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Front Row: Ryan Gosling's two new films reviewed

Ryan Gosling's two new films reviewed

19/09/2011

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Ryan Gosling's two new films reviewed

Ryan Gosling's two new films reviewed and Mike Scott of The Waterboys on Yeats the poet.

John Wilson reviews Ryan Gosling's starring roles in two new films and talks to Mike Scott of The Waterboys about their album An Appointment with Mr Yeats.

With John Wilson. Ryan Gosling stars in two contrasting films in cinemas from Friday. In Drive, a thriller based on the cult novel by James Sallis, he plays a Hollywood stunt driver moonlighting as a getaway driver in the criminal underworld of Los Angeles. In the rom-com Crazy, Stupid, Love, he plays a handsome lothario acting as wingman for an older guy returning to the singles scene. Antonia Quirke reviews and discusses Ryan Gosling's career.

Mike Scott of the band The Waterboys explains how the Nobel-winning Irish poet W B Yeats has become co-writer on his new album. A selection of Yeats' poems - including September 1913 and An Irish Airman Forsees His Death - have been set to music by Scott on the Waterboys' record An Appointment With Mr Yeats. 

John Wilson takes a tour of 'Firstsite', the new £28m art gallery in Colchester, Essex, designed by Uruguayan-born Rafael Vinoly. The architect explains how Roman archeaological remains beneath Colchester dictated the form of the single-storey, crescent-shaped building - dubbed the 'golden banana'. Architect Rafael Viñoly shows John around the Firstsite art centre in Colchester. 

Andrew O'Hagan's debut book, The Missing, was a meditation on people who disappear from their lives- and the families they leave behind. Inspired by his own experience as a reporter camped outside Fred and Rosemary West's home while the bodies of their victims were being discovered, and acclaimed as a portrait of mid-1990s Britain, it was shortlisted for three major literary awards. Now O'Hagan, together with director John Tiffany (Black Watch), has adapted his book into a new production for Glasgow's Tramway theatre. Critic Mark Brown reviews.

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