Alps (aka Alpeis)

Aggeliki Papoulia in Alps

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 3 August Jesse Owens wins the 100 metres, 1936 On this day in 1936, Jesse Owens won the 100 metres at a race meeting hosted by Adolf Hitler, a man who believed the black man was inferior to the white man. It was one of four gold medals Owens won at the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936, and it put the hat on a great year for Owens. He’d set three world records in less than an hour the previous year at the Big Ten track meeting, which has since been called “the greatest 45 minutes in sport”. Hitler did not … Read more

11 March 2013-03-11

Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Master

Out in the UK this week The Master (EV, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Paul Thomas Anderson’s interesting rather than great follow-up to There Will Be Blood follows shell-shocked war veteran Joaquin Phoenix into the ranks of what looks like Scientology in its early days. Like his films Boogie Nights, Magnolia and There Will Be Blood, The Master deals with fakery and the narratives people live by, Philip Seymour Hoffman giving it lots of Orson Welles orotundity as the cult’s charismatic leader, while PTA lays on the period detail with a cultural anthropologist’s precision, demonstrating how you went about building a new religion from nothing in the mid 20th century – a cooky mix of patrician … Read more