Careless whispers: what really happened between George Michael and Lindsay Anderson? The Wham! movie producer reveals all

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How did the pioneering director get involved – then fall out – with the 80s’ poppiest band? How are Sam Peckinpah and Michael Jackson’s Thriller involved? Prepare for a tale of ambition, deception and shuttlecock-stuffed shorts When Wham! squashed Lindsay Anderson’s China film Andrew Ridgeley on Wham’s surreal trip to China It was the evening of 3 April 1985 in a hotel in Hong Kong. Lindsay Anderson, who I’d engaged to direct the theatrical documentary I’d instigated of Wham!’s historic trip to China, had called a meeting of the film crew. He wanted to give a pep talk the night before we flew to Beijing. The 30-strong team my production company had recruited for this adventure duly assembled. Lindsay gave a speech in the stentorian tones of an elder statesman addressing the House of Commons and rooted in Henry V’s St Crispin’s Day oration. And typical Lindsay, he mixed shrewd observation with sardonic wit. “Tomorrow we embark on a great adventure,” he said. “We travel into communist Ch...
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Raging Grace review – scary movie suffers an absence of scares

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An undocumented Filipino cleaner is employed at a vast, remote mansion to care for a bedridden David Hayman, while hiding her daughter Grace

There are interesting ideas – and a tremendous final choir sequence – in this scary movie; it offers a critique of British colonialism, and also plays with the text of Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem The White Man’s Burden that urged the United States to assume the thankless imperial task of civilising and subjugating the people of the Philippines, and nobly overlooking how ungrateful they are going to be. There is ingenuity here, and good acting, but the film for me feels flawed by its strained melodrama, an absence of scares and by a very odd scene of almost unreal, farcical absurdity.

Joy (Max Eigenmann) is a Filipino woman in the UK with a young daughter, Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla); Joy is doing undocumented work as a cleaner and faces racism and exploitation and imminent expulsion. But then she is employed by the haughty Katherine (Leanne Best) to work in a remote, vast mansion as a housekeeper to Katherine’s bedridden and ailing uncle, Mr Garrett, played with relish by David Hayman. Katherine has no idea about Joy’s daughter and there are some weirdly Feydeau-ish scenes when Joy has to hide the girl and somehow distract Katherine from spotting her.

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