STAGE
A Chorus Of Disapproval
Harold Pinter Theatre
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
More tautness and and vigour is needed, but this Trevor Nunn production is still a clever study of provincial lifes, loves and obsessions.
REVIEW
If Rob Brydon were to bring his immense but particular talents to a dramatic role in the West End then the part of put-upon am-dram director Dafydd Ap Llewellyn would be the velvet slippers of his dreams.
The hangdog Welshman of TV fame plays the hangdog Welshman of Alan Ayckbourn's clever-clever suburban farce with brio and eagerness.
Dressed in baggy cords, droopy cardigan and dismayed jowls, Brydon is outstanding in what is, generally, an underpowered version of the revival by the normally meticulous Trevor Nunn.
The scene is set - the light operatic society under the jackboot of the Welsh dragon - is bringing to life The Beggar's Opera, which, amid its tarts and rogues, is centred on a love triangle.
In the twee provincial society, straight from a Mike Leigh 1980s playbook, one love triangle is already in place and another is about to emerge with the arrival of Nigel Harman, who goes from flat-haired dweeb to cock of the walk as he hoovers up the desperate housewives.
The stage is crammed with stereotypes - emotional teens, vampish mares, dodgy dealers - but the set pieces are frequently lost in the fussiness of conveyor belt stage management.
Sometimes - such as in the pub scene - it's difficult to hear (the man behind me repeated the punchlines to his partner) which doesn't play to the strengths of a charming but pallid Ashley Jensen, who, in Extras, did nuanced pragmatism beautifully.
Essentially this is as silly as Noises Off but here the frivolity appears laboured and freighted with needless significance.
A missed opportunity for a starry cast straining at the comic leash.
Until January 5, agttickets.com
Sunday, 7 October 2012
TV: Mental torture porn
Who watches this stuff? Seriously. I was about 10 minutes into Homefront - nothing else on is the excuse - and what have we got? A young wife with a bawling bairn and a hubbie in Helmand gets a visit from a beret-clad doom merchant.
Next thing, just after she tried to push him and the bad news from the room - they're marching a flag-draped coffin out the back of a Hercules at Brize Norton.
She's a melting wreck and I'm thinking - why put us through the wringer? We could flip over and watch the news. We have to do that, it's an obligation, it's the least we can do considering. But this...
It's like children's hospital dramas. Little Lucy Dawson hovers between life and death as nature's cruel hand slaps her frequently around her bloodless face for a laugh. Why would anyone... I mean, why...
And if that's not enough - get the real thing straight from the bedside. Watch authentic pain. Weep real tears as the genuine Lucy Dawson is watched over by parents too despairing to care that they've got their own Facebook fan page.
Give me anodyne. Give me vanilla TV. Give me Terry And June over Terry And June: Conjoined And Condemned any day of the week and a repeat on Sunday.
giles.broadbent@wharf.co.uk
Next thing, just after she tried to push him and the bad news from the room - they're marching a flag-draped coffin out the back of a Hercules at Brize Norton.
She's a melting wreck and I'm thinking - why put us through the wringer? We could flip over and watch the news. We have to do that, it's an obligation, it's the least we can do considering. But this...
It's like children's hospital dramas. Little Lucy Dawson hovers between life and death as nature's cruel hand slaps her frequently around her bloodless face for a laugh. Why would anyone... I mean, why...
And if that's not enough - get the real thing straight from the bedside. Watch authentic pain. Weep real tears as the genuine Lucy Dawson is watched over by parents too despairing to care that they've got their own Facebook fan page.
Give me anodyne. Give me vanilla TV. Give me Terry And June over Terry And June: Conjoined And Condemned any day of the week and a repeat on Sunday.
giles.broadbent@wharf.co.uk
Film review: Looper (15)
FILM
Looper
(15) 118ms
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Confident writer-director Rian Johnson delivers some mind-bending twists in an ambitious tale of time-travelling gun slingers.
REVIEW
Looper doesn't just deliver one mind-bending action movie - it delivers about four. The fact that two of that number are Back To The Future and Terminator shouldn't irretrievably damage the IQ - for the other two are far more ambitious, complex and intelligent.
Like Inception (which also starred Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the premise is simple but the implications are extraordinary and require a switched-on, forward-facing audience.
The story - along with the stripped down, lo-fi 2044 that is the film's drab setting - come from the fernickety mind of writer-director Rian Johnson, who made a stylish impact with 2005's Brick, also starring Gordon-Levitt for whom he wrote the part of hitman Joe.
Gordon-Levitt's appearance jars at first - like Ed Miliband post-op - but the reason for the brutish physog becomes apparent when the older version of himself is dumped back in his time - it's Bruce Willis.
The head-scratching conceit is this: In the future, the Mob use illegal time-travelling technology to send their marks into the past.
There, hitmen, called loopers, take their lives and the silver strapped to their backs - and dispose of bodies that don't technically exist.
But the loopers are not forward-thinkers. In exchange for loot now, they will have to kill off their future selves at some point.
When Bruce Willis comes back for dispatch, the younger Joe loses his nerve and Willis flees, heading off on a cold-blooded killing spree of his own in order to save his future family.
In some kind of Oedipal nightmare, Young Jo has to destroy his older self because Mob boss Abe (Jeff Daniels), sent back in time to oversee this end of the operation, will ensure both incarnations are bumped off.
But Future Joe, in Terminator style, is on the trail of the kid who will grow up to be the Rainmaker, the fearsome uber-boss who triggers his death 30 years' hence.
Present Joe has sufficient clues to predict his targets and finds himself in the remote homestead of tough-but-vulnerable Emily Blunt where she tends to the needs of odd toddler Cid.
While the blank (indeed unpleasant) duo of Present and Future Joe lack any kind of sympathy or charisma, Blunt's Sara is the damaged soul who, finally, brings a welcome human dimension to the movie.
But Blunt doesn't take top acting honours. They go to wee Pierce Gagnon who manages to convey menace and enigma despite being cute as an psycho button.
This hard-but-brittle flick is a slow-starter (all that infernal exposition) and the downtime is too easily spent ticking off the derivative time-travelling tropes.
However, the spectacular (and genuinely shocking) final sequences make up for the shortage of early charm and tie up the cleverly twisting plotlines with panache.
The film is not always likeable but it is a solid two hours of truly mind-bending entertainment.
Looper
(15) 118ms
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Confident writer-director Rian Johnson delivers some mind-bending twists in an ambitious tale of time-travelling gun slingers.
REVIEW
Looper doesn't just deliver one mind-bending action movie - it delivers about four. The fact that two of that number are Back To The Future and Terminator shouldn't irretrievably damage the IQ - for the other two are far more ambitious, complex and intelligent.
Like Inception (which also starred Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the premise is simple but the implications are extraordinary and require a switched-on, forward-facing audience.
The story - along with the stripped down, lo-fi 2044 that is the film's drab setting - come from the fernickety mind of writer-director Rian Johnson, who made a stylish impact with 2005's Brick, also starring Gordon-Levitt for whom he wrote the part of hitman Joe.
Gordon-Levitt's appearance jars at first - like Ed Miliband post-op - but the reason for the brutish physog becomes apparent when the older version of himself is dumped back in his time - it's Bruce Willis.
The head-scratching conceit is this: In the future, the Mob use illegal time-travelling technology to send their marks into the past.
There, hitmen, called loopers, take their lives and the silver strapped to their backs - and dispose of bodies that don't technically exist.
But the loopers are not forward-thinkers. In exchange for loot now, they will have to kill off their future selves at some point.
When Bruce Willis comes back for dispatch, the younger Joe loses his nerve and Willis flees, heading off on a cold-blooded killing spree of his own in order to save his future family.
In some kind of Oedipal nightmare, Young Jo has to destroy his older self because Mob boss Abe (Jeff Daniels), sent back in time to oversee this end of the operation, will ensure both incarnations are bumped off.
But Future Joe, in Terminator style, is on the trail of the kid who will grow up to be the Rainmaker, the fearsome uber-boss who triggers his death 30 years' hence.
Present Joe has sufficient clues to predict his targets and finds himself in the remote homestead of tough-but-vulnerable Emily Blunt where she tends to the needs of odd toddler Cid.
While the blank (indeed unpleasant) duo of Present and Future Joe lack any kind of sympathy or charisma, Blunt's Sara is the damaged soul who, finally, brings a welcome human dimension to the movie.
But Blunt doesn't take top acting honours. They go to wee Pierce Gagnon who manages to convey menace and enigma despite being cute as an psycho button.
This hard-but-brittle flick is a slow-starter (all that infernal exposition) and the downtime is too easily spent ticking off the derivative time-travelling tropes.
However, the spectacular (and genuinely shocking) final sequences make up for the shortage of early charm and tie up the cleverly twisting plotlines with panache.
The film is not always likeable but it is a solid two hours of truly mind-bending entertainment.
Purpose of the cable car is crystal clear
An advert now labels the cable car a legacy item. "Thanks to the Games," it reads, "you can now fly across the Thames and see London in a whole new light." This is part of a series of adverts branded "Gift of the Games."
Now, one could quibble, if one were so minded, over the direct correlation of the Emirates Air Line and the Olympic Games.
Obviously, traffic escalated over those summer weeks, although I suspect this was due to people killing time between events at Excel and The O2 rather than travelling between the two.
Besides, the Emirates Air Line was never touted as a piece of Games infrastructure and, through pricing and ticketing (and very nearly through its late launch) was excluded from routine travel plans.
However, my quibbling is muted. If someone wants to give the cable car an Olympic sheen I'm not going to get too vexed.
But, the truth is, the cable car never really made sense as an adjunct to the Olympics. However, it makes perfect sense as an adjunct to the Crystal.
Shamefully late for a resident of the area, I took my debut flight last week. Mostly because I got free tickets as part of the hoopla that surrounded the opening of the greenest building in the world, dedicated to innovative thinking about urbanisation.
Taking to the air, after a short walk from that squat, pointy building (the East Angular?), the Air Line made sense in a way it never did before.
From around the world, city mayors, digital thinkers and futurologists will convene at Siemens campus. The cable car (although disappointingly analogue) is a perfect mood music for their deliberations - dramatic, innovative, sexy, leftfield and a tiny bit bonkers. (Plus it opens up the lunching options for delegates.)
I should add that the journey over the Thames is London's latest must-do experience.
From a certain vantage point, with perspective foreshortened, when the loop of the river turns the Greenwich peninsula into an island and when the Royal Docks and river make a drowned archipelago of Silvertown, the notion of a Water City is as obvious as it is breathtaking.
PS The Crystal is reminiscent of the Millennium Dome - snazzy exterior but a purpose that is not entirely clear to the average passer-by. Fortunately, we're not picking up the bill for this one.
giles.broadbent@wharf.co.uk
Now, one could quibble, if one were so minded, over the direct correlation of the Emirates Air Line and the Olympic Games.
Obviously, traffic escalated over those summer weeks, although I suspect this was due to people killing time between events at Excel and The O2 rather than travelling between the two.
Besides, the Emirates Air Line was never touted as a piece of Games infrastructure and, through pricing and ticketing (and very nearly through its late launch) was excluded from routine travel plans.
However, my quibbling is muted. If someone wants to give the cable car an Olympic sheen I'm not going to get too vexed.
But, the truth is, the cable car never really made sense as an adjunct to the Olympics. However, it makes perfect sense as an adjunct to the Crystal.
Shamefully late for a resident of the area, I took my debut flight last week. Mostly because I got free tickets as part of the hoopla that surrounded the opening of the greenest building in the world, dedicated to innovative thinking about urbanisation.
Taking to the air, after a short walk from that squat, pointy building (the East Angular?), the Air Line made sense in a way it never did before.
From around the world, city mayors, digital thinkers and futurologists will convene at Siemens campus. The cable car (although disappointingly analogue) is a perfect mood music for their deliberations - dramatic, innovative, sexy, leftfield and a tiny bit bonkers. (Plus it opens up the lunching options for delegates.)
I should add that the journey over the Thames is London's latest must-do experience.
From a certain vantage point, with perspective foreshortened, when the loop of the river turns the Greenwich peninsula into an island and when the Royal Docks and river make a drowned archipelago of Silvertown, the notion of a Water City is as obvious as it is breathtaking.
PS The Crystal is reminiscent of the Millennium Dome - snazzy exterior but a purpose that is not entirely clear to the average passer-by. Fortunately, we're not picking up the bill for this one.
giles.broadbent@wharf.co.uk
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