Latest news with #The400Blows
Hindustan Times
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Author Stephen King, ahead of The Life of Chuck film's release: I'm a chipper guy, I get rid of all dark stuff in books
So vividly drawn is writer Stephen King's fiction that it has already been the basis for over 50 feature films. For half a century, since Brian De Palma's 1976 film Carrie, Hollywood has turned, and turned again, to King's books for their richness of character, nightmare, and sheer entertainment. As the adaptation of his 2020 doomsday novella gears up for a cinematic release, the author says, 'In The Life of Chuck, we understand that this guy's life is cut short, but that doesn't mean he doesn't experience joy... Existential dread and grief and things are part of the human experience, but so is joy.' The 77-year-old has penned around 80 books, which have often been fodder for the movies and the author is a self-confessed moviegoer. 'I love anything from The 400 Blows (1959) to something with that guy Jason Statham,' King says, speaking by phone from his home in Maine (United States). He adds, 'The worst movie I ever saw was still a great way to spend an afternoon. The only movie I ever walked out on was Transformers (2007). At a certain point I said, 'This is just ridiculous'.' Adding how he's always happy writing, King adds, 'I'm a very chipper guy because I get rid of all that dark stuff in the books.' Dark stuff, such as the kind of climate change disaster found in The Life of Chuck, which King says often dominates his anxieties. 'We're creeping up little by little on being the one country who does not acknowledge it's a real problem with carbon in the atmosphere. That's crazy. Certain right-wing politicians can talk all they want about how we're saving the world for our grandchildren. They don't care about that. They care about money,' he opines.
Time Out
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Nouvelle Vague
If being locked in the Criterion Closet for a couple of hours sounds like heaven, Richard Linklater has made the perfect film for you. It's a playful, black-and-white making-of story for Jean-Luc Godard's New Wave classic Breathless – 'À Bout de Souffle' to the cinephile crowd – that captures a revolutionary moment in cinema history with reverence and a touch of cheek. You'll probably know movies that backdrop the story: Godard's 1960 crime drama Breathless is the key text, of course, but Truffaut's Cannes premiere of The 400 Blows is also recreated with a wink to contemporary Cannes-goers, and Linklater offers access-all-areas visits to the sets of Robert Bresson's Pickpocket and Jean-Pierre Melville's classic noir Bob le Flambeur too. But chronology is king here. When he's introduced, coolly intellectual behind his ever-present shades, Godard (played with distracted charisma by Parisian photographer Guillaume Marbeck) has yet to put someone else's money where his sizeable mouth is. The French New Wave has begun and his fellow critics at film mag Cahiers du Cinéma, including Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and his best pal François Truffaut, have begun to establish themselves as filmmakers. Godard is in danger of being left behind, a kind of chic troll snarking from the sidelines. But as Godard famously said, all you need to make a film is a gun and a girl. His opportunity comes via the sponsorship of his soon-to-be long-suffering producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst). Breathless, of course, features both gun and girl: newcomer Jean-Paul Belmondo's hard-bitten but boyish outlaw has the former; pixie-cropped Hollywood starlet Jean Seberg is the effervescent American newspaper vendor he sweeps up in his wake. It'll have you queuing at your local repertory cinema as soon as the credits roll Linklater cleverly homages Godard's style with handheld cameras, unsynced sound, choppy editing and scratchy celluloid, all framed in the same boxy 1:37 aspect ratio as Breathless. His cast of first-timers is impressive, too. Aubry Dullin is fabulous as Belmondo, the angelic ex-boxer whose guilelessness lends his bandit a disarming quality. And like Godard, Linklater casts a more established actor, Zoey Deutch (Everybody Wants Some!!), in the Seberg role. It may be a facsimile of the original stars' on-screen chemistry, but there's real spark as the pair try to cope with their director's abstractions and loathing of scripted dialogue. There is, of course, a script behind all this – a warm and witty one by Holly Gent and Vince Palmo – as well as filming permits and financing and all the things that Godard was railing against when he made Breathless. Maybe that's why Nouveau Vague lacks the same anarchic urgency as the film it's homaging, and why in Linklater's filmography, Boyhood might be the film with more 'Godard' in it. But for devoted filmlovers, Nouvelle Vague is a must-see – a joyful homage to the art of cinema that'll have you queuing at your local repertory cinema as soon as the credits roll.
