If you’ve ever been to a Birmingham Opera production in a warehouse or burnt-out ice-rink and wondered how they got such a thing off the ground, spend an hour listening to Graham Vick and it all starts to make a bit more sense. This is quite a special man. Sharp-eyed, passionate, with a very clear idea of what he wants to do and say while remaining bracingly honest about the doubts and contradictions of being an opera-director. He clearly loves his job, and his enthusiasm is hard to resist. ‘I want you to be part of what I believe’ was one of the many lines that stood out from his lunchtime talk at the Barber Institute today. By blogging my scribbled notes below I probably run the risk of making him sound like a luvvie or a demagogue, but he is a long way from either. (more…)

Happy noo year. Been watching quite a few films about movie-going recently, and came across this three-minuter which the Coens made for the 2007 Cannes film festival:

Sort of reminded me of ‘The Day of the Premiere of Close Up’, with Nanni Moretti losing sleep over the box-office reception for a Kiarostami film. (On youtube, but only in Italian I’m afraid.) And on a similar tack, in this article Mark Cousins talks about showing ‘The Red Balloon’ to hordes of kids in northern Iraq when filming his documentary The First Movie.

My red-hot productive day has fallen at the first hurdle thanks to an innocuous recommendation from Synth Eastwood. Mr Hugh Cooney is based in Dublin and has turned himself into a one-man production line for deranged youtube despatches which seem to be plucked straight from his subconscious with very little filtering. At the same time, they’re smartly put together. And bloody funny. A prolific fellow so it’s difficult to know where to start, but here’s his most recent piece:

A gentle nudge from Jim himself has reminded me that I was going to tell you about Dummy Jim. This is a mooted feature film by Edinburgh-based filmmaker Matt Hulse, who regular Flatpack-goers may remember from his all-enveloping Audible Picture Show and the mysterious Harrachov Exchange. The film is based on the journals of James Duthie, a profoundly deaf Scotsman who cycled to the Arctic Circle in 1951, and this snazzy online portfolio includes a wealth of gubbins relating to his tale including cine footage, thought-provoking homilies (’Never let your sorrows rise higher than your knees’) and cake recipes. There are also details on how you can contribute to the production yourself.