MAGIC MIKE (2012) D- Steven Soderberg
A very fit young man (Channing Tatum) is making good money as a male stripper, and encourages an even younger, but no less attractive Alex Pettyfer to join his troupe. But really he wants to start his own business and is only stripping to fund the enterprise.
I’ve admired Soderberg’s film making ever since Sex, Lies and Videotape, and this maintains his high standard. Watching his films feels a bit like a film crew has wandered into a real-life situation and are quietly filming as apparently real life unfolds. The stripping sequences seem completely authentic, right down to their completely unerotic nature (according my wife, anyway) but eventually the plot loses its way and by the end this viewer for one stopped caring. Pity.
THE TALL BLOND MAN WITH ONE BLACK SHOE (1972) D- Yves Robert
A rather scatter-brained Parisian is somehow mistaken for an international spy by a ring of other spies, and is drawn into a befuddling series of events which confound the real spies, without any apparent effort on the part of the protagonist, played hilariously by Pierre Richard. One of them (Mireille Darc), who is supposed to ensnare him ends up falling for him big time, while the others tie themselves in knots trying to work out what he is doing, which is impossible because he doesn’t know either.
The ‘blond man’ series of movies were an enormous hit in 1970s France, with its blend of 007 and Jacques Tati. Today they have dated alarmingly, as so many films from that era have, especially the spy movies, but it retains a charm and pace which remains engaging to this day.
IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE (2014) D- Hans Petter Moland
A Norwegian man (Stellan Skarsgård, who else?) is so maddened with grief when his son is found dead of a drugs overdose, he resolves to take down the people responsible, from the bottom, with his suppliers, right to the top of the drugs distribution network. Normally an inoffensive snow-plough driver, he transforms into someone only slightly less dangerous than John Wick.
If you want a definition of ‘black comedy’ you need look no further than this film, a minor classic of its kind, with its blood-and-guts violence told with exceptional style and wicked humour. Skarsgård is excellent, as he always is, and he is strongly supported by the ensemble, and the director whose work we should look out for in the future. Excellent work all round.
I, TONYA (2017) D- Craig Gillespie
Being the life story of Tonya Harding, who was nearly, but not quite, America’s greatest figure-skater. Considering the vicissitudes she faced, suffering domestic violence at the hands not only of her husband but also her mother (magnificently played by Allison Janney), it is astonishing she made any kind of impression at all. But she did. Combining great skill with marvellous athletic ability, she sometimes failed to reach the top of her discipline because her face and trailer-trash background didn’t fit the criteria of a reactionary skating establishment.
Margot Robbie puts in a stunningly realistic portrayal of the troubled star, and the story of her now infamous rivalry with Nancy Kerrigan is brilliantly told. I always had a soft spot for the real-life Tonya, partly because, like John Mc Enroe, she emerged as a rebel against the dominant culture. Like McEnroe, she was sometimes her own worst enemy, but really, she was doomed never to reach the heights because of her spirit-destroying roots. A tragic tale, wonderfully realised on screen.
Tuesday, 27 February 2018
February 2018 movie review part one
PAPILLON (1973) D- Franklin J. Schaffner.
A French guy (Steve McQueen) convicted of murder finds himself doomed to spend the rest of his life on Devil’s Island. But from day one he’s plotting to escape from this hell-in-paradise. He enjoys limited success, despite the assistance of fellow inmate Dustin Hoffman. He keeps escaping, keeps getting caught, and every time he is, the punishment is more severe. Does he give up? Does he fuck. There wouldn’t be a movie if he did.
Henri Charriere achieved the writer’s dream with his book, which sold in the millions and was then turned into a highly successful film. This is a trick about as rare as winning the lottery, and like that there’s a huge element of luck involved. To be fair, however, which I try to be, it is a great story, well told, and the film does the book justice, with its accomplished director, strong cast and high production values throughout. You could do a lot worse than give it a go, although if you are anywhere near my age you’ve probably done so already.
BAYWATCH (2017) D- Sam Gordon.
Wel, they had to do this, didn’t they. A highly successful TV series, adored by teenage boys who liked looking at good-looking girls in swimsuits, updated for the millennials with only slightly more political correctness, and no better credentials. We have Dwayne Johnson standing in for the now pretty decrepit David Hasselhoff, and Kelly Rohrbach substituting Pammie Anderson.
Reviewers have spoken admiringly of the cast, which I suppose is fair enough, though for me it doesn’t matter how strong your players are, if they’re having to deal with a paper-thin plot and an execrable script, it wouldn’t be saved even if you staffed it with RSC alumni. Which it so isn’t. Terrible.
THE SHAPE OF WATER (2017) D- Guillermo del Toro
In 1960s America, the FBI has captured some sort of amphibian monster and have taken it home so they can conduct horrible experiments on it, even though it appears to be highly intelligent. The Indians in the Amazon basin where they found it worship it like a god, but once in the US they’re treating it more like a particularly interesting frog. But one of the cleaners in the research establishment where it’s kept seems to bond with it, and when a plan is hatched to spirit it out of there, she’s willing to risk everything to help it escape.
This film has opened to high acclaim around the world, and I certainly admired it a lot. There is more than a nod to earlier ‘monster with a heart’ movies such as Creature from the Black Lagoon and Splash, and Elisa Esposito as the mute cleaner who falls for it is very powerful. But there is one little problem with it. Michael Shannon who plays the evil FBI guy is very good, but he reprises his role in Boardwalk Empire as, you’ve got out, an evil FBI agent, so closely it jars a little. But perhaps I’m being a bit persnickety.
A French guy (Steve McQueen) convicted of murder finds himself doomed to spend the rest of his life on Devil’s Island. But from day one he’s plotting to escape from this hell-in-paradise. He enjoys limited success, despite the assistance of fellow inmate Dustin Hoffman. He keeps escaping, keeps getting caught, and every time he is, the punishment is more severe. Does he give up? Does he fuck. There wouldn’t be a movie if he did.
Henri Charriere achieved the writer’s dream with his book, which sold in the millions and was then turned into a highly successful film. This is a trick about as rare as winning the lottery, and like that there’s a huge element of luck involved. To be fair, however, which I try to be, it is a great story, well told, and the film does the book justice, with its accomplished director, strong cast and high production values throughout. You could do a lot worse than give it a go, although if you are anywhere near my age you’ve probably done so already.
BAYWATCH (2017) D- Sam Gordon.
Wel, they had to do this, didn’t they. A highly successful TV series, adored by teenage boys who liked looking at good-looking girls in swimsuits, updated for the millennials with only slightly more political correctness, and no better credentials. We have Dwayne Johnson standing in for the now pretty decrepit David Hasselhoff, and Kelly Rohrbach substituting Pammie Anderson.
Reviewers have spoken admiringly of the cast, which I suppose is fair enough, though for me it doesn’t matter how strong your players are, if they’re having to deal with a paper-thin plot and an execrable script, it wouldn’t be saved even if you staffed it with RSC alumni. Which it so isn’t. Terrible.
THE SHAPE OF WATER (2017) D- Guillermo del Toro
In 1960s America, the FBI has captured some sort of amphibian monster and have taken it home so they can conduct horrible experiments on it, even though it appears to be highly intelligent. The Indians in the Amazon basin where they found it worship it like a god, but once in the US they’re treating it more like a particularly interesting frog. But one of the cleaners in the research establishment where it’s kept seems to bond with it, and when a plan is hatched to spirit it out of there, she’s willing to risk everything to help it escape.
This film has opened to high acclaim around the world, and I certainly admired it a lot. There is more than a nod to earlier ‘monster with a heart’ movies such as Creature from the Black Lagoon and Splash, and Elisa Esposito as the mute cleaner who falls for it is very powerful. But there is one little problem with it. Michael Shannon who plays the evil FBI guy is very good, but he reprises his role in Boardwalk Empire as, you’ve got out, an evil FBI agent, so closely it jars a little. But perhaps I’m being a bit persnickety.
February 2018 book review
Welcome to February’s media review. Please see subsequent posts for movies. There’s some crackers, as well as a couple of dogs!
BOOKS
THE TERRORISTS, by Maj Sjowell and Per Waloo
Martin Beck, nearing retirement, has been kicked upstairs into a desk job but is chosen to go into the field to head up security for the visit to Stockholm of a right-wing American senator. It soon becomes apparent his work will not be surplus to requirements: a terrorist cell is indeed active, staffed by experienced pros. In fact they’re so good they are confident they can stay one step ahead of the authorities, but they haven’t bargained for the likes of Martin Beck and his anarchic, but extremely effective sidekick, Gunvald Larsen. Perhaps if they kill them as well...
This is the last in the ten-book series of Martin Beck police-procedural classics, and may be the best of all of them. Again the authors mix their world-weary, but clear-headed analysis of Swedish society as it entered the 70s with a brilliant and thrilling tale of catch-the-assassins. I’ve read one a year for the last ten years, and I don’t know what I’m going to read on city breaks now. I’m going to have a job finding thrillers of this standard, that’s for sure.
GHOSTS, SPOOKS AND SPECTRES, edited by Charles Molin
Designed to be read by teenagers but eminently suitable for adults too, here is a fine little collection of classic ghost stories, from Oscar Wilde’s celebrated The Canterville Ghost, through Dickens’s haunting The Signalman, and on to amusing little cameos like James Thurber’s The Night the Ghost got In and Conan Doyle’s The Brown Hand. Well worth a couple of hours of your time.
DISORIENTING ENCOUNTERS: The journey of Mohammed As-Saffar, edited by Susan Gibson Miller
In 1846, having suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the far more technologically advanced French, the Moroccan sultan decided to send a delegation to Paris to try to find out how they were able to do it so easily. Among the delegation was a young man of letters who was asked to keep a journal of his experiences.
He is amazed by what he finds: a far higher standard of living seems to be enjoyed by almost everyone in France, despite its ‘arctic’ climate, and entranced and repelled at the same time by the beauty of the women, who seem happy to flaunt their physical charms even in the company of men they don’t know. He is impressed by their economic organization, and wonders if that might be related to their success on the battlefield. But all along, he is contemptuous of their idolatrous religion, which fails to accept the supremacy of Mohammed and the True Faith.
An interesting idea for a 3000 word essay, but not enough meat for a 200 page book, featuring an introduction which comprises nearly 1/3 of the text. And there’s far too many footnotes for anything other than a PhD thesis.
BOOKS
THE TERRORISTS, by Maj Sjowell and Per Waloo
Martin Beck, nearing retirement, has been kicked upstairs into a desk job but is chosen to go into the field to head up security for the visit to Stockholm of a right-wing American senator. It soon becomes apparent his work will not be surplus to requirements: a terrorist cell is indeed active, staffed by experienced pros. In fact they’re so good they are confident they can stay one step ahead of the authorities, but they haven’t bargained for the likes of Martin Beck and his anarchic, but extremely effective sidekick, Gunvald Larsen. Perhaps if they kill them as well...
This is the last in the ten-book series of Martin Beck police-procedural classics, and may be the best of all of them. Again the authors mix their world-weary, but clear-headed analysis of Swedish society as it entered the 70s with a brilliant and thrilling tale of catch-the-assassins. I’ve read one a year for the last ten years, and I don’t know what I’m going to read on city breaks now. I’m going to have a job finding thrillers of this standard, that’s for sure.
GHOSTS, SPOOKS AND SPECTRES, edited by Charles Molin
Designed to be read by teenagers but eminently suitable for adults too, here is a fine little collection of classic ghost stories, from Oscar Wilde’s celebrated The Canterville Ghost, through Dickens’s haunting The Signalman, and on to amusing little cameos like James Thurber’s The Night the Ghost got In and Conan Doyle’s The Brown Hand. Well worth a couple of hours of your time.
DISORIENTING ENCOUNTERS: The journey of Mohammed As-Saffar, edited by Susan Gibson Miller
In 1846, having suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the far more technologically advanced French, the Moroccan sultan decided to send a delegation to Paris to try to find out how they were able to do it so easily. Among the delegation was a young man of letters who was asked to keep a journal of his experiences.
He is amazed by what he finds: a far higher standard of living seems to be enjoyed by almost everyone in France, despite its ‘arctic’ climate, and entranced and repelled at the same time by the beauty of the women, who seem happy to flaunt their physical charms even in the company of men they don’t know. He is impressed by their economic organization, and wonders if that might be related to their success on the battlefield. But all along, he is contemptuous of their idolatrous religion, which fails to accept the supremacy of Mohammed and the True Faith.
An interesting idea for a 3000 word essay, but not enough meat for a 200 page book, featuring an introduction which comprises nearly 1/3 of the text. And there’s far too many footnotes for anything other than a PhD thesis.
Saturday, 24 February 2018
Death of an asylum seeker
Eyob Tafira was just 27 years old when he decided to end it all and throw himself into the cold dark waters of Swansea Bay. He worked as a lecturer in sports journalism in his home town of Addis Abbaba in Ethiopia until 2014, when, having seen IS carrying out beheadings, and realising that as an academic he might well be next, he fled.
He undertook a difficult, dangerous and expensive journey through the Sahel and Sahara desert before getting on a boat in Libya and finding himself in Italy. He then made his way to Calais and managed to make it to Dover. He declared himself an asylum seeker, but the authorities denied him that status and labelled him an illegal immigrant. As such he was denied both benefits and the right to work. He landed up in Bristol but in 2015 a close friend was murdered. Suffering from severe PTSD, he made his way to Wales, where, still denied the opportunity to make a living and slowly starving to death, he took what many might see as the only way out.
I recently read a book called The Unchosen, by Mya Guarneri. In starkly uncompromising tones, she writes about the horribly unjust way Israel deals with its asylum seekers and ‘illegals’. Once invited in by a government facing a labour shortage, most of these people found jobs paying below the minimum wage, jobs which Israelis simply didn’t want to do: carers, maids, cleaners, servants in other words. They weren’t allowed to get married or even have relationships, facing jail or expulsion should they break the law. Then the state decided it didn’t want them anymore and starting expelling them en masse. It was an extremely upsetting read, but stories like Eyob’s make one realise we are in no position to be morally lofty about the way Israel operates.
Despite Brexit problems, the UK remains one of the wealthiest nations on Earth. Yet we continue to operate an inhumane policy towards some of the most desperate and indigent people on this Earth. What are these people’s chances once Brexit is a an established fact? Even worse than they are now, if such a thing is possible.
He undertook a difficult, dangerous and expensive journey through the Sahel and Sahara desert before getting on a boat in Libya and finding himself in Italy. He then made his way to Calais and managed to make it to Dover. He declared himself an asylum seeker, but the authorities denied him that status and labelled him an illegal immigrant. As such he was denied both benefits and the right to work. He landed up in Bristol but in 2015 a close friend was murdered. Suffering from severe PTSD, he made his way to Wales, where, still denied the opportunity to make a living and slowly starving to death, he took what many might see as the only way out.
I recently read a book called The Unchosen, by Mya Guarneri. In starkly uncompromising tones, she writes about the horribly unjust way Israel deals with its asylum seekers and ‘illegals’. Once invited in by a government facing a labour shortage, most of these people found jobs paying below the minimum wage, jobs which Israelis simply didn’t want to do: carers, maids, cleaners, servants in other words. They weren’t allowed to get married or even have relationships, facing jail or expulsion should they break the law. Then the state decided it didn’t want them anymore and starting expelling them en masse. It was an extremely upsetting read, but stories like Eyob’s make one realise we are in no position to be morally lofty about the way Israel operates.
Despite Brexit problems, the UK remains one of the wealthiest nations on Earth. Yet we continue to operate an inhumane policy towards some of the most desperate and indigent people on this Earth. What are these people’s chances once Brexit is a an established fact? Even worse than they are now, if such a thing is possible.
Monday, 12 February 2018
Leave OXFAM alone!
One of the world’s great charities is under attack. It seems some of their workers procured the services of child prostitutes while working in earthquake-torn Haiti. If true, this is certainly despicable behaviour on their part. To exploit children in a zone already riven by extreme poverty and then the shattering effects of a large earthquake is inexcusable. But let’s not trash the whole of OXFAM because of it.
Since it was founded after WW2, it has done the most wonderful work in alleviating the worst effects of poverty around the world. There’s an old expression:
If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Give that man a fishing-rod and you feed him for life.
That adage has been taken to heart by OXFAM in its work. Digging wells rather than handing out bottles of water (though they do that as well, sometimes), advising about crop rotation and other simple methods of increasing yield, they have transformed the lives of millions of the world’s poorest people. And they’ve worked harder than most international charities to make sure a minimum of their donations are spent on administration, enabling the largest proportion to go to where it’s needed.
But as usual, the right wing rags have used OXFAM’S current embarrassment to call for the end of international aid generally. “Why donate 0.7% of our GDP to corrupt countries who hate us when the money could be better deployed at home?” etc etc. They ignore the fact that we do ourselves a great deal of good around the world by our largesse, even if some of that aid ends up in the wrong hands. We shouldn’t be placing political strictures on our aid; just as we shouldn’t expect gratitude from a homeless junkie when we lob them a pound coin. We do it because we are wealthy and they are not.
To summarise, it’s good for us, spiritually, to give away a tiny proportion of our wealth to those less fortunate than ourselves.
Since it was founded after WW2, it has done the most wonderful work in alleviating the worst effects of poverty around the world. There’s an old expression:
If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Give that man a fishing-rod and you feed him for life.
That adage has been taken to heart by OXFAM in its work. Digging wells rather than handing out bottles of water (though they do that as well, sometimes), advising about crop rotation and other simple methods of increasing yield, they have transformed the lives of millions of the world’s poorest people. And they’ve worked harder than most international charities to make sure a minimum of their donations are spent on administration, enabling the largest proportion to go to where it’s needed.
But as usual, the right wing rags have used OXFAM’S current embarrassment to call for the end of international aid generally. “Why donate 0.7% of our GDP to corrupt countries who hate us when the money could be better deployed at home?” etc etc. They ignore the fact that we do ourselves a great deal of good around the world by our largesse, even if some of that aid ends up in the wrong hands. We shouldn’t be placing political strictures on our aid; just as we shouldn’t expect gratitude from a homeless junkie when we lob them a pound coin. We do it because we are wealthy and they are not.
To summarise, it’s good for us, spiritually, to give away a tiny proportion of our wealth to those less fortunate than ourselves.
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