Black Book

Carice Van Houten in Black Book

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 23 May Netherlands declares independence from Spain, 1568 On this day in 1568, the battle of Heligerlee was fought and won by the rebel army of William I of Orange, against the Duke of Alba, representative of the Hapsburg ruling dynasty. It marked the beginning of the 80 Years’ War for the independence of the Protestant Netherlands from Catholic Spanish rule. Though the rebels won the battle, they lost the campaign, due to lack of funds, and the rebellion sputtered out, only to flame up again in 1572. By 1581 the Netherlands were independent, though it took until 1648 for this … Read more

Submarine

Craig Roberts and Yasmin Paige

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 22 May USS Scorpion submarine sinks, 1968 On this day in 1968, a nuclear submarine called the USS Scorpion was lost at sea in mysterious circumstances with 99 crewmen on board. Scorpion had been built in 1958 and had gone into service in 1960. Operating on the US’s eastern seaboard, she mostly took part in patrols of the Atlantic coast as part of the on-going development of Cold War submarine tactics, though she did occasionally operate in European waters. In 1966 she filmed a Soviet missile launch after stealthily having made the “Northern Run” to Novaya Zemlya, a Russian archipelago on … Read more

Theatre of Blood

Vincent Price and Diana Rigg in Theatre of Blood

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 21 May Sam Jaffe born, 1901 On this day in 1901, one of the great characters of Hollywood was born, in Harlem, New York. Sam Jaffe, not to be confused with the actor of the same name, dropped out of high school and, thanks to his brother-in-law being a producer, got a job as an office boy at Paramount. He rose quickly and by 22 was production manager on films directed by such luminaries as Lubitsch, Von Sternberg and Mamoulian. Having dated Clara Bow and saved Paramount studios financially by inventing the “night for day” system of shooting – which used … Read more

The New World

Colin Farrell and Q'orianka Kilcher in The New World

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 20 May Christopher Columbus dies, 1506 Start typing “Christopher” into Wikipedia and , after getting to “Christo…” it will auto-suggest Christopher Columbus. This man who died over 500 years ago, on this day in 1506, still has an immense hold over the imagination, though he wasn’t the first person to discover the New World, nor even the first European, as is commonly held, nor did he even accept that he had found it, preferring instead to believe that he had arrived in the East Indies (which is why he called the natives Indians). And he was an Italian, sailing under the … Read more

Platoon

Charlie Sheen in Platoon

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 19 May Ho Chi Minh born, 1890 On this day in 1890, Nguyen Sinh Con, later known as Ho Chi Minh, was born, in Hoang Tru, in Vietnam. One of four children, he got an education thanks to the colonial French, at a local lycée, and under the direction of his father, a Confucian scholar. Realising there was little future for him in Vietnam after his father lost his administrative position – influence was everything – he boarded a ship for France, working as a ship’s cook, where he failed to get work in Marseille. Over the next few years he … Read more

Russian Ark

Sergey Dreyden as the Marquis in Aleksandr Sokurov's Russian Ark

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 18 May International Museum Day Today is International Museum Day, held annually by museum professionals as a way of highlighting the work that museums do in preserving the past. It was created in 1977 and has gained in popularity ever since, participating numbers rising from 20,000 museums in 2009 to 30,000 in 2012. Each year a theme is chosen: in 2002 it was “Museums and Globalisation”; in 1993 it was “Museums and Indigenous Peoples”. In 2012, the organisers, the International Council of Museums, encouraged people to take selfies of themselves at their local museum, under the rubric “Me and My Museum”. … Read more

Brokeback Mountain

Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 17 May First same-sex marriage in US, 2004 On this day in 2004, Bostonians Tom Weikle, 53, and Joe Rogers, 55, became the first same sex couple to marry in the United States. They had been together for 25 years and were taking advantage of the change in legislation, Massachusetts being the first state in the US to allow marriage between people of the same sex. Though the US constitution was clear in its position on the “unalienable right… to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, many states had started countering the change of opinion in favour of same-sex marriage … Read more

The Artist

Bérénice Bejo and Malcolm McDowell in The Artist

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 16 May First Academy Awards, 1920 On this day in 1929, the first Academy Awards presentations were made, at a private dinner hosted by Douglas Fairbanks at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Louis B Meyer had created the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences two years earlier, and later stated that “I found that the best way to handle [filmmakers] was to hang medals all over them… that’s why the Academy Award was created.” These were the only Academy Awards not to get radio (later TV) coverage. The awards covered the years 1927 and 1928 and had been announced three months … Read more

19 May 2014-05-19

Margot Robbie and Leonardo DiCaprio in the Wolf of Wall Street

Out in the UK This Week The Wolf of Wall Street (Universal, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) Scorsese’s best film since Casino also continues his trend towards flabby films. Twenty minutes can, and let’s hope eventually will, be trimmed from a film with a Goodfellas arc – we start with a voiceover of Leo Di Caprio saying, in effect, that for as long as he could rememeber he’d always wanted to be a richfella. And off we go into a roaring rush of the true story of Jordan Belfort, who became a licensed Wall Street broker on the day the market crashed in 1987, then started at the bottom all over again, selling penny stocks to … Read more

There Will Be Blood

Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 15 May Standard Oil declared a monopoly, 1911 On this day in 1911, the American oil company Standard Oil was ruled to be a monopoly by the US Supreme Court. Set up only in 1870 by the industrialist John D Rockefeller and his associates, the company was efficient and focused and had grown rapidly, first becoming dominant in refining, where it used its early lead to price competitors out of the market or buy them up, before moving on to production and distribution, where it used similar tactics to squeeze out or buy out competitors. By 1882 the company was already … Read more