Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 129: Wed May 11

CAPITAL CELLULOID takes over the Album Club session at the Spiritland bar in Kings Cross this week. Each night from 6pm on Tuesday to Saturday we’ll be spinning a soundtrack LP at the famous music venue, and tonight’s is from a movie set in London, with Herbie Hancock’s widely praised set of jazz numbers for Michelangelo Antonioni’s archetypal swinging Sixties classic, Blowup (1967). Do come along to say hello (here are the details of how to get there) and enjoy the vibe at one of the best venues in town.


TONIGHT’S FILM CHOICE

Pulp (Hodges, 1972): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.50pm


This 35mm presentation (also being screened on May 4th) is part of the Mike Hodges season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Times review: “The day started quietly enough. Then I got out of bed. That was my first mistake.” And so begins Pulp, an underrated comedic masterpiece from Mike Hodges (who later directed Flash Gordon and Croupier) that features one of the greatest voiceovers in film history. It helps, of course, that Michael Caine is delivering the words with his least cockney caramel burr. He plays Mickey King, a writer of trashy novels who is seconded to Malta to ghostwrite the biography of a legendary Hollywood egomaniac (Mickey Rooney). Naturally, murder intervenes, and King must ultimately become the detective hero of his own fictions. Which he does, but always, thankfully, with that deliciously wry commentary. (“I wondered who he was, the poor dead bastard,” he sighs at a murder scene.) Worth rediscovering. Kevin Maher

Here (and above is the trailer).

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