature of Chuck and Babs.

Actor and singer Jared Leto’s eye-catching performance as the late Paolo Gucci in Ridley Scott’s biopic The House of Gucci is already generating talk of a second supporting actor Academy Award, after his win for Dallas Buyers Club in 2014. In The House of Gucci Leto gets a full prosthetic makeover to transform him into the dumpy, overweight, and balding former Gucci VP and chief designer, following in the footsteps of Tom Cruise’s turn as fictional Hollywood producer Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder (2008). Leto’s performance as Gucci hasn’t gone down well with his daughter Patrizia, who called it: 'Horrible, horrible. I still feel offended.' House of Gucci isn’t the first time Leto has donned a fat suit and prosthetic jowls.

'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' Father of the Atomic Bomb Robert Oppenheimer once claimed that these words from Hindu scripture’s Bhagavad Gita raced through his mind when he witnessed the first nuclear weapon detonate on July 16, 1945. Much of Oppenheimer’s life and work are seen through the lens of the moral dilemma he faced in leading the Manhattan Project that developed the deadly bombs (dubbed ‘Fatman’ and ‘Little Boy’) which destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a month later. Director Christopher Nolan has chosen the scientist as the subject of his next film, the follow-up to the underwhelming Tenet (2020).

This year is a bumper year for the UK in terms of international summitry; in June Prime Minister Boris Johnson hosted the G7 ‘Build Back Better’ conference in Cornwall; and on Sunday he welcomes participating countries to 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow. Before the 13-day summit, which perhaps ominously begins on Halloween, the PM jets off to Rome for the G20. International conferences and high-stakes meetings being largely static events, are not inherently cinematic, although movies such as Oslo (2021), The French Minister (2013), Paris 1919 (2009), In the Loop (2009), Conspiracy (2001), and The Name of the Rose (1986) all enjoyed popularity with audiences.

The Prime Minister is known to be fond of dropping pop culture movie references into his speeches, so it came as no surprise when he threw in a few attempted zingers when addressing the Global Investment Summit on Tuesday morning. Given the audience, it may have seemed impolitic for the Prime Minister to quote Trading Places (1983) and Wall Street (1987), two movies that deal with greed, corporate corruption, and financial fraud. Peppa Pig, Adele, Coldplay, and Ed Sheeran also made appearances in his speech; the latter trio termed as a 'cyclotron of talent.' As a man in his mid-fifties, many of Boris’s filmic allusions are from movies that he may have seen in his childhood, teens, and twenties, maybe in the local Windsor/Slough fleapit as a pupil at Eton College.

With the recent Netflix release of Jake Gyllenhaal’s nordic-inspired The Guilty, as the nights draw in, what better time for a smorgasbord of films from the land of the midnight sun?  The Guilty is a remake of the 2018 Danish film of the same name about a troubled 911 operator who attempts to come to the rescue of a distressed caller.  Since the literary, TV and movie phenomenon of Nordic Noir first broke out from its Scandinavian confines in the 2000s, the genre has become an established part of UK culture, along with cosy lifestyle cousins hygge, lagom and lykke.

If No Time to Die and the inevitable 007 re-runs on ITV haven’t already sated your appetite for Bond-style espionage thrills, there’s a veritable smorgasbord of spy movies available to assuage your hunger. Some of the actors who portrayed Bond also essayed secret agents of a different stripe, with Sean Connery (The Russia House), Pierce Brosnan (The Tailor of Panama), Daniel Craig (Munich, Archangel) and Timothy Dalton (Permission to Kill, The Rocketeer) all dabbling in non-007 cloak and dagger roles. For such a long-lasting and successful franchise, it’s perhaps odd that the producers (Eon) haven’t yet contrived to release any 007 film spin-offs.

Denis Villeneuve's eagerly awaited remake of Frank Herbert's sci-fi novel Dune features a host of barons, dukes, and princes living under a Galactic Emperor. In his dystopia, Herbert depicts a highly stratified society of competing guilds, noble houses, human computer schools (‘Mentats’) and religious cults, with a Padishah Emperor playing them off against each other to retain his place at the top of the heap. Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) the son of a ruined Ducal house rises to become a Madhi-like figure on the planet of Dune, the only source of ‘Spice,’ a substance that both enables faster-than-light space travel and prolongs human life.