Stephen Hawking: His Life And Work
by Kitty Ferguson
Bantam Press
4/5
When Stephen Hawking became Luciasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge he was conveniently associated with his predecessor in the post - the irascible and unlikable genius Isaac Newton.
But, as Kitty Ferguson's biography of the time-wrangler makes clear, the lineage follows more comfortably from Albert Einstein who, in addition to his insight and genius, was an instinctive populariser.
The pair both have an approachable other-worldly image, self-deprecation and a way with wit that ensured they sidestepped the brickbats (or indifference) that is the usual fate of intellectuals.
Hawking's image is also his struggle. His disease has slowly eroded his body but kept his mind brilliantly alive.
That his computer voice is, paradoxically, our only route to his humanity means this 70th birthday tribute is an essential unveiling of the man and his motives.
Survivors by Richard Fortey
HarperPress
4/5
If Santa Claus were a scientist, he would be Richard Fortey, the veteran chronicler of the natural world.
Not only are his books gifts that keep on yielding sparkling treasures but they are delivered with such avuncularity that the brutality of extinction feels like a cuddle by the fireside.
His latest work is endlessly fascinating. Survivors sees the naturalist travel the world in search of animals and plants that have found a means to thrive, virtually unchanged, for millions of years.
As he points out, to suggest that these old-timers - ferns, horse shoe crabs, worms - are crude anachronisms is to miss the point. They carry secrets of reinvention that are far superior to those of the sprightly ingenues who claim mastery of the modern biosphere.
Wednesday, 25 January 2012
Spiral Notebook: The future of British film
David Cameron calls for more commercial movie-making. And as if by magic, following this grand utterance, a giant light bulb illuminates above the head of the directors of Hedgehogs At Dawn and Munchbubble The Shoemaker and they down tools and make The Young Wizard and The Young Wizard II: Dance-Off At T'Pithead instead.
No-one knows what will be commercially successful. Indeed, "Nobody knows anything," according to scriptwriter William Goldman.
The King's Speech wasn't singled out as a potential blockbuster and the line of surprise box office British hits stretches further than a queue of redundant Sheffield steelworkers.
If the BFI finds itself buckling and ticking the funding box that says: "Likely mainstream success?" then just about everyone is working on a false prospectus, crossing their fingers like the National Lottery logo with a bad case of Dupuytren's contracture.
Cameron should take heed of that shiny chap who said once: "Some say that to succeed we need to become more like India, China or Brazil. I say that we need to become more like us."
Which is also the view of former culture secretary Lord Smith's new paper on the industry.
His panel called for more to be done to "re-establish the brand of British film".
Lord Smith said he was "not trying to dictate an artistic vision".
"We advocate support for the widest possible range of films from the overtly commercial to the overtly arty and much in between."
Among some enlightened measures was a further move against privacy. Overhyped 3D is one such measure. Much cheaper is an assault on the mobile phone.
The biggest threat to the cinema is that glaring mini-screen and its gabbling owner that have made cinemas a ghastly place to be.
The chains allow customers to sit there, unchallenged doing anything they like (check Facebook, bootleg the action, upload to YouTube).
Until they police their own auditoriums, the multiplexes will be complicit in their own demise.
No-one knows what will be commercially successful. Indeed, "Nobody knows anything," according to scriptwriter William Goldman.
The King's Speech wasn't singled out as a potential blockbuster and the line of surprise box office British hits stretches further than a queue of redundant Sheffield steelworkers.
If the BFI finds itself buckling and ticking the funding box that says: "Likely mainstream success?" then just about everyone is working on a false prospectus, crossing their fingers like the National Lottery logo with a bad case of Dupuytren's contracture.
Cameron should take heed of that shiny chap who said once: "Some say that to succeed we need to become more like India, China or Brazil. I say that we need to become more like us."
Which is also the view of former culture secretary Lord Smith's new paper on the industry.
His panel called for more to be done to "re-establish the brand of British film".
Lord Smith said he was "not trying to dictate an artistic vision".
"We advocate support for the widest possible range of films from the overtly commercial to the overtly arty and much in between."
Among some enlightened measures was a further move against privacy. Overhyped 3D is one such measure. Much cheaper is an assault on the mobile phone.
The biggest threat to the cinema is that glaring mini-screen and its gabbling owner that have made cinemas a ghastly place to be.
The chains allow customers to sit there, unchallenged doing anything they like (check Facebook, bootleg the action, upload to YouTube).
Until they police their own auditoriums, the multiplexes will be complicit in their own demise.
Exhibition: Scott's Last Expedition, Natural History Museum
The scientific advances of Captain Robert Falcon Scott's doomed expedition to Antarctica are often overlooked in the face of the story of tragedy and triumph that is etched into our national psyche.
This neat exhibition, packed with fascinating artefacts from the 1910-1912 voyage, aims to redress the balance - with one commentator suggesting that Scott's greatest legacy was founding Antartica as a continent of science.
But despite the geology, meteorology, biology, glaciology that went on in the background in that Cape Evans hut, the biggest experiment was on the men themselves - they pushed the boundaries of human endurance and found strengths and reserves beyond previous measure.
Amid the science, this is an essentially human story. The rustic skis, the dated outerwear, the tin of Golden Syrup, the letters home are haunting and evocative, overshadowed by the legend of the last push home.
The journey of Scott is not only measured in miles but in years. His voyage from pride of Britain to blundering oaf and onward is essentially, the journey of the 21st century in which heroes became men, a mix of frailty, dignity and virtue.
"We are weak," wrote Scott, "and writing is difficult but for my own sake I do not regret this journey. The end cannot be far. It seems a pity but I do not think I can write any more."
Fail to be moved, I dare you.
Until Sept 2, adults £9, nhm.ac.uk.
© H Ponting photograph, Pennell collection, Canterbury Museum NZ 1975
This neat exhibition, packed with fascinating artefacts from the 1910-1912 voyage, aims to redress the balance - with one commentator suggesting that Scott's greatest legacy was founding Antartica as a continent of science.
But despite the geology, meteorology, biology, glaciology that went on in the background in that Cape Evans hut, the biggest experiment was on the men themselves - they pushed the boundaries of human endurance and found strengths and reserves beyond previous measure.
Amid the science, this is an essentially human story. The rustic skis, the dated outerwear, the tin of Golden Syrup, the letters home are haunting and evocative, overshadowed by the legend of the last push home.
The journey of Scott is not only measured in miles but in years. His voyage from pride of Britain to blundering oaf and onward is essentially, the journey of the 21st century in which heroes became men, a mix of frailty, dignity and virtue.
"We are weak," wrote Scott, "and writing is difficult but for my own sake I do not regret this journey. The end cannot be far. It seems a pity but I do not think I can write any more."
Fail to be moved, I dare you.
Until Sept 2, adults £9, nhm.ac.uk.
© H Ponting photograph, Pennell collection, Canterbury Museum NZ 1975
Film review: Haywire (15)
Guns And Girls magazine has a new cover girl - she's mixed martial artist Gina Carano and she may look awkward in a cocktail dress but she has thighs to die for (or die in) and a punch that ensures you stay punched.
"Is that your idea of relaxing?" asks Channing Tatum's Aaron to Carano's Mallory. "Wine and gun maintenance?"
Not exactly. Gina, you feel, is not one for frippery or indulgence. Besides, guns? Pah. Our gal enjoys the crunch of bone on flesh, the up close and personal kind of violence that requires an investment of time and muscle.
Mallory's angry. And you wouldn't like Mallory when she's angry. Somewhere along the line the hardcore black ops one-woman army has been double-crossed and her comrades are possibly her deadly enemies.
Either way, people want her dead and she has to cross Europe and get back the US to find some answers.
Stephen Soderbergh's revenge thriller is like Mallory: gets in, pulls no punches, gets the job done, gets out. There is a certain European aesthetic (set pieces in Barcelona and Dublin help) that brings to mind the downbeat directness of Ronin.
He takes a route previously travelled by Bourne - the back-to-basic mechanics of staying alive in a hostile world - but the fight sequences are straight from Giant Chicken v Peter Griffin: relentless, bone-crunching, inventive, blood-thirsty and snappy. Jason Statham's quaking.
This is Gina Carano's first movie. She said of herself: "I don't think I look or act like anybody else. I'm slightly awkward. So I always knew that if it was going it happen, somebody was going to have to come find me."
And Soderbergh did. To ease her in, he has called in a strong support cast, to compensate for Gina's limited range. Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Channing Tatum, Bill Paxton, as her patriot dad, all know what its like to face down a buffalo in heels.
"Don't think of her as woman," says one character has he employs an assassin to finish her off. "It would be a mistake to do that."
Move over Jolie. We could be seeing the creation of the first genuine female action superstar. But don't dwell on it. That's not necessary here.
Just sit back and get your face entertained.
"Is that your idea of relaxing?" asks Channing Tatum's Aaron to Carano's Mallory. "Wine and gun maintenance?"
Not exactly. Gina, you feel, is not one for frippery or indulgence. Besides, guns? Pah. Our gal enjoys the crunch of bone on flesh, the up close and personal kind of violence that requires an investment of time and muscle.
Mallory's angry. And you wouldn't like Mallory when she's angry. Somewhere along the line the hardcore black ops one-woman army has been double-crossed and her comrades are possibly her deadly enemies.
Either way, people want her dead and she has to cross Europe and get back the US to find some answers.
Stephen Soderbergh's revenge thriller is like Mallory: gets in, pulls no punches, gets the job done, gets out. There is a certain European aesthetic (set pieces in Barcelona and Dublin help) that brings to mind the downbeat directness of Ronin.
He takes a route previously travelled by Bourne - the back-to-basic mechanics of staying alive in a hostile world - but the fight sequences are straight from Giant Chicken v Peter Griffin: relentless, bone-crunching, inventive, blood-thirsty and snappy. Jason Statham's quaking.
This is Gina Carano's first movie. She said of herself: "I don't think I look or act like anybody else. I'm slightly awkward. So I always knew that if it was going it happen, somebody was going to have to come find me."
And Soderbergh did. To ease her in, he has called in a strong support cast, to compensate for Gina's limited range. Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Channing Tatum, Bill Paxton, as her patriot dad, all know what its like to face down a buffalo in heels.
"Don't think of her as woman," says one character has he employs an assassin to finish her off. "It would be a mistake to do that."
Move over Jolie. We could be seeing the creation of the first genuine female action superstar. But don't dwell on it. That's not necessary here.
Just sit back and get your face entertained.
Spiral Notebook: The history of predictions
The most famous of Arthur C Clarke's Three Laws of Prediction is the last one: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Most often the law makes for good entertainment. A knight is handed a Wii controller to thwart an armoured Mii or a Chaucerian peasant prods perplexed at a plasma screen to reach a frothing brew.
The amusement that follows is used to show that, gosh, aren't we just the cleverest.
Of course, we are the self-same clots that will be similarly humiliated by the inheritors of our legacy but that fits in less comfortably with our smug narrative.
The Mayans - who will be all over your internet for the next 12 months - were such an advanced civilisation that they developed a written language, figured out zero and studied the stars with such insight that they calculated a length for a year (365.24 days) that we still use today.
Such was the accuracy of their calculations that they could "predict" the celestial cycles right up to, well, at least 2012. The momentous planetary alignment that occurs on December 21 was foreseen 5,000 years ago.
Because many wrongly assume that history is synonymous with stupidity, the inference is that they must have been (a) aided by aliens or (b) divine.
The miscued logic follows that December 21, 2012, is therefore a Big Day - end of the world, second coming, new age of enlightenment etc.
Perhaps Clarke needs an update: Any ahead-of-its-time technology is indistinguishable from magic (for those who run star-speckled websites with yellow type).
Chips with everything
A family Christmas entailed not only a visit to Alvin And The Chipmunks 3: Chipwrecked at the cinema but, afterwards, the original Alvin And The Chipmunks on DVD (many times, often consecutively).
Now, despite myself, I'm curious about No.2 - the Squeakquel. Where did the Chipettes come from? What was the genesis of Simon's existential crisis? How did evil Ian fall so low? Aaargh.
Most often the law makes for good entertainment. A knight is handed a Wii controller to thwart an armoured Mii or a Chaucerian peasant prods perplexed at a plasma screen to reach a frothing brew.
The amusement that follows is used to show that, gosh, aren't we just the cleverest.
Of course, we are the self-same clots that will be similarly humiliated by the inheritors of our legacy but that fits in less comfortably with our smug narrative.
The Mayans - who will be all over your internet for the next 12 months - were such an advanced civilisation that they developed a written language, figured out zero and studied the stars with such insight that they calculated a length for a year (365.24 days) that we still use today.
Such was the accuracy of their calculations that they could "predict" the celestial cycles right up to, well, at least 2012. The momentous planetary alignment that occurs on December 21 was foreseen 5,000 years ago.
Because many wrongly assume that history is synonymous with stupidity, the inference is that they must have been (a) aided by aliens or (b) divine.
The miscued logic follows that December 21, 2012, is therefore a Big Day - end of the world, second coming, new age of enlightenment etc.
Perhaps Clarke needs an update: Any ahead-of-its-time technology is indistinguishable from magic (for those who run star-speckled websites with yellow type).
Chips with everything
A family Christmas entailed not only a visit to Alvin And The Chipmunks 3: Chipwrecked at the cinema but, afterwards, the original Alvin And The Chipmunks on DVD (many times, often consecutively).
Now, despite myself, I'm curious about No.2 - the Squeakquel. Where did the Chipettes come from? What was the genesis of Simon's existential crisis? How did evil Ian fall so low? Aaargh.
Review: War Horse (12A)
Thundering, unbridled, across the screen, reins and restraint tossed aside, a formidable consortium of talents charges headlong into the challenge of converting this picaresque animal classic into a galloping movie.
Consider these people and their rich heritage of sentimentality: director Steven Spielberg, co-writer Richard Curtis, Disney studio execs.
Throw them in a room with a tear-jerker such as Michael Morpurgo's 1982 horse-buster and you can grow mushrooms in the resulting damp and dark of a cinema floor.
There is also remarkable cinematographer Janusz Kaminiski who plucks the early scenes from Cranford and the war scenes from Spielberg's own formidable back catalogue and washes the whole thing with a Disneyfied light, making every scene as lush and hyper-real as a Carravaggio.
This, then, is the film that comes from craftsmen at the top of their game, a rich confection of home-spun hokum and world-gone-awry madness.
Scenes stand out. The naïve cavalry charge of the British, swords raised, against the machine guns of the Bosch. The shivering terror of Tommies waiting for the whistle, no-man's land, and certain death. The timpani of hooves, the timpani of the guns, the honeyed sunsets of pastoral Devon. Everything is alive and vivid.
At the centre is Joey, a free-spirited thoroughbred who goes from home farm to home front, passed from hand to hand, linked by some spiritual bond to his first owner, the simple Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine) who tames the rebel and vows to find him when debts and drink force his family to sign him up to the Army, a route that Albert pledges to follow when he turns 19.
There are flaws in the film. Joey is one minute a canny, all-knowing horse-human, up with the plot and predicting developments (Lassie with a saddle). The next, he is a dumb victim of man's folly and random cruelty.
He is passed from custodian to custodian like the Curse of the Black Spot, apparently bringing woe to everyone he encounters so, aside from Albert, we never know anyone fully or for long.
And despite the blood and cavalry charges and gruelling ransack of the Somme, this is still a children's book and "good people" in the Dickensian high-twee style, appear with perverse regularity.
But that's Spielberg. Unashamed and playing with a straight bat. He is everywhere - from the focus on story, to the beautifully mounted setpieces, to the arch manipulation.
Swift and sure, War Horse captures the brilliant emotional simplicity of ET but with the added lacquer of 30 years of life.
Consider these people and their rich heritage of sentimentality: director Steven Spielberg, co-writer Richard Curtis, Disney studio execs.
Throw them in a room with a tear-jerker such as Michael Morpurgo's 1982 horse-buster and you can grow mushrooms in the resulting damp and dark of a cinema floor.
There is also remarkable cinematographer Janusz Kaminiski who plucks the early scenes from Cranford and the war scenes from Spielberg's own formidable back catalogue and washes the whole thing with a Disneyfied light, making every scene as lush and hyper-real as a Carravaggio.
This, then, is the film that comes from craftsmen at the top of their game, a rich confection of home-spun hokum and world-gone-awry madness.
Scenes stand out. The naïve cavalry charge of the British, swords raised, against the machine guns of the Bosch. The shivering terror of Tommies waiting for the whistle, no-man's land, and certain death. The timpani of hooves, the timpani of the guns, the honeyed sunsets of pastoral Devon. Everything is alive and vivid.
At the centre is Joey, a free-spirited thoroughbred who goes from home farm to home front, passed from hand to hand, linked by some spiritual bond to his first owner, the simple Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine) who tames the rebel and vows to find him when debts and drink force his family to sign him up to the Army, a route that Albert pledges to follow when he turns 19.
There are flaws in the film. Joey is one minute a canny, all-knowing horse-human, up with the plot and predicting developments (Lassie with a saddle). The next, he is a dumb victim of man's folly and random cruelty.
He is passed from custodian to custodian like the Curse of the Black Spot, apparently bringing woe to everyone he encounters so, aside from Albert, we never know anyone fully or for long.
And despite the blood and cavalry charges and gruelling ransack of the Somme, this is still a children's book and "good people" in the Dickensian high-twee style, appear with perverse regularity.
But that's Spielberg. Unashamed and playing with a straight bat. He is everywhere - from the focus on story, to the beautifully mounted setpieces, to the arch manipulation.
Swift and sure, War Horse captures the brilliant emotional simplicity of ET but with the added lacquer of 30 years of life.
Film review: Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol (12A)
The search for sensation goes on, whether at home or abroad, and minuscule screens on smart phones will be a somewhat underwhelming grandstand (when we arrive at that point) for this consummate orgy of outrageous spectacle.
Tom Cruise is attached, frog-like, to the windows of Dubai's Burj Khalifa, so many storeys up that it makes no difference to the likely spatter pattern. Around him, a camera rotates and suddenly we are stuck there too, willing the gizmo glove that keeps him attached to be wi-fi not 3G.
And a snug fit too, for our palms are sweating. This is the biggest screen in Britain (the BFI Imax) and the span between top and bottom of the white sheet is enough to induce vertigo without the further aggravation of a high wind, a time limit and the prospect of world destruction.
Brad Bird, the director, has history in this area although none that you would not expect were his name unfamiliar. The fluid, unending camera swirls, the world as one large WD40 theme park and the gadgets that are part ludicrous but always perfect for the job.
Bird directed The Incredibles. He is one of the chief architects of the Pixar canon and a wise choice to revive the fortunes of this downgraded franchise. And someone's let on to Cruise too about Mission's mixed fortunes so he's buffed up for a box office showdown.
So no baggage from the old days here. Gone are the old crew (there's a cameo by Ving Rhames but he looks sufficiently sofa-thick to make benching a good idea) and we're in with the new.
Simon Pegg puts the brakes on the comedy but still gets to deliver the puckish one-liners rather than the chin-rucking hooks (no action hero he).
Paula Patton is conveniently beautiful enough to seduce tycoon Brij Nath (Anil Kapoor) but also handy in heels for a catfight. And Jeremy Renner is a man of secrets and self-proclaimed (if barely discernible) reticence.
We travel with Ethan Hunt from Russia, to Dubai, to Mumbai (if the dollars desert, then track down the rupee and the rouble) on the trail of some old school baddie who wants to marry nuclear weapons with codes and a delivery system for some warped social experiment.
It matters not about the wonky logistics or bonkers background. The plot is sufficiently occupying to present the requisite number of setpiece impossibilities all safely sidestepped, dismantled or rhino'd by our fantastic four.
Bird has stolen from the tables of Bourne (for the handy action) and Bond (for the sumptuous sets) and, all in all, this rough and tumble is slick, sexy and thoroughly merciless.
A rush from top to bottom.
– From December 2011
Tom Cruise is attached, frog-like, to the windows of Dubai's Burj Khalifa, so many storeys up that it makes no difference to the likely spatter pattern. Around him, a camera rotates and suddenly we are stuck there too, willing the gizmo glove that keeps him attached to be wi-fi not 3G.
And a snug fit too, for our palms are sweating. This is the biggest screen in Britain (the BFI Imax) and the span between top and bottom of the white sheet is enough to induce vertigo without the further aggravation of a high wind, a time limit and the prospect of world destruction.
Brad Bird, the director, has history in this area although none that you would not expect were his name unfamiliar. The fluid, unending camera swirls, the world as one large WD40 theme park and the gadgets that are part ludicrous but always perfect for the job.
Bird directed The Incredibles. He is one of the chief architects of the Pixar canon and a wise choice to revive the fortunes of this downgraded franchise. And someone's let on to Cruise too about Mission's mixed fortunes so he's buffed up for a box office showdown.
So no baggage from the old days here. Gone are the old crew (there's a cameo by Ving Rhames but he looks sufficiently sofa-thick to make benching a good idea) and we're in with the new.
Simon Pegg puts the brakes on the comedy but still gets to deliver the puckish one-liners rather than the chin-rucking hooks (no action hero he).
Paula Patton is conveniently beautiful enough to seduce tycoon Brij Nath (Anil Kapoor) but also handy in heels for a catfight. And Jeremy Renner is a man of secrets and self-proclaimed (if barely discernible) reticence.
We travel with Ethan Hunt from Russia, to Dubai, to Mumbai (if the dollars desert, then track down the rupee and the rouble) on the trail of some old school baddie who wants to marry nuclear weapons with codes and a delivery system for some warped social experiment.
It matters not about the wonky logistics or bonkers background. The plot is sufficiently occupying to present the requisite number of setpiece impossibilities all safely sidestepped, dismantled or rhino'd by our fantastic four.
Bird has stolen from the tables of Bourne (for the handy action) and Bond (for the sumptuous sets) and, all in all, this rough and tumble is slick, sexy and thoroughly merciless.
A rush from top to bottom.
– From December 2011
Spiral Notebook: Putting pen to paper
There are the precious few who still write at Christmas, pen and ink and entreaties for news.
How to respond? It's always a dilemma. A quick gobbet of an update circling the pre-printed sentiments in the card is the best bet, with its implication of a crowded life and an agenda so packed that reams of Basildon Bond would never quite do the job.
Occasionally there is the optimistic (if unexecuted) promise "thanks for your letter, mine to follow".
Some years I opt for Pinteresque brevity, shorn of detail but laden with menace, suggesting my life is dark and brooding and you're better off out of it.
Occasionally I begin a full tale, the A to Z of it all, with its inherent dangers (self-effacement may be taken literally and need to be counterbalanced with full-on bragging; shameful episodes must be given full context by way of an excuse).
Whatever form they take though, these vignettes are underscored, shot through and overwritten with guilt.
Another year passes, another tranche of friendships wilt without the nourishment of contact.
The only saving grace is that my rising stock of misanthropy ensures this diminution gets less onerous by the year.
Return ticket
- There must be a list somewhere, in a drawer or tucked in the Yellow Pages or scrawled in the corner of a City Hall agenda paper.
It is a list of the blackmailers, the screw-turners, the money-grabbers, the opportunists.
Those who don't see a public holiday, a festival, a moment of joy that they cannot dampen with the threat of a strike for some extra dosh to put upon the pile of dosh they wrested from the system last time people want to have a good time in a central location without decent parking facilities.
The list is short. Just three words - London transport workers.
One day, one day, perhaps in 2013 when we've got nothing on... that's when karma will exact its retribution.
How to respond? It's always a dilemma. A quick gobbet of an update circling the pre-printed sentiments in the card is the best bet, with its implication of a crowded life and an agenda so packed that reams of Basildon Bond would never quite do the job.
Occasionally there is the optimistic (if unexecuted) promise "thanks for your letter, mine to follow".
Some years I opt for Pinteresque brevity, shorn of detail but laden with menace, suggesting my life is dark and brooding and you're better off out of it.
Occasionally I begin a full tale, the A to Z of it all, with its inherent dangers (self-effacement may be taken literally and need to be counterbalanced with full-on bragging; shameful episodes must be given full context by way of an excuse).
Whatever form they take though, these vignettes are underscored, shot through and overwritten with guilt.
Another year passes, another tranche of friendships wilt without the nourishment of contact.
The only saving grace is that my rising stock of misanthropy ensures this diminution gets less onerous by the year.
Return ticket
- There must be a list somewhere, in a drawer or tucked in the Yellow Pages or scrawled in the corner of a City Hall agenda paper.
It is a list of the blackmailers, the screw-turners, the money-grabbers, the opportunists.
Those who don't see a public holiday, a festival, a moment of joy that they cannot dampen with the threat of a strike for some extra dosh to put upon the pile of dosh they wrested from the system last time people want to have a good time in a central location without decent parking facilities.
The list is short. Just three words - London transport workers.
One day, one day, perhaps in 2013 when we've got nothing on... that's when karma will exact its retribution.
Stage review: The Ladykillers, Gielgud Theatre
Mousetrap is the inspiration, surely. Not the Agatha Christie whodunnit, but the board game which involves all sorts of convoluted trips, traps and gadgets to snare the prey.
Michael Taylor's stage set for this warm-hearted tribute to a British classic is itself a masterpiece. The dilapidated Kings Cross house is crooked, full of surprises and capable of energetic meltdown when a train goes by.
Rotating, it reveals new opportunities beyond the confines of Mrs Wilberforce's twee fiefdom and when the heist at the centre of this dark caper comes about... well, let's just say Michael Bentine would be pleased.
This is a generous romp from the pen of Graham Linehan who knows how to create inoffensive eccentrics. Director Sean Foley packs the stage with enough trickery to bamboozle Barnum and the cast rise to the potential of script, direction, co-star and stage.
The story sees the redoutable Mrs Wilberforce (played with shy aplomb by the redoutable Marcia Warren) rent out her rooms to friends who claim to be musicians but are, in reality, planning a robbery. When dotty Mrs Wilberforce cottons on, one of their number must live up to the title of the play and the fractures begin to show.
The story, set in the post-war years of bobbies and lodgers, is so well known the script doesn't waste time with exposition. As a result, much of the tension and a large slice of the creepiness is removed in favour of what amounts to a glorious black farce, packed with broad one-liners, slapstick and setpiece sight gags.
Orchestrating the mayhem is the wonderfuly sinuous Peter Capaldi as greasy Professor Marcus, forever teetering on the edge of anarchy but with sufficient self-regard to hold the unravelling strands together.
The characters in the Ealing film had little chance to shine. Here, they each have their moments: James Fleet as the caddish cross-dressing con man Major Courtney (who "lacks confidence as a man"), Ben Miller as east European cut-throat Louis Harvey, Stephen Wight as pill-popping wideboy Harry Robinson and Clive Rowe as simple giant One Round.
Yes, occasionally the stage business is creaky and obvious, and some of the jokes are old groaners but it's all done with a wink and a twinkle. Besides, who can fault a production that throws everything - including a temperamental kitchen sink - at the task of warming hearts.
– From December 2011
Michael Taylor's stage set for this warm-hearted tribute to a British classic is itself a masterpiece. The dilapidated Kings Cross house is crooked, full of surprises and capable of energetic meltdown when a train goes by.
Rotating, it reveals new opportunities beyond the confines of Mrs Wilberforce's twee fiefdom and when the heist at the centre of this dark caper comes about... well, let's just say Michael Bentine would be pleased.
This is a generous romp from the pen of Graham Linehan who knows how to create inoffensive eccentrics. Director Sean Foley packs the stage with enough trickery to bamboozle Barnum and the cast rise to the potential of script, direction, co-star and stage.
The story sees the redoutable Mrs Wilberforce (played with shy aplomb by the redoutable Marcia Warren) rent out her rooms to friends who claim to be musicians but are, in reality, planning a robbery. When dotty Mrs Wilberforce cottons on, one of their number must live up to the title of the play and the fractures begin to show.
The story, set in the post-war years of bobbies and lodgers, is so well known the script doesn't waste time with exposition. As a result, much of the tension and a large slice of the creepiness is removed in favour of what amounts to a glorious black farce, packed with broad one-liners, slapstick and setpiece sight gags.
Orchestrating the mayhem is the wonderfuly sinuous Peter Capaldi as greasy Professor Marcus, forever teetering on the edge of anarchy but with sufficient self-regard to hold the unravelling strands together.
The characters in the Ealing film had little chance to shine. Here, they each have their moments: James Fleet as the caddish cross-dressing con man Major Courtney (who "lacks confidence as a man"), Ben Miller as east European cut-throat Louis Harvey, Stephen Wight as pill-popping wideboy Harry Robinson and Clive Rowe as simple giant One Round.
Yes, occasionally the stage business is creaky and obvious, and some of the jokes are old groaners but it's all done with a wink and a twinkle. Besides, who can fault a production that throws everything - including a temperamental kitchen sink - at the task of warming hearts.
– From December 2011
Stage review: Haunted Child, Royal Court
Who is the Haunted Child in director Jeremy Herrin's neatly-staged production at the Royal Court?
At first, the answer seems obvious - young Thomas (a role shared by Jack Boulter and Jude Campbell) senses ghosts in the house, wets the bed and generally displays the attributes of the side-swiped and unnerved.
But the re-emergence of run-away husband Douglas (Ben Daniels), toothless, ramshackle and semi-coherent with tales of re-birth and enlightenment suggests he could also be the spooked offspring - after all, he claims Thomas is the reincarnation of his dead father so the family tree is somewhat tangled.
Astride this troubled axis, Julie (Sophie Okonedo) attempts to hold the fragments together. The son needs stability and discipline. Fuelled by manic electricity, Douglas believes the opposite. Their lives have become humdrum and their grim passage from dreamers to trudgers is making them sick.
Julie's sensuous seduction appears to unpick his carefully woven explanation but tension lingers over Douglas's final decision - family or philosophy.
On the surface the argument is stacked in Julie's favour. The unease of the boy, the pragmatic urgency of his mother and the sinister demands of the "cult" that adopted Douglas during his meltdown all tend towards the cliche - namely, Dad has the freedom to explore his disappointments while Mum is busy making jam and toast and carting the kid off to school.
In his turn, Douglas is a mix of self-indulgent teenager, blank-eyed cypher of a manipulative cult and just plain mad.
But occasionally the heady lure of his argument and the passion in his eyes coalesce into something close to persuasive - and they are moments of eerie disorientation.
This is mostly Ben Daniel's piece - veering from soapbox fulminator to slick-haired advocate. But Sophie Okonedo has much to do to give Julie more dimensions than a nagging wife and victim. The presence of a child on stage is always disquieting (properly so in this case) but Jack Boulter is an effective catalyst for the woe.
By making Douglas more brittle than enlightened, writer Joe Penhall shies away from a full-on exploration of the central question but this new work is still a gut-wrenching mechanism to examine the potential catastrophes family life.
Until Jan 14. Go to royalcourttheatre.com
– From December 2011
At first, the answer seems obvious - young Thomas (a role shared by Jack Boulter and Jude Campbell) senses ghosts in the house, wets the bed and generally displays the attributes of the side-swiped and unnerved.
But the re-emergence of run-away husband Douglas (Ben Daniels), toothless, ramshackle and semi-coherent with tales of re-birth and enlightenment suggests he could also be the spooked offspring - after all, he claims Thomas is the reincarnation of his dead father so the family tree is somewhat tangled.
Astride this troubled axis, Julie (Sophie Okonedo) attempts to hold the fragments together. The son needs stability and discipline. Fuelled by manic electricity, Douglas believes the opposite. Their lives have become humdrum and their grim passage from dreamers to trudgers is making them sick.
Julie's sensuous seduction appears to unpick his carefully woven explanation but tension lingers over Douglas's final decision - family or philosophy.
On the surface the argument is stacked in Julie's favour. The unease of the boy, the pragmatic urgency of his mother and the sinister demands of the "cult" that adopted Douglas during his meltdown all tend towards the cliche - namely, Dad has the freedom to explore his disappointments while Mum is busy making jam and toast and carting the kid off to school.
In his turn, Douglas is a mix of self-indulgent teenager, blank-eyed cypher of a manipulative cult and just plain mad.
But occasionally the heady lure of his argument and the passion in his eyes coalesce into something close to persuasive - and they are moments of eerie disorientation.
This is mostly Ben Daniel's piece - veering from soapbox fulminator to slick-haired advocate. But Sophie Okonedo has much to do to give Julie more dimensions than a nagging wife and victim. The presence of a child on stage is always disquieting (properly so in this case) but Jack Boulter is an effective catalyst for the woe.
By making Douglas more brittle than enlightened, writer Joe Penhall shies away from a full-on exploration of the central question but this new work is still a gut-wrenching mechanism to examine the potential catastrophes family life.
Until Jan 14. Go to royalcourttheatre.com
– From December 2011
Film review: Another Earth (12A)
There is another world, hanging in the sky, an identical twin that is labelled Earth 2. But this film is not science fiction.
There is a love story too, of sorts, that revives a sense of hope and purpose for two lost and lonely figures. But this film is not a romance.
Seamlessly blending and vaulting genres, Sundance award-winner Another Earth elicits some beautiful performances from its actors in a film that is like the mirror planet - haunting and strange and cold and distant.
At one point Rhoda Williams is dusting. Thousands of motes are illuminated in the sunlight, creating a brilliant but brief constellation. That is the essence of the story-telling - the universe captured in a hallway.
The story is not original, indeed there are hand-me-downs all around. The tale of two people who encounter each other, first tragically and later with urgent necessity before the truth tests their fortitude, has been played out many times.
But not with a second Earth overhead. This omnipresent orb poses the question, "am I alone?" But for the two central characters the question is more pressing and domestic.
Lost in their grief and guilt, they function mindlessly without daring to venture into their fractured emotional hinterland.
Rhoda Williams is played by Brit Marling who is also producer and, along with indie-vibe director Mike Cahill, writer as well. The piece grew from intense workshops and rehearsals, which accounts for its quiet reflection and exquisite moments of awkwardness and doubt.
Rhoda, a drunken teenage student, shatters the family life of music professor John Burroughs (William Mapother). Years later, and anonymously, she tries to make amends. Guilt has led her to abandon her studies and she becomes a school janitor, literally and metaphorically cleaning up her mess.
She enacts the same duties for Burroughs, his decline evident in piles of abandoned books and dishes. From this tentative, false foundation, something tender grows, although the truth ticks away in the background.
He rediscovers music (including an eerie symphony on a saw) and she rediscovers happiness and purpose.
Both wish they could start again, and find the bliss that eludes them. Rhoda tries to make this wish real, vying for one of the Wonka-ish golden tickets that would take her to Earth 2 and the prospect of a fresh start or, at least, to a version of herself who didn't screw up.
With an evocative score by Fall On Your Sword and some brittle photography captured by a camera that stalks the territory like guilt, this slow-moving and clever film witnesses the journey of two people who struggle back to meaning.
The sci-fi is worn lightly but lends a magical air. The mirror Earth presents the story with its most dazzling twists but it is the slow redemption of two broken souls that is far more intriguing and rewarding.
– From December 2011
There is a love story too, of sorts, that revives a sense of hope and purpose for two lost and lonely figures. But this film is not a romance.
Seamlessly blending and vaulting genres, Sundance award-winner Another Earth elicits some beautiful performances from its actors in a film that is like the mirror planet - haunting and strange and cold and distant.
At one point Rhoda Williams is dusting. Thousands of motes are illuminated in the sunlight, creating a brilliant but brief constellation. That is the essence of the story-telling - the universe captured in a hallway.
The story is not original, indeed there are hand-me-downs all around. The tale of two people who encounter each other, first tragically and later with urgent necessity before the truth tests their fortitude, has been played out many times.
But not with a second Earth overhead. This omnipresent orb poses the question, "am I alone?" But for the two central characters the question is more pressing and domestic.
Lost in their grief and guilt, they function mindlessly without daring to venture into their fractured emotional hinterland.
Rhoda Williams is played by Brit Marling who is also producer and, along with indie-vibe director Mike Cahill, writer as well. The piece grew from intense workshops and rehearsals, which accounts for its quiet reflection and exquisite moments of awkwardness and doubt.
Rhoda, a drunken teenage student, shatters the family life of music professor John Burroughs (William Mapother). Years later, and anonymously, she tries to make amends. Guilt has led her to abandon her studies and she becomes a school janitor, literally and metaphorically cleaning up her mess.
She enacts the same duties for Burroughs, his decline evident in piles of abandoned books and dishes. From this tentative, false foundation, something tender grows, although the truth ticks away in the background.
He rediscovers music (including an eerie symphony on a saw) and she rediscovers happiness and purpose.
Both wish they could start again, and find the bliss that eludes them. Rhoda tries to make this wish real, vying for one of the Wonka-ish golden tickets that would take her to Earth 2 and the prospect of a fresh start or, at least, to a version of herself who didn't screw up.
With an evocative score by Fall On Your Sword and some brittle photography captured by a camera that stalks the territory like guilt, this slow-moving and clever film witnesses the journey of two people who struggle back to meaning.
The sci-fi is worn lightly but lends a magical air. The mirror Earth presents the story with its most dazzling twists but it is the slow redemption of two broken souls that is far more intriguing and rewarding.
– From December 2011
Spiral Notebook: The cost of a free lunch
The younger generation, we are reliably informed, don't expect to pay for things any more.
Their news, music, films and stuff arrive via the magic of the internet without rubbing grubby shoulders with lucre.
And there's no going back. Now they're used to getting everything for nothing then a small charge here and there is enough to drive them to further reaches of the silicon hinterland in search of something substandard but free.
But, as they're sadly finding out, nothing's for free. They're paying. Big-time and for a long time.
Because in the olden days of, say, a decade ago, there were people who made things and put things on shelves and biked films to multiplexes and wrote about books in newspapers and put jumpers in bags and said "thank you" and pitched for money from TV companies to make documentaries and all these people were in employment.
The middle men, middle boys and middle girls have all gone. We've wiped out an entire class of employment by refusing to pay. We've seen the ladder pulled up behind us and the man who used to pull up the ladder has been made redundant because some whizkid in Seattle has just released the LadderPull app for 97p.
And now all the youngsters have to get everything for free because they haven't the wage to pay for them. And I wonder if, given the choice, they would quite like a slice of that action, those golden days, where we paid a little for lots of things and people were employed to make all of it happen.
Money-go-round
- Keynesian economics is all about keeping money in circulation - so one person's outlay is another man's wage. And when money stopped circulating, the Government steps in and unblocks the blockage.
One man is paid to dig a hole and another is paid to fill it up, both of them heading off to Greggs to buy pasties for their lunch.
But now even that faux-job is gone. According to the AA, Britain is sinking under the weight of its potholes. So there's only a job for one man now and Greggs will have to toss the extra pasty.
Their news, music, films and stuff arrive via the magic of the internet without rubbing grubby shoulders with lucre.
And there's no going back. Now they're used to getting everything for nothing then a small charge here and there is enough to drive them to further reaches of the silicon hinterland in search of something substandard but free.
But, as they're sadly finding out, nothing's for free. They're paying. Big-time and for a long time.
Because in the olden days of, say, a decade ago, there were people who made things and put things on shelves and biked films to multiplexes and wrote about books in newspapers and put jumpers in bags and said "thank you" and pitched for money from TV companies to make documentaries and all these people were in employment.
The middle men, middle boys and middle girls have all gone. We've wiped out an entire class of employment by refusing to pay. We've seen the ladder pulled up behind us and the man who used to pull up the ladder has been made redundant because some whizkid in Seattle has just released the LadderPull app for 97p.
And now all the youngsters have to get everything for free because they haven't the wage to pay for them. And I wonder if, given the choice, they would quite like a slice of that action, those golden days, where we paid a little for lots of things and people were employed to make all of it happen.
Money-go-round
- Keynesian economics is all about keeping money in circulation - so one person's outlay is another man's wage. And when money stopped circulating, the Government steps in and unblocks the blockage.
One man is paid to dig a hole and another is paid to fill it up, both of them heading off to Greggs to buy pasties for their lunch.
But now even that faux-job is gone. According to the AA, Britain is sinking under the weight of its potholes. So there's only a job for one man now and Greggs will have to toss the extra pasty.
Film review: Hugo (U)
Halfway through Martin Scorsese's stylish dabble into children's fantasy, the narrative screeches to a halt and heads off in another direction, as if the director wanted to play in a toy box of his own.
Explaining the switch in the quest - from repairing an automaton to repairing an old man - would give away the (cracking) central twist.
However, the result is a visual nostalgia-fest as the glorious pioneering years of cinema are brought splendidly to life.
At one point young Hugo dangles from a clock hand, a la Harold Lloyd, and the ground-breaking L'Arrivee d'un Train En Gare - which had the first cinema goers running for their lives - is re-imagined, the 3D aiming to recreate the sense of intrusion that so scared those early viewers.
The setting for Hugo is a Paris train station, exquisitely realised, magically flecked by snow, shrouded in steam and dotted with delightful eccentrics such as Richard Griffiths' and Frances De La Tour's star-crossed pals.
At the outset, then, there are few clues that this will be a mature exploration of regret and bitterness.
Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is a cross between the Artful Dodger, Jonathan Creek and Quasimodo. He lives in the walls of the station, keeping the clocks running so no-one figures out his drunken guardian (Ray Winstone) has long gone.
He ducks and dives through vast cogs and nips behind grates and scurries up echoing spiral staircases to avoid the station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) and the dread prospect of life in an orphanage.
His father (Jude Law) died leaving Hugo a half-finished automaton which the boy repairs, stealing parts from the toy shop of a mean old Georges Melies (Ben Kingsley) in the hope that a functioning mechanical man will, somehow, restore his father.
Georges' young god-daughter Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz) wears the key to the automaton around her neck and the pair's discovery of each other and this curious fact unlocks the adventure.
At that point the production suddenly puts away childish things.
As a result, this is far from the film it could have been. Sacha Baron Cohen, for example, doesn't settle into his role until well after his charmless slapstick has overstayed its welcome.
Meanwhile, the 3D is ghastly in places. Things are thrust so far into the foreground that they become as insubstantial as ghosts and the placing of props and people to engineer a 3D-scape ensures that the immersive experience is not only fragmented but destroyed.
Added to that, the slow, mournful tone is far from the adventure repeatedly promised by Isabelle.
Indeed, it is not entirely clear who the target audience is because there are few concessions to a younger crowd.
It's very long, suffused with middle-aged regret and there's a lot of tell and not much show. Maybe one for those dads who become moist-eyed at Meccano.
– From December 2011
Explaining the switch in the quest - from repairing an automaton to repairing an old man - would give away the (cracking) central twist.
However, the result is a visual nostalgia-fest as the glorious pioneering years of cinema are brought splendidly to life.
At one point young Hugo dangles from a clock hand, a la Harold Lloyd, and the ground-breaking L'Arrivee d'un Train En Gare - which had the first cinema goers running for their lives - is re-imagined, the 3D aiming to recreate the sense of intrusion that so scared those early viewers.
The setting for Hugo is a Paris train station, exquisitely realised, magically flecked by snow, shrouded in steam and dotted with delightful eccentrics such as Richard Griffiths' and Frances De La Tour's star-crossed pals.
At the outset, then, there are few clues that this will be a mature exploration of regret and bitterness.
Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is a cross between the Artful Dodger, Jonathan Creek and Quasimodo. He lives in the walls of the station, keeping the clocks running so no-one figures out his drunken guardian (Ray Winstone) has long gone.
He ducks and dives through vast cogs and nips behind grates and scurries up echoing spiral staircases to avoid the station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) and the dread prospect of life in an orphanage.
His father (Jude Law) died leaving Hugo a half-finished automaton which the boy repairs, stealing parts from the toy shop of a mean old Georges Melies (Ben Kingsley) in the hope that a functioning mechanical man will, somehow, restore his father.
Georges' young god-daughter Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz) wears the key to the automaton around her neck and the pair's discovery of each other and this curious fact unlocks the adventure.
At that point the production suddenly puts away childish things.
As a result, this is far from the film it could have been. Sacha Baron Cohen, for example, doesn't settle into his role until well after his charmless slapstick has overstayed its welcome.
Meanwhile, the 3D is ghastly in places. Things are thrust so far into the foreground that they become as insubstantial as ghosts and the placing of props and people to engineer a 3D-scape ensures that the immersive experience is not only fragmented but destroyed.
Added to that, the slow, mournful tone is far from the adventure repeatedly promised by Isabelle.
Indeed, it is not entirely clear who the target audience is because there are few concessions to a younger crowd.
It's very long, suffused with middle-aged regret and there's a lot of tell and not much show. Maybe one for those dads who become moist-eyed at Meccano.
– From December 2011
Spiral Notebook: Hands of horror
The Inventor has form. Remember him? As twisted history would have us believe, The Inventor died before he could give Edward Scissorhands, well, hands.
Of course, the whole scam is blown apart by the merest tickle of logic.
You name your boy Scissorhands, you're not planning for a Rodin or a Da Vinci or a Bonetti. Besides, the hands are first, right? Up there with the head and the offal and the hairline. And who has that many pairs of scissors? A sadist, that's who.
The Inventor has form. He hates hands. He hates their dexterity and litheness. It is why, before he invented Edward, he invented the cursed DLR ticket machine.
His works are available on every platform, his victims, with their gnarled fingers and bruised knuckles look on Edward enviously with his steely digits, unyielding and nerveless.
Ever try to get a receipt out of a DLR ticket machine? The contortion required, the angles necessary, the pain threshold demanded can only be the product of a wicked, vengeful mind. Who would invent a machine whose form is so opposed to its function?
A hand hater, that's who. He hated hands, that there The Inventor. Look on his works and weep.
He did the steel guitar, string parcels, Christmas trees, cats and the Iranian justice system. He died while planning the spoutless kettle (one scoops out the boiling water with one's hands) and the Gossamer™ gloveless gloves for Arctic exploration.
But most of all he did the DLR ticket machine. And he called himself The Inventor. Shame on you, sir. Shame.
I want to say...
- We have a new entry to common parlance, invited over from America. It's the "I want to say" prelude to a guess.
Who was the first James Bond?
"Ooh. I want to say Sean Connery?"
"What's that thing when you raise the intonation at the end of the sentence?
"OK, so I want to say 'high rising terminal'?"
– From November 2011
Of course, the whole scam is blown apart by the merest tickle of logic.
You name your boy Scissorhands, you're not planning for a Rodin or a Da Vinci or a Bonetti. Besides, the hands are first, right? Up there with the head and the offal and the hairline. And who has that many pairs of scissors? A sadist, that's who.
The Inventor has form. He hates hands. He hates their dexterity and litheness. It is why, before he invented Edward, he invented the cursed DLR ticket machine.
His works are available on every platform, his victims, with their gnarled fingers and bruised knuckles look on Edward enviously with his steely digits, unyielding and nerveless.
Ever try to get a receipt out of a DLR ticket machine? The contortion required, the angles necessary, the pain threshold demanded can only be the product of a wicked, vengeful mind. Who would invent a machine whose form is so opposed to its function?
A hand hater, that's who. He hated hands, that there The Inventor. Look on his works and weep.
He did the steel guitar, string parcels, Christmas trees, cats and the Iranian justice system. He died while planning the spoutless kettle (one scoops out the boiling water with one's hands) and the Gossamer™ gloveless gloves for Arctic exploration.
But most of all he did the DLR ticket machine. And he called himself The Inventor. Shame on you, sir. Shame.
I want to say...
- We have a new entry to common parlance, invited over from America. It's the "I want to say" prelude to a guess.
Who was the first James Bond?
"Ooh. I want to say Sean Connery?"
"What's that thing when you raise the intonation at the end of the sentence?
"OK, so I want to say 'high rising terminal'?"
– From November 2011
Book review: The Fear Index, by Robert Harris
A crop of "what went wrong?" hand-wringers fill the shelves of bookshops these days as eonomic analysts and apologists attempt to pinpoint the moment of first madness.
Robert Harris tries something similar, only The Fear Index is a superior, high-concept "this is what could happen" techno-thriller in which algorithmic traders lose control of their computers and send world markets into turmoil.
Dr Alex Hoffman is the legendary boffin from Cern who has developed an artificial intelligence that can track the greatest driver of market movements - fear - and invest accordingly.
The brisk novel spans just 24 hours in the life of the reclusive Geneva-based billionaire as he wakes to an intruder and begins a day when paranoia and the police are in constant pursuit.
With canny nods to the "Darwin is a better economist than Smith" debate and a gripping Michael Crichton doomsday scenario, Harris teases time and again with the central question: who, or - more likely - what, is out to destroy Hoffman and destabilise the world financial markets.
– From November 2011
Robert Harris tries something similar, only The Fear Index is a superior, high-concept "this is what could happen" techno-thriller in which algorithmic traders lose control of their computers and send world markets into turmoil.
Dr Alex Hoffman is the legendary boffin from Cern who has developed an artificial intelligence that can track the greatest driver of market movements - fear - and invest accordingly.
The brisk novel spans just 24 hours in the life of the reclusive Geneva-based billionaire as he wakes to an intruder and begins a day when paranoia and the police are in constant pursuit.
With canny nods to the "Darwin is a better economist than Smith" debate and a gripping Michael Crichton doomsday scenario, Harris teases time and again with the central question: who, or - more likely - what, is out to destroy Hoffman and destabilise the world financial markets.
– From November 2011
Film review: The Deep Blue Sea (12A)
Love, as a couple of chroniclers have suggested over the years, is a tricky blighter. Terence Davies' languorous adaptation of Terence Rattigan's play underscores the point in 98 minutes of impeccable drama that draws from Rachel Weisz her finest screen performance to date.
Anger and regret suffuse the honey-glowed screen in what becomes a long, silent, scream emanating from a woman who is smart enough to know she is powerless to resist the destructive folly of her heart.
Matters do not begin well for Hester, but they do begin dramatically, as she inhales the gas fire in her ropy lodgings in the hope of oblivion.
The dizzy moments of euphoria that follow are a swirl of violins and eroticism as she recalls the days when passion tossed her out the placid Garden of Eden, unable to return.
Teddy (Tom Hiddlestone) back then was a goofy, irritating former RAF pilot, high on gestures, low on generosity and their lop-sided infatuation was enough to make her quiet marriage to dutiful Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale) instantaneously unbearable.
"Beware of passion. It always turns into something ugly," says Sir William's sniffy mum.
"What would you replace it with?" asks Hester.
"Guarded enthusiasm is much safer."
"And much duller."
And that is Hester's lot, equidistant from insufficient and too much love, letting passion and anger stale to regret.
Rattigan, whose work is liberally re-worked by Davies, presents Sir William as her equal but there is nothing in his tender trap or lamentable entreaties to lure her back to the marital home. But there is also nothing that she shares with cad Teddy that matches that marital affection.
Between the devil and deep, blue sea, you see, that is where unrequited love resides.
And there we hang, sometimes eloquently, sometimes indulgently, sometimes selfishly for the course of the film after Hester survives her dalliance with self-destruction.
The turmoil of love and the repression of the age make for brilliantly cinematic contrast and comparisons with Brief Encounter are obvious. Rousing sing-songs down the rub-a-dub make trembling lips, clipped phrases and watery eyes irredeemably poignant.
A tragedy, says Simon Russell Beale's Sir William - a performance beautifully balanced mix of plaintive boyishness and paternal assurance.
No, just sad, says Hester, lethally aware of her own inconsequence.
This confident, trembling evocation of a heart breaking in slow motion is a wonderful book-end to a year that has witnessed the restoration of Rattigan as the master calibrator of the heart's dark places.
– From November 2011
Anger and regret suffuse the honey-glowed screen in what becomes a long, silent, scream emanating from a woman who is smart enough to know she is powerless to resist the destructive folly of her heart.
Matters do not begin well for Hester, but they do begin dramatically, as she inhales the gas fire in her ropy lodgings in the hope of oblivion.
The dizzy moments of euphoria that follow are a swirl of violins and eroticism as she recalls the days when passion tossed her out the placid Garden of Eden, unable to return.
Teddy (Tom Hiddlestone) back then was a goofy, irritating former RAF pilot, high on gestures, low on generosity and their lop-sided infatuation was enough to make her quiet marriage to dutiful Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale) instantaneously unbearable.
"Beware of passion. It always turns into something ugly," says Sir William's sniffy mum.
"What would you replace it with?" asks Hester.
"Guarded enthusiasm is much safer."
"And much duller."
And that is Hester's lot, equidistant from insufficient and too much love, letting passion and anger stale to regret.
Rattigan, whose work is liberally re-worked by Davies, presents Sir William as her equal but there is nothing in his tender trap or lamentable entreaties to lure her back to the marital home. But there is also nothing that she shares with cad Teddy that matches that marital affection.
Between the devil and deep, blue sea, you see, that is where unrequited love resides.
And there we hang, sometimes eloquently, sometimes indulgently, sometimes selfishly for the course of the film after Hester survives her dalliance with self-destruction.
The turmoil of love and the repression of the age make for brilliantly cinematic contrast and comparisons with Brief Encounter are obvious. Rousing sing-songs down the rub-a-dub make trembling lips, clipped phrases and watery eyes irredeemably poignant.
A tragedy, says Simon Russell Beale's Sir William - a performance beautifully balanced mix of plaintive boyishness and paternal assurance.
No, just sad, says Hester, lethally aware of her own inconsequence.
This confident, trembling evocation of a heart breaking in slow motion is a wonderful book-end to a year that has witnessed the restoration of Rattigan as the master calibrator of the heart's dark places.
– From November 2011
Film review: My Week With Marilyn (15)
When do the stars get star-struck? The answer, in 1956, was when Marilyn Monroe came to town, glitzing up drab Blighty with a pencil skirt and a wink.
The story of the tortuous filming of The Prince And The Showgirl is so rich with contrasts that the fun flows effortlessly - the luvvie thesp (Olivier) and the faux-Method girl, the fading star (Vivien Leigh) and the mesmeric beauty, post-war England and Hollywood excess, stiff upper lips and shimmering rubies.
The film is based on the true story of Colin Clark and his brief, bizarre and intimate encounter. Indeed, here is an air of Lost In Translation here as two mismatched strangers meet and find a deep but ephemeral connection.
"She wanted a friend," explained Marilyn script writer Adrian Hodges. "And through a series of incidents, she became very close and intimate with Colin Clark because he was always there and was non-threatening."
Eddie Redmayne as Colin is a mix of upper class confidence and emotional gawkiness as he sets about accomplishing the task that others had failed - to rescue her. Fresh out of Oxford he acted as gofer for family friend Sir Laurence Olivier until Marilyn called him irretrievably hither.
Michelle Williams in a performance that will surely earn an Oscar nod brings the beauty thrillingly alive.
She is the embodiment of the trembling mess, all little girl lost, vicious hips and guileless manipulation. The woman who asks "shall I be her?" before switching on the smile.
Williams said: "Even as a young girl my primary connection wasn't with this larger-than life personality but with what was going on underneath."
So we feel closer to the person than the icon, beset by a rampant insecurity that was her driving force and downfall.
This is a witty and stylish film drawing uniformly strong performances from the cream of British talent who seem keen to outdo each other with their deft cameos.
Kenneth Branagh is a joy. Exasperated, Sir Laurence, director and star of Showgirl, fails to disguise contempt for Monroe's artless acting and yet he is staggered by her presence on film. All his talent, craft and experience counted for nothing against her celluloid sexuality.
Therein lies their conflict. He's got the craft but not the appeal, she's got the appeal but not the craft.
Teaching her acting is like "teaching Urdu. To a badger".
"Just try to be sexy," he shouts as she screws up a scene once more. "Isn't that what you do?"
And the cutting remark runs to the heart of her insecurity. She wants to do but everyone just wants her to be.
There's a rip-roaring turn too for Judi Dench as the maternal Dame Sybil Thorndyke - but then again everyone gets a bash, including Zoe Wanamaker, Dominic Cooper and blink-and-you-miss-them showings for Simon Russell Beale, Sir Derek Jacobi and Emma Watson.
But who wouldn't want in on the film of the year? The whole circus is one big wink to the modern audience with screwball tinsel wrapped around a heart-melting central performance.
Colin is warned not to fall in love with Marilyn. She'll break your heart, they say. Watching this film the advice is just as pertinent .
But you will. And she will.
– From November 2011
The story of the tortuous filming of The Prince And The Showgirl is so rich with contrasts that the fun flows effortlessly - the luvvie thesp (Olivier) and the faux-Method girl, the fading star (Vivien Leigh) and the mesmeric beauty, post-war England and Hollywood excess, stiff upper lips and shimmering rubies.
The film is based on the true story of Colin Clark and his brief, bizarre and intimate encounter. Indeed, here is an air of Lost In Translation here as two mismatched strangers meet and find a deep but ephemeral connection.
"She wanted a friend," explained Marilyn script writer Adrian Hodges. "And through a series of incidents, she became very close and intimate with Colin Clark because he was always there and was non-threatening."
Eddie Redmayne as Colin is a mix of upper class confidence and emotional gawkiness as he sets about accomplishing the task that others had failed - to rescue her. Fresh out of Oxford he acted as gofer for family friend Sir Laurence Olivier until Marilyn called him irretrievably hither.
Michelle Williams in a performance that will surely earn an Oscar nod brings the beauty thrillingly alive.
She is the embodiment of the trembling mess, all little girl lost, vicious hips and guileless manipulation. The woman who asks "shall I be her?" before switching on the smile.
Williams said: "Even as a young girl my primary connection wasn't with this larger-than life personality but with what was going on underneath."
So we feel closer to the person than the icon, beset by a rampant insecurity that was her driving force and downfall.
This is a witty and stylish film drawing uniformly strong performances from the cream of British talent who seem keen to outdo each other with their deft cameos.
Kenneth Branagh is a joy. Exasperated, Sir Laurence, director and star of Showgirl, fails to disguise contempt for Monroe's artless acting and yet he is staggered by her presence on film. All his talent, craft and experience counted for nothing against her celluloid sexuality.
Therein lies their conflict. He's got the craft but not the appeal, she's got the appeal but not the craft.
Teaching her acting is like "teaching Urdu. To a badger".
"Just try to be sexy," he shouts as she screws up a scene once more. "Isn't that what you do?"
And the cutting remark runs to the heart of her insecurity. She wants to do but everyone just wants her to be.
There's a rip-roaring turn too for Judi Dench as the maternal Dame Sybil Thorndyke - but then again everyone gets a bash, including Zoe Wanamaker, Dominic Cooper and blink-and-you-miss-them showings for Simon Russell Beale, Sir Derek Jacobi and Emma Watson.
But who wouldn't want in on the film of the year? The whole circus is one big wink to the modern audience with screwball tinsel wrapped around a heart-melting central performance.
Colin is warned not to fall in love with Marilyn. She'll break your heart, they say. Watching this film the advice is just as pertinent .
But you will. And she will.
– From November 2011
How Dickens invented the language of cinema
With the arrival of the world on the capital's doorstep craving red telephone boxes, drizzle and scones, it's time to roll out the cultural blockbusters.
And with a confluence of circumstance and need that was the hallmark of a Charles Dickens' story, 2012 also sees the bicentennial of the author's birth.
It was the reason scholars, film buffs, curators, Sir Derek Jacobi and David "One Day" Nicholls gathered at the BFI Southbank to launch the Dickens On Screen season that runs from January to March.
BFI creative director Heather Stewart said: "When we think of Dickens' extraordinary characters and nail-biting cliffhangers, it is not surprising he's the most adapted author of all time."
This, unlike many a twist in the maestro's canon, is not a coincidence. Many commentators have pointed out that Dickens use of parallel narratives, juxtaposition and visual storyboarding invented the language of cinema.
For it is through the prism of the screen - as co-curator and Film London CEO Adrian Wootton said - that most people see Dickens. Their favourite memories are often culled from favourite films rather than favourite passages.
The idea, to be explored in an accompanying BBC Arena documentary (premiered at the BFI on December 15), sets the scene for the three-month exploration of the 100 or so years of Dickensian adaptations from the surviving silent snippets through the David Lean-inspired golden age of the 1940s on to the influence of TV costume dramas.
Mr Wootton said: "We have put together the season not just on the basis of chronology or trying to plot that long history but also we're looking at a particular premise about Dickens and his influence on the creation of cinema and cinema language."
It was a theme taken up by David Nicholls, who cited Great Expectations as his favourite book and Dickens his essential author.
As he spoke at the launch last Thursay, director Mike Newell was filming Nicholls' adaptation of the masterwork which he said was "faithful" but accentuated plotlines that others had bypassed, including, he revealed, an alternative ending that drew from the two endings Dickens' wrote but was different to both.
He said he was offered Great Expectations after adapting Tess Of The d'Urbervilles.
"Initially I said 'no'. As has been pointed out, Great Expectations is a near perfect work of art and has also been made into a film many consider to be the greatest ever.
"It seemed there were two strong reasons not to get involved. But I watched the David Lean film and re-read the book and I found the book overwhelming, funny, exciting and nimble; it has the fewest coincidences and Dickens is at his best with his characterisation.
"So I took it on and it's been a wonderful experience. Dickens' characterisation is superb, he writes dialogue with tremendous humour, bounce and pace.
"Inevitably turning a 500-page novel into a 120-minute film means you have to leave things out but the novel is full of twists and turns and we're approaching it very much as a thriller."
Sir Derek Jacobi, also a Dickens 2012 patron, said he had many encounters with the author, not only in classics such as Little Dorrit but as Dickens himself in The Riddle, a Victoria Wood sketch and "I also did a rather bizarre Sony advert where I was Scrooge-cum-Father Christmas".
Go to dickens2012.org and BFI Southbank.
OTHER DICKENS EVENTS
Dickens And London
Museum Of London
December 9 - June 10
Recreating the atmosphere of Victorian London through sound and projections, you'll be taken on a haunting journey to discover the city that inspired his writings.
Go to museumoflondon.org.uk
A Hankering After Ghosts
British Library
November 29 - March 4
This free exhibition explores the many ways in which Dickens uses supernatural phenomena in his works, placing them in the context of his time.
Go to bl.uk
– From November 2011
Stage review: When The World Began, Arcola
Micah, if my bible (Wikipedia) serves me correctly was an old school Old Testament prophet who predicted the collapse of cities under the weight of their own sin.
It is not surprising then, that fretful student Micah (Perry Millward) foresees wrath and vengeance befalling his small mid-western town with the arrival of New York liberal and pregnant singleton Susan as the new science teacher.
After all, the vengeful Deity has already taken His view on Plainview (the name represents both a theological and geological outlook), sending a tornado to fell the town and the townsfolk, including Micah's own step-father.
And sharp-tongued Susan (a colourfully brash Anna Francolini) doesn't help herself. She makes a hole in the wall between church and state with her use of the word "gobbledegook" in relation to matters spiritual and brittle nutjob Micah toys at the breach until everything comes tumbling down.
But not before Gene (Ciaran McIntyre), the deceptive ex-postmaster does his best to bring Susan into the fold with some passive aggressive charm and an effective thesis about the dissonance between faith and ignorance.
Not much progress then, as science and fundamentalism lock (devil's) horns but Catherine Treischmann's gritty nugget of a play does successfully convey the terror of mindless intolerance while unsettling an enlightened audience that was formerly comfortable in its mockery.
– From November 2011
It is not surprising then, that fretful student Micah (Perry Millward) foresees wrath and vengeance befalling his small mid-western town with the arrival of New York liberal and pregnant singleton Susan as the new science teacher.
After all, the vengeful Deity has already taken His view on Plainview (the name represents both a theological and geological outlook), sending a tornado to fell the town and the townsfolk, including Micah's own step-father.
And sharp-tongued Susan (a colourfully brash Anna Francolini) doesn't help herself. She makes a hole in the wall between church and state with her use of the word "gobbledegook" in relation to matters spiritual and brittle nutjob Micah toys at the breach until everything comes tumbling down.
But not before Gene (Ciaran McIntyre), the deceptive ex-postmaster does his best to bring Susan into the fold with some passive aggressive charm and an effective thesis about the dissonance between faith and ignorance.
Not much progress then, as science and fundamentalism lock (devil's) horns but Catherine Treischmann's gritty nugget of a play does successfully convey the terror of mindless intolerance while unsettling an enlightened audience that was formerly comfortable in its mockery.
– From November 2011
Book review: The Litigators, by John Grisham
The burnt-out partners of Finley & Figg are in a good position in one sense - their offices are placed by a dangerous junction which sees its fair share of fender benders.
So they don't so much chase ambulances as amble out and scoop up cases.
John Grisham does not shy away from the grim horse-trading that is the lifeblood of the US tort bar and Oscar Finley and Wally Figg earn our grudging sympathy because they are (a) tenacious in their quest for the unpalatable and (b) out-and-out losers.
Into this squalid world comes David Zinc - bright, idealistic and fed up with the factory farming that is corporate law.
His rebirth as a good-hearted hustler coincides with the potential jackpot case when popular drug Krayoxx appears to kill its overweight users.
Finley, Figg and Zinc are convinced Big Pharma will settle and it will never see the inside of a courtroom. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Grisham, as usual, is strong on legal procedure and knows how to knot and twist a plot. While this book lacks the high concept of previous stories his thorough and workmanlike exploration of life under a stone is nonetheless absorbing.
– From November, 2011
So they don't so much chase ambulances as amble out and scoop up cases.
John Grisham does not shy away from the grim horse-trading that is the lifeblood of the US tort bar and Oscar Finley and Wally Figg earn our grudging sympathy because they are (a) tenacious in their quest for the unpalatable and (b) out-and-out losers.
Into this squalid world comes David Zinc - bright, idealistic and fed up with the factory farming that is corporate law.
His rebirth as a good-hearted hustler coincides with the potential jackpot case when popular drug Krayoxx appears to kill its overweight users.
Finley, Figg and Zinc are convinced Big Pharma will settle and it will never see the inside of a courtroom. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Grisham, as usual, is strong on legal procedure and knows how to knot and twist a plot. While this book lacks the high concept of previous stories his thorough and workmanlike exploration of life under a stone is nonetheless absorbing.
– From November, 2011
Spiral Notebook: Hobbling Our Progress
I'm rowing back a few strokes on my views on the Occupy London protest outside St Paul's.
Yes, I still think it is sad that the Lord Mayor was thwarted on his parade and the veterans were vexed on their way to Remembrance Day services, and I still think the laudable miscreants should pick up their beds and go but ...
Some 99 per cent of me thinks they remain a nuisance but one per cent gets the point.
And the point is - they're supposed to be awkward. Awkwardness is not an unfortunate byproduct of the message, awkwardness is the means of the message.
Awkwardness is a legitimate form of protest. In many cases, it is the sole form of protest available to the powerless and, in Britain, awkwardness is akin to pepper spray in terms of potency.
They're all legitimate, these tactics: The jab in the ribs, the grit in the oyster and the stone in the shoe (although I do draw the line at the poo in the nave).
IN THE END
- Everything comes to an end even when the end seems impossible.
Downton Abbey, fixed mortgages, rainy spells, final salary pension schemes, Wuthering Heights, life, polar bears, civilisations even, for goodness sake, this sentence.
But still we try to postpone the inevitable. We pack our iPods with tunes of our youth, we watch Dave, pretend Jimmy Savile can see the sea and insist the end doesn't end until we say so (aka closure).
The death card in tarot has a bad press. But it has an optimistic side. The end of a chapter. The beginning of something fresh.
If civilisation is incapable of running its affairs in a manner that doesn't have an unstoppable tendency towards badness then perhaps it is time for a paradigm shift.
Imagine (as John Lennon was wont to say) a place where aspiration was not stifled but the gap between what we needed and what we wanted was more rational, manageable. Less manic, less impractical. Net result, contentment.
Embrace the destruction, I say.
The end.
(Although not for Downton which gets another season.)
Yes, I still think it is sad that the Lord Mayor was thwarted on his parade and the veterans were vexed on their way to Remembrance Day services, and I still think the laudable miscreants should pick up their beds and go but ...
Some 99 per cent of me thinks they remain a nuisance but one per cent gets the point.
And the point is - they're supposed to be awkward. Awkwardness is not an unfortunate byproduct of the message, awkwardness is the means of the message.
Awkwardness is a legitimate form of protest. In many cases, it is the sole form of protest available to the powerless and, in Britain, awkwardness is akin to pepper spray in terms of potency.
They're all legitimate, these tactics: The jab in the ribs, the grit in the oyster and the stone in the shoe (although I do draw the line at the poo in the nave).
IN THE END
- Everything comes to an end even when the end seems impossible.
Downton Abbey, fixed mortgages, rainy spells, final salary pension schemes, Wuthering Heights, life, polar bears, civilisations even, for goodness sake, this sentence.
But still we try to postpone the inevitable. We pack our iPods with tunes of our youth, we watch Dave, pretend Jimmy Savile can see the sea and insist the end doesn't end until we say so (aka closure).
The death card in tarot has a bad press. But it has an optimistic side. The end of a chapter. The beginning of something fresh.
If civilisation is incapable of running its affairs in a manner that doesn't have an unstoppable tendency towards badness then perhaps it is time for a paradigm shift.
Imagine (as John Lennon was wont to say) a place where aspiration was not stifled but the gap between what we needed and what we wanted was more rational, manageable. Less manic, less impractical. Net result, contentment.
Embrace the destruction, I say.
The end.
(Although not for Downton which gets another season.)
Film review: Justice (15)
Someone somewhere should stump up the $10million or so that Nicolas Cage clearly needs so he doesn't have to trash his reputation further with nonsensical stuff like this.
Hell, I'll contribute a pound of two to halt further erosion of the once impeccable Cage brand.
Hot on the heels of the lamentable Trespass comes Justice, which is not quite so lamentable but has so many holes that it could double as a colander at Christmas.
This is Route One retribution stuff although Cage declared - perhaps to himself in the mirror before signing on the dotted line - that he took the part because of its philosophical examination of human nature.
Cage is Eng Lit teacher Will, happily married to cellist Laura, living a life of unruffled middle class contentment.
Only Laura is raped and when a mysterious figure called Simon (Guy Pearce, always effective) offers to unleash his vigilante gang to even the score, Will's liberal credentials go out the window. Oh yes, Simon just wants a couple of favours in return. . .
The central conceit is bust apart quickly. Why would a shadowy organisation expend so much energy converting reluctant amateurs into murderers? To distance themselves from the crimes, you cry. Why then, I reply - angry now - would they engage in running gun battles in public places if anonymity was their thing?
Calm, calm, calm. Director Roger Donaldson did a good job with No Way Out and The Bank Job and there is no lack of tension as Will is put through the mill in his quest to expose Simon.
This is a needless melodrama with contrivances that act as toothpick supports that strain to stop the edifice from crumbling into an embarrassing heap.
– From November 2011
Hell, I'll contribute a pound of two to halt further erosion of the once impeccable Cage brand.
Hot on the heels of the lamentable Trespass comes Justice, which is not quite so lamentable but has so many holes that it could double as a colander at Christmas.
This is Route One retribution stuff although Cage declared - perhaps to himself in the mirror before signing on the dotted line - that he took the part because of its philosophical examination of human nature.
Cage is Eng Lit teacher Will, happily married to cellist Laura, living a life of unruffled middle class contentment.
Only Laura is raped and when a mysterious figure called Simon (Guy Pearce, always effective) offers to unleash his vigilante gang to even the score, Will's liberal credentials go out the window. Oh yes, Simon just wants a couple of favours in return. . .
The central conceit is bust apart quickly. Why would a shadowy organisation expend so much energy converting reluctant amateurs into murderers? To distance themselves from the crimes, you cry. Why then, I reply - angry now - would they engage in running gun battles in public places if anonymity was their thing?
Calm, calm, calm. Director Roger Donaldson did a good job with No Way Out and The Bank Job and there is no lack of tension as Will is put through the mill in his quest to expose Simon.
This is a needless melodrama with contrivances that act as toothpick supports that strain to stop the edifice from crumbling into an embarrassing heap.
– From November 2011
Stage review: The Lion In Winter, Haymarket
He's got a knife!" yells little Johnny, retreating from his blade-swinging brother Richard. "Of course he's got a knife!" shouts mum Eleanor. "We've all got knives! This is 1183."
And so we launch into Carry On Up The Aquitaine, James Goldman's Broadway take on English history that offers ripe opportunity for sitcom mugging amidst hokum relating to Henry II, his troublesome three sons, who are vying for his crown, and his vexatious viper of a wife Eleanor who he has wisely boarded up for a decade.
And with what brio and relish this romp is delivered. There are innumerable delights watching Robert Lindsay (Henry II) and Joanna Lumley (Eleanor) duel and joust for the contents of each other's hearts and inventories.
"Every family has its ups and downs," sighs Eleanor, formerly Queen of France, who has been released briefly for Christmas at Chinon.
Not like this, your Majesty. West Wing's politics meets East End ensibilities in a tale of festive feuding that brings to mind slap-happy humdingers in the Queen Vic.
Yes, King Den and Queen Angie have a simmering beef that's about to blow up into an ermine mudfight. But beneath it all, wouldn't you know, there's love - a destructive love that ensures they fight each other to a weary standstill.
Lindsay and Lumley, a double act to cherish, fill their roles like velvet boxing gloves, finding a rare chemistry that is part-poison, part-passion.
And if the play fails to flatter when the supporting cast have their moments it is only to the credit of the headliners.
Tom Bateman, James Norton and Joseph Drake as the fickle sons roar their way to infamy while the French contingent of Rory Fleck-Byrne as King Philip and Sonya Cassidy as pawn Princess Alais aspire to the bombast of Henry and the dry plotting of Eleanor, respectively, but necessarily fall short.
Against a backdrop of a stone-grey set, Trevor Nunn has put Blackadder firmly in the court of King Lear veering (often wildly) from high drama to low farce ("that's what tapestries are for," says one son, ripping down the offending adornment to reveal an eavesdropping sibling).
A couple of clunks. The cast phlegm it up to 11 so early in proceedings they've got nowhere to go when the action gets stickier. And this means the second half lingers like an unbroken high note waiting for a warble.
But this is a production packed with purring delights and rich silliness.
Forget the front room, Chinon is the place to spend a family Christmas this year.
– From November 2011
And so we launch into Carry On Up The Aquitaine, James Goldman's Broadway take on English history that offers ripe opportunity for sitcom mugging amidst hokum relating to Henry II, his troublesome three sons, who are vying for his crown, and his vexatious viper of a wife Eleanor who he has wisely boarded up for a decade.
And with what brio and relish this romp is delivered. There are innumerable delights watching Robert Lindsay (Henry II) and Joanna Lumley (Eleanor) duel and joust for the contents of each other's hearts and inventories.
"Every family has its ups and downs," sighs Eleanor, formerly Queen of France, who has been released briefly for Christmas at Chinon.
Not like this, your Majesty. West Wing's politics meets East End ensibilities in a tale of festive feuding that brings to mind slap-happy humdingers in the Queen Vic.
Yes, King Den and Queen Angie have a simmering beef that's about to blow up into an ermine mudfight. But beneath it all, wouldn't you know, there's love - a destructive love that ensures they fight each other to a weary standstill.
Lindsay and Lumley, a double act to cherish, fill their roles like velvet boxing gloves, finding a rare chemistry that is part-poison, part-passion.
And if the play fails to flatter when the supporting cast have their moments it is only to the credit of the headliners.
Tom Bateman, James Norton and Joseph Drake as the fickle sons roar their way to infamy while the French contingent of Rory Fleck-Byrne as King Philip and Sonya Cassidy as pawn Princess Alais aspire to the bombast of Henry and the dry plotting of Eleanor, respectively, but necessarily fall short.
Against a backdrop of a stone-grey set, Trevor Nunn has put Blackadder firmly in the court of King Lear veering (often wildly) from high drama to low farce ("that's what tapestries are for," says one son, ripping down the offending adornment to reveal an eavesdropping sibling).
A couple of clunks. The cast phlegm it up to 11 so early in proceedings they've got nowhere to go when the action gets stickier. And this means the second half lingers like an unbroken high note waiting for a warble.
But this is a production packed with purring delights and rich silliness.
Forget the front room, Chinon is the place to spend a family Christmas this year.
– From November 2011
Spiral Notebook: In Praise Of Innovation
Much has been made of the new hi-tech City protester.
They are herded by the Twittersphere, coddled by Portaloo and nestling down with a latte by Starbucks' window to cadge free wi-fi on their Apple laptop.
Technology has made such spontaneous bursts of anger more mobile and co-ordinated. Praise is due, also, to another evolution in technology which has slipped under the commentators' radar. Tent technology.
As a bruised alumni of the guy rope and timber frame version of the unwieldy beast, I was astonished to see a sea of tents affixed to just about nothing at all.
My naïve assumption was that the protesters had anchored themselves via the mossy grouting twixt the stones but, no. Bendy self-supporting frames means tents are go anywhere tools now.
Perhaps the Greenham Common women would have chosen to besiege the US embassy if their protests had not required yielding glades.
Either way, hurrah for capitalism and its unerring need to innovate.
Nationwide disgrace
To "people's bank" Nationwide - "Your feedback shapes our services" which has launched its new Your Nationwide website ("We are on your side and really do care about helping customers.")
One can only assume that Nationwide ("Your needs are at the heart of Your Nationwide.") received a barrage of letters from customers in south east London demanding the bank clear their streets of those irritating High Street branches with their easy access and advisers with faces. Grrr.
Nationwide ("We value every idea, suggestion and question that you voice.") with heavy hearts, no doubt, conceded to people power and retreated into the digital fortress.
Leadership lacking
Re: everything. Things have been worse. In 1940 civilisation was under threat and it was the courage of one man - Winston Churchill - who gambled on the resolve of the British people and won.
As the play Three Days In May reminds us - tough times call for leadership and courage. Brussels and the EU are currently not at home to such qualities, it appears.
They are herded by the Twittersphere, coddled by Portaloo and nestling down with a latte by Starbucks' window to cadge free wi-fi on their Apple laptop.
Technology has made such spontaneous bursts of anger more mobile and co-ordinated. Praise is due, also, to another evolution in technology which has slipped under the commentators' radar. Tent technology.
As a bruised alumni of the guy rope and timber frame version of the unwieldy beast, I was astonished to see a sea of tents affixed to just about nothing at all.
My naïve assumption was that the protesters had anchored themselves via the mossy grouting twixt the stones but, no. Bendy self-supporting frames means tents are go anywhere tools now.
Perhaps the Greenham Common women would have chosen to besiege the US embassy if their protests had not required yielding glades.
Either way, hurrah for capitalism and its unerring need to innovate.
Nationwide disgrace
To "people's bank" Nationwide - "Your feedback shapes our services" which has launched its new Your Nationwide website ("We are on your side and really do care about helping customers.")
One can only assume that Nationwide ("Your needs are at the heart of Your Nationwide.") received a barrage of letters from customers in south east London demanding the bank clear their streets of those irritating High Street branches with their easy access and advisers with faces. Grrr.
Nationwide ("We value every idea, suggestion and question that you voice.") with heavy hearts, no doubt, conceded to people power and retreated into the digital fortress.
Leadership lacking
Re: everything. Things have been worse. In 1940 civilisation was under threat and it was the courage of one man - Winston Churchill - who gambled on the resolve of the British people and won.
As the play Three Days In May reminds us - tough times call for leadership and courage. Brussels and the EU are currently not at home to such qualities, it appears.
Film review: Wuthering Heights (15)
Emily Bronte's sweeping epic is raw and brutal. How this tale of a violently thwarted primal force has ended up on tea towels and treacle tins is a question only money can answer
Either way, director Andrea Arnold has taken the shaky, urban tics she perfected in Fish Tank and put them on a bus to Yorkshire, there to endure the hardships of the rain-lashed moors.
She presents, with savage realism, slavering, salivating Nature as it slowly erodes stones and souls - every wheeling lapwing, fright-eyed rabbit, growling dog, muddy puddle and rasping horse.
The wind (carrying with it rain, snow, despair) howls across the screen and into the auditorium.
Trouble is, so busy is the camera making a Great Film with its mosaic fragments, sly glimpses and unannounced taciturn epiphanies that somewhere along the way the love story has been relegated to a minor intrusion.
The unfulfilled courtship of Heathcliff and Cathy is seemingly played out in real-time as their troubled union becomes a small corner of a 500-piece jigsaw with an undeniably enchanting picture on the box.
Arnold concentrates on the pair when they were teenagers using untrained actors to create the clumsiness of puppy love.
Shannon Beer is delightfully modern and unselfconscious as the young Cathy, happy with mud on her boots, developing a tough-but-tender relationship with Solomon Glave's monosyllabic ex-slave Heathcliff who riles Hindley by being black and being there.
The youngsters tumble gracelessly down the fells, speckled with earth and - prompted by the moistness and fecundity that surrounds them - slowly figure out that cruelty, life and their futures are somehow joined.
Everything is dripping and breeding and urgent. Except the film, which never suggests anything other than a stifled crush between the protagonists.
When they grow up and out, older Cathy (Kaya Scodelario) and older Heathcliff James Howson appear more irritated by life's vicissitudes than destroyed in that Byronesque way that makes a thousand schoolgirls sigh.
This is a mood piece, a collage. The camera is a key character, untutored in its gawping, fascinated with every fleck of phlegm and chomping jaw, transfixed in its sensual wonder of the intractable forces of season and time.
Within this powerful setting, little lives become inconsequential. That, sadly, is the opposite of the story.
– From November 2011
Either way, director Andrea Arnold has taken the shaky, urban tics she perfected in Fish Tank and put them on a bus to Yorkshire, there to endure the hardships of the rain-lashed moors.
She presents, with savage realism, slavering, salivating Nature as it slowly erodes stones and souls - every wheeling lapwing, fright-eyed rabbit, growling dog, muddy puddle and rasping horse.
The wind (carrying with it rain, snow, despair) howls across the screen and into the auditorium.
Trouble is, so busy is the camera making a Great Film with its mosaic fragments, sly glimpses and unannounced taciturn epiphanies that somewhere along the way the love story has been relegated to a minor intrusion.
The unfulfilled courtship of Heathcliff and Cathy is seemingly played out in real-time as their troubled union becomes a small corner of a 500-piece jigsaw with an undeniably enchanting picture on the box.
Arnold concentrates on the pair when they were teenagers using untrained actors to create the clumsiness of puppy love.
Shannon Beer is delightfully modern and unselfconscious as the young Cathy, happy with mud on her boots, developing a tough-but-tender relationship with Solomon Glave's monosyllabic ex-slave Heathcliff who riles Hindley by being black and being there.
The youngsters tumble gracelessly down the fells, speckled with earth and - prompted by the moistness and fecundity that surrounds them - slowly figure out that cruelty, life and their futures are somehow joined.
Everything is dripping and breeding and urgent. Except the film, which never suggests anything other than a stifled crush between the protagonists.
When they grow up and out, older Cathy (Kaya Scodelario) and older Heathcliff James Howson appear more irritated by life's vicissitudes than destroyed in that Byronesque way that makes a thousand schoolgirls sigh.
This is a mood piece, a collage. The camera is a key character, untutored in its gawping, fascinated with every fleck of phlegm and chomping jaw, transfixed in its sensual wonder of the intractable forces of season and time.
Within this powerful setting, little lives become inconsequential. That, sadly, is the opposite of the story.
– From November 2011
Stage review: Three Days In May, Trafalgar Studios
It was not the strategic brilliance that was to secure Britain victory in the second world war, nor the superiority of material or morality. These were all crucial factors, of course - but would have counted for nothing if we had caved at the outset.
For one startling, secret moment that decision hung in the balance. Ultimately, it was only the courage, humanity - and political nous - of the new Prime Minister Winston Churchill that saved the nation.
Sentimental to a fault, blinkered, too fond of whisky and often cornered by his own rhetorical daring, Churchill may have been entirely the wrong man to make such a decision. But he was also perfect in a way that the cold calculation of Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax could never reconcile.
It was this duel - head versus heart - that was the substance of deliberations between May 26-28, 1940, and dramatised by Ben Brown.
For those familiar with the doughty bulldog, Warren Clarke's mesmirising encapsulation displays his contradictions beautifully - the incurable optimist and the man dogged by doubt. The man of outrageous temper and tender friendship. The man of broad-strokes and scalpel-sharp analysis.
He needed either the superbly effete Lord Halifax (Jeremy Clyde) and the hollow-eyed Neville Chamberlain (Robert Demeger) to support his position. But it was not his bullying or eloquence that won the day but his deeply personal understanding of the anatomy of failure.
He called on Chamberlain's memories of his bitter Munich humiliation to persuade him to change his mind and divide him from intractable Halifax.
If Brown's mechanical script never fully rises to the (surely Shakespearean) occasion, it is the smoke-filled rooms and pragmatic debate that gives the play its wonderful authenticity.
One can only emerge from the theatre into the memorials of Whitehall moist-eyed, proud and grateful.
– From November 7
For one startling, secret moment that decision hung in the balance. Ultimately, it was only the courage, humanity - and political nous - of the new Prime Minister Winston Churchill that saved the nation.
Sentimental to a fault, blinkered, too fond of whisky and often cornered by his own rhetorical daring, Churchill may have been entirely the wrong man to make such a decision. But he was also perfect in a way that the cold calculation of Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax could never reconcile.
It was this duel - head versus heart - that was the substance of deliberations between May 26-28, 1940, and dramatised by Ben Brown.
For those familiar with the doughty bulldog, Warren Clarke's mesmirising encapsulation displays his contradictions beautifully - the incurable optimist and the man dogged by doubt. The man of outrageous temper and tender friendship. The man of broad-strokes and scalpel-sharp analysis.
He needed either the superbly effete Lord Halifax (Jeremy Clyde) and the hollow-eyed Neville Chamberlain (Robert Demeger) to support his position. But it was not his bullying or eloquence that won the day but his deeply personal understanding of the anatomy of failure.
He called on Chamberlain's memories of his bitter Munich humiliation to persuade him to change his mind and divide him from intractable Halifax.
If Brown's mechanical script never fully rises to the (surely Shakespearean) occasion, it is the smoke-filled rooms and pragmatic debate that gives the play its wonderful authenticity.
One can only emerge from the theatre into the memorials of Whitehall moist-eyed, proud and grateful.
– From November 7
Stage review: The Last Of The Duchess, Hampstead
Send a thief to catch a thief, so the saying goes and The Sunday Times was thinking along these lines when they dispatched Lady Caroline Blackwood to bag an exclusive with the ailing Duchess of Windsor.
Neither was immune from scandal or indulgent living, both had a reputation for hypnotising their men and both were "difficult women".
However, the Duchess's French gatekeeper Suzanne Blum proved a match from them both. She was a formidable lawyer, an unreconstructed snob and a loyal guardian of the myth of the Duchess who was, according to Blum, gaily enjoying her autumn years. According to everyone else, she was dying a lonely and painful death.
It is this negotiating for access that became the subject of Blackwood's book and the meat of this play.
Blackwood, denied the Duchess, begins to suspect Blum's motives are less than benign. Blum is assured this is the case with the unruly Blackwood.
Nicholas Wright's script initially feels limited by the truth of a missed scoop. There is a slightness in the encounter between the brazen lady and the starchy octogenarian and the swift first act feels like the job is mostly done.
But the cleverness of the piece is the exploration of wider themes and the cat-and-mouse mind games of the protagonists.
The relish with which the two consummate actresses flatter and betray is a pleasure and, under Richard Eyre's direction, as neat and reckless as a a whirlwind in a jam jar.
Voddie-necking Anna Chancellor straddles the faultline between feisty foe and dissolute wreck with impeccable balance while Sheila Hancock, pictured, makes, then breaks, the formidable French façade of Blum with a precision tooled ice pick.
In between times we have Blum's fey assistant Michael Bloch who turns a cypher into a deft and intelligent comic turn and Angela Thorne as the unrepentant Lady Mosley turning a deaf ear by force rather than by choice (as she had done at the height of her despicable political life).
– From October 2011
Neither was immune from scandal or indulgent living, both had a reputation for hypnotising their men and both were "difficult women".
However, the Duchess's French gatekeeper Suzanne Blum proved a match from them both. She was a formidable lawyer, an unreconstructed snob and a loyal guardian of the myth of the Duchess who was, according to Blum, gaily enjoying her autumn years. According to everyone else, she was dying a lonely and painful death.
It is this negotiating for access that became the subject of Blackwood's book and the meat of this play.
Blackwood, denied the Duchess, begins to suspect Blum's motives are less than benign. Blum is assured this is the case with the unruly Blackwood.
Nicholas Wright's script initially feels limited by the truth of a missed scoop. There is a slightness in the encounter between the brazen lady and the starchy octogenarian and the swift first act feels like the job is mostly done.
But the cleverness of the piece is the exploration of wider themes and the cat-and-mouse mind games of the protagonists.
The relish with which the two consummate actresses flatter and betray is a pleasure and, under Richard Eyre's direction, as neat and reckless as a a whirlwind in a jam jar.
Voddie-necking Anna Chancellor straddles the faultline between feisty foe and dissolute wreck with impeccable balance while Sheila Hancock, pictured, makes, then breaks, the formidable French façade of Blum with a precision tooled ice pick.
In between times we have Blum's fey assistant Michael Bloch who turns a cypher into a deft and intelligent comic turn and Angela Thorne as the unrepentant Lady Mosley turning a deaf ear by force rather than by choice (as she had done at the height of her despicable political life).
– From October 2011
Film review: The Ides Of March (15)
The original release date for this cynical political thriller was 2008 but something unexpected happened - there was an outbreak of Obama-inspired hope. Dammit.
Odds were it would never last. And, sure enough, the political lifespan of feelin' good ran to three years and it's now (double-dealing) business as usual.
It is into this dank moistness where the mushrooms do dwell that Clooney - as writer, director, producer, star and occasional activist - plants the seeds of betrayal that is the theme of a tale that is firmly pitched through the looking glass from the high idealism of Aaron Sorkin's West Wing fables.
Into the chilly maelstrom of a winner-takes-all Ohio Democratic primary comes high-flying press agent Stephen Meyers (man of the moment Ryan Gosling) who'll provide the words for Governor Mike Morris (George Clooney) if Morris will give him something to believe in.
Meyers works for political bruiser Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman) but if the manager of the rival campaign Tom Duffy (Paul Giametti) gets his way the bright, young thing will betray the Morris for Senator Pullman's more muscular brand of Democratic politics.
But Meyers believes in Morris. "He has to win," says Meyers, brooding urgently.
"He's a nice guy," says Maresi Tomei's fair weather hack Ida Horowicz, "but he'll let you down sooner or later."
The clever money's on "sooner" and the arrival on the scene of seductress Molly Stearns (Evan Rachel Wood) trailing the heady perfume of political scandal ensures that events move with the syncopated gallop of a chess match.
Meyer's journey from believer, to stooge, to realist, to mannequin barely registers on the practised, plastic of his media visage but the cleverness of Gosling's play is the poker face that hints at the degradation beneath.
This is all driven by a snappy script from Beau Willimon who worked on the 2004 Howard Dean campaign thus bringing the ring of authenticity.
Clooney, the actor, goes through the well-oiled gears from charm to hard-ass and, as a little treat, we get a cameo from Jennifer Ehle as Morris's wife. Indeed, all the cast are superior, relishing Clooney's thesis that there are no heroes or villains, just people chasing the veneer of morality like it's a doughnut down a drainpipe.
Giametti and Hoffman slug it out with thick-throated relish and they are given a run for their money from ingenue Wood who surprises with a deft and intelligent turn as a used and abused intern.
Clooney, the director, puts the story centre stage and his workmanlike direction draws inspiration from the gritty conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s (even borrowing their autumnal browns).
The exception is the space he devotes to a string of seduction scenes - woman on man, man on woman, politician on prey - which are intimate, breathless and laced with danger.
The Ides Of March feels familiar and its message about the debasement of politics breaks no new ground. However, there's sufficient heft and sway to the story to make such shortcomings insignificant.
I WON'T BE ENTERING POLITICS
Director George Clooney has delved deeply into the cynical world of politics in The Ides Of March but he has no intention of entering the game himself.
He told a London Film Festival press conference: "I have a comfortable life. I am able to dip my toe into issues involved in politics, like in Sudan or Darfur.
"Where I can have some involvement then I'm happy to do it and I don't have to compromise as a politician."
But he is not completely disconnected from the political scene. His father Nick recently ran for office as a Democrat in Kentucky. That experience informed his son's film-making.
George said: "There are hands that you have to shake that you wouldn't normally shake and it's unfortunate but that's the way it is.
"You can't finance your own campaign unless you're independently wealthy, which my father isn't. This is even the case in a small congressional district in Kentucky. It could cost you a couple million dollars to run so you end up having to make deals you normally wouldn't find as attractive.
"But, 95 per cent of the people who win elections have the most money, that's it."
– From November 2011
Odds were it would never last. And, sure enough, the political lifespan of feelin' good ran to three years and it's now (double-dealing) business as usual.
It is into this dank moistness where the mushrooms do dwell that Clooney - as writer, director, producer, star and occasional activist - plants the seeds of betrayal that is the theme of a tale that is firmly pitched through the looking glass from the high idealism of Aaron Sorkin's West Wing fables.
Into the chilly maelstrom of a winner-takes-all Ohio Democratic primary comes high-flying press agent Stephen Meyers (man of the moment Ryan Gosling) who'll provide the words for Governor Mike Morris (George Clooney) if Morris will give him something to believe in.
Meyers works for political bruiser Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman) but if the manager of the rival campaign Tom Duffy (Paul Giametti) gets his way the bright, young thing will betray the Morris for Senator Pullman's more muscular brand of Democratic politics.
But Meyers believes in Morris. "He has to win," says Meyers, brooding urgently.
"He's a nice guy," says Maresi Tomei's fair weather hack Ida Horowicz, "but he'll let you down sooner or later."
The clever money's on "sooner" and the arrival on the scene of seductress Molly Stearns (Evan Rachel Wood) trailing the heady perfume of political scandal ensures that events move with the syncopated gallop of a chess match.
Meyer's journey from believer, to stooge, to realist, to mannequin barely registers on the practised, plastic of his media visage but the cleverness of Gosling's play is the poker face that hints at the degradation beneath.
This is all driven by a snappy script from Beau Willimon who worked on the 2004 Howard Dean campaign thus bringing the ring of authenticity.
Clooney, the actor, goes through the well-oiled gears from charm to hard-ass and, as a little treat, we get a cameo from Jennifer Ehle as Morris's wife. Indeed, all the cast are superior, relishing Clooney's thesis that there are no heroes or villains, just people chasing the veneer of morality like it's a doughnut down a drainpipe.
Giametti and Hoffman slug it out with thick-throated relish and they are given a run for their money from ingenue Wood who surprises with a deft and intelligent turn as a used and abused intern.
Clooney, the director, puts the story centre stage and his workmanlike direction draws inspiration from the gritty conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s (even borrowing their autumnal browns).
The exception is the space he devotes to a string of seduction scenes - woman on man, man on woman, politician on prey - which are intimate, breathless and laced with danger.
The Ides Of March feels familiar and its message about the debasement of politics breaks no new ground. However, there's sufficient heft and sway to the story to make such shortcomings insignificant.
I WON'T BE ENTERING POLITICS
Director George Clooney has delved deeply into the cynical world of politics in The Ides Of March but he has no intention of entering the game himself.
He told a London Film Festival press conference: "I have a comfortable life. I am able to dip my toe into issues involved in politics, like in Sudan or Darfur.
"Where I can have some involvement then I'm happy to do it and I don't have to compromise as a politician."
But he is not completely disconnected from the political scene. His father Nick recently ran for office as a Democrat in Kentucky. That experience informed his son's film-making.
George said: "There are hands that you have to shake that you wouldn't normally shake and it's unfortunate but that's the way it is.
"You can't finance your own campaign unless you're independently wealthy, which my father isn't. This is even the case in a small congressional district in Kentucky. It could cost you a couple million dollars to run so you end up having to make deals you normally wouldn't find as attractive.
"But, 95 per cent of the people who win elections have the most money, that's it."
– From November 2011
Film review: Tintin (PG)
Listen very carefully and you will hear them. The rending of garments, the gnashing of teeth and incessant blathering about the dot-eyed detective of yore.
The Tintin traditionalists are out in force spreading the message that Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Herge's adventures is sacrilege. He should have left well alone, they cry.
Ignore those siren voices and march in to the cinema assured of a rollicking, roller-coaster ride that is, essentially, Indiana Jones, young again and freed from the restraints of gravity and risk assessment by dint of the magic box of animation.
Herge famously declared that Spielberg was the natural choice to put the young reporter on film.
Spielberg has nursed the ambition ever since and found a convenient hole in his schedule just as another boy wonder (Harry Potter) left the scene.
The story - Secret Of The Unicorn - is pure Indy. Tintin (voiced by Jamie Bell) stumbles upon an ancient scrap of paper hidden within an old model square-rigger that hints at a squall of secrets.
Others want answers, mostly the nasty Ivan Ivanovictch Sakharine (Daniel Craig) and the criss-crossing quest to track down further clues and find the treasure takes Sakharine and Tintin around the world by boat, by plane, by car, by crane, clashing at awkward junctures and, in Tintin's case, bumping into friends old and new along the way.
These include Thomson and Thompson (Nick Frost and Simon Pegg), the cantankerous Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis) and, of course, his perceptive sidekick Snowy.
The action never stops. The setpieces are gems of artistry and daring. One sequence featuring pirate galleons clashing in a storm trumps that other pirate film while a chase through a desert town is a triumph of inventiveness.
Motion capture has never quite worked - and it doesn't entirely here (it won't until they get the mouths right) but it is by far the most accomplished attempt at the technique yet.
The backdrops are full of rich detail, as lush as a Baroque master.
And if the script (by a trio of big-name Brits Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish) doesn't entirely ignite and the story flags towards the end, the return to the values of the Boys' Own adventure story is more than enough to quicken the pulse.
– From October 2011
The Tintin traditionalists are out in force spreading the message that Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Herge's adventures is sacrilege. He should have left well alone, they cry.
Ignore those siren voices and march in to the cinema assured of a rollicking, roller-coaster ride that is, essentially, Indiana Jones, young again and freed from the restraints of gravity and risk assessment by dint of the magic box of animation.
Herge famously declared that Spielberg was the natural choice to put the young reporter on film.
Spielberg has nursed the ambition ever since and found a convenient hole in his schedule just as another boy wonder (Harry Potter) left the scene.
The story - Secret Of The Unicorn - is pure Indy. Tintin (voiced by Jamie Bell) stumbles upon an ancient scrap of paper hidden within an old model square-rigger that hints at a squall of secrets.
Others want answers, mostly the nasty Ivan Ivanovictch Sakharine (Daniel Craig) and the criss-crossing quest to track down further clues and find the treasure takes Sakharine and Tintin around the world by boat, by plane, by car, by crane, clashing at awkward junctures and, in Tintin's case, bumping into friends old and new along the way.
These include Thomson and Thompson (Nick Frost and Simon Pegg), the cantankerous Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis) and, of course, his perceptive sidekick Snowy.
The action never stops. The setpieces are gems of artistry and daring. One sequence featuring pirate galleons clashing in a storm trumps that other pirate film while a chase through a desert town is a triumph of inventiveness.
Motion capture has never quite worked - and it doesn't entirely here (it won't until they get the mouths right) but it is by far the most accomplished attempt at the technique yet.
The backdrops are full of rich detail, as lush as a Baroque master.
And if the script (by a trio of big-name Brits Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish) doesn't entirely ignite and the story flags towards the end, the return to the values of the Boys' Own adventure story is more than enough to quicken the pulse.
– From October 2011
Stage review: Jumpy, Royal Court
Tamsin Greig gives a superb performance of comic brio, slick clowning and touching vulnerability in a new study of mid-life neurosis by April De Angelis.
The Royal Court rocked to the laughter of recognition as Greig's exhausted Hilary attempts to corral, educate and berate her neon 15-year-old daughter whose dresses are the length of her attention span and whose contempt is as shrill as a text message beep.
Tough-but-brittle Hilary frets upon an all-white stage and head-down hubbie Mark (Ewan Stewart) scurries along the path of least resistance as crisis point - and the half-century - loom into view.
But there is a heart of darkness in this soapy fare. Hilary, the former Greenham Common idealist, wants more for her daughter than Bacardi Breezers and vacant sex.
Her anxieties become a sickness while the juvenile antics of her disillusioned and sex-starved contemporaries only fuel her sense of isolation.
Director Nina Raine keeps things brisk and a parade of young men and a Facebook update quickly reveals Hilary's concerns are not unfounded.
But Hilary is far harsher on herself than her coarse daughter Tilly (Bel Powley, deftly naïve and knowing).
Liberal idealism bends in the face of dread and when flirtatious actor Roland (a delicious turn by Richard Lintern) is freed from the clutches of acid spouse Bea (Sarah Woodward) and comes a-courtin' she recognises the flaws in her own flagging union and sagging skin.
Meanwhile, nifty-50 gal-pal Frances (Doon Mackichan) refuses to play a part in the encroaching Saga and ramps up her allure, culminating in a squirming and hilarious Burlesque routine. Wine-glugging Hilary, losing touch with her own worth, ill-advisedly attempts to follow suit.
The comic chemistry and timing between Mackichan (filling the role of baudy clown again) and Greig is a highlight but Frances is too quickly sacrificed for a quick-fire laugh for anything of substance to develop.
Indeed, all of this amounts to not very much beyond the frilly concerns of modern parents wrapped up in a comedy of manners and trimmed with satire-lite.
De Angelis goes for broad laughs and easy paranoia in a piece that is as cosy as a Radio Four sitcom and as bracing as a Daily Mail editorial (there are lots of frightening things out there).
But the politics are played lightly and, in places, feel preachy but it is the zinging one liners - and Grieg's quixotic performance - that build the buzz.
– From October 2011
The Royal Court rocked to the laughter of recognition as Greig's exhausted Hilary attempts to corral, educate and berate her neon 15-year-old daughter whose dresses are the length of her attention span and whose contempt is as shrill as a text message beep.
Tough-but-brittle Hilary frets upon an all-white stage and head-down hubbie Mark (Ewan Stewart) scurries along the path of least resistance as crisis point - and the half-century - loom into view.
But there is a heart of darkness in this soapy fare. Hilary, the former Greenham Common idealist, wants more for her daughter than Bacardi Breezers and vacant sex.
Her anxieties become a sickness while the juvenile antics of her disillusioned and sex-starved contemporaries only fuel her sense of isolation.
Director Nina Raine keeps things brisk and a parade of young men and a Facebook update quickly reveals Hilary's concerns are not unfounded.
But Hilary is far harsher on herself than her coarse daughter Tilly (Bel Powley, deftly naïve and knowing).
Liberal idealism bends in the face of dread and when flirtatious actor Roland (a delicious turn by Richard Lintern) is freed from the clutches of acid spouse Bea (Sarah Woodward) and comes a-courtin' she recognises the flaws in her own flagging union and sagging skin.
Meanwhile, nifty-50 gal-pal Frances (Doon Mackichan) refuses to play a part in the encroaching Saga and ramps up her allure, culminating in a squirming and hilarious Burlesque routine. Wine-glugging Hilary, losing touch with her own worth, ill-advisedly attempts to follow suit.
The comic chemistry and timing between Mackichan (filling the role of baudy clown again) and Greig is a highlight but Frances is too quickly sacrificed for a quick-fire laugh for anything of substance to develop.
Indeed, all of this amounts to not very much beyond the frilly concerns of modern parents wrapped up in a comedy of manners and trimmed with satire-lite.
De Angelis goes for broad laughs and easy paranoia in a piece that is as cosy as a Radio Four sitcom and as bracing as a Daily Mail editorial (there are lots of frightening things out there).
But the politics are played lightly and, in places, feel preachy but it is the zinging one liners - and Grieg's quixotic performance - that build the buzz.
– From October 2011
Film review: We Need To Talk About Kevin (15)
The experience of Eva in We Need To Talk About Kevin is akin to that of a pumpkin come Halloween.
At first you are eviscerated, your soft innards pulped and trashed, an open-mouthed grimace is etched onto your face and then finally you become a passive bit-part player in some vast horror story.
Eva's numbing experience is shared, in some small way, by the audience.
For the success of this film about maternal guilt lies not in its relish of its gory subject matter - a High School killing spree by a devil-child - but in its muted, woozy restraint.
Director Lynne Ramsay may have touches of melodrama about her (red is a nagging theme, from tomatoes, paint and T-shirts to, of course, blood) but there is a welcome dearth of quick-fix manipulation.
The tale is stark and soulless, the events unremittingly cold and the aftermath devoid of joy. Enough said.
Ramsay embarks upon the life of Kevin as a series of fragments, jigsaw memories from a mother left scrabbling for clues as to the genesis of her satanic offspring.
As Kevin languishes in jail, Eva is left to clean up the mess, literally and figuratively.
She takes the hatred of a grieving community as her necessary punishment as she wrestles with the extent of her culpability.
Hollow-eyed and flayed, she shuffles through her life perplexed by the cruelty her son visited upon her but instinctively inclined to take the blame as her own.
For as Kevin grows from toddler to teen, his wilful manipulations move from stubborn provocation to an unsettling dark flirtation and Eva is disturbed by her complicity.
Ezra Miller as the older Kevin embodies this sly, oily arrogance with sinuous grace and the scenes he shares with Tilda Swinton's Eva - vampire kid versus zombie mum - are laden with menace.
Eva's isolation is only reinforced by the ignorant complacency of Kevin's patsy father (John C Reilly) who recognises only good in his children and a pitiable resentment in a wife who exchanged a successful career for dismal snot-wrangling.
Ramsay has created a coherent collage from the best-selling book by Lionel Shriver.
Haunting images abound; the abrasive sound design creates the theme music to the banality of evil; and Swinton's hallucinatory nightmare is what "numb with shock" should look like.
This is not an easy watch - it never could be - but Ramsay has made the unpalatable delectable, which is an extraordinary feat.
– From October 2011
At first you are eviscerated, your soft innards pulped and trashed, an open-mouthed grimace is etched onto your face and then finally you become a passive bit-part player in some vast horror story.
Eva's numbing experience is shared, in some small way, by the audience.
For the success of this film about maternal guilt lies not in its relish of its gory subject matter - a High School killing spree by a devil-child - but in its muted, woozy restraint.
Director Lynne Ramsay may have touches of melodrama about her (red is a nagging theme, from tomatoes, paint and T-shirts to, of course, blood) but there is a welcome dearth of quick-fix manipulation.
The tale is stark and soulless, the events unremittingly cold and the aftermath devoid of joy. Enough said.
Ramsay embarks upon the life of Kevin as a series of fragments, jigsaw memories from a mother left scrabbling for clues as to the genesis of her satanic offspring.
As Kevin languishes in jail, Eva is left to clean up the mess, literally and figuratively.
She takes the hatred of a grieving community as her necessary punishment as she wrestles with the extent of her culpability.
Hollow-eyed and flayed, she shuffles through her life perplexed by the cruelty her son visited upon her but instinctively inclined to take the blame as her own.
For as Kevin grows from toddler to teen, his wilful manipulations move from stubborn provocation to an unsettling dark flirtation and Eva is disturbed by her complicity.
Ezra Miller as the older Kevin embodies this sly, oily arrogance with sinuous grace and the scenes he shares with Tilda Swinton's Eva - vampire kid versus zombie mum - are laden with menace.
Eva's isolation is only reinforced by the ignorant complacency of Kevin's patsy father (John C Reilly) who recognises only good in his children and a pitiable resentment in a wife who exchanged a successful career for dismal snot-wrangling.
Ramsay has created a coherent collage from the best-selling book by Lionel Shriver.
Haunting images abound; the abrasive sound design creates the theme music to the banality of evil; and Swinton's hallucinatory nightmare is what "numb with shock" should look like.
This is not an easy watch - it never could be - but Ramsay has made the unpalatable delectable, which is an extraordinary feat.
– From October 2011
Stage review: Cool Hand Luke, Aldwych
Seemingly frustrated by the inability to re-create the Florida plains in the confines of a theatre, writer Emma Reeves decides instead to chart another area of unexplored wilderness - the mind of Luke Jackson.
This is a mistake which goes punished repeatedly in a gutsy but flawed adaptation of Donn Pearce's brutal tale of a life on the chain gang.
For Cool Hand Luke is an enigma, a man who smiles when there's no cause for joy, a man who is both selfless and self-absorbed, a man who can rage placidly.
And, as his cohorts in the Florida jail attempt to knit together the strands of a contradictory persona, they create something of a messianic proportion, they create the Cool Hand Luke they need, rather than the one they get.
To have Luke tell us his mind, to parade his back story and bring alive a host of unconvincing demons turns him from rebellious hero into yet another attention-seeking fruitcake off the production line.
That is in no way to dismiss the winning performance of Marc Warren who holds the piece together with his starry presence and flashes of twinkle-eyed charm.
He is suitably charismatic and laconic and should have been left alone to grow Luke rather than shout him out. (He also deserves a more authentic nemesis than Richard Brake's fey Boss Godfrey.)
There are good things in this laboured production. Lee Boardman gives Dragline a credible edge while the iconic "50 egg" scene turns into a neat compilation of nerve, comedy and sleight of hand.
However, the lack of menace, the clunky insertion of unconvincing flashbacks and dead-handed direction by Andrew Loudon kill any sense of menace or foreboding.
This is supposed to be a drama of barely uttered dreams. That Emma Reeves demands her inmates share their pain turns a prison for hard-boiled crims into a soft-centred episode of Educating Essex.
– From October 2011
This is a mistake which goes punished repeatedly in a gutsy but flawed adaptation of Donn Pearce's brutal tale of a life on the chain gang.
For Cool Hand Luke is an enigma, a man who smiles when there's no cause for joy, a man who is both selfless and self-absorbed, a man who can rage placidly.
And, as his cohorts in the Florida jail attempt to knit together the strands of a contradictory persona, they create something of a messianic proportion, they create the Cool Hand Luke they need, rather than the one they get.
To have Luke tell us his mind, to parade his back story and bring alive a host of unconvincing demons turns him from rebellious hero into yet another attention-seeking fruitcake off the production line.
That is in no way to dismiss the winning performance of Marc Warren who holds the piece together with his starry presence and flashes of twinkle-eyed charm.
He is suitably charismatic and laconic and should have been left alone to grow Luke rather than shout him out. (He also deserves a more authentic nemesis than Richard Brake's fey Boss Godfrey.)
There are good things in this laboured production. Lee Boardman gives Dragline a credible edge while the iconic "50 egg" scene turns into a neat compilation of nerve, comedy and sleight of hand.
However, the lack of menace, the clunky insertion of unconvincing flashbacks and dead-handed direction by Andrew Loudon kill any sense of menace or foreboding.
This is supposed to be a drama of barely uttered dreams. That Emma Reeves demands her inmates share their pain turns a prison for hard-boiled crims into a soft-centred episode of Educating Essex.
– From October 2011
Stage review: The Kitchen, National Theatre
Young Arnold Wesker's 1957 play was ground-breaking in its day. The ambitious writer, for starters, put 30 people on the stage, swirling them around like currants in a cake mix.
He was, also, the first to depict the world of work in its soul-crushing mundanity and intensity.
Whether the play stands the test of time is an argument slipping from its grasp but there's no dispute the National Theatre's revival has thrown every trick and curlicue at this rich feast of a production.
Director Bijan Sheibani calls on the services of movement director Aline David to co-ordinate the cast and they swell, heave, sway and stop to amplify and enchance the short, snappy dialogue.
At times this is a ballet in a circus, with the cook-clowns thrashing, stabbing, stirring and slicing in cacophonous unison while waitresses parade in teetering heels.
In that unwritten, fractured manner of work conversation, the (mostly immigrant) staff conduct their disputes and liaisons in shorthand in the tiny lulls between service.
The highlight (and worth the money on its own) is undoubtedly the rousing run-up to lunch services when orders are hurled, cooked and returned in an escalating cavalcade of barked orders, retorts, clashing pans and - at the extreme - flying waitresses.
Here Giles Cadle's stunning set comes into its own as gas jets, stress and steel all create a mechanical timpani. This is Oliver's Food, Glorious Food sequence on a sugar rush.
There are too many of them - cooks, porters, waitresses, management - for individuals truly to become real but the actors make the best of their interjections as they share snippets to create a mosaic of thwarted dreams.
German fish cook Peter (an angular Tom Brooke like a jerked string puppet) is the most fully realised of the vignettes, the mix of his love for married waitress Monique (Katie Lyons) and his anguished impotence curdling to foment a monstrous breakdown.
However, we also get tantalising glimpses of the life, loves and endurance of butcher Max (Ian Burfield), griller Gaston (Stavros Demetraki) and pastry chef Paul (Samuel Roukin).
Ultimately the play suffers from its dated outlook and lack of lasting novelty but there's no doubting this is a spirited, authentic, technical, precise and, at times, breathtaking production.
– From September 2011
He was, also, the first to depict the world of work in its soul-crushing mundanity and intensity.
Whether the play stands the test of time is an argument slipping from its grasp but there's no dispute the National Theatre's revival has thrown every trick and curlicue at this rich feast of a production.
Director Bijan Sheibani calls on the services of movement director Aline David to co-ordinate the cast and they swell, heave, sway and stop to amplify and enchance the short, snappy dialogue.
At times this is a ballet in a circus, with the cook-clowns thrashing, stabbing, stirring and slicing in cacophonous unison while waitresses parade in teetering heels.
In that unwritten, fractured manner of work conversation, the (mostly immigrant) staff conduct their disputes and liaisons in shorthand in the tiny lulls between service.
The highlight (and worth the money on its own) is undoubtedly the rousing run-up to lunch services when orders are hurled, cooked and returned in an escalating cavalcade of barked orders, retorts, clashing pans and - at the extreme - flying waitresses.
Here Giles Cadle's stunning set comes into its own as gas jets, stress and steel all create a mechanical timpani. This is Oliver's Food, Glorious Food sequence on a sugar rush.
There are too many of them - cooks, porters, waitresses, management - for individuals truly to become real but the actors make the best of their interjections as they share snippets to create a mosaic of thwarted dreams.
German fish cook Peter (an angular Tom Brooke like a jerked string puppet) is the most fully realised of the vignettes, the mix of his love for married waitress Monique (Katie Lyons) and his anguished impotence curdling to foment a monstrous breakdown.
However, we also get tantalising glimpses of the life, loves and endurance of butcher Max (Ian Burfield), griller Gaston (Stavros Demetraki) and pastry chef Paul (Samuel Roukin).
Ultimately the play suffers from its dated outlook and lack of lasting novelty but there's no doubting this is a spirited, authentic, technical, precise and, at times, breathtaking production.
– From September 2011
Film review: Warrior (12A)
This movie starts with great intentions and ends on an exhilarating high but the line from one point to the other is not straight. It sags. (Which is more than can be said for Tom Hardy's trapezius muscles that coil round his neck like a buff python digesting a portion of uranium fuel rods).
Gavin O'Connor's epic essay on mumbling manhood sets off well, channelling the best of The Fighter - low-key, drab, blue collar, earthy.
It introduces us to Tommy, the soldier with a secret; his loathed dad Paddy (Nick Nolte as a walking embodiment of the word "grizzled") who beat the bottle but not before beating his wife; and Brendan, who escaped the fractured family to create a nice one of his own (wife Jennifer Morrison is, sadly, only scenery).
The feuding brothers must both take the $5million pot at Sparta, the winner-takes-all Mixed Martial Arts event. Tommy for redemption and Joel to stick it to the bank.
Meanwhile Paddy (as Tommy's trainer and Brendan's neglectful nemesis) needs forgiveness from the boys whose lives he ruined.
Halfway through the movie drifts from this interesting premise. Some clumsy oaf spilled a carton of fight movie cliche juice all over the script obscuring the original intent.
Characters, who began with tales to tell, collapse under the weight of emotional manipulation like an MMA amateur under a crunching tackle from Pete Mad Dog Grimes.
It's not sufficient that Brendan's home is at risk, his daughter has to have a heart condition. It's not sufficient that Tommy is a troubled veteran, he has to be a reluctant war hero (cue, uniformed Marines at Sparta flying the flag). It's not sufficient to bring the best of the US to the final, there's got to be a superfluous "unbeatable" Russian.
The movie should belong to Joel Edgerton's Brendan, the plucky underdog with the frame of a chewed Swan Vesta.
But Tom Hardy, who has cornered the market in lachrymose lunks, rises through the undercard and undoes Joel with yet another in an unbroken line of assured and authentic performances.
Here, Hardy prowls and broods and he is superbly effective as both coiled spring and broken cog.
The two brothers inevitably face each other in the final (not a spoiler, it's in the trailers).
The resulting bout is raw, wincing and rousing but it is also inconsistent and flawed. The actors require huge amounts of dexterity to follow both O'Connor's fight choreography and his character contortions.
But the film is built precisely for this blistering finale so expect the male contingent to quit the cinema with something in their eye before smashing their fist into a lamppost to re-start production of testosterone.
– From September 2011
Gavin O'Connor's epic essay on mumbling manhood sets off well, channelling the best of The Fighter - low-key, drab, blue collar, earthy.
It introduces us to Tommy, the soldier with a secret; his loathed dad Paddy (Nick Nolte as a walking embodiment of the word "grizzled") who beat the bottle but not before beating his wife; and Brendan, who escaped the fractured family to create a nice one of his own (wife Jennifer Morrison is, sadly, only scenery).
The feuding brothers must both take the $5million pot at Sparta, the winner-takes-all Mixed Martial Arts event. Tommy for redemption and Joel to stick it to the bank.
Meanwhile Paddy (as Tommy's trainer and Brendan's neglectful nemesis) needs forgiveness from the boys whose lives he ruined.
Halfway through the movie drifts from this interesting premise. Some clumsy oaf spilled a carton of fight movie cliche juice all over the script obscuring the original intent.
Characters, who began with tales to tell, collapse under the weight of emotional manipulation like an MMA amateur under a crunching tackle from Pete Mad Dog Grimes.
It's not sufficient that Brendan's home is at risk, his daughter has to have a heart condition. It's not sufficient that Tommy is a troubled veteran, he has to be a reluctant war hero (cue, uniformed Marines at Sparta flying the flag). It's not sufficient to bring the best of the US to the final, there's got to be a superfluous "unbeatable" Russian.
The movie should belong to Joel Edgerton's Brendan, the plucky underdog with the frame of a chewed Swan Vesta.
But Tom Hardy, who has cornered the market in lachrymose lunks, rises through the undercard and undoes Joel with yet another in an unbroken line of assured and authentic performances.
Here, Hardy prowls and broods and he is superbly effective as both coiled spring and broken cog.
The two brothers inevitably face each other in the final (not a spoiler, it's in the trailers).
The resulting bout is raw, wincing and rousing but it is also inconsistent and flawed. The actors require huge amounts of dexterity to follow both O'Connor's fight choreography and his character contortions.
But the film is built precisely for this blistering finale so expect the male contingent to quit the cinema with something in their eye before smashing their fist into a lamppost to re-start production of testosterone.
– From September 2011
Film review: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (15)
The world of espionage is never black and white. Nor, in this movie, is it even grey. No, the world of George Smiley and Co is nicotine brown.
And green, the kind of turgid municipal green that is kicked off chunky wrought iron banisters in the echoing stairwells of an Eastern European tower block.
Director Tomas Alfredson has brought his melancholic Swedish sensibilities to John Le Carre's tale of mole hunts and betrayal and he begins with an advantage - he has conjured a '70s atmosphere that is so authentic, drab and penetrating that the dark of the cinema may well be a result of the three-day week.
The blend of the familiar and the foreign are the perfect hue.
Yes, this is the height of the Cold War when paranoia sends the "circus" (MI6) into a spiralling frenzy that matches the whirl of their pipe smoke.
John Le Carre created a classic with his labyrinthine tale and the director, wisely, steps back, puts his camera in the shadows and lets the story do the work.
The adaptation requires some quart-into-pint-pot gymnastics but this only aids the sense of things undone or half-known.
Scenes end before they have begun and the conventions of self-revelation are thrown overboard, leaving only curt, studied dialogue from people who are trained to give away nothing for a living.
At the heart of this layered piece is George Smiley although his eerie stillness suggests the absence of a pulse. He is brought back from the cold to complete the mole hunt that his boss C (John Hurt) began, but botched.
Mild-mannered Smiley is an absence, a placid career civil servant with a man-trap mind. He is a classic of modern literature and Gary Oldman is more than his match.
Oldman imbues Smiley with the suggestion of a hidden life - world weary, dutiful yet neglected, disappointments forming his permafrost. The subtleties of character emerge from a cadence, a look, a muted gesture. He is an engrossing presence.
His formidable hare-and-tortoise comes up against some formidable characters embodied by some formidable character actors - Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds, Mark Strong, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch - making for some sumptuous, sparse jousting.
This is taut and tortuous stuff. The aching slowness becomes hypnotic, creating mountains of tension out of molehills of action.
Alfredson's lo-fi production allows the cast to do more with less and they produce an impeccably nuanced ensemble performance that rises to the challenge of Le Carre's classic in a manner never likely to be bettered.
– From September 2011
And green, the kind of turgid municipal green that is kicked off chunky wrought iron banisters in the echoing stairwells of an Eastern European tower block.
Director Tomas Alfredson has brought his melancholic Swedish sensibilities to John Le Carre's tale of mole hunts and betrayal and he begins with an advantage - he has conjured a '70s atmosphere that is so authentic, drab and penetrating that the dark of the cinema may well be a result of the three-day week.
The blend of the familiar and the foreign are the perfect hue.
Yes, this is the height of the Cold War when paranoia sends the "circus" (MI6) into a spiralling frenzy that matches the whirl of their pipe smoke.
John Le Carre created a classic with his labyrinthine tale and the director, wisely, steps back, puts his camera in the shadows and lets the story do the work.
The adaptation requires some quart-into-pint-pot gymnastics but this only aids the sense of things undone or half-known.
Scenes end before they have begun and the conventions of self-revelation are thrown overboard, leaving only curt, studied dialogue from people who are trained to give away nothing for a living.
At the heart of this layered piece is George Smiley although his eerie stillness suggests the absence of a pulse. He is brought back from the cold to complete the mole hunt that his boss C (John Hurt) began, but botched.
Mild-mannered Smiley is an absence, a placid career civil servant with a man-trap mind. He is a classic of modern literature and Gary Oldman is more than his match.
Oldman imbues Smiley with the suggestion of a hidden life - world weary, dutiful yet neglected, disappointments forming his permafrost. The subtleties of character emerge from a cadence, a look, a muted gesture. He is an engrossing presence.
His formidable hare-and-tortoise comes up against some formidable characters embodied by some formidable character actors - Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds, Mark Strong, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch - making for some sumptuous, sparse jousting.
This is taut and tortuous stuff. The aching slowness becomes hypnotic, creating mountains of tension out of molehills of action.
Alfredson's lo-fi production allows the cast to do more with less and they produce an impeccably nuanced ensemble performance that rises to the challenge of Le Carre's classic in a manner never likely to be bettered.
– From September 2011
Review: Batman Live, The O2
It takes a while for Batman to hit the stage, fully clad in contoured and menacing black.
Too long if you're an seven-year-old boy dressed in similar attire, waving your merchandise in the air and shouting his name.
But when he arrives, spiralling out the sky to curtail an avaricious Catwoman, he delivers: blows, kicks, thumps, straight-faced messages of doom, redemption and bags of style.
Batman Live is a circus with a narrative. It's a 3D neon comic book. It's a theme park ride. It's a valiant attempt to capture the camp and choreography of a superhero tales.
And while the pacing may feel plodding at times and the exposition too lengthy for those action-hungry boys, there are sufficient super villains, painted faces and contorting characters to ensure there's a visual treat around the next corner.
The story takes it all back to the beginning - the orphaned rich boy, the Flying Graysons - and then rushes forward to an unholy alliance of crims looking to finish off their crime-fighting nemesis from the (alarmingly dark and disturbing) Arkham Asylum.
The staging, in the cavernous O2, allows for high flying antics and accommodates a spectacular game-changing 100ft video screen but the space is also something of a drawback.
The action, for many of the seats, is too remote for a production aimed squarely at bringing the bat to your lap. (Harvey Dent's Two Faces, for example, are but a blurred pimple in the distance.)
Perhaps bat masks with glasses attached (Bat-oculars - pat pending) were the answer, or maybe screens a la Glastonbury.
Never mind, the sumptuous staging, amazing colours and adrenalised stylised setpieces, sent home families not in the Honda Civics and Ford Mondeos - but in a thousand imagined Batmobiles.
– From August 2011
Too long if you're an seven-year-old boy dressed in similar attire, waving your merchandise in the air and shouting his name.
But when he arrives, spiralling out the sky to curtail an avaricious Catwoman, he delivers: blows, kicks, thumps, straight-faced messages of doom, redemption and bags of style.
Batman Live is a circus with a narrative. It's a 3D neon comic book. It's a theme park ride. It's a valiant attempt to capture the camp and choreography of a superhero tales.
And while the pacing may feel plodding at times and the exposition too lengthy for those action-hungry boys, there are sufficient super villains, painted faces and contorting characters to ensure there's a visual treat around the next corner.
The story takes it all back to the beginning - the orphaned rich boy, the Flying Graysons - and then rushes forward to an unholy alliance of crims looking to finish off their crime-fighting nemesis from the (alarmingly dark and disturbing) Arkham Asylum.
The staging, in the cavernous O2, allows for high flying antics and accommodates a spectacular game-changing 100ft video screen but the space is also something of a drawback.
The action, for many of the seats, is too remote for a production aimed squarely at bringing the bat to your lap. (Harvey Dent's Two Faces, for example, are but a blurred pimple in the distance.)
Perhaps bat masks with glasses attached (Bat-oculars - pat pending) were the answer, or maybe screens a la Glastonbury.
Never mind, the sumptuous staging, amazing colours and adrenalised stylised setpieces, sent home families not in the Honda Civics and Ford Mondeos - but in a thousand imagined Batmobiles.
– From August 2011
Stage review: Mongrel Island, Soho Theatre
If Sartre wrote on Microsoft Office, he would have expanded on his maxim. Hell is other people crammed into an air-conditioned box inputting streams of data from a mountain of files that only ever get bigger.
Director Steve Marmion captures the near mania, the shifting alliances and bleak hierarchies that come with the nine-to-five and then adds, well, giant prawns for a start.
The three-strong team work under the yoke of tic-ridden Honey (Golda Rosheuvel) who, like her underlings, pays a psychological price for suppressing her starchy desires.
Marie (an eye-catching Robyn Addison), Only Joe (Simon Kunz) and Elvis (Shane Zaza) set themselves at the paperwork like cliffs against the sea only to crumble gently, and then explosively, against its relentless, towering might.
Marie takes on extra hours and finds herself in a twilight world of Tellytubby cleaning ladies (Joanna Holden), sleep deprivation and isolation where the barest human touch is enough to short her circuit board.
Meanwhile, Only Joe buries tears beneath splenetic banter and Elvis conjures surreal adventures to keep the outside world alive.
With nods to Dennis Potter and David Lynch, this is dark, comic and unnerving comedy, especially as the mania gathers pace and anguished souls turn the office into purgatory.
While there is little story to underpin these vignettes, there is plenty to enjoy in writer Ed Harris's capacious and pitch-black imagination.
– From July 2011
Director Steve Marmion captures the near mania, the shifting alliances and bleak hierarchies that come with the nine-to-five and then adds, well, giant prawns for a start.
The three-strong team work under the yoke of tic-ridden Honey (Golda Rosheuvel) who, like her underlings, pays a psychological price for suppressing her starchy desires.
Marie (an eye-catching Robyn Addison), Only Joe (Simon Kunz) and Elvis (Shane Zaza) set themselves at the paperwork like cliffs against the sea only to crumble gently, and then explosively, against its relentless, towering might.
Marie takes on extra hours and finds herself in a twilight world of Tellytubby cleaning ladies (Joanna Holden), sleep deprivation and isolation where the barest human touch is enough to short her circuit board.
Meanwhile, Only Joe buries tears beneath splenetic banter and Elvis conjures surreal adventures to keep the outside world alive.
With nods to Dennis Potter and David Lynch, this is dark, comic and unnerving comedy, especially as the mania gathers pace and anguished souls turn the office into purgatory.
While there is little story to underpin these vignettes, there is plenty to enjoy in writer Ed Harris's capacious and pitch-black imagination.
– From July 2011
Stage review: Loyalty, Hampstead Theatre
Foreign journalist Sarah Helm did not have to travel far to find material for her first play. She rolled over in bed and bumped into her husband.
He is Jonathan Powell and was Tony Blair's chief of staff and therein lies a tale.
This is authentic insider stuff. On opening night TV politicos Adam Boulton and Michael Crick were no doubt straining in the stalls to tally their own recollections with tales from the other side of the black door.
It was commendably pragmatic of Powell to allow his wife to run riot with the blunders of the Iraq war through the fictional pairing of Laura and chief of staff Nick who works for a light-footed narcissist Tony.
Although Helm uses the thin veil of "fictional memoir", she finds no reticence in writing "herself" as a liberal champion, with knowing insight, juggling bath-time with a one-woman fight for truth and justice and her share of the covers.
Good job that magnetic Maxine Peake is called upon to turn this sanctimonious goody-two-shoes into a character. She manages to balance frenticism and a measure of moral calm while maintaining a twinkle in her eye (occasionally drowned by a tear).
Lloyd Owen, so commanding in Blood And Gifts at the National, adopts a similar ramrod role, buffeted by the harsh winds of realpolitik. He merely hints at the conflict between his loyalty to his own beliefs, his leader and his partner but he is not given sufficient room to go much further.
The light-touch take on Blair by Patrick Baladi is a gem. He makes little attempt at an impression but offers sufficient deft vignettes (the toothy "hi", the imagined tennis stroke, the vague sense of the shuffling schoolboy) to elicit laughs where perhaps they were not planned.
Other characters heard from afar (Bush, Campbell et al) also swap character for trusted caricature suggesting either weak writing or (more worryingly) skewered truth.
Ultimately, the busy, noisy, fractured play - under the direction of Edward Hall - is most convenient not as a wrought drama of domestic and global loyalty but as a political comedy, more akin to Er Yes Prime Minister than a searing indictment of truth as a casualty of war.
It is entertainment through recognition. Having lived through years of inquiries, leaks and books, we all know the ins and outs of the blunders that took us to war, so having them played out by apparent (clueless) insiders is comforting and nostalgic rather than disturbing (Allo, Allo anyone?)
Relevance is provided with the occasional parallels with hackgate - although the commanding voice of Murdoch telling Blair to go to war was, by a matter of hours, overtaken by events.
In this play of two halves (domestic travails followed by No.10 tantrums), Laura hovers like everywoman, her heart on her sleeve, her conscious unmangled, her courage undimmed, earnestly tugging away on the emergency cord of a runaway train.
Too good to be true? Laura, yes; the play not so much.
– From July 2011
He is Jonathan Powell and was Tony Blair's chief of staff and therein lies a tale.
This is authentic insider stuff. On opening night TV politicos Adam Boulton and Michael Crick were no doubt straining in the stalls to tally their own recollections with tales from the other side of the black door.
It was commendably pragmatic of Powell to allow his wife to run riot with the blunders of the Iraq war through the fictional pairing of Laura and chief of staff Nick who works for a light-footed narcissist Tony.
Although Helm uses the thin veil of "fictional memoir", she finds no reticence in writing "herself" as a liberal champion, with knowing insight, juggling bath-time with a one-woman fight for truth and justice and her share of the covers.
Good job that magnetic Maxine Peake is called upon to turn this sanctimonious goody-two-shoes into a character. She manages to balance frenticism and a measure of moral calm while maintaining a twinkle in her eye (occasionally drowned by a tear).
Lloyd Owen, so commanding in Blood And Gifts at the National, adopts a similar ramrod role, buffeted by the harsh winds of realpolitik. He merely hints at the conflict between his loyalty to his own beliefs, his leader and his partner but he is not given sufficient room to go much further.
The light-touch take on Blair by Patrick Baladi is a gem. He makes little attempt at an impression but offers sufficient deft vignettes (the toothy "hi", the imagined tennis stroke, the vague sense of the shuffling schoolboy) to elicit laughs where perhaps they were not planned.
Other characters heard from afar (Bush, Campbell et al) also swap character for trusted caricature suggesting either weak writing or (more worryingly) skewered truth.
Ultimately, the busy, noisy, fractured play - under the direction of Edward Hall - is most convenient not as a wrought drama of domestic and global loyalty but as a political comedy, more akin to Er Yes Prime Minister than a searing indictment of truth as a casualty of war.
It is entertainment through recognition. Having lived through years of inquiries, leaks and books, we all know the ins and outs of the blunders that took us to war, so having them played out by apparent (clueless) insiders is comforting and nostalgic rather than disturbing (Allo, Allo anyone?)
Relevance is provided with the occasional parallels with hackgate - although the commanding voice of Murdoch telling Blair to go to war was, by a matter of hours, overtaken by events.
In this play of two halves (domestic travails followed by No.10 tantrums), Laura hovers like everywoman, her heart on her sleeve, her conscious unmangled, her courage undimmed, earnestly tugging away on the emergency cord of a runaway train.
Too good to be true? Laura, yes; the play not so much.
– From July 2011
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