Donald Clarke

• Television
• March 29, 2010, 20:29

I was just sitting down to write a piece on the strange case of Mark Kermode and the Film 2010 job when events suddenly made the story irrelevant. Way back in 1997, when Barry Norman left the BBC’s flagship movie …

• Box Office Figures
• March 27, 2010, 17:41

News reaches us of two spectacularly poor opening weekends. It seems that Motherhood, the new film from Uma Thurman, made a staggeringly anaemic £88 at the UK box office last weekend. The news has triggered surprise and, yes, schadenfreude across …

• Deaths Uncategorized
• March 23, 2010, 16:39

Let us pause for a moment to remember Akira Kurosawa. The great Japanese director, who died in 1998, would have been 100 today. There are endless ways to celebrate him. You could gather up six of your friends and attack …

• Trailerspotting
• March 22, 2010, 02:13

The last line of the current trailer for Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps finds Shia LaBeouf asking Michael Douglas: “Is that a threat?” Good question. When we heard that the most bombastic, least subtle director of the 1980s was to …

• Deaths Rock 'n' pop.
• March 18, 2010, 01:03

Good grief. You go away for three days and all hell breaks loose. Winslet bolts from Mendes. Peter Graves dies. Jack Kirby’s relatives try to set up a rival Spider-Man franchise. And it transpires that Don Cheadle is set to …

• Uncategorized
• March 14, 2010, 20:34

ΠSorry about the lack of posts lately, but I’ve been getting work put away, prior to fleeing the country from the annual festival of petty (small ‘n’) nationalism, professional vomiting and silly hat-wearing that is St Patrick’s Day. If you’ve …

• Oscars
• March 7, 2010, 23:07

Yes. The night is finally here when easily distracted idiots such as me — Oo, a firetruck! — get to learn which films are to be honoured with an award that has, in previous years, validated such brilliant films as …

• Uncategorized
• March 4, 2010, 23:19

Two weeks ago I wrote a piece in The Ticket in which, inspired by the wretchedness of Leap Year, I bemoaned patronising representations of Ireland in American films. If you were being kind you could have described the article as …

• Hell
• March 3, 2010, 22:14

I’ve just been to see Old Dogs. You’ll remember that we discussed the trailer a while back. This is that thing in which crinkly faced casual psychopath Robin Williams and unlikely laydeees man John Travolta have to cope with boisterous …