‘I turned down Gandhi because I’m terrified of snakes’: the amazing movie memories of Bruce Dern

Famed for playing loners, cranks and wayward angels, the Hollywood star is now a wolfish 90 – but he still jogs daily. As he takes his latest film to Edinburgh, we meet the man Hitchcock called ‘the golden calf’ ‘Can you take another story?” asks the veteran actor Bruce Dern towards the end of our talk, as though every tale is a drink and the landlord has called last orders. He doesn’t want to keep me and knows we’re running out of time. It’s just that one memory sparks another and these tales won’t tell themselves. He says that the next one is a doozy. “It’s about Marilyn Monroe.” Throw out all the questions and turn the clocks to the wall. One does not interview Dern so much as say hello, hit record and sit back. The man began his career acting alongside Montgomery Clift and Mary Astor and has collaborated with everyone from John Wayne to Tom Hanks, Hitchcock to Tarantino. He’s the lawless survivor of American movies, blown in from the past, and talking 19 to the dozen. “I’m 90 fucki...

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On review – bijou stop-motion animation will win you over

What should be an irritating story about a tiny talking shell with shoes trying to find his family is somehow funny and beguiling

Here is a genuine oddity: a weird little hothouse flower of a film that looks as if it might crumple at the slightest breath of wind – but is actually very resilient. It’s a quirky stop-motion animation, developed from a series of online short films, whose comedy frequency takes a little time to tune into. You have to wait a bit to hear its batsqueak, and before this happens there is a real and understandable danger that you will simply find it insufferably annoying. The film appears to exist in the Venn diagram-overlap between twee and hipster, which isn’t for everyone – but let it grow on you, and there is a real sweetness and gentleness in its absurdity, a savant innocence and charm.

The idea is that the film’s director, Dean Fleischer Camp, is staying in an Airbnb after the collapse of his marriage; this house itself has become available for rental because the couple who own it have split up. Fleischer Camp becomes aware that there is someone else in the house: a tiny mollusc called Marcel (voiced by Jenny Slate) with a single, blinking human eye and dinky little human shoes. Marcel is a calm, childlike figure who talks with absolute candour in his tiny voice to Dean about his own problems and Dean’s.

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