Andrew O'Hagan on The Evening Standard

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Andrew O'Hagan

World Class director at work for Frontier Blues

One of the things emerging from the huge haul of documents released on Wikileaks this week is that Western forces don’t really understand anything about the East.

30 July 2010 10:56 AM

Cougar comedy in The Rebound

It was a common fantasy among the acne-riddled heroes of my youth that babysitting gigs had several hidden advantages. In the playground of a Monday morning, these heroes would arrive with tall tales of how it all went well with Mrs McKenzie. First: the mother was always fanciable; two: she always had a relaxed attitude towards the babysitter drinking the vodka from the freezer; three: she paid you over the odds; and four: she invariably returned drunk from Amanda’s Discothèque to tell the babysitter it was his lucky night.

23 July 2010 09:38 AM

Toy Story 3 is one for big babies everywhere

Earlier this week, in a vital scientific experiment, the London Evening Standard sent some of the paper’s premier he-men to see if they could watch the new Toy Story movie without bursting into tears.

16 July 2010 09:11 AM

Even green ogres get the blues in Shrek

Everybody’s favourite green Scottish ogre, apart from Alex Salmond, is surely Shrek, a creature who always seems to take pleasure in life’s minor irritations. He lives in a world where fairy stories regularly smack into harsh reality — where Pinnochio is compulsive in his habits, and the three pigs are German — yet Shrek has always managed to reinstate sweetness as the central feature in all good relationships. In Shrek 4, however, we get to see our friend suffer an early midlife crisis. If he were a man, Shrek would simply have bought a sports car and begun sending texts to the blonde receptionist. But this is the magical world of Far Far Away, so what we see, with the onset of Shrek’s crisis, is the world turning upside down.

02 July 2010 09:55 AM

Francis Ford Coppola goes back to drawing board for Tetro

Francis Ford Coppola was always the Norman Mailer of cinema: brilliant and grand, risky and chaotic. As a storyteller, he can make characters and periods beautifully and he is never afraid to load his work with big ideas about power, violence and the family. His instinct is always to push his material to the point where it becomes misshapen, which can work spectacularly well and at other times can bloat the narrative.

25 June 2010 10:01 AM

Please Give queens of comedy a chance

Middle-class guilt is one of the great modern subjects. It doesn’t happen to everybody, but it’s true that some people who have lots of stuff also have lots of shame, feeding off an inner sense of superiority. Charities can do well to exploit this condition, and they do, but there have probably been too few movies to laugh at it or show how ridiculous the condition is.

18 June 2010 10:50 AM

Life after The Wire in Brooklyn's Finest

The best American urban cop dramas have a good relationship with the fundamentals of gangster rap. That’s been true, and ignored, for a couple of decades now, at least since the late Dennis Hopper’s best directorial effort, Colors (1988) and the underrated guns-and-crack-cocaine-fest New Jack City (1991). The success of HBO’s The Wire was based on the kind of experience and the kind of lingo inhabited by rappers, and the suspicion — crucial to the old Wild West tradition — that the goodies and the baddies are really cut from the same ragged cloth.

11 June 2010 10:09 AM