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{"id":5655,"date":"2013-02-20T12:32:26","date_gmt":"2013-02-20T20:32:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/?p=5655"},"modified":"2013-02-21T12:16:49","modified_gmt":"2013-02-21T20:16:49","slug":"mike-leigh-turns-70","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2013\/02\/mike-leigh-turns-70.html","title":{"rendered":"Mike Leigh turns 70"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

$\"\"$ <\/a>British filmmaker Mike Leigh turns 70 today<\/a>. To mark the occasion, I have re-posted all of my articles on him and his films, starting with a phone interview<\/a> that I did with him for the UBC student newspaper back in 1996.<\/p>\n

The occasion for that interview was the release of Secrets & Lies<\/a><\/i>, which I quickly came to regard as my favorite film of the 1990s. Alas, the interview itself did not go as well as I might have hoped, since I was rather under the weather when the appointed time came, and the only free phone was right in the middle of the student-newspaper office \u2014 and this was on a production night, no less. So it was very noisy at my end, and I wasn\u2019t quite as on-the-ball as I should have been, and, well, let\u2019s just leave it at that. But it was still an honour to speak to him, and I can only hope that some day I might get the chance to do so again, under better circumstances.<\/p>\n

Then there are the reviews I have written of some of the films he has made since then: a review of Topsy-Turvy<\/a><\/i> (1999) for the Vancouver Courier<\/i>; a review of Vera Drake<\/a><\/i> (2004) for BC Christian News<\/i> (where it also ended up on my top ten list<\/a> for the year); and a review of Happy-Go-Lucky<\/a><\/i> (2008) for Christianity Today Movies.<\/p>\n

Finally, a couple of blog posts about Leigh\u2019s films: I wrote this one<\/a> when I introduced my wife to Secrets & Lies<\/i> in May 2005; and in this one<\/a>, from December 2005, I linked to a New York Times<\/i> article that looked at how Christian film critics were becoming more \u201csophisticated\u201d in their approach to films like Vera Drake<\/i>. Enjoy.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"