The sister of our very fabulous friend Di lives in Winnipeg in Canada. Why any sensible, sun-drenched South African should make a life in a city where the average temperature is minus three, and it’s dark for nine months of the year (ok, it isn’t really, it just seems that it is) is beyond comprehension.
Given […]

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Anyone whining about the lack of success of the South African film industry need only to look at a movie like Pieces of April to understand what we’re doing wrong. Written and directed by Peter Hedges, April is a small, personal film, well told.  It stars Katie Holmes (post-Dawson and pre-Tom and therefore appealing) as an […]

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Based upon Marvel’s iconic Super Hero, Iron Man tells the story of Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), a billionaire industrialist and genius inventor who is kidnapped by the Bad Guys and forced to build a devastating weapon for them. Instead, Tony builds a high-tech suit of armour and escapes captivity. Upon his return home, Tony […]

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I’ve mentioned before that I’m something of a Tudor history buff; I didn’t perhaps mention why. I grew up in a remote part of rural England, in a small village that happened to be near the birthplace of the infamous Anne Boleyn. Anne is the first historical figure I ever really became aware of, and my entire […]

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OK, so it’s been hectic and there’s not been a lot of time for movie watching. Instead, I did see the first couple of episodes of Holly Hunter’s first foray into TV, the oddly bi-polar Saving Grace. It’s part Walker, Texas Ranger, part Touched by an Angel. Though the drunk and wayward cop thing has been […]

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In Stranger than Fiction, Will Ferrell plays Harold, an anal IRS agent who begins hearing a voice in his head, narrating his life. But then the narrator – a distinguished author with writer’s block - Emma Thompson, says: “Little did he know that this simple seemingly innocuous act would result in his imminent death……”
I’d noticed […]

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Aishwarya Rai plays Tilo, Mistress of Spices, a kind of sayer-healer-agony aunt who is sent to California with three implausible challenges: help people to accomplish their desires (but never her own) through the considered application of spices; never leave the store; and never touch another person’s skin.
But she’s sent to Oakland for pete’s sake, within […]

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Selfish little shockwaves bouncing round my house this morning; with the untimely death of the prodigiously smart and talented Anthony Minghella, what will become of the rest of the series of No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency movies, the pilot of which shot in Gaborone last year?
No.1 is of course the film of the much loved book […]

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My second Made in Cape Town movie of the weekend was Rendition, the first Hollywood production of South African director Gavin Hood, who won a Best Foreign Language Oscar for Tsotsi. Cinematography was by another high flying South African, Dion Beebe.

“Rendition” refers to the ability of the CIA to detain anyone suspected of terrorist dealings, and […]

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In bed over the weekend with a bad back, I took the opportunity to catch up on a couple of movies Made in Cape Town.
The first - Wes Craven’s The Breed - was shot on Steenbras Dam, a beautiful stretch of water just over Sir Lowry’s Pass on the way out of town from Somerset […]

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