Ricky Gervais skips down the tightrope between industry satire and mainstream humour with a deftness few MCs can manage. So he’s an inspired choice to host next year’s Golden Globes – as these clips show

The announcement that Ricky Gervais will host next year’s Golden Globe award ceremony – the first time they have had a single MC, rather than rolling presenters, since 1995 – is a triumphant homecoming of sorts. It was victory there that marked The Office’s and Gervais’s own coming-out onto the world entertainment stage, and set the template for the irreverent approach to award ceremonies in which he has delighted ever since.

In 2004, when The Office was nominated for a Golden Globe for best comedy series and Gervais nominated for best TV comedy actor, the nods were unexpected: for all its recognition in the UK, the series was hardly user-friendly by US TV standards and had only been seen on the niche channel BBC America. Expectations were accordingly low: in the DVD featurette about the cast and crew’s trip to Los Angeles for the awards, Gervais is seen insisting ahead of time that they have “no chance”, which seemed reasonable enough given that the competition included Will & Grace, Arrested Development and Sex and the City.

They won both categories but did indeed present an unusual sight on a stage dominated by Hollywood icons: leads Martin Freeman and Lucy Davis flanked by pudgy Gervais, lanky Stephen Merchant and producer Ash Atalla, a diminutive Asian chap in a wheelchair. If Gervais felt out of his depth, he didn’t show it. “I’m not from these parts,” he smirked at the largely baffled audience. “I’m from a little place called England. We used to run the world before you.” Any whisper of conspicuous humility, Hollywood-style, went out the window when he picked up his second, individual gong. “Two! Bookends. Excellent. You need the set.”

Since then, Gervais has missed few opportunities to use his American awards – he also won Emmys in 2006 and 2007 – as sticks to beat their British counterparts. When Merchant won the Best Comedy Actor award for his role in Extras at the 2006 British Comedy Awards, Gervais butted into the ceremony via satellite link from New York to congratulate his collaborator on what must seem like an honour.

“Not to me,” he added. “I’ve won American ones. But to people in that room, this is probably the highlight of their career…Enjoy the night there with the cream of British comedy. I’m off to have dinner with Jerry Seinfeld and Ben Stiller. That’s true.” A couple of years later, he again appeared via video link at the Comedy Awards, accepting an award by shrugging that to go in person would be “beneath me, to be honest. I’ve won Golden Globes and Emmys.”

Not that Gervais has shown much inclination to take US award ceremonies much more seriously since becoming a staple over there. Presenting a gong at this year’s Emmys, he ribbed the audience by noting that “the thing about the Oscars and the Golden Globes [is] they’ve got film stars there with their jawlines and chiselled looks, making me feel bad. In this room – I’m not being funny – I’m probably above average.” He also emphasised his happiness to make industry in-jokes, making a quip about syndication practices then commenting that it was a “joke just for the 5000 people in this room, not for the 5000 people watching at home.”

He has also made great play of the debt Steve Carell supposedly owes him for starring in the US version of The Office. At the 2007 Emmys, Gervais won the award for lead actor in a comedy series for Extras. In his absence, Carell, who had also been nominated, bounded on stage with conspicuous joy to accept the gong instead. The following year, Gervais, presenting an award, milked the bit to great applause when he confronted Carell and, eventually, retrieved the award.

It was during that exchange that Gervais hit on what, one presumes, award-show organisers like about him. “I’ve gone off-road,” he giggled. “Everyone’s getting nervous now, there’s nothing on the autocue, I could do anything. This is live.”

He also seemed to go “off-road” at this year’s Globes, when he referred from the stage to Kate Winslet’s cameo some years before in Extras. Playing herself, she appeared in a fictitious Second World War movie on the assumption that it would lead to award-season glory. “Well done, Winslet, I told you,” Gervais said from the stage at the Beverly Hilton, where she had won a Best Actress Globe for her part as a former Nazi camp guard in The Reader. “Do a Holocaust movie and the awards come. Didn’t I? Trouble is with Holocaust films, there’s never any gag reel on the DVDs …”

When Gervais takes to the stage next year, then, he’ll be on familiar ground, expected to dish up a little risqué humour without derailing proceedings. Here’s hoping he rewards those expectations. After their victory in 2004, Stephen Merchant noted of the Golden Globe that “it’s such a badly designed award … it looks like something you’d win at a judo tournament.” Gervais countered that “it is good for shoving up your arse.” Even from an unconventional host, that might be a bit much.

The moving 3D adventure turns into one of Pixar’s strongest performers, the Saw series shows its first dip, and fans line up for small-hours premieres of This Is It

The winner
Pixar’s Up remains super-buoyant at the top of the box office, with yet another slim decline – 26% – and cumulative takings of £19.68m. After 17 days on release, the animation is well ahead of Pixar’s previous release WALL-E at the same stage of its run last summer (£13.56m) and modestly ahead of Ratatouille (£17.29m). However, Ratatouille’s 17-day figure included the whole October half-term holiday from 2007, whereas that has only just begun for Up. The film should have an especially rich period between now and Sunday.

Up has already overtaken the lifetime total of Pixar’s worst-performing UK title, Cars (£16.5m), and should soon shoot past Toy Story (£22.3m), WALL-E (£22.9m) and Ratatouille (£24.8m). But it still has a long way to go to challenge Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs’ position as 2009′s biggest animation: that film, from rival studio Twentieth Century Fox, has been pushed back into cinemas for half-term and has now grossed £34.87m.

The rival animation
Offering an alternative to the computer-generated 3D sheen of Up is Wes Anderson’s determinedly lo-fi stop-motion animation Fantastic Mr Fox. Debut takings of £1.52m will be seen as not exactly stellar for a family film based on a recognised property (Roald Dahl’s 1970 story) – but taking all the factors into account, it’s an OK start. In the first place, Anderson has never been mega-box office, and has been on a declining revenue curve since his third movie, 2001′s The Royal Tenenbaums: that film, Life Aquatic and Darjeeling Limited opened with £700,000, £455,000 and £435,000, respectively. Secondly, takings for animations outside Disney/Pixar, DreamWorks and Fox’s Ice Age stables are hit and miss. Coraline debuted with £2.43m in May; Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs with £1.58m last month; and Tale of Despereaux with £561,000 last December. The first two titles on that list, unlike Fantastic Mr Fox, benefited from the higher ticket prices of 3D. Take your pick as to which is an appropriate comparison.

A hit franchise stumbles
“If it’s Halloween, it must be Saw” is the message Lionsgate has been successfully pumping out for five years. And in the UK, since peaking with a £2.52m opening for Saw III in 2006, debut grosses for the ingenious torture franchise have been impressively consistent: Saw IV began its life with £2.48m, and Saw V with £2.44m. Now, at last, Saw takes a stumble: the latest installment has opened with £1.74m. The result echoes a similar underperformance in the US, which had been attributed mostly to competition from low-budget horror phenomenon Paranormal Activity. That film doesn’t open until 27 November in the UK, so Saw VI’s dip here presumably reflects market saturation after pictures on five consecutive Octobers. Saw VII is set to be in 3D; if only Lionsgate had managed to present Saw VI in the popular format, it might have been a whole different story.

Arthouse goes AWOL
Last October, foreign-language releases Gomorrah and I’ve Loved You So Long both played to packed arthouses, while crossover title The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas appealed widely to upscale audiences. Fast forward to October 2009, and there’s a dearth of arthouse hits, unless you count The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus or smart comedy Zombieland, which we don’t. Top arthouse release is eco-documentary The Cove, which, despite lots of press and favorable reviews, opened at the weekened with a blah £18,000 from 27 screens, for a £665 average. The result goes to show how hard it is these days to get audiences to watch environment-themed documentaries in the cinema, even one that promises thrills and spills. The release this Friday of An Education can’t come soon enough for the nation’s independent cinemas.

The future
Michael Jackson’s This Is It is being unveiled to the world at the same time on Tuesday, which is fine if you live in LA (6pm) or New York (9pm), but not so great if you are in London (1am Wednesday morning), Paris (2am) and destinations east. Still, it’s all part of the hoopla Sony is building on the concert-rehearsal movie, and Michael Jackson fans should propel it to a stellar debut, especially since Wednesday and Thursday takings will be added in, giving a five-day opening “weekend” result. Advance ticket sales are said to be exceptionally high. After that, it’s more about how word of mouth can spread interest beyond the core fanbase.

UK top 10
1. Up, 549 sites, £3,807,003. Total: £19,683,204
2. Saw VI, 375 sites, £1,736,287 (New)
3. Fantastic Mr Fox, 481 sites, £1,517,312 (New)
4. Couples Retreat, 379 sites, £932,171. Total: £3,588,820
5. Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, 385 sites, £798,641 (New)
6. The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, 268 sites, £616,719. Total: £2,068,715
7. The Invention of Lying, 307 sites, £362,760. Total: £5,538,932
8. Zombieland, 279 sites, £323,815. Total: £3,001,207
9. Fame, 373 sites, £218,110. Total: £8,311,403
10. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, 369 sites, £142,011. Total: £5,881,661

How the other openers did
The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, 100 screens, £36,360
The Cove, 27 screens, £17,956
Johnny Mad Dog, 2 screens, £6,439 + £3,279 previews
Made in Jamaica, 2 screens, £2,345
Coffin Rock, 2 screens, £184
Colin, 3 screens, no figures available

The moving 3D adventure turns into one of Pixar’s strongest performers, the Saw series shows its first dip, and fans line up for small-hours premieres of This Is It

The winner
Pixar’s Up remains super-buoyant at the top of the box office, with yet another slim decline – 26% – and cumulative takings of £19.68m. After 17 days on release, the animation is well ahead of Pixar’s previous release WALL-E at the same stage of its run last summer (£13.56m) and modestly ahead of Ratatouille (£17.29m). However, Ratatouille’s 17-day figure included the whole October half-term holiday from 2007, whereas that has only just begun for Up. The film should have an especially rich period between now and Sunday.

Up has already overtaken the lifetime total of Pixar’s worst-performing UK title, Cars (£16.5m), and should soon shoot past Toy Story (£22.3m), WALL-E (£22.9m) and Ratatouille (£24.8m). But it still has a long way to go to challenge Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs’ position as 2009′s biggest animation: that film, from rival studio Twentieth Century Fox, has been pushed back into cinemas for half-term and has now grossed £34.87m.

The rival animation
Offering an alternative to the computer-generated 3D sheen of Up is Wes Anderson’s determinedly lo-fi stop-motion animation Fantastic Mr Fox. Debut takings of £1.52m will be seen as not exactly stellar for a family film based on a recognised property (Roald Dahl’s 1970 story) – but taking all the factors into account, it’s an OK start. In the first place, Anderson has never been mega-box office, and has been on a declining revenue curve since his third movie, 2001′s The Royal Tenenbaums: that film, Life Aquatic and Darjeeling Limited opened with £700,000, £455,000 and £435,000, respectively. Secondly, takings for animations outside Disney/Pixar, DreamWorks and Fox’s Ice Age stables are hit and miss. Coraline debuted with £2.43m in May; Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs with £1.58m last month; and Tale of Despereaux with £561,000 last December. The first two titles on that list, unlike Fantastic Mr Fox, benefited from the higher ticket prices of 3D. Take your pick as to which is an appropriate comparison.

A hit franchise stumbles
“If it’s Halloween, it must be Saw” is the message Lionsgate has been successfully pumping out for five years. And in the UK, since peaking with a £2.52m opening for Saw III in 2006, debut grosses for the ingenious torture franchise have been impressively consistent: Saw IV began its life with £2.48m, and Saw V with £2.44m. Now, at last, Saw takes a stumble: the latest installment has opened with £1.74m. The result echoes a similar underperformance in the US, which had been attributed mostly to competition from low-budget horror phenomenon Paranormal Activity. That film doesn’t open until 27 November in the UK, so Saw VI’s dip here presumably reflects market saturation after pictures on five consecutive Octobers. Saw VII is set to be in 3D; if only Lionsgate had managed to present Saw VI in the popular format, it might have been a whole different story.

Arthouse goes AWOL
Last October, foreign-language releases Gomorrah and I’ve Loved You So Long both played to packed arthouses, while crossover title The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas appealed widely to upscale audiences. Fast forward to October 2009, and there’s a dearth of arthouse hits, unless you count The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus or smart comedy Zombieland, which we don’t. Top arthouse release is eco-documentary The Cove, which, despite lots of press and favorable reviews, opened at the weekened with a blah £18,000 from 27 screens, for a £665 average. The result goes to show how hard it is these days to get audiences to watch environment-themed documentaries in the cinema, even one that promises thrills and spills. The release this Friday of An Education can’t come soon enough for the nation’s independent cinemas.

The future
Michael Jackson’s This Is It is being unveiled to the world at the same time on Tuesday, which is fine if you live in LA (6pm) or New York (9pm), but not so great if you are in London (1am Wednesday morning), Paris (2am) and destinations east. Still, it’s all part of the hoopla Sony is building on the concert-rehearsal movie, and Michael Jackson fans should propel it to a stellar debut, especially since Wednesday and Thursday takings will be added in, giving a five-day opening “weekend” result. Advance ticket sales are said to be exceptionally high. After that, it’s more about how word of mouth can spread interest beyond the core fanbase.

UK top 10
1. Up, 549 sites, £3,807,003. Total: £19,683,204
2. Saw VI, 375 sites, £1,736,287 (New)
3. Fantastic Mr Fox, 481 sites, £1,517,312 (New)
4. Couples Retreat, 379 sites, £932,171. Total: £3,588,820
5. Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, 385 sites, £798,641 (New)
6. The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, 268 sites, £616,719. Total: £2,068,715
7. The Invention of Lying, 307 sites, £362,760. Total: £5,538,932
8. Zombieland, 279 sites, £323,815. Total: £3,001,207
9. Fame, 373 sites, £218,110. Total: £8,311,403
10. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, 369 sites, £142,011. Total: £5,881,661

How the other openers did
The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, 100 screens, £36,360
The Cove, 27 screens, £17,956
Johnny Mad Dog, 2 screens, £6,439 + £3,279 previews
Made in Jamaica, 2 screens, £2,345
Coffin Rock, 2 screens, £184
Colin, 3 screens, no figures available

No Orson. No zither. No masterful expressionism. Tobey Maguire instead of Joseph Cotten. Ageless ‘pod actors’ instead of worry-lined titans. Maybe you shouldn’t step in the Turd Man, Leo

Hold on to something firm and reliable, please this paper has no wish to cause accidents. Some stories hurt. Thus, there is a rumour going around that Leonardo DiCaprio is thinking of playing Harry Lime in a remake of The Third Man.

With Tobey Maguire as Holly Martins, the Joseph Cotten part.

For the moment, I thought, just concentrate on age to explode this nightmare. Yes, it’s true that Orson Welles’s Harry Lime was baby-faced in a way that was inescapable if Welles was involved. But Harry Lime, I thought to myself – he’s a villain who’s gone through the war in the black market; he’s a sewer rat in Vienna after the peace; he’s a trafficker in diluted penicillin and so he reduces children to madness and death. This man has lived. Whereas, Leonardo DiCaprio is a boy still. We realized that last year in Revolutionary Road, for as he and Kate Winslet were reunited after their hit in Titanic, it was plain to see and feel that she had grown older and sadder, while Leonardo was really no older or wiser than Tom Cruise managed between, say, Risky Business and Mission Impossible. Our actors these days don’t age much – and they certainly don’t mature. So how is Leonardo (so used to being lovable) going to find the nerve to be Lime without immense stupidity on his side?

That’s what I thought. But then I looked it up. In 1948, when Orson made The Third Man, he was thirty-three – DiCaprio is already thirty-five! What better proof could there be of my just-mentioned principle that we are in an age of pod actors, not subject to ordinary human processes like ageing, thinking and worrying? So Leonardo could say, “Come on, I’m ready!”

And Tobey Maguire is thirty-four – so that works!!!! Except that it begins to lose a very important undertone in the original movie: Joe Cotten was 10 years older than Welles, and thus Holly Martins was all the sadder – an older man who had apparently been infatuated with Lime’s poisoned charm. It made their relationship all the more poignant in that Martins had to learn to see Lime in the cruel light of day.

So the actors can easily think the casting is great! And maybe you do, too! Am I the only one out of my mind and desperate?

Let me go further: The Third Man relied on black-and-white photography by a master named Robert Krasker; and it grew out of the application of that imagery to the nocturnal streets and underground tunnels of war-torn Vienna.  In the minds of its makers – producer Alexander Korda, director Carol Reed, and author Graham Greene – it was a study in the physical and mortal wreckage left by the second world war. It needed the faces of supporting actors who had come close to starving; and it needed the refugee look of the heroine, played by Valli, a woman who had only just survived the war. It needed the brusque Trevor Howard as the policeman, and it needed people  like Bernard Lee, Wilfrid Hyde-White and Geoffrey Keen. It needed that music, played on the zither by Anton Karas; it needed the acuity of its several makers, their ability to look at their world and find a story that caught the shabby moment of 1948.

Now maybe some latter-day talents (at the level of Korda, Reed and Greene; Welles, Cotten and Howard) are going to place this new Turd Man in a modern equivalent of Vienna – in Baghdad, say, or New Orleans (some great city that has been given up). Maybe. Or maybe we need an organized early-warning system whereby thousands of us could email Leonardo and say, look, whatever you do, don’t go near The Third Man, because we are all of us ready to put a curse on you in which not going to see the Turd Man is just the first step. After that, we get nasty.

No Orson. No zither. No masterful expressionism. Tobey Maguire instead of Joseph Cotten. Ageless ‘pod actors’ instead of worry-lined titans. Maybe you shouldn’t step in the Turd Man, Leo

Hold on to something firm and reliable, please this paper has no wish to cause accidents. Some stories hurt. Thus, there is a rumour going around that Leonardo DiCaprio is thinking of playing Harry Lime in a remake of The Third Man.

With Tobey Maguire as Holly Martins, the Joseph Cotten part.

For the moment, I thought, just concentrate on age to explode this nightmare. Yes, it’s true that Orson Welles’s Harry Lime was baby-faced in a way that was inescapable if Welles was involved. But Harry Lime, I thought to myself – he’s a villain who’s gone through the war in the black market; he’s a sewer rat in Vienna after the peace; he’s a trafficker in diluted penicillin and so he reduces children to madness and death. This man has lived. Whereas, Leonardo DiCaprio is a boy still. We realized that last year in Revolutionary Road, for as he and Kate Winslet were reunited after their hit in Titanic, it was plain to see and feel that she had grown older and sadder, while Leonardo was really no older or wiser than Tom Cruise managed between, say, Risky Business and Mission Impossible. Our actors these days don’t age much – and they certainly don’t mature. So how is Leonardo (so used to being lovable) going to find the nerve to be Lime without immense stupidity on his side?

That’s what I thought. But then I looked it up. In 1948, when Orson made The Third Man, he was thirty-three – DiCaprio is already thirty-five! What better proof could there be of my just-mentioned principle that we are in an age of pod actors, not subject to ordinary human processes like ageing, thinking and worrying? So Leonardo could say, “Come on, I’m ready!”

And Tobey Maguire is thirty-four – so that works!!!! Except that it begins to lose a very important undertone in the original movie: Joe Cotten was 10 years older than Welles, and thus Holly Martins was all the sadder – an older man who had apparently been infatuated with Lime’s poisoned charm. It made their relationship all the more poignant in that Martins had to learn to see Lime in the cruel light of day.

So the actors can easily think the casting is great! And maybe you do, too! Am I the only one out of my mind and desperate?

Let me go further: The Third Man relied on black-and-white photography by a master named Robert Krasker; and it grew out of the application of that imagery to the nocturnal streets and underground tunnels of war-torn Vienna.  In the minds of its makers – producer Alexander Korda, director Carol Reed, and author Graham Greene – it was a study in the physical and mortal wreckage left by the second world war. It needed the faces of supporting actors who had come close to starving; and it needed the refugee look of the heroine, played by Valli, a woman who had only just survived the war. It needed the brusque Trevor Howard as the policeman, and it needed people  like Bernard Lee, Wilfrid Hyde-White and Geoffrey Keen. It needed that music, played on the zither by Anton Karas; it needed the acuity of its several makers, their ability to look at their world and find a story that caught the shabby moment of 1948.

Now maybe some latter-day talents (at the level of Korda, Reed and Greene; Welles, Cotten and Howard) are going to place this new Turd Man in a modern equivalent of Vienna – in Baghdad, say, or New Orleans (some great city that has been given up). Maybe. Or maybe we need an organized early-warning system whereby thousands of us could email Leonardo and say, look, whatever you do, don’t go near The Third Man, because we are all of us ready to put a curse on you in which not going to see the Turd Man is just the first step. After that, we get nasty.

How could Wes Anderson have allowed his new animated film to be used to lure young children into bad eating habits?

Consider the great directors of cinema and what are the qualities that spring to mind? A distinctive personal imprint. Profundity and imagination expressed on every level. Stylistic innovation. But when you think back on the work of the so-called greats, don’t you feel, deep in your soul, that something intangible is missing? Well, now the wily young maverick Wes Anderson has revealed exactly what was absent from Tarkovsky, Bresson, Welles and the rest: a merchandising tie-in with McDonald’s. True art, it seems, can co-exist after all with moist, defeated cheeseburgers and limp, glossy French fries. I do hope Cahiers du Cinema got the memo.

Walk into a branch of the fast-food chain right now and you can pick up a Happy Meal in a carton emblazoned with images from Anderson’s latest film, Fantastic Mr Fox. Inside you will find a plastic figure, modelled on one of the film’s characters, which will be only slightly less pleasing to the tastebuds than the food it is helping to sell. As the company’s website so enticingly puts it: “Right now at McDonald’s we’re inviting your kids to join our exciting mission with Fantastic Mr Fox and his animal friends.”

None of which would be noteworthy in the slightest if the film in question were some DreamWorks piece of junk, or a knock-off directed by a hack. But even those of us who lost faith with Wes Anderson several films ago would agree that the director – and, one presumes, the studios with whom he works and the publicists who operate on his instructions – presents himself to the world as an auteur. His six features, from his 1996 debut Bottle Rocket through the near-perfect Rushmore and on to Fantastic Mr Fox, are characterised by an increasingly fanatical attention to detail comparable with Stanley Kubrick. If we are to believe the griping of the London crew who worked on the new picture while Anderson emailed directions from his Parisian base, he is the very embodiment of micromanagement. “I think he’s a little sociopathic,” the film’s cinematographer Tristan Oliver told the LA Times. “I think he’s a little OCD. Contact with people disturbs him … He’s a bit like the Wizard of Oz. Behind the curtain.”

So it would be highly unlikely that Anderson didn’t know about the McDonald’s deal; he may even have been required to sign off on it himself. Anderson should have followed the commendable example of Disney/Pixar, which stopped dealing with fast-food chains after the glaring contradiction of having McDonald’s plugging Cars, that homage to small-town values. The film harked back to a time when America wasn’t carved up by precisely those freeways which had enabled the ravenous expansion of corporations like McDonald’s. By the time of Ratatouille, which celebrated culinary sophistication and artistry, the relationship was untenable. “[Disney] realised their brand really stands for something,” Ratatouille’s director Brad Bird told me in 2007, “and it can only be in their best interest not to align themselves with unhealthy eating. So you won’t be finding Ratatouille merchandise at any fast-food outlets.”

Perhaps Anderson was so fixated on the process of making Fantastic Mr Fox that he forgot that films have a life beyond the screen. Any director is diminished by such an association, but someone like Anderson in particular should not be getting into bed with McDonald’s, and using his work to lure young children into destructive eating habits; it’s a lose-lose situation. He looks like a chump, the film becomes tainted, and obesity levels continue to rocket. Take into account the organic, pastoral quality of the film itself, and the value it places on environmental harmony, and the tie-in looks even more misjudged. If you’re going to use the blood-soaked fast-food industry to plug such a movie, why not go the whole hog and get Otis Ferry to provide one of the voices?

Interview Project, a series of interviews with ordinary Americans conducted by David Lynch’s son Austin and fellow film-maker Jason S, is an addictive experience that plays to the internet’s strengths

The personal, warts-all interview is generally the preserve of movie stars, former politicians, musicians and tabloid celebrities: people with something to promote and something to hide. The internet-based Interview Project – a collection of short interviews with ordinary Americans – turns this status quo on its head.

The series was conceived by film-makers Austin Lynch and Jason S, who travelled across the US for 70 days, picking their subjects off the street – or, more often than not, off their front porches. Every three days, over the course of a year, a new interview is being uploaded on to their website, each one jauntily introduced by Austin’s father, the director David Lynch. (Typical introduction: “Brenda always dreamed of being a dancer!”) The interviewees are diverse in age, race and background, but they have one thing in common: they live outwardly unremarkable lives in towns that most of us would have trouble locating on a map.
 
If you need a Lynchian frame of reference, think the poignant folksiness of The Straight Story, rather than the lucid nightmare of Blue Velvet. Although Interview Project was not directed by David Lynch, Austin and Jason are shaping up to be every bit as mysterious as their dad-cum-mentor. After all, we don’t even know Jason’s surname (although we do know that he directed Lynch (One), a documentary about David Lynch), and the duo refuse to do interviews over the phone, preferring to communicate via email.
 
“Jason and I were sitting together one day at the kitchen table when the idea for Interview Project struck us,” wrote Austin, in reply to my email. “We were very excited by the idea of travelling throughout the United States and simply talking to people about their lives. Shortly thereafter, we approached my dad with the idea and he was very receptive to it.”
 
The result could have been banal or repetitive, but is instead deeply moving and addictive – it’s impossible to watch just one episode. Many of the interviewees have been touched by tragedy, but their stories are, on the whole, uplifting. There’s 18-year-old Daniella Barr of Abington, Virginia, who leans against her car as she describes how her family saved her from drugs and self-destruction. Or 92-year-old Mrs Dennis from Vicksburg, Mississippi, a preacher’s wife who grew up in a family of dirt-poor labourers, but still has endless love for God and humankind. And at a Navajo reservation in Tuba City, Arizona, a gay Native American called Kee describes his journey to self-acceptance.
 
“We were very surprised by how open and receptive people were to our project,” says Austin. “Going into the filming of Interview Project, we really had no idea whether or not people would agree to tell us their stories and to be filmed. Not everyone that we approached agreed to be interviewed, but fortunately for us (and our project) the right ones did.”

While concerning itself with human lives, Interview Project relies heavily on technology. Thanks to the internet (and unlike a traditional documentary), the project changes and gathers momentum as time goes on; it develops according to how it is received. For example, the directors realised that there wasn’t a proper forum for viewers to discuss the project, so they launched a blog in the last couple of weeks, to encourage “a dialogue about the series”. The project acts as an interactive road-trip across America, traced on a map that is updated each time a new film is uploaded.
 
At a time when making movies is more difficult than ever (David Lynch himself has trouble securing funding), Interview Project’s imaginative use of the internet is sure to inspire other cash-strapped independent film-makers into action. “It is a really exciting time for film-makers,” says Austin, “but the same old rules still apply – you have to have a great idea or story to make a great film.” And that’s exactly what Interview Project has in spades: great stories. 121 of them, to be exact.

The first Mamma Mia! film used up all of Abba’s best tunes. Imagine what the proposed sequel would have to resort to …

Mamma Mia! has broken so many records – highest-grossing musical ever, highest-grossing film in the history of UK cinema, most genuinely baffling box-office success in the history of time – that a sequel was always on the cards. Now, according to Amanda Seyfried, who played Sophie in the film, it’s looking closer than ever.

“I’ve been talking to some insiders and it’s not something that they haven’t been working on,” Seyfried told BBC News this weekend. Before any real work can start on a second Mamma Mia! film, however, a few problems need to be ironed out.

The first, obviously, is the punctuation to use in the film’s title. Mamma Mia! 2 makes the most sense, but Mamma Mia 2! scans better. Then there’s Mamma Mia 2!? which is probably the inflection all sensible people used when they first heard about the sequel. And then there’s the problem of Pierce Brosnan’s voice, though we can ignore that because nobody seemed to think it was much of a concern when they were making the first movie.

But the biggest problem with a sequel to Mamma Mia! is the soundtrack. Seyfried seemed certain that Mamma Mia! 2 would utilise Abba’s back catalogue just as effectively as the first film did, but this clearly won’t be the case. Mamma Mia! was only a success because it cherry-picked all of Abba’s good songs, so a follow-up would have to be stitched together from the darker corners of the group’s discography.

Not only would that be a problem for the film’s box-office potential – the lucrative Mamma Mia!: The Sing-Along Edition would have to be replaced by Mamma Mia!: The Mumble Along Like It’s an Obscure Hymn at a Wedding Edition, which doesn’t seem as though it’d be as popular – but crafting a cohesive storyline out of the leftovers is going to be an uphill challenge.

Uphill, but not impossible. To save the producers some time, I’ve taken a look at the remaining Abba canon to knock up the only possible Mamma Mia! 2 treatment that’s available to them:

During a blissful summer’s day on Kalokairi, Meryl Streep announces that Boris Johnson has done a wonderful job as mayor of London. But then Julie Walters unfavourably compares him to his predecessor (set to What About Livingstone). This enrages the inherently conservative Streep to such an extent that she sets off on a wild rampage through the streets, overturning cars and climbing buildings and punching aeroplanes out of the sky (to King Kong Song), before she calms down by having a weird orgy with some antipodean throwing devices (to Bang a Boomerang).

Meanwhile, Brosnan finds himself slowly transforming into a sprawling urban settlement against his wishes (a heartbreaking I Am the City) even though a similar mishap had already left him as a string-operated puppet (I’m a Marionette). This transformation concerns Colin Firth and his friend Bobby and Bobby’s brother (Me and Bobby and Bobby’s Brother) who decide they’re gonna sing Pierce their lovesong (Gonna Sing You My Lovesong) in an effort to save him. Finally, someone puts on their white sombrero (Put On Your White Sombrero) and everyone dies.

You’re welcome, producers. I expect to receive my cheque from you shortly.

Highlighting the plight of Japan’s dolphins could reduce the prospects of relief for other suffering creatures

Why would you pay good money to be told what to think? Because you like it, apparently. Al Gore’s chart-flipping, Morgan Spurlock’s burger-munching and Michael Moore‘s stentorian bombast seem to have inspired something of a taste for big-screen indoctrination.

Audiences may not have been vast, but they’ve been prepared to put up with a lot. So far this year, their endurance has been tested by Pete Postlethwaite’s changeless grimace of pained disbelief, the earnest buzzing of schoolmarmish bee-lovers and a watery challenge to their post-movie fish and chips.

The Cove, too, makes a cruel demand of its patrons. This time, though, they don’t have to fear boredom: they’re just going to be horribly traumatised. Apparently, Japanese hunters kill 23,000 dolphins each year, often with spectacular brutality. Spear-wielders portrayed in the film are happy to inflict protracted agony on their prey. The blue waters of the eponymous cove literally run red.

If we must have blatant propaganda on screen, it might as well be good propaganda. The Cove passes this test with ease. It’s almost impossible to watch it (if you can bear to watch it at all) without accepting unquestioningly that the dolphin massacre it depicts just isn’t on. Moore, Gore and Spurlock, eat your hearts out.

The effectiveness of this piece of evangelism is intuitively unsurprising but theoretically puzzling. If corporate greed is destroying our way of life, or profligate carbon consumption threatening our survival, it’s clear why we should care. It’s not so obvious why the fate of a few thousand cetaceans should exercise us rather more.

The film’s spearspersons are certainly puzzled. Westerners, they point out, kill and eat cows. Easterners eat dolphins. What’s the difference? As we know from the work of other film-makers, what happens on the west’s factory farms doesn’t look pretty on celluloid. Yet we don’t seem to care very much about that. After all, cows aren’t dolphins.

It was the big screen that gave rise to humanity’s love affair with seagoing mammals. So different were attitudes when Flipper first swam into view in 1963 that the film-makers got away with speargunning a live dolphin. The subsequent films and TV series have turned dolphinariums, swimming with dolphins and dolphin-spotting excursions into a substantial global industry.

Yet dolphins aren’t as nice as we like to think. They kill porpoises for the hell of it. According to The Cove, they may be more intelligent than people. Why, however, should that entitle them to special treatment? Human brain-boxes aren’t accorded more rights than their dim-witted fellows. We swoon over dolphins, whales and those furred and feathered creatures that strike us as cute. Meanwhile, the overall case for animal rights goes pretty much by the board.

There are signs that The Cove could be having some impact. Those fiendish Japanese fisherfolk are perhaps beginning to give ground. A welcome break for dolphins maybe, but not necessarily for other suffering creatures whose appeal to human beings is less immediate than theirs. On the contrary, the film-makers’ triumph, if it can be called that, may help foster the widespread notion that our sole duty to our fellow creatures is to look after the most winsome of them.

Dying dolphins are all very well, but what about fish writhing in trawlers, rats squirming in laboratories or chickens cowering in broiler-houses? They might pose more of a challenge to the committed camera’s gaze, but they’re more in need of some messianic film-making.

• The Cove is featured at Sheffield Doc/Fest on 5 November.

Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic has stood the test of time – it is terrifying because it takes us into the most awful place: our own heads

As much of a fixture on the filmic calendar as prematurely manic Oscar speculation, once Halloween approaches many minds turn to movies of a sinister bent. Cue warm tributes to Brazil’s Nietzschean bogeyman Coffin Joe, or Facet Features’ annual 31-day celebration of the likes of Wendigo and The Tingler. But for me, as much as I try and broaden my horizons, every time I come to write or even think about the subject I come creeping back to the same film. Because in my small corner of the world, Halloween, horror movies, even cinema, full stop, are all about The Shining.

And it’s strange, because I saw it young and was predictably awestruck, yet for years afterwards it never seemed to have any great hold on me. But recently Kubrick’s monstrous tour de force has loomed ever more insistently over my whole relationship with film. Its memory is, I’ve found, unshakable, as if the same dreadful currents the story located in the walls of the Overlook hotel somehow bled into the film itself and then, in turn, my private headspace.

God knows, its physical presence was powerful enough: the sheer grim spectacle of the snowbound Overlook or the fleeting bear-suit fellatio – so much rendered so appallingly dreamlike by its lack of explanation. All great horror films (all great films, period) share the ability to push your buttons, but The Shining was a symphony drummed out on the softest and most vulnerable points of the psyche. In the murderous Jack Torrance, we’re presented with cinema’s greatest portrait of predestiny: helplessness before fate however awful, the Fourth of July group photo waiting for us all. The true horror isn’t that Jack wants to kill his wife and child, but that he sees it as his duty.

There is, I realise, nothing very original about being under the spell of The Shining, staple of Family Guy pastiches and old Channel 4 100 Moments shows that it is. And yet, however overfamiliar its set pieces might be, there are times when even the most wilfully contrary of us have to fall in line with mainstream opinion. Because no matter how often we see Jack Nicholson gurning his way through the bathroom door, the pure cold magnificence of The Shining still leaves us freaked out to our cores – no amount of comic parody able to house-train this most profoundly disturbing of movies.

Of course film is a subjective medium, and I know that my own ever-growing fixation here is at least partly down to my own circumstances. I’m not above admitting that on my first viewing as a pallid teenager, the mere fact this was in part the story of a (then much younger than me) only child called Danny was enough to ensure a small amount of personal investment. Then, as an adult, I spent many long, dull hours in the course of my professional life staring at blank white space where joyful flights of fiction should be. Eventually, I had a kid myself: a son, the business of fathers and sons of course at the very centre of the project.

But what makes The Shining so extraordinary is that vast numbers of people I know of every conceivable background – non-writers, non-fathers, a whole lot of people not called Danny – has some kind of connection with it, a particular look to their face at just the mention of the title. Kubrick’s subcutaneous brilliance gets to everyone somehow, a moment for every personality type: for some it’s the Grady Girls, others Room 237, for others still the bloody lift doors. For me though, what I see when I close my eyes are the corridors – not even Danny Lloyd cycling through them but just the corridors, those silent, non-specifically unnerving hallways. We can take the film as a comment on the family, or the west, or just a string of chilling set pieces; but when I see those endless corridors it feels to me Kubrick could almost have been putting forward a visual take on the inside of one’s own head – so often the most awful place in which we’ll ever find ourselves.