The Open House Festival comes rolling into Belfast this Autumn with its most impressive line up to date. The 12th annual incarnation of the Festival will take place from 7th – 12th September 2010, throughout the arts & cultural flavoured Cathedral Quarter. The main festival venue will be the new 2,000 capacity festival marquee in Custom House Square – the biggest music marquee ever to be erected on the site.
BY CHRIS JOHNSON
If the name Serge Gainsbourg doesn’t ring a bell, then you might recognise one of his most famous musical achievements via Jane Birkin’s sensual whisperings, ‘Je t’aime, oh oui, je t’aime’. France’s iconic maverick is brought to the silver screen by graphic novel artist Joann Sfar in a style that is in a word sublime. Bringing to life the innermost workings of the visionary Gainsbourg’s mind and madness, Sfar has created a masterpiece.
BY LAURA SHEARER
www.queensfilmtheatre.com
The beginning of Predators is promising, whether you’re familiar with the character or not. A sense of fear is sparked immediately upon the estranged groups’ arrival to the densely unchartered jungle terrain. The dramatic tension from the typically thematic music relates to both the jungle and the unknown, with the combination of higher metallic moans and grumbling jungle drums certainly createsing a wonderfully heavy atmosphere. It’s the perfect introduction to the fast paced action adventure thriller. It doesn’t take long to develop the weak and stereotypical personas of the group, and thus it is obvious from the outset that the main focus will be on the fight and escape sequences.
BY LAURA SHEARER
Jean Luc Godard’s ‘Breathless’ was recently re-released and played in the QFT. Having seen both it and Jim McBride’s poorly reviewed 1983 remake recently, I began to wonder which was better. Godard’s original is regularly hailed as the masterpiece of the French New Wave, slick and cool, while full of subtext and vigorously innovative. To many, McBride’s decision to remake ‘Breathless’ was sheer egotism, on a par with Werner Herzog’s well-meaning remake of Nosferatu. You have to admit, it’s a brave thing to remake a highly regarded masterpiece and, like Herzog, McBride pulls it off.
BY MATTHEW MCKERNAN
The Orange Order’s Twelfth parades have again been marred by violence. Rioting occurred on Belfast’s Ormeau Road on the twelfth itself and disturbances in the Ardoyne area of North Belfast continued days afterwards. This has rightly been condemned by the police, by Assembly members from both sides of the community, and has been attributed to “dissident republicans” by Sinn Fein. Duncan McCausland, Assistant Chief Constable of the PSNI, has promised that “significant arrests” will be made. Two men, aged sixteen and twenty, have already appeared in court over their involvement in the riots.
BY BEN FINCH
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In a major speech yesterday, Business Secretary Vince Cable has suggested that the current top-up fees system should be replaced with an alternative graduate tax. This graduate tax would see students pay a marginally higher income tax than non-graduates. While details have not yet emerged, student leaders hope that the Cable proposals will mirror those of the NUS ‘Blueprint’. In this document, the NUS outlined a similar idea, where the more a graduate earns, the more they pay back – but even then it is a small percentage at 2.5%.
BY EMMA GALLEN
It’s official, Guns N’ Roses are lined up to play their first ever Belfast gig. Formed in 1985, Guns N’ Roses became one of the defining rock acts of the late 20th Century, selling over 100 million albums worldwide. However, tensions within the band would see the original line-up slowly crumble away, and by 1997 vocalist Axl Rose was the sole remaining original member. Despite this, Guns N’ Roses soldiered on with a new line-up and in 2008 made their comeback with the highly anticipated album Chinese Democracy. Speaking with The Gown, Ron ‘Bumblefoot’ Thal, who joined the band in 2006, talks about Guns N’ Roses coming to Belfast, playing Chinese Democracy material live, how he got started on guitar and more.
BY ANDREW SCOTT