Anderson, McDowell, Kubrick.

"Instituting new distribution methods fascinated Stanley [Kubrick] as much as filmmaking, which he also called 'an exercise in problem solving,'" writes Mike Kaplan in an engaging piece that traces his friendship with the director and his work for him as a marketing strategist that began with 2001. What's more: "Next Friday, the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the British Film Institute will present a joint tribute to Kubrick at BFI Southbank, hosted by Malcolm McDowell. At the same time, in the same building, Never Apologise, Malcolm's tour de force celebration of Lindsay Anderson, which I directed, will be showing."

Also in the Guardian, John Patterson gets McDowell going on Anderson and Kubrick as well as on Never Apologise, "a looser companion piece to the late Gavin Lambert's beautiful memoir Mainly About Lindsay Anderson."

Peter Bradshaw finds the Never Apologise "gossipy, affectionate and fun."

"McDowell's affectionate, mischievous impersonations and the assorted clips from Anderson's work make for an easy couple of hours," writes Anthony Quinn in the Independent.

The Evening Standard's Derek Malcolm finds it "fascinating, revealing McDowell to be a much finer actor than some of his recent films might suggest and Anderson to be not only a great film and theatre director but a character it is impossible, if you knew him, to forget."

"In 1957, the filmmaker Lindsay Anderson was sacked from his reviewing job on this very magazine, this very page," writes Ryan Gilbey, who then explains, amusingly, why the New Statesman dumped him. "Anyway, it's good to have this tenacious and passionate man back in these pages as the subject of Never Apologise: a Personal Visit With Lindsay Anderson. The film is an unfussy record of Malcolm McDowell's 2004 one-man show paying tribute to his mentor. It was Anderson who gave the actor his big break, casting him in 1967 as the rebellious public schoolboy Mick Travis in If..., a role he reprised in the absurdist O Lucky Man! and the barbed satire Britannia Hospital.... Never Apologise concerns Anderson's struggle to realise his vision without compromising, but it says as much about its narrator as its subject."

"Brushing aside thoughts about what future this sort of filmed stand-up has in the age of the podcast, this warm film is the product of the loving memories of a friend," writes Time Out's Dave Calhoun. "Sometimes the rhetoric inevitably tips into the arena of the luvvie but McDowell's performance remains captivating and Anderson's life a genuine fascination."

Update: Ray Bennett's been following Never Apologise.

Posted by dwhudson at November 2, 2007 3:18 AM