Coming in January: James Bond postage stamps

It takes a lot to get me excited about postage stamps, but the Royal Mail's James Bond stamp collection just about does it.

Unveiled today and available to buy and use from January 8th 2008, the James Bond collection marks the centenary of the birth of Bond creator Ian Fleming and includes six 'extra-long' stamps, each featuring different covers of six of his most famous Bond novels.

The two 1st Class stamps feature Fleming’s first novel Casino Royale (1953) and Dr No (the first novel to be filmed). The 54p stamps shows the covers of Goldfinger and Diamonds are Forever, while the final 78p pairing features For Your Eyes Only and From Russia with Love.

All can be ordered now as collector's packs from the Royal Mail website.

Find out more at the Royal Mail website

McQueen's Machines: The Cars and Bikes of a Hollywood Legend

It's stating the obvious somewhat to say that Steve McQueen had an interest in cars and bikes - it was probably more of an obsession. And now you can share that obsession with McQueen's Machines: The Cars and Bikes of a Hollywood Legend.

Journalist Matt Stone was given access to the McQueen family albums to create this 176-page hardback book, packing each page with images of vehicles driven, owned, and raced by Steve McQueen. And to give it continuity, there's plenty of facts too - including his obsession with Triumph motorbikes (James Dean introduced them to him apparently), the disappointing news that he didn't do the motorcycle jump in the Great Escape and the ever-increasing value of his vehicles - his 1963 Ferrari Lusso, which sold last summer for a massive $2.3 million.

This book is available for a more modest price - £10.19 from Amazon.

Find out more about the book at Amazon.co.uk

Coming soon: Martin's Scorsese's movie on the Rolling Stones - Shine A Light

Movie history is littered with movies about or featuring the Rolling Stones, but that's not stopped uber-director Martin Scorsese from adding to the collection with Shine A Light.

It could be good, it could be bad. In essence, this is a live show on film, with Scorsese capturing the band in a small venue in New York - in essence, trying to film the 'electricity' of the band's live performance, mixing it up with background, interviews and history. Which sounds great, but for the fact that the band are well past their peak (though still a decent live act), not to mention that the gig seems to have various walk-on 'special guests' who probably contribute nothing to the event.

But I'll wait until the film's release in April before I pass judgement. In the meantime, check out this trailer for the movie for a taster.

Via Electric Roulette

Details and photos emerge of the 2008 Ford Mustang Bullitt car

Back in May at our sister site Retro To Go, we mentioned that Ford was producing a limited edition Ford Mustang Bullitt to commemorate 40s years since its appearance in the movie. And as we enter 2008, more details and pictures have emerged.

The 2008 Ford Mustang Bullitt has a 4.6-litre V8 engine, a sport-tuned chassis and suspension to boost handling (if you fancy re-creating that car chase) and a 'revised rear-axle ratio' for better acceleration. The paint job will be Dark Highland Green (as the original), the car will be without logos - again as the film car was and most bizarrely of all, the exhaust sound will be just as the original, with the designers having listened to the movie soundtrack to get it just right.

I'm personally not excited by the look of the car, but it could be a shrewd investment, with just 7,700 of these being made. Expect it in 2008 for $31,075 (around £16,000).

More details and images at the Forbes Autos website

Cult Clip: Wonderwall trailer (1968)

Jo Massot's typically swinging sixties flick is rarely seen today, but if you want a glimpse of Wonderwall, you can check out the trailer below.

What's it about? Well. a wall of course - full of holes and used by a reclusive scientist to view a photographer and his model/girlfriend (Jane Birkin). Not officially available on DVD anymore, but you can still pick up used copies quite easily.

Stanley Kubrick T-Shirt

This interesting S IS FOR STANLEY t-shirt features a portrait of director Stanley Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odssey, Dr. Strangelove, etc.) and was designed by the acclaimed London based graphic artist JAKe who's probably most well known for his portraits of artists like Massive Attack, Beastie Boys and Oasis in NME. His other design projects include work for Ugly Duckling, Steinski / Sugarhill Records, and Lucasfilm ( Star Wars).

This designer tee is available from Giant Peach and sells for $32. Giant Peach is based in California, but they offer international shipping to anywhere in the world. For more information please see the Giant Peach website.

- Kimberly Lindbergs

Quadrophenia Convention in Brighton

If you happen to love Quadrophenia, you might want to attend the Quadrophenia Convention in Brighton.

It's a two-day event in Brighton, running from April 5th to April 6th 2008, with appearances from the likes of Phil Daniels (Jimmy) Mark Wingett (Dave) Phil Davis(Chalky) Toyah Willcox (Monkey) Gary Shail (Spider) Garry Cooper (Peter) and Trevor Laird (Ferdy). No sign of Sting I see.

There's a range of events, talks and of course, a movie showing. You can even have a meal with the cast or a brew - but at a price. See the website for full details. Tickets are from £15.

Find out more at the Quadrophenia website

Cult Clip: Kes (1969)

One of the finest scenes from one of the finest British movies. Yes, this is the football match from Kes, with Brian Glover excelling as the sports teacher desperate to win at all costs. They really don't make them like this anymore.

DVD Review: Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery 10th Anniversary Special Edition (1997)

Is it really 10 years since the world 'shagadelic' came into being? It must be, because Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery 10th Anniversary Special Edition is on the market.

I've got to be honest, I was dreading re-watching this. Time hasn't been too kind to the movie's legacy - the name 'Austin Powers' conjures up images of bad fancy dress costumes and even worse impressions, not to mention those tired old catchphrases. In fact, if someone proposed burying the movie (and its two sequels) underground for 100 years, I would have backed them all the way. But I did watch it again - and you know what? I actually enjoyed it.

Because despite all the baggage, this is a very funny, very well-written comedy spoof. And if you happen to have an obsession for 60s cinema (as I do), there's also the opportunity to bore your friends with a spot of 'reference spotting' from the likes of Our Man Flint, Dr Goldfoot, (original) Casino Royale, The Silencers, Valley Of The Dolls, Girl on A Motorcycle, Smashing Time, Blow-Up and various Bond movies to name just a fraction.

DVD Review: The Phantom Carriage (1921)

The silent film that motivated Ingmar Bergman to work in cinema has been given new life in Tartan’s re-release, which matches an artfully tinted, restored print to a new ambient soundtrack by Stephen O’Malley of SunnO))) and Peter Rehberg.

Victor Sjöström’s evocative morality tale, based on the novel by Selma Lagerlöf, exhibits a narrative and emotional sophistication astonishing for its time, as well as groundbreaking special effects. While the density of plotting sometimes works against the piece’s pedagogical aspirations, and the uniformly ominous score risks constraining the tonal variety of the story, the whole is nevertheless an intriguing and genuinely unnerving proposition.

On New Year’s Eve, dissipated, consumptive drunkard David Holm (played by Sjöström himself) is passing the time with his gravedigger colleagues. They discuss an old legend wherein the soul of whoever dies on the stroke of midnight is compelled to be the Grim Reaper for the next year.

Cult Clip: And Soon The Darkness trailer (1970)

And Soon The Darkness is a firm Cinedelica favourite and one of the first films reviewed on the site many months ago.

So as the trailer to this post-Avengers project has recently been added to YouTube, we feel we have to give it a mention. And we also think you should view it, then seek out this gem of a British thriller.

DVD Review: Forest of Death (2007)

If nothing else, Forest of Death proves it's possible to make a supernatural thriller that isn't particularly scary, but still compellingly odd.  Following their jointly directed triumph Re-cycle (2006), the Pang Brothers went their seperate ways this year.  Oxide Pang made the psychological thriller Diary, while sibling Danny takes the helm here. 

The film opens with a young girl driven to slash her wrists amidst the eerie, mist drenched greenery.  Local rumour has it the mysterious forest induces suicides and shock deaths, the next being a police inspector who succumbs to a heart attack while investigating a crime scene.  Detective Ha (Shu Qi) takes up the case, pursuing an arrogant triad rapist.  In a radical move, she teams up with maverick botanist Steven (Ekin Cheng), who believes the living forest thrives upon, records and stores human pain and suffering.  Steven has invented a machine that can talk to trees (Shades of Clint Eastwood in Paint Your Wagon!), while May (Rain Li) his selfish, tabloid TV reporter girlfriend angles for a scoop. 

In the movie's most effective scene, Detective Ha and Steven use the forest's powers to goad a confession out of the rapist, while the trees traumatize the assembled reporters with the victim's pain.  But bodies keep piling up.  Ha discovers some suicides have been missing for decades, their corpses neither decomposed nor aged.  Meanwhile May, tortured by professional failure and a suspicion that Ha and Steven are having an affair, is lured into the forest. 

Cult Clip: Burke and Hare (1972)

YouTube is once more the place to find obscure British horror clips, in this case Vernon Sewell's Burke and Hare from 1972.

A solid British cast recreate the story of the (in)famous Edinburgh body snatchers, while 70s pop act The Scaffold (which featured Paul McCartney's brother) provide the annoyingly catchy theme - which is featured below, along with an all-too-brief clip of the movie.

Not available right now, but one I'd like to see back on the racks.

A Warning To The Curious (1972)

Come on, let’s be honest, amongst all the emotive responses we have whilst watching a play or film on TV, BEING SCARED OUT OUR WITS is the most memorable and masochistically enjoyable.

Your first experience of televisual terror should ideally stay with you forever, be it the moment Sapphire and Steele encounter a haunted picture or a fevered Dennis Weaver gets the ultimate tailgate.  My first big bladder shifting creepy TV experience came with seeing the masterpiece of ghostly horror that is A Warning To The Curious.

DVD Review: Society (1989)

It is appropriate that Brian Yuzna’s barmy, marvellous debut feature took three years after completion to be released in the US, while enjoying critical and popular success in Europe and elsewhere. Into the decade that mythologised hidebound family values, plugged its ears to social injustice and made heroes out of beancounters, the plunging of this splendidly over-the-top nightmarish satire of America’s social elite must have felt like the herald of the Apocalypse. Albeit a deeply silly, psychedelic Apocalypse. With rivers of prosthetic latex instead of blood.

To all outward appearances, Bill Whitney (Baywatch’s Billy Warlock) is living the (American) dream. Son of Beverley Hills WASP socialites, he drives a Jeep, dates a cheerleader, is a star basketball player and frontrunner for Class President. But all is not as it seems. Bill has paranoid fantasies that he is adopted, that his surrogate parents and platinum-blonde sister secretly hate him.

Cult Clip: Frau Im Mond (1929)

Hopefully you read our review of the newly-restored version of Fritz Lang's Frau Im Mond. But just to give you a visual idea of the movie, check out the short clip of part of the rocket's launch below. Note that this clip isn't the restored version - if you want that, you might need to go out and buy Eureka's latest release.

DVD Review: Bride of Re-Animator (1990)

After a 5-year hiatus, those mischievous abominators-of-nature Drs. Herbert West and Dan Cain are back, this time under the direction of shock godfather Brian Yuzna. Sadly, though the grungy production values, hammy acting and gleefully silly prosthetic FX will appeal to genre fans, this is a disimprovement from Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985).

After a pointless prologue set in wartorn Peru, West (the always watchable Jeffrey Combs) and Cain (Bruce Abbott, sporting an unspeakable mullet and all the charisma of an office partition) are back in good old Miskatonic University Hospital, Massachusetts. Far from discouraged by the massacre precipitated in the first film by his ‘research’ into reanimating dead tissue, West has redoubled his efforts to prove that consciousness pervades all flesh by reanimating individual body parts.

Meanwhile Police Lieutenant Chapham (Claude Earl Jones), whose wife was killed in the original Miskatonic Massacre, doggedly continues his investigation into West’s macabre practices. Irritated by his attentions, West kills and subsequently reanimates him. The crazed doctor then reveals to Cain his plans to create a whole organism from disparate body parts. Initially Cain is horrified, but relents when West suggests including the preserved heart of Cain’s dead sweetheart Megan.

DVD Review: Diary (2007)

A dark, psychological thriller with fantastical flourishes, Diary is a solo outing for Oxide Pang. Released alongside brother Danny's supernatural thriller Forest of Death (2007), it is the better of the two films but still requires patience and perseverance throughout its duller patches. 

Winnie (Charlene Choi - one half of Cantopop superstars, Twins), a troubled young woman, leads a miserable life alone in her grungy apartment since her boyfriend Seth went away. She spends her days scribbling thoughts inside her diary, making creepy wooden puppets, and chopping up some suspicious looking meat. Her phone conversations with the errant Seth provide no explanation for why he left.  "Men would do anything for you before they get laid", Winnie confides in her best friend Yvonne (Isabella Leong).  "After that they all change." Yvonne urges Winnie to move on, but she begins stalking Ray (Shawn Yue), a young man whom she mistakes for Seth.

DVD Review: Frau Im Mond (aka Woman in the Moon) (1929)

Following on from its release of the newly-restored Nosferatu, Eureka has released another silent classic from Weimar-era Germany for its Masters of Cinema series - Fritz Lang's Frau Im Mond. Also known under the English title of Woman in the Moon, Frau Im Mond was Lang's final silent movie, a mix of spy flick, romantic tale and science fiction, as well as being a very stylish and very prophetic movie.

Lang's research for the movie was incredibly detailed, using cutting-edge scientific theory on rocket science to give the space travel plot credibility. In fact, the theory on display in the movie was so realistic that the movie was banned in Nazi Germany, with the authorities fearing it would compromise national security. Which probably makes this the first credible science fiction movie.

DVD Review: The Seventh Seal (1957), 50th Anniversary Special Edition

Not before or since the 1957 release of Ingmar Bergman's haunting masterpiece The Seventh Seal has the momentous theme of humankind's search for existential meaning – within or outside a religious framework – been treated of with such furious grace, intelligence and insight. All cynicism concerning the re-release of a '50th Anniversary Digitally Remastered Edition,' in the year of the great filmmaker's death, must therefore be put on hold. Any reason to publicise or disseminate or roll back the technical decay of this supreme piece of cinematic art, whether or not the companies in question make some extra baksheesh by finagling historical contingency, is a good reason.

Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) is a crusading knight freshly returned to the shores of his native Sweden. He has lost all the moral certainty he left with, presumably having seen and participated in atrocities in the name of Christianity. The hypocrisy of this institution which teaches forbearance, peace and tolerance yet practices murder, torture and empire-like expansionism is too much for his reflective nature to bear without apostasy. He yearns for a meaning to life beyond the circumscribed and vague one offered by the Church.

It's A Wonderful Life back on the big screen for Christmas

There's plenty of Christmas movies, but let's be honest, one stands head and shoulders above the rest - Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life.

If you haven't seen it, James Stewart stars as George Bailey, a man whose attempted suicide on Christmas Eve gains the attention of a guardian angel, Clarence Odbody (Henry Travers) who is sent to help him in his hour of need. I defy anyone not to shed a tear!

And it's back at UK cinemas all over the country for the Christmas period, presented in a new frame-by-frame digital restoration. If you want to know when it's showing near you, seen the list over the page.

Review: Young Birds Fly (2007)

I have been privileged enough to be one of the first in the UK to view a new independent film based on Mod Culture and have been asked to write a review of the film by the film’s American director Leonardo Flores. Young Birds Fly is the first feature length film from Mod enthusiast and California State University graduate Flores and is the story of young quiet American girl, Jill, who blossoms into the Los Angeles Mod scene. 

The film tells a detailed tale of Jill’s transition as she discovers the joy and amazement of the Mod scene…the music, the dance moves, the scooters and the fashion. And it really does give you a sense of Jill’s wonderment as she grasps Mod with both of her hands until it is part of the air she breathes.

It takes a brave man to follow in the footsteps of a cult classic such as Quadrophenia. Indeed, Mods and those with an interest in the scene are quick to grab hold of any film made in connection with it, with movies so few and far between. But this isn't just a depiction of contemporary mod in LA, Leonardo has endeavoured to tell a tale that also criticises much of the scene’s lifestyle, showing young Jill’s disappointment and frustration as she discovers the shallow side of Mod.

DVD Review: Nosferatu (1922)

Nosferatu - one of the most famous horror movies of all time and featuring one (if not more) of the most iconic scenes in film history. But how many people have actually sat through the entire movie? Less than you might think, not least because a definitive version of F.W. Murnau's silent classic hasn't been available to buy. Until now that is.

The two-disc release of Nosferatu by Eureka, as part of its Masters of Cinema series, is pretty much as definitive as any release can be, featuring a fully-restored version of the movie, the original score by Hans Erdmann, a full-length commentary, a detailed documentary on both the movie and Murnau and an equally-exhaustive 80-page book. More on these additions later.

The film itself loosely follows Bram Stoker's Dracula novel, carefully avoiding any direct references, but with enough similarity for Bram Stoker's widow to successfully sue the Prana company and insist all copies were destroyed. Thankfully for us, numerous copies of the movie had already been distributed - with this restored release based on a French archive print from 1922, with other prints used to fill in the gaps. Missing storyboards have also been recreated using the same font as the original movie. Which means for the first time in over 80 years, we can sit back and watch what the director intended.