Lego Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Out

Darths Maul and Vader face off in Lego Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Out

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 28 January Lego patents its brick design, 1958 On this day in 1958 the Lego company patented the brick design it had been working on for five years. Originally a company created by a carpenter in 1932 to produce wooden toys (called Lego from the Danish phrase Leg Godt – play well) Lego had been into the production of plastic bricks since 1947. By the early 1950s more than half of the company’s output was plastic. In 1954 Godtfred, son of founder Ole Kirk Christiansen, acting on a conversation he’d had with an overseas buyer, began working on the idea of … Read more

18 March 2013-03-18

Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva

Out in the UK this week Amour (Artificial Eye, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD) Whatever you say about the director of Hidden or Funny Games,  no one does “pitiless gaze” quite as well as Michael Haneke. In Amour he takes one of  his standing obsessions, the life bourgeois, and yokes to it a subject rarely covered in film – the loss of dignity and disappearance of the self that happens to most of us as death comes close. Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva are the film’s focus, playing a pair of sprightly retired piano teachers whose quietly tasteful, cultured lifestyle is interrupted when one of them has a stroke. What follows is harrowing but almost inevitable, the … Read more