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Last Updated: Monday, 11 August, 2003, 12:08 GMT 13:08 UK
Review 8 August
This week the panel discussed:

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

Pirates of the Caribbean
...either you like going to the cinema with nine-year-old boys or it's not a film for you.
Jude Kelly

A summer swashbuckler if ever there was one. Johnny Depp is the glorious cockney Captain Jack Sparrow - complete with dreadlocks, beads, gold teeth and eyeliner.

The film is a homage to the Disney ride of the same name. The ride uses animatronics - the effects in the film take that idea much much further creating a netherworld on The Black Pearl.

Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, the team that wrote Shrek, come up with some funny lines - especially as delivered by the evil Irish Captain Barbossa - Geoffrey Rush.


Hey Nostradamus

Doulgas Coupland
It's a difficult read. It's a very cool, almost chilling read.
Jude Kelly

The man who invented the Mcjobs in Generation X, Girlfriend In A Coma and All Families Are Psychotic has entered the nightmare of a school massacre.

Doulgas Coupland's Hey Nostradamus does something that we all wonder about when the news bulletins turn to fresh tragedies, what happens to the families of the bereaved a long time after?

This moving respectful book by Coupland spans the fifteen years following the fictional Delbrooke School massacre in Vancouver through four main characters - a dead pupil, her husband, his father and his future girlfriend.

Hey Nostradamus by Douglas Coupland is published by Flamingo.


On Your Toes

On Your Toes
It is amateurish and cack-handed.
Will Self

Many people first discovered Adam Cooper in a tutu in Matthew Bourne's brilliant camp Swan Lake which turned the men into swans.

Last year he choreographed and danced in a revival of the 1930's Rogers and Hart musical On Your Toes at the Leicester Haymarket, and now he has re-choreographed it again for its first London outing for more than twenty years.

On Your Toes is a pretty wacky strangulated story of a New York Music Professor who breathes new life into a Russian ballet troupe, and then has a contract taken out on him by the jealous Russian principal.

On Your Toes is at the Royal Festival Hall in London until the 6 September.


Swimming Pool

Swimming Pool
These films are like the film equivalent of Changing Rooms.
Alistair McGowan

Swimming Pool directed by Francois Ozon who also wrote the screenplay with Emmanuele Bernheim.

Charlotte Rampling plays against type as a sexually repressed grumpy crime writer Sarah Morton who goes to a house in Provence to try to effect a change of direction in her writing. Almost immediately her solitude is broken by the unwelcome appearance of her publisher's daughter Julie, played by Ludivine Sagnier who likes to have sex with different men every night.

Sarah becomes a voyeur and it unlocks her creativity - before things start to go badly wrong and murder ensues.

You can see the swimming pool, certificate 15 in cinemas from 22 August.


The panel were:


Newsnight Review, BBC Two's weekly cultural round-up, follows Newsnight on Friday evenings at 2300 BST, 2200 GMT.


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