NAMED best film of 2004 on these pages a year ago, The Best of Youth was the best reviewed US release of 2005, according to an extensive survey compiled by the Metacritic website.
Marco Tullio Giordana's superb Italian epic was named best film of the year by, among others, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. It is followed on the Metacritic top 10 of 2005 by, in order, Capote, Japanese film Nobody Knows, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Brokeback Mountain, Murderball, Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, Iraq-set drama Turtles Can Fly, Michael Haneke's Hidden and Arnaud Desplechin's Kings and Queen.
The Best of Youth is scheduled for DVD release in the US next month, but a release on this side of the Atlantic has yet to be set.
Altman resurrects Miller play
Irish actor Peter McDonald will join Neve Campbell, Matthew Modine, Jane Adams, Maximilian Schell and John Wood in Robert Altman's stage production of the Arthur Miller play Resurrection Blues, which runs at the Old Vic in London from March 2nd until April 22nd. Miller wrote the play in 1999 but was disappointed with its first two productions in the US and extensively reworked it up to his death early last year.
A satire on global politics and predatory media outlets, Resurrection Blues is set in a South American banana republic on the cusp of revolution, as a US TV company arrives to film the execution of a messianic rebel leader.
McDonald, who is from Dublin, has played leading roles in I Went Down, When Brendan Met Trudy, Saltwater and Spin the Bottle. He received rave reviews last year for his performances in the London stage revivals of Aristocrats and Days of Wine and Roses.
Altman, who turns 80 next month, recently finished shooting A Prairie Home Companion, set backstage during the last broadcast of Garrison Keillor's celebrated radio show of the same name. The film stars Woody Harrelson, John C Reilly, Meryl Streep (as a country singer), Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline, Virginia Madsen, Lily Tomlin, Lindsay Lohan, and as himself, Keillor.
Van Gogh Americanised
Two films by murdered Dutch director Theo van Gogh are set for US remakes. Stanley Tucci will direct Blind Date, featuring Tony Shalhoub and Patricia Clarkson as a couple struggling to rebuild their lives and their relationship after the death of their child. Steve Buscemi will direct Interview, in which he also takes the lead as a political journalist reduced to interviewing a soap opera star played by Sienna Miller.
Van Gogh was killed in Amsterdam in 2004 by an Islamic radical, who confessed to the crime and was sentenced to life in prison.
Bruce takes the Case
The next episode of the CBS TV series Cold Case, to be broadcast in the US on Sunday, features nine Bruce Sprinsteen songs on the soundtrack - quite a coup given that Springsteen rarely allows his recordings to be used in film or TV projects. The episode, titled 8 Years, follows four high school friends in the 1980s and the consequences when one of them is found dead.
"Because there are such vivid stories and characters in Bruce Springsteen's music, we decided to let the lyrics do a lot of the storytelling for us, instead of depending on dialogue," says producer Meredith Stiehm, who scripted the episode. "In this case, I chose the songs first and then designed the story around them."
The songs include No Surrender, Stolen Car, Drive All Night and Atlantic City. In an episode of Cold Case last season, 10 John Mellencamp songs were featured on the soundtrack.
