Shaun De Waal

Shaun de Waal has worked at the Mail & Guardian since 1989. He was literary editor from 1991 to 2006 and chief film critic for 15 years. He is now editor-at-large. Recent publications include Exposure: Queer Fiction, 25 Years of the Mail & Guardian and Not the Movie of the Week.

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/ 22 June 2001

Flaws in the glass

The producing/directing team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory has been mocked for being exponents of "the Laura Ashley school of film-making", which is apt in some ways but also rather unfair. They have a meticulous eye for period detail and a beautifully understated way with a story, though there is the danger of blandless in that very reticence.

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/ 8 June 2001

A month of boredom

<i>Sweet November</i>, the biggest release of the week, is so bad that there is very little to be said about it. It’s not even worth pulling apart, since it falls apart anyway as you watch it, if it was ever together in the first place.

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/ 1 June 2001

Big bang theory

You gotta laugh. In the press release for Pearl Harbor, the new mega-budget flick about the surprise Japanese attack that destroyed the United States Pacific Fleet in 1941 and brought the US into World War II, there is a profile of producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

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/ 25 May 2001

The American night

Movies about movie-making are always interesting for the sidelight they throw on the process, though they do run the risk of self-indulgence. Federico Fellini’s classic 8 1/2 is in part about such self-indulgence, showing us a confused filmmaker swamped by fantasy as much as by the travails of getting a movie together, and works flamboyantly well.

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/ 18 May 2001

As crime goes by

Crime is one of the major streams of film narrative. Some movies – such as <i>Pulp Fiction</i> or this week’s release <b>The Mexican</b> – even exist in a criminal world apparently altogether free of police personnel. <i>The Mexican</i> must have put tears of joy into the eyes of its Hollywood producers.

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/ 11 May 2001

Do not go gentle

Julian Schnabel made his name as a ”neo-expressionist” painter during the Eighties, when that form of highly charged canvas experienced a brief revival. His most memorable works were images splashed over huge areas covered with shattered crockery – a rather original way of providing the work with some extra texture.

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/ 4 May 2001

Horse latitudes

The bestselling success of Cormac McCarthy’s 1992 novel <b>All the Pretty Horses</b> was somewhat surprising – his work is bleak and bloody and his writing has the kind of knotty grandiosity not often smiled upon in the videogame-Internet age.

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/ 26 April 2001

Fry me a liver

Two things emerge from seeing <b>Hannibal</b>, the sequel to <i>The Silence of the Lambs</i>: one is that Hannibal Lecter – "Hannibal the Cannibal" – is not as interesting a character as he used to be, and the other is that Ridley Scott is a very uneven director