FILM
Django Unchained
(15) 136mins
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Quentin Tarantino is best to his swaggering, infuriating and brilliant best with this audacious take on America's slave past.
REVIEW
Little wonder director Quentin Tarantino squirmed under scrutiny over movie violence.
In attempting to hold the high ground he had seized by claiming credit for dragging America's slave-owning past into the public arena he then painted himself into a corner.
He tried to insert simplistic gradations between "cathartic violence" and "entertaining violence" which can only translate as "violence that hurts baddies - necessary" and "violence that hurts goodies - worthy".
His revisionist Western (set in the South) contains much of both flavours and whether it's slaves set on by dogs or slave-masters castrated by shot, the result is just the same and usually found on walls and in puddles.
His needless justifications attempt to elevate a gore-fest beyond its very simple roots as a revenge movie.
In many ways, this is a companion piece to Inglourious Basterds. In both, the traditional opponents are redrawn and replaced with a new paradigm.
In the war-time sprawl, the Germans were defeated by the Jews. In the over-long but audacious Django Unchained, the plantation owners are done for by a former slave.
The director's impatience with the argument is understandable. If you're going to see a Quentin Tarantino movie, you know what's coming.
Lavish, unfurling scenes in which razor sharp characters have time to present their philosophies before unleashing hell on their foes.
It's all done with a swagger, lashings of scorn, a respectful tilt at genre, a painful self indulgence and a brazen disdain for queasiness.
Dr King Schultz, as played wonderfully by Christoph Waltz, is, therefore, the perfect QT character. The German bounty hunter has a gift of the gab as well as a dead-eye with a gun.
When he buys slave Django (the underpowered but charismatic Jamie Foxx) to help him track down his next bounty he finds a protege and a purpose.
For Django's slave wife (Kerry Washington) is named after a character in a German myth, a princess atop a hill for whom an adventurer must go through hellfire to rescue.
And so the quest to free Broomhilda is set and brings, by circuitous routes (there are lots of circuitous routes) the charming doctor and his taciturn sidekick to the plantation of ruthless boy king Calvin Candie (another star turn by Leonardo DiCaprio).
But the ruse that brings them to the bargaining table comes under scrutiny by repulsive house slave Stephen (rubberised Samuel L Jackson) - and their treachery will not go unchallenged.
Yet again, Tarantino has mined his love of cinema to create a brilliant, infuriating and rewarding event.
Saturday, 19 January 2013
Saturday, 12 January 2013
Film review: Les Miserables (12A)
FILM
Les Miserables
(12A) 157mins
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
The ultimate musical, picked apart for its string of hits, returns to its stage roots, only on screen, in Tom Hooper's diligent pop opera video.
REVIEW
Here's something delightful - the reverse jukebox musical. Elsewhere songs (from Abba, Spice Girls et al) have had to generate a narrative on which to hang their scattergun ditties.
Here, a selection of memorable melodies finds a comfortable home alongside a cohesive narrative. Almost like it was planned.
So ubiquitous are the classics (I Dreamed A Dream, Bring Him Home, One More Day etc) they have become divorced from their original purpose. Suddenly, set anew against a stunning, stagy backdrop (including another star turn by Greenwich) they make sense all over again.
The result is a wonder - not without flaws - and a trauma, requiring the best bulldog spirit to stem the tears.
I am so biased in favour of Les Mis that a film adaptation of the much-cherished musical was set against a phalanx of prejudices.
The experience is akin to seeing your first love, who sings in the bath, appear on The X-Factor - same music, same intimacy but in a grander setting. In public. Familiar yet out of context.
But all the headline stars give strong vocal performances. Hugh Jackman as tormented Jean Valjean, on the run from policeman Javert (Russell Crowe); Amanda Seyfried as Cosette, Valjean's adopted daughter; Samantha Barks as love-lorn Eponine.
Top of the list though are Anne Hathaway as Fantine and Eddie Redmayne, who is a revelation as revolutionary romancer Marius.
Hathaway's I Dreamed A Dream steals the show (the camera stays with her for every heartbreaking second till it's unbearable) while Redmayne's Empty Chairs At Empty Tables is viscerally raw.
The much-heralded pairing of Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen as the light-fingered inn-keepers are much the most disappointing of the entertainers.
They touch on the weakness of an otherwise diligent production by director Tom Hooper - that is, lack of nuance and range.
Pathos is there in bucketloads but comedy and - more essentially - fury are missing. There is plenty of anger in the story - anger at God, circumstance, fate and power. But that section of the palette has been cauterised, the edge blunted.
Where is Colm Wilkinson (the West End's first and best Valjean) when you need him? Oh yes, he plays the Bishop. Nice touch.
Hooper handles the action well and the visuals are superb - degradation hasn't looked this good since Dickens with Caravaggio in charge of the baroque set design and lighting but this falls just short of being a classic.
But I'll wager this movie will be a DVD blockbuster. Its length precludes too many viewings but as a soundtrack with visuals, it is unsurpassed.
Les Miserables
(12A) 157mins
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
The ultimate musical, picked apart for its string of hits, returns to its stage roots, only on screen, in Tom Hooper's diligent pop opera video.
REVIEW
Here's something delightful - the reverse jukebox musical. Elsewhere songs (from Abba, Spice Girls et al) have had to generate a narrative on which to hang their scattergun ditties.
Here, a selection of memorable melodies finds a comfortable home alongside a cohesive narrative. Almost like it was planned.
So ubiquitous are the classics (I Dreamed A Dream, Bring Him Home, One More Day etc) they have become divorced from their original purpose. Suddenly, set anew against a stunning, stagy backdrop (including another star turn by Greenwich) they make sense all over again.
The result is a wonder - not without flaws - and a trauma, requiring the best bulldog spirit to stem the tears.
I am so biased in favour of Les Mis that a film adaptation of the much-cherished musical was set against a phalanx of prejudices.
The experience is akin to seeing your first love, who sings in the bath, appear on The X-Factor - same music, same intimacy but in a grander setting. In public. Familiar yet out of context.
But all the headline stars give strong vocal performances. Hugh Jackman as tormented Jean Valjean, on the run from policeman Javert (Russell Crowe); Amanda Seyfried as Cosette, Valjean's adopted daughter; Samantha Barks as love-lorn Eponine.
Top of the list though are Anne Hathaway as Fantine and Eddie Redmayne, who is a revelation as revolutionary romancer Marius.
Hathaway's I Dreamed A Dream steals the show (the camera stays with her for every heartbreaking second till it's unbearable) while Redmayne's Empty Chairs At Empty Tables is viscerally raw.
The much-heralded pairing of Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen as the light-fingered inn-keepers are much the most disappointing of the entertainers.
They touch on the weakness of an otherwise diligent production by director Tom Hooper - that is, lack of nuance and range.
Pathos is there in bucketloads but comedy and - more essentially - fury are missing. There is plenty of anger in the story - anger at God, circumstance, fate and power. But that section of the palette has been cauterised, the edge blunted.
Where is Colm Wilkinson (the West End's first and best Valjean) when you need him? Oh yes, he plays the Bishop. Nice touch.
Hooper handles the action well and the visuals are superb - degradation hasn't looked this good since Dickens with Caravaggio in charge of the baroque set design and lighting but this falls just short of being a classic.
But I'll wager this movie will be a DVD blockbuster. Its length precludes too many viewings but as a soundtrack with visuals, it is unsurpassed.
Saturday, 5 January 2013
Weighing up the chances of diet success
On the way home, spilling from a rubbish bin, a box of chocolates. Not any old box of chocolates strewn across the paving slabs but truffles, wrapped in silver foil. Hotel Chocolat or similar.
I thought: there's a drama right there. Throwing out good chocolates. I surmised only two good reasons for throwing out good chocolates - the cat, neglected over Christmas, had taken to malevolent micturition, or, more likely, a giant New Year symbolic act.
Those chocolates were 2012 - indulgence, gorging, muffin tops and armchairs. Fling them. Fling them right out. Because I start as I mean to go on, says the confectionery reactionary, donning sweat band and cape.
I like the thought. The drama. (The sacrifice!) But it's a tough time to start, January 1. Gestures are all very well, but you're hooked on the carbs now. Used to wearing a Pringle tube as a sleeve. Still off work a little while long. Accustomed to cake with every hot beverage.
February 1. That's when to start. Clear the shelves of stilton and strawberry cheesecake. Wean. W-e-a-n. January is weaning month. Go cold turkey on the cold turkey.
There is a chance that in 2013 the Large Hadron Collider will get to the bottom of things, find the indivisible unit of existence.
If you don't want to know what it is, look away now. It's the calorie. That's the fundamental building block. It's everywhere, in everything. You can't escape the calorie.
Yes, you can chuck it out on the streets like an EastEnders bad boy - but turn around and its back. Lurking. Calories lurk.
They're still part of the deal if you eat standing up, or in the dark before bedtime, or straight from the fridge as a distraction while you're chopping healthy legumes.
Physicists say that it is the Higgs Boson that gives objects mass. Yes, but not with the cruel efficacy of the calorie. The Higgs doesn't haunt your crumble like the calorie.
The unforgiving, unyielding calorie, like a mirror on the human soul. Look at yourself! Making you feel sinful and weak and mortal and briefly alive before you're cruelly smited.
Forget the Higgs Boson, the calorie is the God particle.
Licence to grab your money
■ Here is some simple maths. Don't ask me to show my workings. This is not about a decimal points but political ones.
Think of 100 people, friends for life, at a push. Tall order but go with it. British, preferably, or living here at least and robust of health and fans of QI and Top Gear. Imagine you and your 100 pals dutifully pay your licence fee all your lives from uni halls in springtime to shambling bungalow of the autumn years.
Between you and your crew you've just funded ex BBC boss George Entwhistle's five-star gap year (though not his other ancillary benefits - that's the purview of some other goggle box chumps).
You laboured hard for that dosh. Entwhistle not so much. Cheers anyway though.
Wii are the champions
■ Mayor Boris Johnson says he understands the beneficial reassurance of physical things - like police station counters - in an age when everything's going virtual.
To a point. I could quite happily see municipal tennis courts ripped up as part of a move to make the entire sport digital. In that way, my supremacy with the Wii wand would erase all my various humiliations in the real world.
I thought: there's a drama right there. Throwing out good chocolates. I surmised only two good reasons for throwing out good chocolates - the cat, neglected over Christmas, had taken to malevolent micturition, or, more likely, a giant New Year symbolic act.
Those chocolates were 2012 - indulgence, gorging, muffin tops and armchairs. Fling them. Fling them right out. Because I start as I mean to go on, says the confectionery reactionary, donning sweat band and cape.
I like the thought. The drama. (The sacrifice!) But it's a tough time to start, January 1. Gestures are all very well, but you're hooked on the carbs now. Used to wearing a Pringle tube as a sleeve. Still off work a little while long. Accustomed to cake with every hot beverage.
February 1. That's when to start. Clear the shelves of stilton and strawberry cheesecake. Wean. W-e-a-n. January is weaning month. Go cold turkey on the cold turkey.
There is a chance that in 2013 the Large Hadron Collider will get to the bottom of things, find the indivisible unit of existence.
If you don't want to know what it is, look away now. It's the calorie. That's the fundamental building block. It's everywhere, in everything. You can't escape the calorie.
Yes, you can chuck it out on the streets like an EastEnders bad boy - but turn around and its back. Lurking. Calories lurk.
They're still part of the deal if you eat standing up, or in the dark before bedtime, or straight from the fridge as a distraction while you're chopping healthy legumes.
Physicists say that it is the Higgs Boson that gives objects mass. Yes, but not with the cruel efficacy of the calorie. The Higgs doesn't haunt your crumble like the calorie.
The unforgiving, unyielding calorie, like a mirror on the human soul. Look at yourself! Making you feel sinful and weak and mortal and briefly alive before you're cruelly smited.
Forget the Higgs Boson, the calorie is the God particle.
Licence to grab your money
■ Here is some simple maths. Don't ask me to show my workings. This is not about a decimal points but political ones.
Think of 100 people, friends for life, at a push. Tall order but go with it. British, preferably, or living here at least and robust of health and fans of QI and Top Gear. Imagine you and your 100 pals dutifully pay your licence fee all your lives from uni halls in springtime to shambling bungalow of the autumn years.
Between you and your crew you've just funded ex BBC boss George Entwhistle's five-star gap year (though not his other ancillary benefits - that's the purview of some other goggle box chumps).
You laboured hard for that dosh. Entwhistle not so much. Cheers anyway though.
Wii are the champions
■ Mayor Boris Johnson says he understands the beneficial reassurance of physical things - like police station counters - in an age when everything's going virtual.
To a point. I could quite happily see municipal tennis courts ripped up as part of a move to make the entire sport digital. In that way, my supremacy with the Wii wand would erase all my various humiliations in the real world.
Book reviews: Clearing out the cobwebs
Was one of your New Year Resolutions to improve your mind and clear your reading list of all those guilty but shortlived pleasures. Here's a shortcut.
The Victorian City: Everyday Life In Dickens' London
Judith Flanders (Atlantic Books) £20
If the lives of Pip, David Copperfield and Oliver Twist are the bricks, Judith Flanders and her immaculate research are the mortar - filling in the bits in between; the domestic routines, the smells and sounds a Victorian would meet negotiating the unforgiving city. Dickens used to walk the streets at night, with his journalistic eye noting colour and character. Flanders does the same from afar and the result is immeasurably satisfying. For those of us who spend our life duelling with London, the accounts of slums and sewers, transport woes, street lights and railways, rivers and cemeteries are a glimpse at the foundations of the city and a reminder that our travails are lame in comparison.
★★★★★
Both Flesh And Not
David Foster Wallace (Hamish Hamilton) £20
The title of this collection refers to Roger Federer in the first of Foster Wallace's essays but could easily refer to the author himself. His voice and intent is still a major presence in the US literary scene even though he killed himself in 2008. Here, an erudite examination of modern mores, including studies of "conspicuously young" authors and Terminator 2, display his erudition, passion and love of language through 15 essays, some never before available in print in this country. If his novels appear formidable then this collection allows for a gentle, but intellectually rigorous, introduction.
★★★✩✩
The Signal And The Noise: The Art And Science Of Prediction
Nate Silver (Allen Lane) £25
There has never been more information about than there is today. But, somehow Big Data is not making the art of prediction any better and, in the case of the financial collapse, actually aids distortion. Nate Silver is an expert in using statistical information to assess likely outcomes and characterises this duality in the title of the book. He makes the case for a more sophisticated, analytic and dispassionate reading of the information available. Silver's book is an unashamed geek's reading of probability and uncertainty leavened with graspable case studies - US elections, baseball statistics, the failure of the ratings agency. Don't expect an easy read, but do expect a frighteningly illuminating one.
★★★★✩
Antifragile: How To Live In A World We Don't Understand
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Allen Lane) £25
Taleb introduced the world to "Black Swans" - high impact events that occur outside the realm of normal expectation (see The Signal And The Noise above). He develops his idea to argue that Black Swan events are, ultimately, beneficial and invents a word to suggest the qualitative nature of the aftershock - Antifragile. The thesis can be described in the evolutionary notion that "what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger" so it isn't as radical and new as Taleb insists the reader must believe. However, his thorough analysis is a useful weapon against his subtitle - that debilitating "world we don't understand".
★★★✩✩
The Victorian City: Everyday Life In Dickens' London
Judith Flanders (Atlantic Books) £20
If the lives of Pip, David Copperfield and Oliver Twist are the bricks, Judith Flanders and her immaculate research are the mortar - filling in the bits in between; the domestic routines, the smells and sounds a Victorian would meet negotiating the unforgiving city. Dickens used to walk the streets at night, with his journalistic eye noting colour and character. Flanders does the same from afar and the result is immeasurably satisfying. For those of us who spend our life duelling with London, the accounts of slums and sewers, transport woes, street lights and railways, rivers and cemeteries are a glimpse at the foundations of the city and a reminder that our travails are lame in comparison.
★★★★★
Both Flesh And Not
David Foster Wallace (Hamish Hamilton) £20
The title of this collection refers to Roger Federer in the first of Foster Wallace's essays but could easily refer to the author himself. His voice and intent is still a major presence in the US literary scene even though he killed himself in 2008. Here, an erudite examination of modern mores, including studies of "conspicuously young" authors and Terminator 2, display his erudition, passion and love of language through 15 essays, some never before available in print in this country. If his novels appear formidable then this collection allows for a gentle, but intellectually rigorous, introduction.
★★★✩✩
The Signal And The Noise: The Art And Science Of Prediction
Nate Silver (Allen Lane) £25
There has never been more information about than there is today. But, somehow Big Data is not making the art of prediction any better and, in the case of the financial collapse, actually aids distortion. Nate Silver is an expert in using statistical information to assess likely outcomes and characterises this duality in the title of the book. He makes the case for a more sophisticated, analytic and dispassionate reading of the information available. Silver's book is an unashamed geek's reading of probability and uncertainty leavened with graspable case studies - US elections, baseball statistics, the failure of the ratings agency. Don't expect an easy read, but do expect a frighteningly illuminating one.
★★★★✩
Antifragile: How To Live In A World We Don't Understand
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Allen Lane) £25
Taleb introduced the world to "Black Swans" - high impact events that occur outside the realm of normal expectation (see The Signal And The Noise above). He develops his idea to argue that Black Swan events are, ultimately, beneficial and invents a word to suggest the qualitative nature of the aftershock - Antifragile. The thesis can be described in the evolutionary notion that "what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger" so it isn't as radical and new as Taleb insists the reader must believe. However, his thorough analysis is a useful weapon against his subtitle - that debilitating "world we don't understand".
★★★✩✩
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)