Take advantage of this year’s hard crop and invest in vintage wine October 22, 2012 bottle.opener@cityam.com Any day now, in some corner of a vineyard in South West France, the last grape of the 2012 harvest will be picked and put into a basket and then, the serious business of making the Bordeaux vintage will begin. Right now, the whole wine world is waiting in bated breath to find out [...]
Prepared food need not give you nightmares October 22, 2012 Head chef, Paternoster Chop House Thinking what to have for dinner tonight? How about some corned beef, pickled herring or brawn (jellied pig’s head) with fermented vegetables in salt? I’m sure these aren’t top of your wish list – they may even bring back nightmares of bad school dinners – but it could be worth [...]
Bosideng London founder Mr Gao is a man with a plan October 21, 2012 THE LAST time you walked on South Molton Street you would have gone past The Hog in the Pound, a not especially enticing-looking pub that sat at the top of the famous road where it meets with Oxford Street. Walk there today and it looks completely different. Let’s just say it’s had an upgrade; £25m [...]
Breathtaking beauty in Ecuador’s own paradise October 21, 2012 QUITO always seemed to me to be more of a stopover on the way to Ecuador’s Andean heights, Amazon forest, and the Galapagos, than a destination. Not so. This 9,000 ft high city, smack dab on the equator, has a spectacular setting of its own, surrounded by three glistening, glacier-topped volcanoes: Cotapaxi, Cayambe, and Antisana. [...]
Burton is back to his best with horror romp October 18, 2012 FILM FRANKENWEENIE Cert PG **** Only TIM Burton could have got away with making Frankenweenie. I can just hear the pitch: “I want to shoot a feature-length, black and white, stop-motion animation about a dead dog”. Frankenweenie, though, is undoubtedly the most lovingly crafted feature-length, black and white, stop-motion animation about a dead dog ever [...]
London launch boom rolls on October 18, 2012 Autumn’s boom of London launches continues apace, with Barbarella set to open on the Fulham Road this week. Formerly one of the go-to spots for London’s luminaries, Groucho Club maestro Jack Freud has enlisted clubland’s foremost names and undertaken a £2m refurbishment to restore Barbarella to its former glory, with dinner, drinks and dancing featuring [...]
Ginger and Rosa is an interesting but flawed film that doesn’t quite deliver October 18, 2012 FILM GINGER AND ROSA Cert 12A *** Ginger and Rosa weaves a rather implausible coming of age tale about two teenage friends with the post-war fear of The Bomb, resulting in a film with a veneer of sentimentality but a surprisingly cynical heart. Ginger is a bright girl from a bohemian family who is terrified [...]
The best of the fest: must see flicks this weekend at the 56th Annual BFI London Film Festival October 18, 2012 THE 56th Annual BFI London Film Festival was has been a showcase for some of the world’s hottest young directors, as well as some more established personalities such as Tim Burton, whose Frankenweenie, reviewed above, opened the event. The festival is bigger than ever this year, with new venues being added in locations including Shoreditch, [...]
Dig deep for this lame movie October 18, 2012 FILM BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD Cert 12A ** Beasts of the Southern Wild is one of those films that will split opinions. Having heard about the great splash it made at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, I was expecting something special. Instead I got a film that required me to dig deep [...]
Iconic costumes take a leading role at the V&A October 17, 2012 First impressions count – and for actors, they count double. Aside from the rather crucial fact that they play an important role in determining whether or not we believe, for instance, that Johnny Depp is, in fact, a crazy pirate, costumes often tell you all you need to know about a character before they’ve even [...]