The Dorchester is divine

The Dorchester Grill

Dressed in twin-set and pearls, she tutted as she walked past. A woman in her 70s, she looked my way and muttered: "I don't know what the Dorchester is coming to, I really don't. My mother would be appalled."

My faux-pas? My arms were resting on the breakfast table.

Now my mother would also be appalled but the pensioner with a stickler for table manners had got it right. This was The Dorchester, an elegant hotel with an impressive history and certain standards, and I quickly whipped my hands back on to my lap.

Feeling the colour rise in my cheeks, I realised that The Dorchester stands for many things which are passing us by in a world where fast food reigns, supermarkets are open 24 hours a day, people text while they talk, eat while they walk and quality and customer service are sometimes hard.

It is an oasis of luxury and elegance in a fast-moving capital city, which has moved with the times enough to offer 42 inch flat-screen televisions in your suite but serves afternoon tea with cucumber sandwiches, minus the crusts.

Afternoon tea, like breakfast, is served in The Promenade, a lobby on the ground floor, where potted palms and towering fountains of flower plants surround plush couches and marble columns the colour of apricots.

But this hotel isn't just grand … it's an institution. For more than 70 years, it has played host to the noble and the noteworthy - General Eisenhower helped plan the Normandy Invasion from his suite and Prince Philip hosted his bachelor's party on the eve of his wedding to the Queen at the Park Suite.

Of course, it doesn't matter whether you're a multi-millionaire, a star of the big screen or like us, a pair of 30-somethings celebrating their tenth wedding anniversary.

Consistently ranked as one of the world's best hotels, we were thrilled to be spending a night there, with dinner in the famous Dorchester Grill and a visit to the £3.2 million revamped Dorchester Spa.

It was one of the hottest days of the year and as we were shown to our suite on the seventh floor (apparently booked out almost in its entirety by Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt when they arrived in London for the Baftas this year), we were gasping for a cup of tea.

Whatever happened to the great American film director?

Once upon a time in Hollywood, the man behind the camera was king. Today, studios are more interested in blockbusting franchises and big bucks than in nurturing new voices and visionaries - and our screens are suffering as a result, says Kaleem Aftab

In the Nineties, following the success of Miramax, many studios opened up specialist divisions to cultivate and nurture American independent films and film-makers. In the past three years, every major studio has announced job losses or the closure of these speciality divisions. In the same period Woody Allen and Spike Lee have had to go to Europe to secure funding.

Tarantino is the last of these directors - and possibly the only American director working today - who can open a movie on name alone. Even his cachet has dropped a little with the failure of Grindhouse; no wonder Brad Pitt has been drafted in to get Inglourious Basterds off the ground. It's a back-up strategy that Scorsese has been using ever since he helped to establish Robert De Niro as box-office dynamite. More recently, Scorsese has called on Daniel Day-Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio to get bums on seats. In the same way, Michael Mann cast Tom Cruise in Collateral and now Johnny Depp in Public Enemies, and when he adapted Miami Vice for the big screen, the Oscar- winning Jamie Foxx was called up to support Colin Farrell. It's a clear sign that across the industry, no studio believes that a director alone can open a movie. Producers are increasingly hedging their bets to minimise their exposure to risk and unsustainable financial losses.

Only David Fincher, following Se7en and the post-cinema DVD success of Fight Club, has come close to matching Tarantino. Yet when Zodiac was released in 2007 and marketed around the director's reputation, the thriller was a commercial failure. He has also shied away from the fast-cut MTV-style editing that was once his signature especially in his last film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Of the newer talents, Paul Thomas Anderson, seen by many as heir to Altman, and Wes Anderson, the quirky director of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited, have both been put forward as modern-day auteurs. Although both of these film-makers can happily lay claim to a signature style, neither director has shown the requisite personality to become a star in their own right. Sofia Coppola has the benefit of the family name (though her father, Francis, is on a woeful run of form) but while her first efforts, The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation, were breathlessly received, Marie Antoinette was a flop. Spike Jonze, her ex-husband, was once a bright young hope but he has not managed to translate his success in commercial and music videos into a fully realised film career. Expectation around his next film, Where the Wild Things Are, an adaptation of Maurice Sendak's children's classic, has been lowered by rumours of production problems and re-cuts. The studio, Warner Brothers, flexed their muscles and Jonze, it seems, has backed down. Gone are the days when Michael Cimino could hold a studio to ransom.

Charlie Kaufman, who is unusual in that he is a screenwriter who has attained auteur status, wrote Spike Jonze's previous films, including Being John Malkovich, as well as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for Michel Gondry. But the following and acclaim he had built up as a screenwriter counted for nothing as his debut in the director's chair, Synecdoche, New York, flopped at the box office. Audiences are less willing to indulge directors when they fall below par.

Among all the almosts and not-quites, the one person who can claim to have truly bucked this recent trend is Judd Apatow, who has carefully and quietly built up a loyal audience for his signature comedies. The director of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up has done so by producing comedies with a masculine slant and by developing his own stars, who include Seth Rogen and Steve Carell. This summer sees the release of his new film, Funny People, starring Adam Sandler. Set in the world of stand-up comics, it promises to offer something different from his usual formula.

It's unusual for a comedy director to gain auteur status but it's a sign of the times that Apatow has done so. These days, the most important figures for Hollywood studios are the opening-weekend box-office returns. Cinemas have grown incredibly ruthless at culling movies that don't perform well; the time when a film could slowly but surely find its audience is long gone. Word-of-mouth and critical acclaim has little chance against the relentless might of the biggest studios' huge marketing budgets. As a result, American independent films have been largely relegated to the film festival circuit.

Brad Pitt's Make It Right Intros News Green Duplex Designs

Make It Right, the green building foundation started by actor Brad Pitt, has released 14 new designs that will be among the 150 houses reconstructed in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Up to now, the homes on site have been single-family residences only - but Make It Right Director Tom Darden knew that residents were interested in duplex designs as well. "Before the storm, there were a number of duplexes and doubles in the neighborhood," he said. "Families who want to come back to the Lower 9th have been asking us to build them so extended families can live together. And duplexes are right in keeping with Make It Right's mission: They allow more people to live together with less impact on the environment and are more cost-effective to build."