Recent Articles
Thursday, September 26, 2013
Thursday, September 26, 2013
- 1 Comment
The first thing you notice is the teeth. Glistening white chompers nestled serenely in McAvoy's cosy gums. These are the teeth of a movie star, carefully sculpted into existence by a team of top showbiz dentists. What they are not is the teeth of a drug-raddled, chain-smoking, alcoholic policeman on the edge. It's been a while since I read Irvine Welsh's Filth and much of it has faded from memory, but two things wedged themselves deep within my mind. One were the bizarre hallucination sequences involving a talking tapeworm. The other was the central character of Bruce Robertson, who is about as repulsive a hero as I've ever encountered in any fictional work.
Both book and film show a policeman spiralling into insanity, repeatedly committing acts of such demented sociopathy, a man engaged in long term evil plans to ruin his co-workers, fuck every woman that is unfortunate enough to cross his path and shovel enough cocaine up his nose to turn his skull into a snowglobe. There's a murder to be solved and a promotion to be won as the backbone of the narrative, but both film and book are only tangentially concerned with moving the plot forward, and far more interested in dissecting what makes this monster cop tick.
Uniqueness is an pretty subjective concept. Humans have an intrinsic psychological sense of uniqueness, our internal consciousness versus the outside world. Whether each person is a really a precious little snowflake or not is up for debate, but we can at least define ourselves as unique against the rest of the animal kingdom. We have complex language, tool-making abilities, art and culture and an ability to conceptualise solutions to problems. Other animals possess one or more of these traits but the human genetic cocktail is mixed in such a way as to create at least the illusion that we're divorced from the rest of the animal kingdom.
To understand, the human brain has to be splatted onto the slab; pulled apart; sliced up; poked; prodded; examined under a microscope - what separates this particular lump of bloody pink jelly from what's knocking around inside, say, a cat's skull? Fortunately we had two scientists in the Royal Institute last night that could supply some of the answers.
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
- 0 Comments
A good comedy is damn difficult to review. You can say something is hilarious, rib-tickling, smirksome, chortleworthy and so on, but you're just repeating yourself - how many different ways can you say something is plain funny. If you begin to describe the best bits then you're spoiling the punchline and dissecting why it's funny feels like you're missing the point a bit. But yes, The Ladykillers is funny. Funny, funny funny. This is an adaptation of the funny 1955 Ealing Studios film of the same name starring the very funny Alec Guinness. The writer for this stage version is TV funnyman Graham Linehan writer of Black Books (very funny), Father Ted (very very funny) and The IT Crowd (..... sporadically funny).
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
- 0 Comments
Prisoners is not an easy movie to watch. Sure it's got beautiful Roger Deakins cinematography and looks absolutely fantastic from start to finish, but the subject matter is about as grim as it gets. Two families, the Dovers and the Birches, meet for Thanksgiving dinner. They're the very model of suburban American perfection, loving, attentive to their children, friendly and Christian. Yet as the meal winds down they realise their two preteen daughters, Anna and Joy, have gone missing. The only lead is that they were last seen playing near a sinister looking beat-up RV. Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhall) quickly tracks down the RV and its driver, the super-creepy Alex Jones (Paul Dano).
All leads point to him, but he's not spilling the beans and with no hard evidence the police are forced to release him from custody. Wracked with grief, Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman), the father of one the missing girls, abducts Alex, locks him in an abandoned apartment complex with the aim of beating the whereabouts of his daughter out of him. This complex set-up is but the first sequences of a sober and extremely depressing exploration of parental grief and child murder.
"The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are."
L. Frank Baum advocating genocide, December 20th, 1890.
It is August 25th, 1939. As Hitler masses his troops on the Polish border, Judy Garland skips down the Yellow Brick Road for the first time. By the time The Wizard of Oz is on wide release Hitler will have sparked World War II, fascist ideology plunging the world into a confrontation that will leave millions dead. In a sick parallel Baum's twin dreams come to life simultaneously, Oz is realised on the silver screen at precisely the same moment as his fantasy of racial extermination is enacted with brutal efficiency in the Nazi death camps.
Monday, September 16, 2013
Monday, September 16, 2013
- 0 Comments
Within us we have a multitude. As we meet different people in our lives we adjust our behaviour accordingly, shuffling various traits of our personalities like we might a deck of cards. Prevertere is about someone who's mastered this technique, a man whose personality is so variable that if you dig deep enough you might find that there's nothing there at all. This is Templeton (Terry Wayne), a man whose life, at least as far as we see it, is devoted entirely to procuring sex. But this isn't some testosterone soaked "whoo lads!" tribute to the pleasures of boning; Prevertere is about what happens when you construct such a convincing fake personality that who you really are begins to crumble.
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Thursday, September 12, 2013
- 0 Comments
Being in The Drowned Man is like exploring a stranger's dream. This is less a theatrical production and more a slice of some weird alternative reality that’s collapsed into our own. I love immersive theatre: the demolition of the boundary between audience and action, leaving you to construct a personal narrative based on your own experiences.
The Drowned Man occupies an enormous ex-Post Office sorting depot right next to Paddington Station. Punchdrunk have transformed the interior of this unprepossessing building into a mausoleum to the Golden Age of Hollywood. This hallowed time and place occupies a very special place in the popular consciousness; a glitzy town full of 'man’s men' movie stars: Bogart, Peck, Cagney; Wayne; Cooper; Tracy. And the women! This was the age of true glamour, dotted with sequins, encircled in feather boas, dramatic lids seductively fluttering under perfectly coiffed locks. All of this wreathed in a haze of swirling cigarette smoke and washed down with neat whiskey.
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
- 0 Comments
 |
| Halle Berry takes..... THE CALL |
The Call is a movie about a woman sat in a call centre talking to a girl trapped in the boot of a car. Not exactly the most dynamic set up in cinema right? Two central characters unable to move from confined, cramped and mundane locations. I felt apprehensive. This apprehension intensified with the ominous appearance of the WWE wrestling logo at the beginning of the film. Perhaps it's just me, but tense psychological thrillers and the world of pro-wrestling are a bit, well, chalk and cheese.
Sunday, September 8, 2013
Sunday, September 8, 2013
- 0 Comments
Ah Othello: epitome of nobility, driven to the depths of misery by evil manipulation. Described by eminent Shakespearian scholar A.C. Bradley as "the most romantic of all Shakespeare's heroes" and "the greatest poet of them all". As his beloved wife Desdemona perishes beneath his hand, we feel the most intense sympathy: here is a good man whose true love has been twisted, shoved unjustly towards murder. Why - he's hardly guilty at all!
That's the traditional reading. But what Othello Syndrome argues is that Othello's nobility is an illusion, that we labour under a wantonly blind reading of his actions - his romance actually disturbing, violent and controlling. Here, Othello's manipulation by Iago is not a monstrous perversion of Othello's good nature, but a light tap that knocks down a house of cards; exposing this oh-so-admirable nobility as a symptom of internalised misogyny, pent-up violence and a sociopathic possessiveness.
Saturday, September 7, 2013
Saturday, September 7, 2013
- 0 Comments
Werner Herzog once said "we are surrounded by worn-out images, and we deserve new ones." The doomy Bavarian director repeatedly came to my mind during sin∞fin The Movie, firstly because the title Performances at the End of the World is reminiscent of Herzog's own Encounters at the End of the World - both of which feature beautiful Antarctic photography - and secondly because VestandPage are hellbent on providing us with fresh iconography, new perspectives of the human body and its relationship with the aggressive, unfriendly world. Similarly Herzoggian is their commitment to placing themselves in dangerous situations in the name of seeking new images: blood spattering onto ice; a freezing man balefully staring at use from a crevasse; skin being carved open; two naked lovers frantically embracing inside an ice cavern.
Friday, September 6, 2013
Friday, September 6, 2013
- 0 Comments
Creation is the natural partner of destruction. Burn wood and you get charcoal; break rocks and you get gravel; tear clothes and you get dishtowels. Or, in the case of Jeannie Driver's current exhibition at Arbeit Gallery, shred paper and you get a piece of shimmering beauty. The centrepiece of When Contents Become Form is White3, a gently pulsating white cube that hovers in the centre of the gallery. It reacts to the motion of those observing it, perpetually rippling at the slightest breeze.
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
- 0 Comments
On paper Formula 1 is incredibly exciting. Exotic courses, huge crowds and cars that represent the pinnacle of modern mechanical engineering. Yet I find watching it on TV a bit boring. The helicopter tracking shots provide little sense of speed, the screen is crammed with data and there's advertising everywhere. The cars seem to politely process along a line, playing everything as safe as they can - it's difficult to suppress a groan when you realise there's 50 more laps of this tedium. Rush is different. Rush is a battle of personalities, a simple struggle between two sportsmen elevated to the status of mythological epic. Rush, much like the cars it depicts, is streamlined: everything unnecessary has been stripped away, leaving a taut, dynamic and really, really exciting movie.
Last week, after narrowly escaping a burning art gallery, I was strolling back through the gloomy, underlit streets of Notting Hill when my foot struck something on the pavement. It was a book, skidding along the stones in front of me. I stopped, bent down and plucked it from the pavement: Sword of Wisdom: MacGregor Mathers and the Golden Dawn. The book, a history of the magical Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn constantly mentions Aleister Crowley; aka Frater Perdurabo; aka 'The Great Beast 666'; aka Baphomet; aka The Mad Mullah; aka Oliver Haddo; aka "The Wickedest Man in the World". Aleister Crowley, the most notorious occultist of all time - the man whose papers I had just booked a place to view the following Monday.
Monday, September 2, 2013
Monday, September 2, 2013
- 0 Comments
It's the last Saturday of August. The sun beats down upon a city desperately sunning itself before autumn proper kicks in. But I'm not relaxing in some shady park. I'm in Bermondsey watching three people in billowy white robes decapitating a large eel. Behind me was a pot-bellied, hairy man clapping furiously, the mask covering his head making him look a bit like a burn victim. Ordering him around to a rat-a-tat drum beat was a man covered in hundreds of used teabags.
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Sunday, September 1, 2013
- 0 Comments
Ten minutes after a lecture about the morbidly wonderful world of necroplasty I was speeding up Euston Road, dodging buses, taxis and the occasional drunk tourist stumbling off the Eurostar. Purple Turtle sounded fantastic: as did Fake Club, a band that hits me right in the part of my brain devoted to angry girl-fronted punk rock. But as I pushed my way through the doors of the club a tumbleweed gently tumbled past my boots. Was I in the right place? Free entry? Cheap booze? Loud music? If the people of Camden are insects then this gig should be like those big blue electric buzzing things that fries them to a crisp.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
