Boxing hero delights Russia

BBC NEWS, 23.12.05: You can always tell when Nikolay Valuev walks into a room. Everyone in there tilts their heads 45 degrees to see him. Two metres 13cm tall and weighing 147kg, Nikolay is the tallest and heaviest world champion in the history of boxing: a Slavic skyscraper who towers over his opponents. Last weekend in Berlin he notched up the 43rd victory of his career by beating American John Ruiz to snatch the WBA world title. Now the champion known as the "Beast from the East" is back home in snowy St Petersburg.

"I'm really NOT a beast," Nikolay says down at his local sports centre. "I'm a very calm person. I even used to write poetry. "But what I like about boxing is the feeling of danger, all that adrenalin. I don't get enough of it in my normal life." When Nikolay begins laying into a punch bag, before my eyes the calm poet transforms into a fighting machine.

As the punches rain down, I can imagine how the battered John Ruiz must have felt during last Saturday's big fight. After his victory, Nikolay has become Russia's latest sporting

hero. But that does not stop old friends from giving friendly advice. "I watched the fight on TV," one acquaintance tells Nikolay at the sports centre. "I wrote down all your mistakes. I'll tell you if you like." "If I listened to everyone's advice," Nikolay grins, "I wouldn't have time to do anything else!"

I ask Nikolay to show me his big prize - the WBA title belt. "I don't have it," he replies. "It wasn't big enough - it didn't fit round my waist. They're having to make me a larger one." Instead the world's newest heavyweight champion takes me home to meet his family. He lives in a tiny one-room flat on the edge of St Petersburg with his wife Galya and Grisha his son.

Nikolay hopes his success will help promote Russian boxing on the world stage and give other fighters here the chance to challenge for top titles. He is also planning to help the younger generation get into boxing. The Nikolay Valuev Boxing School will take in street kids, young drug addicts and other underprivileged children.

The Classic Films Review

The Ladykillers

by Trevor Brown

Famous for its films in the 1940s and 50s, Ealing studios produced some of the wittiest and best British films ever made. However by the mid 1950s, television in Britain had started to become popular and as people stayed at home to watch entertainment transmitted directly into their houses, British cinema audiences started to drop massively. As the audience numbers dropped so did the number of films made, and this inevitably meant that the production facilities were no longer required. It is therefore ironic that the last comedy film made at Ealing studios in London would be one of the most revered and best loved films ever made in Britain, The Ladykillers (1955, dir. Alexander Mackendrick).

Made in glorious Technicolor (the name used to describe the American colour process, and note the American spelling of the word 'colour'), The Ladykillers was a wonderfully cruel and witty comedy about five criminals who attempt to steal a considerable sum of money in transit from a railway station. Everything goes well until they are thwarted in their attempt to smuggle the money out of London by a little old lady. It is once she discovers what they have done that things start to go wrong for them...horribly wrong! Suddenly their dreams fall apart as they decide to try and kill her so they can make their escape, and yet they find killing her a far harder task than it seems.

Possibly where this film succeeds is not only in having a very funny script, but also in having an excellent cast. Legendary English actor Sir Alec Guinness plays the leader of the gang, Professor Marcus. Marcus is the 'brains' of the gang and the one whose decision it is to befriend the old lady proves to be the downfall of the entire crime. Other actors in the cast include the Czech actor Herbert Lorn, future Hollywood star Peter Sellers (both Sellers and Lom would appear in the incredibly successful Pink Panther films a decade later), and respected English actor Cecil Parker as Major Courteney. Completing the line up of criminals was the lesser known actor Danny Green and almost completely upstaging everybody else as the little old lady, Mrs Wilberforce, is actress Katie Johnson (who would die just two years after the film was released).

Facts and figures about this film are hard to find but the fact that it was one of the few Ealing films made in colour is testament to the faith the producers had in this film, and it was certainly a big success on its release. Although some critics failed to see the funny side to the joke, it should be remembered that despite the technical limitations imposed on the production due to a tight budget (and the need to get the film finished before the studios closed down), it is one of the most highly regarded and witty comedies of its time. Comedic moments flow throughout the film, from the extraordinary relationship between Mrs Wilberforce and her lodger Professor Marcus (she keeps interrupting his planning of the robbery by asking him if he'd like a cup of tea), through the hilarious moment when the gang try to leave with the stolen money but are inadvertently thwarted by Mrs Wilberforce's friends who think the criminals are musicians, down to the blackly amusing and inventive way in which each of the criminals meets an unfortunate end and Mrs Wilberforce ends up with thousands of pounds of stolen money because the police think her story is just the ramblings of an eccentric old lady!

The Ladykillers was remade in 2004 in America, with Tom Hanks in the Professor Marcus role. By all accounts the American remake is hugely inferior to the original, lacking both its sense or irony and eccentricity. In some ways the original film is a comedy of British manners, bringing to mind the playfulness of an Oscar Wilde farce. The absurdity of the situation (that five armed criminals are stopped by a little old lady) is never lost on the audience.

Britain is no longer the country of smiling policemen, mild mannered eccentrics and

high morals that was in this film, but the charm of its production still shines through.

However, above everything else the reason to watch it is obvious to anyone who has ever

seen it....that this is a very, very funny film!

London. May 2006.

A Space Odyssey

Whilst some films are universally loved and some films simply loathed, has there ever been a film that has so divided opinion as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick)? When the film was premiered in April 1968, the world was a very different place. Man had yet to set foot on the moon, the American involvement in the Vietnam war was about to peak, the cold war between Nato & the Warsaw Pact countries was still a major source of tension, and youth culture (certainly in the west) was starting to advocate the use of drugs as a form of relaxation and pleasure. Amongst this period of great political and social change, Stanley Kubrick (the director of Spartacus just 8 years earlier) had emigrated from the U.S. to England, where he believed he would be afforded less interference and more artistic freedom than if he was still based in Hollywood. Since emigrating, Kubrick had made both Lolita (1962) and Dr Strangelove (1963) in England. However whilst both these films were reasonably big projects in themselves, his next project was to make a film based on a story by the British science fiction writer Arthur. C. Clarke. This story was called The Sentinel' and was the basis for the story of the final result, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

2001 was to prove one of the most technically complicated and expensive films ever made until that point (originally budgeted to cost $6 million, the final film ended up costing MGM studios $10.5 million). Of that money, over 60% went on the film's incredible special effects. When watched, it is possible to see where most of the money went, for the beautifully detailed film sets and models are so carefully built and photographed that they took the special effects industry onto another level. For example, the model of the 'Discovery 1' spaceship was 18 metres long, allowing incredible detail to be sculpted and creating a further sense of realism. This devotion to detail helps explain why Kubrick took nearly three years to make 2001.

What also helps 2001 to stand out as a film of high technical accomplishment is that it was made at a time long before computer graphics were to become a tool of the filmmaker (even the computer screens and graphics we see in the film were faked by using animation). Another accomplishment is the complicated set design, using huge expensively made and technically complicated film sets. The film also utilised state of the art make up effects to create the 'Dawn of man' segment at the beginning of the film.

However, what is the film about? Any answer will not be definitive as the story is wide open to personal interpretation. For me the film is about why we (humans) were to become the dominant life form on this planet. The film starts millions of years ago at a time when we were little more than apes. The film follows a tribe of apes who wake up one day to discover an enormous black monolith has appeared from nowhere. This monolith is a frightening curiosity at first to the apes but it seems to affect those in its vicinity and could be representative of intelligence (from god? from another world? this is deliberately never fully explained to us). From this discovery the apes develop intelligence and the ability to discover weapons that are used to kill. The story then moves

on to the year 2001 where another monolith is discovered on the moon by the American space administration. Hiding the discovery from the world (including the Russian space administration), the Americans detect a transmission from the monolith to the planet Saturn. The Americans then decide to send a manned spaceship to Saturn to find out what is at the location where the transmission was made to. However, during the 18 month journey things start to go wrong as the ship's computer, HAL 9000, starts to make mistakes and then starts to murder the crew (incidentally HAL was the name chosen after the IBM computer company refused to let their name be associated with the film).

In many ways, the story is of less importance than the beautiful imagery of the film. 2001 is also famous for its use of classical music to underpin the visual quality and the excellent editing. Watching this film is possibly as near to cinematic poetry as it is possible to get. There are many stories surrounding the reasons why classical music was used instead of a specially written film soundtrack, but the real reason was that whilst the composer Alex North was writing the music for this film, Stanley Kubrick needed to have a temporary soundtrack that would assist in the editing process. The result was that Kubrick used classical music recordings and was so impressed at how much it complimented the film that he stuck with it. Although North's score was finished, Kubrick never used it and anyone who has seen the film will surely agree with that decision, as Johann Strauss's 'Blue Danube' is used to so perfectly within the film.

Kubrick removed approximately 20 minutes from the film after its premiere, as there were complaints that it was too long. The film was not an instant success on its first release either, as many people found it confusing. Yet it would go on to take $15million at the cinemas on its first release, was then re-released in 1972 and would go on to become one of MGM's most prized and prestigious films.

Many science fiction fans credit 2001 with being one of the most influential films ever made. Without its visual style as a guide, perhaps Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972) and George Lucas's Star Wars (1977) may have looked very different. 2001 also generated a decent sequel called 2010 (1984, dir. Peter Hyams) which, whilst nowhere near as impressive, goes someway to explaining some of the originals mysteries.

Whilst 2001 is not everyone's favourite film (some people find it boring, confusing and pretentious) it is still a hugely important, popular and intelligent piece of entertainment. When watched in the cinema it is still an incredibly powerful and visually stimulating experience and a superb example of an artistic touch in capitalist movie making.

By TREVOR BROWN. MAY 2006.

THE CINEMA, 6.01.06. B.A.(hons), MA.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 832