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cinema : features
Movie London
Over recent years the Working Title view of London has
come to dominate Britain’s cinematic output. From Four Weddings
through to Wimbledon, via the execrable Love Actually, this is a world
where every major emotional confrontation takes place in front of a landmark,
a world where you can take a right off London Bridge and end up on Piccadilly,
where fairy lights glitter in every tree and snowflakes fall on cue. In
this export-friendly version of our city ethnic minorities are invisible,
ditto people selling the Big Issue, and the only women deemed worthy of
male attention are American. The Hollywood version of Patrick Marber’s
Closer (currently being shot in Postman’s Park and at various spots
along the Thames) may rectify this image but with previous perpetrators
Julia Roberts and the anglophile Ms Paltrow in the cast things don’t
look good.
In an attempt to set things right, londonlostandfound
presents an alternative guide to the city on celluloid:
Tube Tales
The Underground may have played a pivotal role in the bland Gwynnie-fest
Sliding Doors but it’s also provided the location for some
far more sinister (OK, equally sinister) happenings. In underrated 1970s
horror Death Line smart bowler hated gentlemen meet with a grisly
fate at Russell Square station after falling victim to the under-evolved
cannibalistic creatures that live in the tunnels. Having been bricked
up beneath Bloomsbury for years following a turn-of-the-century ceiling
collapse, their grasp of English is limited to the occasional angry cry
of “Mind the doors.” Further down the Piccadilly Line, Bryan
Forbe’s neglected suspenseful tale of a con artist masquerading
as a medium, Séance on a Wet Afternoon, utilised Leicester
Square Station as the escape route for kidnapper Richard Attenborough’
s escape from the police.
Sleaze and Squalor
And to Soho we go…where the green-tiled doorstep of a delicatessen
in Brewer Street provided the perfect perch for David Thewlis and Ewen
Bremner to share a 3am cigarette in Mike Leigh’s 1993 dingy urban
odyssey Naked. On the other side of Oxford Street Newman Passage,
the alley that runs beside the Newman Arms, marks the site of the first
kill by the voyeuristic cameraman in Michael Powell’s Peeping
Tom. In John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London David
Naughton’s recently wolfed American goes to catch a (Landis directed
parody) porn feature with his decomposing buddy in a cinema amusingly
located right on Piccadilly Circus, the entrance of which is now the home
of one of those 99p-a-slice greasy tourist trap pizza joints.
Scotspotting
Danny Boyle’s modern zombie flick 28 Days Later supplied
some of the most inventive cinematic images of the capital in recent years.
Filming just before sun-up the film’s deserted cityscapes were genuinely
eerie (and probably the best thing in the movie.) 28 days wasn’t
his first foray into London though, in Trainspotting Renton,
Spud, Begbie and co arrive in town to flog a caseload of smack to Keith
Allen, holing up in the grotty Royal Eagle hotel on Craven Road near Paddington
station.
Location, location…location?
When Stanley Kubrick’s fear of flying jeopardised
his desire to make a Vietnam movie the perfectionist director came to
an inventive solution. Becton Gasworks. With a few judiciously placed
palms and clever camera angles this disused industrial site became the
bullet scarred city of Hue for the battle sequences of Full Metal
Jacket. Supposedly you can still spot the Viva Ho Chi Minh graffiti
on the walls.
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