Cinema

Elmore Leonard has died aged 87. Leonard began his career as a hack and ended it as a modern master. His rule was: ‘if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it’. His writing became sparer over the years, perhaps reaching its purest form in Get Shorty, his best known work. His total war on adverbs and adjectives placed all the reader’s focus on his dialogue. Luckily, Leonard understood how speech worked both on the page and in the ear, and he grasped how characters could be developed through dialogue rather than description. This might explain why so many of his stories have been successfully adapted for big and small screens. The Spectator has not reviewed all that many of Leonard’s recent books;

The first Briton in 77 years won the Wimbledon championships on Sunday, but this is perhaps incidental; did you spot the real thing of note? That Bradley Cooper and Gerard Butler were there to watch him, and were actually laughing and talking to each other, like normal human beings? That’s the real story here! From the flurry of online activity about the sighting of the pair, you might be forgiven for thinking they had done something other than, well, just stand there watching the tennis and have a friendly chat, as all the other spectators (or those who weren’t instead scanning the crowd for well-known faces) were doing. Celeb-spotting at

What do you do if you wake up to discover your colleagues implying that you have it easy? If you’re Benedict Cumberbatch, you just stick to your Star Trek script and carry on trying to destroy the world. Benedict Cumberbatch (educated at Harrow) was in the crossfire when Downton Abbey’s Rob James-Collier (Stockport working class and proud) implied that actors from public schools have it easy and suck up all the best jobs. James-Collier reckons you need a rich family behind you if you’re to survive the early years and stick it out until some decent-paying jobs come along. And James-Collier isn’t sure that rich kids make devoted actors. ‘If

For the last 40 years it’s been impossible to interview Anthony Hopkins without him doing his Tommy Cooper impression. He’s obsessed with the bloke, constantly interrupting Silence of the Lambs anecdotes to do Cooper’s chuckle and hand flicking and patter. He was, therefore, the absolutely perfect choice to play Alfred Hitchcock. Actually, the new film’s not that bad. It tells a good yarn about the director’s wife Alma rescuing both him and Psycho, not to mention the 800 grand of their own money they’d sunk into the movie. The other actors are so good that most of the time you can almost forget Anthony Hopkins is wandering around in the

Regularly voted one of the greatest American novels of the last century, Theodore Dreiser’s moralising epic An American Tragedy (1925) hasn’t aged well. Adapted for the cinema as A Place in the Sun, however, it paired Montgomery Clift with the 17-year-old Elizabeth Taylor and gave us a film that still grips more than 60 years later. Director George Stevens disparaged what he called Technicolor’s ‘Oh, what a beautiful morning’ quality, and monochrome is indeed more suited to the ethical grey area explored by the film: whether a man who plans a murder but can’t go through with it is as guilty as a killer. Clift and Taylor don’t have conventional

Abraham Lincoln, in Walt Whitman’s celebrated phrase, contained multitudes. M.E. Synon showed yesterday quite how many there might have been. There is evidence of prejudice, callousness and corruption. Yet there is also the 13th amendment (1865): the basis, whatever the wider context of its adoption, of Lincoln’s right to be called the Great Emancipator. Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is a film of a book: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin, a blockbuster that paints a little more of the good Lincoln than the bad, but which accepts Lincoln’s complexity freely by describing a determined politician at work. Daniel Day-Lewis’s often mesmerising, twinkling Lincoln is not wholly

This post by M.E. Synon is the first in a series about Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln. A counter-argument will be published tomorrow, followed by a comparison of screen and literary adaptations of the last months of Abraham Lincoln’s life. Last week in Dublin there was the European premiere of Spielberg’s film on Lincoln. Why Dublin? Because the star Daniel Day-Lewis lives in Ireland and he wanted the premiere as a fundraiser for an Irish charity. All of which meant I’ve been writing on Lincoln for the Irish press, trying – and I know it’s fruitless, but still I go on – trying again to explain to the Irish that Lincoln was a racist,

David Mitchell slaps a big hand on his head. ‘I look back at that kid and think, what were you thinking! How dare you, idiot!’ He is talking about his recklessness as a young writer. ‘Yeah I’ll stop it halfway, five times, and start it again. I’ll pretend I’m a Chinese woman living up a mountain.’ He compares it to being a teenager ‘leaping off a 12-foot wall’ without fear. As writers get older, he says, the recklessness subsides, and ‘it needs to be replaced by technique. If you can do that, you’re still in business.’ One of his most madly structured books, Cloud Atlas, has just been made into

Warning: this is a very January 17th sort of thought. It’s meant to be comforting, though you may well find it the exact opposite. Try it on for size, anyway, and see what you think. (You might want to keep hold of the receipt.) The thought concerns something in The Ghost by Robert Harris. The book is as gripping as any of his works, and as if that wasn’t praise enough it also gave us, via a truly woeful film version, the comedic delights of Ewan McGregor’s London accent. Next to that performance Dick van Dyke becomes Ray Winstone. At one point in the novel the unnamed ghostwriter penning the

I’m conducting an experiment: Life of Pi concerns a basic metaphor about faith, how is that metaphor rendered in print and on screen? I’ve re-read the book. I’ve deliberately (at this stage) not watched Ang Lee’s film; rather, I’ve found a reviewer of the film (Jonathan Kim of the Huffington Post) who has not read the book, and then I’ve compared notes. Jonathan Kim has derided what he saw, at least from the perspective of the metaphor: ‘Life of Pi is more about the nuts and bolts of a teenager surviving at sea and bonding with a tiger than a spiritual quest that asks hard questions about the wisdom, will, and existence