Not too many TV musical productions from 1957 were still being seen (in this case in San Francisco on the stage) in 2016. Then again, not too many musicals had Rodgers and Hammerstein at the helm. Not too many stars of original TV musical productions from 1957 feature in one of TV’s biggest hits in…
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Jun
… is a Lego exhibition in 2017 featuring St Basil’s Cathedral, but I have encountered the world’s largest nation on my travels. At the 1995 Mardi Gras festival in Sydney, I enjoyed Leaving Lenin: a comedy about Welsh teenagers on a trip to post-communist St Petersburg. I saw a Russian play in Brooklyn, New York…
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May
My quest to see all 29 movies at the Spanish Film Festival involved me taking the train to Fremantle to see this low-budget Mexican production with four interconnecting stories about young people. Although the programme called it a comedy, I thought it was too serious for that, even though there were some light and funny…
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May
This year’s Spanish Film Festival featured Ema, which I saw in March at the Somerville. The title character and her husband (played by Gael García Bernal – pictured above) adopt a child, but give him back after he burns Ema’s sister. Ema later has regrets. But no fear. The publicity material proclaims: ‘SHE HAS A…
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May
I particularly related to this film at the Spanish Film Festival because it was mainly set in Argentina in 2003: the year I first visited that country and began my random love affair with it. For me, the currency crisis at the end of 2001 meant that Argentina became a much cheaper place to visit….
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May
This movie at the Spanish Film Festival is about a boy fleeing through the Spanish desert in 1946. The young actor who plays him handles the confronting subject matter extremely well. Luis Tosar (pictured above), who plays the man he befriends, has – for me – become one of those ‘It’s him! It’s him’ actors….
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May
I took this photo in 2013 on a day trip from Bariloche, in Argentina’s lake district. I’m not sure that the sign would have been much help if there had been an avalanche. Thankfully, there wasn’t.
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Apr
Cancer was the subject matter in the comedy Wishlist, which I saw at a journo preview for the Spanish Film Festival. It’s interesting what does and doesn’t work with comedy. When I performed The Sound of a Social Climbing Nun, I suggested the Maria in The Sound of Music was eaten by cannibals. That always…
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Apr
