tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-72463245926003730282024-03-16T07:21:54.135+00:00Advice to the LovelornOld movies and bad jokesRick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.comBlogger453125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-41782337108434471202023-12-23T17:36:00.009+00:002024-02-07T12:03:14.336+00:00Review of 2023: Part 2 – MoviesHere's part two of my review of the year, focusing on FILMS. The format: 20 'discoveries', seven old favourites, six stinkers, six movies re-appraised, and five areas of obsession.<br /><br />
<b>20 DISCOVERIES</b><br /><br />
or 'premieres', or 'first watches', or whatever <b>you</b> call films that you saw for the first time this year. Here are the 20 that had the biggest effect on me.
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<b>1. Geronimo: An American Legend (Walter Hill, 1993)</b> – An astonishing Western that's at once poetic and authentic as it unspools the untold story of the Geronimo wars. It's full of extraordinary language (much of it in a richly rewarding Matt Damon voiceover, <i>Stand by Me</i> via the real West), sudden action sequences and quiet fury, augmented by perhaps Ry Cooder's greatest score. On any terms, a masterpiece – and utterly unique.<br /><br />
<b>2. All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh, 2023)</b> – If you lost a parent young, this is about as emotional an experience as film can give you. If you didn’t, I wonder how you even make sense of it. Regret and pain and absence and longing and Scott’s inky eyes endlessly shining with tears. It's exactly as brutal and as gentle as it needs to be, excavating how our relationships with those we've lost can be easier than with those still living, but what you’re forever missing in return. It's funny in places; profoundly gay; wryly modern; but principally it's a ghost story about grief. It's certainly the most overwhelmed and unanchored I've ever felt in a cinema. It didn't feel much like watching a film at all, really.
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<b>3. The Reckoning (Jack Gold, 1970)</b> – Oof. A film that fastens your jaw to the floor, as Nicol Williamson's alpha businessman returns to his roots, and begins to question whether he's lost sight of himself. Not that the alternate version of him is much easier to take. Amid seductions, drunken ranting and bingo, he's pondering whether to beat a teddy boy to death with whatever tools he may have to hand. It's an immaculately-constructed, blackly comic film, with a dazzling performance at its centre, but it's also a howl of despair: unstintintingly fascinating – and provocative – on the subjects of class, immigrant experience, and masculine pain. It does ‘⬆️ The North for revenge’ better – and earlier – than <i>Get Carter</i>, and marries sad songs to Scouse visuals a half-decade prior to Terence Davies's <i>Children</i>, while satirising Thatcherism before that term had even been coined. Along with Mike Leigh's <i>Naked</i>, it's one of the few films that permits a northerner to be smarter (and not merely jollier) than his southern counterparts. A stunning experience, swerving cliché right up to its subversive and chilling and perfect ending.<br /><br />
<b>4. Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022)</b> – Finding a shorthand for this film is difficult. Saying it’s “about a father-daughter relationship” offers no clue as to its poetic instincts; calling it “a film about memory, mental illness and loss” carries the latent (and erroneous) threat that it is wanky, or unstintingly hard work. Instead, it is an intensely moving movie that in its rawness, naturalism and emotional honesty – smuggled in via fond joshing and moments of musical and visual inspiration – hits every audience it finds, about as hard as possible. It has some of <i>Morvern Callar</i>’s strobing and sun-bleached stylistics, some of Half Nelson’s grinning sadness. But its greatness is all Wells’s own, the dialogue, performance and camera all doing different things that together form a perfect truth. She fixes our eyes on a Polaroid as it reveals itself, on a TV recycling the recent past, on a man’s back as he comes apart at the seams. She wields the song score like a weapon, distorting it to meet her demands, the familiarity disfigured like our memories after trauma. As Mescal and Corio love and joke and hurt. I can’t get over that single fleeting shot of young Sophie’s face before she starts to dance: the filmmaker’s innate and crucial understanding that joy doesn’t undermine tragedy, it augments it.
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<b>5. The Mark of Zorro (Rouben Mamoulian, 1940)</b> – Fox crashes the swashbuckler craze with this exuberant, precision-tooled crowdpleaser. Ty Power is perfect as the dashing masked avenger posing as a cowardly fop (the sole drawback being that, unlike Doug, he wasn’t permitted to do all his own stunts). It’s curiously-paced here and there, but also impeccably cast and superbly conceived, with ingeniously-devised dramatic sequences and a scintillating climactic duel. Mamoulian’s style is, unless you’re looking for it, close to invisible: you only know you’re entirely enveloped in the film. In short: irresistible.<br /><br />
<b>6. The Intern (Nancy Meyers, 2015)</b> – While clad in the garb of Meyers’ unquestioning capitalist conformity: a humanist masterwork. De Niro’s modest, earnest performance is pitch-perfect.
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<b>7. Café Metropole (Edward H. Griffith, 1937)</b> – An utterly charming confection, with Ty Power’s dissolute gambler blackmailed into romancing heiress Loretta Young by bankrupt hotel owner Adolphe Menjou. It’s a magical, very funny and consistently surprising rom-com, with a touch of <i>The Thin Man</i>’s airy irreverence: Young is remarkably modern as the knowing, offhand love interest who resolutely refuses to engage with each threat of melodrama. Her scene with Power’s head in her lap is just beautiful. And so is Helen Westley’s gangster-talk. The abrupt opening, which works brilliantly in itself, was shamefully the result of studio head Darryl F. Zanuck excising Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson's entire performance due to worries that southern audiences wouldn't stand for a black guy in tails. The complicated, enduringly contentious super-producer did go on to make several sincere if compromised pictures about racism, including <i>Gentleman's Agreement</i>, <i>Pinky</i> and <i>No Way Out</i>.<br /><br />
<b>8. Black Sheep (Allan Dwan, 1935)</b> – A wonderful B movie from Sol Wurtzel’s unit at Fox, which deals – as ever – with jewel thieves on an ocean liner. But what lifts it way out of the ordinary is the central relationship between embittered, alcoholic gambler Edmund Lowe, and the bored, failing actress who joins him in intrigue (Claire Trevor). Their characters are real, their badinage (except for one slightly weak recurring affectation) zingy, and their chemistry off the charts. There’s a small moment where Trevor stops just short of embracing Lowe (“… that’s all I wanted to know,” she says instead) that must be among the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen on screen. Around them, there’s Lowe’s father-son relationship with a wayward rich boy, some rather tiresome drunk comedy, and Eugene Pallette releasing a clockwork mouse onto a dance floor, but we’re here for the heart-mending central couple. Just lovely.
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<b>9. Fifty Roads to Town (Norman Taurog, 1937)</b> – “I hope you’re not one of those whimsical gangsters.” What an absolute delight this is, containing an epic meet-cute (the longest set-up in an early Zanuck film!?), glorious William Conselman/George Marion dialogue, and the only Stepin Fetchit performance I’ve seen where he is being slyly (and hilariously) subversive rather than a racist fantasy. Don Ameche and Ann Sothern are each on the lam from the law, and wind up in a mountain cabin, off-season. He’s sort of holding her hostage, but he’s not what she thinks he is, and she’s not that fussed about leaving. This sleeper is smart, sexy and surprising: full of neat reversals and funny lines. The best old rom-com I’ve seen in quite a while.<br /><br />
<b>10. Freeway (Matthew Bright, 1996)</b> sets itself up as nihilistic and sneeringly classist but stick with it: that’s all part of the game. It’s an adolescent, smugly dark and secretly soft minor masterpiece: Little Red Riding Hood as exploitation flick, with Witherspoon’s incredible performance as a white-trash teenager trolling a serial killer (Kiefer Sutherland). Like DiCaprio, she was most interesting before she became acclaimed, and as the perma-swearing, borderline-illiterate, hotheaded anti-heroine, she’s this movie’s heart and soul. Sutherland, too, was never half as good as he is here, and now and then a riotous Danny Elfman score gets involved, as disorientating as the rest of it. Bright's aim is to shock and surprise and confound, with whiplash turns of both story and tone, and his aim is true.
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<b>11. Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995)</b> – A post-Rodney King nightmare (and box-office calamity) that’s like <i>Blow Out</i> for the ‘90s: a paranoid, sumptuously-shot state-of-the-nation thriller, only this time spiked with exhilarating action. Ralph Fiennes is the complete fucking loser who unwittingly uncovers police malfeasance while doing a roaring trade in the black market of illicit POV memories. The use of subjective camera here honestly feels as revolutionary as anything done by Hollywood since it brought in the talkies. Perhaps this was the Jim Cameron-adjacent innovation that cinema should have followed? Launching with an incredible botched-robbery sequence shot with that subjective camera, Bigelow and screenwriter Cameron deliver an intoxicating fusion of frenzied pursuit, pointed (if compromised) social comment and rulebook-shredding technical wizardry, aided by a couple of fine performances (Fiennes, Angela Bassett) and a memorable one of fragile or possibly malevolent horniness from Juliette Lewis. There is at least one passage here that is virtually unwatchable, and difficult to defend on moral grounds, alongside less complicated shortcomings: a crashingly obvious twist, and Cameron dialogue that, as usual, employs alliteration at the expense of specificity. But the film still feels like a complete one-off, and a triumphant one at that: heady, desperate and, yes, strange, while positing a technical direction that cinema might have engaged with more often, had the movie not lost 34 million dollars.<br /><br />
<b>12. Reign of Terror (Anthony Mann, 1949)</b> – My new favourite genre: French Revolution noir, a world of Wellesian angles and huge looming heads. The paranoiac plot, about Robespierre’s missing hitlist, can barely withstand a moment’s scrutiny, and I was having far too much fun to care. It’s riotous pulp mayhem, with incredible photography from the inimitable John Alton, a fabulously seedy performance from Arnold Moss as the duplicitous Fouché, and every noir trope vividly reimagined for the setting. A horse-and-cart chase? Why not indeed. The scene in which Moss and Robert Cummings claw disfiguringly at one another’s faces gives <i>Cloak and Dagger</i> a run for its money in the Genuinely Disquieting Fight Scene stakes. This 35mm screening was a real highlight of the BFI's fabulous 'Film on Film' festival.
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<b>13. The Contender (Rod Lurie, 2000)</b> – An unbelievably entertaining political drama, with a strong script that mixes insider talk and Hollywood thrills, and an exemplary ensemble. Jeff Bridges is particularly good; along with <i>Cutter’s Way</i>, this is surely his best performance, embodying a president whose wiles are so well-honed and well-worn that they crouch effortlessly beneath that pomaded exterior. Allen too is memorable as the vice-presidential contender at the film’s centre, whose sexual past may be about to torpedo her nomination (though I have never seen anyone run or play basketball in such a physically comic way, she looks like a Muppet). The last reel is a bit too much like wish-fulfilment (though so was <i>Mr. Smith</i>, so was <i>The American President</i>), and occasionally you catch Gary Oldman doing his Acting, but it’s a great ride all the same.<br /><br />
<b>14. Absolution (Anthony Page, 1978)</b> – Richard Burton, Billy Connolly and the lad from <i>Kes</i>, together at last. Thanks to <a href="https://www.powerhousefilms.co.uk/">Indicator</a> for excavating another sleeper from the bin of history, in this case a film that has been underrated, vilified, overlooked and then, worst of all, forgotten. Written by Anthony Shaffer, who subsequently disowned the movie after having his work rewritten, it’s essentially <i>Sleuth</i> filtered through Hitchcock’s <i>I Confess</i>, with an ageing Burton as a priest and schoolteacher who becomes engaged in a twisted battle with pretty protégé, Dominic Guard. It’s beautifully acted by the leads, atmospherically directed, and perpetually surprising. The only shortcomings are Connolly’s glib, surface-level performance as a drifter, and one twist too many.
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<b>15. Bartleby (Anthony Friedman, 1970)</b> – An enjoyably weird film about one of society's dead letters, a possibly depressed, possibly autistic, definitely disconnected accountant who one day decides that he would simply "prefer not to". A little too repetitive, perhaps – Melville's premise stretched to breaking point before snapping into paternalistic sentiment – but superb on loneliness, non-conformity, and the assumptions of capitalism. It's very funny too. "I would not like to kill two birds with one stone" is my new motto. Bartleby's passion for walking and looking provides a feast for vintage-London-location pervs, many of its bleakly seductive monuments to modernism since demolished.<br /><br />
<b>16. High Tension (Allan Dwan, 1936)</b> – A fast-paced B movie, with Brian Donlevy as a wisecracking deep-sea diver continually letting down his short-tempered, hilarious, pulp-fiction-writer girlfriend, Glenda Farrell – and as much fun as that sounds. Former silent film pioneer Dwan is slumming here, making a movie for Sol Wurtzel’s B-unit at Fox, but his comic timing is spot on, and that one meticulously-plotted establishing shot in Honolulu is a beaut. This one’s just highly entertaining throughout, with spectacular leads and a good balance between comedy, story and off-kilter romance; as Farrell’s love rival, Helen Wood has almost as good chemistry with Donlevy as Glenda does. Only complaint: the wrap-up is too abrupt. Norman Foster, who plays the second lead, soon became a B-movie director at Fox, and later collaborated with Orson Welles on the ‘My Friend Bonito’ chapter of the unfinished <i>It’s All True</i>, <i>Journey Into Fear</i> and, as an actor, <i>The Other Side of the Wind</i>.
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<b>17. Thirteen Days (Roger Donaldson, 2000)</b> – A vivid retelling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, though I’d have hated to be in that emergency control room, what with everyone smoking. Costner’s version of advisor Ken O’Donnell has been ridiculed in some quarters for being too good to be true (often a problem with works based on memoir), and I can see that – especially when he seems both omniscient yet intellectually inferior to the Kennedys who are flailing – but his emotional reticence is a moving counterpoint to his moral rectitude. As a piece of cinema, it’s first-rate in almost all quarters: well-cast (both Kennedys are superb), making inspired use of the real meeting transcripts, and somehow interposing neat action sequences into a film about the avoidance of war. Only the occasional bum note – courtesy of Costner's wandering accent, scene-chewing from supporting cast members like Len Cariou (as Dean Acheson), and a periodic pomposity – keeps it short of greatness. The Lyndon Johnson really looks like him. Christopher Lawford, playing Cmdr William B. Ecker, is JFK’s nephew.<br /><br />
<b>18. The Gay Deception (William Wyler, 1935)</b> – Frances Dee is a sweepstakes winner masquerading as an heiress in a New York hotel, where European prince (Francis Lederer) has gone incognito as a bellboy. It’s a charming romantic confection, stylishly handled by Wyler, and filled with familiar faces. Paul Hurst is particularly funny as Lederer’s irascible line manager, who introduces another patronising maxim every day. Lederer’s accent makes him unintelligible at times, but visually he’s just right as both intrusive admirer and dignified royal, and Dee’s eccentric performance refuses to make even a passing acquaintance of sentimentality. (Also: she's allowed to have big sticky-out ears, a novelty in this period.) The film isn’t consistently hilarious or unfalteringly affecting, but it's still a little gem.
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<b>19. Holy Matrimony (John M. Stahl, 1943)</b> – A truly lovely rom-com with two unusually mature leads. Monty Woolley (55) is a legendary British painter who fakes his own death so he can live in peace, and falls hopelessly in love with plain-spoken Gracie Fields (45). But their Putney idyll is threatened by his secret, especially when his work becomes the subject of a court case. Nunnally Johnson’s script is warm and appealing rather than terribly funny (do you think a debate in court about two neck moles is instinctively hilarious? So does Nunnally), but Fields is appealing, Woolley can wring laughs out of anything, and there are nice bits for Laird Cregar and Eric Blore. A courtroom climax where the hero dislikes both sides is also a notable novelty, and there’s a neat ending in a very mid-‘40s style.<br /><br />
<b>20. The Road to Glory (Howard Hawks, 1936)</b> – “Anything to get out of this grave.” A near-classic Hawks picture, devised by Fox to recycle footage they owned from the French war movie, <i>Wooden Crosses</i>. Somehow that lead to something halfway extraordinary, written by Nunnally Johnson, Joel Sayre and William Faulkner (!), shot by Gregg Toland, and featuring one of the best performances you’ll ever see, Fredric March underplaying unforgettably as a womanising lieutenant with magic in his fingers. He joins a memorable love triangle, fighting battle-hardened captain Warner Baxter for the affections of nurse June Lang. The film is ironic, cynical and witty, with Lang the most surprisingly effective of Hawksian women – she soon became a bright, blonde second lead, before her reputation suffered from marrying a literal gangster – but is sadly somewhat derailed halfway through by a lousy subplot featuring Lionel Barrymore as Baxter’s father, a character supposedly torn from life, but not remotely believable.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>SEVEN OLD FAVOURITES</b>
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<b>1. Remember the Night (Mitchell Leisen, 1940)</b> – The small details, the wild counter-intiition of its courtroom climax, and Stanwyck’s story playing out on her face. The way Sturges and Leisen use comedy to segue into, or offer relief from, deep emotion (the cross-eyed grandfather after the homecoming heartbreak; Sterling Holloway’s ballad after he’s been put in his place). The use of snatches of everyday language to represent epiphanies. Bondi as conscience and heavy. My favourite film. And at the Christmas screening I just went to, <a href="https://twitter.com/rickburin/status/1736387927226077484/photo/1">the programme notes were from my Blu-ray essay!</a><br /><br />
<b>2. Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks, 1941)</b> – One of Old Hollywood’s true miracles. So sweet and cynical and clever and true and modern and timeless and of-its-time. Andrews as a slick shitheel, Cooper at peak bashful, Stanwyck at peak everything. Then there's Wilder’s dialogue, Hawks peppering his background with old professors, and Toland, fresh from <i>The Little Foxes</i>, throwing in those two wild and moody deep-focus close-ups. The ‘Richard ill’ scene robs me of my breath.
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<b>3. Stage Door (Gregory La Cava, 1937)</b> – A crackling feminist masterpiece that passes the Bechdel Test 90 times a minute, and hits me harder than any other film. Aside perhaps from <i>Holiday</i>, it has <i>the</i> Kate Hepburn performance.<br /><br />
<b>4. Libeled Lady (Jack Conway, 1936)</b> – The great unheralded screwball comedy, and the ultimate comfort movie, with scintillating dialogue, that incomparable Loy-Powell chemistry, and Jean Harlow showing that in just seven years she had transformed herself from a plank of wood with large breasts into the best comedian in Hollywood.
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<b>5. Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948)</b> – A captivating, emotionally overwhelming Ophüls masterpiece, with director and star (Joan Fontaine) working perfectly in tandem. She’s simply astonishing, playing a waif/model/socialite in turn-of-the-century Vienna, who is slung around by her secret, lifelong love of older neighbour/musician/womanising wastrel Louis Jourdan. Based on a Stefan Zweig story, the film is ingeniously structured, perfectly played and sumptuously filmed (Ophüls rolling out his trademark tracking shots, within the confines of Hollywood convention), as every choice amps up its unique atmosphere: both richly romantic and utterly bereft. Fontaine says in her autobiography that she always knew what effect this director wanted, and it's the one truly transcendent performance of her career, animated by such extraordinary inner life, her character's thoughts dancing across her face, obvious to everyone but the dissolute fuckboy she adores.<br /><br />
<b>6. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000)</b> – The plan-view photography during the sword vs whatever's-on-the-wall fight. The way every character has untold and epic depths. Michelle Yeoh's cheekbones. CINEMA!
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<b>7. 17 Again (Burr Steers, 2009)</b> – “I grew up, and I lost my way. And I blamed you for my failures.” A melancholic masterpiece. There’s some goofy second-lead comedy and fleeting noughties nastiness in there, sure, but the film’s treatment of lost love, lost dreams, lost men is profoundly affecting – and never more so than when Efron says his piece in the divorce court, improvising an honest, last-ditch letter to the woman he both saved and failed. His delivery; Mann’s expression; Steers’ use of subjective camera and a Cat Power needle-drop. It is a remarkable sequence. The film's circular structure works superbly too, launched by the perfect mini-film that is its bleached-out 1989 opening, aided by rapid-fire cuts in that inescapable climax. Efron is just sensationally good throughout, though a mention too for Sterling Knight’s impeccable comic smarts.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>SIX STINKERS</b>
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<b>1. The Holiday (Nancy Meyers, 2006)</b> – The only film I started and didn’t finish (which tells its own story), since one day I will die, and I think at that point I would have regretted it. It's surely the worst Christmas movie ever made: a chance to spend the festive season with a bunch of charmless pricks, and just unremittingly awful, exhibiting none of Meyers’ virtues and all of her flaws in their purest and most alarming form. A movie that begins by misunderstanding newspapers and goes on to misunderstand such concepts as ‘England’, ‘sex’ and ‘people’.<br /><br />
<b>2. No Orchids for Miss Blandish (St. John Legh Clowes, 1948)</b> – A notoriously and mesmerisingly terrible New York-set noir, shot in England, and populated predominantly by homegrown actors doing dreadful American accents in front of woefully unconvincing backdrops. Sid James is the wise, archetypically American barman, which goes about as well as you’d expect. It is marginally more nasty, violent and sexually provocative than was generally permitted by the Hollywood censor (though the outcry in the UK was largely fuelled by latent fears of cultural colonisation), but such licence can only take you so far when the story is this tedious, the characters are so colourless and similar, and no-one can act. The source novel was a blatant rip off of William Faulkner's (dire) 'Sanctuary', and Jack La Rue effectively reprises his analogous role from the Pre-Code adaptation of that book, The Story of Temple Drake (1933). Times had changed, though, and the part here was transformed, with the sanction of the BBFC, from that of a sadistic sex criminal to a doomed romantic.
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<b>3. Paddy O’Day (Lewis Seiler, 1936)</b> – When Rick's Deep-Dive Into the History of 20th Century-Fox (see above, and also below) Goes Bad. An eye-wateringly dreadful Jane Withers vehicle, with the lunatic’s Shirley Temple doing an Irish accent so bad that it technically counts as race hate. Rita Hayworth’s in this too, when she was still called Cansino, and was still half-Spanish, and still had her original hairline. After a terrible opening, the film briefly becomes bearable with the intrusion of three members of John Ford’s stock company, before promptly disappearing off a cliff. I must say that I preferred (real-life bandleader) Pinky Tomlin at the start of the film, when he was an absent-minded bookworm rather than an arrogant prick. I don’t understand what was ever supposed to be entertaining about this film. Its songs are quite remarkably bad, and the slapdash production extends to Tomlin’s character being billed as ‘Ray’; he’s called Roy.<br /><br />
<b>4. Hot Pursuit (Anne Fletcher, 2015)</b> – A pissweak action-comedy featuring perhaps the single most irritating performance in cinema history, as Sofia Vergara yells virtually every line with the exact same grating intonation. The film’s principal jokes are that (a) she is vain and (b) Reese Witherspoon is small, though there’s also much spirited punching down, none of it funny (the opening scene has two jokes, one about transvestites and the other taking the side of a controlling father). This is basically <i>The Heat</i> if it was no good – comedically or morally – with even Witherspoon unable to make it work, though it is marginally more watchable than, say, <i>This Means War</i>. The movie's brief diversion into romance is a bit less shit than the rest of it. I like it when Reese sings ‘(I Never Promised You) A Rose Garden’. It lasts about 15 seconds and is easily the best bit of the film.
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<b>5. My Lucky Star (Roy Del Ruth, 1938)</b> – An absolutely wretched Fox film, in which studio head Zanuck splices together three of the studio's cash shows – the Sonja Henie ice-skating vehicle, the college musical, and the putting-on-a-show film – to create something unspeakable. Shagger Cesar Romero sends employee Henie to university on the proviso that she change her clothes every few hours to advertise his store's fashions. So she does, while braving the taunts of the campus mean girls, and falling in love with some charmless prick (Richard Greene). Terrible story, banal performances, cheap production and awful songs (as far as I can tell, Henie is briefly permitted to sing, dreadfully, before being dubbed by a professional for her second burst). Even the skating scenes are sub-par, though I'm giving the film a full star for some fleeting moments of ice-borne transcendence. The less said about the hysterically ill-conceived 'Alice Through the Looking Glass' finale, however, the better. Henie, often accused of being a Nazi, has one coat that appears to incorporate a Klan hood. Elisha Cook, Jr. appears in his nerdy student era. There’s this weird thing in Fox films of the '30s where the stars are forever being terrorised by cafe owners trying to foist the special on them. These allegedly comic sequences can last for up to three minutes. Just very odd. Crucially, Henie is the worst fucking actor of all time. Zanuck had told his writers to never give her speeches. Here she gets speeches.<br /><br />
<b>6. Traveller’s Joy (Ralph Thomas, 1950)</b> – An often painfully unfunny farce inspired by postwar currency restrictions (yes really), with Googie and McCallum as a divorced couple who get stranded, broke, in Stockholm, a city that’s vividly brought to life, if indeed Stockholm is a drab, poorly-filmed hotel room. The film was based on a hit West End play but the material was dated by the time the movie was released. That’s the problem with signing a deal to hold your film until the source play has folded; it tends to fold because no-one cares anymore. The movie proved an incongruous closing chapter to the story of the near-legendary, borderline-notorious studio, Gainsborough Pictures, best-known for its flushed, sadistic mid-‘40s melodramas. In 1949, it merged with Rank. The man behind the camera is Rank (in both senses of the word) director Ralph Thomas, exhibiting his usual absence of style... and subtlety... and timing… though he does, in one fascinating moment, wring a proto-Sid-James bit of leering from Maurice Denham, who in reference to a potential sexual encounter genuinely utters the phrase, “Oi oi”. Thomas later directed the vaguely underrated <i>Doctor</i> series, while his brother Gerald was responsible for the <i>Carry On</i> films. Responsible in the sense that he should have been tried in the Hague. The film’s most interesting elements are Yolande Donlan’s part as a deceptively smart blonde – she’s very appealing, but also entirely ripping off Judy Holliday’s Billie Dawn, a part she had played in the West End – and the ration-induced gluttony of the script, a charge that Evelyn Waugh later levelled at his own <i>Brideshead</i>. There are, at most, three jokes that halfway land. I only watched <i>Traveller’s</i> Joy because I like Googie Withers but she’s largely bland here, and so is the film. Dora Bryan plays a Swedish maid (?).<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>SIX RE-APPRAISALS</b><br /><br />
... being, naturally, movies I revisited, and changed my mind about.<br /><br />
<b>THREE UP</b><br /><br />
I actually saw this first one on New Year's Eve 2022, but this is my blog and I can do what I want.<br /><br />
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<b>1. Spider-Man (Sam Raimi, 2002)</b> – What’s the wrongest you’ve ever been about a film? I think for me it’s Sam Raimi’s <i>Spider-Man</i>. I saw it when it came out on DVD, and regarded it as a time-passing piece of nothing, a vapid cartoon that regurgitated an over-familiar origins story while periodically breaking out into CGI action that – as Mark Kermode kept saying on the radio, and I was only too happy to parrot – had no “weight”. Without bothering to rewatch it, in 2017 I described the film, on Letterboxd, as “rubbish”. The problem with this opinion is that the film is fucking amazing: a stunning, vibrant, deeply moving movie beautifully balanced between mythmaking, comedy, action and emotion. As for the lack of ‘weight’ – he’s not supposed to be weighty, he’s the fucking Spider-Man! It plays exactly as it is intended to: the springiness is the point. If I wanted to pretend I was right first time, I could point to the mediocrity of James Franco, the hideous product placement, the distracting immobility of the Goblin’s face (and Spidey’s for that matter; when you have two masks talking to one another, it’s particularly undramatic), and the occasional intrusion of what we will come to recognise as The Marvel Style (or lack thereof). But as Twitter's @mildperil has said, the film is just so much more distinctive and unusual and affecting and thrilling than anything the MCU has ever done. It’s the sensitivity of Maguire’s performance – a pair of sad red eyes with a superhero attached. It’s Raimi injecting horror stylistics into the mix as he tussles for supremacy with the studio – and usually wins. It’s his innate understanding of iconography (Maguire ripping open his shirt while on the run, as Danny Elfman triumphantly blares), and the space he affords Dafoe to give a huge – but narrow – performance mixing pathos, menace and horror-ish ham. It's the way that the script plays around with expectation through its jokey cuts and delicate subversion – but never too much. It’s the relatively intimate scale of the story, which keeps it personal and human and direct, aided by Dunst’s perfect love interest. And it’s the fact that the action climax is done in 10 minutes, without the need to open a wormhole to another galaxy or destroy two-thirds of New York City. What a movie. Like I said, it’s rubbish.<br /><br />
<b>2. The Nice Guys (Shane Black, 2016)</b>, which I liked on release, but thought outstayed its welcome. Not this time. It's Shane Black’s phenomenally entertaining buddy movie, with hired thug Russell Crowe and PI Ryan Gosling teaming up to search for a missing porn star in smog-filled late-‘70s LA. Occasionally too meta, with an overlong action climax and a plot that I still don’t understand, but honestly, who gives a shit? About as much fun as the movies have given us in the past decade. Now please make <i>The Nicer Guys</i> (2025) and <i>The Nicest Guys</i> (2028).<br /><br />
<b>3. The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984)</b> seemed thin and dated when I saw it as a teenager, but it <i>was</i> on pan-and-scan ex-rental VHS, and perhaps I was in the wrong mood too. It is, of course, your lean-and-mean sci-fi actioner, with its perfect premise, inspired use of Arnie, and Biehn’s frenzied B-movie intensity: so integral to the film, and so often overlooked. Cameron, then a veteran of just one film – <i>Piranha II: The Spawning</i>, from which he was fired – knits together the action in his instinctive and inimitable style. The rough edges, like Arnie’s rubber head, only add to the fun, though once the star finally exits to be replaced by a relatively scrawny metal skeleton, the film is conspicuously less scary, despite the shimmering imagination of that climactic crawl: its relentless grasping and panting evasion. The panicked synths, ominous drums and atonal honks of Brad Fiedel’s score are the coup de grâce.<br /><br />
<b>THREE DOWN</b><br /><br />
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<b>1. The Wild One (László Benedek, 1953)</b> – I hadn't seen this since I was a teenager. It was one of my favourite films back then, which makes me both fond of and appalled by my 14-year-old self. It is an exceptionally silly bikesploitation film, with Brando playing an alarmingly overage young hellraiser who leads his gang of hoodlums on a theoretical path of destruction, though their activities are for the most part hilariously anodyne. Like the Dead End Kids, their terrifying debauchery extends largely to repeating everything that the townsfolk say, in high-pitched voices, or pretending that a mop is some hair. Surely the only real threat here is that the people of small-town America might be irritated to death. Brando (demurring to do his own fights or riding) is anticipating Elvis a little, and providing plenty for James Dean to steal, but his particular genius almost entirely deserts him. It’s only in the closing 15 minutes – and especially that deeply touching final scene – that his brooding Johnny is anything more than a tedious, preening twat. The problem, partly, is that the film around him ties itself in knots, trying to appease every conceivable audience. Producer Stanley Kramer’s stock-in-trade was a shallow liberalism, but here he flirts with fascism – contrasting it only with vigilantism – by suggesting in the opening sequences that the only way to truly deter cowards like Johnny from causing mayhem is through a show of unwavering force. If the film later embraces some small degree of understanding, it's essentially posited as a next-best option, and even then only really applicable to special cases touched by the redemptive power of love. In support, a loud Lee Marvin gives perhaps the worst performance of his career, during that period where his principal role was to engage in informal sporting contests against Method actors (boxing Brando here; sprinting against Clift in the appalling <i>Raintree County</i>). There are a handful of neat shots employing chiaroscuro, Brando does his “Whaddaya got?” line (immediately ruined by a pointless, on-screen recap of what’s just happened), and Timothy Carey turns up to pull faces. But it is rarely other than an inescapably daft movie, and about as dangerous as dinner with your nan.<br /><br />
<b>2. Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939)</b> – A folksy Fordian fantasy, with the Master printing the legend about the Great Emancipator’s formative years. Ford, and writer Lamar Trotti, are essentially revisiting – and reworking – their 1934 film, <i>Judge Priest</i>: both are movies about a lawyer, haunted by grief, who masks his wisdom and skill with eccentricity and stand-up comedy. Priest even faced down a lynch mob, as Abe does here, though the scene was cut from the earlier film for being too contentious, before being reinstated in Ford’s 1953 remake, <i>The Sun Shines Bright</i>. If I’m honest, <i>Young Mr Lincoln</i> didn’t strike me the same way at 38 as it did when I last saw it aged 21. In the interim, I’ve always thought of it rosily as one of Ford’s unassailable classics, but it isn’t quite that. The soundtrack is too busy, too noisy and ultimately too much (while Ford usually used music brilliantly, his producer Darryl F. Zanuck tended to over-score, leading to a notable battle over <i>My Darling Clementine</i>) and Trotti simply isn’t as good a writer as Frank Nugent. If in doubt he tends to lean towards corn, and the climax to his courtroom drama here simply isn’t convincing – or even plausible. But the film is inferior to the following year’s <i>Abe Lincoln in Illinois</i>, based on Robert Sherwood’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, not because the latter is more faithful to the facts – thought it’s certainly that – but because Ford’s film is flawed in conception and construction, centring on one semi-interesting court case, and too often taking its focus off Abe. The times when it does work, in fact, are when it focuses tightly on its mythologised central figure, generally analogous in this director’s work to an American Jesus, and on the image and nascent iconography of this jacklegged, tufty-haired, big-hatted future president. Henry Fonda, wearing three hours’ worth of make-up including a false nose that makes him look like Gary Neville, hadn’t quite become Henry Fonda, but he makes a fair stab of inhabiting an Abe who was already in some integral way Lincoln. The film's three great moments all belong to him and Ford: a brilliant segue to winter (unfortunately accompanied by a cacophonous, doom-laden score) that finds Fonda, like so many of the director’s heroes, chatting quietly at a graveside; Abe’s silence as he stares at the river in the company of flutey socialite Mary Todd; and the final passage, in which he walks off alone, into a thunderstorm that represents the future.<br /><br />
<b>3. Spider-Man 3 (Sam Raimi, 2007)</b> – You win some, you lose some: just a couple of minutes ago, Raimi was buzzing; now he's crying. More's the point, I spent more than a decade claiming this was a better film than the original. I'm lucky someone didn't punch me in the face. The first thing to say is: "Three villains, Avi? Three? That’s insane." Fuck me, this is such a mess. A shallow, unnecessary, bloated, almost unremittingly sour sequel that trashes the first two films, systematically sullying their every perfect moment. If that makes it sound potentially intriguing – a darker, more mature work, perhaps: something akin to <i>Return to Oz</i>, which inverted the iconography of the beloved 1939 musical – then rest assured: it’s not. Because it’s also stupid. The film finds Peter ruined by fame: now an insufferably smug Spidey whose worst traits are about to be amplified by an alien symbiote. Meanwhile, an escaped murderer (Thomas Haden Church), a vengeful paparazzo ((chris)Topher Grace) and a resentful old friend (James Franco) brood and plot, encouraged by their new superpowers. Church’s Sandman is a handy example of exactly what has gone wrong here. While Dafoe and Molina’s villains could have been taken from old horror films – perhaps Karloff vehicles at Columbia – this storyline about a doting father trying to get the money for his daughter’s operation might have been lifted from a cloying Wallace Beery film made in the early days of the talkies. The Sandman is an impressive visual creation but we neither care about Church’s plight nor enjoy his villainy: his dialogue is the most functional and tedious imaginable, and there’s no fun in his malevolence. There’s the odd sequence in <i>Spider-Man 3</i> that is really special: most notably a restaurant scene between a desperate Mary-Jane and an oblivious, supercilious Peter that plays like a <i>Before Midnight</i> outtake, if bafflingly spliced with 'Allo 'Allo-ish comedy from Bruce Campbell. And there are a few that are really fun: Raimi having a laugh as Peter struts down the street ogling appalled women; the JK Simmons bits; every action sequence until the final one. But they’re in the service of a film that is cloyingly sentimental, crashingly pointless and apparently endless, the action climax anticipating the MCU both in its self-satisfied, bromantic asides and the fact that it goes on for fucking ever. Directors are not necessarily the last word on their own work, but when Sam Raimi said in 2014 that this film was "awful", he was not wrong. Most damagingly, it threatens to cloud our memories of those earlier films. I’m going to just start pretending it doesn’t exist. “Spider-Man 3? Yeah, it was a shame that never got made.”<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>OBSESSIONS</b>
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<b>1. 20th Century-Fox (1935-40)</b> – Between its birth in May 1935 and the point in 1940 by which it had fully found its feet – with studio head Darryl F. Zanuck (pictured above) realising what Ty Power did best (buckling swashes in <i>The Mark of Zorro</i>), discovering Betty Grable (<i>Down Argentine Way</i>), and rediscovering his social conscience (<i>The Grapes of Wrath</i>) – Fox was a studio in a fascinating state of flux. This year, as research for a writing project, I've watched around 80 of these transitional films, and it has been such a rewarding, exciting, eye-opening, exhilarating, maddening, and occasionally slightly boring ride. What did we learn? That the mid-period Loretta Young could be superb on screen (and was ravishing in colour); that Zanuck's short rein on his writers produced a startling uniformity of worldview and story structure across Fox's films; and that the Ritz Brothers remain the single worst comic troupe ever inflicted on a barely-prepared populace. But those were only the first discoveries from this deepest of dives. Seeing the star-making machine in full effect; beginning to comprehend Hollywood as a factory town: these were privileges I didn't expect. People online refer to anything they are even mildly distracted by with the words, "i am obsessed!!", but in this instance I actually <i>am</i> obsessed.<br /><br />
<b>2. Ty Power</b> – As an offshoot from the above project, I have spent several pleasant evenings gazing at Tyrone Power's pretty face, sometimes in colour.<br /><br />
<b>3. Kung fu films on the Eureka label</b> – You keep releasing them, I'll keep buying them. Often this proves to be wise (<i>Royal Warriors</i>) and at other times I feel like I've been robbed (<i>Burning Paradise</i>). But on those evenings when the switch marked 'brain' needs to be flicked to 'off', they're frequently a godsend.<br /><br />
<b>4. Noir</b> – That world of shadows, shady dames, and wry PIs who are the wittiest guys in the room, but with no concept of the frame closing around them. Throw in bluff cops, returning soldiers, corporate slimeballs, drunken floozies and homoerotic heavies, and you have the makings of a good evening in. Criterion Channel's 'Holiday Noir' season has been a treat (including an offering from the cheapo Monogram studio in which a man ends up being sentenced to death after throwing his shoes at a cat), while Indicator are doing the Lord's work with their Columbia Noir and Universal Noir sets.<br /><br />
<b>5. Movies about politics</b> – Completing this year's genre triumvirate: give me a set-piece gently stylising the to-and-fro of a congressional hearing, or an ob-doc about political corruption in a senatorial race, and you can burn down my house in the next 100 minutes and I won't notice.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Thanks for reading.Rick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com1London, UK51.5072178 -0.127586223.196983963821154 -35.2838362 79.817451636178845 35.0286638tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-53102796454588803152023-06-02T13:09:00.010+01:002023-06-05T15:48:24.140+01:00Susanne Sundfør at Røkeriet, USF Verflet, Bergen<b>Friday 29 and Saturday 30 May 2023</b><br /><br />
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Among the things we were least expecting from Susanne Sundfør’s new live show, Rebirth of the Electro Diva must have been pretty high on the list.<br /><br />
First of all, she is touring a new album, <i>blómi</i>, and the last time she toured a new album, she played the-new-album-and-nothing-else, unless you counted the improvised, double-bass-led improvisations linking each song to the next.<br /><br />
Secondly, she has characterised herself as a folk artist whose flirtations with electro-pop were little more than a mathematical digression: the solving of a series of sonic puzzles ultimately pleasing to the human brain.<br /><br />
Increasingly, she has looked to distance herself from that record, 2015’s <i>Ten Love Songs</i>, in which the sorrow is swamped by triumphal dance hooks, and apparently from the life that created it: living in Dalston, smoking and drinking too much, wrecking her voice, close to breaking point.<br /><br />
When she has played songs from the album on recent tours, it has tended to be the eerie or spectral ones – ‘Silence’ and ‘Trust Me’ – rather than the shimmering art-pop of ‘Fade Away’, or her <i>femme fatale</i> monsterpiece, ‘Delirious’.<br /><br />
And yet here she is, on stage at USF Verflet in Bergen – a former sardine factory repurposed as the city’s coolest venue – dancing sensually to four of <i>Ten Love Songs</i>’s floor-filling bangers, as the synths climb a stairway to paradise.<br /><br />
Perhaps that’s what happens when you ask a born contrarian to headline a jazz festival.<br /><br />
<b>This is the kind of love that never goes out of style</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/features/interviews/susanne-sundfor-in-bloom">As I wrote in this recent interview piece</a>: in spring 2018, Sundfør seemed on the cusp of a commercial breakthrough. Then she effectively disappeared. In the intervening years, she has found love, started a family, struggled with anxiety, gone back to high school, and become enormously interested in regenerative farming. Now, finally, she has returned to music. Her first album in six years, <i>blómi</i> was released at the end of April, and she is toying with the idea of a European tour in 2024.<br /><br />
In the meantime, she is playing across her native Norway all summer. The first two shows were in Bergen, headlining the city’s Natt Jazz season just metres from the riverside studio where she recorded her debut album in 2007.<br /><br />
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When Sundfør last performed in the UK, she wore a hooded black cloak, and had apparently smeared soot around her eyes, like a Scandi druid, or an urchin Zorro. This time she has newly bleached her hair, and is clad entirely in white, down to the high-heeled PVC boots she kicks off off-stage at the midway point, so as to dance barefoot.<br /><br />
Her mesmerising 2017 show at Union Chapel was a spare affair, featuring just one introverted co-conspirator. For these extravagant, joyous Bergen shows, her on-stage ensemble has swelled to 15, including a pedal steel guitarist, two synth players, five backing singers, and a multi-instrumentalist husband on sax-solo-and-choral-conductor duties.<br /><br />
<b>Open your eyes and begin again</b><br /><br />
The first night is an invigorating work-in-progress: the thrill of the new, and the old made new, and just the old uncovered and embraced after years in hiding. The second show, which adds a single song – a new opener; Sundfør at the centre of a crescent of 12 vocalists for the handclaps and harmonies of <i>leikara ljóð</i> – is the actualisation of ambition: the art, with most of the wrinkles ironed out.<br /><br />
In common with another legendary vocalist, Sandy Denny, what’s most exciting about Sundfør is the questing restlessness of her invention. Every version of every song she sings is given some new inflection, some new paraphrasing or twisting or variation of melody that changes its feeling and meaning. If neither rendering of ‘Turkish Delight’ here sweeps you up in the same way as the studio version – the blissful simplicity of its third act replaced by something that in its sheer jazziness sounds depressed – the trade-off is in the way that so many other songs are transfigured live. Performing the title track of ‘blómi’, Sundfør chucks in vocal trills, unexpected pauses and head-voice ad-libs that stop you in your tracks. With ‘alyosha’ – the lead single off the album – she knows what she’s got, a vehicle for the sheer scope and power of that God-given instrument, but even then she can’t resist a few experimental flourishes, while gazing across the stage, perhaps just at someone needing a musical cue, or perhaps at the guy who inspired this love song.<br /><br />
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She does all three sitting behind her keyboard, along with ‘White Foxes’ (formerly her encore, now a first night statement-of-intent, with deafening percussion intro); a countrified version of ‘I Resign’ from her debut record; the deep cut, ‘Lilith’; and her gospel-inflected encore, ‘fare thee well’, with a glorious extra verse. For the rest, she’s at the main mic, a place she has barely ventured since 2016.<br /><br />
<b>Do you believe in reincarnation?</b><br /><br />
And that’s where we find the electro-pop diva reborn. First up, she does ‘Kamikaze’, and if you’re wondering whether I’m overhyping the ‘she hasn’t done this for a while’ angle, well: she forgets the second line, consults a band mate, apologises with the words, ‘It’s been a while’, and then launches into the song again. It is one of those tracks that, to paraphrase John Peel talking about the Bluetones’ ‘Slight Return’, “as soon as you hear it, you feel you’ve known it all your life”, but now it comes with a gently wandering opening melody and added blue notes that give the song an emotional punch to go with its sonic one.<br /><br />
Later, she drops in ‘Fade Away’ – by far her most popular song, sporadically drowned out by the spirited singing of first-night die-hards – before returning to ‘Ten Love Songs’ for the final two tracks of the main set, ‘Slowly’ and ‘Delirious’. The latter now has a pleading pedal steel, and rap-adjacent vocals breaking off into clubby exhortations. The former is, simply, one of the best things I’ve ever heard live, especially in its second night iteration. It is notable on record for having at least four separate, irresistible hooks, each more exalting than the last (<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/1lmyD6olLDWFAn35iIEoKe">scroll to 3:08</a> to be lifted into the clouds). And now it has five. “It’s in the way. You. Hold. Me,” Sundfør sings, in a cascading, staccato arpeggio, as the song reaches its zenith. “Baby. I. Know. You’re. Lonely.”<br /><br />
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The other songs she sings at centre stage are a playful ‘Reincarnation’, and ‘rūnā’, in which she seems to be conjuring the music through the contortions of her body, like Judy singing ‘The Man That Got Away’ in <i>A Star Is Born</i>. And between the notes she finds new ones, more beautiful than those on record, before riding the climactic harmonies, swaying, her arms spread wide.<br /><br />
A couple of times during the show, she leaves the stage, firstly for the synth transition between ‘Kamikaze’ and ‘rūnā’, and later to let the rest of the cast perform an <i>a capella</i> version of ‘ashera’s song’, reimagined as an old American spiritual, the original number spliced with fragments of atonal bluegrass, ‘Peace in the Valley’ and ‘Let Your People Go’. While both numbers are interesting, neither are quite what drew us to Bergen tonight.<br /><br />
<b>Take me high to the depths of your soul</b><br /><br />
On the first night, I made a new friend called Thomas, and when we talked about what had drawn us to Sundfør’s music, we were of one mind: once that voice grabs you, there’s no going back.<br /><br />
These songs are beautifully written, the sprawling arrangements are often inspired, there’s space for limited musical improvisation, and the band are talented and charismatic, with the backing singers allowed to cut free and even encroach on some signature Sundfør lines.<br /><br />
But we are here, and will always be here, for That Voice. That it is now allied to the whole of her canon, even the emotionally tricky, musically mathematic bits, is a cause for dancing, in Bergen and far beyond.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>SETLIST</b>:<br /><br />
leikara ljóð [second night only]<br />
White Foxes<br />
Turkish Delight<br />
Kamikaze<br />
rūnā (with synth transition intro)<br />
Reincarnation<br />
I Resign<br />
blómi<br />
Fade Away<br />
Lilith<br />
alyosha<br />
ashera's song (new version, choir only)<br />
Slowly<br />
Delirious<br /><br />
<b>Encore</b>:<br />
fare thee well<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Thanks for reading.Rick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com0London, UK51.5072178 -0.127586223.196983963821154 -35.2838362 79.817451636178845 35.0286638tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-89067781939062412582023-04-15T12:32:00.017+01:002023-04-17T16:34:22.340+01:00Effortless audacity: Big Thief on tour<b>Sage Gateshead – 05/04/23<br />
Usher Hall, Edinburgh – 06/04/23<br />
Manchester Apollo – 07/04/23<br />
The Great Hall, Cardiff – 08/04/23<br />
Hammersmith Apollo, London – 11 and 12/04/23<br />
Chalk Brighton – 13/04/23</b><br /><br />
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There is a song that Big Thief have recently started playing called ‘Born for Loving You’.<br /><br />
If you want to understand it, there is a simple, biographical way. And then there is another way.<br /><br />
The simple way first: when the band’s frontwoman, Adrianne Lenker, was a student at Berklee, her music showcase betrayed the powerful influence of the husky, highway-fixated alt-country chanteuse, Lucinda Williams, right down to the very voice she was affecting. That influence hasn’t been as pronounced since (manifesting merely in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XRwXOvcxCo">the odd cover</a>, with Lenker slipping back into Lucinda-voice), but as the band prepares to tour with Williams this summer, here’s a song – co-written with drummer James Krivchenia – that in its feel and its hook could be seamlessly snuck into Williams’ setlist. It may also be the straight-up sexiest thing that Lenker has ever sung (“Take me to the back of your pick-up truck,” she implores at one point, “show me a thing or two.”).<br /><br />
And now here’s the other way to think about ‘Born for Loving You’: no-one else on earth could have written this song.<br /><br />
<b>‘After the dinos fell’: the world of Adrianne Lenker</b><br /><br />
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In its first two lines, Lenker dispenses with the entire history of the universe up to her birth (“After the first stars formed, after the dinos fell/After the first light flickered out of this motel…”). That effortless audacity is characteristic. But the song’s conceit is not conceited: it is a way of understanding the magnitude of love. Everything that happened – to me, to us, to anyone – was just a prelude to <i>this</i>. From blood-soaked birth to teenage nightmare, via “waddling around, looking at birds”, well: “thank god we made it through.”<br /><br />
Dylan once said, “It isn’t me, it’s the songs. I’m just the postman, I deliver the songs.” And here is Lenker’s current online biography in full: “songs of all sorts from places unknown”.<br /><br />
The places are, admittedly, occasionally known. Across the seven shows on this UK tour, ‘Born for Loving You’ gets four airings: twice as a lush ‘70s California-style singalong, then as a plaintive solo ballad, and finally as a stripped-down full-band version with simple harmonies. For those last three, Lenker adds a coda: a falsetto snatch of ‘I Will Always Love You’ (Whitney version).<br /><br />
Yet even when the sources are, as she says, “unknown”, those songs come filtered through a unique sensibility: ideas are ingeniously inverted, images recur, motifs are endlessly shuffled. Her characters are gender-fluid, avian, feminist and quasi-biblical, traversing a world of blue skies, cluttered kitchens, bare plains and flat roads. Whether broken, fixed or flailing, they are loved.<br /><br />
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And certainly she seems a conduit for whatever immortal music is floating in the ether right now, whether fragile or thundering. The most exhilarating part of following Big Thief on tour is the regularity with which miracles happen. “This is a new song,” Lenker will say, most nights, before playing the greatest fucking thing you’ve ever heard in your life. On the last tour, she composed <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2cGpgszPlk">‘Wait a While’</a> on the ferry over from Dublin, performed it six times in concert, then retired it. It has never been released. Most musicians would kill to ever write a song just half as good.<br /><br />
But Lenker just keeps them coming. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXhts7WPTU8&start=4820">She begins the encore at Edinburgh with ‘Already Lost’</a>, for which the word ‘timeless’ is barely sufficient (by the point she unspools the line, “How slow and how fast you are,” your soul has gone into spasm). She commences the second night at Hammersmith with ‘Sadness As a Gift’, which does for depression what ‘Change’ did for fear of death; turning your understanding inside out. She isn’t soothing you with song, she’s showing you another way of perceiving pain.
While her between-songs badinage is regularly ridiculed by reviewers committed to the cheap shot, there’s something appealingly counter-intuitive about her worldview, about an artist who’ll tell a huge crowd that a mammoth show feels like a dream (so far, so banal), only to dazedly add: “I don’t really even mean career-wise, I just mean in general: it’s so bizarre to be a human being, and we all ended up here, right now.”<br /><br />
<b>A live band who also make records</b><br /><br />
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And <i>here</i> is where you want to be. You don’t know Big Thief if you haven’t seen them live. They are not a group you fall in love with at a distance: they are a live band who make records on the side; the intensity of their in-person performance rarely, if ever, transfers to your preferred streaming service.<br /><br />
Nor does its extremity. They continue to spread out in all directions, the quietest band on the circuit, and about the loudest. I saw them in Oslo last year during one of their particularly metal phases, an evening that did unspeakable things to my left ear. It is a decision I will never regret.<br /><br />
The live experience, gloriously, is never the same twice. That’s how I can justify seeing them seven times in nine days. Across those shows, they play 38 different songs, 14 of them just once. So if you want to hear their most popular song (‘Shark Smile’), a recent album track like ‘Blue Lightning’, or an unexpected cover of ‘Strangers’ by The Kinks, you’ll have to catch them in London, Manchester <i>and</i> Brighton. They start the second show of the tour, in Edinburgh, by playing four songs we haven’t heard the night before.<br /><br />
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Every gig, too, has a different narrative, often built into the sweep of Krivchenia’s setlists. Edinburgh begins with that country-inflected singer-songwriter fare, before shifting into tortured rock, a sequence bookended by two absolute beasts: ‘Contact’ and ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain’. The former explodes into ugly metal screams; the latter continues to delight those who only know the gentle, balladic version that titled their last album.<br /><br />
That’s an emblematic number when talking about how their music continues to evolve, and how no Big Thief song is ever finished. At Gateshead – a curious, slightly muted show (presumably because it was largely seated) – ‘DNWM’ came galumphing out of the gate in a way that just made me think, “yeah OK, but we kind of did this last year”. The next night, it was reborn as a monster, and by Hammersmith, it had mutated into something unstoppable, the band adding more and more mad shit to it: a vocoder, a vocal-coda (Lenker’s drifting falsetto), and squalls of physically-induced feedback, Lenker turning her back on the crowd and throwing her torso at the amp. The song's opening line, "It's a little bit magic," is essentially now a public service announcement.<br /><br />
<b>Not winning</b><br /><br />
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Songs are in constant flux. While ‘Flower of Blood’ reaches its apogee on the first night – as if shoegaze died and went to Heaven, where the Shredding Festival was taking place – two of Lenker’s greatest songs don’t quite find their new place in the world until the final one.<br /><br />
‘Not’ often felt curiously tired, an incomparable song given oddly perfunctory treatment; and after glorious versions exhibiting the extroverted solo (2020) and the internalised one (2022), its climax here seemed technically impressive but hard to follow, either musically or emotionally. Manchester was an exception – Lenker beginning and ending the song on her knees, her guitar part suddenly pleading – while the first night in Hammersmith was an enjoyable anomaly in which she either forgot the words (<i>not</i>, ironically, for the first time) or just tried something new: a ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’-style semi-rap on the verses. It’s Brighton, though, where the song comes to life again in exhilarating fashion. It’s longer, unerring, precise in meaning, Lenker drawing a defining message of futility from its endless negation, as she circles back for a last chorus, screaming the words “not winning” over and again, like some apocalyptic benediction.<br /><br />
She ended both the last UK tour and this one with ‘Change’ – her song about life gaining its very meaning from the existence of death – and while the deeply moving solo version that closed the Shepherd’s Bush run remains the indelible one, her message best delivered by a single voice, the four-part harmony and falsetto ending of this new reading also reaches its full flower by the seaside.<br /><br />
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Other songs have been completely reworked. ‘Spud Infinity’ continues its transformation from a wispy, metaphysical ballad to a showcase for a band at its happiest and silliest, complete with Jew’s harp, stomping and a sing-along. While ostensibly a country song, it’s also a jazz number in as much as it allows for showy improv, including guitarist Buck Meek’s characteristically weird anti-solos. ‘Zombie Girl’, another song that Lenker played as a haunting solo song at Union Chapel in 2019, is performed in Edinburgh as a seven-minute prog number with two guitar solos.<br /><br />
At other times, the emotions are simply dialled up. Lenker’s guitar-play is further spotlighted in a newly funky, swaggeringly cocky ‘Simulation Swarm’ that contains two killer – and subtly different – solos, while the cult favourite, ‘Sparrow’ (whose accompanying t-shirt has become practically a uniform for teen girls paying pilgrimage), escalates into tormented fretwork. Simply ditching her acoustic 12-string is enough to conjure up a different world of ‘Cattails’, as if rural America finally got electrified. And in ‘Certainty’, she effectively improves upon perfection by dropping onto a blue note on the pivotal word ‘wild’, an innovation that makes the song more – not less – certain; and irrevocable, without end.<br /><br />
<b>Real love: a horror show</b><br /><br />
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Manchester, probably the best show of the tour, offers a first outing for ‘Real Love’ (Lenker memorably responded to audience cries for the song at Shepherd’s Bush by murmuring, “I know that one”, and mock-innocently singing a bit of the chorus). It’s a blistering rendition, with an extended solo, a huge riff and a similarly huge performance, Lenker grasping glorious, frenzied at the falsetto finale. It remains one of her greatest and most deceptively important love songs: a haunting and seductive marriage of adolescent goth imagery and childhood trauma. This is love as illness, incapacitation, sudden death; a life sentence; a horror show; a beating; a curse, endlessly repeating – and who doesn’t want love?<br /><br />
There are also the moments when Big Thief drag out a deep cut, and drag you around to their way of thinking. I didn’t get the fuss over ‘Change’ until the final moments of last year’s tour. Adrianne starts the first show here with a beautiful solo rendering of ‘UFOF’ – despite twice forgetting the words – a song I’d never cared about at all, before the band blasts out ‘Blurred View’ in a version that finally makes the song make sense: hypnotic and insistent. Other apparent filler from last year’s mammoth double-album grows in stature over the nine days, ‘Time Escaping’ in Cardiff emerging lopsidedly gorgeous from bizarre tuning and improvised wordless vocals; the yearning ’12,000 Lines’ rising to meet the majesty of its cosmic sentiments; a finger-picked ‘Dried Roses’ finally opening up in London, rather than repeatedly shutting its door in your face. In Brighton, the band turn the thin pastiche of ‘Red Moon’ into a total winner, the song racing past and carrying you with it.<br /><br />
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And then there are those new songs. Alongside the ones already mentioned are ‘Horsepower’ – a groove-filled metaphor about fucking, via <i>Top Gear Driving Classics, Vol. 5</i> – an amiable solo number called ‘Bright Future’, and a pair of instant classics. The sensual, longing ‘Ruined’ is one hell of a choice to kick off your biggest show in four years, while the raw and imploring ‘Free Treasure’ sounds like Springsteen’s more talented sister knocking about in the back yard. “Just when I thought I couldn’t feel more, I feel a little more,” Lenker sings, her voice breaking. Tell me about it.<br /><br />
<b>Psycho-drama in Hammersmith</b><br /><br />
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If the first Hammersmith show was, to me, the night she sang ‘Free Treasure’ solo (and the night I got to see my band with my best friend for the first time), then the second show felt more like a psycho-drama. In the 22 hours between, Adrianne had met up with her ex, and the band’s return to London had been damned with varying degrees of faint praise by the reviewers of two national papers. The armchair psychologist in me wonders whether that personal experience informed the quietly anguished elements of the show, while the professional brickbats inspired the setlist and the ferocious physicality. ‘Vampire Empire’ ended with Adrianne falling in tandem with the word itself, ending the song sprawled on her back; once up on her feet again, she took quite some time to compose herself for the repetitive, unrepentant, pseudo-cheery toxic ballad, ‘Happy with You’ (Krivchenia’s favourite Big Thief song). Incorporating ‘Masterpiece’ as recorded – rather than the conversational iteration performed the previous two nights – along with the only outings this tour of fan favourites ‘Shark Smile’ and ‘Mary’, this was the band’s version of a hits show, though they remain the only band whose hits show has four unreleased songs in it.<br /><br />
One of those is ‘Vampire Empire’, which – in typically offbeat fashion – Big Thief decided to showcase on prime-time TV, despite the fact it isn’t available to stream or buy. Whether that was 4D chess, agreeable iconoclasm or a mild form of commercial self-sabotage remains to be seen, but it’s looking increasingly like the former. Adopted as a Gen Z anthem, its spiky gender nonconformity (a preoccupation that found its most beautiful expression in Lenker’s 2016 song, ‘Paul’) might just boot them into the next level of rock stardom. Is it selfish to say that I hope not? I love this band, I don’t want to watch them in a large shipping container.<br /><br />
These spaces just feel right. In Cardiff, Lenker adapts her songs not just to her mood but to the acoustic peculiarities of the low-ceilinged Great Hall. After playing to 10,000 people across two nights at Hammersmith, the band could have treated the 800-capacity Chalk Brighton as a comedown; instead they embrace the intimacy.<br /><br />
<b>Fashion rocks</b><br /><br />
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When I wrote about the 2022 tour, I received two tweets that really stuck in my mind. One, from @roryisconfused, said: <a href="https://twitter.com/roryisconfused/status/1500250570187317254">“I love that since I saw them 3 days ago, the bassist has dyed his hair pink.”</a> Someone else, their name now sadly lost to history, wrote: “Each member looks like they’re in a different band.”<br /><br />
Last year, Lenker manfully continued with the solo to ‘Not’ despite the fact that what appeared to be a wedding dress was coming down around her. This time she has to negotiate the thrashing climax of ‘Contact’ with a green beenie having fallen down over her eyes. This band suffers for their art, but also occasionally for their fashion. In Gateshead, they are wearing: an untucked pink satin shirt and tall hair (Buck, guitar adornments); a silver jump suit and matching sandals (James, drums); a pale pink dress (Max, bass); a cut-off motorbike shop t-shirt, old black jeans and silver tooth (Adrianne).<br /><br />
Each has a stock expression on stage. Krivchenia’s mouth hangs open, as if in a drum-induced trance. Meek endlessly shakes his head, his front leg bent, a slim shoe pointing towards the crowd. Bassist Max Oleartchik greets regular deviations from formula by shrugging contentedly and giving it the big lower lip. And Lenker has three principal modes nowadays: eyes closed peacefully for a solo spot; eyes closed tormentedly for a howling guitar break; hopping from one foot to the other in a hoedown style when she feels the need to lighten up a little.<br /><br />
Her place on stage was always front right, but apparently a bad back has forced her inwards. Ironically, shifting to centre-stage makes her seem less like a solo act with some willing accomplices, and more like one of the band. She also seems younger on this tour, somehow. Maybe it’s the hair: a tomboyish tuft rather than the blonde buzzcut that made her look so otherworldly at Shepherd’s Bush. She was married to Meek, way back in the mists of 2015, and their dynamic remains hugely touching. For his part, he is possibly the most wholesome person on earth. In Edinburgh, he tells a story in his faltering southern twang about how as a child he stayed in a nearby castle where his grandfather – a dealer in antique coins – made the children a treasure hunt in which they had to find doubloons. Alright, Keith Moon.<br /><br />
<b>Sadness as a gift</b><br /><br />
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That gentleness extends to the whole band. Most nights, they spoil the big rock star reveal by shambling onto the stage an hour early to introduce the support act and ask the audience to be quiet and attentive. Lenker says in Hammersmith that it’s the part of the show that makes her most nervous. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2022/03/when-i-say-infinity-i-mean-now-adrianne.html">What I pretentiously took to be a delight in linguistic invention when she did it at EartH</a>, may, instead, just be mere awkwardness.<br /><br />
But the vagueness that can beset that plea, or her chats between songs, vanishes when she sings, or writes, or plays. Her commitment to emotional truth habitually forces her to disrupt the band’s best laid plans by politely interpolating whatever song she suddenly feels like playing (you can think of their printed setlist as an interesting alternate reality). And it informs both the sincerity of her singing and the specificity of her songs. Even if the songs still come from ‘places unknown’.<br /><br />
In ‘Sadness as a Gift’, perhaps the most vivid example of Lenker’s ability to leap repeatedly between the everyday and the eternal, she addresses a lost lover. “You and I both know there is nothing more to say,” she begins, before saying it anyway, if only to herself. The song builds to a remembrance – or an offer? – of profound simplicity, as Lenker croons with a fractured strength: “You could hear the music inside my mind.”<br /><br />
I just feel privileged to live in a time when I can do the same.<br /><br />
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***<br /><br />
With thanks to old friends and new on this tour: Paul, Jess, Jamie, Sorrel, Jordan, Chris and Orlando.<br /><br />
<b>Setlists:</b>
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<b>My pieces on previous Big Thief tours:</b> <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2020/03/BigThief.html">2020</a>, <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2022/03/when-i-say-infinity-i-mean-now-adrianne.html">2022</a>Rick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com4London, UK51.5072178 -0.127586223.196983963821154 -35.2838362 79.817451636178845 35.0286638tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-88611215099039374542022-12-22T16:09:00.016+00:002023-04-17T12:37:29.493+01:00Review of 2022: Part 2 – MoviesHere's part two of my Review of the Year, focusing on FILMS. Twenty 'discoveries', six stinkers, six movies re-appraised, five areas of obsession, and some bits and pieces of writing you might enjoy, he added presumptuously.<br /><br />
<b>DISCOVERIES</b><br /><br />
... being films that I saw for the first time this year, and loved.<br /><br />
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<b>1. The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier, 2021)</b> – I liked this an awful lot. Loved it, even. It’s wise and surprising and somehow unafraid in a way that few films are. In a sense, it takes a MPDG template – the struggles of a comic book artist with a hot young girlfriend – and instead shows real life, from her side. It’s a film, really, about the messiness of life, which cares deeply about its complicated characters and bothers to understand its female protagonist, rather than celebrating her capriciousness as an inscrutable virtue because she happens to be fit (hello Godard). Aside from one creaky mansplaining gag, it’s also remarkable in managing to engage with so much of contemporary life without being didactic or one-dimensional. Feminism and face-fucking; social media and relationships; art vs morality – it touches deftly on those things, thrown up naturally by the characters, and doesn’t make decisions for you. The non-cheating set-piece, Julie’s tortuous meeting with her father, and the conversations between her and Aksel late in the film are all extraordinary. As is Reinsve throughout. Even the film’s bad trip, the point at which most movies bore the shit out of me, is neat, meaningful and pays off beautifully, first as drama, then as comedy.<br /><br />
<b>2. The Small World of Sammy Lee (Ken Hughes, 1963)</b> – Newley as a neurotically quipping nebbish/mensch/loser, powering the film with a mixture of charm and nervous energy. He's a stripclub comic trying to get 300 quid in five hours to escape the beating of a lifetime. Amazing dialogue, fine Soho atmosphere, brilliant bits for Kenneth J. Warren and Warren Mitchell. The opening, in which we crawl through early-'60s Soho, is like a fucking time machine.
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<b>3. The Breaking Point (Michael Curtiz, 1950)</b> – A stunning noir, based on the same Hemingway novel as <i>To Have and Have Not</i>, with a lumpy, sweaty John Garfield playing a flat-broke family man who gets in way over his head ferrying illegal immigrants and gangsters from Mexico to California. The film has a jittery, manic quality, its massively overwritten script requiring everyone to speak too much in short, staccato sentences, as others patiently wait their turn. In the hands of these actors (not Wallace Ford, the other actors), what might have been a flaw seems more like a stylistic choice. Garfield’s last roles all feel like HUAC allegories – a macho guy, suddenly all alone, facing unbearable pressure – but even without the post-facto subtext there’s a lot going on here. <i>The Breaking Point</i>’s greatest virtue is surely its unusually adult treatment of desire. “A guy can be married and still want something exciting to happen,” the hero tells the would-be fatale (Patricia Neal), rebuffing her repeated advances. Even by her standards, Neal is sensational in this, as a vaguely tragic floozie who loves the mug, but has to couch everything in terms of a fling. There are vast currents of feeling beneath each offhand remark, and the sparks she generates with the film’s star are astonishing when you consider the haircut she’s dealing with. If Garfield is only in peak form about half the time, that’s enough, his domestic scenes immeasurably enhanced by Phyllis Thaxter’s best performance, cast as his (theoretically) unglamorous wife, as comfy as her cardigan. Though film noir’s birth as a response to WW2 has been well-documented, the more direct links between the two tend to be underreported: plenty of noir patsies (though few of the most famous ones) are returning soldiers for whom domestic life is now the hallucination, and violent action the only reality they understand. <i>The Breaking Point</i> deals with this idea superbly by setting up Garfield’s character as a man with no choice: it’s purely bad luck and the need to provide for his family that provoke him to transgress. It’s only when his wife pleads with him not to, and we see him cannily strapping handguns to the inside of a boat loft, that we understand: he wants a return to the visceral simplicity of violence as much as he wants to get a little ahead. A guy can be married and still want something exciting to happen. The film is more regularly cited as one of the first to treat a black character with real dignity, and on (close to) an equal footing with the white. If the praise directed at Juano Hernández’s performance can sometimes be a little hyperbolic because of that distinction, he is effective as Garfield’s best mate, repeatedly being ordered off the boat for sentimental but obscured reasons. Though the film has its imperfections – moments of distracting falsity, and some continuity clangers that simply feel bizarre in a Michael Curtiz film – when it gets to the crunch, it doesn’t put a foot wrong. Taking the lead trio off screen is a gamble, but that fantastically unfussy robbery sequence is about the best one on film, and leads into an absolute gut-punch of a screen death, followed by the constantly escalating tension of its climax: Garfield at breaking point, surrounded by gangsters on a moving boat. *SPOILERS* If the movie drifts, in its final reel, into a slightly corny domesticity, it then proceeds to rip your heart in two, as an impotent Neal becomes merely an observer, and a small boy stands on the dock, waiting for a father who’ll never come home.<br /><br />
<b>4. Scaramouche (George Sidney, 1952)</b> – Ingenuity: that’s what any great swashbuckler needs, from Doug zipping down the mast in <i>The Black Pirate</i> to Jack Sparrow hopping onto that second ship. <i>Scaramouche</i> has an abundance of the stuff, its dashing hero (Stewart Granger) swinging on theatre ropes, plunging through trapdoors and treating the architecture of a small town as a gymnastics arena as he morphs from carefree shagger to vengeful swordsman and part-time clown, while evading the blades of the French aristocracy. It's an exquisite movie, blessed with a delicate balance of offhand wit and genuine feeling, the unsurpassed sight of Stewart Granger in a billowing white shirt, and particularly fine performances from Janet Leigh – ideal as the idealised good girl – and Mel Ferrer, playing the superlative foil (who's magnificent with a foil). The casting is inspired across the board. You can spot the film's weak points – some crap back-projection; the sequences with Granger as the clown Scaramouche, which have a dramatic purpose but no intrinsic entertainment value; Eleanor Parker pushing too hard as Granger’s red-haired, fiery-tempered old flame; the meandering of the third act – and yet it’s hard to care too much about them. Because the movie is just so much fun, climaxing with that exhilarating eight-minute duel, still the longest swordfight ever put on screen, and probably the best. The genre works when it’s light on its feet, its heroes improvising in the fact of mortal danger, and made serious – but not joyless – by personal tragedy. <i>Scaramouche</i> does everything that matters so well. It was written, bizarrely, by the same team as <i>Mrs Miniver</i>.<br /><br />
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<b>5. The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, 2022)</b> – Easily McDonagh’s best screen work since <i>In Bruges</i>, those derivative, cheaply postmodern, dazzled-by-Hollywood films he made in the interim superseded by something specific, profound and intrinsically, incredibly funny. Colin Farrell is the dull-witted nice guy – living on an island off Ireland in 1923 – who finds himself confounded by the former best friend (Brendan Gleeson) who won’t talk to him anymore. When Farrell refuses to take no for an answer, Gleeson gives him an ultimatum: either leave me alone or I’ll start cutting off my fingers. It's essentially a <i>Roan Inish</i>-style folk tale, infused with both the end-of-an-island melancholy of Michael Powell’s <i>The Edge of the World</i>, and McDonagh’s distinctive sense of humour, both pungent and pained. Whereas his Hollywood missteps felt like rip-offs of other people’s calling cards (first Tarantino, then the Coens), here he’s on his own turf and creating something that comes closest in tone to the deceptively fatalistic <i>Father Ted</i>, with only the utter blackness of McDonagh’s despair setting it apart. The writer-director is dealing, too, with real themes, and themes that actually matter: the desire for legacy – the human need to leave a mark, to create something that endures – versus the beautiful, ephemeral simplicity of enhancing the world immediately around you, as you live in it. That question is purposefully corrupted by McDonagh, who decides that coming down on one side of the argument isn’t necessary once loneliness has got its claws into these characters. The clarity of his vision, the cultural veracity of this world and the typically apposite song score (augmented by Carter Burwell’s strings) are all major virtues, and there’s the finest fetishisation of finger mutilation since Paul Schrader developed his interest in The Yakuza. It’s only McDonagh’s overly conventional visual sense and the film’s muted ending – first drawn-out, then abrupt – that disappoint, coupled to a slight dearth of emotional high spots. The central story, while affecting, doesn’t possess the seismic impact of the stars' pyrotechnics in Bruges, and at times pales alongside Farrell's scenes with his practical and literate sister (Kerry Condon). What lingers above all, though, is Barry Keoghan’s performance as the guileless, possibly stupid Dominic, the film’s damaged and misshapen heart. Everything he does is so strange and affecting and funny, and “there goes that dream, then,” is simply a perfect line, delivered in a way you’ll never forget.<br /><br />
<b>6. Elvis (Baz Luhrmann, 2022)</b> – An orgiastic Baz Luhrmann phantasmagoria, bombarding you with iconography, mythos and music. It’s only when the film occasionally (though increasingly) stops for a dialogue scene that the plates stop spinning and smash on the floor. A biopic needs a strong angle more than it needs fidelity to the facts, and the way this one uses Elvis to talk about race, sexual hypocrisy and creative integrity is superb. It is too long, with a paucity of great scenes in its final hour, but at its best it is just irresistible. Its stadium set-piece is simply a masterpiece, and ‘If I Can Dream’ isn’t too far behind. Butler carries it all, and if Hanks at times becomes a Mitteleuropean cartoon, the compensations include an absolutely explosive cameo from Alton Mason as Little Richard. A film that loves music – and cinema.
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<b>7. Primary Colo(u)rs (Mike Nichols, 1998)</b> – An unusually nuanced film about politics, without either the wish-fulfilment of Capra and Sorkin or the empty cynicism of New Hollywood. Instead it argues that the indulging of personal flaws and political hedging is a price worth considering for an administration that will at least help some of the people, some of the time. While its periodic stabs at comedy and satire don’t really work, as a drama about disillusionment – and that question of purity vs practicality – it’s excellent. Playing the barely-veiled Bill Clinton, Travolta gives the best performance of his career, exhibiting a charm that’s irresistible in all the senses of that word, and nailing his character’s smallness, greatness and self-pity. There’s also unforgettable work from Emma Thompson as his pained, pragmatic wife – a wily operator hobbled by hurt – and from Billy Bob Thornton, disappearing into his role as the predatory, perma-swearing Carville figure. If the scene-stealing interventions from Larry Hagman and a rather preachy Kathy Bates are markedly less complex, they’re certainly commanding, while Adrian Lester completes the ensemble as the audience avatar (and George Stephanopoulous surrogate), the actor on the cusp of a Hollywood career that never materialised. That isn’t a showy performance, but he has the right, old-fashioned mix of charm and naivete, as well as one superb scene in which he's sent to pay off the father of a pregnant girl, and feeds him the most horrible, reassuring smile.<br />
<b>Best production surprise:</b> a group photo of the young Travolta, Thompson and Bates in 1973 that actually looks real!<br />
<b>Worst production surprise:</b> it’s bad enough that Nichols plays ‘On the Road Again’ by Willie Nelson to signify the campaign team being on the road. But then he does it again.<br /><br />
<b>8. The Prisoner of Zenda (Richard Thorpe, 1952)</b> – Considering that there was no need to make this movie, it is just wonderful. It’s a remake of the 1937 classic, with the same script and the same score. In theory all it does is add Technicolor and replace the stars with more fashionable ones. With these stars, though – three titans of ‘40s British cinema, since transplanted to Hollywood – that leads to something genuinely new. Kerr is absolutely sensational as Flavia: a queen buffeted by the winds of fate, her performance like a fire beneath glass. A frog-faced James Mason luxuriates in his dialogue, rocking a startlingly contemporary trim as the mellifluous, gleefully villainous Rupert of Hentzau. And while Stewart Granger is a limited actor, he’s a fine star, born of sudden emotion, baritone exclamation and billowing shirts. If these ‘50s swashbucklers are really about anything, then they’re about his torso. The action climax is stunningly done, and if the film is otherwise fairly talky, there are flashes of inventive direction throughout, most notably during Rupert and Michael’s tete-a-tete, in which their plotting becomes a conversation between two armchairs and two sets of hands, the heads largely unseen.
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<b>9. Romance on the High Seas (Michael Curtiz, 1947)</b> – Doris Day's debut is an absolutely wonderful musical, with good tunes, good jokes, and chemistry between the star and Jack Carson (her acting mentor) that is simply off the charts. Don DeFore and Janis Paige play a married couple whose mutual suspicions unwittingly set up a cruise-ship romance between nightclub singer Day and private eye Carson. He's there to find out if she's cheating on her husband. She isn't married. They fall in love. FARCE ensues. Michael Curtiz's direction is occasionally laborious (he's oddly fastidious about the idea that we witness each tenuous visual misunderstanding in full) but more often elegant, and allied to stunning Technicolor photography from Woody Bredell. The supporting cast is just out of this world, with S. Z. Sakall unstintingly hilarious as DeFore's panicked, good-natured uncle, and Oscar Levant peerless as a depressed suitor; his shtick didn't always work on screen, but here he's perfect. There are bits too for veteran character comics Eric Blore (playing an ill doctor) and Franklin Pangborn (very funny as a voyeuristic hotel clerk). Busby Berkeley's numbers are relatively restrained, but for the most part utterly charming. If Jack Carson's calypso number is just cheerily racist, Avon Long’s brilliantly-choreographed ‘The Tourist Trade’ delightfully satirises American myopia, and Day’s vocalisations of the Styne-Kahn songs are some of her best. The sight of her bouncing around a nightclub stage, shouting, "I'm in love, I'm in love, I'm in love, I'm in love, I'm in love!" is as good a justification as any for the invention of the talking picture. This is the most enjoyable musical – or rom-com – that I’ve seen in a long time: hilarious, romantic escapism with a scintillating central duo.<br /><br />
<b>10. Cash on Demand (Quentin Lawrence, 1961)</b> – ‘A Christmas Carol’ reimagined as a heist movie. Peter Cushing is a sadistic bank manager visited on 23 December by a psychopath armed with endless intel, four holdalls, and a route to his host’s loved ones. It’s an exceptional festive film: tense, witty and very moving in its starchy, understated British way, with Cushing in simply imperious form. Also there’s snow everywhere and the score keeps segueing from ‘The First Nowell’ into an eerie thriller register. What a treat.
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<b>11. The Detective (Gordon Douglas, 1968)</b> – Perhaps the best film ever made about the Nixonian culture wars. Ol’ Blue Eyes is a cop – and old-fashioned liberal – navigating a new world of gays, drugs and noisy activists. Much Younger Blue Eyes (Lee Remick) is terrific as his Mia Farrow-ish wife, a nymphomaniac. Admittedly it’s hard to tell, at times, whether this is accomplished moviemaking or simply an incredibly vivid snapshot of its age – in which gays are deserving of our respect, but also a different species; in which police violence is abhorrent but perhaps worth covering up. But its score, Remick’s performance, and Douglas’s use of the stars’ faces (often depicted in straight-on POV close-up during the domestic sequences; usually captured in medium profile and flux during the procedural elements) are all outstanding virtues. The only real false notes are Jacqueline Bisset’s flat performance, and the laborious reveal. A terrific movie.<br /><br />
<b>12. Dig! (Ondi Timoner, 2004)</b> – A stunning as-it-happened documentary about the contrasting fortunes of Portland scenesters The Dandy Warhols – who make it massive – and their frenemies, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, who don’t. The film attributes the latter development to the BJM’s frontman, Anton Newcombe, who is depicted as a genius, the victim of both a tough childhood and a serious drug habit, and, most crucially, an absolute fucking nightmare. The case for him being a nightmare is, incidentally, rather more compelling than the one for him being a genius. At one point, an A&R talking head tells us that the BJM’s crucial private showcase for an industry bigwig was “a disaster”, to which my reaction was, “Oh, they must have played a bad show.” No, they beat each other up on stage. The camera later finds Newcombe sitting disconsolately outside the building. “You fucking broke my sitar, motherfucker,” he laments. Such black comedy gold is augmented by a deep sadness, and vast, telling insights about the music industry, difficult people and the nature of ‘authenticity’. I’d argue that the Dandies made it bigger partly because they just had better tunes, but they also compromised: there’s nothing in their polished festival shows that’s halfway as exciting as the early clips of them in their Oregon element.
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<b>13. Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021)</b> – In one sense, a frankly terrible movie to choose while experiencing the body horror of post-op convalescence, managing to handily consolidate most of the more unwatchable things imaginable into one handy film. But while its female serial killer is impregnated by a car (yes we do see the birth, thank you for asking), and breaks her own nose on a sink, it's also a secretly sentimental, latently compassionate movie. And that dance on the fire truck contains everything. On the subject of hybrid children, I suppose <i>Titane</i> is most superficially Cronenberg’s <i>Crash</i> + <i>The Imposter</i> + <i>My Life as a Courgette</i>. Most importantly, though, it isn't the self-consciously strange, even attention-seeking film I’d anticipated but a picture about capitalism’s fetishising of bodies and objects, and the connections we make or sever in order to evade it.<br /><br />
<b>14. Mission: Impossible – Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie, 2018)</b> – Easily the best of the series: it’s about the story and the action, and both are exceptional. In one sense it’s a greatest hits package culled from previous films (free-climbing, crashing to earth in a deadweight vehicle, exhausted hand-to-hand combat in the open-air...) but the fight scenes have such weight and kinetic energy to them, and the chases overflow with invention. The bathroom scrap and the sequence in a Grand Palais bar stuffed with assassins are as good as anything in a Hollywood actioner this century. I enjoyed the main villain too, though it’s Vanessa Kirby who completely steals the film, playing an arms dealer with a sideline in flirtation. The only real flaws are Cruise's slightly creepy characterisation ("You need to walk away," he says, like a cult leader encountering a dissenter) and the overdone sentiment: it's a series that rarely gets emotion quite right, and the scene where Cruise comforts a downed gendarme is infinitely more affecting than the ladled-on, soft-focus guff with his wife (a never-knowingly-underemoting Michelle Monaghan).
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<b>15. The Pitch o’ Chance/Nugget Jim's Pardner/The Pilgrim (Frank Borzage, 1915-6)</b> – Borzage is probably the least known of the great Golden Era directors. Perhaps because his sincere, romantic style has gone out of fashion. Perhaps because he made films called things like '<i>Nugget Jim's Pardner</i>'. But he directed Janet Gaynor in two of the three films that won her the first Best Actress Oscar (two of his late silent masterworks, <i>7th Heaven</i> and <i>Street Angel</i>, made one of the five best films noir (the haunted <i>Moonrise</i>) and had an unparalleled gift for crafting emotional Americana (<i>Lucky Star</i> and <i>The Vanishing Virginian</i>). My <b>#AgeOfBorzage</b> project kicked off this year (let's get it trending, and involves trying to see every one of his extant films in chronological order. Beyond the box-office behemoths and critical darlings of cinema's early years, it's essentially pot luck as to which silent films remain in existence; indeed, only a quarter of them do. Incredibly, Borzage's 1915 debut, a two-reel Western called <i>The Pitch o' Chance</i>, is among those spared by fate, and a pair of his follow-ups have also been preserved and restored. All three films are special in their own way. <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-pitch-o-chance/">The Pitch o' Chance</a></i>, made by Borzage when he was just 21, is remarkably accomplished for a first film: a tender, deeply touching story offering early evidence of the director's interest in the transformative power of love. <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/nugget-jims-pardner/">Nugget Jim's Pardner</a></i> is a thoroughly likeable comedy with a perfect ending. While <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-pilgrim-1916/">The Pilgrim</a></i> sees a leap forward in terms of Borzage’s style, being a character piece told largely through its images. I can't wait to continue.<br /><br />
<b>16. A Good Marriage (Éric Rohmer, 1982)</b> – Sporadically superb mid-period Rohmer, centred on a scintillating performance from Béatrice Romand (Laura in perhaps his most celebrated film, <i>Claire’s Knee</i>). She’s the capricious, forthright Sabine, who tires of relationships with married men and so decides to get married herself – setting her cap for an emotionally unavailable lawyer who seems scarcely interested. At times it skirts close to self-parody in its sheer Frenchness and maleness (the women are beguiling, the men all have terrible hair and look about 50), but Rohmer is too interested in his protagonist, her convictions and flaws – and Romand is simply too talented – for it not to dig deep. Amid slow scenes and a certain gimmickry of concept that may be its characters’, and may not, it has moments of pain, honesty and hypocrisy that are utterly real, before one of the most beautiful and exhilarating endings I’ve ever seen. Yes Rohmer creates intriguing characters, and delves into enduring questions about sex, but the most extraordinary element of his canon is how he evokes the feeling of love, not between two characters but between one character and the viewer.
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<b>17. Righting Wrongs (Corey Yuen, 1986)</b> – Kung fu cinema’s secret weapon, Yuen Biao, plays a prosecutor who tires of defendants wriggling off the hook, and so resolves to start killing them instead. Cynthia Rothrock is the Lady-Di-haired cop who decides that isn’t fine. In story terms, this Corey Yuen actioner is undernourished and rather muddled, but it’s also oddly moving, genuinely bleak, and packed with the most incredible action sequences, the explosive, frenetic fight scenes complemented by car chases, abseiling and freefalling. A small classic. Original-ending fans: assemble!<br /><br />
<b>18. The Cimarron Kid (Budd Boetticher, 1952)</b> – God praise Boetticher. His first Western is just the most stunningly-directed film. There’s so much going on in every frame, but with such a perfect hierarchy of elements. He’s unfussy or stylish as the occasion demands: beautifully blocking the first convention of outlaws; lovingly lingering on Audie Murphy’s body as the hero lounges in his sick bed; indulging an inspired fondness for off-screen gunfire leading to dances of death... And no-one ever did a cinematic “uh-oh, who’s that in the background?” better than Budd. The plot is pat in places – a hard-luck story with a few messy joins – and the ending is dreadful, impacted by both censorship and commercial concerns, but taken as a whole this might just be Murphy’s best vehicle. The supporting characters are particularly vivid, and their fates gratifyingly hard to guess – at least until that botch-job of a finish.
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<b>19. Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972)</b> – My chronological take:<br />
0-5 mins: This is boring. Is it just this?<br />
5-40 mins: This is incredible. The travelling, lamplit figures diminishing in the frame. Chilly childhood memories, thawed by that maternal exhalation of “come”. Ullmann on death watch but there for the taking if the doctor wants her. (He doesn’t.) Their flashback scene: spiteful, erotic, pathetic. Ohhhh, the red washes are blood.<br />
40-55 mins: Where’s Liv gone?<br />
55 mins: Bergman, what the FUCK is wrong with you?<br />
55-65 mins: Wow, he’s given us one of the most beautiful endings of all time. Pure Rohmer.<br />
66 mins: Oh no, it’s carrying on.<br />
67-75 mins: Even worse, there’s a dream sequence.<br />
75-89 mins: Well that was invigoratingly nasty.<br />
89-91 mins: [quiet whimpering]<br /><br />
<b>20. Daisy Kenyon (Otto Preminger, 1947)</b> – An excellent melodrama, with three of the era’s most interesting, nuanced characters engaged in an unpredictable love triangle – the tortured Crawford torn between Andrews’ charming but ruthless attorney and Fonda’s depressed, widowed war vet. The latter delivers every one of his exit lines in some unexpected and affecting way. The film's second half isn’t as deft or as swaggeringly confident as its first, becoming circular and plotty, but it remains intriguing, and Preminger’s inspired utilisation of a ringing phone as the movie reaches its climax is a stunning piece of filmmaking, half-inched by Leone for <i>Once Upon a Time in America</i>.<br />
***<br /><br />
<b>AND SIX OF THE WORST</b><br />
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<b>1. The Beales of Grey Gardens (David and Albert Maysles, 2006)</b> – Shapeless, aimless and pointless. Without a proper narrative this time, it’s just costumes, songs and the bleak, unilluminating spectacle of untreated mental illness.<br /><br />
<b>2. Sutter's Gold (James Cruze, 1935)</b> – I’ve seen 773 films from the 1930s. I think this is the worst. Edward Arnold’s blameless Swiss flautist is accused of a double-murder; leaves his (apparently American) children to move to New York; gets a job as a streetcar driver; is mistaken for a scab and hospitalised by striking workers; and heads for California. These aren’t spoilers, that’s the first 13 minutes of the film. From then on, it’s sanctimony, cardboard characters, terrible comedy, embarrassing philosophising and farcical acting, across an apparently endless number of short scenes, all of them boring. Arnold quickly gives up on his Swiss accent – and apparently on the notion of movie stardom, right before our very eyes – though incredibly the great Lee Tracy is just as bad, well out of his comfort zone, and left high and dry by the appalling material. An unremittingly and eye-wateringly awful film.<br />
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<b>3. The Last Movie (Dennis Hopper, 1971)</b> – This reminds me of that Paul McCartney quote about taking LSD: “We only use one-tenth of our brain. Just think what we could accomplish if we could tap that hidden part.” <i>The Last Movie</i> is what happens when you take so many drugs that you can only use one per cent of your brain.<br /><br />
<b>4. Posse from Hell (Herbert Coleman, 1961)</b> – An amazingly boring Audie Murphy Western (probably his worst), with cardboard characters, predictable plot developments and the star at his most sullen and shallow. Even a supporting cast featuring Lee van Cleef and James Bell can’t help – not when the dialogue’s this dire. The film’s sole virtue: a climactic gunfight that isn’t too bad, opening and closing with a bang, and featuring an embryonic version of Rooster Cogburn’s 1969 ride to destiny. The posse are from Hell, incidentally, in the sense that they’re not very good at their job.<br />
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<b>5. The Boogie Man Will Get You (Lew Landers, 1942)</b> – A teeth-achingly awful comedy, clearly meant to leech off the success of stage smash <i>Arsenic and Old Lace</i>, with a young couple plagued by murderers and weirdos at their new heritage hotel. In a remarkable misjudgement, Karloff plays the insane scientist as an absent, camp old duffer – rather than just reprising his Mad Doctor persona – and this is the first time I’ve ever seen the incomparable Lorre defeated by his material, though he still has his moments. Larry Parks is just mesmerisingly bad, mugging endlessly as the exasperated hero; it would be cruel to say that he didn’t even embarrass himself this much in front of HUAC, but it would also be funny, so let’s say it. This is a loud, stupid, laughless, incoherent film, and a complete waste of everybody’s time and energy, including mine.<br /><br />
<b>6. Room 237 (Rodney Ascher, 2012)</b> – The Talking Shite Championships of the World: a deeply annoying film in which several of the most pretentious and/or insane people on Earth claim that <i>The Shining</i> is a metaphor for the Holocaust, sex, the genocide of Native Americans or the faking of the Moon Landings. It’s about one per cent as enjoyable as it sounds (the one per cent being that now and then there’ll be a coincidence that makes you go, “Oh yeah, that’s nearly interesting”), with the choice of visuals somehow just as irritating as the interviewees – and not as varied. At one point, the Moon Guy focuses in on the key to Door 237, saying: “The only capital letters on the key are R-O-O-M-N, and there’s only two words you can come up with that have those letters in ‘em, and that’s ‘moon’ and ‘room’.” But he’s wrong. There’s also ‘moron’. It's like being detained on your night off by the nine loneliest pub bores on earth, and somehow even worse than <i>The Shining</i> itself.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>RE-APPRAISALS</b><br /><br />
... being movies I revisited, and changed my mind about.<br /><br />
<b>THREE UP</b><br /><br />
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<b>1. Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)</b> – “Well, you gotta live, no matter what happens.” An essential film, of course, and yet not quite up there with Ford's greatest. That was what I thought until this year. And there's nothing like the zeal of the convert, is there? It is an impeccably constructed film, revitalising and reinventing what was by then a maligned and moribund genre. In one sense, it’s a manifest destiny Western, but it’s also an interventionist parable, a hymn to the outsider, a swaggering satire about American morality. Its heroes are an escaped convict, a sex worker, an alcoholic, and a card cheat who shoots people in the back. Its principal villain is a bank president. This was 1939 and John Ford was still “a socialist democrat – always left.” Ford isn’t merely subverting the hypocrisy of modern America, though, he’s picking at the fabric of the genre: his hero is introduced stranded in the desert with a lame horse; there’s no action for an hour, merely talking. What talking, though; and what art. Welles famously watched the film 40 times while prepping Kane (though I've seen it more often than that, and I'm not prepping anything). When Louise Platt faints in the deserted compound, the ceilinged sets, low angles and shadow-play on the walls are pointing the way towards Kane vs Leland. A mention too for that brief and simple shot of two diverging paths early in the film: as neat an illustration of Ford’s singular genius as you’ll ever see. Then in the final third, the gratification of action: that stagecoach set-piece with its kinetic energy, its grace notes and Yakima Canutt stuntwork; that downbeat, gloriously-conceived gunfight, treated by critics as an underwhelming afterthought. Nothing, though, is quite as memorable as Thomas Mitchell delivering Dudley Nichols dialogue: his Doc Boone would be by far the greatest performance of most actors’ careers; it’s Mitchell’s second or third best of 1939. Trevor is fantastic too: you’d never accuse her of subtlety, but she commands your attention: that throb in her voice, the thought that goes into her physicality, the beguiling, unexpected softness of her and Wayne. What’s not to like? A bit of shoddy back-projection, a bit too much crap comedy in the opening reels. That’s all. One of Ford's greatest, and therefore one of the greatest by anyone. A second viewing only revealed <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/stagecoach/1/">more delights</a>.<br /><br />
<b>2. Sorcerer (William Friedkin, 1977)</b> – Friedkin’s filthy, hard-as-nails <i>Wages of Fear</i> swings from verité to surrealism like the lost link between <i>Battle of Algiers</i> and <i>Fitzcarraldo</i>. The exposition is so artful and economical, and an incredible Tangerine Dream score underscores the fatalism and sense of dread, as the car-chase maestro proves he's just as adept with slow-crawling trucks.<br /><br />
<b>3. Grosse Pointe Blank (George Armitage, 1997)</b> – It has that glib, smug, postmodern post-<i>Reservoir Dogs</i> thing but so much more heart and originality than any of its rivals. There are three or four great scenes, and the bursts of action are unfailingly effective – not least because they're so brief. Driver is just terrific.<br /><br />
<b>THREE DOWN</b><br /><br />
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<b>1. They Were Expendable (John Ford, 1945)</b>, in which Ford serves up one of his most confounding pictures, a challenge to critics along the lines of, “Try to work out what the hell you think of that.” It has perhaps John Wayne’s worst performance (his self-consciousness presumably stoked by the director's constant bullying on set about his supposed draft-dodging), and yet one of the great scenes of his career. Throughout the movie, moments of breathtaking beauty jostle for space with the kind of ugly, prosaic filmmaking that tends to accompany any state-sanctioned military film made in the US. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/they-were-expendable/">Full appraisal here.</a><br /><br />
<b>2. Meet John Doe (Frank Capra, 1941)</b> – <i>Mr Deeds Goes to Hell</i>. Gary Cooper is an aww-shucks-guy and bush-league baseball pitcher who agrees to help fast-talking reporter Barbara Stanwyck boost her paper’s circulation, by posing as the disaffected, suicidal ‘John Doe’ figure she just dreamt up. Soon the John Doe campaign is sweeping the nation, providing the perfect launchpad for fascist financier and presidential hopeful, Edward Arnold (who has his own blackshirted corps of motorbike-riding thugs). It's an objectively fascinating but also ludicrous, over-familiar film that trades too much on Riskin and Capra’s tried and tested tricks. By 1941, and post-Lindbergh and the Bund, the cagey optimism of their ‘30s films has also been replaced by a muscular libertarianism, and a tendency to alternately patronise and demonise the malleable masses. Most of the film feels as deep as a trailer. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/meet-john-doe/">Full review here.</a><br /><br />
<b>3. Running on Empty (Sidney Lumet, 1988)</b> – "I just need you to know: I don't know what I'm doing... and I love you." An unforgettable though unbelievably flawed film, lit up by its performances. The script (by Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s mum) is disorientatingly and at times comically inauthentic, while failing to explore the more intriguing elements of its premise: that of two left-wing radicals still on the run with their kids, a decade and a half after bombing a napalm lab. Wouldn’t it be fascinating if their son wanted to study music at Juilliard? Not necessarily, no. Yet this film (and that subplot) is justified by showcasing the extraordinary sensitivity of River Phoenix, who gives probably the most conventional of his great performances. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/running-on-empty-1988/">More here.</a><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>OBSESSIONS</b><br />
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<b>1. London films!</b> – My current hobby is time-travelling to Londons past through the medium of film. This year, I luxuriated in the locations of films great (<i>The Small World of Sammy Lee</i>, see 'Discoveries'), good (<i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/theatre-of-blood/">Theatre of Blood</a></i>, <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/bunny-lake-is-missing/">Bunny Lake Is Missing</a></i>, <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/otley/">Otley</a></i>, <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/a-dandy-in-aspic/">A Dandy in Aspic</a></i>, <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-galloping-major/">The Galloping Major</a></i>, <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/gideons-day/">Gideon's Day</a></i>) and absolutely fucking terrible (<i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/brannigan/">Brannigan</a></i>, <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/hennessy/">Hennessy</a></i>).<br /><br />
<b>2. Audie Murphy</b> – I've long subscribed to Murphy's Law. That's the idea that although Audie Murphy wasn't much of an actor, the most-decorated soldier of World War Two entered the Western at the time when the genre was at its most daring, and these often well-written movies used him (and his singular baggage) in fascinating ways. But actually I'm coming round to him as an actor too; certainly he's superb in his final film, <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/a-time-for-dying/">A Time for Dying</a></i>, in an extended cameo as a wise and fatalistic Jesse James. That was one of <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/tag/audie-murphy/reviews/">11 Murphy Westerns I watched this year</a>. Other highlights were the early vehicle, <i>The Cimarron Kid</i> (see 'Discoveries'), <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-duel-at-silver-creek/">The Duel at Silver Creek</a></i> – notable for one absolutely exhilarating flash of action – and the fascinating <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/hell-bent-for-leather/">Hell Bent for Leather</a></i>. <i>Posse from Hell</i>, as I already intimated, was not so hot.<br /><br />
<b>3. Budd Boetticher</b> – Like Frank Borzage (see 'Discoveries'), the name 'Budd Boetticher' serves as a password in old-movie circles. He's simply the best Western director that most people have never heard of, reaching his zenith with the 'Ranown' cycle: six (or seven, if you count <i>Westbound</i>, which Boetticher didn't) remarkable chamber pieces featuring Randolph Scott as a greying, taciturn hell-bent on revenge. This year I dipped into some deeper cuts. His first and last Westerns both featured Audie Murphy: <i>The Cimarron Kid</i> is akin to a mission statement; <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/a-time-for-dying/">A Time for Dying</a></i> has a hero who looks like Cristiano Ronaldo and acts even worse, but also moments that'll never leave you. After that, I went onto <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-man-from-the-alamo/">The Man from the Alamo</a></i> (stylistically valuable), <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/bullfighter-and-the-lady/">The Bullfighter and the Lady</a></i> (a deeply flawed labour of love), and <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/horizons-west/">Horizons West</a></i> (crap).<br /><br />
<b>4. My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946)</b> – My health wasn't great this summer, so I ended up missing two big gigs and my summer holiday. On the night I was failing to see Phoebe Bridgers at Brixton Academy, I decided I should do something else that I'd love and which I wouldn't have otherwise been able to. But what? Well, watch <i>My Darling Clementine</i>, of course. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2010/04/my-darling-clementine-pre-release.html">The Pre-Release Version</a>, <i>of course</i>. Ford's first postwar Western is a 99-minute art film about loss and nation-building, with some action at the end. And it does just about everything right. Though its principal characters – hero, villain, anti-hero, madonna and whore – are the purest refinements of those archetypes, with destinies that are therefore ineluctable, what the director does with those characters is purely Fordian – and utterly new. The film remains as compelling an argument as any that Ford is by far the greatest director there has ever been, and everyone else has just sort of been piddling around in his wake. That was my conclusion <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/my-darling-clementine/">back in July</a>, and <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/my-darling-clementine/1/">another viewing a few months later</a> did nothing to dispel that impression.<br /><br />
<b>5. John Ford generally</b> – The daddy. I revisited favourites for fun (<i>Stagecoach</i>, <i>Clementine</i>, <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/wagon-master/">Wagon Master</a></i>), and mined uneven films both familiar (<i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-sun-shines-bright/">The Sun Shines Bright</a></i>, <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-whole-towns-talking/">The Whole Town's Talking</a></i>) and new (<i>Gideon's Day</i>) for recurring themes, images and obsessions.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>MY BEST WRITING ON FILM</b>
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<b>1. EMPIRE – The Masterpiece: <i>Angels with Dirty Faces</i></b> – For the October issue, a thousand words on Cagney, poverty and gangsterism (above).<br /><br />
<b>2. <i>Remember the Night</i>: <a href="https://twitter.com/rickburin/status/1605211405640163328?cxt=HHwWgICz6ZjR7cYsAAAA">'A good dose of schmerz'</a> (Indicator, 2022)</b> – A 14-page booklet essay about the movie's making, meaning and enduring importance. This limited edition Blu-ray is available to order <a href="https://www.powerhousefilms.co.uk/products/remember-the-night-le">here</a>.<br /><br />
<b>3. I played Zuzu in <i>It’s A Wonderful Life</i> – then I was jerked out of Hollywood at 15</b> – An emotional interview with Karolyn Grimes about child stardom, pain and the movies. For the i Paper. <a href="https://inews.co.uk/culture/film/zuzu-actress-its-a-wonderful-life-karolyn-grimes-hollywood-2017499">Link here.</a><br /><br />
<b>4. My Sight & Sound ballot</b> – It's always been an ambition of mine to vote in Sight & Sound's poll of the 100 greatest films of all time, held once a decade. And this time I got to. My ballot (with notes) will be on the BFI website in the new year, <a href="https://twitter.com/rickburin/status/1600122783152807936">but for now it's here</a>.<br /><br />
<b>5. <a href="https://inews.co.uk/culture/film/avatar-the-way-of-water-was-a-waste-of-13-years-2032059">Some ruminations on <i>Avatar</i></b></a> (and Marvel, and 3D, and the career of James Cameron) for the i Paper, ahead of the release of <i>The Way of Water</i>.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Thanks for reading.Rick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com2London, UK51.5072178 -0.127586223.196983963821154 -35.2838362 79.817451636178845 35.0286638tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-32366842682070726402022-12-19T12:26:00.009+00:002022-12-29T09:17:33.041+00:00Review of 2022: Part 1 – BooksAll the books I read in 2022, capriciously ranked, compulsively reviewed.<br /><br />
<b>FICTION</b><br /><br />
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At the risk of <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2021/12/Books2021.html">repeating myself</a> following last year's rhapsody on the subject of <i>The Age of Innocence</i>, my favourite novel of the year was by Edith Wharton. Her Midwest masterpiece, <b>Ethan Frome (1911)</b>, is heartbreaking, then horrific – a devastating trick on its audience that leaves you slack-jawed and queasy. Abandoning the drawing rooms, wood-panelled libraries and elegant witticisms of New York for the inarticulate sincerity and abject poverty of rural America, her pen alights on Ethan Frome, a man irreparably damaged by some physical and spiritual smash-up in his distant past. And then we get the whole story, climaxing with the gut-punch to end them all. The prose is beautifully balanced, the emotions so real that they're yours, and if the villainy initially seems too simplistic, that's all in the service of the pay-off. "I doubt I’ll read a better book this year," I wrote in March. And reader, I didn't.<br /><br />
There was serious competition, though, as I plunged into a host of classics I'd been long neglecting. George Eliot's <b>Middlemarch (1872)</b> will be with me for a long time. Dealing with three pairs of lovers in a rural English town of the 1830s, it’s wise, emotionally overpowering and blessed with a remarkable psychological complexity. Like the best of Philip Roth, it is preoccupied with the unknowability of others. I haven’t read a book that captures so perfectly the way in which we talk with one another at cross-purposes, our readings of situations coloured by our peculiarities, prejudices and degrees of self-obsession. Eliot makes us complicit in those misreadings, leading us in one direction before catching us red-handed, her narrator cautioning us to not be too hasty. She draws her characters so sharply – with an almost merciless clarity – but then forgives them their transgressions. None of that, though, makes her forget to be a smartarse. It’s a book about life, really: about self-delusion, change, and the way our hopes are variously realised, modified or crushed.<br /><br />
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I suppose that's what <b>The Portrait of a Lady (1881)</b> is about too. It's a masterpiece of a slow-burner from Henry James, presenting a young American woman, drunk on freedom, full of ideas, a little too full of pride, who unwittingly entrances a vigorous industrialist, a stolid lord and a consumptive aristocrat, before being manipulated into a relationship with a monstrous aesthete. It took me a while to become attuned to the turns of James’s mind and pen – his long and mannered sentences, overflowing with complex concepts, dressed in the superfluities of Victorian prose – but once I did, I was riveted. And if the serialised nature of the book’s creation results in an imperfect pace, that has virtues of its own: a languorous opening section that we look back upon as an evocation of a lost Eden, followed by lurches forward in time and rapidly accreting plot twists, time going too quickly now, dragging us away from that which is irrevocably past. It's a book driven by its characters, who perform roles out of melodrama (victim, villain, fallen woman, tragic hero) while possessed of a minute and complex shading. Not for James the crisp immediacy of his friend and contemporary, Wharton; he is more obscure and stealthy, his lady graduating from a glazed and bright-eyed complacency to a dreadful greatness and a fate made inescapable by both her virtues and flaws.<br /><br />
I do occasionally read novels that are less than a hundred years old. Like P. G. Wodehouse's <b>The Code of the Woosters (1938)</b>, a mere 84, and quite possibly the funniest book I've ever read. Having come to Jeeves and Wooster absurdly late, I've been going through the oeuvre in order. While <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2020/12/Books2020.html">the short stories are mostly terrific</a> and, after the misstep of the first novel (with its rather dated commitment to extended periods of blackface), <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2021/12/Books2021.html">the second proved to be a return to form</a>, this third full-length outing is on a completely different level. The plot – which sees Bertie tormented at Totleigh Towers by the continuous re-appearance of three inanimate objects: an antique silver cow creamer, a policeman's helmet, and a notebook filled with bile – is masterfully assembled, and somehow every word that Wodehouse chooses is the correct one. I must have laughed out loud a dozen times. One to return to whenever I need a bit of cheering up, I think.<br /><br />
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Though I watch Orson Welles' 1942 film of <b>The Magnificent Ambersons</b> all the damn time, and voted for it in <a href="https://twitter.com/rickburin/status/1600122783152807936?s=46&t=0Dz1xjHXc1-hCxO0-mtsKA">my <i>Sight and Sound</i> top 10</a>, I only just got around to reading Booth Tarkington's source novel. It was a sensational success in 1918, winning the Pulitzer, but is now largely derided or dismissed. I found the book deeply moving and surprisingly modern – aside from its occasional yet eye-watering racism and an impenetrably dated opening chapter during which I had to google half the words (they mostly turned out to be types of hat). It’s about the fall of a wealthy Midwest family, and the comeuppance – and ultimate redemption – of a prideful mother’s boy named George Amberson Minafer. He reigns over an aristocratic (though nouveau riche) milieu and possesses no real ambition beyond being “a yachtsman”, but as the automobile is introduced and the town changes (“It was spreading, incredibly. And as it heaved and spread, it befouled itself, and darkened its sky”), the old world dies, and, as it does, George makes the fateful decision to interfere in his widowed mother’s lovelife. Like many (most?) great novels, it’s an ambivalent book: a paean to a lost world, but a world that produced Georgie, that handsome but overweening monster. It is also vividly atmospheric and wonderfully witty, with unforgettable characters, a rich sense of irony, and a great rhythm and poetry to its dialogue. Only the ending stutters, radiating “oh shit, how do I wrap this up” vibes, as a central character makes a sudden and bafflingly-conceived visit to a psychic medium.<br /><br />
<b>The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman (1998)</b>, the first novel by <i>Withnail & I</i> writer-director Bruce Robinson, knocked me sideways. In the wind-blasted Broadstairs winter of 1957, Thomas goes in search of some grubby photographs and instead finds himself – or lack thereof. This book reads like a challenge, in which Robinson must fashion a heartrending coming-of-age novel from the most offputting material imaginable. Its 15-year-old hero – on the surface irredeemably damaged – begins the book by repeatedly soiling himself, before poring over animal porn and indulging in animal torture, while trapped in an airless house that stinks of dog shit, violence and boiling meat. The result, somehow, is deeply and enduringly affecting, more sustained than Paul McVeigh’s <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2020/12/Books2020.html">The Good Son</a></i> and more authentic than Joe Dunthorne’s <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2020/12/Books2020.html">Submarine</a></i>, illuminated by Robinson’s vast, buried reserves of empathy (it has at least four great love stories at its centre), and extraordinary facility for language. It’s also extremely funny, both in its asides and the meticulously-engineered set-pieces, the best of which has Thomas being interrogated about enemas, by a vicar. So in a sense it's quite like <i>Middlemarch</i>, which also has a vicar.<br /><br />
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Another contemporary favourite was Meg Mason's <b>Sorrow and Bliss</b> (2021), which is brilliant on mental illness, but even better on a specific person with mental illness: cruel, self-destructive and lovely. It's lit fic vaguely masquerading as commercial, with a narrative voice that's up there with <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2020/12/Books2020.html">Boy Parts</a></i>: hilarious, but punctuated with sucker-punch sentences of great sadness. I knew I'd love the book as soon as I read this immaculately-phrased joke:
<blockquote>"The letting agent told us it was an Executive Home, in an Executive Development, and therefore perfect for us – even though neither of us are executives. One of us a consultant specialist in intensive care. One of us writes a funny food column for Waitrose magazine and went through a period of Googling 'Priory clinic how much per night?' when her husband was at work."
</blockquote>
, Mason's subsequent utilisation of the words 'Me Cookie' (to denote the taking of pills) merely cemented the deal. The book has a couple of small flaws, I suppose – not all of the supporting characters are fleshed out as well as the main ones; the narrator's journal feels more like a plot device than an organic character element – but dwelling on those seems churlish. It is a stressful, valuable and compassionate book, truly remarkable in the way that y it slowly reveals its central character's great – and perhaps missed – calling in life.<br /><br />
If there's one writer I admire (and look to emulate) more than any other, it's Penelope Fitzgerald. <b>At Freddie's (1982)</b> is another of her semi-autobiographical masterpieces: small and beautifully-carved, its melancholia and humour in effortless balance, and every sentence perfectly weighted. Its story of devotion, artistry and compromise plays out in a shrewdly-drawn hinterland at the fringes of the West End, where the glorious, quasi-monstrous Freddie runs her rundown stage school for precocious kids. Fitzgerald’s work is so uncommonly atmospheric – the Blitz glass crunched under feet in <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2019/12/Books2019.html">Human Voices</a></i> or the rainfall on fat green leaves in <i>The Beginning of Spring</i> – and her evocation of this greasepaint-streaked world is unstintingly remarkable, while shot through with an irony that’s neither good-natured joshing nor naïve luvviedom, but something heightened and touching and true. The only time her unerring gift threatens to fail her is during an extended diversion into the love life of two teachers, and yet their climactic meeting in a Lyons’ tearoom is one of the great set-pieces of her career, possessed of a piercing specificity in terms of era and national character that renders it at once a passage of deep and backwards-looking longing, and a work of brutal anti-nostalgia. The book is sad and subtle – its characters’ triumphs fleeting, their disasters enduring – and yet Fitzgerald writes with such unstinting empathy about human bungling, self-delusion and mediocrity, qualities she herself seemed to have in such short supply. The climactic sequence, of snow falling into shadows, and a boy falling too – a presage to a tragedy, and the boy a genius – is heartstopping.<br /><br />
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If Sandra Newman's <b>The Men (2022)</b> lacks the dazzling surefootedness of her exquisitely sad time-travel novel, <i>The Heavens</i>, it still gets its claws into you. It's a strange, challenging book that engages with, investigates and is occasionally hobbled by contemporary identity politics. Though its peripheral stories are oddly uninteresting, its central one, unfurling slowly, is immersing and utterly haunting. Incidentally: belying the slew of idiotic one-star reviews on Goodreads that greeted the announcement of the book's premise, Newman makes her trans characters specific and deeply human, while engagingly directly with the cruelty of their identity being compromised by the premise.<br /><br />
My continued explorations into the work of Edith Wharton yielded one more elegiac masterwork and a relative failure. <b>The House of Mirth (1905)</b> is a haunting Wharton tragedy that's universal in its portrait of human impulses, while typically alive to the miniscule nuances of 19th century New York society. It centres on the witty, decorative Lily Bart, who precipitates her own downfall by transgressing the unspoken, irrational codes of her milieu, then clings to an obscure sense of honour that prevents her from halting her slide. Most prosaically, Wharton's writing is perfectly balanced between related but competing elements: plot and character, dialogue and description, humour and emotional gut-punches. And whatever she does, she does superbly: as the world of society first palls on Lily, in the shadow of a joyless future married to a dull book collector, Wharton suddenly turns on her other characters, assassinating each in turn through a succession of short, laser-guided putdowns. The sublime virtue here, though, is the author's understanding of human frailties, and our moments of small greatness, and how they are warped, magnified or covered over by a society obsessed with appearances. By contrast, <b>The Custom of the Country (1913)</b> is a long-winded, largely one-note satire about monstrous social climber Undine Spragg, and the human wreckage she leaves in her wake. It’s audacious, and at first exciting, but becomes monotonous in its second half, without the clever shading that blesses Wharton’s most effective tours of this sparkling but superficial world. When Undine’s son tries to piece together his life from news clippings, you realise that what’s been missing for the past hundred pages is anything resembling complex human feeling, though the climactic twist – conceived and executed with Wharton’s characteristic, clear-eyed mercilessness, and in retrospect inevitable – is undeniably and blackly hilarious. Her handling of perspective, asking us to sympathise alternately with Undine and with her deluded husband Ralph, a gentle and troubled aesthete, is as cleverly handled as ever, it’s just that at times the characters seem to have been cut out of cardboard.<br /><br />
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In the old-favourites-having-trouble corner, we also have J. L. Carr, Howard Spring and Elizabeth Taylor. Last year, I was deeply moved, thoroughly transported and possibly transformed by Carr's <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2021/12/Books2021.html">A Month in the Country</a></i>, but subsequent forays into his work haven't been so fulfilling. <b>The Battle of Pollocks Crossing (1985)</b> is, like his signature novel, a time-limited period piece: <i>A Year in Dakota</i>, if you will, based on the author's own time there as a teacher during the Depression. It doesn't feel successful as a whole, lurching forwards, grinding to a halt, the approach not revolutionary (though early passages seem to nudge towards an ingenious fragmented structure a la <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2018/12/review-of-2018-part-1-books.html">Lincoln in the Bardo</a></i>) but merely piecemeal. If anything its story is too unconventional and perverse, its narrator struggling to penetrate the psyche of his environs, and so keeping us out too. Carr, though, can dazzle in the moment like few authors in history, at times from nowhere. The dialogue he finds in the mouth of James Ardvaak has the rhythm and the ring of the real. And ultimately his is a book about American violence – about a foreign land with a common tongue – and in it you find his peculiar politics, which prize a vivid individuality born of communal spirit, resulting in a left-wing modern Western, elegiac and frustrating, unsatisfying yet essential.<br /><br />
Spring's <b>My Son, My Son (1938)</b> is basically <i>We Need to Talk About Oliver</i>, the spoilt son of the selfish, self-made narrator. This was Spring's breakthrough book but now looks more like a dry-run for his masterly 1940 novel, <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2019/12/Books2019.html">Fame Is the Spur</a></i>, another sprawling saga in which his sad-eyed chronicler accrues wisdom as he mellows. Except here it's money and Irish Republicanism in place of renown and labour history, and the characterisation is too daft and cartoonish to properly engage. It isn't just Oliver, whose sole attributes are a physical beauty and a spiralling sociopathy, but the preposterous supporting characters like Irish rabble-rouser Michael Flynn (sample quote: "the peasants haven't so much as a rotten potato to eat") and a mad sea captain who thinks he's Judas Iscariot, comfortably two of the worst creations I've encountered in recent years. The book does pay off, though, building momentum through an aggregation of incident (and an investment of the reader's time) so vast that you can't help but be affected by it. And if it relies too much on coincidences that it mistakes for fate, its final chapters are certainly its best, as Spring's miserable thesis closes out with a succession of punches to the gut.<br /><br />
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Elizabeth Taylor is one of the great English writers of the 20th century, but her final novel, <b>Blaming (1976)</b>, written as she was dying from cancer and published posthumously, inevitably suffers from those impossible conditions. The bitter final breath of a truly singular career, it finds her spare style at long last failing, with no real substance behind its extended Kids Say the Funniest Things comedy, and little real meaning beneath the chilly and unfocused misanthropy. We never really get to know these characters, insufficiently introduced and barely expanded, and while some of that may be intentional – since they never really get to know one another – it doesn't make for great fiction. In contrast to <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2017/12/2017Books.html">Angel</a></i> or <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2018/12/review-of-2018-part-1-books.html">Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont</a></i>, we only see things happening, we don’t feel them. It is, simply, a bleak book, apparently about old age and death, but undermined by those very things. There are moments when the light breaks through – the last scene before the tragedy; the donation of a photograph and later a painting – where Taylor’s bleak wit and reluctant compassion flash into view, but like Muriel Spark’s swansong (<i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2021/12/Books2021.html">The Finishing School</a></i>), <i>Blaming</i> seems both baggy and strangely slight, with a jaundiced worldview that’s rarely other than wearying.<br /><br />
<b>The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher (2015)</b>, a collection of short stories by the scintillating (and sadly late) Hilary Mantel is perhaps more valuable as a portrait of a changing writer than for the works themselves. The earliest ('Harley Street', 1993; 'How Shall I Know You?', 2000) are overwritten and overly-direct; by the time you get to the final two, written especially for this collection, Mantel's language is spare and strange, and her points often made elliptically through allusion and supposed diversion. In any event, 'The School of English', about the prelude to a rape, is so unpleasant as to be almost unreadable. The world Mantel conjures throughout the anthology is chilly, violent and foul (or, in the case of the opening story, mundane to the point of tedium), lit by only fleeting flashes of compassion. Often she seems either despairing about mankind, or else revelling in putting such nastiness on the page (a case in point: the end of 'Winter Break'). But her work is most effective when not keeping its humanity at bay: after all, unstinting malevolence is no more complex than unstinting mawkishness would be. The best of the stories, 'The Heart Fails Without Warning' (2009), concerns the relationship between two sisters: one gripped by anorexia; the other narrating the decline with a mixture of cruelty, mockery and empathy, her prose showered with fragments of haunting, almost beautiful imagery. Its story is the most familiar of the set, but amid much muted middle-class noir, its balance of style and tone simply seems more satisfying – and interesting. I've never met anyone, or read any reviewer, who wasn't ultimately underwhelmed by the title story (after all, it cuts out before you see anything good), and consoled themselves with the incidental detail. I liked it a lot, though they're right that it's the detail. Best of all is a paragraph in which the narrator crystallises the English condition, and how it informs the nation's response to everything from social injustice to climate change: "in Berkshire and the Home Counties, all causes are the same, all ideas for which a person might care to die: they are nuisances, a breach of the peace, and likely to hold up the traffic or delay the trains."<br /><br />
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I got to know some other authors for the first time. Patricia Highsmith's <b>Deep Water (1957)</b> was an effectively horrible novel about an aloof, eerily avuncular cuckold and his appalling wife. Amid the social staples and status symbols of mid-‘50s America, the author spins a story of sociopathy, satirising middle-class mores while revelling in the chance to be quite spectacularly nasty. Whether its elements of repetition and monotony are a reflection of its instinctively passive protagonist or simply flaws in the writing, I’m not sure. But it’s certainly memorable: evocative, sometimes suspenseful, wickedly funny in places, and dripping with unease and dread.<br /><br />
Notably less gripping was Len Deighton's debut novel, <b>The Ipcress File (1962)</b>, a book that takes a bit of getting used to: not the purposefully convoluted plot or the relentless smartarse asides, but the writer's mildly tortured phrasemaking. He writes uniquely, sure, but hardly clearly, the self-conscious style acting like a barrier between the action and your brain. The genre is Cold War-era spy fiction, saturated with paranoia. It's a book lit by neat touches, but with no underlying authenticity, perhaps unsurprising when you consider that's it's a first-time work by a full-time illustrator with no real knowledge of espionage. It is diverting and distinctive, mildly irritating, and seriously anti-climactic. Soon afterwards, of course, IPCRESS became a film, and its nameless hero turned from a lanky, languid son of Burnley into Michael Caine. I doubt I'll be revisiting Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie series following the first entry, <b>Case Histories (2004)</b>: a well-plotted mystery novel with an extensive vocabulary, a mannered structure and a vaguely unpleasant after-taste. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4865535334?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">More here.</a><br /><br />
Having become vaguely acquainted with Ancient Rome via the frustrating <i>SPQR</i> (see below), I fancied plunging into a more immersive if fanciful version. Robert Graves' <b>I, Claudius (1934)</b> is certainly that, though it's also deceptively shallow. Our guide is the stammering, 'crippled' historian of the title, an overlooked and widely derided figure prior to his improbable ascension to the throne. Claudius gives us an overview of the three imperial eras (those of Augustus, Tiberius and Caligula) that led to his own, but while the book convincing and atmospheric, it's also remote, poorly-paced and massively overlong. Something in the novel's conception is simply off: the idea of Claudius as a historian strips away any immediacy from the bulk of the action, as he writes from a viewpoint that renders his stories as distant anecdotes, frequently happening long ago or far away. And while the court intrigue is often gripping, if often too abruptly dispensed with, a chapter on a military mutiny is frankly interminable. Most philistinic complaint of the year: there are just too many characters for a reader to keep track of.<br /><br />
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As a man who only recently found out that you could read your Kindle on your iPhone, I had taken to carrying Penguin's pocket-sized Black Classics to gigs with me, to read in the time between acts. Yes I am a cool yet normal guy, thank you for noticing. By far my favourite was Henry James's <b>The Figure in the Carpet (1896)</b>, a glorious literary mystery, almost gleeful in its malevolence, about a critic who searches for the 'string the pearls were strung on': the unifying secret to a legendary author's work. For much of its length, it's amusing and intriguing, an insider work with faintly laborious plotting; then James swerves into the eternal. Robert Louis Stevenson's <b>Olalla (1885)</b> has its moments, though, as a Scottish soldier recovering from his injuries decamps to a Spanish mansion whose inbred owners are hiding a few secrets. This Gothic novella is a story of intrigue, obsession and bestial pseudo-vampirism, a little long-winded in its language, but told with such lush and overwrought conviction that you can’t help but be swept along.<br /><br />
Bleaker still was Dostoyevsky's <b>The Meek One (1876)</b>, a profoundly disquieting short story about a pawnbroker, haunted by past disgrace, who directs an obscure, long-term mind game against his child bride. But is his narration sincere or self-serving? It's certainly one of the more horrifying things I've read in recent years. The only disappointing Black Classic was <b>Femme Fatale (1811)</b>, a quartet of stories from the dubious Guy de Maupassant: one about penises, another about lesbianism, a third concerning a mistress passed down from father to son, and the fourth dealing with a female pick-up artist who uses a cemetery as a stalking ground. They're really all just about women though, the author exhibiting some serious incel energy as he's alternately fascinated and repelled by these beguiling, capricious and awful creatures. I found the stories diverting but shallow, and the translation oddly tortuous.<br /><br />
<b>Children's</b><br /><br />
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I loved Grace Easton's picture book, <b>Cannonball Coralie and the Lion (2018)</b>, a story of about friendship, self-worth and roaring. The illustrations are just beautiful. And yeah, alright, I read <b>Spy School at Sea (2021)</b>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4541178525?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">but it wasn't very good</a>.<br /><br />
<b>NON-FICTION</b><br /><br />
<b>History/politics</b><br /><br />
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Shall we, for once, work our way upwards? That means that we start with Leo Damore's atrocious <b>Chappaquiddick: Power, Privilege, and the Ted Kennedy Cover-Up (2018)</b>, which is both well-researched and almost completely incomprehensible. The author digs up new revelations about his subject's fall from grace (the most notable from Kennedy's cousin, Joe Gargan, a trade-off that apparently requires painting Gargan in the most flattering light imaginable), but the story is so confusingly rendered, and its innumerable characters' motivations so poorly explained, that it's impossible to get a proper handle on either the tragedy or the cover-up. An injustice was clearly done, but the nature and the scale of it remains maddeningly out of focus.<br /><br />
I also very much did not enjoy <b>I'll Be Gone in the Dark (2018)</b>, not just a poor piece of writing but a truly horrible thing to read, as Michelle McNamara recounts a succession of rapes and murders that took place in San Francisco in the '70s and '80s. The details of the attacks made me so anxious and sad that I couldn't sleep, which I'm attributing less to the power of her prose than my lack of compatibility with the true crime genre. The story naturally had a far greater effect on McNamara, whose friends say that her all-consuming interest in this cold case was what caused her to neglect her health, leading to the overdose of prescription drugs that killed her before she could finish the book. While her obsession may have been born of humanity and a sympathy with the victims, the resulting work feels simply ghoulish, with pretensions as inappropriate as its prurience, the author using the ruins of people's lives as springboards for flights of the most appalling writing. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4742514094?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">More here.</a><br /><br />
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At least <b>Golden Boy: Kim Hughes and the bad old days of Australian cricket (2009)</b> was merely disappointing. Often cited as the best book ever written about cricket, it fails to work on almost every level. Critically, its tantalisingly sad thesis – ‘sensitive lad is drummed out of the national captaincy and then the game he loves by macho pricks’ – isn’t borne out by the details. Yes, Hughes is bounced and sometimes bullied by contemporaries Lillee and Marsh, but he himself is a part of the apparently ruinous drinking culture, he urinates on a debutant in the shower for banter, and he ends up leading a rebel tour to Apartheid-era South Africa (!). The book is occasionally gripping and moving, but much more often it's repetitive and difficult to follow, weaving around haphazardly in its chronology and written in strangulated prose that aims for stylisation but is merely confusing and abrupt.<br /><br />
<b>Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind (2007)</b> was a book I'd wanted to read for an age, and to be honest it didn't deliver. It's an erratic overview of perhaps the 20th century’s most celebrated cause de célèbre: that of two Italian anarchists sentenced to death for an armed hold-up in Braintee, Massachusetts. It’s a remarkable story, rather functionally told, with some big but not always convincing thoughts on the wider context, a vivid evocation of the trial and various hearings that sadly fumbles key parts of the evidence, and an agreeably even-handed treatment of its subjects that is then repeatedly undermined by purple prose, clunky similes and tortured segues. The latter weakness may be down to the writer’s preoccupations and personal tics (he seems to strains for an epic profundity in his conclusions to chapters; his habit of introducing a character first by biography and then by name is conspicuously clunky) but it also suggests a certain bittiness in the research: the need to pad the prose by incorporating each piece of information, no matter how tenuous or even irrelevant. I learned a lot, yet left feeling frustrated, particularly by the lack of clarity. It's fine to be unsure about Sacco and Vanzetti's guilt, but here the reader's own faculties are at times clouded by the marshalling of evidence. Take the notorious ‘third bullet’: there’s a wealth of information here – a gallery of fascinating characters issuing charges and counter-charges. But it's only in a brief picture credit, and during the epilogue, that the defence case comes properly into view, and even then it feels incomplete.<br /><br />
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Another one that somewhat fizzled was from my regular stomping ground of sporting scandals. <b>Eight Men Out (1963)</b>, by Eliot Asinof, is the definitive chronicle of the ‘Black Sox’ scandal, in which underpaid Chicago baseball players colluded with gangsters to fix the 1919 World Series. It’s an impressive feat of newsgathering – good on the what, why and how – but disappointingly lacking in emotion. Interestingly, it exonerates one of the eight – shortstop Buck Weaver – but indicts “Shoeless Joe” Jackson, the near-mythic figure memorialised in <i>Field of Dreams</i> whose supposed innocence has become (like Sacco and Vanzetti's) a cause célèbre.<br /><br />
<b>Conspiracy: A History of Boll*cks Theories, and How Not to Fall for Them (2022)</b>, by Jonn Elledge and Tom Phillips, does exactly what it says on the tin filled with absolute fucking loons. If it isn't as elegantly written as Elledge's brilliant shorter-form journalism, it is both eye-opening and packed with amusing detail. The passages about the Lincoln assassination and the Illuminati (please note: these are <i>not</i> connected) are particularly memorable. Favourite conspiracy theory: people who don't believe that a large chunk of the Middle Ages ever happened.<br /><br />
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Mary Beard's <b>SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015)</b> was the first time I've really dipped my toe into the classical world, and probably not the best book with which to do so. It feels like the revisionist notes to a more entertaining if fanciful history that is being enjoyed nearby. Beard’s approach is notably modern: interested in how we know, as much as what we know. But while that is initially invigorating, it ultimately makes the book disjointed and piecemeal, preventing it from generating any momentum. The overall effect is of having attended 12 fitfully fascinating lectures, full of cumbersome equivocations, rather than been swept away by an immersive story with a propulsive narrative. Her vast love of her subject makes me want to explore it more, while the limitations of <i>SPQR</i>’s approach make me want to do so with someone else. <br /><br />
<i>SPQR</i> took me more than a month to finish, I think <b>Scoundrel (2022)</b> took me two days. Subtitled, '<i>How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free</i>', it's a pageturner about the charming psychopath who hoodwinked Conservative tastemaker William F. Buckley into campaigning for his release – and then, when he got out, tried to kill again. The treasure trove of letters sent between Buckley, the psychopath (Edgar Smith) and the lovelorn literary editor drawn into their circle (Sophie Wilkins) is so irresistible to Weinman that at times she surrenders the narrative entirely to them, an issue that makes the book’s mid-section feel paper-thin. The wider significance of the story is also overstated, not least by the book’s blurb. But the tale at the book’s centre is darkly and abidingly fascinating, showing what happens when an almost-great man of vast qualities and deep flaws – a dazzlingly witty, furiously loyal and outstandingly kind bigot, dazzlingly clever in a rather shallow way – comes into contact with a master manipulator whose only interest is in himself, and at whose centre is nothing but an untamed misogynistic rage. Smith is a fairly simple character (if a persuasive and deceptive one) but Buckley is anything but, and the book shows him at his best and his worse: he is trusting, dogged and decisive, willing to pause his principles in the name of basic humanity, and yet famously unwilling to do the same for non-male, non-white people, and unable to ever quite accept or acknowledge his own mistakes or their effect, either psychically or in print. In truth, Weinman doesn't dig into those issues enough, but she does lay out the information that makes it possible for us to do so.<br /><br />
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Robert Caro wrote my favourite non-fiction books of <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2019/12/Books2019.html">2019</a>, <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2020/12/Books2020.html">2020</a> and <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2021/12/Books2021.html">2021</a>. <b>Working (2019)</b> is a welcome stopgap while we wait for his <i>fifth</i> epic volume on the years of Lyndon B. Johnson. In theory, it’s about Caro’s process. In practice, it’s a series of lively snippets taking us behind the scenes of the two greatest biographies I’ve ever read. Why now? And why a piecemeal approach when he also intends to write a memoir? Because our time here is short, Caro says, and he wants to get some of this down just in case. In the earlier essays (dealing mostly with New York power broker Robert Moses), he’s often repeating things we know – admittedly interspersed with piercing insights – but the book becomes increasingly illuminating as he delves into the life of LBJ, and listens as ‘Tommy the Cork’ shrugs off a political scandal, Alice Glass’s relatives arrive to defend her honour, and Lady Bird Johnson discusses her husband’s mistress. The climactic chapter here, a sidebar about the two songs that defined LBJ, is absolutely exquisite. If only, like <i>The Power Broker</i>, this book were also 1,300 pages long. Now back to the main project, Robert. Chop chop, time's a wasting.<br /><br />
Jeffrey Toobin's <b>The People V. O.J. Simpson (2016)</b>, meanwhile, was a simply scintillating account of that notorious case, focusing on the investigation and the criminal trial, and explaining just how O.J. got away with it. Toobin's telling is masterly (if rather bracingly of-its-time), full of deft character sketches, colourful detail and illuminating legal analysis. A shame, then, that the author will always be the man who got sacked from the New Yorker for wanking on a Zoom call.<br /><br />
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As you may have heard, <b>Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (2021)</b> is something special: a brilliant book on the dizzying saga of the Sacklers, who got a nation hooked on opioids, and used the proceeds to plaster their own name across the great museums of the Western world. It’s a jawdropping exposé: a portrait of capitalism at its most obscene, heartless and unhinged, starring modern-day robber-barons simply allergic to decency, steamrollering societal safeguards as they warp and erode the very tenets of democracy. After a couple of fairly dry early chapters (inevitable, I think, due to a dearth of sources), it is just revelation after revelation. About a third of the way through, I thought that Keefe must surely be running out of bombshells. That’s when it really escalates. If <i>Empire of Pain</i> becomes a little disjointed towards the end, with almost self-contained portraits of minor Sacklers and the introduction of artist Nan Godlin, it never loses either its clear-eyed anger or its sense of panache. It is chilling, infuriating and spectacularly entertaining, like <i>Succession</i> set against the backdrop of <i>Winter’s Bone</i>.<br /><br />
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My favourite non-fiction book of 2022, though, was definitely David M. Oshinsky's <b>A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (1983)</b>. Robert Caro’s series on LBJ has certainly done a number on me: most contemporary political history now looks barely-researched and fatally lacking in pizzazz. Not David Oshinsky’s magnificently-titled biography of Tail-Gunner Joe. It's a wry, perceptive and quite astonishingly authoritative study of McCarthy’s peak years, with the author junking the received wisdom and going instead for the truth, both in the detail and his overarching narrative. McCarthy was a true believer not a con man, argues Oshinsky; a skillful communicator not a thicko; a bullying braggart who never did quite find a spy – but who perhaps deserves a modicum of credit for identifying genuine failings in his nation’s security. Could it ever truly have been worth it, though? Along the way, McCarthy trashed reputations and ruined lives – at least one of his victims killed himself. And how did he get away with it all for so long? That’s in Oshinsky’s purview too: he’s only slightly interested in his subject’s childhood – regarding it mostly as a chance to stick the boot into rival biographers – but devotes entire, zippy chapters to Eisenhower, the Senate establishment and the fourth estate, revealing how their complaisance, fear or sympathy for McCarthy’s crusade aided his rise to prominence. This is an outrageously entertaining book, peppered with choice excerpts from congressional transcripts, colourful details, and the author’s deadpan witticisms, and breaking off whenever it matters to dig out a crucial document and finally set the record straight. Perhaps my obsession with the communist witchhunt in Hollywood can now be expanded to communist witchhunts in America more generally. I'll keep you posted.<br /><br />
<b>Film</b><br /><br />
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My film book of the year was <b>Shepperton Babylon (2006)</b>, in which Matthew Sweet essays British cinema from the silent days to the late ‘70s, waging war on received wisdom (and, for that matter, Norman Wisdom). At its heart it’s an oral history, the author touring Britain in the early noughties so as to bother the wrinkled remnants of our cinema’s glory days before their stories are lost forever. As a guide, Dr Sweet is superb: deeply knowledgeable, effortlessly witty, and with a loyalty only to his theses – not his subjects – meaning that though he’ll turn up with flowers on the doorstep of some forgotten former ingenue, he’ll be brutally frank about their career when it comes to the writing. He’s also a glutton for gossip; I’d naively imagined that the book’s title (riffing amusingly on Kenneth Anger’s scurrilous <i>Hollywood Babylon</i>) was a joke about our film industry’s fundamental innocence, but absolutely not – this book is as rich in scandal as Anger’s, if rather better sourced. Across 10 roughly chronological chapters, focusing on phenomena like Gainsborough pictures’ heroines, Michael Balcon, and Rank’s decade of dominance, Sweet’s passion is for rescuing figures from wrongful obscurity (a hello to weird, profligate ‘30s impresario Basil Dean), and correcting myths about our homegrown cinema, some redressed since it was published in 2004, but others enduring. He repeatedly assails the idea that British film is dull, staid or disposable, instead celebrating the sheer strangeness of our cinema – born equally of artistic cravings and commercial expediency – and realising that genre films invariably tell us much more about our times than so-called ‘prestige’ pictures. His mini-essays on Dickie Attenborough (celebrated as our screen’s finest monster and most unbearable hypocrite), George Formby (a blackface comic without the make-up) and Kenneth More (his cockiness only bearable when it is crumbling) are just about definitive, and if I don’t quite buy the summations of Dirk Bogarde and Johnny Mills’ careers, they are at least agreeably provocative. In fact, the only time he lost me was with some scattershot barbs elsewhere about bulimia and scoliosis. This is the most I’ve learnt from a film book in a long time, and the most I’ve laughed along with one too, though the final chapter proper – dealing with British sex comedies, and narrated in part by a pimp – is suitably but quite remarkably unpleasant.<br /><br />
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It was an absolute joy, and a really proud moment, to write the essay for the <a href="https://www.powerhousefilms.co.uk/collections/frontpage/products/remember-the-night-le">UK Blu-ray release of my favourite film, <i>Remember the Night</i></a>. As part of my research, I had a lovely time reading <b>Three More Screenplays by Preston Sturges: <i>The Power and the Glory</i>, <i>Easy Living</i>, <i>Remember the Night</i> (1998)</b>, which is full of Sturges' sparkling, delicately sentimental dialogue, allied to a sense of fun that at times is just there to amuse himself. "We TRUCK ALONG after [the main characters]," begins one note to the eventual director of his depressing 1933 spec script, <i>The Power and the Glory</i>, "which will enhance the charm of the scene besides being excellent exercise for the director and camera man." The accompanying introductions in this edition are a little dry, but Sturges would just have a Mitteleuropean waiter prescribe alka seltzer and have done with it. James Curtis's <b>Between Flops: A Biography of Preston Sturges (1992)</b> was also absolutely invaluable. It's a fine, fast-paced biography of the singular Hollywood humourist (and director, restaurateur, engineer, inventor, perfume wholesaler), which gets to the bottom of how it went so right – and then so wrong. It rarely hits as hard emotionally as it might – only when Sturges breaks with regular cast member Bill Demarest, or goes into a decline-fuelled trance-like mope-state on his boat – but its mixture of script analysis, oral interviews and breezy detail is both easy-to-take and of lasting value.<br /><br />
I got a huge amount out of Alan K. Rode's <b>Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film (2017)</b>, which details the life of the great Warner Bros director, who made <i>Casablanca</i>, made stars of Doris Day and Errol Flynn, and made his underlings cry. Curtiz's work was his life, and so beyond a fair stab at essaying his early years (typically difficult to document), his innumerable conquests (ditto) and his property purchases (tedious), Rode focuses on the films, chatting to everyone who's still around, digging out interviews with everyone else, and raiding the paper archives to reconstruct the production of his subject's numerous classic movies (as well as the not-so-good ones). If Hal Wallis and Jack Warner's innumerable missives can generally just be condensed to the words, "Please stop spending our money", there are countless irresistible nuggets. Curtiz the director emerges as an artist, a company man and an on-set tyrant, with Rode an unusually clear-eyed chronicler, particularly good on studio-era context, and at teasing out the truth about contested stories. Did Curtiz really drown three extras during the making of <i>Noah's Ark</i>? Did he murder hundreds of horses while filming <i>The Change of the Light Brigade</i>? And did he shit on the ground in front of his cinematographer to prove a point? The answers, incidentally, are 'Yes, quite possibly', 'no', and 'yes, but he might have had dementia'. Curtiz also tried to cast Shirley Temple as a femme fatale, one of the great cinematic 'what-if's.<br /><br />
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Not purely about film, but crucial to understanding it, is Isaac Butler's <b>The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act</b> (2022), a vivid biography of the Method, a theory of acting that was birthed in Russia some time after 1897. migrated to the US, reached its maturity at the radical Group Theatre during the Depression, and then found fame in Hollywood, being partially discredited before its death in the 1980s. Butler is a witty, lively but unfailingly sincere guide, whose belief in the value and power of performance sweeps you along. Simply put, it's a book that has changed the way I think about, engage with and appraise acting. Its middle section, in which the Method takes Broadway and then Hollywood by storm, is probably its most exciting, but it is full of vivid detail and fresh perspectives, and the author's ability to distil the art and career of an artist like Clifford Odets or John Garfield in a single paragraph is extraordinary. He can also cut to the heart of the infighting between the various proponents of the system, explaining that ultimately there is no 'one true method', and that De Niro's famous physical transformation in <i>Raging Bull</i> has something in common with the approach of Stella Adler, but little of Stanislavski and none of Strasberg.<br /><br />
Glenn Frankel's <b>High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic (2017)</b> is an excellent addition to that bulging shelf of books about the blacklist, retelling the story from the perspective of screenwriter Carl Foreman, who wrote the seminal Western – and HUAC allegory – <i>High Noon</i>, only to be sacked by his (posturing, liberal) production partners during filming. They could back a film about the importance of standing up for a principle, it seems, they just couldn’t stand up for a principle themselves. The first third of the book, setting the political scene and offering overlapping pen-portraits of the likes of actor Gary Cooper, director Fred Zinnemann and producer Stanley Kramer is undeniably deft but will also be over-familiar to anyone immersed in this era. Thereafter, though, there’s plenty that’s new, with Frankel playing judge and jury over competing claims about the making of <i>High Noon</i> (most notably debunking cutter Elmo Williams’ oft-repeated tale that he single-handedly ‘saved’ the film in his editing suite), and unearthing the transcript of Foreman’s appearance before HUAC, never published before. It's a valuable and highly readable book on its own terms, but also works amazingly well as a sequel to Thomas Doherty’s <i><a href="https://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2021/12/Books2021.html">Show Trial</a></i>, since Doherty saw 1947-8 as the most interesting period of the witchhunt story – the later hearings consisting merely of rehashes and echoes – whereas Frankel is concerned primarily with 1951-2, which cast the net wider, bringing hundreds more artists under suspicion, each one dealing with the threat to their reputation and livelihood in a slightly different way.<br /><br />
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I am, as I have said before, obsessed with HUAC in Hollywood, so I didn't stop there. <b>Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist (1996)</b> by Walter Bernstein is an honest and intimate first-person account of the era from blacklisted writer Walter Bernstein, tracing his journey from Young Communist League activist to wartime news reporter and finally fully-fledged party member, as the vultures begin to circle. You might look at Bernstein’s credits and think, “Who the hell was this guy anyway? He didn’t write much of note” and then you remember that he’d just been hired by Robert Rossen to adapt <i>All the King’s Men</i> when he was blacklisted for eight years. Which is rather the point. Bernstein writes in a spare, staccato style, influenced like so many of his contemporaries by Hemingway’s short sentences and simple language. Chapter breaks are rare, but new chapters start with vivid, cinematic images born of his teleplay experience. His segues between topics can be clumsy or even incoherent, and there’s little hierarchy of information: John Garfield’s death, the unmasking of Soviet Russia, a Bette Davis name-drop and sketch – all get much the same treatment. But the book is truly exceptional on the psychology of blacklisting: why Bernstein abhorred some stool pigeons and almost excused others; the way HUAC inspired the communal living that the reds had previously only imagined; the way it put them on the defensive, preventing them from questioning their own beliefs. By 1996, aged 77, he is, for the most part, a remarkably clear-eyed chronicler (the exception is the question of loyalty to the Soviet Union, raised as an issue, then rather mangled), candid about his own errors of judgement or analysis, ruthless about others’ failure of integrity. There are moving cameos from Zero Mostel, Abe Polonsky and Philip Loeb, all victims of the blacklist who Bernstein semi-fictionalised for his 1976 script, <i>The Front</i>. A child of the screen, he sees everything through the prism of cinema: events from real life are merely mirrors of things he’s glimpsed in the movies. And man does he love the movies. He writes wonderfully about them too: sentimental but perceptive, celebrating art and genre schlock alike, simultaneously seduced and revolted by the “lunatic pretension” of Mankiewicz’s <i>Barefoot Contessa</i> (which he watches in the company of sailors who believe that the male hero has “got no dick”). If you’re here purely for the witchhunt material, you’ll find it in embedded in context of variable interest – Bernstein’s wartime exploits include scoring the first international interview with Tito, training, and just sort of sitting around quite a bit – but at its best it offers a perspective on the period that no other blacklist book does.<br /><br />
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There’s plenty of pretension and even more padding in <b>Last Night at the Viper Room (2013)</b>, Gavin Edwards' biography of the extraordinary and deeply troubled actor River Phoenix, yet it gets close to at least some version of its complex and contradictory central figure. Edwards’ approach is to offer a mosaic of Phoenix’s life and world in more than 70 short chapters, some of them straightforwardly biographical but others impressionistic or irrelevant, as the book leaps between present-tense flights of pseudo-poetry and baldly factual chunks of text dealing with Phoenix’s contemporaries (an ancient Johnny Depp interview is mined far beyond its worth, not least because Depp, away from the screen, seems such a shallow, charmless bore). Phoenix was probably the single most gifted actor of his generation; his work – particularly in <i>My Own Private Idaho</i>, <i>Running on Empty</i>, <i>Dogfight</i>, <i>Stand by Me</i> and <i>The Mosquito Coast</i> - remains deep and strange and quite remarkably raw. But while the temptation always seems to be to paint him as either a saint – too good for this world – who made one tragic diversion into hedonism, or as a selfish, barely-talented smack addict with great cheekbones, Edwards sensibly finds a centre ground, seeing his subject as an unworldly, essentially decent guy tormented by the trauma of childhood sexual abuse, who after a blistering start to his career saw his talent increasingly subsumed by addiction. The author’s sense of compassion for Phoenix is clearer in his tweets, and in the book’s Acknowledgements, than in the book proper, but when he sticks to his central subject – and puts aside the amateur psychology, distractions and eerie but cartoonish foreshadowing – it’s a fairly enlightening, effective and affecting biography. Martha Plimpton’s angry, empathetic response to her friend’s death is still so clear-eyed, honest and sad: “He was just a boy," she said, "a very good-hearted boy, who was very fucked-up and had no idea how to implement his good intentions.”<br /><br />
<b>Silent Star (1968)</b> is a lively if rather over-familiar* memoir from, well, silent star Colleen Moore. You can tick off the cliches as we come to them: a night at Chaplin's; a trip to San Simeon; the scandals of the '20s and '30s (Arbuckle, William Desmond Taylor, Paul Bern); the matter of John Gilbert's voice. As ever, key figures are idealised (Tom Mix, Mervyn LeRoy) while others are traduced (William S. Hart), as the subject finds professional success but personal disappointment, while taking credit for various discoveries (boosting Gary Cooper, renaming Loretta Young). It can be hard to take this sort of book entirely seriously once you've read <i>Me, Cheeta</i>. Moore's proximity to Hollywood lore is a draw, though – she double-dated with Taylor's mistress, was Errol Flynn's landlady, and can debunk misinformation about Harlow from being at her wedding reception – and there are enough diverting if hardly uproarious after-dinner stories to you keep you engaged. I wouldn't have minded a bit more about her own movies, though. She lists <i>The Power and the Glory</i> as her favourite film, and <i>So Big!</i> as her best performance, but doesn't even mention the classic <i>Why Be Good?</i>, while her comic masterclass in <i>Ella Cinders</i> is only deemed worthy of a photo and caption. One interesting side-note: when F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "I was the spark that lit up Flaming Youth, Colleen Moore was the torch," he wasn't referring to himself! He was inscribing a miniature of his book, This Side of Paradise, and writing the sentence from the book's perspective. That's obvious in the text ("My author's name is F. Scott Fitzgerald," his inscription concludes), but misconstrued by whoever wrote the jacket copy, and misrepresented ever since.<br />
*in the sense that we have read all this before, not that she is being overly familiar with us<br /><br />
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But man alive that book looked like <i>Slaughterhouse-Five</i> next to the next one, during which I almost died of boredom. The fact that James T. Fisher's <b>On the Irish Waterfront (2009)</b> was published by the Cushwa Center Studies of Catholicism in Twentieth-Century America should perhaps have given me the clue that it'd be a rather dry PhD thesis of a book, rather than a piece of popular history or a behind-the-scenes pageturner. Fisher is interested primarily in union wrangling on the docks, and in the life, politics and theology of Pete Corridan, the 'waterfront priest' who inspired Karl Malden's character in Kazan's immortal apologia for informing, <i>On the Waterfront</i>. The author's provocative view, in fact, is that the film wasn't Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg's celluloid defence of their decision to name names to HUAC, since Schulberg had already written a draft of the script beforehand. But that argument doesn't really make sense: the question of naming names had been in the air in Hollywood since 1947, Schulberg added the scenes of Terry Malloy on the witness stand two years after his own testimony, and Kazan explicitly acknowledged the link in his own autobiography (Fisher suggests that the direction simply found it too "irresistible" a reading to pass up). There is some valuable material in here – it's certainly a useful reference work if you're studying the film – but taken as a whole the book is rather poorly-ordered, repetitive and, well, extremely tedious.<br /><br />
<b>Art, music, love, letters and operations</b><br /><br />
Yes, that famous way of classifying books, coming in handy again.<br /><br />
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I really liked Janet Malcolm's <b>Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers (2013)</b>: more piercing insights, precisely elucidated, in this collection from one of the great non-fiction stylists. Malcolm is unconquerable in the realm of the profile (there are three such works here, all superb, though her epic on the characters swirling around the magazine Artform is simply a masterpiece), and if her essays are more earthly, they're always provocative and interesting, with piping hot takes on the likes of the Bloomsbury Group, Edith Wharton, and photographer Irving Penn. While wolfing down great quantities of her work does begin to reveal repeated ideas (the 'figure in the carpet' she borrows from Henry James) and terms ('demotic' is a favourite), the final line of her obituary of Joseph Mitchell brings home with devastating clarity just what an unusual and original a writer she truly was.<br /><br />
<b>Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy by John Armstrong (2003)</b> is a slim, deceptively weighty book about the nature of love: what it is, how it feels, how we keep it. Sometimes a polemic, at others a gentle rumination, Armstrong spikes his philosophy with evolutionary biology, and draws in narratives from Tolstoy, Lampedusa and the life of Goethe to make his points. It's incomplete, inevitably, but it isn't intended as a book of instructions, more a starting point, encouraging you through his compassionate writing to think deeply.<br /><br />
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The book of Kurt Vonnegut's <b>Letters (2014)</b> is a revealing if not always obviously edifying anthology that exhibits both the public Vonnegut – that is, Vonnegut as he wished to be and often was: compassionate; warm; funny in a way that no-one else ever quite has been – and the more difficult private creature: spiky and even spiteful when wounded; at times tediously money-minded; slogging away at work that always seemed effortless. There’s gossip here if that’s what you’re after (and most journalists covering its publication were) – about the true origins of Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut’s 1965 affair, or his second wife’s subsequent betrayal – but the real delight is in his use of the language: the echoes of his signature phrases and themes, the genesis of others, the way he caps each letter with the perfect sign-off, the matching of theme and style. His letter to a baseball team seeking sponsorship is wonderful, and his evisceration of literary critic Anatole Broyard utterly devastating, but it’s the emotionally complex letters to his daughter Nanny that form the centre of this book. She felt abandoned when her dad left the family unit (a decision he starkly outlines in a confession to a friend that at a stroke cuts a gash into his reputation as America’s grandfather), and their complex relationship results in letters from Vonnegut that can be wise, reconciliatory or desperately unhappy and splenetic, but are beneath those things utterly loving. It is not an unstintintingly insightful or entertaining collection but if you care about Kurt – and can embrace his flaws and complexities as much as you can the projected, accepted image – then it is essential.<br /><br />
I wrote a lot (perhaps too much?) about Bob Dylan's mad, maddening and unwittingly insightful <b>Philosophy of Modern Song (2022)</b> <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2022/11/DylanBook.html">right here</a>, if that seems like the sort of thing you might like.<br /><br />
And I had another operation. Well, two actually. And while recuperating I was reading a biography of Preston Sturges that mentioned how much of an influence Irvin S. Cobb's 35-page comic essay, <b>Speaking of Operations (1915)</b> had had on his work. So I read it. Cobb's piece is inevitably dated (not just the author puffing a cigar in the hospital ward, but his knowing references to medical conventions long since forgotten), but amid that, and a periodically offputting smugness, are some fantastic gags, especially towards the end. His thoughts on the ultimate value of vivisection are a definite highlight.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Thanks for reading. Part 2 of the review will about the other best thing in the world, movies.Rick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com0London, UK51.5072178 -0.127586223.196983963821154 -35.2838362 79.817451636178845 35.0286638tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-17701487258328916642022-11-10T08:30:00.022+00:002022-11-16T17:00:37.246+00:00REVIEW: The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan (2022)<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizuwUJ_AK1RcsHayekCZXjYKjexPCpO1Kr0G9S0SXcGNKDuJNVA8_-K8Q6cxJoIVmFMiLQTBzFVQM-gfHAWpr7OstDef82iTMlTxC4zD71Rb_Zl6G341ftX3csBXPkvPw2FLXg7dMNZANanu11W3Paw8pyMxv5ZjRd-r_bGpJALbXofTdx_NyZ5RyABA/s1389/00-COVER-14-mobileMasterAt3x.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="1389" data-original-width="1267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizuwUJ_AK1RcsHayekCZXjYKjexPCpO1Kr0G9S0SXcGNKDuJNVA8_-K8Q6cxJoIVmFMiLQTBzFVQM-gfHAWpr7OstDef82iTMlTxC4zD71Rb_Zl6G341ftX3csBXPkvPw2FLXg7dMNZANanu11W3Paw8pyMxv5ZjRd-r_bGpJALbXofTdx_NyZ5RyABA/s400/00-COVER-14-mobileMasterAt3x.jpg"/></a></div>
“Like everything Dylan does, it is a momentous artistic achievement,” says the publicity bumf from publisher Simon & Schuster. Is it, though?<br /><br />
Bob’s new book works best if you regard it as his version of Harry Smith’s <i>Anthology of American Folk Music</i>, the entirely unlicensed compilation that he stole from a friend as a teenager, and which informed his career more than any other single document. That bootleg box-set compiled 84 folk, country and blues songs from 1926-33; this book creates a canon of its own, with essays on 66 recordings dating from 1924 to 2004, its accent falling particularly on early rock and roll. It arguably works better <a href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7oK3UXsHYmC3PYGQFY5IOb">as a playlist</a> than a book – alongside vaguely leftfield classics like Bobby Darin’s ‘Mack the Knife’ and Marty Robbins’ ‘El Paso', he includes obscurities such as ‘CIA Man’ by the Fugs, 'Detroit City' by Bobby Bare, and Johnny Paycheck’s desolate, gorgeous ‘Old Violin’ – but there’s enough in <i>The Philosophy of Modern Song</i> to make it worthwhile, at least for that stoic and balding band of Dylan obsessives.<br /><br />
<b>STREAMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS</b><br /><br />
Most of the book's essays consist of a freeform, stream-of-consciousness riff on the meaning of the song – inhabiting its world; frequently written in the second person – followed by a more matter-of-fact contextual section. The former, aside from the occasionally arresting, terse turn of phrase, is usually pretentious and tedious (editors don’t like to tinker with "momentous artistic achievements", especially when written by Nobel Prize winners); the latter tends to be more interesting, allowing for insights into Dylan’s own processes and prejudices – some of those revelations intentional, others unwitting – as well as inspiring some agreeably peculiar tangents. A Santana track turns into a recap of the career of screenwriter and sci-fi novelist Leigh Brackett, as well as incorporating a note about the invention of Velcro. Other songs lead to digressions on lemmings, Esperanto and the history of the Nudie suit. Good non-fiction has always been about connections.<br /><br />
Dylan is a curmudgeonly host, tediously "both sides”-ing every political question, complaining about people saying “OK, boomer” (OK, boomer) and, perhaps more reasonably, railing against the rise of niche marketing, which by definition narrows our artistic horizons. This broadly grouchy work, though, is saved by two things in particular: the author's transparent love of music, and the way the book shades in, subverts or enhances our understanding of his own life and legacy.<br /><br />
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Whether he’s extolling the emotional directness of bluegrass ("the other side of heavy metal"), becoming transparently excited that Stevie Wonder plays the harmonica on the Temptations’ ‘Ball of Confusion’, or exhibiting a very nerdy, very male obsession with chart placings and discographical chronology, the sincerity of his enthusiasm about the music itself is rarely less than endearing. He'll tell you about a song he loves, and then he'll tell you why a certain live version is even more special.<br /><br />
And for Dylanologists, there is an almost endless amount to get your teeth into – not least his absolute hatred for you in particular; understanding music doesn’t enhance it, he says for the millionth time in his life, which broadly translates as, “Stop analysing my songs and fuck off.” Another endlessly-repeated Dylan mantra, that songs are merely captured in the studio, they don’t end there, is, like Highway 61 before it, revisited.<br /><br />
<b>PROTEST SONGS</b><br /><br />
For those still nonplussed by Dylan's shrugging off of “finger-pointing songs” in 1964, he’ll spell it out for you, with that pronounced predilection for provocation that here bleeds into trolling. ‘Ball of Confusion’ is “one of the few non-embarrassing songs of social awareness,” he says. “Writing a song like this can be deceptively easy. First you assemble a laundry list of things people hate. For the most part, people are not going to like war, starvation, death, prejudice and the destruction of the environment." He follows this with an unexpected, barely-veiled ad-hominem attack on Tom Lehrer.<br /><br />
In 1966, Dylan pretended to placate his audience in Manchester in 1966 with one of the funniest pieces of trolling in history, announcing to his audience of disgruntled folkies, “I'm going to do a protest song... this is called ‘I Hear You’ve Got Your Brand New Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’.” His essay on ‘War’ by Edwin Starr is a fascinating counterpoint to perhaps his first great protest song, ‘Masters of War’. War is “often the only solution”, he says baldly now, while still raging at the attendant profiteering, pomposity and pride. Whereas Robert Caro’s recent book, <i>Working</i>, included a chapter on Pete Seeger’s song, ‘Waist Deep in the Big Muddy’, notable for its piercing clarity on the subject of Vietnam, Dylan’s waffly, pointless discursion on the track turns into a peculiar rumination of the ethics of old Disney documentaries. It had been Woody Guthrie – allied perhaps to boundless ambition – that first opened Dylan’s eyes to music as a vehicle for social change; Guthrie who was once his lode star. There are no Woody Guthrie songs in the book.<br /><br />
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Surely the oddest and most disquieting element of <i>The Philosophy of Modern Song</i>, though, is Dylan’s women problem. If we’re playing count-the-faces identity politics, then 62 of the 66 songs are by men, and the cover photo seems a hollow joke, but that’s not even the point. While most of the strange things he writes about women in the book are said essentially in character, <i>he chose the songs</i>, which include <i>I Got a Woman</i>, <i>Black Magic Woman</i>, and the execrable Eagles track, <i>Witchy Woman</i>). Taken at face value – which in this instance seems reasonable – Dylan is trapped as a product of his time, his inspirations and his own oeuvre in a disastrous madonna/whore dichotomy, forever desperate to escape from an awful world of terrifying, sexualised harpies to a simpler, more old-fashioned place and time in which a submissive and pliant woman will bring him snacks. A lengthy digression on the subject of divorce lawyers also seems less an objective and reasoned treatise about a societal ill, and more a highly public admission that he has just got divorced.<br /><br />
<b>FIBS</b><br /><br />
In his only volume of memoir, <i>Chronicles</i>, Dylan defensively – and unconvincingly – suggested that his 1975 album, <i>Blood on the Tracks</i>, had been based on a series of Chekhov plays, but had been misidentified by rock writers as exactly what it was, a break-up album in which he sounds alternately livid, sentimental and bereft. When he says in the first chapter here that first-person narration is often mistaken for truth, I took it as a threat that he’s warming up for another crack at that unconvincing lie.<br /><br />
There are smaller insights too, for those who care about such things. A chapter about Willie Nelson’s ‘On the Road Again’ is is unexpectedly revealing as to the mundane details – and psychological facts – of Dylan’s own life on tour. ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ may be a strange vehicle for Dylan’s crotchety musings about mystery and nuance in art, but they’re valuable all the same. Elsewhere, he’s still low-key obsessed with Robert Ford, he loves old movies (though doesn’t write very well about them, and passes up the chance to engage in some much-needed Mickey Rooney revisionism), and touchingly refers to Pete Seeger throughout as “Pete”, their connection long-severed but not dead.<br /><br />
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There’s some merit, too, in his observations from outside, though the level of insight – and interest – really does vary. He makes a fascinating, if confused, argument that how learning the back story of a song can either augment ('Old Violin') or obliterate ('Save the Last Dance for Me') its universallity. Once you know that Doc Pomus's lyric for the latter is about being in a wheelchair at his wedding, due to polio, that subtext overpowers anything the listener can bring to the song. The idea that our feelings of pure empathy for the song's narrator might create a different, even richer experience is, bizarrely, an angle that Dylan doesn't consider.<br /><br />
Bob's thoughts on country music are especially arresting (also sexist): the genre "finds itself in the church on Sunday morning becauuse it spent Saturday night in a back-alley knife fight and trying to convince the barmaid to hike her skirt up around her hips." Perceptively, he crystallises the glory of so much country music and the emptiness of its recent iterations: "Without the dynamic tension of the guilty over the bacchanal, it becomes either joyless proselytising or empty-headed carousing." That idea, though, clashes with the author's simplistic ideas of spirituality expressed elsewhere; Sam Cooke's undeniable gospel credentials are largely dismissed because ultimately he got "shot, bare-naked in a motel room". This as Bob grows misty-eyed over monotonous pig-tail wearer Willie Nelson, very much the Danny McBride of the songwriter world: adored and revered by his more talented contemporaries to the general bafflement of their fans. "Elvis had a hit with 'Always on My Mind'," points out Bob, following this observation with one of the wrongest sentences ever written: "All you remember now is the Willie version."<br /><br />
<b>'MOON, JUNE, SPOON' SONGS</b><br /><br />
The author's enthusiasm is expended much more effectively righting wrongs. Dylan writes with a mixture of an old man's irascibility and a young man's idealism about the cynics who ridicule simple lyrics, particularly on paper (<a href="https://recordcollectormag.com/reviews/book/suede-3">Brett Anderson talked about something similar when I interviewed him in 2019</a>). Explaining that the words are written for the ear and not the eye (apologies to anyone who's bought the coffee table book of his own Nobel Prize for Literature-winning lyrics), and that prescriptive songwriting rules impair creativity, Bob takes aim at the naysayers with a critique that's at once petulant, adolescent and quite beautifully pure: "All the self-styled social critics who read lyrics in a deadpan drone to satirise their lack of profundity only show their own limitations."<br /><br />
So he's appealing if repetitive when stanning Tin Pan Alley, penetrating if not necessarily correct as he delves into the world of ‘El Paso’ (“a ballad of the tortured soul… that resonates on every level with people on every level… a dark tale of indescribable beauty and death”), and extremely funny when describing Carl Perkins’ obsession with his Blue Suede Shoes. But he also reads way too much into Jackson Browne’s semi-laughable ‘The Pretender’, a song where events and what passes for motivation are determined entirely by things that happen to rhyme with ‘pretender’, including “begin and end there”, “legal tender” and, most regrettably, “ice cream vendor”. His fascinating essay on ‘Volare’ – which takes in psychedelia and foreign-language records – is followed by a confused chapter on ‘London Calling’ that contradicts itself and constantly misses the point, suggesting that Dylan understands neither punk nor England.<br /><br />
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Perhaps only this author could reimagine the most innocuous songs as being so ineffably creepy – he depicts Rosemary Clooney’s ‘Come On-A My House’ as a grim fairytale, and cheerily informs us, of Eddy Arnold’s elusive ‘You Don’t Know Me’, that “a serial killer would sing this song” – and yet his phrasemaking is at times appallingly cringy. “Some may argue that there are better reasons to go to war than an unpaid patisserie bill’, he writes, replacing Roget’s Thesaurus on the shelf, before claiming that a Rodgers & Hart tune is “as complex as anything by Stephen Hawking,” a sentence that could only be worse if he’d referred to him as “Hawkings”. Similarly, the potted biographies of artists sometimes come with an interesting slant, and at others are largely meaningless, whether that’s because the claims made about their talent are so vague (Bobby Darin) or so preposterous (Perry Como). The final chapter – on space, time and Dion and the Belmonts – is, fittingly, this book at its most extreme: the most weird, the most nerdy, the most pretentious and ambitious.<br /><br />
<b>A GRUMPIER BOB</b><br /><br />
Some have described <i>The Philosophy of Modern Song</i> as the print equivalent of Dylan’s now-defunct <i>Theme Time Radio Hour</i>, but while the world of the songs remains the same, his view of the wider world has intruded, and palled. This is a grumpier Bob, less playful, more resigned. There are still tall tales, but there are fewer of them, and his listing of song titles that share a word seems less like a fun experiment in genre and more like a boring old bloke who won’t leave you alone in the pub.<br /><br />
But like everything Dylan does, it is, if not a momentous artistic achievement, at least deceptively unusual, repeatedly illuminating – at times by accident – and in the end just about worthwhile.Rick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com0London, UK51.5072178 -0.127586223.196983963821154 -35.2838362 79.817451636178845 35.0286638tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-12208069106313485872022-03-07T14:49:00.028+00:002023-04-15T16:38:30.160+01:00“When I say infinity, I mean NOW": Adrianne Lenker and Bob Dylan<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgxlJn_6wM8wZlN_hBHwuNSXZwBq3UyEXkZ6MTlt3fKFcB15BSIrURvW97OFCzm11fqYjX5EwMxsGz_ses3Uj4VVGoPEAHBgnANu5ZIk0JvnHG48WhsHV2uqjq0jjw1-eFknUw8WnBZSEr4KwopXnmtqextnHxPXQp4nJ6ANG8HT03LO8gCqhoigKZ_qQ=s1436" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="1436" data-original-width="990" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgxlJn_6wM8wZlN_hBHwuNSXZwBq3UyEXkZ6MTlt3fKFcB15BSIrURvW97OFCzm11fqYjX5EwMxsGz_ses3Uj4VVGoPEAHBgnANu5ZIk0JvnHG48WhsHV2uqjq0jjw1-eFknUw8WnBZSEr4KwopXnmtqextnHxPXQp4nJ6ANG8HT03LO8gCqhoigKZ_qQ=s400"/></a></div>
<b>Big Thief at Bristol Academy, 27/02/22<br />
Big Thief at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, 02/03/22-05/03/22<br />
Adrianne Lenker at EartH, 06/03/22</b><br /><br />
“The new album by @BigThiefMusic is a revelation,” <a href="https://twitter.com/rainnwilson/status/1500155334886707205">tweeted Dwight from The Office this weekend</a>. “Can I have permission to compare Adrianne Lenker to Bob Dylan?” Permission granted: the parallels are inescapable – and thickening.<br /><br />
When I followed Big Thief on tour in 2020 (not that I like to go on about it), I wrote:
<blockquote>I leave muttering something about Lenker being the only New Dylan since Dylan. You know in ‘Love Minus Zero’ when he sings, “My love, she speaks like silence”, or ‘Visions of Johanna – “The ghost of ‘lectricity howls in the bones of her face” – well no-one writes like that. But Lenker does. Not like Dylan, exactly – because what’s special about that? – but prolifically singular, with his perfect abstract specificity. “Your eyes were like machinery,” she sings in ‘Mary’. “Your hands were making artefacts in the corner of my mind.”</blockquote>
Perhaps the most exhilarating aspect of seeing either artist live, though, is that their songs are never finished: they’re in a constant state of flux, developed organically through being played to an audience. How a song sounds on record is just how it happened to sound at the point it was recorded. Or in the words of Dylan at the Free Trade Hall, “It used to go like that, and now it goes like <i>this</i>…” Take the title track of Big Thief’s latest, for example. Lenker introduced it in a whispered, half-written version at an Islington church in 2019. Last month it debuted on record: a wispy rendering so delicate that you feel if you breathed on it, it might blow away. By the time the band takes to the stage at Bristol, it has become a chugging, unremitting post-punk song, with a jagged, slashing guitar riff.<br /><br />
Or listen to ‘Not’, included among Obama’s songs of 2019, and essentially the band’s anthem nowadays. Reviewing the following year’s tour, I called it “an explosion of cathartic anguish … a list song that exalts through endless negation”, but there was release there: a rush of respite in Lenker’s breakaway guitar solo. This tour, there is no release. The support band back then was ITHACA, a London thrash metal group, and a sign that Lenker’s interest in getting heavier was getting heavy. ‘Not’ ends now in an unforgiving squall that’s directed entirely inwards. The flurry of squealing, arrhythmic high notes whistling from Lenker’s guitar feel like clues to an emotion, not the emotion itself. In Bristol, the song becomes a 15-minute freakout. On the second London night, Lenker towers above the crowd during the solo, her face tortured beneath the lights, purging something. The next evening her dress starts coming down during the guitar break, like a stress dream for the ages. She doesn’t quite cut her losses, but let’s say that she doesn’t extend the communication with her muse.<br /><br />
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<i>I love this picture because you can </i>hear<i> it.</i><br /><br />
Another interesting comparison with Dylan is how Lenker’s persona appears to be ageing in reverse. Dylan wrote ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ at 21, junked his political ideals in favour of creative ones with ‘My Back Pages’ at 23, and by 27 was writing throwaway country ditties. “Oh me oh my,” he sang that year. “Love that country pie.” By comparison, Lenker was a late starter: she didn’t put out ‘Indiana’, ‘I Still Hear You’ and ‘Steamboat’ until she was 22. But the three records (!) she released in 2014 feel like the crystallisation of late style: simple, pared-down, timeless. They are an old man’s songs. Perhaps her life has been back to front in a way: she married young, then caught up on her ‘freedom’ later.<br /><br />
Five years after that flurry of standards, Lenker would introduce a strange new tune called ‘Spud Infinity’, which mixes abstract cosmic imagery with twee nonsense poetry and sounds like what people who don’t like Big Thief think Big Thief sound like. Over time it has become a clarion call (and a merchandising opportunity: there is a long-sleeved ‘Spud Infinity’ t-shirt; I’m wearing it right now), and morphed from an ethereal poem into a wobbleboard-inflected album track and then a sing-along anthem. Appending an intro and outro centred around the words ‘lah-di-dah’, like an alt-folk Annie Hall, Lenker now takes a transparent on-stage delight in the song’s passages of trivial incoherence, as if Dylan had spliced bits of ‘Motorpsycho Nightmare’ into ‘Chimes of Freedom’.<br /><br />
That love of language for language’s sake is another parallel, surprisingly rare among songwriters. Think of the DA Pennebaker footage of Dylan in England in 1966, where he’s outside that cornershop, repeatedly re-arranging the words in his mouth, taking simple joy in the possibilities of a sentence. I was reminded of that before Lenker’s solo show at EartH last night, when she performed her customary, gentle duty of asking people who want to talk during the support act to do so outside. “If any of you have any social obligations that need to be… expressed verbally,” she said, “please do them in the… outer realm.” Aside from the humility, it felt like pure Dylan, right down to the mid-sentence giggle. But more importantly, it was pure Lenker: the perfect choice of words, inevitably straddling the mundane and the eternal. The similarities run deeper, though: it isn't just the elegant synonymising that draws these two artists together, it's the very sound of their syllables. Both his "majestic belts of bolts" and her "meteor show at the motel" are as much in love with the tongue as with the picture.<br /><br />
And yet sometimes words aren't enough. In 'Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands', after close to 10 minutes of cryptic love verse, rock music's most important poet simply gives up on the idea that his lyrics could ever do justice to Sara Lowndes' spiritual and aesthetic beauty, and finally picks up his harp. It's among the most moving moments in the Dylan canon, and finds an echo in Lenker's guitar solos: with words, she builds a dam; with sound, she sweeps it away. Her 2020 colllection of improvised instrumentals hinted at an artist growing tired of chatter, and in the title track of her accompanying 'songs' (which, paradoxically, also provided the name of the new Big Thief record), she made the feeling overt: time to trade the metaphysical for the purely physical. "I don't wanna talk about anything," she sings. "I wanna kiss, kiss your eyes again/Wanna witness your eyes looking."<br /><br />
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Perhaps the most prosaic point of comparison between the pair is how prolific they are. Dylan released the five albums spanning The <i>Freewheelin’…</i> to <i>Highway 61</i> in just over two years, writing dozens of other masterpieces that have since turned up in the Bootleg series. Lenker put out two Big Thief albums in 2019, and two solo records (one comprising instrumental improvisations) in 2020, before penning a 20-song double-album released last month. My friend Jeff called it “her <i>Blonde on Blonde</i>”, and that’s spot on: it’s sprawling, unfocused, with whiplash turns of tone; incoherent, perhaps, but with incredible high points. During the first show that I saw on the official <i>Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You</i> tour, two weeks after the record’s release, she performed three <i>newer</i> songs before playing anything from the album, including two absolute all-timers: a rambling, Neil Young-ish number about a river (‘Forgiver’) complete with shredding solos, and a quiet one, ‘Wait a While’, written mostly on the ferry across from the Dublin gig.<br /><br />
Introducing it, she said it was to comfort the heartbroken, and it seems that she has had her own heart broken. If these shows have seen her between-songs chatter become more natural – spotlighting a sense of comic timing that was always present in her lyrics but previously buried beneath sheer awkwardness – they have also suggested that she is Working Through Some Shit. The climax of ‘Flower of Blood’ sees her assaulting the bridge of her guitar, bending it to within a point of snapping as the track ascends into pure metal; ‘Not’ is purpled with rage, ‘Shoulders’ flecked with spit. It can’t just be down to entering the world of ITHACA, though one wonders how the ambient support act KMRU might influence Big Thief’s next moves: the Bristol show is dominated by strange and extended atonal intros. The next night it’s mostly the new album, then the one after that is as close to a greatest hits show as this band ever gets.<br /><br />
The recent country music influence is largely (and somewhat thankfully) absent. Dylan’s dalliances with the genre have usually been tinged with embarrassment, especially at first: the acknowledgement, perhaps, that this is a small Minnesotan boy playing dress-up. And that’s how Big Thief have tentatively approached country too. If there’s a cringier moment in their career so far than Adrianne’s cry of “That’s my grandma!” during the new album’s square dance number, ‘Red Moon’, then it must have escaped me. I really struggle to understand the point of pastiche in music: it feels like a dollop of self-satisfaction where the heart should be. The band’s other country tune, ‘Blue Lightning’ – a cousin of Evan Dando’s impeccable ‘Being Around’ – is also hampered by its affectations, though Lenker’s preference for playing the song as a lolloping, languid chronicle of offbeat admiration (rather than the country bop favoured by co-conspirator Buck Meek) helps a little.<br /><br />
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On the second London night, when the band trips over ‘Little Things’, a song they’ve been struggling to render live, they ‘reset’ by watching Meek play a new number of his own, Lenker sitting down on the stage, bassist Max Oleachik lying on his back. It flows into the one of the most euphoric passages that I’ve ever witnessed at a gig: five full-band numbers of shimmering intensity – a rhapsodic, mounting ‘Mary’, ‘Black Diamonds’ reinvented in the Bunker Studio style – and, tossed in alongside, the sweet humanist sentiment of ‘Forgotten Eyes’ (the key refrain: “Everybody needs a home and deserves protection”). If the band’s essential duality – its capacity for quietness or ferocity – is another mid-‘60s Dylan trait (those being the two halves of his ’66 tour), it’s the spirit of the former, of the hiatus, that dominates Lenker’s heartstopping one-night-only show at EartH on Sunday night.<br /><br />
The first evening at Shepherd’s Bush, she makes her only concession to rock star ladder-climbing I’ve seen so far: playing the game for the three-songs-and-out photographers, striking a few poses, gently accentuating the facial mannerisms. There’s none of that at EartH, nor the breath-caught stillness of her full band solo spots. This is like she’s just picked up a guitar in a mutual mate’s flat and begun to cycle through new songs, cast-iron masterpieces (‘Indiana’, ‘cradle’) and deep cuts (‘Kerina’, an update of Dylan's 'Corrina, Corrina'), covering for flubs with self-deprecating quips, a genius in your front room.<br /><br />
She seems different there. But then she always does. Dylan once said, “I wake up in the morning and I'm one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else.” I’m certain that Lenker could relate. Her most popular song, ‘Paul’, is an ode to one of her alter-egos (“The last time I saw Paul, I was horrible and almost let him in,” she confides), and, most trivially, she always <i>looks</i> different. Last time she was rocking a Henry V pudding basin and then a long bob. This time she turns up shaven-headed, with a scar cut into one side. Across several nights, she’ll dye her hair blonde, and wear variously a vintage wedding dress, a <i>Scarface</i> t-shirt, a sweater that’s more holes than sweater, some sort of ornately-patterned kimono, and a see-through top (a bold choice, since there’s always the danger you’ll be upstaged by your own boobs). An enduringly enjoyable aspect of the Big Thief experience, too, is that the four members each look like they’re in different bands. Brian Epstein would shit.<br /><br />
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Musically, though, they’re perfectly simpatico, their irregularities allowing them to effortlessly tessellate. For the most part, Meek plays a supporting role, sprinkling sounds into the mix, occasionally breaking out into an anti-solo dominated by the notes implied but not played. His cult status, or perhaps just the satisfying nature of his eight-letter Southern name, is defined by the fact that for every 10 fans shouting, “I love you, Adrianne,” there is one – always male – just yelling, “BUCK MEEK!” No pleasantries, just “BUCK MEEK!” That’s how you know you’re at a good show.<br /><br />
After playing a tormented new number, ‘Happy with You’ – halfway between an accusatory mantra and a Cranberries song, an impression not dispelled by Lenker’s hairdo – she says revealingly that you “don’t need to explain love”, before launching into ‘Certainty’, probably the best love song she has ever written. Like Dylan’s ‘I Want You’ or his late-period ‘Nettie Moore’, it’s built around a statement of perfect, direct economy (“My certainty is wild”), and there’s something so desperately affecting about seeing her perform it with Meek, when one knows their back story. They were married young, they broke up, they still write and play together, and they perform this almost as equals, both playing acoustics, voices entwined like brambles over a grave. They love each other. It’s complicated but it’s simple. Like the song.<br /><br />
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Another guitar hero spotlighted at these shows is 80-year-old Tucker Zimmerman, a contemporary of Ralph McTell excavated from the footnotes of folk by an adoring Lenker, and summoned from his seclusion in the Belgian woods to open half of these shows. She takes the lead vocal on a version of his classic, ‘Slowin’ Down Love’, memorably describes his fingerpicking style as having “a danceband in his right hand”, and disappears at the start of his first show to find his songbook, which he’s left in the wings. He’s helped onto and off-stage each night by members of the main act. And that’s where there’s a key differences to Dylan: these people care about each other, their collaborators, their fans. You can accuse Dylan of many things but not of being a nice person.<br /><br />
There are marked disparities, too, when it comes to their limitations. “Geniuses steal”, of course (the ‘Nettie Moore’ chorus I mentioned was a direct lift), but Dylan has always stolen too much and too often. If Lenker has a shortcoming as a writer, it’s that her auteurism can lead to a repetition of imagery. I regard myself as one of the world’s premier Big Thief botherers: I turned up an hour before doors every night to get on the front row of six consecutive shows, and there are still a handful of their songs that I get mixed up because they essentially trade in the same pastoral imagery or Biblical allusion.<br /><br />
Yet there’s more to the reconfiguring of material than musical evolution. I wrote in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/17/live-music-therapy-lockdown-streamed-shows-spotify-gig">a <i>Guardian</i> piece a couple of years back</a> that it took seeing Big Thief live to reveal the secrets of some of their songs, as if they had meanings that could only be communicated in person. Hearing ‘Simulation Swarm’ live was a great musical experience, but hearing ‘Change’ was an emotional and intellectual one. That track had left me cold on record – another lilting trip to the bucolic well – but now that I understand it, I love it. As the perfect closer to the fifth and final show, it unfolded not as a retread but as a soothing antidote to the depressed stupor of ‘Terminal Paradise’, seeing the vastness of nature’s pattern, not the bitter poignancy of a single death. You know, like ‘Every Grain of Sand’.<br /><br />
Lenker has, in fact, only ever recorded one Dylan song, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/63KU6CDZK4fzBQhSEFymBn?autoplay=true">a version of ‘I Was Young When I Left Home’ for an obscure recording-studio project in 2015</a>. It was among the first songs he ever wrote. Like him, she was so much older then. She’s younger than that now.<br /><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgr3HzoSwD1qtu94y4LN5ezT7V1r2WyQ7GqZVUfHjWpVZRvfq5XJ1TBpx8Kn0f9GU1TvpFJBaa_J6s2NgUwP1c6YHdbFQi95RUODSTV4u3Rqxlu7RC-3O5Apss4joisDEGxJHrhoCGaUXYH-RCvit6rGj5wXHyAN1t1AwFH1E-zFH3KjOVcK3FuzZIj-w=s828" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="786" data-original-width="828" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgr3HzoSwD1qtu94y4LN5ezT7V1r2WyQ7GqZVUfHjWpVZRvfq5XJ1TBpx8Kn0f9GU1TvpFJBaa_J6s2NgUwP1c6YHdbFQi95RUODSTV4u3Rqxlu7RC-3O5Apss4joisDEGxJHrhoCGaUXYH-RCvit6rGj5wXHyAN1t1AwFH1E-zFH3KjOVcK3FuzZIj-w=s400"/></a></div>Rick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-34734196418558139782021-12-29T12:59:00.006+00:002021-12-29T16:09:35.198+00:00Review of the Year: Part 2 – MoviesHere's part two of my Review of the Year, focusing on films. Twenty 'discoveries', six movies re-appraised, five areas of obsession, and some bits and pieces of writing you might enjoy.<br /><br />
<b>DISCOVERIES</b><br /><br />
... being films that I saw for the first time this year, and loved.<br /><br />
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<b>1. Playground (Laura Wandel, 2021)</b> – The highlight of this year's London Film Festival, and <a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/polls/best-films-2021-all-votes">a film that I got to rave about in Sight & Sound's annual poll</a>. It's a staggering debut that begins like <i>Être et avoir</i> and ends like a prison movie. Seven-year-old Maya Vanderbeque is extraordinary as Nora, a sensitive young girl trying to negotiate the perilous world of big school, a place of obscure rules and incomprehensible moral codes. “When you help someone, it makes things worse,” she tells a teacher, in the film’s most profound and affecting scene. Shot in shallow focus, at child’s-eye level, it’s fantastically immersive, gripping and moving, the innocence and charm of its opening reels evaporating as Nora is sucked into a vortex of pain. But while it is a film without convenient illusions, and cursed with a memory of childhood’s cruelties and formative, guilt-ridden compromises, it is not merely human but humane, recalling the best of the Dardenne brothers, before a final shot that reminded me of <i>Bicycle Thieves</i> in its sincerity and pained, tear-stained hopefulness. A masterpiece, simply.<br /><br />
<b>2. Princess Cyd (Stephen Cone, 2017)</b> – What if <i>Swimming Pool</i>, but unutterably lovely? A warm and fuzzy film that deals deftly and deeply with faith, love and dead parents – all the good stuff, in fact. It’s unusually attuned to how people talk, and every scene is about something, both on the surface and beneath. Its rough edges, of which there are many, only add to the charm; the slight amateurishness in places serving to make it seem more real, as if it’s a docu-drama starring the people this all happened too. It reminded me, in turn of <i>Housekeeping</i>, Sciamma, <i>Junebug</i> and <i>The Way, Way Back</i>, and yet it’s not derivative in any way. And if its view of the world remains rosily and reassuringly liberal, it is also not uncomplicated. The scene in which Cyd and her aunt talk about sex is some kind of classic.<br /><br />
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<b>3. Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl, 1945)</b>, in which we learn that Stahl created the Sirkian melodrama, Douglas Sirk just perfected it. While Sirk would go on to remake three of Stahl’s monochrome hits – including <i>Imitation of Life</i> and <i>Magnificent Obsession</i> – the look and feel of his classic cycle of ‘women’s pictures’ seems to have been drawn largely from this Technicolor noir. It’s one of the best-looking colour films I’ve ever seen: sumptuously shot by everyone’s favourite egomaniacal cinematographer, Leon Shamroy, who conjures a chic world of turquoise and cyan that spells d-e-a-t-h. After all, that’s the colour of Gene Tierney’s eyes – as well as the walls of the train carriage, the water on the lake, her gown, her slip-ons and the carpet on those fateful stairs – and her murderously clingy fatale just isn’t going to share new husband Cornel Wilde with anyone. It is a chilly, masterly film that kills the cute, sees perversity and psychopathy within love, and is head over heels with its villain’s face. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/leave-her-to-heaven/">Full review here.</a><br /><br />
<b>4. Light Sleeper (Paul Schrader, 1992)</b> – Just the right words, and just the right number of them, as Schrader reworks <i>Taxi Driver</i> again, but finds all kinds of different shadings. For long stretches, it’s his best film, with only the trimmings (particularly the synthetic work by Susan Sarandon and Victor Garber) and the ending dulling its edge. Dafoe was never half as good – as a drug dealer and ex-addict vaguely thinking he might reform – and both Dana Delany and Mary Beth Hurt are absolutely terrific in support. Schrader wraps the existentialism and surprising characterisation in the perfect ambience, helped by a typically apposite score. It’s a film about tormented masculinity, but more than that: its impact on others.<br /><br />
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<b>5. Matewan (John Sayles, 1987)</b> – An incredible movie about labour, faith, violence, honour, pragmatism and loneliness, as union organiser Chris Cooper arrives in the town of Matewan to support striking miners, unwittingly but unavoidably setting in motion a chain of violence. It’s a film filled with extraordinary moments, both big and small: Cooper’s little smile at the dinner table and his Mennonites monologue; McDonnell gasping with grief on a porch swing; the procession that follows a killing: Fordian staging and howls of sorrow; and a simply jawdropping finale, Sayles staging a tragedy in the style of a Western gone mad. The film sags just now and then but it has six or seven remarkable scenes, and the feeling of truth. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/matewan/">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<b>6. Ceiling Zero (Howard Hawks, 1936)</b> – In broad plot terms, this second collaboration between director Howard Hawks and star Jimmy Cagney is like every other aviation pic of the ‘30s, and yet what’s going on within that is completely new. You can see it as another film in the vein of MGM’s <i>Night Flight</i>, a rehearsal for writer Spig Wead’s <i>Test Pilot</i>, or a dry-run for Hawks’ <i>Only Angels Have Wings</i> but Cagney’s character – and characterisation – are quite unlike anything else in the genre, or in cinema at large. His Dizzy Davis is introduced as a hellraising ledge, a continuation of Cagney’s fast-talking Pre-Code heroes, who returns to the small commercial airport run by his mate Pat O’Brien and picks up where he left off – spewing wisecracks, pulling stunts and chasing women. But that’s all a trick on the audience: his pioneering pilot is a relic, a danger and almost a joke, a 34-year-old barnstormer with a dicky heart, adrift in a new world filling with college graduates. And how he plays it... cast as an inveterate shagger, he goes for the most unexpected option imaginable, giving the most gentle, sensitive and tactile performance of his career. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/ceiling-zero/">I wrote a mini-essay on the film here.</a><br /><br />
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<b>7. Run for Cover (Nicholas Ray, 1955)</b> – The second of three films from my extended investigations into the work of Jimmy Cagney. Released five months before the same director’s <i>Rebel without a Cause</i>, <i>Run for Cover</i> finds Nick Ray tiring of the young rebel character he had created in <i>They Live by Night</i> and <i>Knock on Any Door</i>, as everyman Jimmy Cagney invests heart and soul in self-pitying, no-good John Derek. If that seems unexpected, then so is everything else about this Western, from an opening anti-heist to a climactic non-shootout among Aztec ruins. Shot like an Eastwood film and plotted like a Boetticher, it’s resistant to the mythos of genre, with no interest in the idea of the legendary hero or the fastest gun. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/run-for-cover/">More thoughts here.</a><br /><br />
<b>8. Shattered Glass (Billy Ray, 2003)</b> takes 10 minutes to settle into anything even remotely resembling real life – or indeed the world of journalism. After that it is completely riveting, always holding back just enough, in terms of both its information and its emotion. Christensen, Azaria and Lynskey are all excellent, but Sarsgaard is just sensational, those four forming the most 2003 ensemble imaginable with help from Chloë Sevigny, Rosario Dawson and Steve Zahn. The film has surface flaws – including a few duff lines and some odd structural choices – but the central thrust of the story is perfect, and it has more to say about how the media (and therefore the modern world) works than just about any other movie of its type. Its intelligence and incisiveness are way above the ordinary.<br /><br />
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<b>9. To Live and Die in L.A. (William Friedkin, 1985)</b> – A kinetic ‘80s actioner, with cop William Petersen looking to avenge his partner by bringing down psycho Willem Dafoe – using whatever means necessary. What I love most about the film is that it defines its genre and then defies it, offering the most heightened versions of each stock scene, before setting fire to the rulebook in its final reel. That mixture of the traditional and offbeat runs right through the movie. While the dialogue and score are agreeably mainstream, Friedkin’s instinctive handling is incredibly varied. The action sequences are pulsating (I’m not really a car chase guy, but man, that car chase). And yet other parts of it are shot almost like an art film. The extended counterfeiting montage seems amazingly fetishistic, like a Jacques Becker scene filmed by De Palma. The movie can seem meatheaded at times, glorifying the idea of tortured machismo as much as questioning it, but those shades of grey are partly what makes it so interesting. It is also unbelievably entertaining. Bonus thought: by 1995, synths and neon seemed the most impossibly dated elements of the '80s; now they feel more modern than everything else.<br /><br />
<b>10. Remember My Name (Alan Rudolph, 1978)</b> – This pretends to be a slasher and ends up as a noir, but it’s New Hollywood to its bones – provocative and deep, full of subtly striking shots, and lit by one of the best performances of its decade. Geraldine Chaplin is just sensational as the endlessly slippery central figure: brittle, malevolent, vulnerable, sad, with a Chaplinesque physicality and a gameplan we can only guess at. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/remember-my-name/">More here.</a><br /><br />
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<b>11. Rocks (Sarah Gavron, 2020)</b> – They should make all films this good. That opening scene is so joyous and yet so alien, its characters the sort of people who sit opposite you on a train and then do your fucking head in for the next two hours. This gloriously empathetic movie allows you into their lives. It’s a film of resilience, desperation and joy, its imagery dotted with spare poetry, its hero all bunged up with unspoken anguish. I was really struck by the parallels with <i>Les 400 Coups</i>. Both begin with their characters symbolically distanced from the touristic image of the city, both end with them seeing the sea for the first time. And, in between, they steal; they run away; we see their parents as lost, childlike figures. If Girlhood is the most obvious parallel in terms of theme, and perhaps <i>Half Nelson</i> in terms of style, the Truffaut film felt like <i>Rocks</i>’ spiritual twin. That it can withstand such a comparison is about as high praise as I can dish out.<br /><br />
<b>12. Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)</b> is about sex and death, the very mundanity of its early dialogue scenes accentuating both the film’s eroticism and the fleeting nature of existence, before it begins to drown its men in black, abstract spaces. The movie’s main card is Scarlett, making an early swerve into low-budget weirdness, and it plays that perfectly. I have rarely seen a film as besotted with its star; I’m surprised that Glazer didn’t get both an Oscar and a restraining order. The camera is obsessed with every line of her face, obsessed with her eyes. And it’s through those eyes that we see the film, that we see Earth as an alien landscape, full of curious natural phenomena and simplistic beings. Under the skin, we are all animals, it says – some of us with vast compassion, some of us without even consent.
<a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/under-the-skin-2013/">Further thoughts here.</a><br /><br />
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<b>13. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931)</b> – A very Pre-Code Jekyll, with the doc using the pursuit of science as an excuse to relieve his unruly horn. It's really a film about toxic masculinity, with Fredric March a superficially sensitive 'good man' barely masking a monster, and Miriam Hopkins allowed to be bawdy and sensual and yet still an affecting victim. The scene in which she flees to Jekyll and pleads for his help, proposing a master-slave relationship that both tickles his fetish and provokes his self-loathing, is really something. Aside from one oddly stagey sequence near the end – March permitted to do some slow emoting on the floor in front of a piano – it's just a beautifully-directed film: so instinctive and inventive and alive. How the hell was Mamoulian three years ahead of everyone else in Hollywood?!<br /><br />
<b>14. Minding the Gap (Bing Liu, 2018)</b> – Skateboarding is an escape from the domestic violence that colours the lives of these young people. Two are victims, haunted by their childhoods. The other may well be a perpetrator, introduced as an outsider hero, but evincing the unstinting self-pity and hollow charm of the abuser. It cheats a little in its presentation of these three characters’ relationships with one another but attains a deep emotional truth in dealing with its central subject.<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhINurQ6wunSoDAho8l8u9Gu7LgsM5lRweP_9jFe2kFViQhDSWAkuTEmgF_TZrsA5R1o4UdakwMF4A9i-h1p6qMfk7gz0UqvTFygTdqymHkVQ-jWOpGE-u1pkjixbEwg6GeUaUdG_DH75PUA94Xu5FgmU3MVZr_8tiCKQOLCCl088rZSprf6rukFygcDg=s1280" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhINurQ6wunSoDAho8l8u9Gu7LgsM5lRweP_9jFe2kFViQhDSWAkuTEmgF_TZrsA5R1o4UdakwMF4A9i-h1p6qMfk7gz0UqvTFygTdqymHkVQ-jWOpGE-u1pkjixbEwg6GeUaUdG_DH75PUA94Xu5FgmU3MVZr_8tiCKQOLCCl088rZSprf6rukFygcDg=s320"/></a></div>
<b>15. Kikujiro (Takeshi Kitano, 1999)</b> – A warm, sweet, episodic and often very funny film about a gangster (Takeshi) escorting a little boy to his estranged mother – and back again. Takeshi's character is so fantastically and disarmingly rude – just a little boy himself, really, with little filter and no impulse control – which keeps the movie well away from genre clichés, and the ending works so well precisely because it doesn’t try to do too much. A mention too for that beautiful musical theme (even if it is slightly over-used), and the scene in which Kitano tries to get psychic tips on a series of bicycle races: a comic masterpiece.<br /><br />
<b>16. The Lady in Red (Lewis Teague, 1979)</b> – The last great Pre-Code film, 45 years after the fact, as farm girl Pamela Sue Martin is brutalised by a range of obsolete genres, en route to a dalliance with Dillinger. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-lady-in-red/">More here.</a><br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiTzjZu2990AtS-OTPB7STESt6qNEf6oD1-wIv4lgQaVol_IUhnGgFaidIy9lYmF7iPiv2kOLwyG3laON5bj0M5WDboUqTQ-2YHNGFJpUknp8Oun1QwJDLz903XPygDisKmp_LWkoHnZV8k3NnoTANTcBc-nHkdLPCuv5cB8HUjhvt-w9s-rbmMTBgRKg=s1000" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="544" data-original-width="1000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiTzjZu2990AtS-OTPB7STESt6qNEf6oD1-wIv4lgQaVol_IUhnGgFaidIy9lYmF7iPiv2kOLwyG3laON5bj0M5WDboUqTQ-2YHNGFJpUknp8Oun1QwJDLz903XPygDisKmp_LWkoHnZV8k3NnoTANTcBc-nHkdLPCuv5cB8HUjhvt-w9s-rbmMTBgRKg=s320"/></a></div>
<b>17. The Shooting (Monte Hellman, 1966)</b> – Warren Oates plays a bounty hunter in this Ranown-style Western that morphs into a Reichardt movie that morphs into a New Hollywood movie that morphs into a hippie headfuck. It mixes existentialism, Old Testament dialogue and a blankly beautiful psycho in the Gene Tierney mould (Millie Perkins), who can’t really act but whose limitations drag the movie into interesting places: namely exploitation territory. Oates is characteristically sensational in a part that imbues him with the gruff humanism of a Van Heflin, while Nicholson plays the Henry Silva/James Coburn/James Best part from the Ranown cycle with his teeth, and a conspicuously modern sense of nihilism. This period of Nicholson’s career always reminds me of Bruce Dern’s incredulous utterance just three years later: “Jack Nicholson’s a movie star now?!” I’ve never seen a Western in which everyone gets so exhausted, man and beast. And only <i>Meek’s Cutoff</i> ever left you feeling satisfied with so few of the answers.<br /><br />
<b>18. Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975)</b> – An archetypal New Hollywood neo-noir, with useless PI Gene Hackman searching for a 16-year-old nymphomaniac (Melanie Griffith) – only it's him who's lost. Hackman is great, plastering a smile over every emotion until finally it's pulled away, topped only by Jennifer Warren, scintillating as the double-talking, hard-nippled fatale whose gnomic utterances are part of her weaponry. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/night-moves/">More here.</a><br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjfUS_J-BHnaGPIw_1elY4EEmHc1BVUXWozJODXkv1jzVWJd4wRe3NLa2_xWdJ4iie-20Nb4KNtqnWKXsjZkLh36D_3fWeJ9cf_PiYu-00uBOsrvYczYvYEmck-3o9GY_ppVDkqGdUHMZ6E8_8TeFbOJVC5PNR_m94T6orjLi0eBxXd4mIT9_zgm45ubQ=s800" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="800" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjfUS_J-BHnaGPIw_1elY4EEmHc1BVUXWozJODXkv1jzVWJd4wRe3NLa2_xWdJ4iie-20Nb4KNtqnWKXsjZkLh36D_3fWeJ9cf_PiYu-00uBOsrvYczYvYEmck-3o9GY_ppVDkqGdUHMZ6E8_8TeFbOJVC5PNR_m94T6orjLi0eBxXd4mIT9_zgm45ubQ=s320"/></a></div>
<b>19. He Was Her Man (Lloyd Bacon, 1934)</b> – A tender, erotic Pre-Code drama with soft-voiced safecracker Jimmy Cagney fleeing the hoods he just crossed, while escorting sad-eyed retired sex worker Joan Blondell to her wedding in an immigrant fishing community. It’s similar in plot terms to <i>The Bride Came C.O.D.</i>, but very different in tone, with two astonishing central performances. Neither star was ever gentler nor more sensual. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/he-was-her-man/">More here.</a><br /><br />
<b>20. Petite Maman (Céline Sciamma, 2021)</b> – A short, sweet, gently magical film about mother-daughter relationships, childhood and depression. It’s surprisingly cheery for a Sciamma movie, its suffering oblique and largely unseen, and perhaps for that reason can’t match the emotional impact of her other features. That small moment, though, where Marion says, “You didn’t invent my sadness”, is one of the most truthful and resonant evocations of mental illness (as I have experienced it) yet put on screen.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>RE-APPRAISED: MOVIES I REVISITED, AND CHANGED MY MIND ABOUT</b><br /><br />
<b>THREE UP:</b><br /><br />
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<b>1. The Last Seduction (John Dahl, 1994)</b> – The greatest of the neo-noirs, an intensely funny black comedy in which city trash (and absolute psycho) Linda Fiorentino steals the cash from her husband’s drug deal and holes up in cow town, where she has oodles of malevolent fun manipulating the men around her. It exists not in a credible ‘90s but in a world where <i>Double Indemnity</i> was reality and we’ve just moved on a half-century. The venetian blinds still throw slatted shadows on the walls, and Fiorentino’s ‘backwards writing’ trick is surely a reference to the opening shot of The Maltese Falcon but people can now fuck, and say ‘fuck’, and there’s no censorship code demanding that being a fatale be fatal. Everything about it works: Steve Barancik's misanthropic script, the neat foreshadowing in Dahl's direction, and Fiorentino's for-the-ages performance, which might have won her an Oscar had they not shown the film on HBO first. Peter Berg has just the right amount of callow uncertainty as the patsy, and Bill Pullman and J. T. Walsh are impeccable weasels. I remembered it as a good movie; it's a whole lot more than that. A masterpiece, in fact, but – perhaps more importantly right now – incredible escapism.<br /><br />
<b>2. Babe: Pig in the City (George Miller, 1998)</b> – I remembered this as merely a collection of amusingly insane creative decisions but it is, in fact, a really great film. Babe goes to America in an attempt to save his farm, but instead ends up as a robbery victim, circus punchline and, ultimately, benevolent dictator of a flophouse for abandoned animals. The film takes a simply outrageous risk with its premise, proceeds to capture its city in a similar way to <i>Amélie</i>, and then breaks out seamlessly and stylishly into ingenious or balletic action, including one of the most terrifying and ultimately affecting set-pieces in American film. You'll know it when you see it. The story may be slight and even distractingly eccentric at times (Farmer Hoggett's wife is arrested for being a drug mule in the first 15 minutes, which is perhaps the most normal thing that happens in the film), but the execution is everything, with memorable characters, an undertow of heartbreaking melancholy, and a neat narrative style that surely inspired <i>Pushing Daises</i>. The gracefulness of Miller's camera, and his attendant use of space, is absolutely beguiling. As is the film's sense of originality. Remember originality in mainstream cinema? What was all that about?<br /><br />
<b>3. Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1955)</b> – What a knockout: Nick Ray’s meticulous, super-stylised melodrama, got up in Western clothes and shot in garish Trucolor. I saw this as a teenager, when I wanted cool gunslingers and concessions to naturalism, and hated it, regarding the film’s champions as posers and pseuds. Now I’m a pseud myself and can revel in the theatrical choreography, sex-starved sadism and wild gender reversals: those overpowering women and emasculated men. Crawford is quite effective in martyr mode (though her character’s relationship with guns – and the men who draw them – complicates matters), but it’s Mercedes McCambridge who dominates, in her massive performance as the quiveringly cruel Emma, so terrified of her own desire that she starts hanging everyone in sight. Now and then the film falters, abruptly shifting tone with the help of deafening orchestral cues, but mostly it’s fascinating, with incredible use of sound – the characters dictating their own atmosphere like something out of Brecht – and a succession of spectacular pay-offs. In Borgnine’s dance of death and that bullet through the forehead it has two of the greatest flashes of action in Western history. And even its flaws tend to enhance the whole: that cheap and shonky Republic back-projection only adding to the feeling of unreality and claustrophobia. The next year, Ray made <i>Run for Cover</i> (see above), abandoning the strangulated, uptight atmosphere of this one, and toying with genre convention by providing a hero who was a rough reversal of <i>Johnny Guitar</i>: not a legendary gunman posing as a nobody, but a nobody mistaken for an outlaw.<br /><br />
<b>THREE DOWN:</b><br /><br />
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<b>1. The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)</b> – A smug, purposefully shambling pseudo-noir, with Altman not so much deconstructing the PI genre as dismantling it. Since the genre was fine as it is, that exercise ends up being rather more fun for him than it is for us. <a href="https://app5.letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-long-goodbye/">More whinging here.</a><br /><br />
<b>2. The Baxter (Michael Showalter, 2005)</b> – Showalter’s performance as the title character is so pointlessly weird and artificial that it actively disengages you. Neither it nor his film quite dares to be a parody, and yet they're also fatally lacking in sincerity. I would love to see the movie that Michelle Williams thinks she’s in, as she is sensational.<br /><br />
<b>3. The Ox-Bow Incident (William Wellman, 1943)</b> – I’d forgotten how talky and didactic this is. I like Lamar Trotti as a screenwriter – his work on <i>Judge Priest</i>, <i>Young Mr Lincoln</i> and <i>Yellow Sky</i> is frequently exquisite – but if you’ve ever wanted to know what it would feel like to be bludgeoned to death by liberalism, then now’s your chance. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-ox-bow-incident/">More here.</a><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>OBSESSIONS</b><br /><br />
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<b>1.</b> Well, <b>Cagney</b>, of course. An actor I loved when I first got into old movies as a teenager, then came to vaguely overlook and underrate. Seeing him electrify a couple of otherwise mundane pictures (<i>Great Guy</i> and <i>13 Rue Madeleine</i>) back in 2019 reminded me how great he could be, and I properly remedied the situation this year, watching or rewatching a dozen of his films. The toughness I knew about, as well as his Lorre-ish blending of comedy and danger, but the beguiling softness I'd somehow missed. You can find all the reviews <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/tag/jimmy-cagney/reviews/">here</a>, but these are the best of them: a salute to the neglected majesty of <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-roaring-twenties/">The Roaring Twenties</a></i>, and more qualified appraisals of <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/white-heat/">White Heat</a></i>, <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-public-enemy/">The Public Enemy</a></i> and <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/love-me-or-leave-me/">Love Me or Leave Me</a></i>.<br /><br />
<b>2. André De Toth</b> – I'm not sure he's a great director – and I suspect those who argue he is of a certain pseudiness – but I've certainly had a good time trying to decide. A kind of poor man's Preminger in comportment, De Toth had one eye, seven wives and 21 children (two of them biological), and made one unassailable masterpiece, a 1959 snow Western called <i>The Day of the Outlaw</i>. That one I was already familiar with (though that didn't prevent me from <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/day-of-the-outlaw/">watching it again</a>), but <a href="https://twitter.com/marshlands/status/1451350759610720259">this tweet</a> encouraged me to dig deeper, leading me to <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/riding-shotgun/">Riding Shotgun</a></i>, as well as more disposable fare like <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-bounty-hunter-1954/">The Bounty Hunter</a></i> and <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/man-in-the-saddle/">Man in the Saddle</a></i>. All three are led by Randolph Scott, perhaps the worst actor of his era, and the star of several of my favourite films.<br /><br />
<b>3. Paul Schrader/William Friedkin</b> – You know, sometimes the Film Bros are just correct.<br /><br />
<b>4. Mae West</b> – Another blind spot for me: I'd seen just one of Mae's movies before Indicator put out <a href="https://www.powerhousefilms.co.uk/products/mae-west-in-hollywood-1932-1943-le">a lavish Blu-ray box-set</a>. The pick of the bunch is <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/im-no-angel/">I'm No Angel</a></i>, and although the subsequent imposition of the Hays Code certainly curbed her fun (especially at first), West's control of her body, her talents and her destiny is still so refreshing. She didn't just carry these films, she wrote most of them, and frequently brooked the sexist cliches of '30s cinema, both behind the screen and up on it.<br /><br />
<b>5. Holly Hunter</b> – I don't care what it is, if Holly Hunter's in it, I'll watch it. The greatest actor of her generation, if only occasionally given the material to match. Watching <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/copycat/">Copycat</a></i>, shortly after revisiting <i>Broadcast News</i>, made me realise that Holly Hunter talking in a choked whisper is the main thing cinema was invented for. She is absolutely staggering in that film – cast as a cop hunting a serial killer with help from boffin Sigourney Weaver, who got strangled by a psycho and hasn’t left the house for 13 months (which in the current climate doesn't seem that long). The movie is like the halfway point between <i>Tightrope</i> and <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/in-the-cut/">In the Cut</a></i>: a hybrid of misogynistic serial killer porn and inverted feminist thriller, and isn't great overall, but it's worth it a hundred times over for Hunter’s rich, multi-layered characterisation, a performance that knocks you sideways.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>MY BEST WRITING ON FILM</b><br /><br />
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1. My favourite piece to write this year was <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/ghost-world-film-thora-birch-interview-b1815277.html">this one</a>. Getting to tell the story of <i><b>Ghost World</b></i> on its 20th anniversary was a dream come true. As a teenager, the film struck me like lightning, and it's been hugely important to me ever since. Since I compressed a month of research into 1,800 words, here are a few deleted scenes:<br />
<blockquote>- Enid’s trendsetting look, worked on by Birch and costume designer Mary Zophres, wasn’t purely for show. “It was a great way to express Enid’s mood from day to day,” says Birch, “because she was so stoic and almost monotone in a lot of her expressions and delivery – with the sarcasm and everything – so it really gave you a glimpse of her inner world.”<br /><br />
- Birch on the age-gap relationship: “The only one in control of that relationship was Enid. She’s the driving force in finding him, in building a connection with him, in trying him out in a romantic capacity and then making the decision to go. So there is no power imbalance, other than that she’s got all the power, but doesn’t know what to do with it.”<br /><br />
- Zwigoff on working with the Weinsteins. “United Artists, MGM and Granada pretty much left me alone, for which I’m ever grateful. It was the opposite of my next film, Bad Santa, which was a constant series of battles with the Weinsteins. I refused to let them ruin that film after I’d put so much work into it. I managed to stubbornly navigate around most of their bad ideas, but I’d say that experience took about 10 years off my life. They deserve prison for that alone.”<br /><br />
- Joe Talbot on <i>Ghost World</i>’s ambivalence: “It doesn’t feel like it’s ever judgemental towards its characters. Sometimes directors end up wagging our finger at our characters, to show our own moral superiority, because we’re afraid that we’ll be judged by the flaws of the characters we’ve created. And I really loved <i>Ghost World</i>’s ability to hover above that fear and that judgement.”<br /><br />
- Illeana Douglas made frequent pleas to Zwigoff for Seymour to end up with her character, Roberta. Those fell on deaf ears.<br /><br />
- What does Birch think Enid would be railing against today? “She’d probably be pissed off about everything,” she says. “As much as I am.” Zwigoff says the character would still have “mindless consumerism” in her sights, “and maybe greed, and religion”. Does he think consumerism has worsened since 2001? “Well, you can now buy a $75 ‘vagina’ candle at Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop website,” he says. “That’s the ‘high-end’ racket. The low-end grifts are more like the Dollar Menu at McDonald’s. But they’re all trying to scramble for more money for which they would eagerly trade off say, the Amazon rainforest for a few more pennies of profit.”</blockquote>
2. A spirited defence of <i><b>Return to Oz</b></i>, for the <i>Guardian</i>. (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/feb/11/hear-me-out-why-return-to-oz-isnt-a-bad-movie">Link</a>)<br /><br />
3. Interviewing <b>Benh Zeitlin</b> for <i>Total Film</i> (August issue). (<a href="https://twitter.com/rickburin/status/1427969448275763206">Link to preview</a>) <br /><br />
4. Stray thoughts on <i><b>Tiger Bay</b></i>, a revolution in British film. (<a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/tiger-bay/1/">Link</a>)<br /><br />
5. <i><b>An American in Paris</b></i> on the big screen. (<a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/an-american-in-paris">Link</a>)<br /><br />
6. Trash as social history: <i><b>Pit Stop</b></i>. (<a href="https://letterboxd.com/film/pit-stop/">Link</a>)<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>AND A COUPLE OF PIECES ABOUT OTHER THINGS</b><br /><br />
1. On <b>returning to gigs</b>, for the <i>Guardian</i>. (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/profile/rick-burin">Link</a>)<br /><br />
2. On <b>the Manics' Holy Bible</b> for <i>Record Collector</i>'s special edition mag:<br /><br />
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***<br /><br />
Thanks for reading. I'll leave you with one of the greatest pieces of dialogue ever written, by Jules Furthman for Hawks' <i>Only Angels Have Wings</i>, a film that I watch at least once a year:
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<b>Bonnie Lee:</b> You love him, don't you, Kid?<br />
<b>Kid Dabb:</b> Yes, I guess I do.<br />
<b>Bonnie Lee:</b> Why can't I love him the way you do? Why couldn't I sneer when he tries to kill himself, feel proud when he doesn't? Why couldn't I be there to meet him when he gets back? Why couldn't I... What do you do when he doesn't come back when you expect him to?<br />
<b>Kid Dabb:</b> I go nuts.<br />Rick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com0London, UK51.5072178 -0.127586223.196983963821154 -35.2838362 79.817451636178845 35.0286638tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-88067009988615850672021-12-29T00:00:00.001+00:002021-12-29T11:54:13.213+00:00Review of the Year: Part 1 – BooksHello and welcome to the blog that people have taken to calling "that thing where you review the books you've read that year". They're not lying. No pre-amble, let's get to it.<br /><br />
<b>FICTION</b><br /><br />
My favourite novels of the year were thematic twins.
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<b>The Age of Innocence (1920)</b> by Edith Wharton is a deeply moving, searingly perceptive novel about love and missed opportunities that doubles as a portrait of 19th century New York society: a world it is both entranced by and abhors. Newland Archer is a product of that world – a place of stifling surface rectitude and eye-watering hypocrisy – whose firm but shallow convictions are uprooted by his fiancee’s vaguely-disgraced cousin, the Countess Olenska. As he attempts to navigate his feelings within a milieu bereft of complexity or compassion, Wharton conjures a succession of breathtaking set-pieces, rich in romance, irony, longing and sadness. I wasn’t prepared for how funny <i>The Age of Innocence</i>’s opening pages would be, nor how honest, insightful and modern Wharton’s take on love (is it modern, or merely eternal?) – and how could anyone ever be ready for that ending? Ambitious, profound, and profoundly sad, it carries the DNA of Ishiguro’s <i>Remains of the Day</i>, and somehow satisfies you, even as – or perhaps because – it holds you at arms’ length from your desires. J. L. Carr's <b>A Month in the Country (1980)</b> wreaked a similar havoc on me, your reader. It's a novel that does more in 103 pages than most mortals manage in a career, as an old man looks back on the month in the country he spent as a twitching young war vet, restoring a painting in a medieval church. For almost its entire length, it is merely amusing and wise and well-observed, underpinned by an understanding of nostalgia and a clear-sighted evocation of bucolic beauty. Then Carr proceeds to tear your heart to pieces. It's one of the most moving books I have ever read.<br /><br />
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Nowadays, Carr's friend and contemporary Penelope Fitzgerald is probably my favourite writer. Her second novel, <b>The Bookshop (1978)</b>, is desperately sad (are you beginning to see a pattern?), in the most understated and wounding way. Florence, an unprepossessing woman in her 40s, opens a bookshop in a small town where cruelty is a way of life and no good deed is ever revealed, let alone rewarded. Though the conversations that the hero has with her bookkeeper and her young protégé are extraordinarily funny – like Elizabeth Taylor's children, Fitzgerald's are always bracingly unsentimental little adults – and though nothing pays off in the way you expect, it is really a book about the death of hope. If Fitzgerald's style is yet to reach its apogee, the writing is still shimmeringly clean. Only quibble: does its introduction of a poltergeist work? Perhaps. In anyone else's hands, it wouldn't stand a chance. <b>The Blue Flower (1995)</b> is another Fitzgerald masterpiece, this one anticipating the succession of tragedies awaiting one aristocratic German family. It’s more episodic and fragmented than most of her books, leaning more, too, on documented fact – these are, after all, the early years of the poet Novalis, nonciness not excluded – but it is so recognisably hers. No-one writes better sentences or moves you so quickly to laughter or grief. She was some kind of genius.<br /><br />
I also truly loved Philip Pullman's <b>Serpentine (2020)</b>, a brief and beautiful book that feels like the rightful sequel to the original <i>His Dark Materials</i> trilogy, completely authentic in character because, unlike his <i>Book of Dust</i> outings, it isn’t subservient to the demands of plot. It’s wise, tender and gently sentimental, all of that augmented by Tom Duxbury’s glorious line-cut illustrations. While prepping for <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/ghost-world-film-thora-birch-interview-b1815277.html">my favourite feature I wrote this year</a> (more of which later), I revisited Daniel Clowes' comic, <b>Ghost World (1997)</b>, which remains utterly fresh: a brilliantly off-kilter and enduringly affecting salute to the freaks.<br /><br />
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Then there was <b>The Heavens (2019)</b> by Sandra Newman, an incredibly and indelibly sad book about a young woman in turn-of-the-Millennium Manhattan whose unwitting – even unwanted – second life in Elizabethan England begins to tear at the fabric of her sanity, and befoul the 21st century itself. Newman takes the basic premise of Ursula Le Guin's <i>The Lathe of Heaven</i>, in which dreams redraw reality, a reality that has then instantly always existed, and uses it to explore love, genius, mental illness and the climate emergency. As with Ishiguro's <i>When We Were Orphans</i>, the final third seems almost unsatisfying in the moment, but also leaves the strongest impression, being sprawling and daring and dark. Despite those narrative cousins, I've never read anything quite like it.<br /><br />
The same was true of <b>Sterling Karat Gold (2021)</b>. Isabel Waidner's wild and pointed fantasia was inspired by <i>The Trial</i> and shares something of <i>Slaughterhouse-Five</i>'s freewheeling spirit, but is <i>very</i> queer, <i>very</i> London, and, in almost all ways, very <i>new</i>. Matadors roam the streets of Camden, trans allies time-travel using Google Street View, and Franz Beckenbauer is improbably memorialised as a victim of the AIDS epidemic, but these are no shallow quirks, they are simply elements of a new universe, as Waidner folds sci-fi, social satire and cultural critique into an exalting, vivid and violent story of resistance. This one really got to me. The rhythm of its language, the specificity of its viewpoint, even the colour of its cover – it's an electric shock of a book.<br /><br />
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Somewhat gentler, if only on the surface, was Richard Smyth's debut novel, <b>The Woodcock (2021)</b>, in which the nature writer trains his eye on the silliest of all creatures: men. Set on the coast of Yorkshire in the '20s, it's a book about love, faith and putting crabs in jars, as an outsized American promoter arrives in the small village of Gravely with the dream of constructing a pleasureground, and our damn fool narrator takes his eye off his own marriage to pursue the visitor's horny daughter. Alive to the foibles of men – their laughable obsessions, their inexplicable decisions, their moments of clarity delivered a moment too late – and darkened by the long shadow of war, it's a wise and richly atmospheric book that deals with immortal themes, and ends in about the only way it can.<br /><br />
Having read Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster short stories, I have since commenced on the novels. The first (<i>Thank You, Jeeves</i>) is <a href="https://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2020/12/Books2020.html">overplotted to the point of tedium and dated to the point of irrelevance (Bertie spends much of it in blackface)</a>. The second one, however – <b>Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)</b> – is a little gem: largely sprightly and, at its best, quite incredibly funny. The passage in which Bertie rounds on Jeeves for his condescending vocal tics might be my favourite sequence in the series so far.<br /><br />
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One of the year's more pleasant surprises was Quentin Tarantino's debut novel(isation), <b>Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2021)</b>. The man may be an irritating gobshite who doesn’t understand the Golden Age of Cinema, but he sure can write. This book is impeccably conceived: more coherent and introspective than its source film, but with characteristically superb dialogue and plotting. The way he intercuts the 1969 material with chunks of a Western novel is inspired, neatly revealing the unspoken horrors lurking behind the coded artifice of '60s TV, while mirroring those that loom beyond Hollywood at the Spahn Movie Ranch. It's only the elements in which the author isn't as practised that drag it down a little – particularly some tortured synonymising in his prose (who knew there were so many words for a film director?) – as well as moments of self-consciousness, Tarantino never quite as cool as he imagines, since cool is an effortless thing.<br /><br />
I liked, though didn't love, Sally Rooney's<b> Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021)</b>, in which her romantic melancholia – and gentle, disquieting fetishisation of cruelty – rubs up against other things: a revulsion at the insanity of celebrity, and a working-through of the idea that her vein of fiction may have no wider resonance. It’s a criticism that she ultimately rubbishes, but earlier guards against, her main narrative alternated with epistles from its two main characters as they dissect Marxism, Catholicism, climate change and – most brilliantly and perceptively – the virtues and limitations of identity politics. Rooney was, after all, a high school debating champ, and watching her flex those muscles is invigorating. This third novel can’t quite match the overwhelming emotional impact of her first two: it's imperfect in its pacing and pay-off, and incorporates lockdown in a perversely clunky manner. But at the same time, no-one else can do what she does – and now she's also doing something new. At a pivotal moment, she dares to reference Joyce’s <i>The Dead</i>, lending her book’s laddish warehouse stacker the ethereal, tragic grace of young Michael Furey. I say this not just to underline the swaggering chutzpah of Rooney's writing, but also so that you know I spotted it, and think I am clever.<br /><br />
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I finally got around to reading an Agatha Christie novel, <b>And Then There Were None (1939)</b>, an incredibly entertaining, impeccably constructed whodunit (and howdunit), with neatly-sketched characterisation and a famously ingenious solution. If the use of language is almost perfunctory, the way Christie juggles her 10 stories is masterly. I also had my first exposure to Robert Penn Warren, through <b>All the King's Men (1946)</b>. It's a strange, lumbering book, overwritten to the point of parody in a self-serious mid-century vernacular that sees every thought instantly negated, as if precision were a thing to be feared. Once you acclimatise to the style, the story carries you along, but the lack of lucidity still undermines its meaning. You might have read that this is a book about a Huey Long-like politician – his rise and fall. But that’s the film adaptation. Here, Willie Stark is the climate, not the focus. The focus, instead, is the narrator, an ex-hack trying on the clothes of nihilism after being stung by love, only to find that the consequences of action are a little too hard to bear. Warren’s hard-boiled humour is almost objectively unfunny, and his recourse to not just inversion but self-satisfied repetition is wearying, but his story is interesting and the long, sad flashbacks – to a tragic ancestor, to an aborted love affair – are remarkably touching.<br /><br />
Having been damn near ruined by J. L. Carr's <i>A Month in the Country</i> (above), I went back for seconds, but found <b>How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup (1975)</b> a more mixed affair. I loved its melancholia and ambivalent social commentary but was less sure about the evocation of the football itself, or the tone of the comedy: often funny in the moment but also outsized and tending towards pastiche, untethered from the realism that’s broadly required. Carr’s treatment of chances missed (in a cosmic rather than footballing sense) remains, however, uniquely good. Another slight disappointment from a remarkable writer was Ishiguro's <b>Klara and the Sun (2021)</b>, in which the author investigates memory and what it means to be human through the eyes of Klara, a solar-powered Artificial Friend whose teenage owner may be on the wane. No-one does ‘voice’ quite like him, the story is essentially effective – the revelations parcelled out periodically – and that wonderful final chapter has moments that are remarkably moving. But there is something missing. The central relationship feels seriously underpowered, the book’s dialogue frequently lacks the ring of authenticity, and the idea of Josie’s specialness being “inside those who loved her” is frankly beneath the bloke who wrote <i>The Remains of the Day</i>, and whose pedestal I generally prostrate myself before.<br /><br />
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Muriel Spark's <b>The Finishing School (2005)</b> was less effective still. Her final book, it's a strange and elusive work written in incredibly direct prose. Rowland is a creative writing teacher at an exclusive and lax finishing school in Switzerland who is driven insane by jealousy after discovering that his charismatic, red-headed pupil, Chris, is writing rather a good novel. <i>The Finishing School</i>’s virtues and flaws both come from Spark’s singularity: the style is so pared down by this stage that either her points land with laser-precision or else – when the juxtaposition of short sentences is slightly off – it all seems slightly forced and irrelevant. The book is for the most part amusingly offbeat rather than funny, while Spark’s dislike of people in general and her own characters in particular feels to me not just a matter of taste but a failing, though it has flashes of brilliance: subversive ideas, confounding twists, and weird lines of dialogue that come out of nowhere.<br /><br />
At this stage, we are poking about in the year's bargain bin. <b>Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994)</b>, a non-fiction novel from John Berendt, tells tall tales in Savannah – segueing into murder. It’s flavourful and mostly entertaining but doesn’t add up to quite enough, with obvious and long-winded digressions about voodoo and drag queens, a slightly muted feel to its true crime story, and a sense that this reportage is being written long after the fact, which is why all the characters speak like some version of the author.<br /><br />
My second comic of the year, following <i>Ghost World</i>, was Frank Miller's <b>Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986)</b>, which I feel almost singularly ill-equipped to review. It's not that I don't know enough about comics, but rather that I don't know anything at all. I found it silly, difficult to follow and full of hollow climaxes involving uninteresting fight scenes, though there's some striking imagery and the odd provoking, pre-<i>Robocop</i> contention.<br /><br />
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There were only two novels I barely valued at all. <b>Happy All the Time (1978)</b> by Laurie Colwin was extremely grating: an oppressively cartoonish and offensively mechanical book, with endless lists of quirks and objects in place of actual characterisation, and every joke constructed in the same wearisome three-part way. There are a few lovely ideas but you have to withstand a positive blizzard of triviality to get to them. Faulkner's <b>Sanctuary (1931)</b> is just really... bad. It was a potboiler that Faulkner later rewrote in a fit of literary panic, and that shows. There are a few wonderful phrases, mostly at the end of chapters, but it's almost unrelentingly unpleasant, and, in most prosaic terms, I frequently found it hard to follow what on earth was going on or who anyone was. <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2019/12/Books2019.html">As I Lay Dying</a></i> has a reputation for being more difficult, but despite its experimental elements it's so much easier to read than this offputting, repetitive and confusing bilge.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>NON-FICTION</b><br /><br />
<b>History and politics:</b><br /><br />
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<a href="https://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2020/12/Books2020.html">My favourite non-fiction books of the past two years were the various instalments of Robert Caro's epic work on Lyndon B. Johnson.</a> My favourite non-fiction book of this year is Caro's <i>other</i> biography, which won the Pulitzer for 1974. <b>The Power Broker</b> is a 1,300-page character assassination, both sweeping and impossibly detailed, that rips the mask from ‘master builder’ Robert Moses, who dominated the world of New York politics for more than 40 years, providing the city with dozens of highways, hundreds of parks, Shea Stadium and the Lincoln Center, but at what cost? Caro is in awe of Moses’ energy, ingenuity and cunning, but also lays bare his subject’s thirst for power, his myopia and his malevolence. Born in the era of the horse and carriage, and the primitive, expensive automobile, Moses was fixated on the idea that the most beautiful land be given over to create the most beautiful roads. Increasingly isolated by his power, hamstrung by his arrogance and surrounded by an army of sycophants, it was a view that – if anything – hardened with time; by the 1960s, after repeated, unsuccessful attempts to prise him from office, he had fundamentally and irreparably scarred the landscape of his city. His policies were underscored, too, by snobbery: the parks, the highways and the housing priorities of this privileged Yale graduate were in the service of the wealthy. And, as Caro brilliantly exposes, in the service of the white. It is an unstintingly remarkable book, filled with vivid sketches of its once-in-a-lifetime supporting cast – Moses’ mentor is the up-from-the-gutter presidential candidate Al Smith; his primary antagonist FDR – and with heartbreaking vignettes. Moses’ casual destruction of rivals, communal treasures and entire communities is stunningly evoked, particularly in the book’s second half, when Caro breaks with a conventionally chronological narrative to tell almost self-contained, intensely personal stories of the damage done, before revealing the wider malaise, echoing down the decades. The reconstruction of the 'Battle of the Central Park', when Moses' true character was revealed to an adoring public for the first time, is as exciting as anything I've ever read. And the short, snappy early chapter in which the subject mounts the worst gubernatorial campaign in New York history is up there with the funniest. Perhaps Caro is wedded too much to the idea of power corrupting (Moses was, after all, a snob and a racist when he was a young reformer). Perhaps he himself unhelpfully uses immigration as a synonym for a community heading downhill. And there’s also an unnecessary comma on one page near the end. In terms of flaws, that’s about all I can find. In 1,300 pages.<br /><br />
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I also loved Janet Malcolm's <b>The Journalist and the Murderer (1990)</b>, in which the essayist uses true crime – once removed – to interrogate journalism, non-fiction and literature, examining the hypocrisy behind fact-gathering and the artifice behind art. Her chosen lens is the case of convicted murderer Dr Jeffrey MacDonald, who won a libel suit against Joe McGillis after the biographer pretended to believe in his innocence before savaging him in print. They, then, are the journalist and the murderer, but the book's true value is revealed in the title's dual meaning: the journalist is a sympathetic mother in conversation and a harsh father in execution; he is a killer of reputations. You surely won't agree with everything in Malcolm's wide-ranging thesis, which among other things attributes candidness in interviews to vanity, paints literary creations as simplistic renderings compared to real people, and regards shorthand notes as the only basis for truthful quotes. But it's a book that challenges you and compels you to think, full of beautifully-wrought phrases and thoughts of piercing clarity.<br /><br />
Regular readers will know how much I love reading transcripts of things, like some unspeakable nerd(/history graduate). So <b>Buckley v Vidal: The Historic 1968 ABC News Debates (1968/2015)</b> was a real treat: the complete record of everything that dissolute wordsmith Gore Vidal and debonair bigot William F. Buckley spat at each during their dazzling and ultimately infamous televised duels. In the exceptional documentary about the affair, <i>Best of Enemies</i>, the filmmakers suggest that the debates ushered in a new era of political TV, antagonistic and personality-driven. In his 2014 book, <b>All the Truth Is Out: The Week That Politics Went Tabloid (2014)</b>, Matt Bai makes some similarly gargantuan claims about what he sees as another watershed moment in modern media: the presidential campaign of Gary Hart, which appeared to be heading towards the White House, before colliding with the candidate's history of infidelity. Bai's book is partly a (balanced) attempt to rehabilitate a noted shagger – whose downfall is brought spectacularly to life – and partly an incisive examination of why it still matters, and what we lost when politics turned into entertainment. Bai's language occasionally lapses into an imprecise chattiness, and his thesis now feels slightly incomplete – though not wrong – in a post-Trump world, but this is still an exhilarating mixture of room-where-it-happens reportage, wet-eyed polemic and clarion cry. Crucially, it makes you look at the world a little differently.<br /><br />
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Another brilliant, and important, non-fiction work was Peter Mitchell's <b>Imperial Nostalgia (2021)</b>, a scintillating study of Britain’s relationship with its Empire, and how that continues to warp society, infect the discourse and power the culture wars. Beginning with probably the funniest epigraph I’ve ever read, Mitchell casts a remarkably clear eye over his subject, covering everything from the post-rationalised manufacturing of the imperial myth to the masculine violence that underpins the soft, feminine beauty of the standard British country house; the studied innocence of the colonial project and its “imperial wonder boy” (typified most recently by Rory Stewart) to the ventriloquising of far-right ideas, currently emerging with remarkable regularity from the mouths of a fictional northern demographic. Mitchell is a withering, acerbic and compassionate guide, profoundly moving when dealing with his own father’s death (a metaphor for wanting to resurrect a vanished idyll), even-handed in his extended portrait of culture warrior Nigel Biggar, and fantastically pungent when turning his fire on right-wing commentators like Tim Shipman and Matthew Goodwin. Those vivid, economical portraits of contemporary players are in several cases virtually definitive: Boris Johnson is “a public school boy from a mid-century comic strip ... about to snaffle a pie from the window ledge on which it is cooling”. Occasionally he’ll repeat a phrase or an idea, or be over-exuberant in dismissing a tangled culture story as simply “a lie”. But <i>Imperial Nostalgia</i> remains an invigorating antidote to a form of gaslighting-by-media that Mitchell himself identifies: at times, the sheer quantity of misinformation currently being spewed into the public sphere makes it almost impossible to withstand. The most vital non-fiction either opens your eyes a little wider or else sneaks you around the back so you can see the contraptions that power the machine. This book does both.<br /><br />
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So does Rick Perlstein's <b>Nixonland</b>, which is about ‘60s America, and came out in 2008, but is the most instructive and insightful book I’ve read in terms of understanding the British culture wars of the past decade. A true conservative movement can never offer economic populism – that's not what it's for – so instead it offers the cultural alternative: flags, family values, and ordinariness as a virtue; stoking up fear of ‘the other’, dampening it with reassurance. Nixon’s version of the culture wars (with an apparent debt to Ayn Rand that’s unacknowledged here) is the one that has stuck – you see it in Brexit, you see it in Trump. On the one hand are the intellectual liberal elite – a spineless, snobbish, effete group selling us down the river to thugs, scroungers, immigrants and weirdos – and on the other are the "silent majority"; decent people who believe in hard work, law and order. In Britain, it appeared that we had reached a rough consensus under Blair: economically conservative but (for the most part) socially liberal. In America, after LBJ’s 1964 landslide, there had been no doubt in the commentators’ minds: this was a nation that had mellowed and matured into liberalism, and once it had speedily dispensed with poverty and racism, it would be casting around for new realms to conquer, not just material but spiritual. Instead came Vietnam, and Watts, and Chicago '68; instead came the Black Panthers and Kent State. That’s Perlstein’s take, anyway – America missed the signs of intolerance and racism. The counterculture missed the way it was playing into its enemy’s hands. And Nixon? Nixon didn’t miss a trick. This book is sprawling and overlong (often Perlstein will strive for a panoramic approach by merely resorting to a breathless compendium of vaguely similar acts in diverse cities). It has little of the oral history that I feel really brings biographies to life – indeed, layers them with life – leaning largely on secondary sources, newspaper reports, and descriptions of TV broadcasts. And while the writing is energetic and readable, too often it's lacking in poetry or flavour. But where the book scores is in its huge, honking opinions. It is a fascinating thesis, with a persuasive overarching argument and a willingness to brook received wisdom, frequently finding nuance in a world that allowed for none. It is depressing, enraging and almost endless, but it is also incredibly valuable, giving you that rare gift: the context to help you understand the world that you live in.<br /><br />
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One of this year's great losses was Dawn Foster, the brilliant left-wing journalist (and forever one of the funniest people on the accursed hellsite where I live, <a href="https://twitter.com/home">Twitter.com</a>). Her first book, <b>Lean Out (2016)</b>, is a dismantling of corporate and choice feminism, touched by a remarkable sincerity when focusing on her particular areas of expertise (poverty and housing), but also laced with typically withering one-liners: the finest is surely when she dismisses the author of a report on women in business as “former banker and government minister, and current man, Lord Davies". I also enjoyed <b>Essex Girls (2020)</b>, a debut non-fiction work from one of my favourite novelists, Sarah Perry. Though I was slightly flummoxed by its thesis, which doesn't seem to entirely cohere, I also found it eye-opening and profound, full of beautifully-wrought language, and blessed by a singular way of seeing the world. By contrast, Joan Smith's influential, near-legendary collection of essays, <b>Misogynies (1989)</b>, was broadly poisonous. I wrote about my problems with it – though also its virtues – <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4361967315?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">here</a>.<br /><br />
James Felton's <b>Sunburn (2020)</b> made me laugh out loud every couple of pages. It's a discursive, gag-heavy survey of a half-century of The Sun (for any children reading, The Sun is like The Beano but for racists), written in his distinctive style, with enough context, plenty of righteous anger, and great jokes. If this piques your interest in the subject, <i>Tabloid Nation</i> and <i>Stick It Up Your Punter!</i> are also indispensable.<br /><br />
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John Preston's fantastically pacey and entertaining biography of Robert Maxwell, <b>The Fall (2020)</b>, is perhaps more purely enjoyable than a book about Robert Maxwell should be, given the great tragedies in his early life, his execution of civilians during WWII, and the notorious raids he made on the Mirror’s pension fund. I’m not complaining, though. Like Ben Macintyre, Preston will sometimes prioritise a quirky detail or anecdote over real psychological insight, and if in doubt he tends to turn to some absolute bastard for comment – Murdoch, Conrad Black, Jeffrey Archer, Alastair Campbell – but it’s a vivid, readable portrait of a large and awful character, with something amusing or amazing on almost every page. Another riveting if vaguely unsatisfying tome was <b>The Suspect (2019)</b>, by Kent Alexander and Kevin Salwen, which is just about the definition of a pageturner: the turbo-charged story of Richard Jewell, the hero of the Atlanta Olympics bombing in 1996, who then became the chief suspect – and the subject of a trial-by-media. That was partly down to the actions of single-minded FBI agent Don Johnson and colourful local reporter Kathy Scruggs, their ad-hoc collaboration providing a handy illustration of how the relationship between law enforcement and the media continues to distort much of news journalism. The authors’ juggling of the various narratives isn’t always perfect, but every time you fear that the book might be flagging, there is some stunningly-deployed twist or colourful new character, and the access and insight is truly remarkable. From innumerable conflicting accounts, they fashion a solid character study and a riveting thriller, and their command of the facts and the context enables them to elucidate the wider significance of what we’re witnessing. “A contributing source for the Warner Bros’ film, Richard Jewell” is surely the most joyless yet legally watertight “now a major motion picture” strapline ever.<br /><br />
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Less successful was David Grann's <b>Killers of the Flower Moon (2017)</b> (<i>soon</i> to be a major motion picture). It's a feat of research, as opposed to one of writing, as Grann chronicles – and later expands upon – an FBI investigation into a series of murders in Oklahoma’s Osage Mountains during the 1920s. The victims: Native Americans who had been made wealthy by a rare and savvy contract clause while surrendering their oil-rich lands. There’s no faulting the thoroughness of Grann’s digging, even if he ultimately has to overstate the significance of his own discoveries, but everyone who works for the <i>New Yorker</i> nowadays seems to write in the same restrictively mannered, semi-intellectual style, and the often-remarkable material is too often dropped on us in chunks. Ultimately, this readable and empathetic book never brushes against greatness, while its 'birth of the FBI' subtitle is a piece of marketing that isn't really borne out by the work itself. <b>Don’t Call It a Cult: The Shocking Story of Keith Raniere and the Women of Nxivm (2021)</b> by Sarah Berman is similarly flawed, fascinating and quite remarkably unpleasant, while told with genuine sensitivity for its victims. It deals with that old chestnut: a multi-level marketing programme of self-improvement classes that turns out instead to be a(n alleged) sex cult. Berman's book is slightly hamstrung by its structure, which promises to avoid the pitfalls of a dry chronological narrative – as well as playing to her strengths as a journalist and debut author – by presenting a succession of gently overlapping long reads, but leaves you feeling as if you've missed a few steps. Perhaps that was the case for NXIVM members too.<br /><br />
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I mentioned earlier my fondness for transcripts, and it's those sections of <b>The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 (2019)</b> by Garrett M. Graff that are most powerful: history, unedited by memory retrieval or false narrative, unfiltered by hindsight. The logs of voicemails, cockpit transmissions and emergency calls – possessed of startling immediacy and slow-dawning horror – are as remarkable artefacts as exist of that pivotal day in modern history. Graff is also able to augment his sources with inspired editorial flourishes, including short bursts of staccato editing that cut between similar reminiscences. At its best, then, the book is chilling, desperately moving, profoundly human and subtly insightful about America's self-image. But at its worst, and it is frequently at its worst, this interminable volume is repetitive, plodding, confusing and beset by digression (it was expanded from Graff's POLITICO piece set aboard Air Force One, which isn't nearly as interesting a place to spend time as you might imagine), while permitting a handful of Neo-Con psychos to start spinning the past. Placed alongside the real-time documents, almost everything else seems post-rationalised and aloof. Then you get to the images section, and see the faces in the crowded stairwell of a tower, and wonder if certain stories are just told best by certain media, and that for the most part dry text can't get close to the centre of this one.<br /><br />
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And I read a book about a big boat. <b>Normandie: Her Life and Times (1985)</b> by Harvey Ardman is a remarkably well-researched account of the art deco liner’s creation, glory days and tragic fate that sadly falls down a touch in the writing. The opening chapters are too dry – presumably a treat for hull-length aficionados and gross-tonnage obsessives, but not the casual reader – though the book’s most obvious failing is that while it gives us a detailed tour of the vessel in its heyday, it fails to truly evoke life on board or articulate what was special about the ship, beyond its size, speed and sense of opulence. More time and colour seems to be expended on the (essentially pointless) salvage operation than on those salad days. Those later sections really do sing, though. By far the best parts of the book are those that deal with the fire in New York, and the ship’s subsequent years – there is nothing eerier, after all, than luxury run to ruin, or a place that once teemed with life but is now bereft of it. While the impact is lessened by the shallowness of those earlier chapters, Ardman makes SS Normandie feel like a real person, and her sudden and precipitous decline is correspondingly moving. One curious omission: though there are countless references to Normandie in popular culture, Hitchcock’s classic thriller, <i>Saboteur</i>, was presumably inspired by the rumours around the vessel’s burning, and features footage of the ship on its side, and yet isn’t mentioned once. And speaking of films...<br /><br />
<b>Film and music (and for some reason a biography of Stan Lee):</b><br /><br />
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One of my enduring obsessions is the communist witchhunt in Hollywood. In the past few years, I've managed to crowbar the subject into features on subjects as disparate as <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/mank-film-david-fincher-old-hollywood-b1762327.html">the film <i>Mank</i></a> and <a href="https://recordcollectormag.com/reviews/book/suede-3">the memoir of Britpop frontman, Brett Anderson</a>. For those new to the subject, Thomas Doherty's 2018 work, <b>Show Trial</b>, is about as good an introduction as you could ask for – and my favourite culture book of the year. Doherty focuses primarily on 1947, and though he somewhat unconvincingly minimises the events of subsequent years, he does a fine job of explaining critical industry context that often gets overlooked: particularly the rancour that already existed between rival unions, and between different factions on the left. The author also makes vivid sketches of previously neglected players like MPAA head Eric Johnston, whose principles were always subservient to his particular brand of business-minded pragmatism, and eschews the simplicity of many HUAC books, which frequently whitewash Stalinist bullies like John Howard Lawson. Going back to primary sources wherever possible, and proving as witty and film-literate as ever, Doherty creates a fast-paced and credible study of the blacklist’s origins that’s perhaps lacking only in emotional charge and dramatic impact – which might be a shortcoming of his style, or just what happens when you replace the certainties of the usual HUAC discourse with something more ambivalent.<br /><br />
I also enjoyed Doherty's <b>Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-34 (1999)</b>, which deals with <i>another</i> of my cinematic preoccupations: the period between the coming of sound and the imposition of the censorship code, when films dealt frankly with issues like sex, social justice, queerness and addiction. Rich in detail and stylishly-written, the book covers the high spots, with plenty of political and industry context, but goes further afield too. The chapter on fakery, nudity and colonial tropes in ethnographic documentaries is properly hilarious, and if sometimes Doherty stretches too far in attempting to score Freudian points about racial unease, his thoughtful, imaginative approach does offer a fresh perspective. There are a few errors (mostly relating to film titles and restricted to the opening chapter, though some release dates later in the book are a year out), but that stuff was trickier in 1999. If you’re interested in Pre-Code cinema, it remains essential. If you’re not, then what are you thinking, you’ll hate this.<br /><br />
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Of the books I read by or about directors, the liveliest was Edward White's <b>The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock (2021)</b>. In his intro, White makes some bold claims about Hitch’s greatness that aren’t so much disingenuous as untrue. Hitchcock’s work spanned an unusual number of genres? Surely he has about the narrowest range of any great director. Hitch is the only filmmaker whose mythology eclipses his movies? Not only is that a perverse metric, hard to quantify, but it probably doesn’t even apply to Hitch. And anyway, what about Orson Welles? Then we get into the 12 lives and it’s suddenly terrific, full of neat connections and deep research. Only one chapter seems redundant – ‘Hitchcock the dandy’ is largely predicated on the idea that, like most people of his era and background, the director often wore a suit – and the ones zooming in on his relationships with his weight, his relationships with women and his status as a Londoner are simply outstanding. Perhaps the best thing about White’s approach is that he is prepared to fully engage, from a progressive perspective, with the difficult elements of Hitchcock the person and Hitchcock the artist, without thinking that these in any way negate the art. He's interesting, too, on the significance of the director's TV career, and the way it helped shape his public image. Like his subject, White's book is entertaining, provocative, provoking and occasionally pretentious. I only really realised while reading it that many people claim their favourite Hitchcock film is <i>Marnie</i>, which... well it’s not, is it. The author's gentle pisstaking about the film’s unintentional technical defects – and the way that pseuds have praised them as artistic virtues – is highly enjoyable.<br /><br />
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<i><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Not as absorbing as any novel.</i></div></i><br />
Michael Powell is probably the best filmmaker that Britain has ever produced. He is not, though, the best writer Britain has ever produced. The first half (!) of his autobiography, <b>My Life in Movies (1986)</b>, is quite outrageously long-winded: there's more here than you could ever need to know about Michael Powell's uncles, Michael Powell's holidays, and the inner workings of a hop farm. But after a largely tedious first 100 pages, he begins his life in movies and from then on there's enough gold to make the long-winded diversions worthwhile. Powell himself is vain, arrogant, silly, trivial, brilliant, honest, intuitive, incisive and annoying, and the best way for fans to experience this book may be simply to skip to their favourite films from the index. Not only are there numerous small revelations, details and pieces of gossip (Deborah Kerr and James Mason were supposed to star in <i>I Know Where I'm Going!</i> only for a break-up and a squabble to scupper that), but what he chooses to focus on during his discussion of each production is fascinating in itself. While a better and more ruthless editor would have resulted in a more readable book, if the purpose of an autobiography is just to give you an unfiltered portrait of the person, then this certainly does that.<br /><br />
By contrast, Sidney Lumet’s book is not an autobiography, nor even a memoir, but an attempt to put down – across a couple of hundred pages – how he makes movies. <b>Making Movies (1996)</b> is even structured that way, beginning with rehearsals and ending with the release of the film. His writing style is functional (as if his flavourful turn of phrase is reserved purely for his few screenplays) but a bigger problem is that he has little concept of what’s interesting or revelatory, so remarkable insights jostle for space with some of the driest passages I’ve ever read in my life. One minute he’s explaining how you light, frame and edit O’Neill's <i>Long Day’s Journey Into Night</i> to accentuate the characters’ differing declines (for clarity, that’s the bit I enjoyed); the next he’s telling you what he likes to eat for dinner, or explaining all 64 channels in a mid-‘90s soundtrack mix. Sometimes the book seems to be for people who’ve never seen a film, let alone imagined how one might be made; at others, it’s like you’ve just started work at the lab and he’s explaining your duties. Lumet is also so averse to gossip that even gentle revelations tend to be anonymised, and he’s more of a luvvie than you might expect, albeit one driven to distraction by Teamsters and personal make-up artists. But the compensation is that he also tells you how he begins each project (theme and concept first), how that is translated into his technical approach, and how each film is then captured and refined. His insights into rehearsal, the nature of compromise and the process of editing are particularly valuable, and he offers little flashes into the working patterns of collaborators like Pacino, Paul Newman and Quincy Jones. You’re panning for gold here, really, but there is plenty to be found.<br /><br />
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The pick of the year's books on actors was Christina Rice's <b>Mean... Moody... Magnificent! Jane Russell and the Marketing of a Hollywood Legend (2021)</b>. Though it pales alongside <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2019/12/Books2019.html">Rice's biography of Ann Dvorak</a> – as I like Ann more, and so does the author – it's extremely well-researched, with characteristically crisp and witty writing. I'm not typically as interested in film fashion as many writers on the Golden Age, but here it makes total sense to zone in on those elements, since the limited, pneumatic Russell was sold as a physical product ("like a tin of tomatoes", in her words), and that was her wrapper. It also does an impressive job of unpicking the actor's considerable contradictions, like being an LBQTI+ icon and a self-proclaimed 'bigot'. I read the book in one sitting, which is a good review in itself.<br /><br />
Hayley Mills' memoir, <b>Forever Young (2021)</b>, ran it close. The book's great virtue is its honesty, with Hayley merciless in her appraisal of herself (at times, you sense, rather too much so). There are moments of self-indulgence (only Morrissey ever focused more on a court case) and her writing is variable – she resorts to clichés in quotation marks, and repeatedly misuses the word “literally” – but the book is also consistently diverting, with fun cameos from figures as disparate as George Harrison and Lord Lucan, and some touching tales of minor characters from the worlds of entertainment and 'society'. The daughter of Johnny Mills, she's inevitably a bit of a luvvie, but a loveable one, and with a rare talent to which she seems largely oblivious (more of which in <i>Review of Year: Part 2 – Movies</i>).<br /><br />
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My forays into the lives of three other favourite actors left me rather cold and/or bored. <b>Body and Soul: The Story of John Garfield by Larry Swindell (1975)</b> is a confounding biography of Hollywood’s first genuine Method actor, the busy adulterer and tragic HUAC victim born Julius Garfinkle. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33946201-body-and-soul">, fatally lacking the dynamism that defined its subject's work.</a> Garfield's predecessor – another up-from-the-ground New York kid who changed screen art forever – was James Cagney, a fellow recipient of an extremely underwhelming biography. <b>Cagney by John McCabe (1997)</b> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4034373564?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">never even begins to explain the actor’s rare genius or to use his films as a key to unlock the history of the country he idealised</a>. It's better, though, than <b>Veronica: The Autobiography of Veronica Lake (1969)</b>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4006095798?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">which is inescapably the memoir of an alcoholic, and one who isn't quite candid enough for it to be valuable</a>.<br /><br />
Candidness has never been a problem for the living legend, Sinéad O'Connor, who is difficult, brilliant and just one of my favourite people on Planet Earth. The first third of her memoir, <b>Rememberings (2021)</b>, is extraordinary: heartbreaking, ironic, suddenly hilarious – or else horrifying – with that striking narrative voice. The next part comprises honest, lively but disconnected vignettes, too many about farting or shit, not adding up to quite enough. The final third was written post-illness and is mostly just padding. That’s a review of the book, then. But she’s a total hero: a fearless trailblazer who ran so others could merely walk.<br /><br />
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A brief consultation with a couple of apps tells me that while my most-listened-to artist of 2021 was the incomparable folk singer, Nic Jones, a distant but respectable second was Frank Sinatra. What came first, the incessant record-spinning or the two-volume biography? James Kaplan's <b>Frank: The Making of a Legend (2010)</b> starts off shakily, and leans too much on secondary sources, but it's an awful lot of fun, and Kaplan writes unusually well about the music. The rest is speculation, supposition, half-truths, Freudian leaps, diversions dealing with supporting characters, and even a few facts, bundled together in a breathless, chatty style. And where versions of key incidents <i>do</i> diverge, the author makes a fair go of getting at the truth. While the subject was, at the end of a day, an arsehole, he couldn't half sing, and a life of triumphs and tantrums makes for an enjoyable read.<br /><br />
After devouring volume one, which climaxes with Sinatra's Oscar win in 1954, I did much the same to <b>Sinatra: The Chairman (2015)</b> by James Kaplan.
It's also gossipy, psychologically enlightening and has a real feel for the records. If I don’t always agree with Kaplan’s takes (‘Cycles’ is one of my favourite Sinatra vocals, and ‘Watertown’ – whatever the pretensions of its admirers – is just a stunning album), they’re invariably thought-provoking, enlightening and sincere. Somehow he also manages to square the apparently irreconcilable elements of his subject: the sensitive artist and the cowardly, selfish bully. But while the book is great on the man and his music it’s rather long-winded on both JFK and the mob. And though Kaplan displays his familiar tenacity when it comes to getting at the truth, as well as reining in his chattier first-person tendencies, <i>The Chairman</i> is also bittier than the earlier volume – especially as it progresses. It’s perhaps most memorable – and funny – when digging into Frank’s own relationship with his later work. It’s fascinating to me that the singer compromised his artistic integrity because of a terror that the world was leaving him behind, and is now largely known – both positively and negatively – for the records he hated or thought beneath him (most notably ‘Strangers in the Night’, which he initially dismissed with the words, “I don’t want to sing this. It’s a piece of shit.”). While that isn’t a unique story, it’s rarely seen to this degree.<br /><br />
<b>Let's Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood (2020)</b> is certainly comprehensive, but also a little dull. Author Jasper Rees clearly believes that the role of such a biography is to record, for posterity, what the subject was doing and when. As a result, his book can resemble a glorified bookings calendar, though there are liberal servings of Wood wit, thanks to regular excerpts from sketches, interviews and letters – most notably those to her friend, Jane Wymark, which are variously candid, charming and bitchy. Wood emerges from the book as a surprisingly but perhaps gratifyingly difficult character: a workaholic perfectionist who demanded the same from her collaborators, and turned herself from a painfully awkward shy girl to a dazzyingly charismatic entertainer through sheer force of will.
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And finally: Abraham Riesman's <b>True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee (2021)</b>, a warts-and-all biography – comprising mostly warts, to be honest – which promises a lot but delivers only a fraction of that. It’s pitched as sort of <i>Death-of-a-Salesman</i>-meets-<i>Kavalier and Clay</i>, with a stunning title, a breathless blurb hinting at some epic exploration of the American Dream, and an opening section that finds the roots of this story in a Romanian pogrom. I wish the book that I'd imagined existed, but I'm not sure Stan Lee could be the subject of it. Perhaps <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2017/12/2017Books.html">I just wanted <i>Kavalier and Clay</i> again</a>. The first half of <i>True Believer</i> is hugely readable if curiously paced, skirting over entire decades then drilling down into a particular controversy for a dozen pages. But while Riesman does about as good a job as possible of untangling the disputed genesis of certain Lee ‘creations’, there simply is no smoking gun, which can't help but leave you unsatisfied. After that, the book becomes increasingly shapeless, resembling a rummage through Lee’s personal papers and financial records – augmented by some interviews – before climaxing with a lengthy depiction of the dying subject being held captive in his house by various malign forces. There are fleeting moments of excitement and scandal here, with the author neatly contrasting the cartoonishly avuncular image of Lee with the reality. But that reality is ultimately not very interesting. The portrait of Lee that emerges is of a dull man concerned largely with money and full to bursting with bad ideas.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Thanks for reading.Rick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com0London, UK51.5072178 -0.127586223.196983963821154 -35.2838362 79.817451636178845 35.0286638tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-30699195004132757622021-05-24T11:33:00.027+01:002023-05-24T19:44:10.716+01:00Dylan at 80: two songs<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-deklsZLp0aI/YKuDF_zdE8I/AAAAAAAAIrY/sC2UITEd020LejwDg11-4KZ7txTZ_puNACLcBGAsYHQ/s768/bob-dylan-577455df5f9b585875a0ab91.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="502" data-original-width="768" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-deklsZLp0aI/YKuDF_zdE8I/AAAAAAAAIrY/sC2UITEd020LejwDg11-4KZ7txTZ_puNACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/bob-dylan-577455df5f9b585875a0ab91.jpg"/></a></div>
<b>Every Grain of Sand (1981)</b><br /><br />
<i>"Don't have the inclination to look back on any mistake,<br />
Like Cain, I now behold this chain of events that I must break."</i><br /><br />
The problem with Dylan's immediately notorious sojourn in evangelical Christianity wasn't that he was failing to give fans what they wanted − when has that honestly ever been the point of Dylan? − or that he'd sold out those earlier ideals: if you could stomach him ripping the piss out of your revolution for much of 1964-6, then surely you could accept him bigging up The Big Man. It was that most of the music was <i>terrible</i>.<br /><br />
The tunes were risible, the vocals largely lifeless, and the words worse, often consisting of him simply paraphrasing the Bible. The genius who at 24 wrote, "Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial/Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while" was now so myopically committed to his newfound faith − and to his thoroughly questionable way of proselytising about it − that he seriously put out a song that goes like this:<br />
<blockquote><i>Jesus said, "Be ready,<br />
For you know not the hour in which I come."<br />
He said, "He who is not for Me is against Me,"<br />
Just so you know where He's coming from.</i><br /></blockquote>
Yes, OK, he did say those things, but is that the point?<br /><br />
There are lots of good songs about God, like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihJAJA4ibEs">'Be Thou My Vision'</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxIG2msJ7ow">'Down There by the Train'</a>, but for much of this almost self-parodic diversion, Dylan didn't seem to know how to write one. For a man who had dismissed his Civil Rights-era anthems as 'finger-pointing songs', he was suddenly doing a lot of finger-pointing, and the results were, almost without exception, deadening. <i>Slow Train Coming</i> has just the funky 'Gotta Serve Somebody' and some vocal sensitivity on the closing number ('When He Returns') to recommend it. In 'Man Gave Names to All the Animals', the bloke who wrote 'Love Minus Zero' appeared to have lost not just his talent but his mind, memorably describing a bear as having a "great big furry back and furry hair", which − while broadly accurate − is one hell of a drop-off. Dylan's follow-up record, <i>Saved</i>, is an album so utterly devoid of empathy and sensitivity it makes <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_rZqypc2Kg">the Louvin Brothers</a> sound like, well, <i>Jesus</i>.<br /><br />
All of this − this whole tone-deaf, three-year exercise in one-dimensional, closed-minded, redundant didacticism − is justified by 'Every Grain of Sand', and its 'still small voice of calm', to borrow a line from another great hymn. Gone is the surety and the intolerance of those previous two records, replaced by tenderness, solace and, yes, doubt: a doubt that renders Dylan human and his message divine. He's not calling on you to repent now, or describing a sheep, he is instead content, trading his pain and anger for both beauty and humility ("In the fury of the moment, I can see the master's hand," he sings in the first chorus. "In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand").<br /><br />
As the song nears its close and his voice climbs towards an apparent climax, fittingly you'd be forgiven for fearing the worst. "I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea," he intones, perhaps on his way to a little fire and brimstone − but this time there's no certainty, simply honesty: "Sometimes I turn, there's someone there," he says, "other times it's only me." And by the time the song had gone from doggy demo (there is literally a dog woofing on the demo) to final version, he had gone further, no longer hanging in the balance of "a perfect finished plan" but in "the reality of man", a critical adjustment that underlines something crucial. That this quiet, gentle song, Elvis Costello's favourite of Dylan's back catalogue, and the most peaceful in his entire oeuvre, is also one of his most personal. And that he is a part of creation, not some avenging angel.<br /><br />
When Dylan went Christian, he became essentially uninteresting, aside perhaps from the sheer novelty of <i>Dylan</i> going <i>Christian</i>. And since I'm Catholic and still an absolutely scintillating personality, I can only assume that's because of how he did it. From <i>The Freewheelin'</i> to <i>Modern Times</i>, Dylan has always stolen (and sometimes, like when he stole from a still-recovering Nic Jones, that was Not OK), but when he took the tune of 'Nottamun' Town for 'Masters of War', he was acting in the folk tradition; when 'Where the Blue of the Night' became 'When the Deal Goes Down', he was stretching back to the Great American Songbook and signposting where he'd (unwisely) be going next; and, in both songs, crucially, those earlier inspirations were merely springboards for new explosions of creativity. There is nothing distinctive or creative about his use of other texts in the first two Christian albums: what we have here is more like a Body Snatchers situation, in which he is the unthinking mouthpiece for someone else's ideas, regurgitated wholesale. (The only difference I can think of is that the Body Snatchers didn't have a glossy funk-rock ensemble featuring Mark Knopfler on lead guitar.)<br /><br />
'Every Grain of Sand' is the sound of Dylan rejoining both the artistic community and the human race, as he mixes Blakean imagery that conjures incalculable size through its intimate focus, with a vulnerability, even fragility, revealed so rarely in Bob's work. "The sorrow of the night", "the bitter dance of loneliness" and "the broken mirror of innocence", though, are no match for his faith, which you sense is stronger now that he can admit he only has some of the answers, only some of the time.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>Abandoned Love (1975)</b><br /><br />
<i>"My patron saint's off fighting with a ghost, he's always off somewhere when I need him most."</i><br /><br />
In July 1975, Dylan drifted into a Ramblin' Jack Elliott set at The Other End in Greenwich Village, consented to play on a couple of numbers, and then started singing something of his own. Joe Kivak was there: "After a couple of lines, we realised he was performing a new song, with each line getting even better than the last ... it still is the most powerful performance I've ever heard." The bootleg recording is pure lightning-in-a-bottle stuff: Dylan in an emotional trough but at a creative zenith, singing, heartbroken but clear-eyed, for a handful of people in a tiny club about the breakdown of his marriage. When he says simply, "Wherever the children go I'll follow them," you're not sure if he's referencing <i>Nights of Cabiria</i>, the Bible or just the fact that he might not see his kids any more. Dylan had form in reducing audiences to rubble, but to tears? Not so much.<br /><br />
The song is, I suppose, the final part of a trilogy which began with the hypnotic, endless 'Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' (1966), and continued in a more literal form with 'Sara' (1976, but written earlier), combining the lyrical preoccupations of the <i>Blonde on Blonde</i> era (where "gods are dead" and "queens are in the church") with the burgeoning Tex-Mex theatricality of <i>Desire</i> and a devastating emotional sincerity that rears its head but rarely in his work. By the time Dylan got around to recording it later that month, he had managed to strangle it in glib, jaunty, violin-led full-band pointlessness, its poetry evaporating on impact. It was ultimately chopped from the record in favour of 'Joey', a shallow hymn to a mobster, and the only version in public circulation is the studio one, released on <i>Biograph</i> (1985) and later <i>Side Tracks</i>.<br /><br />
Perhaps playing it as he did at The Other End was just too painful. It has its allusions but they're always in service of a bracing directness. The song is, in the modern parlance, 'relatable'. It's definitely the most I've ever got out of a man telling me about his divorce.<br /><br />Rick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-90334215822467999282020-12-15T14:34:00.114+00:002020-12-29T12:07:46.316+00:00Review of 2020: Part 2 – FilmsThis is the most excited I’ve felt about cinema in a long while. Not in terms of new releases – though I fell wildly in love with the films of Céline Sciamma – but just my new areas of exploration. I mentioned last year that sometimes it can feel like you’ve seen all the good films. But in 2020 I stayed up late watching<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awaara"> Indian melodrama</a>, discovered that war films aren’t all cardboard jingoism, and became briefly preoccupied with ‘70s schlock, as well as excavating new nooks and crannies in my true home – Golden Age Hollywood.<br /><br />
At heart, I am just a shameful sentimentalist, and wherever they originate, my favourite films are always those that make me feel. You’ll find the list of best ‘discoveries’ (movies I saw for the first time this year) slanted severely in that direction. I’m going to pick out 20 of those, chat about a handful of cinematic obsessions that dominated 2020 for me, and then share a few snippets of the best film writing I’ve done this year.<br /><br />
<b>DISCOVERIES<br /><br />
1. Broadcast News (James L. Brooks, 1987)</b><br />
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I’ll just be thinking about Holly Hunter’s performance for the foreseeable. It’s the best I’ve seen in years. Words hit her with physical force, and she reminds me of nothing so much as ‘50s Brando, in that every choice she makes is unexpected and inspired, and every scene she plays is underscored by something odd and intriguing. With Brando, that often meant plastering tough-guy theatrics over a soft, wounded femininity; Hunter is sweetness slapped on top of rage and sadness. In her performance are at least 20 of those small moments that, each on their own, would be worth seeing a film for. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/broadcast-news/">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<b>2. Our Little Sister (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2015)</b><br />
One of the loveliest films I’ve ever seen, an intensely moving and yet spare, understated movie on Kore-eda’s favourite theme of surrogate families (or perhaps, in this case, just families. It's a movie about many things: family, heritage, unexpected human connections, what we bequeath to our children, what we leave behind for our future selves and for others – plum wine or emotional wreckage – and our capacity to appreciate beauty. The blocking in the final scene is a tender ballet that traces these characters’ personas, their relationships and their unbreakable solidarity. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/our-little-sister/">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<b>3. Céline Sciamma films (2011-19)</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-T_VYs1AJc3E/X9jQbfdF5PI/AAAAAAAAInY/RMstjI2g3vIsx-I6v7UmoJ_S4xLm8N7JwCLcBGAsYHQ/s700/vi0Ol165.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="700" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-T_VYs1AJc3E/X9jQbfdF5PI/AAAAAAAAInY/RMstjI2g3vIsx-I6v7UmoJ_S4xLm8N7JwCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/vi0Ol165.jpg"/></a></div><br />
Sciamma has alighted on an essential truth in her work, which is that we should stop putting men in films. Her five features (if we include <i>My Life as a Courgette</i>, which she wrote), form the Sciamma Cinematic Universe – a place of cruelty, longing and occasional catharsis, of gender fluidity, of blessed tactility. Each of the films is marked by her vast capacity for compassionate non-judgement, and shot in a way that mirrors her material. My favourite, <i>Tomboy</i>, is almost scrappy at times; <i>Girlhood</i> oscillates between stylisation and social realism; <i>Portrait of a Lady on Fire</i> is touched with an elegant grace headily infused with flaming eroticism. I find her films both profoundly painful and utterly beguiling. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/tag/celine-sciamma/reviews/">Reviews.</a><br /><br />
<b>4. Little Women (Greta Gerwig, 2019)</b><br />
This has passages about as good as anything I’ve ever seen on screen, with Ronan a mesmerising, indelible and definitive Jo. It isn't a perfect film, but – beneath Desplat's overly conventional score, away from those performances that dwell in the shadow of past triumphs, those early lines uttered unnaturally to oneself – there are passages of extraordinary intelligence, sincerity and sensitivity that happily confirm Gerwig-Ronan as the most exciting actor-director partnership in aeons. I just kept crying. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/little-women-2019/">Full review (which also discusses the 1933, ’49 and ’94 versions).</a><br /><br />
<b>5. After Life (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 1998)</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DBbKmVzeelc/X9jKsLNICGI/AAAAAAAAIl4/a8RwdnX7m9ADOPontD-LTssD2idRpRvvgCLcBGAsYHQ/s425/After_20Life_208.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="263" data-original-width="425" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DBbKmVzeelc/X9jKsLNICGI/AAAAAAAAIl4/a8RwdnX7m9ADOPontD-LTssD2idRpRvvgCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/After_20Life_208.jpg"/></a></div><br />
Kore-eda’s answer to <i>A Matter of Life and Death</i>: the Technicolor fantasy of life (or at least reminiscence), the drab bureaucracy of death, as the newly deceased spend a week at a residential centre, deciding which memory to take with them for the rest of time. Their counsellors, meanwhile, have secrets and torments of their own. This contemporary masterpiece has more to say – quietly, painfully, sometimes obliquely – about life’s compromises, disappointments and beauties than almost any other film I’ve seen. I haven’t been this broken by a man sitting on a bench since <i>Ikiru</i>.<br /><br />
<b>6. Blue Collar (Paul Schrader, 1978)</b><br />
A breathtaking film about class and race, so entertaining that you scarcely realise what it’s up to. Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto are blue collar workers in a Detroit car factory who decide to steal from their corrupt union. In other hands, that could mean a conventional heist film or a reactionary polemic, but for Schrader it’s some wild fusion of laugh-out-loud comedy, counter-intuitive politics and rich character drama, like <i>The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists</i> filtered through the ‘70s malaise.<a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/blue-collar/"> Full review.</a><br /><br />
<b>7. Only Yesterday (Isao Takahata, 1991)</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZhGD4qzS1sk/X9jK35rpdtI/AAAAAAAAImA/INE5p625_60lRK5squVQ4T3GHrgZaHPFwCLcBGAsYHQ/s2000/only-yesterday.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="2000" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZhGD4qzS1sk/X9jK35rpdtI/AAAAAAAAImA/INE5p625_60lRK5squVQ4T3GHrgZaHPFwCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/only-yesterday.jpg"/></a></div><br />
An exquisitely beautiful Ghibli film about memory, which both understands that you can be impossibly nostalgic for your childhood whilst in your 20s, and that what we remember isn’t what is obviously significant – but it is significant. It's full of the most beguiling small moments. Like a little league baseball player standing on a quiet street in the sunset, a moment that threatens not to end. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/only-yesterday/">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<b>8. A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood (Marielle Heller, 2019)</b><br />
Matthew Rhys is a hardbitten feature writer, fucking up his life one malicious long read at a time. Then he’s sent to profile beloved children’s TV personality, Mr Rogers (Tom Hanks). The cover plug for the eventual feature is “Mr Rogers – Especially Now”, and that’s how I feel about this film. It’s so deftly done, toying meta-ly with the iconography of the milieu in a way that reminded me of <i>Life on Mars</i>, expertly using Rhys as a surrogate for its audience’s own cynicism, and drawing from Hanks a performance of multi-layered complexity that somehow plays out entirely on the surface. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/a-beautiful-day-in-the-neighborhood/">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<b>9. A Girl in Every Port (Howard Hawks, 1928)</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ol5T628Ro5k/X9jLDFWsJvI/AAAAAAAAImI/VYGzFVOPRF4H6-TXw9SF33SrxscBLhsgQCLcBGAsYHQ/s600/girl10.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="600" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ol5T628Ro5k/X9jLDFWsJvI/AAAAAAAAImI/VYGzFVOPRF4H6-TXw9SF33SrxscBLhsgQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/girl10.jpg"/></a></div><br />
A wonderful Hawks comedy about sailors (and shaggers) Victor McLaglen and Robert Armstrong who have, well, a girl in every port. The opening scene promises so little, but then the film catches light: it’s so charming and disarmingly funny, balanced by moments of romance and rich emotion. That sequence in the apartment block – where McLaglen and Armstrong go in search of dates, then discover their latent compassion – may be the most tender and lovely thing in the whole Hawks canon. Then just when you think the film can’t get any better, Louise Brooks turns up and takes over. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/a-girl-in-every-port-1928/">Full review here, and there’s more about both Hawks and Brooks in the Obsessions section below.</a><br /><br />
<b>10. Deadline at Dawn (Harold Clurman, 1946)</b><br />
There’s a purposefully offbeat scene in this brilliant humanist noir from the typewriter of Clifford Odets, in which a sailor trying to solve a murder sees a nervy man dash from a building next to the crime scene. He tails the man… right to the door of a vet’s, where the suspect breaks down in tears. It’s closed, and he was too late anyway. His cat is dead. There are other stories, you see. And this film intersects with those. In the irritating vernacular of 2020, it is “noir adjacent”. The cat vignette seems the sort of thing that would happen during the night, in the New York of noir, but usually it happens just around the corner. And this film is just around the corner from noir. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/deadline-at-dawn/">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<b>11. The Secret of Convict Lake (Michael Gordon, 1951)</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-B8E0J-PZbZI/X9jLPXA9QQI/AAAAAAAAImM/t7ULbhInwAc7dT5epHKNkkwoYd_0k8yywCLcBGAsYHQ/s640/c5817b9bba8f1332dee40d02ce1502b3.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-B8E0J-PZbZI/X9jLPXA9QQI/AAAAAAAAImM/t7ULbhInwAc7dT5epHKNkkwoYd_0k8yywCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/c5817b9bba8f1332dee40d02ce1502b3.png"/></a></div><br />
Most films that have a secret have just that – one secret – and so we sit around amiably waiting for it to be revealed. But almost everyone in <i>The Secret of Convict Lake</i> is covering something up: at least four of the characters are powder kegs just waiting to go off, and you have no idea where the explosion is coming from. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-secret-of-convict-lake/">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<b>12. The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook, 2016)</b><br />
An intoxicating, strange, erotic Korean lesbian period-drama heist-romance, though it cares as much about genre as I care about horror films. I’ve tried to distil its essence – <i>The Favourite</i> if it was sincere, shot through with genius and spliced with <i>The Sting</i>; a warmer, feminist <i>Rashômon</i> shot like <i>A Very Long Engagement</i>, Lubitsch’s early role-play films with the songs and Maurice Chevalier replaced by sapphic love, East Asian geopolitics and graphic prose about vaginas – but it’s not really like those films, or indeed like any other films at all. It’s sad eyes and wet mouths, love that feels like betrayal, betrayal that feels like love. It’s imperialism’s dominance glimpsed through misogny’s dominance. It’s bodies so entwined they lose all parameters, all meaning. It’s twists that accentuate emotion, that find new depths to the characters, that renew, rather than erase.<br /><br />
<b>13. The Souvenir (Joanna Hogg, 2019)</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GQmY84sVYlk/X9jLfUA407I/AAAAAAAAImY/gopiXh_xoLgaKgdBDFOLIU1wHbHWzMIowCLcBGAsYHQ/s700/2000.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="420" data-original-width="700" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GQmY84sVYlk/X9jLfUA407I/AAAAAAAAImY/gopiXh_xoLgaKgdBDFOLIU1wHbHWzMIowCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/2000.jpg"/></a></div><br />
A riveting autobiographical drama about a film school student and her relationship with a darkly fascinating older man. The first half is tight and intriguing, the second open and exhausting, and though the odd line falls flat, for the most part it’s acted, written and filmed with a striking nuance, originality and truth. It feels like a spiritual cousin of Erick Zonca’s <i>The Dreamlife of Angels</i>, sharing that movie’s freshness of vision, its bleak acceptance of destructive relationships, and female characters who are complex and real, but also readable and specific. Not everything is revealed – neither here, nor there – but by the end you have a complete picture of these people, and of the chilly world they inhabit. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-souvenir/">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<b>14. The Past (Asghar Farhadi, 2013)</b><br />
A bleak moral thriller, in Farhadi’s distinctive style, about an Iranian man, Ahmad (Tahar Ramin), returning to France to divorce his wife (Bérénice Bejo), and being drawn into the lives of her boyfriend, his wife, and Bejo’s troubled daughter. It’s long but never feels it, dealing in complex characterisation, purposefully spacing out its revelations – even the premise itself is kept from us for 10 minutes – and wallowing in ambiguity, with shades of Kenneth Lonergan’s <i>Margaret</i>. To the end, it all remains brilliantly unresolved – Ahmad doesn’t even get the climactic speech he asks for, because people want to move on; there is no ‘closure’ beyond the desire to close the book now. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-past/">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<b>15. The Bigamist (Ida Lupino, 1953)</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mIEIYYMW-wI/X9jRE0qA8JI/AAAAAAAAInk/AAx0vAJutHUXdRe-_2cjUp1v6Dw2FmB0ACLcBGAsYHQ/s512/unnamed.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="284" data-original-width="512" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mIEIYYMW-wI/X9jRE0qA8JI/AAAAAAAAInk/AAx0vAJutHUXdRe-_2cjUp1v6Dw2FmB0ACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/unnamed.jpg"/></a></div><br />
This remarkably compassionate and sensitive film belies its opening, its periodic speechifying, and a credit that screams, “… and Edmond O’Brien as The Bigamist”. It has a patsy, a heavy, a good girl and a fatale, but the good girl unwittingly lures the anti-hero into adultery, the fatale is the wife who drags him back from the life he wants, and the heavy is just trying to make up for the time he let something happen to an adopted child. And Robert Towne thought he was being clever with <i>Chinatown</i>. (To be fair, he was.) <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-bigamist/">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<b>16. Housekeeping (Bill Forsyth, 1987)</b><br />
A melancholy gem from Bill Forsyth, about two young sisters in an icy, isolated ‘50s town, and their relationship with their non-conformist aunt, who isn’t the free and liberating spirit of cliché, but a loving woman whose eccentricities (and mental illness) become an embarrassment. It’s an astonishingly uncommercial film: sad, quiet and almost devoid of incident, but incredibly well-observed, and even profound. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/housekeeping/">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<b>17. Battleground (William A. Wellman, 1949)</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tluePv7WxcU/X9jL5Oo3GZI/AAAAAAAAImk/hgTpqTEhtlg-W4ex-lCeYS-yiN-2BVHtQCLcBGAsYHQ/s720/battleground.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="720" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tluePv7WxcU/X9jL5Oo3GZI/AAAAAAAAImk/hgTpqTEhtlg-W4ex-lCeYS-yiN-2BVHtQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/battleground.jpg"/></a></div><br />
This film from producer Dore Schary and director William Wellman is miles away from the cardboard stereotypes and plastic heroics of most ‘40s war movies. It had the advantage, of course, of being made four years after the conflict, without the strictures that come with shooting propaganda. But while flagwaving, speeches and gung-ho clichés may have been hard to avoid during World War Two, there was never a reason why those earlier filmmakers had to people their pictures with one-dimensional characters, skimp on atmosphere, or attempt to squeeze the genre into the established mould of a Western. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/battleground-1949/">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<b>18. Dragon Inn (King Hu, 1967)</b><br />
This was just SO MUCH FUN, a Taiwanese martial arts <i>Rio Bravo</i> with what I can only describe as brilliantly deadpan cartoon ultra-violence. You also get a nice minimalist score, a raft of cool performances, and a neat mix of studio claustrophobia and lovely exterior shots (from sumptuous vistas to the titular inn pockmarked with flaming arrows). It takes 15 minutes to get going (and, in my case, to be able to work out what’s going on), but after that it’s a whole carnival of leaping, slicing people in the belly, and laughing at a man for having no balls – when honestly there are other things you could have a go at him for; the psychopathy, for a start.<br /><br />
<b>19. Quiz Show (Robert Redford, 1994)</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DhalH7ET3zI/X-scBlWC9yI/AAAAAAAAIoQ/vzcHWOoNP3s6SYqix_1_MUexMgP-wszvQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1080/6305428522_QuizShow_UXDY1._SX1080_.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="743" data-original-width="1080" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DhalH7ET3zI/X-scBlWC9yI/AAAAAAAAIoQ/vzcHWOoNP3s6SYqix_1_MUexMgP-wszvQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/6305428522_QuizShow_UXDY1._SX1080_.jpg"/></a></div>
This dramatisation of the ‘50s quiz show scandals is conspicuously great on America, anti-semitism, TV, and the pass that comes with privilege. I particularly love the gay cat-and-mouse chemistry between Fiennes – doing a sort of cinematic-shorthand performance – and Rob Morrow, bringing method energy to Dick Goodwin. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/quiz-show/">Full review.</a> The film was based on Dick Goodwin's memoir, <i>Remembering America</i>, reviewed <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2020/12/Books2020.html">here</a>.<br /><br />
<b>20. Why Be Good? (William A. Seiter, 1929)</b><br />
A captivating silent rom-com, with Colleen Moore irresistible as a Charleston-ing flapper in love with millionaire’s son, Neil Hamilton. She’s a good girl – but his dad won’t believe it. It’s fun as a snapshot of the time – with slangy dialogue and deceptively interesting mores – and it’s also neatly filmed, but this material could well have felt slight. It has to be carried by Moore’s talent and charm, and both are absolutely off the charts. Her comic timing is perfect, and she’s so appealing when playing it smitten, but it’s those moments of pain that stay with you, played with such subtlety and purity.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>OBSESSIONS<br /><br />
1. Brian De Palma</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DsNmFSzxOEE/X9jQ8Q8CE_I/AAAAAAAAIng/vRLtpEql8082P4y2n2P9W2nEpSGTgTDcQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1280/image-w1280.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DsNmFSzxOEE/X9jQ8Q8CE_I/AAAAAAAAIng/vRLtpEql8082P4y2n2P9W2nEpSGTgTDcQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/image-w1280.jpg"/></a></div><br />
De Palma was the first ‘great’ filmmaker I ever identified as someone whose work I couldn’t stand, but with age I have come to appreciate that the inherent stupidity and wildly erratic direction of his work is part of its appeal. It is, in fact, the main part. <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/sisters/">Sisters</a></i> (pictured) was my way in: it’s trivial and trashy, even by his standards, but it is <i>very</i> directed, in the best sense of that word. After that, it was crane shots and voyeurism all the way, as I gorged on such debatable fare as <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/dressed-to-kill-1980/">Dressed to Kill</a></i>, <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/femme-fatale/">Femme Fatale</a></i> and <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/passion-2012/">Passion</a></i>, as well as the derivative but dazzling <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/blow-out/">Blow Out</a></i>, in which his warped oeuvre reaches some kind of apogee.<br /><br />
<b>2. Louise Brooks</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0C1C8nXZn5Q/X9jMQeb9kKI/AAAAAAAAIm0/-huULRanIHs8CQZv1ABh66vTY44hlXMOwCLcBGAsYHQ/s720/Louise%2BBrooks%2B-%2BPrix%2Bde%2BBeaut%25C3%25A9%2B%25281930%2529%2Bsmile.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="720" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0C1C8nXZn5Q/X9jMQeb9kKI/AAAAAAAAIm0/-huULRanIHs8CQZv1ABh66vTY44hlXMOwCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/Louise%2BBrooks%2B-%2BPrix%2Bde%2BBeaut%25C3%25A9%2B%25281930%2529%2Bsmile.png"/></a></div><br />
It took me a while to embrace the cult of Brooks, who wasn't a big star during the silent era and whose reputation rests on just a handful of irregularly-sized roles. It seemed unfair that being absolutely smoking hot, in a conspicuously modern way, made her recognisable to modern audiences in a way that, say, Clara Bow wasn't. But having finally 'got' it, thanks in large part to <a href="https://shop.bfi.org.uk/pandora-s-box-bfi-film-classics.html">the evangelising of historian Pamela Hutchinson</a>, a chance encounter with <i>Diary of a Lost Girl</i> and a Damascene conversion at seeing <i>Pandora's Box</i> on the big screen, I've since made up for lost time. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/tag/louise-brooks/reviews/">This year I watched six</a>, a real mixed bag, from the glory of Hawks’ <i>A Girl in Every Port</i> (see Discoveries, above) to the hopelessly compromised fragmentation of <i>The Canary Murder Case</i> – Brooks was dubbed, and her performance sliced and diced, after refusing to return for retakes – and the abject humiliation of <i>Windy Riles Goes Hollywood</i>. At her best, she has a cold, quicksilver magnetism entirely unique in cinema. And great hair.<br /><br />
<b>3. Howard Hawks</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TrpxHh8g-tc/X9jRZKOQwfI/AAAAAAAAInw/SX_cGKDwHjEp9SnF39JVF_UXqlX96Sg_wCLcBGAsYHQ/s620/nfr-gallery-only-angels-have-wings-b.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="451" data-original-width="620" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TrpxHh8g-tc/X9jRZKOQwfI/AAAAAAAAInw/SX_cGKDwHjEp9SnF39JVF_UXqlX96Sg_wCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/nfr-gallery-only-angels-have-wings-b.jpg"/></a></div><br />
Tough and soppy, the archetypal Hawks film is recognisable from a mile away: a hangout movie in which people are put to the test. I revisited <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/rio-bravo/">Rio Bravo</a></i>, <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/red-river/">Red River</a></i> (a hangout movie on the move!) and – best of all – the staggering <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/only-angels-have-wings/">Only Angels Have Wings</a></i> in 2020, as well as exposing myself to his puzzling ‘60s Nascar variation, <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/red-line-7000/">Red Line 7000</a></i>, which is faintly embarrassing but with those effective moments of Hawksian sentiment that always make his work worthwhile. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/ball-of-fire/1/">And then there’s <i>Ball of Fire</i></a>, by far the best of his screwball comedies, with the incomparable Barbara Stanwyck at her absolute zenith.<br /><br />
<b>4. Glenda Farrell</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-V1ubZnmNTw4/X9jM3FkrwuI/AAAAAAAAInE/TKy14xvf6x8jEoCF9NAy9HqBRHn4bXTUACLcBGAsYHQ/s628/torchy-blane-3.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="628" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-V1ubZnmNTw4/X9jM3FkrwuI/AAAAAAAAInE/TKy14xvf6x8jEoCF9NAy9HqBRHn4bXTUACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/torchy-blane-3.png"/></a></div><br />
I just really like Glenda Farrell. No-one ever spat rat-a-tat dialogue like she did, and she was a constant companion during Lockdown 1.<br /><br />
<b>5. Zachary Scott</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mepB1EqWpcw/X9jNDZyMM7I/AAAAAAAAInM/m689ir42uc8TB0GyzACRqiMVZJ0f4DKnQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1000/ba307bace04d7a7d0b6457a7e8f620f3.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="784" data-original-width="1000" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mepB1EqWpcw/X9jNDZyMM7I/AAAAAAAAInM/m689ir42uc8TB0GyzACRqiMVZJ0f4DKnQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/ba307bace04d7a7d0b6457a7e8f620f3.jpg"/></a></div><br />
Scott (pictured, right) – a sort of faintly upmarket Lee van Cleef, with the same widow’s peak, overbite and aquiline nose – was a Warner contract player who never quite made it, though endures in the pages of various Hollywood memoirs as the noted antagonist of the studio’s ‘Irish Mafia’ (Cagney, Pat O’Brien, Frank McHugh). Somehow he became the hero of this year’s Socially-Distanced Film Club, in which my friend Andrew and I watch a film together every Saturday night. Our first exposure was via <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/guilty-bystander/">Guilty Bystander</a></i>, we enjoyed him in <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-secret-of-convict-lake/">The Secret of Convict Lake</a></i>, then actively sought him out, via <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-southerner/">The Southerner</a></i>, <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/ruthless/">Ruthless</a></i> and <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-young-one/">The Young One</a></i>. I’m not sure if he’s actually that good, but like Toby Wing or Donald Meek, it’s always nice to see him.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>BEST WRITING</b><br /><br />
For your consideration, a pile of stuff I wrote on film.<br /><br />
<a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment">1. On <i>Mank</i>, and how Old Hollywood learned to hate itself, for the Independent. Featuring Billy Wilder, Dorothy Parker, Clifford Odets and many more.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/oct/21/the-little-foxes-bette-davis-streaming?CMP=twt_a-culture_b-gdnculture">2. Malevolence and mansplaining in <i>The Little Foxes</i>, for the Guardian.</a><br /><br />
3. Bigging up the blistering Pre-Code masterpiece, <i>Blessed Event</i>, in Sight & Sound:<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IX9r3Z4MvT4/X9jJaYL8h0I/AAAAAAAAIlU/wj3BQVykWgw80VN8GjpkARo35qp6wtvQQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1240/Blessed%2BEvent.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="1240" data-original-width="889" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IX9r3Z4MvT4/X9jJaYL8h0I/AAAAAAAAIlU/wj3BQVykWgw80VN8GjpkARo35qp6wtvQQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/Blessed%2BEvent.jpg"/></a></div><br /><br />
<a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/wild-river/">4. Extended thoughts on Elia Kazan’s troubling and inspired <i>Wild River</i>.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/they-call-it-sin/">5. The Pre-Code era and sex, in <i>They Call It Sin</i>.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/showgirls/">6. <i>Showgirls</i></a><br /><br />
<a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/pink-string-and-sealing-wax/">7. Googie Withers in <i>Pink String and Sealing Wax</i></a><br /><br />
<a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/ten-cents-a-dance/">8. <i>Ten Cents a Dance</i></a> (part of Socially-Distanced Film Club; the full list of mini-essays is <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/list/socially-distanced-film-club/detail/">here</a>)<br /><br />
<a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/touch-of-evil/1/">9. Orson Welles’ <i>Touch of Evil</i></a><br /><br />
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/29/pogues-frank-capra-christmas-fairytale-of-new-york">10. <i>It’s a Wonderful Life</i> and other Christmas behemoths, for the Guardian</a><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Thanks for reading.Rick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com0London, UK51.5073509 -0.127758323.197117063821153 -35.284008299999996 79.817584736178844 35.028491700000004tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-50831387256860710882020-12-12T12:29:00.002+00:002021-04-29T15:33:39.784+01:00Review of 2020: Part 1 – Books<b>Pre-amble/bragging</b><br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9lWbAqtrKBk/X9SsXSzHBaI/AAAAAAAAIkU/rRS7KjBYIfYROVAL_aenDr2wl3c4fVQXgCLcBGAsYHQ/s480/617a3cb119f523096b619dc8dbdc02f5.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="445" data-original-width="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9lWbAqtrKBk/X9SsXSzHBaI/AAAAAAAAIkU/rRS7KjBYIfYROVAL_aenDr2wl3c4fVQXgCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/617a3cb119f523096b619dc8dbdc02f5.jpg"/></a></div>
If you'd told me at the start of year that I'd hardly leave the house for nine months, barely see a friend during that time, and get to read whenever I wanted, I'd have said, "OK cool, do we start now, or...?"<br /><br />
My attention span actually evaporated for the first two months of lockdown, a period I spent either working obsessively on the Royal Albert Hall's livestream programme (70 sets, including shows from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix1Ubrpewxc">Emilie Nicolas</a>, Lucy Dacus and Richard Thompson) or watching only disposable <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenda_Farrell">Glenda Farrell</a> vehicles. But since May I've been reading a lot and also writing a lot, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/profile/rick-burin">firstly for the <i>Guardian</i></a>, and then for places like <i>Sight & Sound</i>, <i>NME</i> and <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/mank-film-david-fincher-old-hollywood-b1762327.html">the <i>Independent</i></a>. Freelancing had taken a back seat for a few years as I worked obsessively on fiction, and untangled some mental knots that were getting in the way, so it's been so nice to be read again, to reach a big audience, and to respond almost in real-time to art and politics and the enduring and shifting strangeness of 2020. Thanks so much to everyone who's supported my writing this year. Doing something creative has made me really happy.<br /><br />
Though I also have three full-time jobs – going on Twitter, managing the Albert Hall press office, and managing Derby County on <i>Championship Manager 2000-01</i> – I've kept up with the reading, which for me is many things: a way to calm my brain, an education an escape. Mine is the kind of brain that likes a goal, and so the goal is always the same: a book a week across the year. And despite it taking me most of the first lockdown to read Dick Goodwin's interminable memoir, <i>Remembering America</i>, we got there in the end. So here's a meander through everything I read in 2020. Regular readers will notice some old favourites, including Penelope Fitzgerald, Robert Caro's biographies of LBJ, and books about football in the 1990s. I told you my brain liked goals.<br /><br />
<b>BOOKS</b><br /><br />
<b>Fiction</b><br /><br />
My favourite novel of the year was...<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MhKCubB1UJM/X9JbUCgB5cI/AAAAAAAAIhU/HJvXGxeDE_kAwfcXUm2zJRnVRMAL_QJpACLcBGAsYHQ/s311/penelope.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="311" data-original-width="204" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MhKCubB1UJM/X9JbUCgB5cI/AAAAAAAAIhU/HJvXGxeDE_kAwfcXUm2zJRnVRMAL_QJpACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/penelope.jpg"/></a></div><br /><br />
Penelope Fitzgerald is just about my favourite writer nowadays and this small, short, quiet book is just about perfect. Based on her own wilderness years, <b>Offshore (1979)</b> is a ‘tragi-farce’ about outsiders living on barges off Battersea in the ‘60s, caught in the eddies of life, troubled by an undertow of regret or squandered promise. These are characters living between land and water, half one thing and half another: half-respectable, half-free, half-grown, half-content. She is a wonderfully non-judgemental, inquisitive and precise writer, who understands the different ways that people think, and act, and negotiate the world and one another. And she is fantastically funny, whether building a set-piece or resting on a brilliant turn of phrase. Who else would mire you in such intimate tragedy, then end on a comic cliffhanger? This is a book with a latent power, written in perfect sentences – a model of effective economy and restrained beauty – located in a strict time and place, but sending ripples in all directions.<br /><br />
I've never been the best timekeeper, but even by my standards I'm embarrassingly late to the Sarah Perry party. <b>The Essex Serpent (2016)</b> is such a wonderful novel, seeming to promise Gothic horrors but opting for something altogether darker: the pain, compromise and complexity of real life. Amidst mounting atmosphere, its salt on your tongue, the characterisation is impossibly rich. Though Perry is preoccupied primarily with the question of faith vs reason, one thing seeps into the other, her creations working one upon the next, and her characters are not manifestations of viewpoints, but living, breathing, bleeding beings. Her style is like no-one else’s: she tends to use simple words – aside from the specificities of the natural and Victorian worlds – but in juxtapositions as fresh as first frost. Her storytelling is swaggeringly-assured, full of life’s capricious abruptness, but this isn't merely a book of ruptures, it’s one of renewal, dealing with the way we heal, though then are never quite the same as we were before. I found it incredibly moving.<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YsRTQVH-fa8/X9OYPdHuICI/AAAAAAAAIhk/3zQIPBOtPxEtg5MnJum_2JcpAD2suIwHwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1534/Boy_Parts_sales_cover.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="1534" data-original-width="1000" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YsRTQVH-fa8/X9OYPdHuICI/AAAAAAAAIhk/3zQIPBOtPxEtg5MnJum_2JcpAD2suIwHwCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/Boy_Parts_sales_cover.jpg"/></a></div><br /><br />
Another huge favourite this year was Eliza Clark's <b>Boy Parts</b> (2020), a fantastically malevolent book blessed with an indelible protagonist: a narrator-fatale whose misanthropy and violence is forever excused on the grounds of her beauty. She is the caustic, unapologetic Irina, a fetish photographer brutally reversing society’s gender power dynamics with the aid of some handcuffs, a wine bottle and a letter opener. It is swaggering and smooth, with incredibly clean and quick writing that immerses you in a world of coke bumps and dubious consent, then pierces the unease with shards of sudden black humour. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3682073752">It's a novel that puts two hands around your throat.</a><br /><br />
<b>Grief Is the Thing with Feathers</b> (2015), meanwhile, is your standard spiky, absurdist prose-poem told from the points of view of a grieving father, two bereaved kids and a foul-mouthed crow. My favourite writing is often that which turns in an instant, shifting suddenly and seamlessly into a different emotional sphere; twisting your mouth all ways, as it slips into comedy, segues into sadness. Vonnegut does it, and George Saunders. Max Porter refines that gift, taking your breath away, and the floor out from under you.<br /><br />
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It's a talent that's also in Lucy Prebble's <a href="https://www.libdems.org.uk/skills-wallet">skills wallet</a>, though she does it for the stage. Because we haven't been allowed to go to the theatre since that man ate that bat, I've been going in my head. <b>The Effect</b> is my favourite of Prebble's plays, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3240011790?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">radiating something suspiciously like genius</a>, but everything she does is great, like her earlier one, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3486702832?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1"><b>ENRON</b></a>. Few people writing today are able to engender emotion with such sudden intensity, at least in me, and I'm not sure any have her facility for an unforgettable line. <a href="amazingly%20self-indulgent%20play">Arthur Miller's <b>After the Fall</b></a> felt like quite a comedown after that: an amazingly self-indulgent torrent of talk, if interesting principally for that reason. And also if you're obsessed with the communist witchhunt of the 1940s and '50s (am I or have I ever been obsessed with it? Yes).<br /><br />
I loved my first exposure to Wodehouse (yes, aged 35!), via <b>The World of Jeeves</b> (1967). You can find reasons to dislike him – his work has no real resonance beyond itself, he (sort of) collaborated with the Nazis, Julian Fellowes likes him – and he truly is to middle-aged Tories what Harry Potter is to millennials (by which I mean: ffs, read another book). But this compendium of mostly early Jeeves stories – airy, stylish, often brilliantly funny – is escapism of the highest order. I took to reading one before bed most evenings, and it just became a lovely thing to look forward to. Every story is basically the same, but then it’s a good story, and one illuminated by varying – and often dazzling – degrees of inspiration. Sample line: “Lay out some raiment suitable for travel, and leave the rest to me. Where is this waterpipe of which you speak so highly?” After that, the first novel in the series felt like a head wound. <b>Thank You, Jeeves</b> (1933) is extremely funny in places, largely due to Wodehouse's unique prose style, but the plot isnt terribly compelling, and Bertie spends the whole second half of the book in fucking blackface.<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GDJSCefqg7Q/X9OYbdNEDnI/AAAAAAAAIhs/JGqGJHJ88bs82IeKxtwy52wPpvEb_fgvQCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/81W9PpPLptL.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1273" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GDJSCefqg7Q/X9OYbdNEDnI/AAAAAAAAIhs/JGqGJHJ88bs82IeKxtwy52wPpvEb_fgvQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/81W9PpPLptL.jpg"/></a></div><br /><br />
I will, of course, read anything that Lissa Evans ever cares to write. <b>V for Victory</b> (2020), the third in her <i>Crooked Heart</i> series, opens up the familiar world of her <i>Crooked Heart</i> series in such deft and affecting ways. It is so witty and good-hearted, with characters ennobled by their vulnerabilities. If it doesn’t make you cry, you should have to go to prison. It reminded me a little of <i>London Belongs to Me</i>, telling a wartime story largely through the lives of several residents of the same building. In fact, it’s what I imagined that earlier (and lesser) novel would be: humane, subtle and funny.<br /><br />
Perhaps the flat-out funniest book I read this year was Paul McVeigh's <b>The Good Son</b> (2015), about a smart but soft Belfast kid trying to navigate family life and the world of the Troubles. It's dark and rude, with a tender centre, and a dazzling, outsized comic voice. Though it does sag a little between a sensational opening and a warped fairy story of a finish, its sense of time and place is superb, and I loved the specificity of the central character, who adores his mam and his little sister, wants to live in America, and will never fit in at home – though he tries to, and sometimes almost manages. <b>Falling Leaves</b> (2018) by Stefan Mohamed is from the same publisher, Salt, and it's similarly glorious: moving, empathetic and also heading somewhere; written in a loose, informal style that turns out to be the best way to tell its story. That story is of 23-year-old Vanessa, whose life is rudely interrupted by the re-appearance of a missing school friend, who hasn't aged a day in seven years. It's cryptic, gripping, and funny when it wants to be, before erupting into metaphysical phantasmagoria in its mindbending final chapter.<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4rF-f5IY8Jo/X9OYk1plCDI/AAAAAAAAIh8/KbHdaW4e15kZ0QTFprsB_rcyh2jNkrdlACLcBGAsYHQ/s557/9781782832546.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="557" data-original-width="363" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4rF-f5IY8Jo/X9OYk1plCDI/AAAAAAAAIh8/KbHdaW4e15kZ0QTFprsB_rcyh2jNkrdlACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/9781782832546.jpg"/></a></div><br /><br />
<b>I Love Dick</b> (2016) by Chris Kraus is the best kind of contemporary book: one that reveals as much about its reader as its writer – and it reveals almost everything about her. It isn’t always easy, or easy to like, and it doesn’t follow any of the rules of book-writing, if indeed it’s ever heard what they are, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3237184443?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">but it makes you question so much, achieving a kind of universality in its hyper-specificity. </a> <b>Billionaires' Banquet</b> (2017) by Ron Butlin, meanwhile, seemed to belong to a slightly earlier age, immune from the nervous self-questioning of the past decade. It's a sort of spiritually violent <i>One Day</i>, looking at how the passing of time affects a gaggle of Edinburgh students. The marketing bumf pegs it as a novel about Thatcherism, which it isn't quite, though it does deal with political, moral sacrifice and mental health. Crucially it's principally about its well-drawn characters, who are clever, sharp and real, saturated in philosophy, religion or maths. Butlin has some linguistic tics that lead to repetition, but there are also some wonderfully-wrought phrases, and his dark comedy just <i>works</i>: take-no-prisoners satire and impeccably constructed farce, all done with a light touch. It's sharp, pungent and surprising, with a latent layer of unsentimental compassion.<br /><br />
Jane Gardam's <b>Old Filth</b> (2004) was largely great: a lawyer’s life as it was, not as it appeared to be; some kind of constant tragedy, in which he is forever left by loved ones. Or is that just life? It is so unsentimental and splintered that it feels mannered, but in the best way, appearing to set up one type of book before refusing to deliver it – or indeed offer anything like emotional release. Another fine book about ageing – in this case, about growing old but having more to give – was Jonathan Coe's <b>Mr Wilder and Me</b> (2020), which also dwells on the subjects of family, the purpose of cinema and the delights of brie. The sequence in which it changes gear, and form, to deal with Wilder and the Holocaust is just virtuosic.<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5gcwHc0jc80/X9OYxlubwuI/AAAAAAAAIiE/V6Mp3jO0KrsR1wyZLKsMkYSF9n52WFxpwCLcBGAsYHQ/s475/27845924._SY475_.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="475" data-original-width="314" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5gcwHc0jc80/X9OYxlubwuI/AAAAAAAAIiE/V6Mp3jO0KrsR1wyZLKsMkYSF9n52WFxpwCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/27845924._SY475_.jpg"/></a></div><br /><br />
I don't read much crime, but I got a huge amount from Emma Flint's <b>Little Deaths</b> (2016), a gripping novel about missing children that's blessed with rich characterisation, a remarkable evocation of Queens in the 1960s, and vast amounts of empathy for its central character – the kids' mother, in a growing shadow of suspicion. It towered above this year's other crime book, <b>The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle</b> (2018) by Stuart Turton, which wasn't really my thing: death by simile, with a lot of recounted plot points and stabbings. Despite a morally ambitious climax, it all felt more like an elaborate game – a body-hop <i>Groundhog Day</i> ‘30s country house murder-mystery – than a satisfying emotional experience.<br /><br />
I had mixed feelings about Ken Kesey's <b>One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)</b>, which was more experimental than I was expecting, more indebted to Faulkner, and more of its time: a bit rapey, a bit racist, and narrated by a Native American, which isn’t really How We Do Things Now. But this uneven, despairing howl of non-conformity still has the power to compel – and to move you, especially in its closing pages. The book centres on the escalating tug-of-war between the porcelain, plastic-smiled, big-titted Nurse Ratched – commandant of the Combine, which in the mind of Chief Bromden runs the world – and the hulking red-headed Irish gambler, R. P. McMurphy, who blasts into her asylum one day, figuring that it beats a stretch on a work farm. Milos Forman’s film ironed out some of its misogny (as well as adding one terrific, very Hollywood sequence in which McMurphy feigns being brain-dead) but also removed its more fantastical elements, particularly Bromden’s imaginings, both asleep and awake, as inmates are cut apart in the night, their cogs spilling out, and by day Nurse Ratchet pumps vast fields of fog into the ward.<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YV6XpU1mgbE/X9OhD8Uv_nI/AAAAAAAAIiY/Si-uqNJ2zw8is3ZPSFSe6SSQDnHuC7GaACLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/9781784630966_b7b42422-bfa8-423d-8ac9-aafb61806373.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1334" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YV6XpU1mgbE/X9OhD8Uv_nI/AAAAAAAAIiY/Si-uqNJ2zw8is3ZPSFSe6SSQDnHuC7GaACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/9781784630966_b7b42422-bfa8-423d-8ac9-aafb61806373.jpg"/></a></div><br /><br />
<b>How to Be a Kosovan Bride</b> (2017) is most effective as a portal into a culture: a distinctive, sometimes harrowing, mostly solemn book elevated by the fact that author Naomi Hamill <i>really cares</i>. Written in the second person (you are one character's older brother, another's confidante), it's drenched in the details of daily life and fixated on the mores, desires and clashes of culture that define modern Kosovo, a place haunted by war. That culture clash means city vs country, English vs Kosovan, and also the female sense of self vs restrictive gender roles – there's a curious dichotomy here that recurs on the left and hasn't come close to being resolved: a complicated pride in a culture that seems to subjugate women.<br /><br />
Almost as traumatic as the ghosts of war are the scenes of former <i>Fun House</i> host Pat Sharp becoming addicted to hair conditioner in Darren Richman and Luke Catterson's terrific <b>Re-run the Fun</b> (2020). It's a very clever book masquerading as a very silly one, and one of the funniest things I've read in ages, a brilliantly precise spoof of celebrity memoirs, which re-imagines Sharp as a Zelig figure at the heart of modern popular culture. Across a couple of hundred pages, he reveals the sources of his particular genius, then confronts his rivalries, addictions and growing obsolescence. Not many books make me laugh out loud, but this did repeatedly; the scene in which Pat writes the voiceover for the opening credits of <i>Fun House</i> was a particular favourite. Kudos to Sharp for having the sense of humour to front the book, as one of the (terrific) running gags is that he has done nothing but sit at home for the past 20 years.<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fMo9ZbY0JyQ/X9OhUMi4dXI/AAAAAAAAIig/AiEgoANVw30vpx6Sg45rt6itBuUTT7FwACLcBGAsYHQ/s500/51P9-BAlViL.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="326" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fMo9ZbY0JyQ/X9OhUMi4dXI/AAAAAAAAIig/AiEgoANVw30vpx6Sg45rt6itBuUTT7FwACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/51P9-BAlViL.jpg"/></a></div><br /><br />
Its sense of irony, and fondness for a '90s cultural reference is shared by Scott Innes' lovely <b>Galactic Keegan</b> (2020), surely the definitive Kevin-Keegan-in-Space novel of the past decade. It has some truly fantastic jokes, and a breakout star in the shape of monotonous-voiced robot Barrington12, though my favourite thing about the book is how it dares to go for the big soppy moments – and hits them every time.<br /><br />
By contrast, I found Xan Brooks' <b>The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times</b> (2017) almost wilfully offputting: a book about crippled war veterans having sex with underage girls in a forest. Its story develops in interesting ways, its characters are colourful (a special mention for Fred, a 14-year-old prostitute with a riotous sense of humour) and its view is often panoramic, but it can seem like a pastiche of a modern serious novel, with a purely mechanical use of language that drains the life from the page. I also struggled a little with J.G. Ballard's celebrated <b>High Rise</b> (1975), a purposefully impersonal book that charts the descent of a tower block full of urban professionals into violence, dissolution and primordial savagery. It’s a great concept, and the author's phrasemaking – especially in the opening chapters – is wonderfully clean and precise, augmented by deft little flashes forward that reminded me unexpectedly of Muriel Spark. But while it’s unusual and memorable, it becomes increasingly repetitive, especially in terms of its language, and Ballard makes some of his allegories – to a prison, to a hospital, to the world as a whole – inexplicably overt.<br /><br />
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Joe Dunthorne's <i>The Adulterants</i> <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2019/12/Books2019.html">was one of my favourite books of last year</a>, so I read his debut, <b>Submarine</b> (2008), which was turned into an excellent film by Richard Ayoade. It's decidedly erratic: smugly unpleasant and even irritating, with an oddball protagonist who doesn’t seem real, and broad comic set pieces that vary wildly in quality (nadirs include a shower of piss at a funfair, and a sex scene set against a Holocaust play). It's funny in places, the deluge of imagery contains flashes of imagination hinting at Dunthorne’s double-life as a poet, and there’s some off-kilter pathos amid its gleeful adolescent nastiness, but it’s also shapeless and unsatisfying, juggling its storylines and media with something less than control, and lacking the balance of sad sentiment and dry humour that made <i>The Adulterants</i> such a melancholy pleasure.<br /><br />
It was a similar story with Sayaka Murata's <b>Earthlings</b> (2018), the follow-up to her brilliant debut, <i>Convenience Store Woman</i>, and the worst novel I read this year (though not the worst book – keep reading!). You can see what Murata is trying to do – her heroine resigning from the human race as a response to child sexual abuse – and yet it’s an almost total misfire. There are moments of amusingly detached weirdness, particularly in an intriguing mid-section, but the alien concept is poorly defined and the translated text clunky, on the way to a shallow and pretentious climax that relies entirely on tiresome shock value. <i>Convenience Store Woman</i> was such a distinctive and impressive book; this feels like what happens when you trust that someone will repeat a phenomenon, even if what they’ve delivered appears to be largely dreadful. Goodreads is absolutely adamant that I have read this book twice – on Kindle and in hardback – please don't believe them, they are liars.<br /><br />
<b>YA/Middle-grade</b><br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qSrir-fCkQs/X9SpWJ3SrzI/AAAAAAAAIi0/5LW7vZTy9w0Xs844Md0rFEie7sgRTBxcACLcBGAsYHQ/s1024/DZFPyTGX0AACgOd.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="888" data-original-width="1024" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qSrir-fCkQs/X9SpWJ3SrzI/AAAAAAAAIi0/5LW7vZTy9w0Xs844Md0rFEie7sgRTBxcACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/DZFPyTGX0AACgOd.jpg"/></a></div><br /><br />
Just three this year. By far my favourite was <b>The Hate U Give</b> (2017), a gripping YA novel with a BLM theme, about a black teenager who’s the only witness to her friend’s murder by a cop. Already trapped between two worlds – her rough inner-city black neighbourhood and a mostly white, mostly affluent school – she feels the weight of the world coming down on her: guilt, grief, responsibility, fear. Written in the present tense, and in simple, direct language, it’s a page-turner that drops you into another world, where there’s humanity and a taut, desperate feeling of community, but also crack, gangs, and tanks on the street. You could work away at slight inconsistencies in its viewpoint (especially on gang violence and the police), at clunky synonyms or convenient plot developments, but it’s forthright and affecting and persuasive, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32613366-the-hate-u-give">and what’s more it’s right</a>.<br /><br />
The returns of Philip Pullman's <i>His Dark Materials</i> series <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3450813548?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">continued to diminish with the disappointing 2019 entry, <b>The Secret Commonwealth</b></a>, but <b>Spy School Revolution</b> (2020) <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3618947976?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">was a reliable eighth instalment</a> in Stuart Gibbs' likeable middle-grade series.<br /><br />
<b>NON-FICTION</b><br /><br />
<b>History/politics</b><br /><br />
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<a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2019/12/Books2019.html">My favourite book of 2019 was volume one of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon B. Johnson.</a> And my favourite book of 2020 is... volume two of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. Followed in quick succession by volumes three and four. It is truly the greatest biography I have ever read in my life. In volume five, Caro is going to get properly into Johnson's presidency, so that'll be the best book of whichever year it comes out.<br /><br />
If <i>The Path to Power</i> was <i>Wolf Hall</i> – sprawling and labyrinthine, fashioning rules that redefined its genre – then <b>Volume 2: Means of Ascent</b> (1990) is <i>Bring Up the Bodies</i>: a bracing, pulsating thriller that fastens your jaw to the floor, even as you know how it’s going to end. The first third of the book is about LBJ in exile from political influence – fabricating his war record, sulking in Congress – while the remainder deals with the 1948 Senate race, an election that Johnson tried to buy; when that failed, he stole it instead. Caro’s second instalment of this epic biography lacks the extraordinary scope of the first, and takes a while to get going, as he recaps the story so far and deals with some less promising raw material, but by any reasonable standards it’s a classic: assured in its tone, clear-sighted in its judgements, and revelatory in its forensic detail, an exhilarating combination of beautiful writing and utterly staggering research.<br /><br />
The third volume of Caro’s epic biography – weighing in at 1,167 pages and 3.6 lbs – is <b>Master of the Senate</b> (2002), a vast, panoramic book that tells an extraordinary story: the story of a bad man who did great things. In fact, Caro’s reading of his subject is the flipside of how Evan Thomas paints Robert Kennedy: Johnson had an instinctive compassion that was usually overridden by pragmatism –overridden by pragmatism until suddenly the compassionate route became the expedient one – whereas Kennedy was instinctively pragmatic, but on reflection, after that first burst of anger, his principles would win out. That’s perhaps why, although Kennedy was a good campaigner, a vital figurehead and a better man, LBJ got more done. That and Johnson’s drive, his unscrupulousness, his instinctive genius as a legislator. (And the fact that Robert Kennedy got shot.) <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3228330923?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">I wrote about the book more here.</a><br /><br />
<b>Volume 4: The Passage of Power</b> (2012) <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3476434689?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">covers the heroic portion of Johnson’s story</a>: his unconquerable fear of failure sees him delay a presidential bid until it’s much too late, and after that follow the years of failure: the public humiliation he’d feared since his father’s bankruptcy turned the family into a laughing stock, only now Lyndon himself is the joke, derided by the witty, debonair New Frontier intellectuals as ‘Rufus Cornpone’, the southern master of the senate who traded his power for the vice-presidency and lost everything. “Whatever happened to Lyndon Johnson” ask the editorials, and then in an instant, a heartbeat, a gunshot, he is catapulted to the height of ambition, of power, the book tracing his first seven weeks as president, in which he sows the seeds of his own destruction and yet guides the country towards greatness, stabilising an America that is drowning in paranoia, debilitated by paralysing grief, while finding the lever that will force through civil rights – and beginning to lean on it...<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WxurYgxY8HQ/X9Spt6WityI/AAAAAAAAIjI/djxMfT9-u2sLigoGh4stDElphdUKNNARQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/%257BC2D82F0F-D02F-4FE7-B3A5-BAADFFBB2D0E%257DImg400.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WxurYgxY8HQ/X9Spt6WityI/AAAAAAAAIjI/djxMfT9-u2sLigoGh4stDElphdUKNNARQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/%257BC2D82F0F-D02F-4FE7-B3A5-BAADFFBB2D0E%257DImg400.jpg"/></a></div><br /><br />
Another non-fic epic was Eric Bentley's <b>Thirty Years of Treason</b> (1971), which offers extended excerpts from the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings (1938-68), augmented by other valuable primary sources: articles, speeches, bits from plays. That may well sound like the most boring thing on earth, but I find the communist witchhunt enduringly fascinating, and if you do too, you'll find the book absolutely astonishing. The transcripts are, in turn, absurd, thrilling and chilling.<br /><br />
It took me an age to get through <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23253077-remembering-america">Dick Goodwin's <b>Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties</b> (1988)</a>, which I picked up because I was interested in the author's role in revealing the quiz show scandals of the late '50s, but which turned out to deal extensively with LBJ and RFK, two of my main five interests (the others are, of course, test cricket, Lillian Gish and HUAC). The book is a curious jumble of elements: at times deeply self-involved, at others as impersonal as a textbook, and only occasionally calling for a return to the values of American postwar liberalism – which Goodwin claims to be its raison d’être. But the period dealt with is enduringly fascinating, and there are more than enough insights into seismic events and totemic figures to make it worthwhile, provided you don’t mind being slightly bored along the way.<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6mfH6-2VoGE/X9S0LSEfaTI/AAAAAAAAIkk/pa2TEU1npi4n7J-qzXuGRkeG8ApSxw3cwCLcBGAsYHQ/s613/9780241956885.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="613" data-original-width="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6mfH6-2VoGE/X9S0LSEfaTI/AAAAAAAAIkk/pa2TEU1npi4n7J-qzXuGRkeG8ApSxw3cwCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/9780241956885.jpg"/></a></div><br /><br />
Briefer and breezier was Andy Beckett's <b>Promised You a Miracle</b> (2015), a hugely entertaining work of popular social history that essentially provides a succession of loosely-connected long reads about all aspects of Britain in 1980-82, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29598005-promised-you-a-miracle">when the country rediscovered its sense of pride and direction – but at what cost?</a> Beckett's book was hugely evocative and enjoyable, without always making connections in the way you wanted, while <b>The United States of Paranoia</b> (2012) by Jesse Walker was almost the opposite. This history of American conspiracy theories makes endless connections, and gives you a broad but workable framework for understanding America’s particular brand of paranoia – <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3444112943?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">but it doesn’t necessarily do anything else.</a> By contrast, Sarah Churchwell's dazzling <b>Behold, America</b> (2018) works as both a polemic in favour of social democracy, and a dual history of American fascism and the shifting nature of the American Dream – before the latter became about materialism and the free market, before it atrophied. Drawing primarily on primary sources (especially regional newspaper, but also novels and national columnists), it's vivid, angry and witty, with remarkable insights and an extraordinary sense of immediacy.<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fVRuc3VlOrk/X9S0mAGlhiI/AAAAAAAAIkw/FdRLbBBzmW0hjQMiB_men6anc8bUXllXACLcBGAsYHQ/s500/9781471130076.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="325" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fVRuc3VlOrk/X9S0mAGlhiI/AAAAAAAAIkw/FdRLbBBzmW0hjQMiB_men6anc8bUXllXACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/9781471130076.jpg"/></a></div><br /><br />
Charles Lindbergh looms large in any discussion of the American far right, and the celebrated aviator had an extraordinary life, though you'd never know it from A. Scott Berg's unbelievably dry biography, which somehow won the Pulitzer. There are sections of <b>Lindbergh</b> (1998) that grip – particularly the investigation and prosecution of his son's murderer – and some interesting details here and there (two years before his legendary New York to Paris flight, Lindbergh’s activities in the air included carrying a judge to a sky wedding, claiming to cure deafness by spinning the hard of hearing repeatedly in the air, and allowing a man to urinate on his hometown). <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3615610020?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">But it’s a compromised, turgid and stolid book</a>, with its most moving story, in which an aged Lindbergh quietly alludes to his defining 1927 flight, relegated to an end note on p607.<br /><br />
I was also disappointed by Richard Herring's <b>The Problem with Men</b> (2020), which felt like a waffly cash-in. There are a handful of good jokes (though my favourite, about World Toilet Day, turned out to have been a misunderstanding by the reader), and it's well-meaning in its arguments, but it felt stretched, incoherent and perhaps in the wrong medium: you think that it might work better as a stand-up show, where its points could sneak through beneath the gags. I'd suggest either reading Bridget Christie's <i>A Book for You</i>, or Herring's touching and wistful 2010 memoir, <i>How Not to Grow Up</i>, a book that has really stayed with me. On the plus side, his new one does include <a href="https://twitter.com/Herring1967/status/442254692362760192">a tweet I once sent him</a>, so I am essentially the co-author.<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ghwfMxvmnaw/X9S0XIW0kHI/AAAAAAAAIko/z_Fbn_2afWsWYD3TKJN_UBmF4uBWoramgCLcBGAsYHQ/s499/51QtirvxEbL._SX324_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="326" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ghwfMxvmnaw/X9S0XIW0kHI/AAAAAAAAIko/z_Fbn_2afWsWYD3TKJN_UBmF4uBWoramgCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/51QtirvxEbL._SX324_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg"/></a></div><br /><br />
By far the worst book I read this year were the putrid diaries of old racist-with-the-horn, Alan Clark. <b>Into Politics</b> (1979-82) is truly one of the most joyless and repulsive things I've ever had the misfortune to be assailed by. Seeing modern history through Clark's eyes is an almost unrelentingly depressing experience. He’s a lech, a misogynist and an unrepentant racist. In a way there’s a parallel with Errol Flynn’s performative wickedness, in that Clark is undoubtedly playing up to an image and we’re asked to weigh up how much of his Nazi sympathising is merely attention-seeking, but that’s honestly not something you should have to say about an MP. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3536634374?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">More here if you're so inclined.</a><br /><br />
<b>Sport</b><br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0MCI2CFIE2Y/X9SqTf9E8nI/AAAAAAAAIjc/EpAmlJjl780qz-Bune5IpxfMWFCgT2DAACLcBGAsYHQ/s500/51%252BrJMBv5BL.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="326" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0MCI2CFIE2Y/X9SqTf9E8nI/AAAAAAAAIjc/EpAmlJjl780qz-Bune5IpxfMWFCgT2DAACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/51%252BrJMBv5BL.jpg"/></a></div><br /><br />
Oliver Kay's <b>Forever Young: The Story of Adrian Doherty, Football's Lost Genius</b> (2016) is perhaps the best sporting biography I've read, and yet it's about a man who played just a month of professional football, and that in Ireland, years after the injury that wrecked his career. But whereas the tragedy of <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2019/12/Books2019.html">fellow United youngster Ben Thornley</a> is that he had so little in his life except football, the tragedy of this one is that Doherty had so much, and yet died so young. Kay's book is sensitive, nuanced, tragic but – in the midst of that – uplifting. It's about a man who lived his life by defying every cliche, not through genius (though he was certainly talented), but through honesty, and the author does a superb job of articulating Doherty's complexities and contradictions, while swerving the pitfalls and temptations of this genre, from synthetic sentimentalism to pat theories. Kay writes exhilaratingly about football and superbly about character, only occasionally misordering his discoveries, or leaning on alliteration in place of truth. I really loved this, and it moved me very deeply.<br /><br />
With <b>World in Motion: The Inside Story of Italia '90</b> (2018), I was looking for nostalgia but got something trickier – and better. The nicest thing about the book is how author Simon Hart delves into untold stories of countries like Yugoslavia, the UAE, Czechslovakia and the US – though even when he’s recounting the more familiar tales of Cameroon and Italy, his wealth of retrospective interviews offer new insights. If his writing isn’t of the same quality as his research, and now and then the focus and pacing seems determined by who he has managed to get time with, the amount of knowledge that lies behind the text is staggering. Every scandal or rumour you’ve heard about, from spiked drinks to match-fixing, is astutely appraised, just as every nation’s campaign is contextualised in terms of both its football and the wider socio-political picture. <b>Arlott, Swanton and the Soul of English Cricket</b> (2019) <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42446908-arlott-swanton-and-the-soul-of-english-cricket">seemed to skate along the surface of its subject</a>, attempting to be numerous things – a dual biography, a social history, a sporting history – and ultimately not doing any of them very well. At times it’s more a collection of annotated transcripts and articles than it is an important new work, and it’s only in the final two chapters that the book becomes truly personal – and genuinely touching. <a href="https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81KkoEYsADL.jpg&imgrefurl=https://www.amazon.co.uk/Arlott-Swanton-Soul-English-Cricket/dp/1408895404&tbnid=y646McPdF-gkqM&vet=1&docid=wjeJHgwDKjBsGM&w=1354&h=2023&source=sh/x/im">I loved the cover, though.</a><br /><br />
<b>Film, music and TV</b><br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_OkS81tRxKk/X9SqlwAK_nI/AAAAAAAAIjo/03e6kHamihAhqDq3O23y7CBF8UGhUI3iQCLcBGAsYHQ/s512/unnamed.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="267" data-original-width="512" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_OkS81tRxKk/X9SqlwAK_nI/AAAAAAAAIjo/03e6kHamihAhqDq3O23y7CBF8UGhUI3iQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/unnamed.jpg"/></a></div><br /><br />
The best film book I read this year was <b>Louise Brooks</b> (1989) by Barry Paris, one of the finest four or five film biographies I’ve read (up there with Lee Server’s on Mitchum, <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2012/09/john-barrymore-buster-keaton-and.html">John Kobler's on John Barrymore</a>, David Stenn’s Clara Bow book, and Searching for John Ford by Joseph McBride). It has such a feel for its various worlds, strikes such a perfect balance between subject and context, and offers such a convincing – if contested – psychological reading of its heroine: a maddening, dazzling, difficult figure. Brooks was a dancer turned sex symbol, actor, call girl and finally writer, who torpedoed her various careers and most of her relationships through neurotic capriciousness, alcoholism or wilful neglect. But at her best – as an actor whose naturalness sliced through artifice, as a writer whose pared-down prose eviscerated her old nemeses – she was simply like no-one else. Paris wrestles with this enigma for 600 pages, nailing her singularity as an artist, and providing a credible reading of the woman, broken by child sexual abuse and never quite put back together again.<br /><br />
I think I've probably read more about Orson Welles than I have any other subject, but I'd never got around to his autobiography (of sorts), <b>This Is Orson Welles</b> (1992), co-created with Peter Bogdanovich. Like <i>Citizen Kane</i>, this book tells a life story in an experimental, fragmented way – eight discursive chats in eight different locations – and just as Welles inserted Kane into history through the March of Time sequence, so he repeatedly inserts himself and his family into improbable scenarios. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3558237171?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">The Welles who emerges from this book</a> is far more likeable and generous than the one depicted by Simon Callow in his multi-volume biography. Absent too is the vague sage of countless interviews, who speaks in counter-intuitive aphorisms that on closer inspection mean nothing. Here he is fantastically astute and specific on the subject of cinema, shorn of pretension, and often forcing you to look at the form in a completely new way. That you have to sit through him pretending that he used to fight bulls is a concession I was ultimately happy to make.<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dhggr6yGNvs/X9SquOnCgEI/AAAAAAAAIjs/uDSqtD_aJqIHl1z-0_oryKWcj_xEa2nGACLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/81lMIcUuUkL.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1344" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dhggr6yGNvs/X9SquOnCgEI/AAAAAAAAIjs/uDSqtD_aJqIHl1z-0_oryKWcj_xEa2nGACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/81lMIcUuUkL.jpg"/></a></div><br /><br />
The other towering figure of American auteurist cinema is of, course, Steven Seagal, so it was a delight to be forced to read Vern's <b>Seagology</b> (2007/12) – I've offered a full explanation of my actions <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3141423114?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">here</a>. One of Vern’s gifts is his ability to contextualise: you don’t need to know much about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-to-video">DTV</a> action films, you don’t need to have seen most of these films, he’ll give you all the info you need to get the references – and the jokes. And fuck me, the jokes are brilliant. I laughed out loud quite a few times. My favourite punchline is the one where he describes the hopeless honeytrap operation in <i>True Justice</i> as being like if “instead of putting a worm on a fishhook they just threw the worm in the water”.<br /><br />
For a quid, you can read Truman Capote's famous feature interview with Marlon Brando, <b>The Duke in His Domain</b> (1957). This New Yorker profile is, of course, as much about himself as his subject – but then he was just as interesting. It finds Brando lost and aimless in a Japan hotel room, a talent without a cause, self-obsessed and meandering, a would-be philosopher king whose quest for understanding is more admirable than what he’s found. And then – near the death – the death of his mother intrudes, and Capote is off out into the wet street to think pretentious thoughts. My love of Capote (who seems so overlooked and underpraised nowadays) can clash with my lack of interest in interminable descriptions of everything – for which he had a weakness, especially early on – and his ruminations here on Japan are perhaps a distraction, but it’s a fantastically astute portrait, studded with supporting interviews and beautifully-rendered insights, and perceptively foreshadowing the slide into irrelevance and gluttony that would come to define Brando’s public image. FOR A QUID.<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-THvvf3L0nWU/X9Sq0eaFYKI/AAAAAAAAIjw/RREI_rhEfLgGFbVTlCzjf7ny31ZnC2WSgCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/91EPlwQOwWL.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1519" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-THvvf3L0nWU/X9Sq0eaFYKI/AAAAAAAAIjw/RREI_rhEfLgGFbVTlCzjf7ny31ZnC2WSgCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/91EPlwQOwWL.jpg"/></a></div><br /><br />
Another quick read was <b>Ayoade on Top</b> (2019), a mock-intellectual critical appreciation of the 2003 Gwyneth-Paltrow-as-air-hostess flick, <i>A View from the Top</i>, executed with some style. It’s erudite, funny in its purposefully pedantic way, and distinctively expressed, the main business augmented by brief flashes of autobiography and comic fantasy, but it does sometimes tip over into smugness and nastiness (I could have lived without the bulimia gags, tbh). As indeed does Craig Brown's <b>One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time</b> (2020). To be honest, it's exactly what you would expect a book by Craig Brown about The Beatles to be like: gurningly self-satisfied, endlessly punching down and afflicted with a critical lack of empathy, but also amusing, and armed with both a viewpoint and an abundance of interesting connections. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3486689295?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">I disassembled and examined its moving parts here.</a><br /><br />
I was also left a little unsatisfied by Sam Wasson's <b>The Big Goodbye</b> (2020), about the making of Polanski's <i>Chinatown</i>, a book that has attracted widespread raves and is now being adapted for the screen itself. It’s a little pretentious in the writing, and stretches at times to draw parallels between the world of the film and its makers (who are mostly wankers), thought it is also well-contextualised – at one point a history of Los Angeles, at others an elegy for a period of movie-making – conjuring the atmosphere of Hollywood in the '70s, and painting vivid portraits of its protagonists that lie somewhere between history and gossip. Where the book falls down, though, is in failing to properly address the film's greatest virtue: the singularity of its dialogue, which goes one better than the best of classic noir, providing some of the most beautiful, satisfying and sickening sentences on the American screen.<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CZA1w6l3_7I/X9Sq7voiTXI/AAAAAAAAIj4/ffM37QMmaQwgAPKBQxv07C2Fje-TQ_SFwCLcBGAsYHQ/s499/51iz17I7PCL._SX323_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="325" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CZA1w6l3_7I/X9Sq7voiTXI/AAAAAAAAIj4/ffM37QMmaQwgAPKBQxv07C2Fje-TQ_SFwCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/51iz17I7PCL._SX323_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg"/></a></div><br /><br />
A cheerier book about easier films was <b>Wild and Crazy Guys</b> (2019) by Nick de Semlyen, a fast-moving history of the Hollywood comedy boom of the '80s (though we start a little earlier and stay a little later). I don't love these movies like he does – or quite get why these loud, rude, often broad films are considered so groundbreaking – but his enthusiasm is incredibly appealing, and there's so much to enjoy, with some amazing detail about how close we often were to <i>not</i> getting these movies, and vibrant sketches of the protagonists. I came out of it wanting to hug John Candy and live with Rick Moranis.<br /><br />
And, finally, I <i>finally</i> got a copy of former child actor Dick Moore's book about Hollywood child actors: <b>Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star: But Don't Have Sex or Take the Car</b> (1984). That copy turned out to be signed, and to have been given as a gift by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Carroll">Pat Carroll</a>. In it, the '80s Moore searches for a Rosebud – or several – as he meets around 30 of his fellow former child stars, from Baby Peggy to Natalie Wood, trying to work out how their early years in Hollywood have affected their lives. It’s quite bleak, to be honest: only Mickey Rooney seems to have enjoyed his time as a star, and only Bonita Granville and the very together, polished Shirley Temple seem to be relatively well-adjusted now. For the others, it’s been poverty, failed marriages, feelings of guilt and oppressive responsibility, and an inability to reconcile a desire for anonymity with a need to emulate former glories. Bear in mind too that these are the ones who survived – Scotty Beckett, Bobby Driscoll and Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer didn’t, and weirdly don’t get a mention. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1506534.Twinkle_Twinkle_Little_Star">A bit more here if you're interested</a>.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Thanks for reading.Rick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-52295338247812948532020-03-11T12:58:00.001+00:002023-09-01T07:42:37.443+01:00Big Thief on tour<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6xbQ_7-20ug/Xmjlhyd93iI/AAAAAAAAIck/TfHwmlhSxLYj84kcOplmQ8fUxeULdRVEACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/IMG_1501.PNG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6xbQ_7-20ug/Xmjlhyd93iI/AAAAAAAAIck/TfHwmlhSxLYj84kcOplmQ8fUxeULdRVEACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/IMG_1501.PNG" width="225" height="400" data-original-width="750" data-original-height="1334" /></a>
<br /><br /><b>BIG THIEF at<br />
Hammersmith Apollo, London (27 Feb)<br />
Rock City, Nottingham (29 Feb)<br />
Albert Hall, Manchester (1 Mar)<br />
Ancienne Belgique, Brussels (5 Mar)<br />
Paradiso, Amsterdam (6 Mar)</b><br /><br />
Every time you see Adrianne Lenker, she’s three different people. This month I’ve seen her five times.<br /><br />
It started like this. Last year I watched her enchant Union Chapel, picking at an outsized acoustic guitar, tooth missing, hiding behind a thatched fringe, whispering whimsical self-penned songs that seemed to be about potatoes but were suddenly about the cosmos. Four months later (two of which I’d spent in hospital), she played the Roundhouse with her band Big Thief, four disparate, perfectly and weirdly simpatico Brooklyn alt-folk scenesters.<br /><br />
She’d shaved her head and she was just screaming. Swaggering and screaming, guitar like a machine gun.<br /><br />
Later in 2019, her band played Bush Hall in one of those small miracles that London serves up now and again: announcement on Thursday, on sale Friday, gig on Monday, previewing their second album of the year, <i>Two Hands</i>, doing it in full for the-first-and-only-time, figuring out how to play these songs live, before our eyes, something between a workshop and a front seat to history. Since then they’ve been lauded by Pitchfork, the <i>Guardian</i>, and Barack Obama(‘s PR consultants), but it was how the shows made me <i>feel</i>. After Suede and the Manics gave way to The Strokes and The White Stripes, I thought I was through with bands – that really bands were the kind of thing you grow out of, like Ricicles or the Socialist Workers’ Party. Then The National came along and asked if that was in any way a tenable position. Big Thief set fire to it.<br /><br />
I had tickets to the London show, had the flyer magnet-pinned to my fringe for close to a year, but Big Thief aren’t a one-evening proposition. They’re mercurial and explosive, allergic to convention and setlists – to having a set list for more than one night in a row, even to sticking to the one drummer James Krivchenia has written – and seeing them just once suddenly seemed perverse. Like listening to Mahler’s Ninth once, enjoying it and then smashing the vinyl on the sideboard. Instead I could spend all my money going to Nottingham. And Manchester. And Brussels. And Amsterdam. Anywhere there were sympathetic Burins with fold-out sofas and an accepting attitude to turning up two hours early for gigs.<br /><br />
OK, I missed Glasgow and Paris somewhere in there, but the five shows were like a suite, or a Gus Van Sant film from back when he was great, and I’m left with this: a series of impressions, a juggling of snapshots, a succession of reinventions: the same but different, different but the same.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0BuxR2kUzDc/XmjlAXjnSoI/AAAAAAAAIbk/QpN8unu1ql0oqu65tXmFCV9_paTFfR_XACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/IMG_1198.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0BuxR2kUzDc/XmjlAXjnSoI/AAAAAAAAIbk/QpN8unu1ql0oqu65tXmFCV9_paTFfR_XACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/IMG_1198.JPG" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a><br /><br />
Hammersmith is first and it’s your erratic epic – their biggest gig ever, perhaps their longest. Big Thief are the only band whose singer’s hair is a continuing psychodrama of its own, and she turns up looking like Henry V. “He that outlives this day, and comes safe home/Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named/And rouse him at the name of Crispian,” says the grown Hal, and Lenker is a soul obsessed with home: the “good home” of ‘Parallels’, the home that everyone deserves in ‘Forgotten Eyes’, the home confused for a refuge in ‘Rock and Sing’. And this few, this happy few, this band of brothers so fierce in their gentle, sporadic, lolloping way: three men and this androgynous tour-de-force, Lenker unshaven and muscular and suited, spinning tortured love songs that are, upon inspection, not love songs at all but explorations of the male selves that at times flicker to her forefront. “Oh, the last time I saw Paul,” she breathes in one of their debut album’s heartstopping moments, “I was horrible and almost let him in.”<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-DouM8MnqOpc/XmjlAfKtiPI/AAAAAAAAIbc/OviKHB0E8LAnqCWkgCklYAQoPEfasts7wCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/IMG_1205.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-DouM8MnqOpc/XmjlAfKtiPI/AAAAAAAAIbc/OviKHB0E8LAnqCWkgCklYAQoPEfasts7wCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/IMG_1205.JPG" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a><br /><br />
There are concessions to commercialism, or at least pragmatism, in London, but Big Thief are still just so irregular and counter-intuitive, and weird, and heavy, and fey. Which other band would kick off a landmark show with a new song called ‘Zombie Girl’, played acoustic and solo? Which band would meet every ovation with a wistfully abstruse deep cut? Or consent to an encore (by no means a given) from a pissed-up crowd of 5,000, do only a subdued ‘Rock and Sing’ and then leave. They quietly reinvent the Spotify Top Songs stuff – angular guitars, drum-and-vocal bridges, rolling rhythms – but at that stage I’m just getting attuned to it. I leave muttering something about Lenker being the only New Dylan since Dylan. You know in ‘Love Minus Zero’ when he sings, “My love, she speaks like silence”, or ‘Visions of Johanna – “The ghost of ‘lectricity howls in the bones of her face” – well no-one writes like that. But Lenker does. Not <i>like</i> Dylan, exactly – because what’s special about that? – but prolifically singular, with his perfect abstract specificity. “Your eyes were like machinery,” she sings in ‘Mary’. “Your hands were making artefacts in the corner of my mind.”<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Cn_XS7VkkJg/XmjlBr47QtI/AAAAAAAAIbs/FS4WxN14n8QQzodLYYm0p1jaTAneC21VwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/IMG_1286.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Cn_XS7VkkJg/XmjlBr47QtI/AAAAAAAAIbs/FS4WxN14n8QQzodLYYm0p1jaTAneC21VwCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/IMG_1286.JPG" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a><br /><br />
At Nottingham’s Rock City, bathed in blue, they manufacture atmosphere, then feed off it, swelling to twice their size (I’m on the front row now), pressing inexorably forward. “I love you, Adriana,” yells a male voice from the back of the room. Lenker scowls, says nothing. He says it once, twice, half-a-dozen times. She looks at her feet. It’s when two teenage girls begin to speak, freaking out at being in the same room with her that she engages. “I just love these songs so much,” says one, pushing her way forward, beginning to cry. Lenker, who’s crouching down over her guitar to fiddle with the amps, smiles, contorts her fingers into a thin and sturdy heart.<br /><br />
The show is intense, and in its intensity the tour’s themes start to reveal and congeal. You realise what a political record <i>Two Hands</i> is, with a directness that can only be communicated in person. ‘Not’ is an explosion of cathartic anguish, with something of <i>Sleep Well Beast</i>’s state-of-the-nation remit, a list song that exalts through endless negation, like Cole Porter just went fucking mental. Seen through the squall are Bible-old traumas and rampaging ills: climate emergency, consumerism, mortality, listlessness, loneliness. And at some point words are no longer enough, no matter how perfect the words, like when the harmonica comes in at the end of Dylan’s <i>Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands</i>, and then ‘Not’ spirals into horror, madness, purposeful fury, and finally release; a howl, a blast of noise, a guitar solo that’s half-rehearsed, half-improvised, and by Amsterdam will be refined, Lenker no longer on her haunches, twiddling amp dials, but trading sonic perfection for picturesque rage, because the display, the physicality is part of the thing, if not the whole thing.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5BcHan7-28I/XmjlCCJHOdI/AAAAAAAAIbw/3-w6aZAGA-g_T7SbXx0l7SGbsU7hIvc_ACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/IMG_1408.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5BcHan7-28I/XmjlCCJHOdI/AAAAAAAAIbw/3-w6aZAGA-g_T7SbXx0l7SGbsU7hIvc_ACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/IMG_1408.JPG" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a><br /><br />
‘Forgotten Eyes’ is empathetic: a big hug, a socialist manifesto viewed through a hippy aesthetic. But ‘Shoulders’? That’s merely harrowing: domestic violence in primary colours, the sins of the father as anthem; at one point I turn half-around to see the whole crowd chanting in unison; it’s a definite moment, but it isn’t comfortable. In Manchester, Lenker will turn ‘The Toy’ into a stylised pantomime, her right hand a gun firing skywards as childhood play turns into misadventure, love transmogrifies into murder, and the horror of sudden, eyes-wide realisation twists America into an apocalyptic hellscape. But that’s not yet: here it’s just fraught and ugly. As these new songs flex their muscles, others are dragged into the present: the political present; the musical <i>now</i> – dragged upwards as the band degenerate into grunge. And then when it’s over, there’s just ‘Magic Dealer’, gentle as a sparrow in the dawn.<br /><br />
Manchester, though, is about those gestures. Lenker stretches out a hand towards the child by her side, before ‘Capacity’ turns introspective. She tracks a tear down her cheek. She fires the finger-gun. Birds fly away. And in ‘Masterpiece’s new, stompy segue, she clomps across the stage in black boots, facing away, the song as funky as it can ever get and still stab you in the heart. Because when she’s stopped playing at being the rockabilly George Clinton, she’s still got to go back to the mic, got to tell us that there’s only so much letting go you can ask someone to do.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tg1vqt4VDzo/XmjlBUFZ3BI/AAAAAAAAIbo/WSeFWfxIaWEncuhT2qwyVHVGDv7nbJuDgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/IMG_1246.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tg1vqt4VDzo/XmjlBUFZ3BI/AAAAAAAAIbo/WSeFWfxIaWEncuhT2qwyVHVGDv7nbJuDgCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/IMG_1246.JPG" width="400" height="297" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1186" /></a><br /><br />
She is avian. High cheekbones and a hooked nose. The wild, ethereal twitter of her head voice. And when she nods to a fast, burgeoning riff, ‘Shark Smile’ coming to life, her heads bobs and juts like a pigeon’s. Yes, she’s birdlike. Almost brittle. But her middle-range is powerful and her lower-range is brutal, and there’s such strength in this band. They’re pastoral and sensitive, but if you pollute that lake, they are going to fucking kill you. She handles her guitar like a feminist manifesto, and though it’s hard to find a new way of playing guitar live, rock clichés sit lightly on you when you’re a genius. Lenker moshes with a Beatle cut, backpedals as she thrashes out chords, delicately stamps her feet and shakes her head as ‘Forgotten Eyes’ takes shape, and screams as ‘Contact’ is made: the long, slow prelude, then skin touches skin, or metal touches brain, or a mind lurches awake, or somewhere in that vast empty blackness, something responds.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Kl91LH1TIQA/XmjlCloIzUI/AAAAAAAAIb4/ZyW4lv1jDkU-yfwp99_ZkaghUr967dSPQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/IMG_1412.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Kl91LH1TIQA/XmjlCloIzUI/AAAAAAAAIb4/ZyW4lv1jDkU-yfwp99_ZkaghUr967dSPQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/IMG_1412.JPG" width="300" height="400" data-original-width="1200" data-original-height="1600" /></a><br /><br />
So often, her eyes are closed, and they flicker open to gaze into yours or just into the middle distance. She breaks sparingly but completely into a smile, into nervous laughter. There are thank yous, at times that feeling of being quietly overwhelmed that a band get when they’re suddenly big, but that comes only when they speak, and the spell of impetus slackens. In Brussels there’s a soliloquy about Europe. The cobbled streets… the beauty… wanting to go there, but feeling afraid. It’s not scary, though, it’s people, says Lenker – and stone. In Minnesota, everything was thin, but… no… there’s beauty there too, and she’s into ‘Cattails’, which rocks, but like a hand on a cradle, a part-cryptic bucolic lullaby, a deceptive 12-string dance track about the natural world, full-to-choking with beauty, in its imagery, its sounds, its meter. “And the clusters fell, like an empty bell,” sings Lenker, the rhythm so infectious that she’s proto-rapping. “Meteor shower at the motel.” It makes my throat swell.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bpfU87wM7p0/XmjlDCOEEVI/AAAAAAAAIb8/IElytJQeNeA3fII9KjJ4W_K22LkpFHd9gCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/IMG_1416.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bpfU87wM7p0/XmjlDCOEEVI/AAAAAAAAIb8/IElytJQeNeA3fII9KjJ4W_K22LkpFHd9gCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/IMG_1416.JPG" width="300" height="400" data-original-width="1200" data-original-height="1600" /></a><br /><br />
She plays around with those rhythms, always. In ‘Mary’, her hypnotic, lulling fast-talking can either speed or drag, make the song lost and dreamlike, or else relentless and pretty; she injects urgency, uncertainty, certainty into ‘Not’. The freakout jams are different every night.<br /><br />
The setlist changes every night too, but there are runs of songs, and you get to know them. ‘Masterpiece’ into ‘Capacity’ – sad and sensual, spinning the heartbroken lover trope into bisexual erotica – then ‘Shark Smile’ and sometimes ‘Real Love’, that exquisitely painful smash-and-grab that takes one look at songs that glorify abusive relationships and decides that actually I’ll probably be alright, thanks – and suddenly you’re the kid watching his alcoholic mum get the shit beaten out of her by its dad. In Brussels, the poignancy almost drowns you, the “hummingbird” passage offbeat, strange and haunting, like it’s broken out of <i>The Innocents</i>: a quiet, haunting new song, the child’s song, suddenly growing out of this old one. In Amsterdam that’s gone forever, but the song is a monster, stretched out and violent. That show is the heaviest of the lot, ‘Shark Smile’ sped up, aggressive but still insouciant, its lust barely dampened by its auto-wreck tragedy.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-W4_8GGKv1Wg/XmjlER21ClI/AAAAAAAAIcI/Xpvf9Of3ESQwzZuTz4qoFOoJCYoUmzBjwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/IMG_1468.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-W4_8GGKv1Wg/XmjlER21ClI/AAAAAAAAIcI/Xpvf9Of3ESQwzZuTz4qoFOoJCYoUmzBjwCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/IMG_1468.JPG" width="300" height="400" data-original-width="1200" data-original-height="1600" /></a><br /><br />
Then there’s the acoustic stretch: for some of it the band take a back seat and, in bassist Max Oleartchik’s case, a literal one. ‘Orange’ is one of the loveliest, most straightforward songs Lenker has ever written – that’s played in London, then comes back for the Benelux gigs. There are new tracks: the conventionally attractive ‘Zombie Girl’; ‘Dried Roses’, premiered in Nottingham, which takes Lenker’s whimsical-metaphysical thing near to the point of parody but damn-near breaks you anyway; and ‘Time Escaping’, which eludes me still; I don’t remember it, nor how it goes. Maybe one day. She’s backed by the band for ‘Happiness’ – another list song, Lenker-style – for the rocky ‘Bruiser’, for the gorgeous ‘Two Rivers’, which meanders through familiar territory with an iridescent beauty. She picks a repetitive pattern over Krivchenia’s brushwork, voice scaling mountains of arpeggios, checking out the scenery, until finally she gets to the crux of it, words trembling: “Is it a crime to do what you ask me to?”<br /><br />
Krivchenia is a superb drummer, and his languorous expression – leaning forward, mouth lolling open – sets some sort of tone. He cracks one smile in five nights. Oleartchik – feet bare, clad in a pink onesie or a dress, often-times perched on a stack of amps – is unaffected, unobtrusive and unfussy, as if he’s scarcely realised he’s playing bass. And Buck Meek, extreme left of the stage, as Lenker is centre-right, has his knee eternally bent, slim shoes that feel like they should be winkle pickers, leaning towards her, towards Krivchenia, looming almost, lurching with those thin legs as he issues spare notes and shimmering soundscapes, but his talent sublimated to his group, with just the odd lead guitar part. And sometimes he’s scarcely playing at all, but fuck me those vocal harmonies, lifting ‘Mary’ and ‘Masterpiece’ still higher – and it’s only when he comes in, adding to Lenker’s voice, to Krivchenia’s, to Oleartchik’s, that you realise those sharply uptilted Texan vowels were what was missing. High forehead, hair like corn drifting back in a stack at the back of his head; guileless, polite, deceptively brilliant; when Lenker goes off, and <i>yes she goes off</i>, he instinctively complements her crackling invention, their chemistry absolute, and you think of that photo of them in front of the camper van on the front of ‘A Sides’, when they were a couple, perhaps halfway to getting married. In Amsterdam there’s even a rare concession to practicality, as he gets a solo spot, because he’s back later in the month as a solo supporting act, and he has tickets to sell.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QI2wLdE2I5A/XmjlDTJmgvI/AAAAAAAAIcA/ogjb7I6jJDolYT98ctQJdYn-phyAa2tiQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/IMG_1464.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QI2wLdE2I5A/XmjlDTJmgvI/AAAAAAAAIcA/ogjb7I6jJDolYT98ctQJdYn-phyAa2tiQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/IMG_1464.JPG" width="400" height="276" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1105" /></a><br /><br />
So yes it’s a band, and if they ever split up, I will cry, but for all that it’s Lenker’s band. Walking on stage with wet hair, in high-waisted trousers, stripping off her suit jacket to unmask a sleeveless top – white or blue or khaki – after a frenetic guitar solo, an illegible tattoo snaking down her arm, she holds you for 90, 100 minutes in her thrall. She comes face-on to the audience just once, as ‘Masterpiece’ reaches its zenith; otherwise she’s off to one side, one of four points, but the driving force, content in her endless capacity. With three people, and three people herself.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>Setlists:</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jrUzNecGRYI/XmjlCPB5tQI/AAAAAAAAIb0/120XMhyb7KcNwmStcOD6sjbOOgEH-xqBACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/IMG_1297.PNG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jrUzNecGRYI/XmjlCPB5tQI/AAAAAAAAIb0/120XMhyb7KcNwmStcOD6sjbOOgEH-xqBACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/IMG_1297.PNG" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="1334" data-original-height="750" /></a><br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kM58OOnhY0M/XmkGgUywHRI/AAAAAAAAIc8/sHf1xq-5Ghsrw4_XYjTTcEQxMDnWTf-9QCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Big%2BThief%2Bsetlist.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kM58OOnhY0M/XmkGgUywHRI/AAAAAAAAIc8/sHf1xq-5Ghsrw4_XYjTTcEQxMDnWTf-9QCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/Big%2BThief%2Bsetlist.PNG" width="400" height="267" data-original-width="727" data-original-height="485" /></a></div>Rick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com2London, UK51.5073509 -0.127758351.1912379 -0.7732053 51.8234639 0.5176887tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-90750656939252221182019-12-24T15:55:00.000+00:002020-01-26T21:30:14.601+00:00Review of 2019: Part 3 – Movies<a href="https://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2019/12/Books2019.html">Part 1 was about books</a>, <a href="https://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2019/12/Live2019.html">Part 2 was live stuff</a>. This one's about films. I only saw 95 this year, which by my previous standards is <i>pathetic</i>, but is also probably Healthy and A Good Thing.<br /><br />
<b>Fourteen premieres of the year...</b><br /><br />
... being old films I saw for the first time in 2019, and really liked.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WRdKprE8lSw/XgIwk5MWaZI/AAAAAAAAIWU/ADQFc0y79x06qrflJkYQtML95MR8VhUFACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/hero_EB20030309REVIEWS08303090308AR.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WRdKprE8lSw/XgIwk5MWaZI/AAAAAAAAIWU/ADQFc0y79x06qrflJkYQtML95MR8VhUFACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/hero_EB20030309REVIEWS08303090308AR.jpg" width="400" height="167" data-original-width="1200" data-original-height="500" /></a><br /><br />
<b>1-3. Three Colours Red (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1994)</b>, <b>The Double Life of Véronique (Kieślowski, 1991)</b> and <b>No End (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1985)</b> – The climax to Kieslowski’s tricolore trilogy is a sort of twisted Amèlie: a wilfully dark slow-burner that dares you to love it. Part-time model Irène Jacob has a sexist boyfriend, a junkie brother, and has just run over a dog. That dog belongs to reclusive retired judge Jean-Louis Trintignant, who hates everyone and is spying crustily on his neighbours. After that charming meet cute they begin a tentative friendship, but this is no simple Hollywood heartwarmer and Trintignant no thawing grandpa: he remains a complex character, and their relationship is as much about honesty as redemption. If it speaks to you, though – and it does to me – you’ll never forget it. This is Kieslowski’s most stylish film: playful at times, almost hallucinatory at others, with Felliniesque tendencies and an inspired use of music. Those flourishes augment a story that feels minor and even disjointed for quite a while – but stick with it. The final 20 is astonishing.<br /><br />
When I was watching movies, this was the year of Kieslowski. <i>Véronique</i> is an understated, hypnotic Kieslowski film that runs the gamut from eerie to joyous, but thrums with quiet pain, while radiating artistry in the imagery, music (by Zbigniew Preisner) and performance. Jacob is chokingly effective as Véronique and Weronika, sensitive, identical women who never meet, but feel an intangible connection. It’s often plotless – and its bits of plot can feel like contrived whimsy – but it’s mesmerising too, and when it hits, it hits hard. You may know it’s coming, when Véronique takes a closer look at those transparencies... oof. I’d like to watch this again soon, as I’m not quite sure how to judge it: the moments of profound visual and emotional beauty (Jacob walking in the light between shadows) vs some apparent shortcomings that are more prosaic. It could end up being a favourite.<br /><br />
And then there was <i>No End</i>, which began the whole thing. That's a mesmerising Kieslowski film about a ghost, a grieving widow and a political trial. It's a sad, wise, wintry work, profound about loss and revealing about communist Poland. Every scene is brilliant.<br /><br />
I'm going to watch <i>Dekalog</i> for the first time in 2020. I can't wait.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-omxaaRIK46E/XgIweYPp6LI/AAAAAAAAIWQ/7msmJW0SHeECfjhPA02WFZfWXSOjW2FFQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/heat-lightning-xxx.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-omxaaRIK46E/XgIweYPp6LI/AAAAAAAAIWQ/7msmJW0SHeECfjhPA02WFZfWXSOjW2FFQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/heat-lightning-xxx.jpg" width="400" height="301" data-original-width="322" data-original-height="242" /></a><br /><br />
<b>4. Heat Lightning (Mervyn LeRoy, 1934)</b> – Like The Petrified Forest but fun: a tough, crackling, slangy piece of Pre-Code magic about mannish mechanic Aline MacMahon, her frustrated kid sister (Ann Dvorak) and the fugitives, floozies and other lost souls who stumble into their desert gas station. It’s a little masterpiece: a film that juggles irreverence, suspense and drama, working hard for its emotional moments, which are understated and all the more effective for it. And it has pretty much my dream cast, dominated by MacMahon – who’s in terrific form – but with a decent part for Dvorak (largely sidelined by Warner’s after taking an eight-month honeymoon and briefing against the studio from the boat), as well as perfect supporting bits for Willard Robertson as McMahon’s quietly-spoken admirer, Glenda Farrell as a flirtatious divorcee, and Frank McHugh as her put-upon chauffeur. Plus Lyle Talbot as a nervy bank robber on the lam. It is 1933 after all.<br /><br />
<b>5. The Twilight Samurai (Yōji Yamada, 2002)</b> – A wonderful film about widowed, low-ranking samurai Hiroyuki Sanada trying to care for two daughters – and a mum with dementia – as honour and clan loyalties threaten to draw him into conflict. It’s a mixture of the conventional and the markedly not: there’s a little spoonfeeding and a mawkish coda, but also a hero who’s told off for being smelly, and a bit where the long-promised face-off is delayed by the villain wanting a chat and eating his own cremated daughter. In either mode, the film has a lovely feel to it: touching, melancholic but good-humoured, ultimately elegiac, and while the accent is rarely on action, it can do that too. Sanada is perfect as the taciturn hero: reluctant retainer and doting father, spurning the love of his life through a sense of duty.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-c1fIr6NYGBQ/XgIw1DZqaZI/AAAAAAAAIWk/KChN9cy4hEAUmcGLPCgdURuLgjmeMVUKwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/download.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-c1fIr6NYGBQ/XgIw1DZqaZI/AAAAAAAAIWk/KChN9cy4hEAUmcGLPCgdURuLgjmeMVUKwCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/download.jpg" width="400" height="289" data-original-width="264" data-original-height="191" /></a><br /><br />
<b>6. Tales of Manhattan (Julien Duvivier, 1942)</b> – The best pormanteau film I’ve seen from Hollywood’s Golden Age, beginning with Charles Boyer, Rita Hayworth and Thomas Mitchell trapped in a warped, noirish love triangle, and ending with Paul Robeson arms outstretched, in full voice – the stories all linked by the same increasingly bedraggled tailcoat. There’s a phenomenal collection of talent assembled here by Fox, both behind and in front of the camera, including director Julien Duvivier (Pépé Le Moko), writers Ben Hecht and Lamar Trotti, and one of the best casts brought together in this or any other era. And though the film juggles genres, it brings the same heightened sensibility to each, as well as ruminating gamely on the nature of luck. With the exception of a tiresome chapter starring W. C. Fields – excised from the original release, restored on home video – every single one of these stories is good (the African-American one is compassionate and treats its younger characters quite well, though it’s also patronising and stereotypical to the point of racism), and two of them are exceptional.<br /><br />
The pick of the bunch is a screwball masterpiece in miniature, utilising Ginger Rogers’ gift for instant emotional connection and Henry Fonda’s ever underrated comic timing in a funny, lushly romantic story about a bride falling in love with her best man. And in the other stand-out, which features a lovely part for veteran character actor Harry Davenport, homeless alcoholic Edward G. Robinson gets cleaned up, in more ways than one, to attend a university reunion, which – naturally thanks to George Sanders – turns into a referendum on his character. Right from the ingenious play-within-a-film near its commencement, you know this movie’s going to be something special, and it is. There’s wit and wisdom to spare. There’s also Charles Laughton as a frustrated composer, J. Carrol Naish as an armed robber and Robeson in dungarees, married to Ethel Waters, spouting socialist agitprop – so something for everyone, really. Also, did I mention how good Thomas Mitchell is here? He is. And he’s fantastically directed.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uqdeXUd8E4g/XgIx_x5pNZI/AAAAAAAAIXY/dV0iRf8NSBQsKbk1i36YyO7-G-U2kDKnACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/MV5BY2VmMGE1ZjItNTI1Yi00OWEzLTk1MTctNzA4ODQ3MmE3YjMyXkEyXkFqcGdeQXRzdGFzaWVr._V1_CR0%252C56%252C654%252C368_AL_UX477_CR0%252C0%252C477%252C268_AL_.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uqdeXUd8E4g/XgIx_x5pNZI/AAAAAAAAIXY/dV0iRf8NSBQsKbk1i36YyO7-G-U2kDKnACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/MV5BY2VmMGE1ZjItNTI1Yi00OWEzLTk1MTctNzA4ODQ3MmE3YjMyXkEyXkFqcGdeQXRzdGFzaWVr._V1_CR0%252C56%252C654%252C368_AL_UX477_CR0%252C0%252C477%252C268_AL_.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="477" data-original-height="268" /></a><br /><br />
<b>7. The Warriors (Walter Hill, 1979)</b> – Eight gang members in lovely leather waistcoats try to fight their way home to Coney Island from The Bronx, pursued by the cops and every ridiculously-attired badass in town. A richly visual cult action film from Walter Hall, with echoes of early John Carpenter, tons of suspense and a gloriously grimy NY milieu. On one level it’s completely preposterous (one rival gang appear to be Kiss wearing baseball gear, another are in dungarees and on rollerskates), but luckily it’s also amazing: one of the great all-in-one-night movies (see also: After Hours, Die Hard, American Graffiti, Attack the Block). And, apparently oblivious to it, and in other ways rather unreconstructed, it’s also really quite gay. It can add something curious and intangible to a B-movie when you get wooden actors speaking stylised dialogue, but when those bad actors go big, it falls down. That’s the case here: keeping it simple, the Warriors work – even if a few could be written more fully – while hamming baddie David Patrick Kelly is notably A Bit Much. Cracking film, though.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7CLdxYLk8dM/XgIw-2sjXRI/AAAAAAAAIWo/Q_yuT2LELF0RqQOwHX7dQKTtma5HV75OwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/they-came-to-a-city-1944-004-long-shot-three-people-in-black-and-white-walls.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7CLdxYLk8dM/XgIw-2sjXRI/AAAAAAAAIWo/Q_yuT2LELF0RqQOwHX7dQKTtma5HV75OwCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/they-came-to-a-city-1944-004-long-shot-three-people-in-black-and-white-walls.jpg" width="400" height="314" data-original-width="1000" data-original-height="785" /></a><br /><br />
<b>8. They Came to a City (Basil Dearden, 1945)</b> – A genuinely inspiring socialist allegory, based on a J. B. Priestley play, with a heady atmosphere of victory-scented utopianism that places it unmistakably in 1944. A bit heavy-handed in places, but thoroughly striking, with rich rhetoric, a notably fine Googie Withers performance, and modernist, abstract sets that are almost as fascinating as her face.<br /><br />
<b>9. Nine Queens (Fabián Bielinsky, 2000)</b> – A terrific, endlessly surprising Argentine film about two con men walking the streets of Buenos Aires, trying to close the deal of a lifetime. Affecting and amusing, with a cast of memorable characters – particularly Ricardo Darin’s goateed, merciless Marcos.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cu_SKc1qxTs/XgIxLVw9nNI/AAAAAAAAIWw/X3qLbnNh_lwUv5pt4btyu62PFy_WIaT0ACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/7ea44756be1246dcd67dddf47b819d9bdf7a7371.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cu_SKc1qxTs/XgIxLVw9nNI/AAAAAAAAIWw/X3qLbnNh_lwUv5pt4btyu62PFy_WIaT0ACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/7ea44756be1246dcd67dddf47b819d9bdf7a7371.jpg" width="400" height="200" data-original-width="600" data-original-height="300" /></a><br /><br />
<b>10. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Peter Ramsey, Bob Persichetti and Rodney Rothman, 2018)</b> – When a film has a cartoon Peter Porker pig known as Spider-Ham and that cartoon Peter Porker pig says something so unexpectedly moving that it nearly makes you cry – that’s when you know you’re watching a good film. It’s that heart that sets it apart, though it is also very funny and well-animated, and Lord and Miller’s post-modernism freshens the formula without overwhelming the story. Even the action climax doesn’t overstay its welcome (much). Film noir isn’t from the 1930s, though. Sort it out.<br /><br />
<b>11. Lenny (Bob Fosse, 1974)</b> – An exceptional, intelligent Lenny Bruce biopic, with Dustin Hoffman’s acerbic, neurotic, obsessive, impulsive Bruce – an insecure adulterer and hopeless morphine addict, as well as trailblazer and mirror to America’s rampant hypocrisy – a little more recognisable than the Manic Pixie Dream Lenny of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel. It’s directed in incomparable New Hollywood style by Fosse, a clear influence on films from Raging Bull to Jackie, with credible performances led by Hoffman’s pyrotechnics, though Bruce’s professional life is rather more interesting to watch than his personal one, meaning that the decision to angle the story on his relationship with his wife (Valerie Perrine) isn’t necessarily right.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9_VHFf991eM/XgIxS1E1F8I/AAAAAAAAIW4/ByGkg-tX1ycycKZP1p4tc5_i0hIfkFJ1wCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/download%2B%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9_VHFf991eM/XgIxS1E1F8I/AAAAAAAAIW4/ByGkg-tX1ycycKZP1p4tc5_i0hIfkFJ1wCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/download%2B%25281%2529.jpg" width="400" height="227" data-original-width="298" data-original-height="169" /></a><br /><br />
<b>12. Harper (Jack Smight, 1966)</b> – A genuinely special PI film that bridges the gap between The Big Sleep (with Bacall in the General Sternwood role) and Altman’s Long Goodbye, as Paul Newman’s tough-talking, hungover Lew Harper scoops old coffee grains out of the bin for re-use – and gets outsmarted a half-dozen times, while rarely losing his smirk. At times the plot plods and the story feels secondhand, the film touched too by those naff ‘60s elements that never feel authentic, but it’s packed full of scintillating William Goldman dialogue, with a first-rate cast – including Shelley Winters as an alcoholic former starlet, Julie Harris a smack addict chanteuse, and Arthur Hill as Newman’s best bud – and imaginative imagery from Conrad Hall. The final scene in particular is an absolute classic: Goldman at his zenith, and Newman close to his; a shame then that the writer’s conspicuous contempt for women, fat people and “faggots” serves elsewhere to detract from the sardonic lyricism of his lines.<br /><br />
<b>13. Crumb (Terry Zwigoff, 1995)</b> – A revealing, difficult documentary about counter-culture cartoonist Robert Crumb, mental illness and America. The sequence in which you see his brother's comic books degenerate from charming pastiches of popular art into endlessly and impossibly dense word-heavy blue scrawls is as harrowing a depiction of insanity as I've seen. I've found it hard to get it out of my head.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-w8yUwEBXG6Y/XgIxbBgBDUI/AAAAAAAAIXA/qHFNJsM4VOA_s7KbJfzmIDNPduMh3PqMACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/26.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-w8yUwEBXG6Y/XgIxbBgBDUI/AAAAAAAAIXA/qHFNJsM4VOA_s7KbJfzmIDNPduMh3PqMACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/26.JPG" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="634" data-original-height="475" /></a><br /><br />
<b>14. The Adventures of Mark Twain (Irving Rapper, 1944)</b> – Wonderful episodic Americana about steamboat captain, gold prospector and comedy roaster Sam Clemens (Fredric March) – better known by his nom de plume. March is excellent, sidestepping his penchant to play too big, and there are lovely moments throughout – particularly the love scene in the rain, and the characters tumbling from the Huck Finn manuscript – though the second half is sometimes too conventional, and Alexis Smith (as Mrs Clemens) is increasingly asked to eulogise Twain’s greatness for the benefit of the viewer, rather than enjoy a character of her own. Still, the writers’ knowledge of Twain is clearly first-rate (I’m talking the works, not the events), and they do a good job of knitting his observations and witticisms into the script without it ever feeling mannered or laborious. Plenty of his gags still hold up, though the ones in his climactic speaking tour are admittedly absolutely terrible bantz. Max Steiner’s score has his usual virtues and vices: lovely themes alongside clichéd jingles and hysterical cues.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>Old favourites</b><br /><br />
The ten best films I rewatched:<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-gn1oJtovvi4/XgIxkCOPDcI/AAAAAAAAIXI/DG_vxhLDyUgLD3qCuZjzvbl9evuSM44gQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/magnificent_ambersons-590x308.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-gn1oJtovvi4/XgIxkCOPDcI/AAAAAAAAIXI/DG_vxhLDyUgLD3qCuZjzvbl9evuSM44gQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/magnificent_ambersons-590x308.jpg" width="400" height="209" data-original-width="590" data-original-height="308" /></a><br /><br />
<b>1. The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)</b> – Fragments of genius. Amidst the wreckage are five or six of the most stunning passages in American cinema. I wrote at length about the film <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-magnificence-of-ambersons.html">here</a>.<br /><br />
<b>2. Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001)</b> – You can take your <i>Juno</i>, your <i>Scott Pilgrim</i>, even your <i>Heathers</i>, and chuck them in a skip, because <i>Ghost World</i> just does it all so much better. Well, all of it that's worth doing. I'm beginning to think this melancholy, bitingly hilarious crystallisation of teen ennui might be the only film I'll ever really need.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1ax0V1jDjoI/XgIxzEkRvxI/AAAAAAAAIXQ/OuEiWqXZfeQ3mlrXko97xTIwpV8FN5aOwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/21f2e497f10c696891679a48b8a4b294.gif" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1ax0V1jDjoI/XgIxzEkRvxI/AAAAAAAAIXQ/OuEiWqXZfeQ3mlrXko97xTIwpV8FN5aOwCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/21f2e497f10c696891679a48b8a4b294.gif" width="400" height="354" data-original-width="245" data-original-height="217" /></a><br /><br />
<b>3. Holiday (George Cukor, 1938)</b> – Unfortunately I am in love with Katharine Hepburn in this film. And in love with the Potters. Lew Ayres starts as a cartoon, then adds layer upon layer. Inspired, inspiring, intoxicating. It’s pretty much perfection. <a href="1/kate-hepburn-112263-and-elia-kazans.html">Here's a full-length piece about it. The film is out on Criterion Blu-ray, including the original 1930 version as an extra, next month.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MemdteSmkN8/XgIyMGbzEYI/AAAAAAAAIXg/QLwKUv-AjBQ3l1Za6mXIloWOhzTceAMogCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/waterfrontbrando_wide-117f1ad82f058d3407f98cb9ebe0665f94900f52.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MemdteSmkN8/XgIyMGbzEYI/AAAAAAAAIXg/QLwKUv-AjBQ3l1Za6mXIloWOhzTceAMogCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/waterfrontbrando_wide-117f1ad82f058d3407f98cb9ebe0665f94900f52.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="1400" data-original-height="788" /></a><br /><br />
<b>4. On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)</b> – Along with <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2015/04/ten-things-i-love-about-star-wars.html">Star Wars</a></i> and <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2016/01/totoro-les-400-coups-and-in-desert-with.html">Les 400 Coups</a></i>, this was the movie that got me into movies. I had that amazing Italian poster on my wall as a teenager. I’ve been to a concert because they were performing a bit of the score. I still know the (incomparable) taxicab scene off by heart. The film, enduringly problematically, is an apologia for informing, in which director Elia Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg shamefully equate the parlour communists they ratted out to the HUAC with murderous mobsters. Context and subtext aside, though, it remains an absolutely exhilarating piece of cinema: powerful, rousing, moving – even sexy.<br /><br />
Brando, in the greatest of all his performances, is Terry Malloy, the uneducated ‘bum’ who threw his one shot at a title fight and is now the mascot of a corrupt waterfront labour union run by Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb). After setting up a talkative neighbour to get shoved off a building, Terry falls for the victim’s sister, convent girl Edie (Eva Marie Saint), and feels the first painful stirrings of conscience. There’s such an intensity and a depth to Brando’s performance here, which conjures beauty and nobility and even innocence from a character who is thick and crude and inarticulate and sometimes ugly. Something is always happening beneath the surface of his skin, and the details too are dynamic: the way he picks up Saint’s glove, cleans it off, then puts it on, as he sits on a swing and continues his guileless, pained, teasing courtship.<br /><br />
Schulberg’s dialogue is lyrical but real, the location photography groundbreakingly good, and Leonard Bernstein’s sole movie score a revelation, while Kazan dips into horror iconography and avant garde camera swishes – the latter simulating Terry’s punchdrunk climactic stagger – to augment the action. It comes too with career-best turns from Saint (her debut), Cobb and Karl Malden, as well as the finest thing Steiger did outside of The Pawnbroker. I still find it a troubling, difficult and mendacious film, but it also gave me the gift of cinema and I will always love it.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VP-_NPd9cVI/XgIymlMn7NI/AAAAAAAAIXw/hiwp5lSida0rx-qW7J-6UBqPPK1_G94RACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/top-hat-isnt-it-a-lovely-day.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VP-_NPd9cVI/XgIymlMn7NI/AAAAAAAAIXw/hiwp5lSida0rx-qW7J-6UBqPPK1_G94RACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/top-hat-isnt-it-a-lovely-day.png" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="640" data-original-height="480" /></a><br /><br />
<b>5. Top Hat (Mark Sandrich, 1935)</b> – Not the most groundbreaking, challenging, interesting, avant garde or seamless musical, but hands-down my favourite. The five numbers are transformative, transcendent, even transfiguring, and around them is a slick, funny Wodehousian comedy of mistaken identity, only occasionally made mystifying by time, and played to the hilt by a perfect supporting cast: bask in Helen Broderick’s one-liners, Edward Everett Horton’s double-takes and that weird, slightly saucy pouty thing that Eric Blore keeps doing.<br /><br />
I really love Ginger’s facial acting in this, especially the two greatest of the dance sequences: ‘Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)’ and ‘Cheek to Cheek’ – the latter a heightened, aching, impossibly beautiful five minutes of cinema, and irresistible shorthand for the intoxicating nature of Depression-era escapism, utilised in films like <i>The Purple Rose of Cairo</i> and <i>The English Patient</i>.<br /><br />
There are some wonderful flashes of instant mythmaking too, particularly Sandrich’s exuberant shot of Fred and Ginger’s feet travelling to the dancefloor at the start of ‘The Piccolino’, and the delirious, ecstatic way they twirl out of frame at the close, love conquering all, including the elaborately drawn-out plot whose very superficiality enhances those peaks of exotic American romanticism.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-b1oW4URPta8/XgIyv9lk1oI/AAAAAAAAIX0/F81knNTSDkY1yh2R8-kQicORPuRxS-N1gCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/maxresdefault%2B%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-b1oW4URPta8/XgIyv9lk1oI/AAAAAAAAIX0/F81knNTSDkY1yh2R8-kQicORPuRxS-N1gCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/maxresdefault%2B%25281%2529.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="1280" data-original-height="720" /></a><br /><br />
<b>6. A Star Is Born (George Cukor, 1954)</b> – An utterly devastating musical melodrama, with Judy’s best performance, some brilliantly perverse numbers, those delicate, beautifully balanced CinemaScope visuals from Cukor, Leavitt and Hoyningen-Heuse, and Moss Hart’s rich, economical dialogue. It can feel jumpy at times – and not just because of the two lost passages (now partially reconstructed) – with long scenes, sudden epiphanies and then leaps forward, but the classic sequences are legion. Three favourites are the early passage in Norman’s bedroom – which brilliantly foreshadows and elucidates in a handful of images and lines – Esther’s emotionally complex monologue in her dressing room (followed by a ‘show must goes on’ musical reprise), and Maine putting on one last great performance prior to his fateful dip.<br /><br />
The last hits very close to home for me and as such is virtually unwatchable. That Esther-Norman relationship is one of the most effective and believable I’ve seen on screen: so tactile and true, with a rhapsodic tenderness, an easy, playful chemistry and a shared pain that you engage with almost physically. Mason’s acting in the night court, and later in his bed, is mesmerising. And then there’s ‘The Man That Got Away’ – arguably the outstanding musical sequence in all of cinema, though the journey there was tortuous. Cukor and co were on at least their fourth vastly different conception of the scene by the time they cracked it. It’s absolute magic: the only thing more extraordinary than what Judy is doing with her body – contorting in communion with her muse in that dim, smoke-filled dive – is what she’s doing with her voice.<br /><br />
If you love the film as I do, and enjoy reading, I’d really recommend <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2982933630?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">Ronald Haver’s book about <i>A Star Is Born</i> and its 1983 reconstruction</a>, a mixture of making-of (and unmaking-of, and remaking-of), Hollywood history, detective story and love story.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uoi9mlUK3IE/XgIy56ouDhI/AAAAAAAAIX4/bWsHPuuRkCQ209_Jxx236W6XevOPi4xoQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/download%2B%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uoi9mlUK3IE/XgIy56ouDhI/AAAAAAAAIX4/bWsHPuuRkCQ209_Jxx236W6XevOPi4xoQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/download%2B%25282%2529.jpg" width="400" height="172" data-original-width="342" data-original-height="147" /></a><br /><br />
<b>7. Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992)</b> – A shortsighted gunfighter, a hero who can’t get on his horse, and a bloke being shot on the shitter. Yes, it’s the last great Western: Eastwood’s ambivalent masterpiece about the cost of killing, and a lot else besides. It’s classic in style but offbeat in nature, chock-full of stylised, lyrical language (which extends even to the opening crawl) and powered by an astonishing ensemble. English Bob’s unmasking, Clint’s heart-to-heart with the damaged damsel, and the Schofield Kid’s tear-flecked confession are all extraordinary highlights. Saul Rubinek? Saul Rubbernecking, more like. *high five* <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/unforgiven/">There's a long(-ish) read here.</a><br /><br />
<b>8. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2013)</b> – The Coen brothers film that I really love: yearning, folk music, wintry sadness, counter-intuitive plotting and cats. Call me conventional but I could live without the John Goodman passage. The musical scenes are utterly perfect.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FODRbk8ZW84/XgIzCD2HgqI/AAAAAAAAIX8/C4-GeiQ84vUHZV88vwxAOfa5LAyHk4LagCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/MV5BZTM2YmE0MDEtMGZlNy00YzVlLTk5MjAtYTM0NTFkYjY1OWZhL2ltYWdlXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjUxODE0MDY%2540._V1_.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FODRbk8ZW84/XgIzCD2HgqI/AAAAAAAAIX8/C4-GeiQ84vUHZV88vwxAOfa5LAyHk4LagCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/MV5BZTM2YmE0MDEtMGZlNy00YzVlLTk5MjAtYTM0NTFkYjY1OWZhL2ltYWdlXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjUxODE0MDY%2540._V1_.jpg" width="400" height="312" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="798" /></a><br /><br />
<b>9. I Love You Again (W. S. Van Dyke II, 1940)</b> – An immaculate, unheralded comic masterpiece, with Bill Powell’s effortless tour-de-force as teetotal pillar of the community Larry “Grape Juice” Wilson, who gets a whack on the head and reverts to his old self – charming conman, George Carey. He heads home to raid the savings, only to fall in love with his own wife (Myrna Loy, naturally), who’s busy divorcing him. Frank McHugh is hilarious as the phony medic along for the ride. Ingenious script by Charles Lederer, Harry Kurnitz and George Oppenheimer, whose hand seems most apparent. There’s the odd rough edge from Woody Van Dyke’s obsessive, breakneck one-take approach, but he certainly knew how to film comedy, especially with a script and cast as good as this one.<br /><br />
<b>10. Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)</b> – “Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money and for a woman. I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman. Pretty, isn't it?” A near-perfect noir, with poetic insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) suckered into a murder plot by housewife, anklet wearer and angel of death, Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck). It’s cleverly plotted, intensely suspenseful and full of the most extraordinary dialogue and voiceover, written by Wilder and Raymond Chandler.<br /><br />
Stanwyck is good and MacMurray terrific – cast brilliantly against type for the first time – though no-one can touch Edward G. Robinson as the gruff, adoring, fast-talking investigator from up the corridor, who smells a rat but can’t ever quite believe that it’s his friend. Their doomed bromance gives the film its heart and its deeply moving final exchange – another of Wilder’s impeccable pay-offs, though only because the gas chamber finale that he shot was rejected by censors. I’m even coming around to Stanwyck’s wig.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>And here's a top 25 of the decade...</b><br /><br />
... boiled down from a long list of 70 to a shortlist of 68, then a final 25. It's favourites, really, not best, though that distinction is always a little muddy. The top two are right, anyway; the rest of it is up for grabs.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ctQN-8DHWOQ/XgIzVJYTjUI/AAAAAAAAIYI/7xL019UtlvQoCKoHqCRizpuG2jGNq7HPgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/bad-lucky-goat-f71963.jpeg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ctQN-8DHWOQ/XgIzVJYTjUI/AAAAAAAAIYI/7xL019UtlvQoCKoHqCRizpuG2jGNq7HPgCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/bad-lucky-goat-f71963.jpeg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="928" data-original-height="523" /></a><br /><br />
<a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2017/10/LFF2017-P2.html"><b>25. Bad Lucky Goat (Samir Oliveros, 2017)</b></a><br />
<a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2013/04/crouching-tiger-thora-birch-in-hole-and.html"><b>24. Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell, 2012)</b></a><br />
<a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2014/10/boyhood-carol-haney-and-kissimee-in.html"><b>23. Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014)</b></a><br />
<a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2013/02/wreck-it-ralph-kathleen-turner-and.html"><b>22. Paperman (John Kahrs, 2011)</b></a><br />
<a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2012/05/sunrise-louise-brooks-and-stars-in.html"><b>21. Skeletons (Nick Whitfield, 2010)</b></a><br />
<a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2017/05/james-baldwin-absolute-beginners-and.html"><b>20. I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, 2016)</b></a><br />
<a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2012/06/pre-coders-policemen-and-real-paris.html"><b>19. The Other Guys (Adam McKay, 2010)</b></a><br />
<a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2012/10/zac-efron-lesbians-and-how-to-stop-riot.html"><b>18. The Interrupters (Steve James, 2011)</b></a><br />
<a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-field-in-england-woody-allen-and-my.html"><b>17. The Intouchables (Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano, 2011)</b></a><br />
<a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2010/05/mona-lisa-nanny-mcphee-and-how-to-train.html"><b>16. Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang (Susanna White, 2010)</b></a><br />
<a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2017/10/LFF2017-P2.html"><b>15. A Fantastic Woman (Sebastián Lelio, 2017)</b></a><br />
<a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2013/12/joan-crawford-nebraska-and.html"><b>14. The Descendants (Alexander Payne, 2011)</b></a><br />
<a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2011/05/attack-block-reviews-70.html"><b>13. Attack the Block (Joe Cornish, 2011)</b></a><br />
<a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-way-way-back-greta-gerwig-and.html"><b>12. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2012)</b></a><br />
<a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/best-of-enemies/1/"><b>11. Best of Enemies (Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville, 2015)</b></a><br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dIa-DfR8aFU/XgIzcNBbzBI/AAAAAAAAIYM/0BPRHf-OCw0U3pNXJ67lcmzXCnC6ycJIwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/certain-women-1200-1200-675-675-crop-000000.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dIa-DfR8aFU/XgIzcNBbzBI/AAAAAAAAIYM/0BPRHf-OCw0U3pNXJ67lcmzXCnC6ycJIwCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/certain-women-1200-1200-675-675-crop-000000.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="1200" data-original-height="675" /></a><br /><br />
<b>10. Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, 2016)</b> – Kelly Reichardt has such a unique way of looking at the world, at humanity, and this triptych of short stories is an instant classic: a rich, tactile, beautifully-edited film that's brilliantly low key in its performances, its humour and its sumptuous, washed-out, finely-grained cinematography. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2016/10/london-film-festival-part-3.html">First-watch review here.</a><br /><br />
<b>9. Amy (Asif Kapadia, 2015)</b> is a tough watch, but it feels essential, not just for its vivid picture of a fascinating, deeply troubled young woman, but also for its wider significance: as a plea for people to stop being so horribly selfish, to stop seeing excess and illness as ‘rock and roll’ and drug abuse as a joke, and for the media to realise that if it wants to paint itself as a crusading Fifth Estate, then some basic humanity wouldn’t go amiss. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2015/08/amy-kurt-vonnegut-and-back-to-future.html">First-watch review.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YBZOtD6tnsU/XgIzlSGDkjI/AAAAAAAAIYU/CEDcUjCeWQAySR_9mKBBRqj8czJvd4qBgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/the-kid-with-a-bike-whysoblu.com-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YBZOtD6tnsU/XgIzlSGDkjI/AAAAAAAAIYU/CEDcUjCeWQAySR_9mKBBRqj8czJvd4qBgCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/the-kid-with-a-bike-whysoblu.com-1.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="1000" data-original-height="563" /></a><br /><br />
<b>8. The Kid with a Bike (Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, 2011)</b> has elements of fatalism without being pessimistic, tells a simple story that never looks for an easy way out, and eschews sentimentality while radiating a bold and uncompromising sense of humanity. It moved me very deeply. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2013/01/jeff-jail-and-judith-hearne-reviews-144.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<b>7. Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan, 2011)</b> – A breathtaking, one-of-a-kind character study about a high-school student (Anna Paquin) wrestling harrowingly with life's vicissitudes after causing a fatal accident. It's profound, rounded, literate, poetic and intimate, full of completely surprising and real characters and developments, and climaxing with a scene of remarkable catharsis in lieu of any easy answers. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2016/10/joseph-h-lewis-margaret-and-what-to.html">More here.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wkRcedhq3gA/XgIzuNiT-PI/AAAAAAAAIYc/4a42qpRtk8gXClEsFVSjEDqRkqqI7hYzACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/download%2B%25283%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wkRcedhq3gA/XgIzuNiT-PI/AAAAAAAAIYc/4a42qpRtk8gXClEsFVSjEDqRkqqI7hYzACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/download%2B%25283%2529.jpg" width="400" height="266" data-original-width="275" data-original-height="183" /></a><br /><br />
<b>6. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016)</b> – An intensely beautiful, compassionate film in three parts about a quiet, 'soft' African-American boy being battered by the inner-city experience as he tries to deal with his tortured sexual awakening. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2017/03/rauschenberg-moonlight-and-simon-peggs.html">First-watch review here.</a><br /><br />
<b>5. Pride (Matthew Warchus, 2014)</b> takes a premise that seems merely like a liberal wet dream and fashions an astonishingly erudite, funny and intensely moving movie, which works as an examination of our shared humanity, a startling recreation of the last stand of our country's working class, and a much-needed rallying cry at a time when the left has never seemed weaker or more irrelevant. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/pride-2014/">Full review here.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3Q-1xtYCziQ/XgIz0fJ9TrI/AAAAAAAAIYg/8FFKiZA4N6sky6fKFEJXWUtE7bMc8nFmQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/1470921404715002260.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3Q-1xtYCziQ/XgIz0fJ9TrI/AAAAAAAAIYg/8FFKiZA4N6sky6fKFEJXWUtE7bMc8nFmQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/1470921404715002260.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="780" data-original-height="438" /></a><br /><br />
<b>4. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015)</b> – An exhilarating feminist actioner that unleashes torrents of water on the risible '80s Mad Max films from an improbably great height. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/mad-max-fury-road/">More here.</a><br /><br />
<b>3. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2013)</b> – This sad, whimsical and purposefully baggy story of missed opportunities and shambling urban alienation is an extraordinarily special piece of work, and one which avoids cliché not because it thinks it’s clever to do so, but because this is how things <i>would</i> be, how the characters <i>would</i> behave. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/inside-llewyn-davis/">Full first-watch review here.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Q17wrV1F8hw/XgI0DeTdy4I/AAAAAAAAIYs/Jw9aR1ap6w42-zws-BbIgKt-Xb9HGpdNgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/BeastsoftheSourthernWild.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Q17wrV1F8hw/XgI0DeTdy4I/AAAAAAAAIYs/Jw9aR1ap6w42-zws-BbIgKt-Xb9HGpdNgCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/BeastsoftheSourthernWild.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="576" data-original-height="324" /></a><br /><br />
<b>2. Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin, 2012)</b> is remarkable in every way: stunning to look at, full of jaw-droppingly lyrical dialogue and blessed with a triumphant, eminently hummable Cajun soundtrack. Lit by a multitude of brilliant sequences that seem to come out of nowhere, but don't, and dominated by Wallis's heroics (including some excellent screaming), it packs an emotional punch like nothing else I've seen in years. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2013/03/clint-more-clint-and-back-to-southern.html">More here.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-K3jnJuEKMlE/XgI0KUuivmI/AAAAAAAAIY0/bwOA-nimxXMRYcAeug5XNfoPenm8a6mmwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/download%2B%25284%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-K3jnJuEKMlE/XgI0KUuivmI/AAAAAAAAIY0/bwOA-nimxXMRYcAeug5XNfoPenm8a6mmwCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/download%2B%25284%2529.jpg" width="400" height="191" data-original-width="325" data-original-height="155" /></a><br /><br />
<b>1. Winter's Bone (Debra Granik, 2011)</b> – Debra Granik's feminist masterwork is the key film of the decade so far: an unorthodox, spine-tingling thriller, a humanist fable, and a staggering study of a good person under almost intolerable pressure. In her breakout role, Jennifer Lawrence is Ree Dolly, a strong, selfless, smart-mouthed 17-year-old living with her vacant mother and two young siblings in Missouri's Ozark Mountains. Once it ran with bootleg moonshine, now this here's Meth Country, and if her crystal-cooking father doesn't turn up for his court hearing, they're going to lose the house, the woods and the whole family unit. So Ree sets out in search of him, facing threats, silence and regular beatings from pinch-faced people who share a lot of the same blood that runs in her veins, and down her face. There's brutality and violence to spare, but it's the humanity you remember. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/winters-bone/2/">Full review.</a><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Thanks for reading, and thanks in particular to those who've shared these pieces.Rick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com0London, UK51.5073509 -0.1277582999999822351.1912379 -0.77320529999998222 51.8234639 0.51768870000001777tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-84061331610707231342019-12-24T12:53:00.001+00:002019-12-24T14:04:52.936+00:00Review of 2019: Part 2 – Live<a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2019/12/Books2019.html">Part 1 was about books.</a> Part 2 is about events and tbh it never gets as many hits, as you can famously read a book that someone read last year, but you cannot attend a gig in the past.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NobWCY7XLm4/XgIJdMM5TvI/AAAAAAAAIWA/VetoKUdcE8EkQB737Pxe5UyXxm1gHHStQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/57096996_10157047981027530_2137915010620325888_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NobWCY7XLm4/XgIJdMM5TvI/AAAAAAAAIWA/VetoKUdcE8EkQB737Pxe5UyXxm1gHHStQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/57096996_10157047981027530_2137915010620325888_o.jpg" width="400" height="280" data-original-width="1000" data-original-height="700" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Gigs of the year:</b><br /><br />
When I wasn't reading, writing, working or being stabbed in the kidney by that surgeon I mentioned, I've mostly been at gigs. I've seen <b>Knopfler</b>, <b>Clapton</b>, <b>Mariah Carey</b>, <b>the Lake Poets</b>, <b>Sheku Kanneh-Mason</b>, <b>Michael Giacchino</b> and <b>three nights of film scores</b> at the Royal Albert Hall, old favourites <b>David Ford</b>, <b>June Tabor</b> (with Oyster Band), <b>Bjӧrk </b>and <b>Kate Rusby</b>, thrilled to <b>Topic Records' 80th Anniversary</b> show – which introduced me to Emily Portman and Lisa Knapp – and celebrated the long-awaited return of folk hero <b>Ruth Notman</b>, who's been busy in the interim training to become a nurse. And then there was that weird event where I went to an 'immersive screening' of Ghost World, and found myself watching more than an hour of ragtime jazz performed by director Terry Zwigoff and <b>mad sexist Robert Crumb</b>, punctuated by rants about political correctness. Yay!<br /><br />
But here are the 10 gigs that meant the most to me in 2019:<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OlD9yFcTrGI/XgH9OtE61wI/AAAAAAAAIT0/Y74Lfi0C6p4rnMlLmaKvXN-XVTi5rzWLACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/IMG_8436.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OlD9yFcTrGI/XgH9OtE61wI/AAAAAAAAIT0/Y74Lfi0C6p4rnMlLmaKvXN-XVTi5rzWLACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/IMG_8436.jpg" width="400" height="233" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="933" /></a><br /><br />
<b>10. The Milk Carton Kids (Barbican)</b> – I’ve got a bit of a thing about <i>Inside Llewyn Davis</i>, the wintry film in which the Coens brothers shrug off their arch, aloof smugness, and burrow into the psyche of their sullen anti-hero, a titular traditional singer wandering freezing Greenwich Village as the folk revival approaches. I can only play four songs on the guitar and three of them are from this film. So when I heard there was a spin-off concert film, <i>Another Day, Another Time</i>, <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/another-day-another-time-celebrating-the-music-of-inside-llewyn-davis/">I thought I better see it</a>. And that's how I discovered The Milk Carton Kids, and a lot more besides. The duo's deceptively complex songs at first seemed frozen in time and genre – almost a pastiche of early Simon and Garfunkel – but over time they've diversified and gone deeper, pain and fear bringing not weariness but grace. Their biggest show so far, at London's Barbican, was a fast-paced treat mixing frenetic flatpicking, heartbreaking close harmony and the best between-songs badinage since the Manics stopped saying awful things for attention.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lhY_qdW64i4/XgH79Kr6xXI/AAAAAAAAITo/k0jG89fV58YJbOoeUDgHcU1LooqvN_ZGgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/IMG_0637.PNG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lhY_qdW64i4/XgH79Kr6xXI/AAAAAAAAITo/k0jG89fV58YJbOoeUDgHcU1LooqvN_ZGgCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/IMG_0637.PNG" width="271" height="400" data-original-width="750" data-original-height="1105" /></a><br />
<i>Yes she was, and yes I did.</i><br /><br />
<b>9. Ariana Grande (The O2)</b> – I liked Ariana Grande, the gay-friendly feminist who became a hero to my home city of Manchester, but I can’t say I liked her music. Then a friend played me ‘Into You’, that intoxicating blast of dance-y horniness, followed by ‘thank u, next’, the sad, wise title-track of her fifth album, and I stopped being a stupid dick who doesn’t know anything. A lot of rubbish gets talked about middle-aged men who spend more than a hundred pounds to go and see Ariana Grande live by themselves, but to me I am a legend. While the O2 isn’t the best place to see any kind of show – it’s essentially a warehouse in which the atmosphere simply evaporates, and everything is just too far away – Grande is a great performer, and when she isn’t also dancing (which takes the edge off the majesty), she has an insane set of pipes. Some songs I loved already (‘Into You’ was spectacular, ‘Fake Smile’ exuberantly misanthropic), and others came to life in concert: the knockabout ‘Be Alright’, the desperate ‘Breathin’’, though the numbers utilising the walkway that looped towards our section of the arena both raised the spirits and underlined just how good it would be to see Grande in a smaller and less antiseptic space. As she ripped through ‘thank u, next’ for the climax, she and the dancers skipped around it, waving Pride flags.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-l7M220s1JKU/XgH9ZwPyeJI/AAAAAAAAIT4/GsvvdCa0V8EoLnGzo3oZ43StUrpeqic7QCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/047_D5A_3572c.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-l7M220s1JKU/XgH9ZwPyeJI/AAAAAAAAIT4/GsvvdCa0V8EoLnGzo3oZ43StUrpeqic7QCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/047_D5A_3572c.jpg" width="400" height="267" data-original-width="1200" data-original-height="800" /></a><br /><br />
<i>Lily! Martha! Certainly-one-of-the-Thompsons,-not-sure-which-one!</i><br /><br />
<b>8. Rufus and Martha Wainwright: A Not So Silent Night (Southbank Centre)</b> – The siblings in London together at Christmas for the first time in a decade. The older generation may no longer want to travel, but their own was out in force, including half-sister Lucy Wainwright Roche and their cousin (and personal favourite), the marvellously-monikered Lily Lanken. This all used to be about roots music and family, but Rufus is now the artistic brains behind these jamborees, and he’s made the whole thing so incredibly gay. It’s delightful. Among the guests were Dan Gillespie Sells, Neil Tennant and Sophie Ellis-Bextor, alongside various members of the inter-connected Thompson clan, Guy Garvey and Jenni Muldaur. The show was intended to celebrate the festive season but also the work of Kate McGarrigle, the matriarch who made her last public appearance at the previous London show in 2009. Being in a packed house watching Ellis-Bextor act her way through Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s ‘First Born’, a deep cut from their second record and a song that’s very personal to me, was a surreal experience – as was hearing a second live version of ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’ this year; that’s the signature song of my musical idol, Sandy Denny. Lucy Wainwright Roche’s vocal here was better than Olivia Chaney’s, but she didn’t have half of Fairport behind her. Chrissie Hynde’s contributions may have been tuneless, but the rest of the show was scintillating, especially Martha’s Janis Joplin-esque ‘Mary Had a Baby’, her duet with Lanken on Jackson Browne’s left-wing atheist carol, ‘Rebel Jesus’, and Rufus’s ‘O Holy Night’, sung a capella and in French. I went in as a Rufus agnostic, but left as a fan. My affection for Martha Wainwright, <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2017/02/review-martha-wainwright-and-ed.html">you can take as a given</a>. This was just about the perfect Christmas evening.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-im8kpgl0W2E/XgH98ahwbZI/AAAAAAAAIUA/saO_csvyzlEQNI4JjjYG-UHiV0ktgBzNgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/rhiannon%2BGiddens%2Blive.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-im8kpgl0W2E/XgH98ahwbZI/AAAAAAAAIUA/saO_csvyzlEQNI4JjjYG-UHiV0ktgBzNgCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/rhiannon%2BGiddens%2Blive.jpg" width="400" height="262" data-original-width="800" data-original-height="524" /></a><br /><br />
<b>7. Rhiannon Giddens (Southbank Centre)</b> – An extravagantly gifted performer, whose vocal texture, range, expression and timing is of the sort that most people can only dream about. This show saw her collaborating with Sicilian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, his self-deprecating patter and exceptional tambourine solos providing the perfect counterpoint to her spiky lectures on African-American experience and full-lunged outpourings of empathy and collective grief. The shade is balanced by the light. When you know what it’s about, ‘At the Purchaser’s Option’ is as gruelling as beautiful music can ever get, but her uproarious cover of Ethel Waters’ ‘Underneath Our Harlem Moon’, which reinstates the author’s original, unsanitised lyrics, is an uproarious, swinging showstopper, and the Celtic folk of ‘Molly Brannigan’ showcases the facility with a quickening vocal line <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RtT0obOS80">that made me fall in love with her in the first place</a>.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-iy7Y8SH2Ba0/XgH-KgngOKI/AAAAAAAAIUE/vouATZVBufU2QcvppB6GkeBkDUxCDhcvwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Dynamic-9bee8581-a5b1-5605-b287-ecc73551d8ba.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-iy7Y8SH2Ba0/XgH-KgngOKI/AAAAAAAAIUE/vouATZVBufU2QcvppB6GkeBkDUxCDhcvwCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/Dynamic-9bee8581-a5b1-5605-b287-ecc73551d8ba.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="900" /></a><br /><br />
<b>6. Johnny Marr (Southbank Centre)</b> – I grew up as a huge Smiths fan (thanks Dad), but it had never really occurred to me that I might go to see Johnny Marr live. Then I heard him on the Adam Buxton podcast, asked for his book for Christmas, and ended up buying a ticket to his Meltdown show on the night itself. An encore of ‘Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me’ and ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ will do me, though I was surprised how much I liked his solo stuff – especially the obscenely catchy ‘Easy Money’. I think this show gave me more simple pleasure than any other this year. And Marr himself is so easy to like, which isn’t something one can necessarily say about all the members of the Morrissey-Marr songwriting partnership.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-rnCHIkRhMyI/XgIF1kSFFtI/AAAAAAAAIUU/SQIVNHVH670-WyeFbLzD5RGl8xB9zPDBACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/D_qfjBMXYAAT6CN.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-rnCHIkRhMyI/XgIF1kSFFtI/AAAAAAAAIUU/SQIVNHVH670-WyeFbLzD5RGl8xB9zPDBACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/D_qfjBMXYAAT6CN.jpg" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="600" data-original-height="450" /></a><br /><br />
<b>5. 33 Revolutions Per Minute (JW3)</b> – This was such a magical night: an event inspired by Dorian Lynskey’s history of protest songs (<a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2019/12/Books2019.html">which I wrote about here</a>), featuring a gallery of gargantuan contemporary talents. Ayanna Witter-Johnson got the biggest ovation of the evening for her captivating ‘Redemption Song’ – accompanying herself on stand-up cello – but it was one of a string of highlights, from Kathryn Williams’ clear-throated cover of ‘American Tune’, to David Ford’s explosive takes on ‘John Walker’s Blues’ and the ‘Fixin’-to-Die Rag’, and a climactic, unexpected and thoroughly incongruous ‘Up the Junction’ from a very late Chris Difford. It was that kind of night. A few months later, I saw Williams hosting a <b>Daylight Music</b> show at Union Chapel, she and Ford doing a few numbers of their own, and spotlighting various protégés, including Phil Langran, whose ‘Time’s Dark Wing’ is simply one of the finest songs I’ve ever heard.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0ol9VnsOFPs/XgIGFSHYtZI/AAAAAAAAIUY/Fh5CbqNFjcIRXwV6NbggzIXmuZANS3uHwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/rah_57226919506.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0ol9VnsOFPs/XgIGFSHYtZI/AAAAAAAAIUY/Fh5CbqNFjcIRXwV6NbggzIXmuZANS3uHwCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/rah_57226919506.jpg" width="400" height="250" data-original-width="800" data-original-height="500" /></a><br /><br />
<b>4. Richard Thompson: 70th birthday party (Royal Albert Hall)</b> – A once-in-a-lifetime show, for those who incline towards folk, with virtually every existing luminary of the British scene coming to pay homage. It’s an embarrassment of riches, and an eclectic one, with guests typically doing one song of theirs and then one song of his. Surprises include Bob Mould’s chugging, punkish ‘Turning of the Tide’ (above), Thompson, his son Teddy and Maddy Prior duetting on a heightened ‘Grey Funnel Line’, and Loudon Wainwright’s ebullient ‘Swimming Song’, alongside more expected treats, like the birthday boy’s own ‘Beeswing’, delivered with a delicacy befitting its title. There’s also Kate Rusby returning to ‘Withered and Died’, half of Fairport Convention’s classic <i>Liege & Lief</i> line-up backing Olivia Chaney on ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’, and Harry Shearer alienating the half of the audience who clearly haven’t seen <i>Spinal Tap</i> with an in-character (and interminable), ‘She Puts the Bitch in Obituary’.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0iFhuPn3vZQ/XgIGOVE_qNI/AAAAAAAAIUg/DlOBanG6MUcIEGIIR7DRKkd4NZTMlFbJQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/8c1ad2e0-a547-11e9-9fbf-ad642f38afa8.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0iFhuPn3vZQ/XgIGOVE_qNI/AAAAAAAAIUg/DlOBanG6MUcIEGIIR7DRKkd4NZTMlFbJQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/8c1ad2e0-a547-11e9-9fbf-ad642f38afa8.jpg" width="400" height="267" data-original-width="800" data-original-height="533" /></a><br /><br />
<b>3. Bob Dylan; support: Neil Young, Laura Marling and Cat Power (Hyde Park)</b> – At a time when seeing Bob had begun to feel more like a duty than a treat, he came roaring back. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2019/07/bob-dylan-at-british-summer-time-hyde.html">Full review here.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sljIf1ddRcA/XgIHVOUgoCI/AAAAAAAAIU4/USZRQbLdLaM6gqh2X5guNGtSoZckJ_DOACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/IMG_8383.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sljIf1ddRcA/XgIHVOUgoCI/AAAAAAAAIU4/USZRQbLdLaM6gqh2X5guNGtSoZckJ_DOACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/IMG_8383.JPG" width="400" height="269" data-original-width="819" data-original-height="550" /></a><br /><br />
<b>2. Big Thief (The Roundhouse)</b> – In January, I saw <b>Adrianne Lenker</b> on-stage in a church (London’s Union Chapel), performing wistful acoustic folk ballads behind a thatch of fringe, murmuring awkwardly through the void in her teeth. Three months later, she’s had a buzzcut, got a replacement tooth and is just screaming, amid a maelstrom of noise in a beer-soaked Roundhouse. This has been a big year for Big Thief, the most exciting band on the planet, ending with <i>two</i> albums in most ‘best of’ lists, and this was their biggest show to date. They can do it all, <a href="https://twitter.com/rickburin/status/1131695068740542464?lang=en">and at the Roundhouse they did</a>: the hush and whimsy of ‘Spud Infinity’, the apocalyptic squall of ‘Not’ (the year’s best song?), the pure release of ‘Masterpiece’. No-one is writing more interesting material than Lenker’s tortured, introspective, pastoral alt-folk, nor delivering it with such exquisite abandon. The band, though, are not merely a vehicle for one woman’s genius, there’s a chemistry there: the fleet-fingered flat-picking of crooked-grinned Buck Meek, James Krivchenia’s lolloping, long-armed beats, Max Oleartchik... playing the bass (look, I don’t know much about music). I saw them again <b>at Bush Hall</b> in October, premiering new record <i>Two Hands</i>, and it was another experience entirely: every bit as vital, the band still figuring out the songs, groping towards greatness and frequently finding it. Next year I’m going to follow them on tour.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WTFrcRi6r8Y/XgIGpKdG1yI/AAAAAAAAIUs/qIZdTm3oVbYaUPNBEDmSxpkblMpab6GKgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Robyn-Alexandra-Palace-London-www.patrickgunning.com-6256.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WTFrcRi6r8Y/XgIGpKdG1yI/AAAAAAAAIUs/qIZdTm3oVbYaUPNBEDmSxpkblMpab6GKgCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/Robyn-Alexandra-Palace-London-www.patrickgunning.com-6256.jpg" width="400" height="267" data-original-width="1500" data-original-height="1001" /></a><br /><br />
<b>1. Robyn (Alexandra Palace)</b> – Total catharsis, Robyn-style: the sexiest, saddest songs in the pop canon, battered across with the ultimate in quicksilver charisma, clad in white knee-length boots. I’ve never seen a performer with greater stage presence, a firmer grasp of a show’s necessary theatricality, or better dance moves. During ‘Dancing on My Own’, a celebration of jealous, heartbroken melancholia that represents some kind of peak, 10,000 voices join hers, and Robyn bursts into tears. Then it’s a wall of noise – an outpouring of love, and gratitude, for the returning queen of chilly Swedish electro-pop, doing her first UK shows in nine years – that goes on and on and on.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>Theatre of the year...</b><br /><br />
... is probably a stretch, as I only saw 10 plays, and there were definitely more than 10 plays out there. Because I'm extremely clever, I didn't end up seeing anything I didn't broadly enjoy, though my tolerance for the annoying affectations of musical theatre (as opposed to the most naturalistic and intimate musical film) seems to be shrinking. While <b>Come From Away (Phoenix Theatre)</b> built to a rather lovely climax, fashioning something largely feelgood out of 9/11, <b>Dear Evan Hansen (Noel Coward Theatre)</b> dealt with its own subject – teen suicide – in a less than humane, intelligent way, though it had some fine moments. <b>Hansard (National Theatre)</b> broke no new ground, and largely recycled its audience's own liberal prejudices, though it was highly entertaining and extremely well-acted by Alex Jennings and Lindsay Duncan. <b>The Lehman Trilogy (Piccadilly Theatre)</b> went the other way, struggling to get ahold of its themes across three theatrically inventive but rather exhausting hours.<br /><br />
These were my favourites:<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WQp7GGsZHH4/XgIHo0L6wtI/AAAAAAAAIVA/5BJH-jUikNYLISNLww4XDPmu8OmpnqDzACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/anna_national_theatre_c_johan_persson_1-sfw.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WQp7GGsZHH4/XgIHo0L6wtI/AAAAAAAAIVA/5BJH-jUikNYLISNLww4XDPmu8OmpnqDzACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/anna_national_theatre_c_johan_persson_1-sfw.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="768" data-original-height="432" /></a><br /><br />
<b>6. Anna (National Theatre)</b> – Ella Hickson, <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2018/12/review-of-2017-part-2-live.html">who wrote the best play of 2018</a>, returned with this gimmicky thriller, which was about itself and not much else. The audience was complicit in the surveillance state of East Germany, strapping on headphones and hearing only what the heroine heard, as she tried to survive in an atmosphere of spiralling paranoia (and, if we're being very literal about it, in a soundproof box with the rest of the cast). After <i>The Writer</i>, it felt like a slight comedown, but it was neatly conceived and made the most of its quirk, with some neat twists and a couple of great jump scares.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nJwXoG2eI84/XgIHvIcRAFI/AAAAAAAAIVE/mmf9KlG7csYptCeecCiCstYsvlq7f9OawCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Andrew-Scott-as-Garry-Essendine-and-Enzo-Cilenti-as-Joe-Lyppiatt-in-Present-Laughter.-Photo-Manuel-Harlan1-700x455.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nJwXoG2eI84/XgIHvIcRAFI/AAAAAAAAIVE/mmf9KlG7csYptCeecCiCstYsvlq7f9OawCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/Andrew-Scott-as-Garry-Essendine-and-Enzo-Cilenti-as-Joe-Lyppiatt-in-Present-Laughter.-Photo-Manuel-Harlan1-700x455.jpg" width="400" height="260" data-original-width="700" data-original-height="455" /></a><br /><br />
<b>5. Present Laughter (The Old Vic)</b> – Simply Noel Coward done well, with Andrew Scott having the time of his life as a vain, selfish, philandering actor who's making his entourage's life hell in '30s London. It wasn't deep, but it was riotously funny.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Wttv45OLH_M/XgIH7mxv8_I/AAAAAAAAIVI/4PucvPwHynIU_77N0PDRQvkfZfLR987fwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/OVamsP2019JP_15135.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Wttv45OLH_M/XgIH7mxv8_I/AAAAAAAAIVI/4PucvPwHynIU_77N0PDRQvkfZfLR987fwCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/OVamsP2019JP_15135.jpg" width="400" height="277" data-original-width="917" data-original-height="636" /></a><br /><br />
<b>4. All My Sons (The Old Vic)</b> – Classy adaptation of the early Arthur Miller play, with – and please excuse the banality – one of the handsomest sets I've ever seen: a quietly idyllic back garden in a small American town. Jenna Coleman couldn't hold her own among a heavy-hitting cast, and Bill Pullman couldn't project to the cheap seats, but he, Sally Field and Colin Morgan captured Miller's anger and anguish – tragedy on an intimate but epic scale.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JWoS9OmzRsg/XgIIFeWIueI/AAAAAAAAIVQ/Tl24M0PCRKEQllzaMavbYx46z17ULlLqACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Matthew-Broderick-and-Elizabeth-McGovern-in-Starry-Messenger-by-Marc-Brenner.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JWoS9OmzRsg/XgIIFeWIueI/AAAAAAAAIVQ/Tl24M0PCRKEQllzaMavbYx46z17ULlLqACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/Matthew-Broderick-and-Elizabeth-McGovern-in-Starry-Messenger-by-Marc-Brenner.jpg" width="400" height="267" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1068" /></a><br /><br />
<b>3. The Starry Messenger (Wyndham's Theatre)</b> – Space, adultery and adult education: this was none-more-Lonergan, with an exceptional performance from Matthew Broderick as a frustrated science lecturer trapped by the quietly festering American Dream. How it can be that, and make me laugh as hard as it did, is some achievement. Elizabeth McGovern, also billed above the title, had little to do until the final act.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uug_pHvAws4/XgIIUnLPSII/AAAAAAAAIVY/g0DxIIlBp1ALJHZAtOOuPmbL2CQn3efPgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/69108706_10155604519682185_602750268597075968_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uug_pHvAws4/XgIIUnLPSII/AAAAAAAAIVY/g0DxIIlBp1ALJHZAtOOuPmbL2CQn3efPgCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/69108706_10155604519682185_602750268597075968_o.jpg" width="400" height="280" data-original-width="1000" data-original-height="700" /></a><br /><br />
<b>2. A Very Expensive Poison (The Old Vic)</b> – Lucy Prebble returned with this freewheeling, meta-textual romp through the Litvinenko tragedy – where, as with Dylan's 'Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll', perhaps the greatest tragedy happened after the killing. The material positively swaggers, throwing everything into the mix, but the right everything, at the right time, and no-one I can think of, in any medium, writes better off-kilter one-liners. Reece Shearsmith is perfect as a supercilious, bombastic and seductive Putin, at one point hanging out of a box to tell everyone to go home, as the story is clearly over.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xm8tPAH-UvU/XgIIb5q3DPI/AAAAAAAAIVg/NsQH3wfxkTUt1ukbbTWWVKOLDM_aNWoiACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/prod_1556906376860_ROS1.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xm8tPAH-UvU/XgIIb5q3DPI/AAAAAAAAIVg/NsQH3wfxkTUt1ukbbTWWVKOLDM_aNWoiACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/prod_1556906376860_ROS1.jpg" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a><br /><br />
<b>1. Rosmersholm (Duke of York's Theatre)</b> – Ibsen at his bleakest and most pointed, as influential former cleric Rosmer (Tom Burke) strives to understand his relationship with free-spirited Rebecca (Hayley Atwell) – and reconcile his friendship with smooth-talking hatemonger Kroll (Giles Terera) – as an election approaches, and the vultures of the press circle. This electrifying, overpowering adaptation saw writer Duncan Macmillan tease out the parallels with our current national binfire, played out by a note-perfect cast amid the light shafts and dust motes of an ancestral home that boxes in its characters as vividly as their political and personal dilemmas.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>Other live stuff/exhibitions:</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-76BXm4g9iak/XgIIkJj8_4I/AAAAAAAAIVo/mEks1kvdUJgWOvdv4pzhlClTo6zvxlIgwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/TELEMMGLPICT000215380720_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqGnvE-VNXSbhg1qqFSd7eP37dZ9IK7EdZU2eI6F-bB34.webp" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-76BXm4g9iak/XgIIkJj8_4I/AAAAAAAAIVo/mEks1kvdUJgWOvdv4pzhlClTo6zvxlIgwCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/TELEMMGLPICT000215380720_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqGnvE-VNXSbhg1qqFSd7eP37dZ9IK7EdZU2eI6F-bB34.webp" width="400" height="250" data-original-width="480" data-original-height="300" /></a><br /><br />
My favourite comedy set of the year was <b>Stewart Lee</b>'s new show: <i>Snowflake/Tornado</i>, a succession of inspired, airtight routines about liberalism, Alan Bennett, Netflix, <i>Fleabag</i>, anti-PC campaigners and 'saying the unsayable', the last of which consists of him gurning, spitting, sputtering and striving to make noises for literally ten minutes. This show might be the best thing he's ever done. It's certainly the hardest I've laughed this year. He is simply on a different level to almost any other political comic working today, and probably the second funniest person in his house.<br /><br />
<b>James Acaster</b>'s <i>Cold Lasagna Hate Myself 1999</i> was often brilliant, but genuinely required a better working knowledge of shit TV than I've got to hand. It was also great to see <b>Bassem Youssef</b> doing his first English-language show, and to watch Daniel Kitson confounding a good portion of his audience by pretending for quite some time that his set would consist of him reading out a cabinet's worth of index cards listing his possessions. It didn't. Discovery of the year was <b>Sarah Keyworth</b>, who somehow emerged triumphant from a showcase at Union Chapel also featuring Sara Pascoe, Rose Matafeo and Phil Wang (and Arthur Smith).<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ql6baSjKEpw/XgIIsRn82AI/AAAAAAAAIVw/EgbTtUGTY84Um8D4Sw6KNqMWdHlNwSnnACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/rah_57264528956.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ql6baSjKEpw/XgIIsRn82AI/AAAAAAAAIVw/EgbTtUGTY84Um8D4Sw6KNqMWdHlNwSnnACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/rah_57264528956.jpg" width="400" height="250" data-original-width="800" data-original-height="500" /></a><br /><br />
And at work I got to be involved with <a href="https://www.royalalberthall.com/about-the-hall/news/2019/october/photos-the-biggest-letters-live-ever-delivers-at-the-royal-albert-hall-with-stellar-line-up-and-surprising-material/"><b>Letters Live</b></a>, one of the best nights of the year (even when Rory Stewart resigned from the Tory Party on stage and I had to work until 1am). Louise Brealey, pictured, – who can pack so much emotion, so subtly, into any material – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and (much to my surprise) Alan Carr were the stand-out stars.<br /><br />
Across the road, Dr Matthew Sweet, Pamela Hutchinson and David Benedict probed the Warner Bros canon in a lovely <b>Proms Plus</b> talk, and at the BFI <b>Malcolm McDowell</b> provided some insights and lols that turned out to be rather well-rehearsed when I decided to venture onto YouTube in search of further #content.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PRXsoJw73mU/XgII0-6W3YI/AAAAAAAAIV0/cqHI-2a1dckwPINKz42ekgWMvXRacnpowCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/1d868ad2-a235-11e9-a282-2df48f366f7d.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PRXsoJw73mU/XgII0-6W3YI/AAAAAAAAIV0/cqHI-2a1dckwPINKz42ekgWMvXRacnpowCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/1d868ad2-a235-11e9-a282-2df48f366f7d.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="900" /></a><br /><br />
My favourite exhibition of the year was also the smallest, <strike>and it was, of course, your penis,</strike> a tiny addendum to the Design Museum's gargantuan (and impressive) <b>Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition</b>, which collected some of his stunning news photography for Look Magazine. Visual art-themed jaunts spotlighted work by <b>Matisse</b>, <b>William Blake</b>, <b>Abram Games</b> and <b>Eva Hesse</b> – while the IWM's oddly disjointed <i>Making a New World</i> delved into WWI from a few odd and interesting angles – but <b>Olafur Eliasson: In real life</b> at the Tate Modern (above) was so great because it was so unlike anything else I'd been to, with a rainbow in one room and a world of coloured fog in another.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Thanks for reading. I'll chat about films a bit in the next (and final) part.Rick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com0London, UK51.5073509 -0.1277582999999822351.1912379 -0.77320529999998222 51.8234639 0.51768870000001777tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-66706412201210547512019-12-23T10:29:00.003+00:002022-06-01T15:41:10.890+01:00Review of 2019: Part 1 – Books<b></b>This year I spent two months in bed, which I would recommend to anyone who wants to catch up on their reading. All you need is a dysfunctional kidney, a sympathetic boss and an erratic surgeon. Here's everything I've read this year:<br /><br />
<b>FICTION<br /><br />
Adults</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-A0MHStP1Yj4/Xfuo-I8I01I/AAAAAAAAIPw/XQFnfcXD2Lwi3Igr38Ei_U-2eMCuF0yugCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/fame%2Bspur.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-A0MHStP1Yj4/Xfuo-I8I01I/AAAAAAAAIPw/XQFnfcXD2Lwi3Igr38Ei_U-2eMCuF0yugCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/fame%2Bspur.jpg" width="261" height="400" data-original-width="326" data-original-height="499" /></a><br /><br />
First, the good stuff. My favourite novel of 2019 was Howard Spring's <b>Fame Is the Spur</b> (1940), a slow-burning saga about the rise to prominence of opportunistic, working-class J. Hamer Shawcross, whose soaring oratory and ability to weaponise his past catapult him to fame, as the fledgling Labour Party begins to crystallise. Beginning with a dying man’s memories of Peterloo, it follows Shawcross from an Ancoats slum to the House of Lords, and the labour movement from its birthing pains to the betrayal of 1930, incorporating – often realistically, though sometimes rather conveniently – the Welsh coalfields, Popular Front communism and the Suffragettes. It has shortcomings – its supporting characters, especially the female ones, aren’t nearly as interesting as its protagonist, and both its focus and its pacing can be confounding – but it’s also one of the most immersing and affecting books I’ve read in a long time, with spectacular set-pieces, a rich strain of irony and an insistent emotional pull that simply overwhelms you in its final hundred pages. There’s hurt and anger in Spring’s story of a man selling out his past, but there’s also realism, wisdom and a rich humanity, with none of the one-dimensional didacticism that can ruin political fiction, whichever side it falls.<br /><br />
It's a book that endures because of its characters, but also because of its insights. Though the prose can border on the Victorian (its modernist flashes forward aside), its observations still feel incredibly contemporary. Perhaps that’s because whatever tags are applied – from Blairism through Brexit – the fights going on at the centre of British politics are always the same: self-interest versus society, and – particularly on the left – idealism versus pragmatism. For Shawcross, that’s a question not of principle but of expediency, and ironically he is a better private man at the end of the book – when he has fundamentally betrayed his former allies – than he is at the start, as he has discovered an honesty and empathy sorely lacking in his sabre-rattling days. But like the sabre snatched from the ground at Peterloo, he was once a symbol, and people need symbols.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kN1ACqx4MCM/XfupKA0tkFI/AAAAAAAAIP0/UDwH-7wh3-A7ROzaLB76MqyJYMAKmZufQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/51Nz1OivRcL._SX324_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kN1ACqx4MCM/XfupKA0tkFI/AAAAAAAAIP0/UDwH-7wh3-A7ROzaLB76MqyJYMAKmZufQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/51Nz1OivRcL._SX324_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="261" height="400" data-original-width="326" data-original-height="499" /></a><br /><br />
Also right up there was <b>The Beginning of Spring</b> (1988) by Penelope Fitzgerald, a masterpiece of a miniature, the author creating a whole, vividly atmospheric world with extraordinary economy. That world is the Russia of 1913, where printer and father-of-three Frank Reid – English, ordinary, but surprising, at times almost irrational – is attempting to carry on as normal after the disappearance of his wife. Around him cavort a poetic accountant, a precocious daughter and a drunken bear, but none of these characters are simple, or quite what they appear (or would be in other hands), and all are drawn with empathy and imagination.<br /><br />
Fitzgerald’s prose is so unadorned and clear, and through it you glimpse many layers of meaning: hints and illusions, shards of wisdom, observations that skewer your preconceptions. She is a writer who understands the balance of human interactions, and their often unknowable nature. Her solution isn’t to hypothesise but to observe. A couple of times she breaks off into almost self-contained passages – the acutely painful farce of the bear’s torture; branches by a dacha sagging under rain – and the effects are hypnotic: enrapturing in themselves, richly textured but hinting at themes that nudge through the story like the first grass of spring. This book is many things: a character study (or several), a key to a culture, a door to another realm. And while not a comic novel, it is funnier than most comic novels: droll and dry, giving its characters a litany of obstacles but tongues just loose enough to speak plainly. That was my second Fitzgerald of the year, and even better than <b>Human Voices</b> (1980), a delicately detached, effortlessly evocative story of the BBC during the Blitz, written with a precision that almost saunters, and rendering wartime London in crisp, uncompromising detail. Thanks to <a href="https://twitter.com/i_am_mill_i_am">Andy Miller</a> for his proselytising on Fitzgerald's behalf, which turned me onto her work. If you love books, listen to <a href="https://www.backlisted.fm/">his podcast</a>.<br /><br />
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Nothing made me laugh more than <b>The Adulterants</b> (2018) by Joe Dunthorne, a slim, unspeakably wonderful addition to one of my favourite genres: books in which a middle-class white man fucks everything up. I don't laugh out loud very often when reading; I must have laughed out loud 30 times reading this. It’s also deeply touching, in a disarmingly direct way, and realises that our guilt and our cruelty are as sad as the things that sting us from outside, though no sadder. You could argue that the riot and the drink-sodden flirtation with homosexuality tip the story too far towards farce, but if you changed those bits you might lose something, and I wouldn’t want to risk it. <b>Nine Stories</b> by J. D. Salinger (1953) comprises nine deceptively immense achievements, if (again) you don’t mind your characters mostly white and comfortably-off. It’s Salinger, so it’s quasi-real and desperately sad and sometimes hilarious, angling on precocious kids, self-delusion and the beginnings of mysticism. I’d have a different favourite every day, but ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’, ‘The Laughing Man’ and ‘Esme’ say something about Salinger’s protracted innocence, ‘De Daumier Smith’s Blue Period’ is quite insanely funny – and the closest thing here to <i>A Catcher in the Rye</i> – while the final paragraph of ‘Teddy’ hits you like a swimming pool. Stories one, two and five are part of Salinger’s ongoing, fragmented portrait of the Glass family.<br /><br />
Emeric Pressburger wrote many of the finest films of the '40s and, it turns out, one of the best novels of the '60s: <b>The Glass Pearls</b> (1966). It’s somewhat reminiscent of <i>Peeping Tom</i>, his regular collaborator Michael Powell’s 1960 movie, dealing with a quiet, haunted German psychopath engaging in tentative, sexless romance in London, while trying to stay ahead of the law. His protagonist, though, isn’t a serial killer wielding a murderous tripod, but a Nazi war criminal, suspectible to flights of hypnotic anxiety and ornamented deceit, all cleverly tied by Pressburger to the character’s chilling wartime experiments. At one point he is hired by the Royal Albert Hall to tune their organ, which puts some of my mistakes at the Iconic London Venue into perspective. The book is dark and unsettling – the nature of narrative forcing us to be complicit in Braun’s neuroses, excuses and evasion of justice – but, like so much of the writer’s work, also deft, witty, intelligent and entertaining. The final scene is truly jawdropping and heartbreaking, Pressburger bringing the weight of history to bear, after holding it at bay for so long. How critics could regard the author’s feelings towards Braun as ambivalent following that is truly mystifying.<br /><br />
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I loved Lissa Evans' <b>Old Baggage</b> (2018), one of the highlights of my two months in bed: a wonderful, transportative book about former Suffragettes on divergent paths in the late ‘20s. It’s full of remarkably rich characterisation, with a story that’s immersive, moving and unflinching. It's a sequel to <b>Crooked Heart</b> (2014), which is only marginally less wonderful: a great story from a great storyteller, whose speciality is unexpected human connections – and the ones that seem so obvious and yet miss. Both books pulse with sly humour and a quiet, offbeat humanity that really got through to me.<br /><br />
<b>If Beale Street Could Talk</b> (1974) by James Baldwin is a painful, beautiful book narrated by pregnant 19-year-old Tish, whose boyfriend Fonny is in jail, charged with rape. In Baldwin’s economical later style – still suffused with the anger that never left him – she both recalls the development of their relationship and recounts the family’s faltering efforts to get justice in a deeply racist America. The book takes a while to build, and there’s the odd pretentious line, but its characters, its world and its ideas are vividly sketched, and its relationships are suffused with a deep love that endures beyond the reading. <b>Train Dreams</b> (2002), meanwhile continued my love affair with Denis Johnson. It's a brutal book: unsettling, haunting and horrifying, but also lyrical, its life of labour and sadness told Johnson-style, with that unorthodox, roaming mind, and that gift for imagery, jarring juxtaposition and the right word.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xNVn_jYV2YA/XfurG26_H4I/AAAAAAAAIRI/b3CE7Nx5ciAuS-mzk-e9m2m27wKIcugGQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/a-perfect-spy-6.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xNVn_jYV2YA/XfurG26_H4I/AAAAAAAAIRI/b3CE7Nx5ciAuS-mzk-e9m2m27wKIcugGQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/a-perfect-spy-6.jpg" width="261" height="400" data-original-width="353" data-original-height="542" /></a><br /><br />
After that, we're into 'flawed but fantastic' territory, led by John Le Carré's <b>A Perfect Spy</b> (1986), which Philip Roth once called "the best English novel since the war", having sadly died before he could read my novel, or apparently <i>Lucky Jim</i>. It's a book that promises a manhunt but delivers something else entirely: a deep, densely literate, richly autobiographical exploration of its cipherous anti-hero, fugitive spy Magnus Pym, a man caught between two masters, in the long, erratic shadow of his conman father. Now and then it drags its feet, so far into Pym’s mind – and childhood – that it loses sight of what will move its audience, but more often than that it’s formidable: a swaggeringly assured study of a man with so many selves he has ceased to exist, told with the stylistic affectations that mirror his shapeshifting, amidst a gallery of brilliantly-etched supporting characters – each sympathetic when telling the story on their terms. Le Carré’s ability to switch from introspection to action is startling, and he has a turn of phrase that can take the breath away.<br /><br />
<b>As I Lay Dying</b> (1930) by William Faulkner is hard work in places – with almost impenetrable passages born of its experimental elements and rooted Southern vernacular – but also gripping, original and wonderfully strange; full of sound, fury, and the most outrageous feats of language. But my mother is a fish. Also oscillating between the sublime and the not-quite is W. Somerset Maugham's <b>Cakes and Ale</b> (1930). It starts and ends superbly – the final 20 pages are emotionally overwhelming – and the portrait of free-spirited, nonconformist adulteress Rosie Driffield is vibrant and fascinating, though the middle of the book isn’t as specific or focused as it might be, with too many asides, half-drawn faces and exuberant character assassinations that seem to have more to do with its author than its story, and frankly go on a bit. The best line in the book (“She seemed to offer herself to the assault of love”) is followed, with a crushing inevitability, by some very 1930 racism, though Maugham’s mordant wit is still a joy in 2019, particularly in the opening pages, where he slices through his alter ego’s contemporaries, before getting started on Americans.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-T-19vAOQgcI/XfurT-MerYI/AAAAAAAAIRM/JdBUKxJkyGIS_hL6C1UXZBO1fBU8YLK8ACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/51oGwP-ec5L._SX324_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-T-19vAOQgcI/XfurT-MerYI/AAAAAAAAIRM/JdBUKxJkyGIS_hL6C1UXZBO1fBU8YLK8ACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/51oGwP-ec5L._SX324_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="261" height="400" data-original-width="326" data-original-height="499" /></a><br /><br />
Jonathan Coe's <b>What a Carve Up!</b> (1995) also offers us a woman to idealise, but on a fleapit screen, or freezeframed from a VHS in a festering bedsit, as his hero regresses to adolescent arousal in the face of life's utter horror. This satirical novel manages to feel both freewheeling and inexorable, Coe's simple convictions delivered through a meticulously-constructed story lit by flights of bizarre comic fancy. Its protagonist is novelist Michael Owen, a man transparently and unapologetically obsessed with <i>What a Carve Up!</i>, the Carry On-ish ‘60s horror-comedy that provided his entry to the world of mysterious adult sexuality (and voyeurism, and thwarted desire). Meanwhile, his journalistic investigations into the history of the aristocratic Winshaw clan finds a family carving up both Britain’s nationalised industries in the heyday of Thatcherism – and a succession of arms deals with the Iraqis. It is, frequently, an astonishingly assured book, full of meta-textual hi-jinks, comic set-pieces and broiling anger, though its ambitious meshing of cartoonish villainy and confrontational sincerity doesn’t always come off. While it takes an admirable sense of ambition to segue from the heartbreaking sequences in an NHS hospital to a warped recreation of an Old Dark House comedy, that doesn’t mean the juxtaposition quite works. Similarly, comic sequences about an incomprehensible interviewee on a current affairs programme, or the contrast between a HELLO! profile and the more bitter reality, feel broader than a book like this should be. At its best, though, it’s remarkable, with a specificity in both its mode of comedy and the subjects it has in its sights. Perhaps there are coincidences here and there, with characters reappearing in one another’s lives more than is likely, but – as with the one-dimensional nature of the villains – it seems unlikely that’s accidental: more that the Winshaws, and people like them, control everything, and we are but their playthings.<br /><br />
In comparison Syaka Murata's satirical <b>Convenience Store Woman</b> (2016) was trim and fast-moving, the perfect antidote to the book I read before it (<i>Origins of Totalitarianism</i>, more of which later). It's a fresh, deadpan novel about a sociopathic 36-year-old woman who can’t relate to anyone else, and lives only for her job in a convenience store. In its subversive portrait of society’s fear of nonconformity, and its adroit observations about the search for meaning, it has more to say than a dozen heavier books, though the last 30 pages are quite muddled, and can’t live up to what precedes them.<br /><br />
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I'm rationing my Vonnegut these days, after <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2015/12/review-of-2015-part-3-books-and-tiny.html">the splurge of 2014</a>, as there's not much left. <b>Welcome to the Monkey House</b> (1968) collects 25 stories written between 1950 and 1968, many dealing with his favoured themes of consumerism, conformity, community, machines, space exploration and loneliness. The title tale is very hard to take − I either simply don't understand it, or it's extremely misogynistic − and a handful of others miss the mark ('Adam', 'The Foster Portfolio', 'New Dictionary') or interrogate issues that seem irrelevant now, but at their best, these small works are as good as anything he ever wrote. And read in one lengthy slurp, <i>Welcome to the Monkey House</i> accentuates the worldview that underpinned his surface obsessions. "Sometimes − there's God − so quickly," Tennessee Williams once wrote, and so there is in the writing of this arch humanist, who finds tenderness at the most unexpected times, and from the most unexpected places. He finds incredible deadpan jokes there too, and wellsprings of undeserved courtesy. There's little I've read this year that I've enjoyed as much as the one-two of 'D. P.' − in which an illegitimate, mixed-race German boy mistakes an American soldier for his father − and 'Report on the Barnhouse Effect', written from the perspective of a college student whose mentor has taken to blowing up armouries with his mind. There's no other writer I enjoy, or relate to, or draw upon nearly as much. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2952678729?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">A bit more here.</a><br /><br />
I also read <b>Bluebeard</b> (1987), which is about as pure Vonnegut as you can get, melancholy flowing beneath its unfailingly cheery, relentlessly civil surface, as he ruminates on love, war, art, loneliness, misogyny, immigration, survivor's syndrome and mental illness. His vehicle is the autobiography of an almost talentless abstract expressionist, Rabo Karabekian, who loses an eye, the love of his children and almost all of his life's work (rendered in the unintentionally self-destroying Sateen Dura-Luxe, which after a few years simply falls off the canvas), but not his sense of wonder at this thing, whatever it is. Vonnegut's approach here may no longer be novel, and <i>Bluebeard</i> might lack the shimmering originality of his greatest work, but no-one else on Earth could have written it, and at this point he's like an old, dear and brilliant friend.<br /><br />
<b>Fleishman Is in Trouble</b> by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (2019) takes a very certain type of macho, self-pitying American novel – in which the women are psychos or ciphers or sex objects – and, with a slow-rising fury, begins to interrogate it. The twist, if indeed it is a twist, feels slightly signposted and mechanical, but the subsequent sequence is so beautifully written and compassionate and mordantly funny that it acquires a momentum which makes it real. It’s a book about the break-up of a marriage, almost two, theoretically three, and as such it’s bleak and difficult and – in Akner’s hands – intense; frighteningly unflinching. She probes and digs and mostly (though not always) transcends a superficial, self-involved NY world that can otherwise be a turn-off. And she’s funny, very funny. Laugh-out-loud funny in a way that writers of serious, introspective books about big, moody characters struggle to be: one-liners, barbs, moments of absurdism and almost unreadable cringe comedy. I didn’t exactly enjoy it – it’s hard to enjoy something so sad and weary – and now and then Anker’s postulations are vague or tip over into the merely pretentious, but it’s such a valuable book: an omniscient feminist counter-argument which runs on a motor of anger to places that those hulking novels of self-righteous machismo simply don’t, or perhaps can’t.<br /><br />
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I read <b>The Princess Bride</b> (1973) as William Goldman intended: recovering from illness. His über-meta story of high adventure and true love is a leeeettle long-winded now and then, but mostly a joy – especially when vengeance-bent Spanish swordsman Inigo Montoya is involved. My favourite joke is probably in the intro when Goldman is thinking about how clever he’s been, picks up a ringing phone and just says “clever” down it. The best scene is that wonderful duel atop the Cliffs of Insanity. <b>When We Were Orphans</b> (2000) by Kazuo Ishiguro is bewitching and deeply poignant, though its purposefully strange diversion – meant, I presume, to satirise imperial myopia and the limits of detective fiction in comprehending the true horrors of the world – somewhat overbalances the book. If <i>When We Were Orphans</i> ended with those absurd, surreal and undeniably memorable sequences, and that was therefore its point, that might make sense, but we then get a very real, human coda. I’m struck by the incomparable way Ishiguro can craft a character through both small details and what he doesn’t say in his first-person narration, and this story about memory and loss is hugely affecting, I just wonder if its most obviously arresting (and ultimately most enduring) sequences are also its least effective.<br /><br />
Italo Calvino's <b>If on a winter's night a traveller</b> (1979) is dizzying postmodernism about you, the reader, starting <i>If on a winter’s night a traveller</i> only to find it unfinished, along with each subsequent story you begin. Between the diverse selection of openings, each interrupted at the exact point you’ve become hooked, is the continuing, surreal second-person tale of you, Ludmilla – the enigmatic ‘Other Reader’ – a hoaxer, a police state and at least one cult. It’s very clever, and also very convinced of its own cleverness, which along with its dense philosophising can become a little taxing, but it’s one of a kind, with an ingenious shifting of genres and moods, an abundance of striking passages and some fascinating ideas. Tag yourself: I’m the troubled writer paralysed by ambition.<br /><br />
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Now we're dealing with the mediocre or the maddening, led by Don LeLillo's mammoth <b>Underworld</b> (1997), which is the latter. Baseball, nuclear waste, painted planes and Lenny Bruce – DeLillo’s sprawling novel starts with the ‘Shot heard round the world’, leaps forward to the ‘90s, then travels back inexorably, inevitably to 1951. At times it feels almost like a pastiche of a Big Important Novel: unstintingly serious, laughably verbose, the word ‘cunt’ sprayed earthily, liberally around in the otherwise magniloquent prose. It was on page 806 that the book really, profoundly moved me, and I realised that it hadn’t done so before, and that this – along with anything resembling brevity – had been what was missing. It begins like mid-period Ellroy, tantalises and wows, sags badly in the mid-section then comes roaring back once Lenny Bruce starts riffing on Armageddon. You can’t deny the scale of DeLillo’s ambition: the scope and the niche, the level of the intellect and the beauty of the phrasing, the size of the ideas he’s wrestling with, and frequently subduing. You just wish he’d drop the genius act and get on with it. If he can close a chapter with a sentence more telling than other authors’ entire oeuvres, you wonder if another 16-page set-piece oscillating between the sloppy heat of adultery and the specifics of waste management might possibly be overkill. This taught me a lot about how to write, and a little about how not to, with some of the most dazzling passages I’ve ever read, and several of the most tedious.<br /><br />
Also weighing in at uncomfortably-heavy-for-my-arthritic-left-hand was <b>London Belongs to Me</b> by Norman Collins (1945), a brilliantly-titled close-up epic which follows the occupants of a single house in SE11 from Christmas 1938 to Christmas 1940, and is hugely readable at first, but goes on too long and doesn’t amount to enough. It’s ultimately a soap opera with a bit of edge and irony, and a faint philosophical bent. The London flavour is there, but it should be stronger: Penelope Fitzgerald evoked the city at war far more powerfully in the brief, brilliant <i>Human Voices</i> (above).<br /><br />
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George MacDonald Fraser's <b>Flashman</b> (1969) is a mixed bag: a rake's progress in colonial Britain, as a minor character from Tom Brown's Schooldays takes centre stage: shagging, lying and riding to ill-gotten glory against the fabulously convincing backdrop of the First Afghan War. The character needs to be <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3079604582?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">more of a scoundrel and less of a sex criminal</a>. Speaking of anti-heroes who are simply dislikeable, <b>The Damned Utd</b> (2006) gives us David Peace's take on Brian Clough. The book is initially interesting but ultimately deadening. Peace has just one main mode of writing – supposed force through relentless repetition – and one type of character: furious, obsessive people in Yorkshire who can’t stop swearing. For all that, its story is one well worth telling, and now and then, when he drops the rage and finds something else to say, it can be rather brilliant.<br /><br />
Capote’s debut – like James Baldwin’s – is vivid, moving and idiosyncratic, but also very overwritten. At 23, he’s a stylist in so much as he writes like no-one else, and twists every sentence to his will. But his style isn’t developed. By <i>Music for Chameleons</i> he was concise and his writing perfectly balanced. In <b>Other Voices, Other Rooms</b> (1948), there are passages of piercing wisdom and fine characterisation – Randolph’s monologue; the scenes of the young, Capote-ish Joel and the brilliantly-drawn tomboy Idabel – but they don’t often gel with the lengthy descriptions of plantlife, animals and furniture. Nor do those descriptions generally inform character, or even conjure a world. As a result, the book moves between the affecting, the profound and the densely dull.<br /><br />
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I bought Limmy's <b>Daft Wee Stories</b> (2015) as I’d heard him on <a href="https://www.comedy.co.uk/podcasts/richard_herring_lst_podcast/">RHLSTP</a> (RHLSTP), followed him on Twitter from that, and found that his feed is like a piece of inspired performance art – and the fact he’d ridicule me for saying that is partly why. Written in straightforward colloquial language (a lot of ‘wee’, a lot of ‘shite’), the stories are distinctly variable: some funny, some very funny, some fun but formulaic with increasingly obvious counterintuitive endings, some agreeably weird and a couple just crap.<br /><br />
Last year I had an awful lot of fun with Chester Himes' cult 'Harlem cycle'. The third in the series, <b>The Crazy Kill</b> (1959), has an interesting set-up, and features his usual calling cards of loud clothes, adultery and ultra-violence – all laced with black humour – but it’s conspicuously more plodding and one-note than the explosive second outing, <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2018/12/review-of-2018-part-1-books.html">The Real Cool Killers</a></i>. It doesn’t help that Himes introduces so many characters at once near the beginning, and gives others similar names (Poor Boy/Pony Boy, Doll Baby/Baby Sis), so it’s difficult to remember exactly who is diddling whose girlfriend. And everyone keeps calling everyone else a "mother raper". It’s still grisly escapism of a sort.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oVm8MgekU-w/XfuqpG_2PfI/AAAAAAAAIQ4/otJAvfzTuWskM4TqZUSMrPwiD0OQK5t8wCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/51THIfjNOTL._SX327_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oVm8MgekU-w/XfuqpG_2PfI/AAAAAAAAIQ4/otJAvfzTuWskM4TqZUSMrPwiD0OQK5t8wCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/51THIfjNOTL._SX327_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="264" height="400" data-original-width="329" data-original-height="499" /></a><br /><br />
If there’s one thing that undermines prospective satire, it’s characters whose names describe them, but in <b>The Warden</b> (1855), Anthony Trollope isn’t even trying: his low-grade novelist is called Mr Popular Sentiment. But while it may not work on those terms, as a rumination on the nature of personal conscience it’s quite effective. Still less successful was Nancy Mitford's <b>Love in a Cold Climate</b> (1949). I <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2016/12/review-of-2016-part-3-books-and-tv.html">absolutely loved <i>The Pursuit of Love</i></a>: so fresh and funny, before it whacks you in the solar plexus. Great title aside, this sequel is less likeable, loveable and readable. Following another set of narrator Fanny Wincham’s relatives, it manages to have lots of plot without really having a story – at least one it’s possible to care about – as it focuses on a gallery of near-blanks and minor grotesques, spending unforgivably little time on the Radletts (for which, read: Mitfords). When Jassy and Victoria Radlett turn up, the book flares into life, and you realise just what you’ve been missing. Compared to that, the relationship between superficial Lady Montdore and her family’s prospective heir, Cedric, is a joyless slog. This one also seems to groan under the weight of its references to redundant styles of clothing and furniture – I’m not sure if the earlier book was lighter on such quickly ageing trivialities, or if I was just having so much fun (and heartbreak) that I didn’t notice. Sorry to be such a terrible counter-Hon.<br /><br />
Another comic novel that left me a little chilly was Nina Stibbe's <b>Reasons to be Cheerful</b> (2019), which nabbed the Wodehouse prize. It has a handful of good jokes and evokes its time and place well – a Leicester dental surgery in 1980 – but its observations largely involve reminding the reader of things from the past, which if you weren’t around at the time doesn’t have the same nostalgic cache. It’s diverting enough, but increasingly rambling: a succession of sitcom-ish scenes, its story not really going anywhere until it resorts to the neatest trick in literature – one which Penelope Fitzgerald employed so perfectly in <i>Human Voices</i>, but which here seems simply forced.<br /><br />
And finally on adult fiction... Rob Palk's first book, <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Animal-Lovers-Rob-Palk/dp/1912240033/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr="><i>Animal Lovers</i></a>, was obnoxiously great: a novel in which <i>every sentence was good</i>. I've been trying to make him like me on Twitter, and I think it's going OK as he let me read the draft of his new one, <b>The Crowd Pleaser</b> (2021?). No spoilers, but if you're a publisher who doesn't want to be laughed at by other, richer publishers, you might want to drop him a line.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>Children</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-x11CwlyVjIA/XfusMff6zkI/AAAAAAAAIR0/sdOCXe08pD0MB4O05XyNGNJ90dFAI3GvACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/41GHOyqXrxL._SX328_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-x11CwlyVjIA/XfusMff6zkI/AAAAAAAAIR0/sdOCXe08pD0MB4O05XyNGNJ90dFAI3GvACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/41GHOyqXrxL._SX328_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="265" height="400" data-original-width="330" data-original-height="499" /></a><br /><br />
Only a handful this time around. I read Stuart Gibbs' middle-grade comedy-thriller <i>Sp<i></i>y School</i> last year, and had a lovely time, so this year I appear to have read the six sequels. They're too American, the jokes aren't funny and the adult characters are poorly-drawn, but the plots are involving, and the emotional and romantic subplots are unusually effective. Though the titles suggest a certain gimmickry, each book is a cracking and (within its knowingly ludicrous parameters) credible continuation of Gibbs' main story. Just so we're clear, the correct ranking is:<br /><br />
- <b>#4. Spy Ski School</b> (2016)<br />
- <b>#3. Evil Spy School</b> (2015)<br />
- #1. Spy School (2012)<br />
- <b>#6. Spy School Goes South</b> (2018)<br />
- <b>#7. Spy School British Invasion</b> (2019)<br />
- <b>#5. Spy School Secret Service</b> (2017)<br />
- <b>#2. Spy Camp</b> (2013)<br /><br />
I also enjoyed a couple of Philip Pullman books. <b>The Tiger in the Well</b> (1990) is something of a drop-off from his first two Sally Lockhart novels, with one conspicuously ridiculous plot development that sets up several sequences of inert, unimaginative unpleasantness and spotlights a villain who's simply an uninteresting grotesque. But before that, and even afterwards, it's exciting and highly atmospheric, as Sally discovers socialism (yay!) and atheism (yawn), the surefooted sense of storytelling, intriguing premise and original characters offsetting a certain conventiality in its mystery-thriller tropes. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2742820620?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">More here.</a> <b>Lyra's Oxford</b> (2003) is slight in terms of length and story, as 15-year-old Lyra and Pantalaimon receive a visit from a witch daemon, but loaded with intelligence, atmosphere and especially emotion. The line about Will connected like a shovel to the face. I could spend my whole life in this world.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>NON-FICTION</b><br /><br />
<b>History and politics</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dYGky7gPOvw/XgCSsW26ohI/AAAAAAAAISE/ENjxB_ovTAsugfzptvaaWMorQAgIhg6egCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/caro.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dYGky7gPOvw/XgCSsW26ohI/AAAAAAAAISE/ENjxB_ovTAsugfzptvaaWMorQAgIhg6egCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/caro.jpg" width="293" height="400" data-original-width="1036" data-original-height="1413" /></a><br /><br />
Head and shoulders above all other non-fiction this year was Robert Caro’s <b>The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power</b> (1982), the first in a five-volume (!) biography of the Vietnam War enthusiast and famed shagger. Sitting atop a mountain of research, Caro wages a war of his own: this one against received wisdom and inferior biographers who won't rent a house in their subject's home town for three years. For many, Johnson’s reputation is as a good man and unrepentant New Dealer whose liberal inclinations, and aspirations for a ‘Great Society’, were thwarted after he was boxed into a corner by the draining, unwinnable, all-consuming anti-commie crusade in Southeast Asia. Not so, says Caro. In this impossibly rich book, he fashions an indelible, uncompromising and excoriating portrait of a cunning, selfish but dynamic self-made politico, powered by want, hunger and insecurity, who used everyone he ever met, believed in little, and rode to the first power he ever held on a tidal wave of construction money. In order to understand Johnson, though, Caro argues, we have to understand the Hill Country, the dirt poor area of Texas beyond the 98th Meridian in which toil, hardship and, well, <i>dirt</i> was about all there ever was. And so, after an exhilarating flash-forward prologue that finds Johnson in the horns of a dilemma, that’s where we begin, with Johnson’s ancestors suckered into a trap which closed around them, lured there by lush, untrammelled vegetation that once utilised never returned. His grandfather and his father both gambled on fortunes and lost; Johnson gambled – repeatedly – and won. Until one day he didn't.<br /><br />
It’s a book about the making of a man, but a man who appears to have crystallised by the time he was at college: in his ruthless manoeuvring behind the scenes of meaningless campus elections, Caro sees the LBJ who performed the same moves, to dizzying ends, as a congressman, senator and president. By the midway point, we’re dealing with many of the titans of the 1930s, including Sam Rayburn, one of the unheralded heroes of the New Deal, an honourable, combustible man whose hard-won authority proves no match for Johnson’s flattery, obsequiousness and laser-sighted perception. The author can make literally anything interesting – a congress committee, the funding of a dam – and the way he brings to life the worlds of Texas and Washington, and the gallery of supporting players is utterly exhilarating. You’re so close to Johnson himself that you can almost feel his hand on your shoulder, the other on your lapel.<br /><br />
<b>The Origins of Totalitarianism</b> (1951) by Hannah Arendt was dazzling and difficult and insightful, if not in quite the way I was expecting. For the most part the book underlined how hyperbolic much of our discourse is. Hitler didn't start with the Holocaust, as liberal columnists keep reminding us, but he did start by writing down pretty much everything he was going to do, and I don't see the seeds of totalitarianism in Trump, as much as he's a horrible, racist cunt who appeals to the worst in people. Most topical in the book, along with Arendt's insights into the moral judgements placed on refugees − rather than their frequent persecutors − is perhaps the notion of 'political romanticism', which anticipates the tiresome 'free speech' zealots for whom no topic is apparently off-limits, nor consistency a pressing issue. I found the book enormously upsetting, if I'm honest: it shook my faith in the basic goodness of people. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2851797552?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">I wrote a bit more about it here.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-W_atRSomFxw/XgCS6ikaxII/AAAAAAAAISI/txb6uw6aWWQSAJ9wObszXYEqk9Su_I_DACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/51EvX0kyZrL._SX323_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-W_atRSomFxw/XgCS6ikaxII/AAAAAAAAISI/txb6uw6aWWQSAJ9wObszXYEqk9Su_I_DACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/51EvX0kyZrL._SX323_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="261" height="400" data-original-width="325" data-original-height="499" /></a><br /><br />
The Tories who came together to oust Chamberlain and install Churchill are the subject of Lynne Olson's erratic but periodically electrifying <b>Troublesome Young Men</b> (2007), which comes to life when it takes us into Parliament, and ends with a heartbreakingly ironic postscript dealing with the debacle of Suez. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2761866398?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">More here.</a><br /><br />
On a similar theme, my peculiar fascination with the far-right (though I was reading them specifically for a novel I've been working on – it's ready, hit me up) led me to two books about deserved neo-Nazi bogeymen. Nigel Farndale's <b>Haw-Haw</b> (2005) is interesting, but decreasingly so, and too sympathetic to its subject. Stephen Dorril's <b>Blackshirt</b> (1999), dealing with Oswald Mosley and the wider world of British fascism, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2868940475?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">turned out to be a tremendous, cheerless chore</a>, which it took me more than six weeks to get through.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-stxlxCc7-P8/XgCTGH0fOGI/AAAAAAAAISQ/DyHmDKFxhkcGLfnl8Y3Q4r3cben59VHfwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/81rPWZP68hL.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-stxlxCc7-P8/XgCTGH0fOGI/AAAAAAAAISQ/DyHmDKFxhkcGLfnl8Y3Q4r3cben59VHfwCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/81rPWZP68hL.jpg" width="249" height="400" data-original-width="995" data-original-height="1600" /></a><br /><br />
Speaking of people on the extreme right (I'm kidding), Jess Phillips' <b>Everywoman</b> (2017) proved a suitably confusing read. She has done more good than I will ever do in my life. Her campaigns to stop violence against women are extraordinary and inspiring. She receives intolerable abuse because she is a woman who strongly and unapologetically speaks out about appalling, systemic misogyny. And she seems to expend an unusual amount of energy launching unhelpful, self-aggrandising attacks on her own party, then complaining when people tell her to fuck off. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2815928168?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">The book is basically that, but a book.</a><br /><br />
It's becoming increasingly apparent that Ben Macintyre is just a useful idiot for the security services who regards his association with the <i>Times</i> as a cross between a knighthood and a canonisation. <b>The Spy and the Traitor</b> (2018) is a rip-roaring read, written with panache and verve, but seeing Macintyre wrangling with the complexities of the 1980s, regarding them as essentially the same old battle between good and evil, and then swallowing everything doled out to him by a literal spy, is rather embarrassing. <b>A Foreign Field</b> (2001), one of his earliest books, is by contrast merely aloof and clunky, artlessly exposing the mechanics behind its construction.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MYB_xkRz5RM/XgCTUYRqNnI/AAAAAAAAISY/fYhn6_I3uAYQTIetYg3dM6rdsY6TxRTMQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/81Je8mzcmpL.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MYB_xkRz5RM/XgCTUYRqNnI/AAAAAAAAISY/fYhn6_I3uAYQTIetYg3dM6rdsY6TxRTMQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/81Je8mzcmpL.jpg" width="261" height="400" data-original-width="1043" data-original-height="1600" /></a><br /><br />
I'm happy to report, however, that I am still obsessed with spies, so also devoured <b>The Greatest Traitor: The Secret Lives of Agent George Blake</b> (2013) by Roger Hermiston, a serviceable biog of the double-agent, flipped by the Russians in a Korean prisoner-of-war camp. It's a little light overall, especially compared to <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2018/12/review-of-2018-part-1-books.html">Andrew Lownie’s recent book on Guy Burgess</a>, though it improves as it progresses and the author’s sources become more varied and detailed: the passages on Blake’s escape from Wormwood Scrubs are excellent. In the intro, Hermiston – a former Today programme producer – attempts to incinerate our goodwill by praising Rod Liddle.<br /><br />
Like Ben Macintyre, Niall Ferguson is a capitalist running dog. <b>Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World</b> (2003) became wildly successful, and I can see why − we'd all love to believe the Empire was great and noble. The first hundred pages are curiously dry, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2885056160?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">then he begins to offset his economic graphs and fixation on Scots with stories of derring do, imperial overreach and totally mad shit.</a> This shouldn't be the only thing you read on empire, as there's a definite agenda underpinning its supposedly disinterested overview, and I don't personally agree with Ferguson's viewpoint (or indeed his insane conflation of homosexuality with paedophilia), but it's an interesting book.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_x-3Wf2r1UA/XgCTvlNurQI/AAAAAAAAISk/y4ehyPT4GtwV1g0sQguJ8JpycG5GWdfkgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/download.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_x-3Wf2r1UA/XgCTvlNurQI/AAAAAAAAISk/y4ehyPT4GtwV1g0sQguJ8JpycG5GWdfkgCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/download.jpg" width="400" height="266" data-original-width="275" data-original-height="183" /></a><br /><br />
I enjoyed <i>The Devil in the White City</i> last year, and thought Gary Krist's <b>Empire of Sin</b> (2014) might deliver more of the same. His book lacks the same laser focus, hopping along quite happily from 1890 to 1920, though the assorted stories of sex, jazz, murder and reform (but mostly murder, let's be honest) are zippily written, and there’s enough context about race, power and psychogeography for it to be of some value – if rarely enough for it to feel like heavyweight history. My usual unease with true crime reared its head near the end: I’m not sure I quite have the temperament or the stomach for it.<br /><br />
Finally, I nearly expired from boredom while reading Mary Banham's <b>The Festival of Britain: A Land and Its People</b> (2012), which is <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2734453521?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">both desperately dry and dreadfully repetitive</a>, doing little to evoke the experience of <i>being there</i>, instead delving into the ideological imperatives of various architectural journals, and endlessly restating its uncontroversial contention: that a festival subtitled ‘a land and its people’ was, by all accounts, preoccupied with the land and its people.<br /><br />
<b>Music and film</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-r5xK1-s1O3k/XgCWHo6c5iI/AAAAAAAAITc/LY8EH7iM8B4fjyFQPPEZA4kV765KxcmlQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/91bN4WXzzGL.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-r5xK1-s1O3k/XgCWHo6c5iI/AAAAAAAAITc/LY8EH7iM8B4fjyFQPPEZA4kV765KxcmlQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/91bN4WXzzGL.jpg" width="254" height="400" data-original-width="1016" data-original-height="1600" /></a><br /><br />
I'd been meaning to read Dorian Lynskey's <b>33 Revolutions Per Minute</b> (2012) for a while, and a celebratory themed concert at London's JW3 gave me the requisite kick up the arse. It's a masterful, moving and at times very funny history of message music, with a flair for both the anecdotal and the analytical, looking (as the terrific title suggests) at 33 emblematic protest songs, and the events and artistic movements that spawned them. Lynskey’s chapters on Dylan, the Pistols and the Manics are so precise and perceptive, with such sharply drawn character studies, that when he was dealing with artists of whom I knew nothing – like Crass, Fela Kuti and the Dead Kennedys – I was sure I was in safe hands. The chapter on Chilean folk hero Jara is particularly affecting, and it’s lovely too to see the committed, mercurially gifted ‘60s lefty Phil Ochs given his due. (Conversely, I always find middle-class white people pontificating about hip hop slightly embarrassing, but this may be a problem with me; Lynskey does it with humour – and his eyes wide open.) That was the pick of the bunch this year, and I'm hoping to get around to his biography of Orwell's <i>1984</i> next year. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13159622-33-revolutions-per-minute">More here.</a><br /><br />
Elia Kazan's 1988 autobiography, <b>A Life</b>, is one of the world's more problematic doorstops. It's a <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/148938.Elia_Kazan">comprehensive portrait of an important creative artist and a shabby man, congratulating himself on half-recognising his failings.</a> Because I didn't read enough in my 20s but still like showing off, I mentioned that book in <a href="https://recordcollectormag.com/reviews/suede-3">my Record Collector piece on Brett Anderson</a>, which included a review of <b>Afternoons with the Blinds Drawn</b> (2019), an excellent follow-up to Suede frontman Anderson's first volume of autobiography, <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2018/12/review-of-2018-part-1-books.html">Coal Black Mornings</a></i>. I read two other musical memoirs: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2686155128?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">Johnny Marr's <b>Set the Boy Free</b> (2016)</a> and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2764409051?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1"><b>Just for One Day</b> by Louise Wener (2010)</a>, which were both alright.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dJ2WYs_JQXU/XgCUBNjvoTI/AAAAAAAAISs/jfyGnDOlyI0yiSvP-x6YSzy4KMbWb0PxACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/71f1duKg1wL.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dJ2WYs_JQXU/XgCUBNjvoTI/AAAAAAAAISs/jfyGnDOlyI0yiSvP-x6YSzy4KMbWb0PxACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/71f1duKg1wL.jpg" width="260" height="400" data-original-width="1040" data-original-height="1600" /></a><br /><br />
Two other books about music underwhelmed, exhibiting contrasting failings. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44096745-perfect-sound-whatever"><b>Perfect Sound Whatever</b> by James Acaster (2019)</a> – dealing with the music of 2016 – was too prosaic and functional; though <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2912908585?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">Greil Marcus's <b>The Old, Weird America</b> (1997/2011)</a> exhibited more insight into its subject (Dylan's extraordinary Basement Tapes), it was also unbearably pretentious.<br /><br />
Thanks to Malcolm Prince for recommending Ronald Haver's <b>A Star Is Born</b> (1988), which deals with the 1954 film. It's a superb book, not just a making-of (and an unmaking-of, and a remaking-of), but also a Hollywood history lesson, detective story and love story, as Haver chronicles the production of a mammoth, crucial piece of cinematic art, its partial destruction, and the campaign to find and restore its missing reels – which brings him front and centre. Beginning with a second-person tour that walks you around the Tinseltown in 1954 – and evokes the city better than anything else I have ever read – it captures a moment in history, as Fox’s CinemaScope captures the national imagination, and Jack Warner and his stumbling studio scramble to react. Their solution: to bank everything on the re-emergent popularity of difficult, Dexedrine-addicted former child star, Judy Garland. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2982933630?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">It's a great story, irresistibly told, though I imagine you have to be pretty interested in <i>A Star Is Born</i> to get as much out of this as I did.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-pfdgGZVGxvA/XgCUJ8jggRI/AAAAAAAAIS0/MisdxU9_BU8XyJ5axYDdHrBeqIkvGRRoACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/41M3Z2QWVQL._AC_UL436_.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-pfdgGZVGxvA/XgCUJ8jggRI/AAAAAAAAIS0/MisdxU9_BU8XyJ5axYDdHrBeqIkvGRRoACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/41M3Z2QWVQL._AC_UL436_.jpg" width="259" height="400" data-original-width="282" data-original-height="436" /></a><br /><br />
Since it seems unlikely that we’ll get another biography of the cult wartime filmmaker, <b>Humphrey Jennings</b>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2736824503?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">Kevin Jackson's engrossing, impassioned if imperfect book (2003)</a> is required reading for fans. The same is true of Christina Rice's <b>Ann Dvorak</b> biog (2013) – subtitled 'Hollywood's Forgotten Rebel' – which does a stellar job of explaining why the most promising of starts – Dvorak was a star at 20, stealing the show in Howard Hawks' <i>Scarface</i> – failed to translate to an enduring career. Rice is naturally funny, and an artful writer, finding what she can (Dvorak left no personal papers and has no surviving family), then marshalling her research with considerable finesse. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2742822897?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">More here.</a><br /><br />
People with no discernible talent can be good subjects for non-fiction too. <b>The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell</b> (2013) is an entertaining memoir about the making of <i>The Room</i> – and Sestero’s warped relationship with its bizarre, mysterious, tragi-comic creator, Tommy Wiseau. It starts brilliantly, though runs out of steam a little towards the end, bending to formula in its self-justification and strained attempts to render the story inspirational. The funniest bits, and there are many funny bits, are Sestero’s deadpan descriptions of the film itself.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3qfMXAQJWJU/XgCUSYwaR3I/AAAAAAAAIS8/jcAOL2fUnJwX2GMLGqovkXN3OQ-coKkxgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/download%2B%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3qfMXAQJWJU/XgCUSYwaR3I/AAAAAAAAIS8/jcAOL2fUnJwX2GMLGqovkXN3OQ-coKkxgCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/download%2B%25281%2529.jpg" width="260" height="400" data-original-width="181" data-original-height="278" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Reel History</b> (2015), meanwhile, collects most of Alex von Tunzelmann's <i>Guardian</i> columns of the same name, which scrutinised movies for their historical accuracy. I used to read the feature regularly, and I’d dipped into the book since I picked it up, but sitting down and reading it cover to cover – immersing yourself in the film history, the real history and the authorial voice – reminded me of the fun I had devouring Dorothy Parker’s non-fic last year. Arranging the entries by when the films were <i>set</i> (an inspired decision), the author wears her learning lightly as she travels from 10 Million Years BC to the Wikileaks scandal, via Pocahontas, Tolstoy and the Titanic, the essays sharp, concise and witty – even laugh-out-loud funny. Special mention for Laurence Olivier in <i>Khartoum</i> looking “like he has escaped from a racist panto”, and a comprehensive overview of the lot of Native Americans from 1492 to the present day that concludes, “... [they] suffer significantly higher rates of poverty, alcoholism and suicide than the American average. On the bright side, they can paint with all the colours of the wind.” If you like history, cinema and laughing, you couldn't do much better than to pick up a copy.<br /><br />
<b>Sport</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-eSpluNHwEgY/XgCUZPmWwZI/AAAAAAAAITA/iqQ9WRwyChQ2QxUaSNQD0FffOd6mWbr2gCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/61F1TBXlz6L.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-eSpluNHwEgY/XgCUZPmWwZI/AAAAAAAAITA/iqQ9WRwyChQ2QxUaSNQD0FffOd6mWbr2gCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/61F1TBXlz6L.jpg" width="267" height="400" data-original-width="667" data-original-height="1000" /></a><br /><br />
My favourite sports book of the year is about someone who didn't quite make the grade. As United-mad kids in 1994, we knew that Ben Thornley was going to be the next big thing. Everyone said it. He was the best since Best. He’d scored in every round of the FA Youth Cup in 1992: shining in a side that included Beckham, Butt, Giggs, Gary Neville and Robbie Savage. Then, on the cusp of first-team success, auditioning for a FA Cup semi-final spot, he was wiped out by a journeyman defender in a reserve game, and he never quite got it back again. <b>Tackled: The Class of '92 Star Who Never Got to Graduate</b> (2019), co-authored with ghost writer Dan Poole, is Thornley's story. Elegantly mixing its subject's reminiscences with those of schoolfriends, teachers, coaches and fellow players, it's amusing, honest and deeply affecting, its emotional heft accentuated intentionally by the non-linear structure (the book begins with the horror tackle and ends just before, alternating between pre- and post-injury) and perhaps unwittingly by the prominence granted the FA Youth Cup Final, which has attained a near-mythic status in modern football folklore, but remains a mere footnote for those teammates who ‘made it’. For Thornley, that was as good as it got. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2789907554?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">A bit more here.</a><br /><br />
Vic Marks' Original Spin (2019) is <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2955262477?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">one of the gentlest, most genial books I’ve read, though it rather limps to the finish</a>. I've just now realised that the title is a play on 'original sin'. I read the book four months ago. It's a lot better than <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2960667766?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1"><b>Leo McKinstry's Geoff Boycott: A Cricketing Hero</b> (2005/2010)</a>. Ruy Castro's biography of Garrincha – <b>The Triumph and Tragedy of Brazil's Forgotten Footballing Hero</b> (1995/2004) – is <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2789351412?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">also rather a dreary devoir</a>. You get the facts, neatly established and marshalled into chronological order, but there’s no poetry. And since the sheer joy of Garrincha is absent – the transcendence he found on the field, the exultance he inspired – when the authors strip away the attendant myths, all that’s left is a selfish man (with a 10-inch penis), drinking himself to death.<br /><br />
<b>Miscellaneous</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-rawVx61ewRY/XgCUipqRWsI/AAAAAAAAITM/wXf85zor61o6i3sYJsKkTblCfo5UHCsfACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/51JEEishc%252BL._AC_SL400_.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-rawVx61ewRY/XgCUipqRWsI/AAAAAAAAITM/wXf85zor61o6i3sYJsKkTblCfo5UHCsfACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/51JEEishc%252BL._AC_SL400_.jpg" width="260" height="400" data-original-width="260" data-original-height="400" /></a><br /><br />
I enjoyed <b>Gotta Get Theroux This</b> (2019) by Louis Theroux. This autobiography starts off lightheartedly, then becomes increasingly introspective – as Theroux dwells on his romantic relationships – and more challenging, as he deals with Savile. What comes across most strongly is how nuanced his view of humanity is. He can also find a good joke, a brilliant turn of phrase or a literare allusion in the tightest corner. And there simply aren’t many writers around today with such an understanding of how funny the word ‘willy’ is. One slight shortcoming is that his memory doesn’t seem to be particularly good, so the earlier sections can sometimes consist of him simply describing familiar scenes from Weird Weekends, while the behind-the-curtain material about TV production probably isn’t of wide interest. But he’s extremely honest and the book gets better and better as it progresses, exploring his own character and mirroring the growing complexity of both his work and his worldview. I read Walter Kirn's <b>Blood Will Out</b> (2014) as Theroux had recommended it on a podcast. In it, novelist Kirn befriends an eccentric scion of the Rockefeller clan – only he’s not a Rockefeller, he’s a murderer. It's <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3071274419">a compulsive page-turner told with a dash of class, some eminently plausible armchair analysis and insane levels of unwitting, unwanted access.
</a><br /><br />
Sara Pascoe's second book, <b>Sex Power Money</b> (2019) is less focused than <i>Animal</i>, and seems less assured: at times you’re just watching someone argue with themselves. In one way that’s not a bad thing – the issues she’s discussing are complex and many-sided, and earlier it could seem like she was presenting contestable theory as established fact – but <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3066021377?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">it can also feel disordered and incomplete, a draft away from being ready</a>. I enjoyed it a lot more than Spike Milligan's <b>Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall</b> (1971) which <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2732009836?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">was mostly just irritating</a>. I wish I hadn't bought the sequel at the same time.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Thanks for reading. Thanks also to everyone who gave me books, lent me books, or recommended books to me in 2019, and to Jamie for organising the Brett Anderson piece.
And if for some unaccountable reason you still want MORE, then sneaking in under the wire at the end of 2018 (after I compiled <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2018/12/review-of-2018-part-1-books.html">this thing</a>) were <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2637945652?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">this Sunday Times collection of short stories</a> – which I read for the Rooney – Seumas Milne's <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2644909881?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">partway-convincing Miners' Strike conspiracy-athon</a>, and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2634924735?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">the memoirs of musician David Ford</a>.Rick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com0London, UK51.5073509 -0.1277582999999822351.1912379 -0.77320529999998222 51.8234639 0.51768870000001777tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-85114883048484121482019-07-13T15:57:00.001+01:002019-07-17T15:53:53.026+01:00Bob Dylan at Hyde Park, LondonFriday 12 July, 2019<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-j6LH-KRA1Pw/XSnuDTA4XCI/AAAAAAAAIM8/WDpy-pBA6P4en6trVJVMtHRQdMmZ37FtwCLcBGAs/s1600/Bob-Dylan-Hyde-Park-concert-review-1959105.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-j6LH-KRA1Pw/XSnuDTA4XCI/AAAAAAAAIM8/WDpy-pBA6P4en6trVJVMtHRQdMmZ37FtwCLcBGAs/s400/Bob-Dylan-Hyde-Park-concert-review-1959105.jpg" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="590" data-original-height="443" /></a><br /><br />
They came, they drank, they talked. And off in the distance, the other side of a 'Golden Circle' sparsely populated with affluent boomers, Bob Dylan delivered what must be the best performance I've seen him give in 10 years*. At a time when seeing Bob had begun to feel more like a duty than a treat, he came roaring back.<br /><br />
Dylan doesn't really do crowdpleasing shows: at least, not for the casual gig-goer ticking another legend off their bucket list. It may be that he simply <i>won't</i> − after all, such popular staples as 'saying hello to the audience' are relatively easy to execute − but I've begun to think that he simply doesn't know how.<br /><br />
Seeing Dylan is purely about the music, those songs are in permanent flux ("It used to go like that and now it goes like this," he barks on <i>Live 1966</i>, before launching into a paranoid, gasping 'I Don't Believe You'), and such personality as you can glean and harvest comes from his treatment of five decades of material, some increasingly peculiar physical posturing − is he a self-satisfied cowboy courting adulation or a man with a bad back? − and the intrusion of his crooked grin, which on bad nights is kept within the crusty exterior, but flashed across Hyde Park for half the damn show.<br /><br />
That approach has its virtues and its vices. His shows are erratic: I've seen great ones, weak ones, and everything in between. And there's something to be said for an artist who can turn up on time, display a certain basic level of gratitude towards their fans, and play what the masses want to hear. But there's also something cheering, and instinctively hilarious, about a performer who is ornery enough to neglect the pallid norms of stadium rock − be it punctuality, platitudes or sing-along set-pieces − and charged with the creative inspiration to make every night different, even if sometimes that appears to be merely because he's in a bad mood.<br /><br />
I'll tell you something, though. For those leaving the fields of South Kensington uttering those tritest of generalities, now worn so threadbare they're practically transparent − "His voice has gone", "You can't tell which song it is till halfway through", "He could at least speak to the crowd" − know this: Friday night was the closest to a straight hits show that I've ever seen Dylan play. Who knows why, I can offer only tinpot psychology: he wanted to best Neil Young, he wants to impress Neil Young, he was just in the right mood… whatever, he kicked off with three cast-iron '60s behemoths, and seemed almost eager to please, committed to every last song, though with that indelible caveat that he's Bob Dylan and if we're going to do this, we're still going to do it his way.<br /><br />
---<br /><br />
Before we get onto the main business, here's a quick word on the support:<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qhXuSsANvdA/XSnudQZOy7I/AAAAAAAAINE/HJoyF-REWsIF7GXweQcHj6iNDSRl9wXrQCLcBGAs/s1600/cat.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qhXuSsANvdA/XSnudQZOy7I/AAAAAAAAINE/HJoyF-REWsIF7GXweQcHj6iNDSRl9wXrQCLcBGAs/s400/cat.jpg" width="400" height="213" data-original-width="620" data-original-height="330" /></a><br />
<i>A picture of Cat Power owned by a fairly non-litigious photographer.</i><br /><br />
I was most excited about seeing <b>Cat Power</b>, the scuzzily brilliant vocalist whose unhappy, often half-murmured laments seem almost singularly ill-suited to a big field in which people won't shut up. Time and again, she got the techs to turn up her mic, but despite throwing in a Dylan cover ('He Was a Friend of Mine', a fantastically if self-sabotagingly abstruse choice), it was only during a clutch of grungier numbers that her spellbinding set cut through to an audience waiting − for reasons unknown − for Neil Young. The songs from her current record, <i>Wanderer</i>, had a sensitive, beguiling if sometimes inaudible quality, coupled to a strutting stage style I hadn't anticipated, though the knock-out highlight was the title track from <i>The Greatest</i>, half-shorn of the anomalous shoo-wop style that defined that extraordinary record. It was weird, and oddly moving, to watch such life-stopping brilliance in a vacuum of complete disinterest.<br /><br />
Up next was <b>Laura Marling</b>, who has junked her treading-on-eggshells style for a more Carly Simon-ish approach (or was it just the wind buffeting her hair, like in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfmp_kZ0ZfE">that 'You're So Vain' video?</a>). I have infinitesimal amounts of patience for British folkies who go all American, but Marling has some nice hooks and a flair for digging out a killingly sad line just when you think she's slipping into broad-brush mundanity.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-roz9WckgMSg/XSnu42Bg4PI/AAAAAAAAINM/-tMZs28W7L41WRA2UEvD6l23E1P075ypACLcBGAs/s1600/neil-young-performing-in-hyde-park-3445e9fbea186be808a624426.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-roz9WckgMSg/XSnu42Bg4PI/AAAAAAAAINM/-tMZs28W7L41WRA2UEvD6l23E1P075ypACLcBGAs/s400/neil-young-performing-in-hyde-park-3445e9fbea186be808a624426.jpg" width="400" height="266" data-original-width="1000" data-original-height="666" /></a><br />
<i>Kermit the Frog's let himself go.</i><br /><br />
And then there was <b>Neil Young</b>. Imagine Neil Young being your favourite artist, it's like your favourite food being a packet of ham. There's a bit in Peep Show where Jez tells Mark that he loves Nancy, and Mark says: "You <i>love</i> her? What do you <i>love</i> about her?" That's me trying to understood people who love Neil Young. What do you <i>love</i> about him? His guitar? Still, the first CD we had in my house growing up was <i>Live Rust</i> and I seem to have absorbed most of his other stuff through cultural osmosis. Either way, I didn't expect to enjoy his set half as much as I did. A blistering 'Over and Over' was squeezed between the woozy 'Mansion on the Hill' and the appealingly corny 'Country Home' at the start of the set, and that was the perfect beginning, with what on record becomes an interminable jam session working just right in a live situation. And for an hour Young struck just the right balance, the set reaching its climax with a lovely 'Heart of Gold'.<br /><br />
Then his self-indulgence fuse blew, and every song started going on for four minutes too long, following the same format: song, jam, attempted audience ovation, Young fiddling frantically with the tremolo, drum solo, another jam, more tremolo... The apparent aim was to continue the song until everybody had stopped clapping. As a final insult, he then broke into 'Rockin' in the Free World', which is fun but also highly embarrassing, the Kissification of Neil Young. Is there anything more excruciating than saying 'rockin''? Except, that is, for the song's muscular Reaganism. Twice we thought the track was over, only for Young and co to burst into another chorus, which is a great idea for a comedy sketch, if not for a set of live guitar music.<br /><br />
I'd hoped for 'Like a Hurricane', but by the time it came along, I'd had about enough Neil Young for one year. This was partly due to him and partly due to me, as I'd been stood in one place for over four hours and was anxious to set off for my wee so I'd be back in time for Bob.<br /><br />
---<br /><br />
The screens were blank. And for a moment, it seemed like Dylan's recent but noted aversion to having anybody see his face close-up (<a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2010/07/bob-dylan-at-hop-farm-festival-review.html">at Hop Farm</a> he was shown from a distance; his stage lights have been getting dimmer; in the recent <i>Rolling Thunder Revue</i> doc, he is painted a most curious shade of auburn) was going to result in the funniest audience-baiting of modern times**, but as he wandered on stage in a muted fit of anti-climax, the vast panels crackled into life. Young had shared screen-time with his band, but there was no such egality here: the camera fixed on Dylan's small, stooping frame for the next 105 minutes.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LZnK8zF7cSE/XSnvEZjmkTI/AAAAAAAAINQ/fbBP1vXDeGIHDQeaGkkJlzz6zO3O5ncLACLcBGAs/s1600/ballad.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LZnK8zF7cSE/XSnvEZjmkTI/AAAAAAAAINQ/fbBP1vXDeGIHDQeaGkkJlzz6zO3O5ncLACLcBGAs/s400/ballad.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="1280" data-original-height="720" /></a><br />
<i>'Ballad of a Thin Man', 1966.</i><br /><br />
With a justifiably self-satisfied grin, Dylan launched into <b>'Ballad of a Thin Man'</b>, the 1965 track irrevocably associated with his reinvention as a braying individualist with great hair who was enthusiastically kicking apart his legacy as a protest singer, and sneering at anybody who asked him not to. It's an absolute monster of a song, with a fantastically snide and direct central refrain: "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is/Do you, Mr Jones?", the name typically squawked amid a squall of noise as "Jooooahhhhhrrrrnnnns". It's a perfect choice to kick off this type of show, as at this point several members of the audience who've never seen Dylan before, and are confronted with a jowly, wire-haired, tactiturn little man in a rhinestone jacket jabbering 54-year-old words in a half-swallowed 80-a-day rasp as he happily plinky-plonks on his piano will indeed be wondering what is happening here. Perhaps you have to have Dylan in your blood to react to this with a rush of utter euphoria, but I don't know any other way. Dylan will spend the rest of the evening reshaping his songs in the most exhilarating manner, but with this one, it's enough to just deliver your statement of intent, and give it both fucking barrels.<br /><br />
<b>'It Ain't Me, Babe'</b> is up second, and one of the highlights of the night, its hero now not so much nobly apologetic as cheekily elusive, a quality one more associates with the fantastically unfaithful 20-something Bob. The word "babe" is intoned with such gleefully dismissive malevolence that you really do begin to suspect the protagonist is avoiding this lovesick woman more for his own sake than hers. James Taylor may appear to genuinely like his own audience, and Paul Simon's voice may be in better nick, but no-one but Dylan would excavate a song from 1964 and then warp it out of all recognition: not just its tune or its style, but its actual theme.<br /><br />
He follows that with an explosive <b>'Highway 61 Revisited'</b>, the closest you'll get to him acknowledging that now and then people would like to hear the hits, perhaps with one of them sounding similar to the record. This song's a great gauge, incidentally, for how good a Dylan show is going to be (though unfortunately by the time this litmus test can be performed, you have bought your ticket, train pass and accommodation, and are midway through the show): whenever I've seen Dylan at his best, he has spent it grooving, grinning and very occasionally (Sheffield 2009) genuinely dancing. And it's <i>such</i> a great song: the best organ-driven Biblical comedy record of psychedelic '60s rock. After that 'Simple Twist of Fate', from 1975's <i>Blood on the Tracks</i>, feels slightly bland: it's a wonderful song: small, sad, wry and lyrical, but it feels swallowed up in this space, the reading almost perfunctory.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WBRmfme3maM/XSnvVac63sI/AAAAAAAAINc/Ynmji2HZCJkiFjVlsgQYriVhBfIGvXLgQCLcBGAs/s1600/download.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WBRmfme3maM/XSnvVac63sI/AAAAAAAAINc/Ynmji2HZCJkiFjVlsgQYriVhBfIGvXLgQCLcBGAs/s400/download.jpg" width="400" height="309" data-original-width="256" data-original-height="198" /></a><br />
<i>1974.</i><br /><br />
I've written about Dylan before and said in 2013 that, while you rarely get unequivocally great Dylan <i>shows</i> any more, you can usually rely on a run of three or four songs where he's really cooking, where he cares enough to make it count. I did wonder, as <b>'Simple Twist of Fate'</b> meandered meekly out from the vast speakers strapped around Hyde Park, whether perhaps we might have had our three-song run.<br /><br />
So sometimes you worry. And then sometimes you can only laugh, in slack-jawed amazement, at this maddening, occasionally ridiculous genius, who takes absurd risks with his material, even in front of 70,000 people. On record, <b>'Can't Wait'</b> is a stinging, ominous, Tom Waits-ish lament, a hymn to utter isolation, a paean to pain near the close of Dylan's saddest album, <i>Time Out of Mind</i>, recorded as his health dwindled, en route to a brush with death. On Friday, it's not. On Friday, it's a fantastically funky James Brown number, with Dylan a white-suited ringmaster, holding the mic-stand at a jaunty angle as he defiantly raps the lyrics from out front, turning one of his most heartbreaking lyrics ("It doesn't matter where I go anymore, I just go") into nothing short of a punchline.<br /><br />
<b>
'When I Paint My Masterpiece'</b>, which follows, is fine, but the song's main virtue is how its rapturous but yearning melody lends harmony and power to some rather trite lyrics, so when you junk that tune in favour of something pleasant but basically unmemorable, you're neutering it. And then we're into a stompy, somewhat impenetrable '<b>Honest with Me</b>', from 2001's <i>Love and Theft</i>, which I'm sure Dylan would be proud to learn (and I'm only mildly ashamed to confess) I didn't recognise until at least two minutes in, and I know that album back-to-front.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jt3PQhC0Unc/XSnwBqEp9II/AAAAAAAAINk/5wdX3ILTrWwg4Z33aDPO9t3JGg3oq7UuwCLcBGAs/s1600/Bob%2BDylan_time%2Bout%2Bof%2Bmind.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jt3PQhC0Unc/XSnwBqEp9II/AAAAAAAAINk/5wdX3ILTrWwg4Z33aDPO9t3JGg3oq7UuwCLcBGAs/s400/Bob%2BDylan_time%2Bout%2Bof%2Bmind.jpg" width="400" height="200" data-original-width="1000" data-original-height="500" /></a><br />
<i>1997.</i><br /><br />
We get four from <i>Time Out of Mind</i> in total, and the second is the best of the lot. The album is, I think, and after everything, my favourite of all Dylan's records: a wintry, introspective retrospective. It sounds like the last testament of a dying man, and it nearly was. <b>'Trying to Get to Heaven'</b> is probably the single greatest thing on it: essentially an update of 'Knockin' on Heaven's Door', his earlier defiance and desperation replaced by a wry and weary yearning pockmarked with pain ("You broke a heart that loved you/Now you can seal up the book and not write anymore"). Dylan is never content to trade on 22-year-old emotions, though, and last night the song became more like a whimsical quest, lines of alienation rendered playful, until the hammer-blow of its protagonist's essential pointlessness. "I been to Sugar Town, I shook the sugar down," he sighs, "now I'm trying to get to heaven before they close the door."<br /><br />
At the end of the song, as at the end of many of these songs, he stands up for the final few bars, then begins to wander off, as if he's remembered that the remote is in the other room, and the screens cut to black.<br /><br />
<b>'Make You Feel My Love'</b> is a song that was stolen from us by Adele, and some absolute roasters near us insisted on singing her version over the top of it, but just as Dylan never wrote sadder, starker words than on <i>Time Out of My Mind</i>, he never wrote a more direct love song than this one***. At Hyde Park, it's an effectively conventional reading, and while we'll never get a better reading of the unexpectedly and breathtakingly seductive line that closes the penultimate verse ("You ain’t seen nothing like me yet") than the one on the album, I suppose he can keep trying.<br /><br />
You can certainly never accuse Dylan of not backing himself, and he continues to display a vaguely misguided loyalty to <b>'Pay In Blood'</b> and <b>'Early Roman Kings'</b>, two of the more didactic tracks from his last album of original songs, <i>Tempest</i>, Both are rather long-winded, both benefit from his full-blooded investment in their mixture of threats and fantasy, and both are barked in the same unflinching but essentially unchanging tone. Unfortunately, both are also heard in direct comparison to 'Like a Rolling Stone', which he stretches out languorously between them.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SNynG6OwTmY/XSnwMCDacZI/AAAAAAAAINo/hca3sccsDqwj5-YrQfHa16T0pbvnjuOSgCLcBGAs/s1600/download%2B%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SNynG6OwTmY/XSnwMCDacZI/AAAAAAAAINo/hca3sccsDqwj5-YrQfHa16T0pbvnjuOSgCLcBGAs/s400/download%2B%25281%2529.jpg" width="400" height="224" data-original-width="300" data-original-height="168" /></a><br />
<i>2012, the time of </i>Tempest<i>.</i><br /><br />
The first seven or eight times I saw Dylan, he played <b>'Like a Rolling Stone'</b> fairly straight, usually as an encore with a familiarly cacophonous organ part. He's stopped doing that now. If you want to sing along, you really have to be on your toes. At first, it seemed like Bob was actively trying to prevent this, then you realised it was more like delayed gratification: a piano-led rap; a jazzy, dialled-down and almost painfully slow lead-in to the chorus; then this ferocious burst of rock; and finally the potential for a fists-in-the-air resolution with the beats of a football chant. By the final two choruses, he was almost egging the audience on, through some flamboyant embellishments to the words.<br /><br />
After 'Early Roman Kings' comes the best five minutes of the whole show: a heartstoppingly beautiful version of <b>'Girl from the North Country'</b>, with Bob singing: like, <i>really</i> singing, exposing himself not just through the emotional vulnerability of his performance, but the vulnerability of his voice. It's not what it was in 1963, it's not even what it was in 2005, and for the most part his live vocals are nowadays snapped out or throatily hollered. So a stripped-down country-folk ballad, accompanied only by a piano line and the aching strains of a pedal steel, is a hell of a thing to try. What results is simply one of the most moving experiences I've had at a concert. Incredibly, Dylan wrote the song at 21, but it is an old man's song: reflective, regretful, nostalgic in the most acutely painful way. He sings it here with his heart on display; the vocal wistful, even desolate, negotiating the loss of innocence, love and youth. He sings it like it has only just become true. And like telling someone may make it hurt a little less.<br /><br />
That he can mine such pathos from a simple old song, then continue hammering his most elegiac record, <i>Time Out of Mind</i> into baffling new shapes is the mark of a man for whom reinvention is everything. Isn't that better than a greatest hits show? The fourth and final track from his 1997 record is <b>'Love Sick'</b>, which Dylan famously leased to Victoria's Secret, due to his long and enduring commitment to underpants. It's an enduringly fascinating collision of dystopian imagery coupled to a doth-protest-too-much renunciation of love itself, all because some bird has apparently put him through the wringer. Live, it runs the gamut from unrepentant to vulnerable, needy and ultimately knowing.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-TQSKwuyOUD0/XSnwdGKhlvI/AAAAAAAAIN0/DQYfkJZt1FUXLDCln1uy_AAxoOvGps1AQCLcBGAs/s1600/alicia-keys-today-180723-main-art_0aad726ade8a3807f4ffbb5beea3d834.fit-760w.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-TQSKwuyOUD0/XSnwdGKhlvI/AAAAAAAAIN0/DQYfkJZt1FUXLDCln1uy_AAxoOvGps1AQCLcBGAs/s400/alicia-keys-today-180723-main-art_0aad726ade8a3807f4ffbb5beea3d834.fit-760w.jpg" width="400" height="200" data-original-width="760" data-original-height="380" /></a><br />
<i>Alicia Keys (more of whom below).</i><br /><br />
For the best part of 10 years, <b>'Thunder on the Mountain'</b> was one of the two main blues jams in Dylan's set, along with 'Summer Days', which I don't like nearly as much, though it's more interesting live than listening to it in your front room. Both dropped out for a while, but now 'Thunder on the Mountain' is back. The album it opens − <i>Modern Times</i>, the final part of a loose career-revival trilogy − came out during a happy period of my life, and Dylan did it at the two best shows I've seen him play: in Sheffield in 2007 and 2009, so it means a lot to me for those reasons. Having said that, I think he mostly wrote it to try to get Alicia Keys to kiss him, an endeavour that I believe was unfortunately unsuccessful. He has recently changed the wording around her birthplace on the track, though whether this will do the trick, I'm not sure. It's a rumbling, suitably thundering blues adventure that runs appropriately up and down the scales as Dylan mixes the unapologetic doom-mongering of <i>Time Out of Mind</i> with the absurdism and cheery punning of <i>Love and Theft</i>, and while it lacks the emotional sensitivity, freewheelin' poetry or acidic, steel-shelled mythology-shredding that constitutes Dylan's most enduring work, it's a lot of fun.<br /><br />
<b>'Soon After Midnight'</b> is something else entirely: Dylan's stab at a Great American Songbook standard, before he decided to go and record a load of fucking terrible versions of other people's. It has a lovely, yearning feel to it, half-familiar, as if overheard from someone else's wood-fronted '30s radio unit, and it has some of those wonderful pay-offs that mark Dylan's best work post-<i>Time Out of Mind</i>: when he sings, "I'm in no great hurry/I'm not afraid of your fury", you doubt his resilience, then he nails your fucking feet to the floor with the saddest of clinchers: "I've faced stronger walls than yours." And you wonder whether fighting the expectations of the 1960s almost broke him in two, and doubt that anything else would be half as hard. With all due respect (which actually isn't all that much), if you think Neil Young doing 18 songs that sound broadly the same is as interesting as Dylan segueing from heartbroken country to epic blues and then what appears to be a depressive Bing Crosby record, I think it unlikely that we will ultimately get on.<br /><br />
The main set ends with <b>'Gotta Serve Somebody'</b>, one of the handful of great songs to come out of Dylan's dalliance with evangelical Christianity. I've been going to see Dylan as regularly as money and geography can permit since 2002, and this is the first time I've seen him play it. The lead single from his first Christian album, 1979's <i>Slow Train Coming</i>, it's essentially a strident list song about people who are, at some stage, gonna have to serve somebody. I'm going to stick my neck out and suggest that he means God. The studio version (a favourite of Sinéad O'Connor) is funky as hell − a bass-driven track that neatly mixes simple encouragement, finger-wagging and what sounds suspiciously like a series of threats − but since Dylan had already given us our serving of funk in the singularly improbably shape of 'Can't Wait', he does this as a simple rock number, one of the most confounding creative decisions of the night. I say 'one of', as at the end of the song he comes and stands at the front of the stage with his hand in one pocket, and just sort of lightly sways, in what I presume is his weird attempt at some straightforward rock-star posturing.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3ULHZDxYC9g/XSnxC6TMyXI/AAAAAAAAIN8/Jr2XiK51L2kATwpPCjB3b5Vyzq6fryjPACLcBGAs/s1600/rs-4997-rectangle.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3ULHZDxYC9g/XSnxC6TMyXI/AAAAAAAAIN8/Jr2XiK51L2kATwpPCjB3b5Vyzq6fryjPACLcBGAs/s400/rs-4997-rectangle.jpg" width="400" height="271" data-original-width="624" data-original-height="422" /></a><br />
<i>Would you trust this man with your revolution?</i><br /><br />
The encore begins in familiar fashion: <b>'Blowin' in the Wind'</b> as it's generally played nowadays, its polemical power lost somewhere between now and then, presumably because its author doesn't seem to care about its questions, only the cynicism that greets them. He follows that in the only way a committed crowdpleasing people person can: with <checks notes> 1965 album track, <b>'It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry'</b>, an emblematic 'thin wild mercury sound'-era song, that period when genres seemed to be flowing through Dylan like water, and everything that came out of his pen and gob was effortlessly sublime. There are two moments in Dylan's career that will never be unsurpassed in terms of effortless cool. One is when Al Kooper rang Dylan (ultimately to resign from his touring band) and asked what he was up to. "I'm eating toast and listening to Smokey Robinson," replied Dylan. The other is in this song, when Bob's voice first casually joins the jaunty tune: "Well, I ride on a mail train, baby, can't buy a thrill," he offers, in a purposefully dismissive rejection of regressive folk norms. "Well, I been up all night, leanin' on the windowsill."<br /><br />
In Hyde Park, the song becomes the night's second legit blues jam, not as expansive (or lengthy) as 'Thunder on the Mountain', but with a relentless, lolloping beat that meshes astonishingly well with the song's hip, flip pronouncements: the mythos of Depression-era train-hopping filtered through the wired mind of a man busily shedding his hairshirt. In this bluesy guise, you could imagine it nestling between 'Workingman's Blues #2' and 'Beyond the Horizon' on <i>Modern Times</i>.<br /><br />
And that's your lot. It's the best I've seen Dylan for a decade. If you disagree, then I can only chastise you for your rank ingratitude.<br /><br />
Thanks for reading.<br /><br />
---<br /><br />
<b>Footnotes:</b><br /><br />
* "I dread to think what the others must be like, then!" is not good banter.<br />
** pun intended<br />
*** I suppose a rival would be the (somewhat risible and madly popular) 'Lay Lady Lay', the hit single from 1969's <i>Nashville Skyline</i><br /><br />
---<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-afa6wfnDzZE/XSnxTmFjO7I/AAAAAAAAIOE/S1xHi7wT2c0E6CLw54-IZoGhXLuDQCPtQCLcBGAs/s1600/download%2B%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-afa6wfnDzZE/XSnxTmFjO7I/AAAAAAAAIOE/S1xHi7wT2c0E6CLw54-IZoGhXLuDQCPtQCLcBGAs/s400/download%2B%25282%2529.jpg" width="400" height="289" data-original-width="264" data-original-height="191" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Setlist:</b><br /><br />
Ballad of a Thin Man<br />
It Ain't Me, Babe<br />
Highway 61 Revisited<br />
Simple Twist of Fate<br />
Can't Wait<br />
When I Paint My Masterpiece<br />
Honest With Me<br />
Tryin' to Get to Heaven<br />
Make You Feel My Love<br />
Pay in Blood<br />
Like a Rolling Stone<br />
Early Roman Kings<br />
Girl From the North Country<br />
Love Sick<br />
Thunder on the Mountain<br />
Soon After Midnight<br />
Gotta Serve Somebody<br /><br />
<b>Encore:</b><br />
Blowin' in the Wind<br />
It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to CryRick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com8London, UK51.5073509 -0.1277582999999822351.1912379 -0.77320529999998222 51.8234639 0.51768870000001777tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-75559993315396546202018-12-24T15:38:00.003+00:002018-12-28T09:24:34.263+00:00Review of 2018: Part 3 – MoviesSometimes I wonder if I may have seen all the good films. I know they keep on making new ones but they're either Marvel or <i>Zama</i> and <i>Roma</i>, and I mean, <i>come on</i>. I wonder too about the value of a movie list with the same 'best film of the year' as the Oscars, and <i>Pan's Labyrinth</i>h in its Deep Cuts folder, and yet here we are. Hopefully you'll learn something, but it may only be one thing.<br /><br />
I spent January and February watching and re-watching Orson Welles films (and then trailers and then TV episodes; I went far down the Welles Hole). <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/tag/orson-welles/diary/">If that's of interest, you can catch up here.</a><br /><br />
The previous two Review of 2018 blogs are about <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2018/12/review-of-2018-part-1-books.html">books</a> and <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2018/12/review-of-2017-part-2-live.html">live stuff</a>. And here are the previous film round-ups (the ones that are any good, anyway): <a href="https://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2012/12/review-of-2012.html">2012</a>, <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2013/12/review-of-2013-part-two-crazes-and.html">2013</a>, <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2014/12/review-of-2014.html">2014</a>, <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2015/12/review-of-2015-part-1-movies.html">2015</a>, <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2016/12/2016review1.html">2016</a> and <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2017/12/2017Movies.html">2017</a>.<br /><br />
<b>Top 10 of 2018</b><br /><br />
It wasn't the most thrilling year (I'm really scrabbling around for a #10 tbh), but we got there. Five classics, four imperfect knock-out blows and one relic of last year's film festival that for all its flaws had a certain something.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-s0URh0bELt0/XCD6UI5W05I/AAAAAAAAIJI/uo7YXqx39OYVUMvyjnaeChofozLVW4f5ACLcBGAs/s1600/screen-shot-2017-10-05-at-12-57-50-pm.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-s0URh0bELt0/XCD6UI5W05I/AAAAAAAAIJI/uo7YXqx39OYVUMvyjnaeChofozLVW4f5ACLcBGAs/s400/screen-shot-2017-10-05-at-12-57-50-pm.png" width="400" height="231" data-original-width="780" data-original-height="451" /></a><br /><br />
<b>10. BPM (Director: Robin Campillo)</b> – At its best, this confrontational, unsentimental but humanistic film has unexpected echoes of Melville's Army in the Shadows, which looked at action, division and necessity within the French Resistance, and I understand why it included so many sequences of illness and fucking, but those elements don't seem as interesting as the story it started to tell. When it returns to it in those final moments, loaded with the suffering and sadness of what's gone before, the results are admittedly astounding. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2017/10/LFF2017-P1.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/--MmdxiT1mY4/XCD7MD-XUaI/AAAAAAAAIJ4/dLqmeV0i4QYjrKgdFufMDELPiE4EGh6rACLcBGAs/s1600/On-Chesil-Beach-Location-Chesil-Beach.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/--MmdxiT1mY4/XCD7MD-XUaI/AAAAAAAAIJ4/dLqmeV0i4QYjrKgdFufMDELPiE4EGh6rACLcBGAs/s400/On-Chesil-Beach-Location-Chesil-Beach.jpg" width="400" height="267" data-original-width="1000" data-original-height="667" /></a><br /><br />
<b>9. On Chesil Beach (Dominic Cooke)</b> – For almost its entire length, this adaptation of Ian McEwan's 2007 novella is close to perfect: the beautifully-modulated, restrained story of a strait-laced couple in the still strait-laced early '60s who look back on their often idyllic courtship from the claustrophobic environs of their honeymoon suite. If only they'd ended it there. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2017/10/LFF2017-P2.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-14ceIUEIXic/XCD6ccqmYdI/AAAAAAAAIJM/KI3RrsVQkmY8ENEyqfe_wxjJP-YRGJmDgCLcBGAs/s1600/I-Tonya-13.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-14ceIUEIXic/XCD6ccqmYdI/AAAAAAAAIJM/KI3RrsVQkmY8ENEyqfe_wxjJP-YRGJmDgCLcBGAs/s400/I-Tonya-13.jpg" width="400" height="170" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="680" /></a><br /><br />
<b>8. I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie)</b> – A dynamic, polemical retelling of a story that’s always fascinated me. The film’s great gamble is the blackly comic tone, and it works superbly, while never blunting the story’s harrowing edge. It’s only in the caper-ish, somewhat longwinded treatment leading up to the pivotal ‘incident’ that the movie errs, before kicking in hard again at the end. Who knew that Steven Rogers, the writer of weak, mawkish rom-coms, had this in his locker?! As everyone has said, Robbie is terrific, while the sequences on the ice are genuinely dazzling.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-whcUF4bsytE/XCD7WcPSYHI/AAAAAAAAIKE/9W2e8y7ZYJwYxbipYdi2Q7NWeydInG5gACLcBGAs/s1600/10199434-3x2-700x467.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-whcUF4bsytE/XCD7WcPSYHI/AAAAAAAAIKE/9W2e8y7ZYJwYxbipYdi2Q7NWeydInG5gACLcBGAs/s400/10199434-3x2-700x467.jpg" width="400" height="267" data-original-width="700" data-original-height="467" /></a><br /><br />
<b>7. You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay)</b> – Well what did you think a Lynne Ramsay noir with Joaquin Phoenix as a hitman would be like? Ramsay can write great dialogue, but with a Hitchcockian desire to tell stories using just pictures, that visual imagination – CCTV action sequence ftw! – and her matchless ear for apposite pop music, she rarely needs it. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2017/10/LFF2017-P2.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-U2AOxrJmRXQ/XCD6kppuKTI/AAAAAAAAIJY/0rfpcR9oNpkAzEfTw6NphvrDETyadT-7gCLcBGAs/s1600/Shoplifters-3-1600x900-c-default.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-U2AOxrJmRXQ/XCD6kppuKTI/AAAAAAAAIJY/0rfpcR9oNpkAzEfTw6NphvrDETyadT-7gCLcBGAs/s400/Shoplifters-3-1600x900-c-default.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="900" /></a><br /><br />
<b>6. Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-eda)</b> – An almighty assault on the emotions in the tradition of <i>Bicycle Thieves</i> and <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2014/07/mick-travis-how-to-train-your-dragon-2.html">Forbidden Games</a></i>, though its inevitability is cloaked in surprises – and charm. Beautifully observed and filmed in the most extraordinarily tactile manner, with fine performances all round; Lily Franky is astonishingly good.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-olnBlr39jNY/XCD7fUfWU5I/AAAAAAAAIKM/AkAHcJxRh2Ic5-KhxIZN8WYcrCDeXAdmQCLcBGAs/s1600/lady-cooper-bradley-cooper-a-star-is-born.gif" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-olnBlr39jNY/XCD7fUfWU5I/AAAAAAAAIKM/AkAHcJxRh2Ic5-KhxIZN8WYcrCDeXAdmQCLcBGAs/s400/lady-cooper-bradley-cooper-a-star-is-born.gif" width="400" height="163" data-original-width="540" data-original-height="220" /></a><br /><br />
<b>5. A Star Is Born (Bradley Cooper)</b> – The best version of this story for 64 years. There’s the odd wrong note in the script – you could write books on its sexual politics and rock v pop posturing, not all of them positive – but it’s still something special, thrumming with emotional charge, crackling with chemistry. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/a-star-is-born-2018/">More here.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FqG-VHdGhYk/XCD6rr2rFTI/AAAAAAAAIJc/pnkA5A42c48K6rPPQ8RKR7NBtJ_4E90kACLcBGAs/s1600/Lady-Bird-rotten-tomatoes.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FqG-VHdGhYk/XCD6rr2rFTI/AAAAAAAAIJc/pnkA5A42c48K6rPPQ8RKR7NBtJ_4E90kACLcBGAs/s400/Lady-Bird-rotten-tomatoes.jpg" width="400" height="171" data-original-width="700" data-original-height="300" /></a><br /><br />
<b>4. Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig)</b> – Greta Gerwig: Origins. An unsentimental, painful, deceptively lyrical debut.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zIk1_Xp7e3k/XCD7pNpChnI/AAAAAAAAIKU/GAOJrGBI6SQGkkZSOiPwW2X7VxFIIA9sgCLcBGAs/s1600/bogdanovich.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zIk1_Xp7e3k/XCD7pNpChnI/AAAAAAAAIKU/GAOJrGBI6SQGkkZSOiPwW2X7VxFIIA9sgCLcBGAs/s400/bogdanovich.jpg" width="400" height="293" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="366" /></a><br />
<i>"Our revels now are ended..."</i><br /><br />
<b>3. The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles)</b> – The first new Orson Welles film for 40 years, which was something I could look forward to for 10 months of 2018. And when it arrived, in a blur of bad Twitter takes about authorship and misogny, it truly delivered: as a maddening, daring, relentless, repetitive, often dazzling examination of creativity, cinematic artifice and Welles himself. Not just the director's self-destructiveness, myth-making and Falstaffian relationship with protégé Peter Bogdanovich (playing a barely fictionalised version of himself), but also the conflicts raging within him: his outsider posturing but need to belong, a buried tendency towards homoeroticism, the battle between art and commerce (at a time when art was <i>becoming</i> commerce, and vice versa) that had sunk him back in 1942. All of that filmed across six years, much of it in a Hollywood mansion peopled by the wizened faces of his old stock company and the directors that had usurped the old order. The passages that Welles edited himself – including the best sex scene ever put on celluloid – are utterly dazzling; despite the remarkable work done in completing the film, pure genius has a way of standing out.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ad9Khy8rhRI/XCD6-bm15iI/AAAAAAAAIJw/2s70glB1buotgMSk0MzUrAspOO-aVcjkACLcBGAs/s1600/a-fantastic-woman1.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ad9Khy8rhRI/XCD6-bm15iI/AAAAAAAAIJw/2s70glB1buotgMSk0MzUrAspOO-aVcjkACLcBGAs/s400/a-fantastic-woman1.jpg" width="400" height="210" data-original-width="1200" data-original-height="630" /></a><br /><br />
<b>2. A Fantastic Woman (Sebastián Lelio)</b> – Vega has the most fascinating face and the camera makes the most of it, not least in a dazzling nightclub sequence that moves from pain to sensuality to a fantasy dance number, but there's such depth to her characterisation too, and the film's refusal to give her easy, sassy victories is uniquely satisfying, grappling profoundly and humanely with issues that are both specific and universal. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2017/10/LFF2017-P2.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yrEQ90kD7Zw/XCD7E3h-EBI/AAAAAAAAIJ0/QcswTtDF-S0tLTM_6aruAohjPYgShyctwCLcBGAs/s1600/shape.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yrEQ90kD7Zw/XCD7E3h-EBI/AAAAAAAAIJ0/QcswTtDF-S0tLTM_6aruAohjPYgShyctwCLcBGAs/s400/shape.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="1000" data-original-height="563" /></a><br /><br />
<b>1. The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro)</b> – A sci-fi, a horror, a monster movie, a romance, a Cold War thriller, and a history lesson about Alice Faye: this genre-bender is many things, but above all it's an emotional experience, a clear-sighted, glowing-hearted picture with some of the most beautiful imagery and a performance I'm going to be rhapsodising about for weeks, months, years. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2017/10/LFF2017-P2.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>14 'discoveries' of 2018</b><br /><br />
... being the best old things I hadn't seen before this year.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xlhMGopARv8/XCD77FbSwNI/AAAAAAAAIKg/UQDC6FmWRPo18UOwvCBOn-_Mop6bEg02gCLcBGAs/s1600/flynn.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xlhMGopARv8/XCD77FbSwNI/AAAAAAAAIKg/UQDC6FmWRPo18UOwvCBOn-_Mop6bEg02gCLcBGAs/s400/flynn.jpg" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="450" data-original-height="338" /></a><br /><br />
<b>The Dawn Patrol (Edmund Goulding, 1938)</b> – My pick of the year, an unexpectedly terrific anti-war film (though its polemicising isn’t perfect), about WWI flyers facing impossible odds – and for what? Niven, Rathbone and Crisp are all excellent in this understated, intensely moving movie, though it’s Flynn who leaves the greatest impression, as a carousing but stiff-upper-lipped flyboy suddenly shackled by responsibility, and flirting with despair. He was never better. Only complaint: almost all the action and even several scenes of dialogue are lifted from Howard Hawks’ 1930 original. Perhaps only Capra’s <i>Riding High</i> ever recycled footage so flagrantly/stingily.<br /><br />
<b>The films of Alan Rudolph: <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/choose-me/">Choose Me (1984)</a>, <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-moderns/">The Moderns (1988)</a>, <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/mrs-parker-and-the-vicious-circle/">Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994)</a></b> – Yes, reader, I found a new director to investigate, with thrilling results. Short reviews via those links. Here's how I started the one of <i>Choose Me</i>: "Sex and madness, Alan Rudolph style, as a group of unhappy souls in a pink-skied, neon-lit netherworld engage in fleeting erotic encounters..."<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bfGKxWLUjOI/XCD8EEVwH1I/AAAAAAAAIKk/Qy416basimkIvDx8AOKG2N3zyPVzDYr1gCLcBGAs/s1600/6036308_orig.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bfGKxWLUjOI/XCD8EEVwH1I/AAAAAAAAIKk/Qy416basimkIvDx8AOKG2N3zyPVzDYr1gCLcBGAs/s400/6036308_orig.jpg" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="720" data-original-height="540" /></a><br /><br />
<b>The Song of Bernadette (Henry King, 1943)</b> – A beautiful film about Bernadette of Lourdes – from back when Fox doing religion meant faith, gentleness and visual poetry, not private healthcare, intolerance and assault rifles. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-song-of-bernadette/">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<b>Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)</b> – Magical Del Toro film, in the tradition of <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2013/12/joan-crawford-nebraska-and.html">Spirit of the Beehive</a></i> and <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2016/09/fathers-and-daughters-at-bfi-reviews-243.html">El Sur</a></i>, about a young Spanish girl (Ivana Baqueiro) negotiating the horrors of war by passing into a fantasy world. Lyrical, moving and humanistic – but also shockingly and viscerally violent, existing almost entirely in the chilling real world, with mere doses of escapism. The director revisited many of its themes and touch points in <i>The Shape of Water</i> (see above), another haunting, beautiful movie about the collision between innocence and brutality.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5TggV9xb6z8/XCD8Kb_nZxI/AAAAAAAAIKo/visTsvFC1GY-ChFRhs8yONMf-oOgIKTzQCLcBGAs/s1600/554245-universal_pictures_home_ent.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5TggV9xb6z8/XCD8Kb_nZxI/AAAAAAAAIKo/visTsvFC1GY-ChFRhs8yONMf-oOgIKTzQCLcBGAs/s400/554245-universal_pictures_home_ent.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="1100" data-original-height="618" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)</b> – So cinematic. A white-hot Lee polemic, masquerading (at first) as a slice-of-life drama. It nods to <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2015/10/joel-mccrea-night-of-hunter-and.html">Night of the Hunter</a></i> and Welles’ <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-trial/">The Trial</a></i>, but it’s conspicuously in communion with its times, and the unwanted touchstones of the contemporary African-American experience, Tawana Brawley to Howard Beach. Full of humanity, anger and pizza. My subsequent adventures in Lee have been mixed: I loved She's Gotta Have It, in all its scuzzy imperfection, until its hero sexually assaulted his ex-girlfriend and we were supposed to cheer along.<br /><br />
<b>Best of Enemies (Robert Morgan and Gordon Neville, 2015)</b> – A superb doc about the 1968 TV debates between influential Conservative commentator William F. Buckley and his arch nemesis (at least at this time), flamboyantly gay, left-leaning novelist Gore Vidal. It's brilliantly put together, though what makes it most thrilling is simply the raw footage of two intellectual behemoths going at it hammer and tongs. For all you want Vidal to triumph, Buckley is often on top, though watching Vidal needle someone until they explode is my new favourite spectator sport... and the pay-off is unforgettable. I've since read two books about Buckley and none about Vidal, so who's the real winner?<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7S9yABzn3TE/XCD8RE1KBqI/AAAAAAAAIKw/fR4Julyvbz0BirDEvj5IL2tumHCxod3BQCLcBGAs/s1600/all-night-long-mcgoohan.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7S9yABzn3TE/XCD8RE1KBqI/AAAAAAAAIKw/fR4Julyvbz0BirDEvj5IL2tumHCxod3BQCLcBGAs/s400/all-night-long-mcgoohan.png" width="400" height="238" data-original-width="672" data-original-height="400" /></a><br /><br />
<b>All Night Long (Basil Dearden, 1962)</b> – ‘60s London jazz Othello? Yes please. McGoohan’s the standout as Iago, drummer ‘Johnny Cousin’. Only the climax disappoints.<br /><br />
<b>The Power and the Glory (William K. Howard, 1933)</b> – Terrific Preston Sturges script about a working class industrialist (Spencer Tracy) whose controversial personal and professional lives are revealed in flashback. This one’s often cited as a key inspiration on Citizen Kane, but in truth, the similarities are fairly superficial. It’s a superb movie on its own terms, though, with a maturity, complexity and lack of moral judgement that’s really refreshing, and a panache in the storytelling that’s way ahead of its time, its human secrets gradually revealed, and the individual scenes imaginatively devised. Tracy is excellent. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-power-and-the-glory/">Slightly longer review.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lHhWS97YTjQ/XCD8YxYMKRI/AAAAAAAAIK4/x6W4HKarTlcfBVZcYq6S7E9weCkRFIalACLcBGAs/s1600/what-we-do-in-the-shadows.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lHhWS97YTjQ/XCD8YxYMKRI/AAAAAAAAIK4/x6W4HKarTlcfBVZcYq6S7E9weCkRFIalACLcBGAs/s400/what-we-do-in-the-shadows.png" width="400" height="255" data-original-width="807" data-original-height="515" /></a><br /><br />
<b>What We Do in the Shadows (Taika Waititi, 2014)</b> – Disarmingly funny and original. This mockumentary about vampires (and werewolves) is full of well-sketched characters, and opens up its story in intelligent ways, but beyond all that it just made me laugh a lot.<br /><br />
<b>Piccadilly (E. A. Dupont, 1929)</b> – Pictorially striking silent, set in the clubs, dives and slums of London, with an electrifying performance from Anna May Wong as a sultry Chinese dancer whose moves make men knife each other. Director Dupont seems more interested in character and atmosphere than the thin, ultimately melodramatic story, and I’m with him, though the elements touching on race are quite interesting. Try to see <i>Piccadilly</i> with Neil Brand’s infectious jazz score if you can, music that matches the film’s energy, cynicism and modernity.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5WPMDArNVhc/XCD8l6HXIBI/AAAAAAAAILE/PZr82JvGFJYYWxF4l8fKykXAUL0nkGXmwCLcBGAs/s1600/Screen-Shot-2017-01-04-at-1.54.29-AM-695x347%2B%25281%2529.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5WPMDArNVhc/XCD8l6HXIBI/AAAAAAAAILE/PZr82JvGFJYYWxF4l8fKykXAUL0nkGXmwCLcBGAs/s400/Screen-Shot-2017-01-04-at-1.54.29-AM-695x347%2B%25281%2529.png" width="400" height="200" data-original-width="695" data-original-height="348" /></a><br /><br />
<b>20th Century Women (Mike Mills, 2016)</b> – They’re saying ‘menstruation’ wrong. But this film about women, written by a man, directed by a man, starring a boy, is insightful and interesting and only occasionally very irritating. As usual, Greta Gerwig is much better than everybody else, even when dealing with some of Mills' heaviest indie affectations.<br /><br />
<b>Lola Montès (Max Ophüls, 1955) (Cinema)</b> – Everything Ophüls does to tell this story works, even if the story itself doesn’t. If you get the chance to see it on the big screen: leap. Otherwise, perhaps leave it, as without its grandiose visual sumptuousness there's not an enormous amount to embrace.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-torYyW2u_gc/XCD8zWcjm4I/AAAAAAAAILQ/IZH5rClR2FcUWbTJzfCCXD6lEcV5YUyagCLcBGAs/s1600/MV5BNjMyNDkwMDctMmZhZS00YjY4LWE0Y2QtZDFlYjYyYjEzY2Y4XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjE5MzM3MjA%2540._V1_.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-torYyW2u_gc/XCD8zWcjm4I/AAAAAAAAILQ/IZH5rClR2FcUWbTJzfCCXD6lEcV5YUyagCLcBGAs/s400/MV5BNjMyNDkwMDctMmZhZS00YjY4LWE0Y2QtZDFlYjYyYjEzY2Y4XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjE5MzM3MjA%2540._V1_.jpg" width="400" height="169" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="677" /></a><br />
<i>Jack Nicholson during those halcyon days (1969-74) when he did some acting.</i><br /><br />
<b>Carnal Knowledge (Mike Nichols, 1971)</b> – A fascinating, distinctive New Hollywood film about sex, self and the death of love, which is steeped in macho despair, as well as a horror at what it reaps. Everyone in the film is great, though having Jack Nicholson (34) and Art Garfunkel (30) play the 18-year-old versions of their characters, nervous about touching a boob, does take a little getting used to. Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, Jules Feiffer, it’s probably not for everyone – talky, weirdly-paced, and as much about its characters as their times – but I found it really interesting: one of those movies that you fear might add up to nothing, then find yourself chewing over for days.<br /><br />
<b>The Holly and the Ivy (George More O'Ferrall, 1952)</b> – A literate British ensemble drama with a great cast; a little stagy and cheap-looking, but exhibiting considerable compensations. It’s the story of a family regathering in a Norfolk village at Christmas. They are Irish parson Ralph Richardson, his children – a damaged fashion journalist (Margaret Leighton), an aimless soldier (Denholm Elliott) and the live-in daughter who wants to spread her wings (Celia Johnson) – a couple of grandparents and a godfather. Over Christmas they’ll quietly tear one another apart and be born anew, so it’s hardly festive fluff, but it’s all the better for that. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-holly-and-the-ivy/">Full review.</a><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
I kept it short and sweet this year. Like I say, the books blog is generally the best one, but hopefully you found something halfway decent that you can watch in 2019. Thanks for reading.Rick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com1London, UK51.5073509 -0.1277582999999822351.1912379 -0.77320529999998222 51.8234639 0.51768870000001777tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-75848504271320214342018-12-23T21:34:00.000+00:002019-06-10T12:51:50.272+01:00Review of 2018: Part 2 – LiveThis part focuses on LIVE things: mostly music and theatre. Part one (the best part) was about books, <a href="https://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2018/12/review-of-2018-part-1-books.html">you can read that here.</a> Without additional ado, here goes:<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2BTBwW4makw/XCDMtj8QrWI/AAAAAAAAIHI/3VgKi8BsiRsyA5X_2trgQirvQAawfNO8QCLcBGAs/s1600/susanne-sundfor.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2BTBwW4makw/XCDMtj8QrWI/AAAAAAAAIHI/3VgKi8BsiRsyA5X_2trgQirvQAawfNO8QCLcBGAs/s400/susanne-sundfor.jpg" width="400" height="281" data-original-width="968" data-original-height="681" /></a><br /><br />
2018 had its challenges, but its artistic compensations too. If my seven-year-old self could have seen me in the staff box as <b>Morrissey</b> played 'Everyday Is Like Sunday', he would have first asked whether I'd already retired as a footballer, then asked me to explain exactly how my job was a job, and then felt curiously proud. It was a pinch-yourself moment, of which I've been lucky to have many. I may not see eye-to-eye with Mozza on Anne-Marie Waters, but we'll always have Viva Hate. Most of it, anyway. Not 'Bengali in Platforms'. <a href="https://twitter.com/rickburin/status/1045303886528094210">I saw <b>Lynne Ramsey</b> talk about <i>Morvern Callar</i> </a> (her reaction to seeing the movie for the first time since release, "What a weird fucking film"), <b>Sally Rooney</b> talk about Conversations with Friends, and <b>Tom Courtenay</b> get heckled by opponents of the 1960 Education Act during a seminar on Woodfall's kitchen sink cycle. The world seems to have moved on from stand-up <b>Bridget Christie</b>, judging by the words of friends and the empty seats, which is a shame, as she is better than ever and better than anyone else. I was invited to <b>Edith Bowman</b>'s Soundtracking with Lenny Abrahamson, lured to the 2018 Panzini Lectures – blank space has never been so much fun – and dragged others to <b>Elis James and John Robins</b>' book tour. Is watching a man drunkenly planking while his friend recreates the whole of Freddie Mercury's Live Aid set in mime entertaining? I'm still not sure, but I <i>think</i> it is.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>Gigs of the year:</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xyAfQWWg97Q/XCDaImx_fUI/AAAAAAAAIII/IwJ11uURXTod6Ee2cTiqc5k8zvboW4EywCLcBGAs/s1600/rah_46841978227.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xyAfQWWg97Q/XCDaImx_fUI/AAAAAAAAIII/IwJ11uURXTod6Ee2cTiqc5k8zvboW4EywCLcBGAs/s400/rah_46841978227.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="1280" data-original-height="720" /></a><br />
<i>This man was not in attendance.</i><br /><br />
<b>10. A Celebration of John Williams/Star Wars: A New Hope in Concert (Royal Albert Hall)</b> – Don't worry, they won't <i>all</i> be things that took place in my office and for which I was responsible for the PR. Just three of the first four, and then the #2. The Williams show was originally 'An Evening with John Williams' and then became 'An Evening without John Williams' as he was regrettably checked into hospital while preparing for the show in London. This created an awful lot of work for the Hall's handsome Press Manager, but we found enough Blitz Spirit that wasn't already being used for Brexit to rally round and win the day. I say 'we', it was mostly the London Symphony Orchestra and substitute conductor Dirk Brossé. It was a hell of a night: poignant, nostalgic, life-affirming, with one great piece of music after another: a triumphant <i>Superman</i>, a lilting, heartbreaking <i>Schindler's List</i>. No-one sounds quite like this orchestra. They were back the following month to accompany the original Star Wars (well, the '97 version) in full: as the two suns rose over Tatooine, the LSO rose to meet them.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uSRgUd5F3Xs/XCDaFow5rkI/AAAAAAAAIHk/Pt0GioMDZ0srR5xkJx112xvy9XpAyfU0wCLcBGAs/s1600/Haim-05-Mango_SergioAlbert-1024x682.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uSRgUd5F3Xs/XCDaFow5rkI/AAAAAAAAIHk/Pt0GioMDZ0srR5xkJx112xvy9XpAyfU0wCLcBGAs/s400/Haim-05-Mango_SergioAlbert-1024x682.jpg" width="400" height="266" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="682" /></a><br /><br />
<b>9. HAIM (Alexandra Palace)</b> – Being a HAIM fan is like being in a cool gang where everyone is really nice. Support came from Maggie Rogers, who rocked up on stage wearing a cape and got increasingly less interesting.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-U0m-PQik2zc/XCDaF25LeiI/AAAAAAAAIHo/JuxsEExmI8UXvfG-miIPYcjGePK0UriUwCLcBGAs/s1600/MV5BMjE0MTY5MDE4NF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNDQ4NjQzNDM%2540._V1_%2B%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-U0m-PQik2zc/XCDaF25LeiI/AAAAAAAAIHo/JuxsEExmI8UXvfG-miIPYcjGePK0UriUwCLcBGAs/s400/MV5BMjE0MTY5MDE4NF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNDQ4NjQzNDM%2540._V1_%2B%25281%2529.jpg" width="400" height="310" data-original-width="1200" data-original-height="929" /></a><br /><br />
<b>8. The Snowman (Royal Albert Hall)</b> – I watch this every Christmas. For me it <i>is</i> Christmas, though it was only this year that I realised its ending is a metaphor for Christmas as a grown-up – or at least can be. I watched it with thousands of children, and the Royal Philharmonic playing the music live, and the moment when it becomes clear (after a little ingenious use of perspective) that The Snowman and Young David Bowie are flying was as exalting as ever. The kids loved the show, though despite the neat jokes (pineapple nose!), the bit they laughed at most was when the boy gets changed out of his pyjamas and you see his bum. (Technically this was <a href="https://www.royalalberthall.com/tickets/events/2018/the-snowman-and-paddington-bear/">the second half of a show</a>, but it was on in the middle of the afternoon and I do have to do <i>some</i> work.)<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zFFDSJvPLv8/XCDaITVsscI/AAAAAAAAIIE/XJv14fvAos0y9PvU_wiA2jyJ6rI7YtWTQCLcBGAs/s1600/rah_39537159612.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zFFDSJvPLv8/XCDaITVsscI/AAAAAAAAIIE/XJv14fvAos0y9PvU_wiA2jyJ6rI7YtWTQCLcBGAs/s400/rah_39537159612.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="1280" data-original-height="720" /></a><br />
<i>This is actually from the 2016 performance, don't tell anyone.</i><br /><br />
<b>7. Guy Barker's Big Band Christmas (Royal Albert Hall)</b> – This is one of my favourite things we do, and now an indispensable part of my Christmas. Paloma Faith turned up in a Big Hat, but as ever the incomparable Vanessa Haynes stole the show. She is our Aretha and I still don't understand how she isn't the biggest star in the world.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QtTtgCWFCUc/XCDaERWm4BI/AAAAAAAAIHU/EnW8vnBVS8oW17D9SKCvkZiQ_JJDwqr6wCLcBGAs/s1600/3.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QtTtgCWFCUc/XCDaERWm4BI/AAAAAAAAIHU/EnW8vnBVS8oW17D9SKCvkZiQ_JJDwqr6wCLcBGAs/s400/3.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="768" data-original-height="432" /></a><br />
<i>Still not quite sure about this publicity shot tbh.</i><br /><br />
<b>6. Paul Brady and Andy Irvine (Barbican Centre)</b> – It's not every day you get to see one of your all-time favourite records played live, long after you thought any such opportunity must have passed. The first half was deep cuts and obscurities, the second half that immortal debut album, featuring Irvine's 'Bonny Woodhall' and Brady's immortal 'Arthur McBride', up there with the best seven minutes of my year.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZjV76ZJp3uU/XCDaFEOn7KI/AAAAAAAAIHg/hREmswxw3r04wjvmQz4Odj5bkJmWrS_-QCLcBGAs/s1600/DePNuFKWkAAwVwT.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZjV76ZJp3uU/XCDaFEOn7KI/AAAAAAAAIHg/hREmswxw3r04wjvmQz4Odj5bkJmWrS_-QCLcBGAs/s400/DePNuFKWkAAwVwT.jpg" width="400" height="229" data-original-width="937" data-original-height="536" /></a><br />
<i>Somewhere in there is Bjӧrk.</i><br /><br />
<b>5. All Points East: Bjӧrk and Father John Misty (Victoria Park)</b> – I returned to the fray of the 'outdoor gig' after six years, irresistibly tempted by the two headliners. Neither were as good as the last time I saw them (<a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2016/09/review-bjork-at-royal-albert-hall.html">Bjӧrk in 2016</a>, <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2017/11/misty.html">Misty last year</a>), but those were some unscalable bars. Her absurd sets, magical soundscapes and conga of flautists, and his stripped-back singer-songwriter shtick made for <a href="https://twitter.com/rickburin/status/1000869782961434624">a lovely night</a>. Highlights: 'Isobel' and 'Holy Shit'. And the queues for the loos weren't too bad at all.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZMGxovqfgsg/XCDb_pSgI4I/AAAAAAAAIIw/lKYOXoOEVQQCDk7Sn-lSfFRBRAvMEEX_wCLcBGAs/s1600/YMCA.PNG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZMGxovqfgsg/XCDb_pSgI4I/AAAAAAAAIIw/lKYOXoOEVQQCDk7Sn-lSfFRBRAvMEEX_wCLcBGAs/s400/YMCA.PNG" width="400" height="232" data-original-width="1142" data-original-height="663" /></a><br /><br />
<b>4. David Ford presents Milk and Cookies 2018 (Bush Hall)</b> – With #s 8 and 7, think of this as the third part of an informal trilogy of Christmas musical traditions, in which Eastbourne's finest digs out the charity buckets, lays off the songs about dashed dreams and macro-economics, and cranks up his guitar for a succession of unmissable covers. This year's highlights included a heartbreaking piano-led take on Lionel Richie's 'Hello', a gorgeous 'God Only Knows' and an uproarious 'Go Your Own Way', <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25KN0l-87nc">before he made his peace with 'YMCA' (once his punchline in a muddled interview with Rolling Stone) in thrilling, climactic fashion</a>. There was space for his own material too, including a metal-ish freakout to 'Requiem'.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mvZmbaCeYaM/XCDeLG42I2I/AAAAAAAAII8/3zn2JLJJ8YMS-tBdwpd4XhAU7QNLQrMiACLcBGAs/s1600/methode_times_prod_web_bin_2c59c25c-e8e7-11e8-b4e6-5632a3a9d8ab.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mvZmbaCeYaM/XCDeLG42I2I/AAAAAAAAII8/3zn2JLJJ8YMS-tBdwpd4XhAU7QNLQrMiACLcBGAs/s400/methode_times_prod_web_bin_2c59c25c-e8e7-11e8-b4e6-5632a3a9d8ab.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="685" data-original-height="385" /></a><br /><br />
<b>3. Courtney Barnett (Brixton Academy)</b> was blistering and brilliant: intense and heavy and heart-open, warts-and-all joyous. Go get her new record – her best yet – and I'll see you there next time.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4452tQyegbo/XCDaH1vjgTI/AAAAAAAAIH8/3DLladNbkdAsufe6iiyxNHpu4IYfvDmSgCLcBGAs/s1600/nin.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4452tQyegbo/XCDaH1vjgTI/AAAAAAAAIH8/3DLladNbkdAsufe6iiyxNHpu4IYfvDmSgCLcBGAs/s400/nin.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="1280" data-original-height="720" /></a><br /><br />
<b>2. Nine Inch Nails (Royal Albert Hall)</b> – Fourteen years ago I came down from Manchester on the £1 Megabus to see my first gig in London: Nine Inch Nails at Brixton Academy. This time I got to promote the show. That's not a humblebrag, it's just a brag. I knew this would be great, but not how confrontational and brutal and majestic the new material would sound against the old. Amidst songs from The Downward Spiral and The Fragile, the absolute stand-out was a relentless, furious 'Copy of A'. Sensational light show too: <a href="https://d15v4l58k2n80w.cloudfront.net/file/1396975600/49208363865/width=800/height=500/format=-1/fit=crop/crop=0x208+4971x3106/rev=2/t=425048/e=never/k=ec3df51c/NIN%20RAH%20100.jpg">snapping timers casting rhythmic, perverse and iconic shadows</a>.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YSDZsHA32yQ/XCDaIijfz8I/AAAAAAAAIIM/kzhNyzxcG1c6i40i0OIbLwc_sY-sEUJ9gCLcBGAs/s1600/susanne-sundfor-barbican-0.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YSDZsHA32yQ/XCDaIijfz8I/AAAAAAAAIIM/kzhNyzxcG1c6i40i0OIbLwc_sY-sEUJ9gCLcBGAs/s400/susanne-sundfor-barbican-0.jpg" width="400" height="267" data-original-width="968" data-original-height="645" /></a><br /><br />
<b>1. Susanne Sundfør: Music for People in Trouble AV (Barbican Centre)</b> – She just gets better and better. A suite of 11 songs, staged with a deceptively tricksy, pixie-ish sense of fun (the whole band dressed alike in hooded black capes, behind a mesh of projections, so Sundfør will be apparently sat behind a guitar at stage left, then pop up at the piano on the far side), but with a greater emotional heft than any gig I have been to in years. The album, and the show, begin with the quiet naïve simplicity of 'Mantra' and build, via 'Undercover' (the song of the decade), to the towering, escalating wall of sound that is 'Mountaineers'. An utterly singular experience that for an hour takes you out of the world, and then allows you to live in it a little more happily.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>Theatre of the year...</b><br /><br />
... is quite a grand title considering I've only seen a dozen things, but here are my six favourites.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Icalimpki-4/XCDaGeHPx0I/AAAAAAAAIHw/JE85BS6Wd1MLEKUUVGh4Vk20Vnw8PfYFgCLcBGAs/s1600/ben-whishaw-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Icalimpki-4/XCDaGeHPx0I/AAAAAAAAIHw/JE85BS6Wd1MLEKUUVGh4Vk20Vnw8PfYFgCLcBGAs/s400/ben-whishaw-1.jpg" width="400" height="281" data-original-width="968" data-original-height="681" /></a><br /><br />
<b>6. Julius Caesar (Bridge Theatre)</b> – My artistic appreciation of this production was hampered by having an overloaded kidney and a back spasm, meaning that Caesar was the only person who came out of this play worse than me... but through wincing eyes and a cloud of codeine I found much to love, especially the heartstopping 'Et tu, Brute?' set-piece, a sequence so profoundly moving that it has led me to stop using the phrase as a joke. The acting was variable and the Trumpian trappings a fairly unconvincing gimmick, but at its best it made Shakespeare new.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-l3IL0chLEOU/XCDaEPVHr2I/AAAAAAAAIHc/Q5RALWrBrYod3HCtzjn5Y2o6YnmRdZ5ZACLcBGAs/s1600/2-Current-cast-in-Witness-for-the-Prosecution-at-London-County-Hall.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-l3IL0chLEOU/XCDaEPVHr2I/AAAAAAAAIHc/Q5RALWrBrYod3HCtzjn5Y2o6YnmRdZ5ZACLcBGAs/s400/2-Current-cast-in-Witness-for-the-Prosecution-at-London-County-Hall.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="640" data-original-height="360" /></a><br /><br />
<b>5. Witness for the Prosecution (County Hall)</b> – As purely entertaining as anything I saw this year: a cleverly-staged production of the Agatha Christie story (memorably filmed by Billy Wilder in 1957): never profound or touched by genius, but remarkably enjoyable. It seems I can live without genius now and then.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-F2ndpsx8dIg/XCDaGA29tOI/AAAAAAAAIHs/9PPQIWg5eeoqNBDcYZ8cwKASnaeuCJ2mgCLcBGAs/s1600/Meow-Meow-as-Miss-Adelaide-in-Guys-and-Dolls.-Credit-Roy-Tan-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-F2ndpsx8dIg/XCDaGA29tOI/AAAAAAAAIHs/9PPQIWg5eeoqNBDcYZ8cwKASnaeuCJ2mgCLcBGAs/s400/Meow-Meow-as-Miss-Adelaide-in-Guys-and-Dolls.-Credit-Roy-Tan-2.jpg" width="400" height="267" data-original-width="1500" data-original-height="1000" /></a><br /><br />
<b>4. Guys and Dolls in Concert (Royal Albert Hall)</b> – I'm glad this was good, as I spent about a month working intensively on press for the show and we convinced lots of people to attend. Its abridged nature slightly undercut the play's emotional impact, but the numbers were astonishingly good. Clive Rowe's reprisal of his Olivier-winning role as Nicely Nicely meant that a show-stopping 'Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat' was guaranteed, Adrian Lester's 'Luck Be a Lady' was great fun and director Stephen Mear's take on the 'Crapshooters' Ballet' was inspired, but it was Australian cabaret star Meow Meow who absolutely stole the show, shrinking the Hall's notably large stage with her mammoth talent, presence and charisma.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-heQdCmlISkA/XCDaHwqkVhI/AAAAAAAAIIA/ASbe1brwDrQb35N2GeqpOyJkHHouU5xTgCLcBGAs/s1600/othello.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-heQdCmlISkA/XCDaHwqkVhI/AAAAAAAAIIA/ASbe1brwDrQb35N2GeqpOyJkHHouU5xTgCLcBGAs/s400/othello.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="1000" data-original-height="563" /></a><br />
<i>It's-a-me, Iago!</i><br /><br />
<b>3. Othello (The Globe)</b>, in which Mark Rylance (as Iago), manages to play the first half of the play almost exclusively for laughs. Genuinely. Rather than wickedness, Iago's evasiveness commences (at least in appearance) as a kind of shameless, confounded innocence – and his plotting as a clever caper – somehow dragging us to his side. Then he starts to drip cruel and complex villainy, all the time looking like Super Mario. Sheila Atim, as a bullish, knowing Emelia, is excellent in support too. The best five quid I've spent since the Merlin Premier League 1993-4 sticker album.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GFvSxZPdREc/XCDaEGVGXaI/AAAAAAAAIHY/QMv1kuDFJ7oF-rlEd7X0-kxfedsE8LSJgCLcBGAs/s1600/Andrew-Scott_Photo-Kevin-Cummins_KC_3724-700x455.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GFvSxZPdREc/XCDaEGVGXaI/AAAAAAAAIHY/QMv1kuDFJ7oF-rlEd7X0-kxfedsE8LSJgCLcBGAs/s400/Andrew-Scott_Photo-Kevin-Cummins_KC_3724-700x455.jpg" width="400" height="260" data-original-width="700" data-original-height="455" /></a><br /><br />
<b>2. The Sea Wall (The Old Vic)</b> – Andrew Scott stands on an otherwise empty stage for half an hour and breaks our hearts. Theatre at its most primal, modern and moving.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uogWYMY-ZJM/XCDaI2MmotI/AAAAAAAAIIQ/g9LAVwMUIXoRGPCTYiGT_rSG476Sy9jUwCLcBGAs/s1600/writer.jpeg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uogWYMY-ZJM/XCDaI2MmotI/AAAAAAAAIIQ/g9LAVwMUIXoRGPCTYiGT_rSG476Sy9jUwCLcBGAs/s400/writer.jpeg" width="400" height="250" data-original-width="1280" data-original-height="801" /></a><br /><br />
<b>1. The Writer (Almeida Theatre)</b> – Oh to write like this. Ella Hickson's confounding, irresistible, meta-textual exploration of gender and sexuality begins with a two-hander between a misogynistic but superficially reasonable theatre director (Samuel West) and a feminist audience member (Lara Rossi), then snaps back to reveal that these are just characters, and that writer Romola Garai is going somewhere else: perhaps to a quasi-psychedelic lesbian rural idyll (complete with a subsequent, sarcastic post-modern deconstruction), perhaps to the brink of masculinity and beyond, attaining power and control at the expense of her identity. It is so entertaining, so funny, so clever and so packed with ideas that it's exhilarating, but it's also utterly haunting: a profoundly disquieting and disorientating piece of theatre. And it even acknowledges that preaching to a small, committed choir in an Islington theatre is a complete waste of time. Maybe I do need some genius now and again.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YwQrakJ9Md0/XCDaHh07MgI/AAAAAAAAIH4/BtxZCfKp290XwwOvwtLvIb_Gm7C_35FqACLcBGAs/s1600/liners.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YwQrakJ9Md0/XCDaHh07MgI/AAAAAAAAIH4/BtxZCfKp290XwwOvwtLvIb_Gm7C_35FqACLcBGAs/s400/liners.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="960" data-original-height="540" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Exhibitions</b> get just a brief mention this year, as I didn't go to many. My favourite was <b>Ocean Liners: Speed and Style</b> at the V&A, which included <i>genuine bits of the Titanic</i>, alongside a celebration of the Normandie's hilarious levels of excess (perhaps not so hilarious during the Depression), and a crash course in liner design. <b>The Great British Seaside</b>, at the National Maritime Museum, was also a lot of fun, bringing together the work of four very different photographers, each preoccupied with a vanishing culture, whether capturing its inherent quirkiness (Martin Parr), its poetry, offbeat dignity and key to national character (Tony Ray-Jones), or its scale if you put a camera a long way away (I wasn't as into Simon Roberts).<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Thanks for reading. Part three will be about FILMS.Rick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com0London, UK51.5073509 -0.1277582999999822351.1912379 -0.77320529999998222 51.8234639 0.51768870000001777tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-89410615320220860592018-12-18T15:40:00.002+00:002018-12-19T12:48:14.925+00:00Review of 2018: Part 1 – BooksThe good, the bad and the <i>Atlas Shrugged</i>: here's everything I read in a vain attempt to stave off the comic hopelessness and soul-chewing despair of this toxic binfire of a year. Yay. It's divided into fiction (for adults and children) and non-fiction. 79 in total.<br /><br />
<b>FICTION</b><br /><br />
<b>Adults:</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gyOB322q9t4/XBVH0NlGGhI/AAAAAAAAIEI/PGbxhMP0PXEPoHILwyzoE91qqWHc08uRgCLcBGAs/s1600/9781408871768.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gyOB322q9t4/XBVH0NlGGhI/AAAAAAAAIEI/PGbxhMP0PXEPoHILwyzoE91qqWHc08uRgCLcBGAs/s320/9781408871768.jpg" width="208" height="320" data-original-width="420" data-original-height="647" /></a><br /><br />
My favourites first, and call me Corporate McNosurprises, but the best book I read all year was George Saunders' miraculous <b>Lincoln in the Bardo</b> (2017), which won the Booker last year. A hypnotic, hilarious, heart-opening story of grief and redemption, it uses the implacable, granite greatness of Honest Abe – a man we can see only in retrospect, in simple terms and a mile high – as a counterpoint to human fragility, and a way to explore the essence of our heroic figures, who are both less and much more than we often realise. It's like Vonnegut shot by John Ford, and the most intensely moving, exhilaratingly imaginative work that I've read in years.<br /><br />
Similarly revelatory, and American, was Denis Johnson's <b>The Largesse of the Sea Maiden</b> (2018), which has only one shortcoming, and that is its pseudo-arthouse title. These five short stories may begin with a broadly conventional examination of middle-age malaise, but they end with an errant, unbalanced genius raiding Elvis Presley's grave, and are quite unlike anything else I've read. His off-kilter sentences, like his delicately warped view of society, are arresting and unsettling, and the third story – an epistolary one in which a psychiatric patient slowly loses his mind to medication – manages to be horrifying and hysterical, practically daring you to care. After that, I sought out Johnson's only previous short story collection, <b>Jesus' Son</b> (1993), which has an army of acolytes, but struck me as rather monotonous with its gallery of interchangeable addicts and losers.<br /><br />
I finally sat down and read <b>Brideshead Revisited</b> (1945) properly, susceptible as I expected (<i>yes, OK, from the TV series</i>) to Waugh's gluttonous story of youth and beauty laid low by drink-fuelled demons.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-aN4WfofK2r4/XBVEfmyXRXI/AAAAAAAAICk/U-jQfRI6idM_QbqRc877OJhTEp7qzS2hwCLcBGAs/s1600/41HJc3j8feL._SX308_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-aN4WfofK2r4/XBVEfmyXRXI/AAAAAAAAICk/U-jQfRI6idM_QbqRc877OJhTEp7qzS2hwCLcBGAs/s320/41HJc3j8feL._SX308_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="199" height="320" data-original-width="310" data-original-height="499" /></a><br /><br />
Sally Rooney's <b>Conversations with Friends</b> (2016) – available in a variety of irrelevant, hideous covers – is deceptively immense: a 21st century <i>Pursuit of Love</i> turning inwards in blurry self-loathing and late-capitalist malaise. I gather that some people 'didn't like the characters', which is apparently a legitimate response. Rooney then had the temerity to follow it with <b>Normal People</b> (2018), which is somehow even better: an emotionally exhausting, effortlessly profound second book, with layer upon layer of characterisation and telling, memorable, incisive detail. She is so perceptive and so observant as to the details of human interactions (and human <i>cruelty</i>), with such extraordinary understanding of her characters’ inner workings. It's masterfully drawn, chokingly effective and deserving of all the hype, and then some. Quite how we're supposed to wait two years for the next one, I can't imagine, though I may take that long to recover.<br /><br />
<i>Normal People</i> is superficially similar to David Nicholls' <b>One Day</b> (2009), a book that I gather is easy to pick holes in, but why bother? I came to the party both late and snootily prepared to shrug off a book that had sold <i>two million copies</i>, but fuck me it got to me. An adroit, piercing love story between a smart, sharp, over-educated young woman and a guy who for most of the book is basically Tim Lovejoy, it shrugs off any danger of gimmickry with a pronounced insouciance, and proceeds to involve you in these tangled lives, before shattering your heart a dozen ways. The trappings may be mundane and the jokes variable, but I'm still thinking about it two months later.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HhIAqI1Edag/XBVFEKX_FTI/AAAAAAAAICw/gsPDnOvzk_0DcWQip7Am6XRWfg1zN_fcACLcBGAs/s1600/61foKTM76FL.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HhIAqI1Edag/XBVFEKX_FTI/AAAAAAAAICw/gsPDnOvzk_0DcWQip7Am6XRWfg1zN_fcACLcBGAs/s320/61foKTM76FL.jpg" width="203" height="320" data-original-width="635" data-original-height="1000" /></a><br /><br />
Rounding up the list of the broadly unassailable, we have two books about old, lonely women. Firstly, Margaret Atwood's <b>The Blind Assassin</b> (2000), a dense and meticulous mystery steeped in a limping dotage and a need to reveal the truths underpinning our lives, in which ailing Iris Chase reflects on her sister's long-ago suicide, aided by dog-eared photographs, contemporary news reports and a devotion to veracity underpinned by a very Canadian reticence. It's the first of hers I've read (as I am a noted charlatan and fraudster), so I've got years of fun and education ahead of me. Less chilly, and more mordant and acidic and zippy, was Elizabeth Taylor's <b>Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont</b> (1971), in which the residents of a South Kensington rooming house while away the hours until death, through artifice, self-delusion and the odd visit from a charming, utterly ruthless young writer. I think it taught me more about writing good sentences than anything else I've ever read. In comparison, her much earlier <b>A View from the Harbour</b> (1947) felt limp and somehow mean-spirited, the poetry of physical and moral decay summoning nothing but a sort of weary depression.<br /><br />
I've written before about my love of John Steinbeck, especially his trilogy about labourers in Depression-era california (<i>In Dubious Battle</i>, <i>The Grapes of Wrath</i> and <i>Of Mice and Men</i>). <b>East of Eden</b> (1952), Steinbeck's sprawling, biblical Californian phantasmagoria – which drags Cain and Abel into the Salinas Valley – is dizzyingly ambitious and often impossibly rich, but also a little disjointed, its characters' fates too often anti-climactic and its central 400 pages dwarfing what's either side. In a similar vein, Ken Kesey's mammoth, magnificently-titled <b>Sometimes a Great Notion</b> (1962) frequently takes the breath away, humanising but scrutinising every one of its fucked up characters across 600+ pages of labour wrangling, Freudian familial strife and unexpected action sequences, as college-educated Leland Stamper returns to his old, erm, stamper-ing ground to lock horns with his half-brother, the none-more-alpha Hank. Told from a multitude of viewpoints, we watch the characters begin to destroy themselves and one another, forever misreading acts of gentleness or solidarity. It begins to plod a little, bogged down in repetition by page 500, but the ending is irresistible.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-V5k4QSI_cVw/XBVFQDYbQjI/AAAAAAAAIC0/gKTu0HBTQnYiORUVgc4ZRcIDPQnZdduOgCLcBGAs/s1600/7152wIWx1KL.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-V5k4QSI_cVw/XBVFQDYbQjI/AAAAAAAAIC0/gKTu0HBTQnYiORUVgc4ZRcIDPQnZdduOgCLcBGAs/s320/7152wIWx1KL.jpg" width="210" height="320" data-original-width="767" data-original-height="1171" /></a><br /><br />
Alongside Steinbeck, another of my favourite writers is Jane Austen. This year I delved deep into the admittedly limited canon. You can get <b>Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sanditon</b> in a single volume. <i>Lady Susan</i> (1793) is an epistolary novel, recently adapted as the film <i>Love & Friendship</i> by the great independent filmmaker, Whit Stillman. It is Austen, but not as we know her, reveling in the amorality (and admittedly the resulting downfall) of the thoroughly unscrupulous title character, who is interested purely in acquiring capital and getting her end away. By the time she embarked on her cycle of six great, major novels, Austen had shrugged off such vicarious pleasures, though scholars still bicker over whether she had reached an artistic and emotional maturity or was merely bowing to the demands of Christian society. It is hard to read something as still and gentle and moving as <i>Persuasion</i> and imagine that she wasn't sincere.<br /><br />
<i>The Watsons</i> is by far my favourite of the three short works and one of the great 'what ifs' of modern literature, started in 1803 but discontinued after her father's death, at which point she returned to redrafting earlier works, beginning with <i>Sense and Sensibility</i>. It's an overwhelmingly charming fragment about young Emma Watson (yes, very good), who returns to the bosom of her family after years away, and begins to negotiate the social and romantic traps of their world. I say 'begins to negotiate' because we only get 17,000 words. The highlight is a wonderful set-piece at a country dance. By 1817, the 40-year-old Austen was ailing, being treated for the illness that would kill her. Out of this decline came the wry, almost absurdist <b>Sanditon</b>, a comedy about hypochondriacs, set in a spa-town, which is minor in itself (and again unfinished), but a testament to Austen's absolute and enduring awesomeness. I also picked up <b>The Beautiful Cassandra</b> (1786-93), in the Penguin Little Black Classics series, which incorporates the minor, silly eponymous story and other pieces of juvenilia: some impenetrable (being pastiches of things no longer remembered), some disposable, and others disarmingly funny.<br /><br />
I was surprised how readable and contemporary <b>Jane Eyre</b> (1847) felt, in its language and storytelling if not its sexual politics: an immersing, appealing, fast-moving and agreeably unconventional book that rather runs out of steam after its most notable revelation. Jean Rhys's <b>Wide Sargasso Sea</b> (1966) is an unsettling, unforgettable riposte: feminist, anti-colonial, written in an abstract, authentic but unrooted vernacular and almost staccato prose, dragging you where you fear to go and casting Brontë's book in the eeriest and most searing of lights.<br /><br />
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One of the most-lauded books of last year was Sean Edward Greer's <b>Less</b>, which won the Pulitzer. The sad, globe-trotting adventures of a lovelorn, failed author, I liked it a lot. I didn't find it as relentlessly hilarious as a lot of reviewers (I gather that it's Greer's first comedy, so perhaps they were surprised), but I loved its warm beating heart and he undoubtedly writes lovely sentences, especially about suits.<br /><br />
I've always loved <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/morvern-callar/">Lynne Ramsay's film of <b>Morvern Callar</b></a>, but had never read the Alan Warner novel (1995) that inspired it. Written in an aggressively mannered first-person Scottish dialect, it's a quietly beguiling book with a quite brilliant protagonist – the chain-smoking, powerful, inscrutable Morvern, who deals with her boyfriend's suicide by passing off his unpublished novel as her own, and going clubbing with the money – and some observations on the beautiful, crumbling wasteland of working-class culture, all of which compensate for dull pastoral passages and a rather obvious ending. (I should add that I bought this book for my friend Jess and she thought Warner's idea of how women think was completely embarrassing.)<br /><br />
My favourite author is Kurt Vonnegut, but I'm rationing his work now, because I've read most of it in a mad, four-year blitz. This year I treated myself to two: <b>Jailbird</b> (1979), a counter-intuitive, hilarious, subversive and righteous riposte to the all-consuming national crisis that was Watergate, and his 1971 play, <b>Happy Birthday, Wanda June</b>, which has Vonnegut sort of playing at Orton: a bawdy farce with legitimate pretensions at indicting modern America. It doesn't all work, and it isn't the best medium for Vonnegut's singular gifts, but it's kind of fascinating.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BU_04xzqPl0/XBVFvn67GwI/AAAAAAAAIDE/nkmYtfFKQ0w3w4c5LPCeJ9T68vxdhfmzACLcBGAs/s1600/dorothyparker5.jpeg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BU_04xzqPl0/XBVFvn67GwI/AAAAAAAAIDE/nkmYtfFKQ0w3w4c5LPCeJ9T68vxdhfmzACLcBGAs/s320/dorothyparker5.jpeg" width="320" height="246" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="384" /></a><br /><br />
I've long been fascinated by the waspish, tippling doyen of the Jazz Age, without really doing anything about it, so this year I read <b>The Collected Dorothy Parker</b> (1977). My abiding impression was that while her verse can be good and her stories can be great (<i>Big Blonde</i>, ffs), it’s Parker’s journalism that’s truly remarkable. She turned reviewing into an art form, increasingly using some recent book as a jumping off point for a ruthless, coruscating comic sketch radiating her caustic, devastating wit. One dreary Sunday afternoon I decided to dip into that part of the book, only to emerge six hours later, having devoured the lot. I don’t mean for it to sound like she’s hard to live with as an author: putdowns were only a twentieth of Parker’s repertoire, and her most brutal assessments were always of herself (or A. A. Milne). But while she had the pithiness and sarcasm to make for a Jazz Age Jane Austen, she didn’t tend to trust her warmth, and there’s a lack of scope to her sharp stories and pungent, pulchritudinous poetry that for every moment of amazement and exhilaration can – when essaying the collected works over a week or two – leave you ultimately a little unsatisfied, wishing she had cast her piercing gaze a little farther.<br /><br />
Perhaps the most fun I've had reading this year was with Chester Himes' <b>The Real Cool Killers</b> (1958), a dark hymn to Harlem, in which two black policemen (Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson) run around with nickel-plated handguns, shooting and pistol-whipping everyone in sight as they try to solve a murder. Written by ex-con Himes, who was living in Paris at the time, it's a fantastically entertaining slice of urban noir, the OTT violence and lashings of black comedy only slightly undercut by a bizarrely mawkish ending. I then discovered it was the second in a series, so I went back to the start with <b>A Rage in Harlem</b> (1957), which has the central cops as mere supporting characters in a somewhat self-satisfied tall tale about a dumb patsy unable to countenance his girlfriend's duplicity as the bodies pile up. It's good, and tries more transparently to evoke its setting, but it's not <i>as</i> good: certainly far less fun. I've asked for books three and four for Christmas.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-l-Y5RF3oXLw/XBVINfwcvaI/AAAAAAAAIEU/GrPJ0WfWICA-enC5ecoGmSnld2YgBVXhwCLcBGAs/s1600/354.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-l-Y5RF3oXLw/XBVINfwcvaI/AAAAAAAAIEU/GrPJ0WfWICA-enC5ecoGmSnld2YgBVXhwCLcBGAs/s320/354.jpg" width="250" height="320" data-original-width="935" data-original-height="1196" /></a><br /><br />
Salinger's <b>Franny and Zooey</b> (1961) is one of the most brilliant and maddening books I've read in a while: beautiful phrases and life-changing ideas wrapped in a story so cloistered and myopic that it makes Wes Anderson look like Vittorio de Sica. Its historic contextualising and throwaway brilliance seems to anticipate Roth at his zenith, but I also wanted to headbutt the author quite a bit.<br /><br />
<a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2017/12/2017Books.html"><i>The Sound of Trumpets</i> was, unexpectedly, one of 2017's greatest pleasures</a> – for all its self-evident flaws, a nifty, near-mythic deconstruction of Blairite hypocrisy before the ink was barely dry on the '97 election results. This year I went back to the beginning of the Rapstone Chronicles, to find that a little John Mortimer goes a long way, and that his preoccupations (a love of conservation, women who smoke and slightly laboured one-liners) can tend to make his work distinctly samey. <b>Paradise Postponed</b> (1986), written with TV in mind, is a multi-generational, would-be-sprawling story hooked on a mystery: why has a socialist vicar left all of his money to the Tebbit-ian figure of Thatcherite cabinet minister, Lord Titmuss? You'll desperately want to know, and enjoy the ride too, but when you find out, you'll discover it's not that interesting. The second book in the series, <b>Titmuss Regained</b> is so slickly plotted, and hung on such a repetitious, nebulous sense of what it means to be human (Titmuss is motivated by revenge after being pushed in a river; his new girlfriend Jackie is fixated purely on honesty) that it feels about as deep as a puddle, and it's <i>very</i> 1990 (which seems to date it more than if it was 1945), though its refusal to demonise or sanctify any of its characters is at least refreshing.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-iHJC4k4wn5o/XBVIVAw7DdI/AAAAAAAAIEY/eSBYwqV8GHMmoQmUwTSokXi1DnTPMOyhgCLcBGAs/s1600/818368VcRvL.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-iHJC4k4wn5o/XBVIVAw7DdI/AAAAAAAAIEY/eSBYwqV8GHMmoQmUwTSokXi1DnTPMOyhgCLcBGAs/s320/818368VcRvL.jpg" width="208" height="320" data-original-width="1041" data-original-height="1600" /></a><br /><br />
William Boyd's <b>A Good Man in Africa</b> (1981) is like <i>Lucky Jim</i> (<a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2016/12/review-of-2016-part-3-books-and-tv.html">my favourite book of 2016)</a> transplanted to the colonial world of Graham Greene, but nowhere near as good. It's one of those books that you like consistently less, the more you think about it, though there is a terrific joke near the end about the narrator's seduction technique, and my friend who grew up in post-colonial Africa finds the book extraordinarily perceptive. In a similar vein, but with its sexual misadventures haunted by genocide rather than the remnants of racism, is Isaac Bashevis Singer's <b>Enemies: A Love Story</b> (1966), a book that cleverer men than I have lauded to the heavens. I thought it was... fine, but found the presumably purposeful trivialities of its central story frankly mystifying in this context.<br /><br />
Which leaves us with just three more novels: <b>The Natural</b> by Bernard Malamud (1952) – fitfully engaging shreds of baseball folklore fashioned into an uneven narrative – Anita Loos' influential but hopelessly weathered <b>Gentlemen Prefer Blondes</b> (1925) and, of course, Ayn Rand's <b>Atlas Shrugged</b> (1957): a riotous, relentless, ridiculous book, with Rand enthusiastically punching a straw man in the face for 1,168 caustic, sentimental, weird pages. It’s full of BIG ideas (well, one big idea), BIG heroes, predictable ‘twists’, identikit imagery and a cast-iron commitment to never properly engaging with the other side, who don’t merely subscribe to a different ideology, but are all physically-repulsive con-men and gangsters, with flabby faces, drooling mouths and glassy, filmy, dead, panicked eyes. I can’t help but think that seeing all her family’s belongings getting pinched by the Bolsheviks as a kid might have influenced Rand’s worldview somewhat. I wrote about it a little more <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2270504297">here</a>, if that's of interest.<br /><br />
A quick mention finally for two books by friends, which I can't possibly review, as that would be insane. These are: <a href="https://twitter.com/rickburin/status/971114209491718144">Rob Palk's <b>Animal Lovers</b></a> and Sophia Money-Coutts' <b>The Plus One</b> (both 2018). And all I will say is that I resent both authors.<br /><br />
<b>Children:</b><br /><br />
I read a lot of kids' books: partly because I love them, partly because I write them and want to understand the marketplace, and partly so I can weasel up to agents who persist in ignoring my questionable talents. Here's a quick round-up of 2018:<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bBxMTjTpXQw/XBVIuf3-EWI/AAAAAAAAIEs/-QHaBRpUhU4zcUex-1XCHCqoEQfuLbelgCLcBGAs/s1600/The-Many-Worlds-of-Albie-Bright-70495-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bBxMTjTpXQw/XBVIuf3-EWI/AAAAAAAAIEs/-QHaBRpUhU4zcUex-1XCHCqoEQfuLbelgCLcBGAs/s320/The-Many-Worlds-of-Albie-Bright-70495-1.jpg" width="208" height="320" data-original-width="1040" data-original-height="1600" /></a><br /><br />
<b>The Many Worlds of Albie Bright</b> (2016) by Christopher Edge is extraordinarily beautiful: a miracle of a book about a boy searching for his late mother through alternate worlds. It's ingenious and amusing and the only thing that's made me cry this year (as established last year, I am very tough and northern and only cry once a year). It's not dissimilar, in fact, to my other favourite of this year: Ross Welford's multi-award-winning <b>Time Travelling with a Hamster</b> (2015), another utterly winning sci-fi story in which an imperfect hero searches for a deceased parent. Only the feelgood ending misses the target. I got so engrossed in it that I accidentally took a two-hour lunch break. That is my story and I am sticking to it.<br /><br />
Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart books are a treat I'd recommend to anyone (except my friend Jess, who also hated these – what <i>does</i> she like? <i>Titanic</i>, that's what), pitching you into Victorian London with only a steely heroine and a good-looking portrait photographer for company. <b>The Ruby in the Smoke</b> (1985) is, appropriately, the jewel in the crown, though the second book – <b>The Shadow in the North</b> (1986) – compensates for some annoyingly faithless characterisation by being in all other ways terrific.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LShcI7-wF3s/XBVGjUhS4II/AAAAAAAAIDk/DJBsnJJjkiksw6PqboMqo0ancMgQcGWwgCLcBGAs/s1600/download%2B%25285%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LShcI7-wF3s/XBVGjUhS4II/AAAAAAAAIDk/DJBsnJJjkiksw6PqboMqo0ancMgQcGWwgCLcBGAs/s320/download%2B%25285%2529.jpg" width="215" height="320" data-original-width="184" data-original-height="274" /></a><br /><br />
Genre fiction for kids doesn't get much more purely entertaining than Stuart Gibbs' <b>Spy School</b> (2012), which shakes off some apparently reactionary tendencies early on and throws in dozens of neat twists. The only disappointment is that the identity of its villain negates one of its funniest ideas. Also relentlessly entertaining are Andy Stanton's enormously successful Mr Gum books – beginning with <b>You're a Bad Man, Mr Gum!</b> (2006) and <b>Mr Gum and the Biscuit Billionaire</b> (2007) – which are simply and effortlessly and consistently hilarious. The biscuit billionaire is a gingerbread man called Alan Warner who has a tin full of cash and electric muscles.<br /><br />
Lovely Liverpudlian socialist Frank Cottrell Boyce's book, <b>Sputnik's Guide to Life on Earth</b> (2016), is offbeat and thrillingly unsentimental, dealing with an alien who comes to Earth to reluctantly destroy it, unless he can find 10 things worth saving. These are not the things you might expect, whether you're a tourist board, right-winger or mawkish humanitarian. It's full of clever conceits and comic flourishes. Other enjoyable comic books, with perhaps just a touch less heart, are the bizarrely overlooked <b>Pirate McSnottbeard in the Zombie Terror Rampage</b> (2017) – a deliriously post-modern romp with genuinely good jokes – and the overly plotty but nevertheless entertaining <b>Jim Reaper: Son of Grim</b> (2016).<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YgJd_LbX-A0/XBVI20gWfBI/AAAAAAAAIEw/sgYMviZ2GKYwNs3G83X4IdyaKtuW2yAzgCLcBGAs/s1600/61pCyJpznuL._SX328_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YgJd_LbX-A0/XBVI20gWfBI/AAAAAAAAIEw/sgYMviZ2GKYwNs3G83X4IdyaKtuW2yAzgCLcBGAs/s320/61pCyJpznuL._SX328_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="212" height="320" data-original-width="330" data-original-height="499" /></a><br /><br />
For older kids, Gaby Halberstam's <b>The Red Dress</b> (2009) is troubling – even difficult – and starts conspicuously slowly, but is extremely rewarding: a heartfelt coming-of-age story, with a realistic heroine, set in a brutal, misogynistic, dirt-poor South Africa.<br /><br />
Tom Fletcher's <b>The Christmasaurus</b> (2016) is written in a slightly tiresome, patronising vernacular, but the story is lovely, even magical, with a great antagonist in the shape of charismatic bully, Brenda Payne. Maz Evans' popular <b>Who Let the Gods Out?</b> (2017) brings the Olympian gods (as well as a little formula plotting) to modern Britain in a book that's well-conceived, and learned and funny, though the point at which an author brings in a karate-chopping version of the Queen as a comic character is the moment in which I fucking despair. The Queen is also invoked in Onjali Q. Rauf's <b>The Boy at the Back of the Class</b> (2018), a simplistic but sincere story about a group of schoolchildren trying to help a refugee to integrate. The fact this involves Buckingham Palace would appear to be evidence of the cringing deference we seem committed to passing on to our children. Is what I would say if I had voted for Jeremy Corbyn. Which I did.<br /><br />
<b>How Winston Delivered Christmas</b> (2018) is a lovely new offering: an advent calendar of a book, divided into 24-and-a-half chapters, each with typically sumptuous Alex T. Smith illustrations, as a bedraggled mouse tries to get a kid's letter to Father Christmas in time for the big day.
Emma Barnes' <b>Wild Thing</b> (2014) skirts by on the strength of its heart, <b>The Nowhere Emporium</b> (2015) adds up to a whole lot of vague nothing, and <b>Paddington Races Ahead</b> (2012) finds our hero rather adrift in a world that Michael Bond doesn't seem to understand (which after the pointedly political <i>Paddington Here and Now</i> is rather a disappointment).<br /><br />
And already at a charity shop near you are Jonathan Meres' inherently dislikeable <b>May Contain Nuts</b> (2011), the inexplicably successful <b>Beetle Boy</b> (2016) – in which the villain is a half-woman, half-beetle – and <b>The Strange and Deadly Portraits of Bryony Gray</b> (2018) by E. Latimer, a ludicrous semi-sequel to T<i>he Picture of Dorian Gray</i>, in which characters escape from paintings and kill people. It was written by a Canadian whose idea of how people in Victorian London speak memorably incorporates the phrase, "Did you just try to sass me?"<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>NON-FICTION</b><br /><br />
<b>Favourites</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2pSVxJMlNe0/XBVJjkFcynI/AAAAAAAAIFA/Ncf8SPa2bv06YzdiIzcSbNOrlgJ3sYSzQCLcBGAs/s1600/bechdel.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2pSVxJMlNe0/XBVJjkFcynI/AAAAAAAAIFA/Ncf8SPa2bv06YzdiIzcSbNOrlgJ3sYSzQCLcBGAs/s400/bechdel.jpg" width="400" height="190" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="760" /></a><br /><br />
Nothing could touch <b>Fun Home</b> (2006), the graphic novel in which Alison Bechdel explores her relationship with her closeted father, whose life was a succession of secrets that drove them apart and pulled them together. It's peppered with wonderful imagery and details that break and mend your heart, and is also really fucking sexy. Like the best art, it leaves you changed. I also got a huge amount from Sara Pascoe's <b>Animal</b> (2016), which may take evolutionary psychology as fact not theory, but also made me look at the world in a different way. It's fantastically honest, Pascoe transforming her fear into fearlessness, and full of good jokes.<br /><br />
<b>History and politics</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-A6Pe3uPqGNk/XBVJzWh5roI/AAAAAAAAIFM/bO3NIZK3ntMKPMXVfrpubS-djBSFA3r5QCLcBGAs/s1600/2015_39_guy_burgess.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-A6Pe3uPqGNk/XBVJzWh5roI/AAAAAAAAIFM/bO3NIZK3ntMKPMXVfrpubS-djBSFA3r5QCLcBGAs/s400/2015_39_guy_burgess.jpg" width="400" height="177" data-original-width="790" data-original-height="350" /></a><br /><br />
Most of the non-fic I read is about history and politics. The pick of the bunch this year was probably Andrew Lownie's biography, <b>Stalin's Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess</b>. It's a fabulously entertaining, spectacularly well-researched book which makes a convincing case that Burgess was the most brilliant and important of the Cambridge Spies – rather than the indiscreet, drunken liability of popular myth. Its flaws, such as they are, comprise an unfortunate tendency to introduce supporting characters by name without explaining who they are, and an inability to quite reach the heart of the garrulous, gossipy but complex Burgess – an analytical closing chapter coming rather closer than the 400 pages that precede it. Thanks to Lownie, we know far more of what Burgess did than we ever have before; we know when and how and definitely who, even if we’re not always sure why. The (crap) title seems to have more to do with marketing algorithms than the book it’s describing.<br /><br />
Another rip-roaring read was <b>Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line</b> (2016) by Heather Hendershot. The author, an unrepentant but open-minded liberal, delves deep into the archives to examine the story of <i>Firing Line</i>, the American debate show hosted by waspish, brilliant, perma-grinning William F. Buckley, which presaged the triumph of American conservatism. Broken down by themes (though in a roughly chronological order, such was Buckley’s cresting and declining interest in certain subjects), the book looks at how <i>Firing Line</i> covered conservatism, communism, feminism, black power, Nixon and Reagan, giving thinkers as inflammatory and revolutionary as Huey Newton and Germaine Greer a platform to air their views at length, and so find supporters, unless the audience was suitably convinced by Buckley’s rebuttals. The writing has the odd cliché or lapse into clunkiness, and Hendershot’s need to restate conclusions at the end of each chapter (and then write another chapter of woolly media studies material positing a potential ‘Firing Line 2.0’) is an academic affectation I could do without, but this is a gripping, thoughtful and revelatory book, a treat for anyone interested in political discourse, public intellectualism or just modern American history.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-duHRli48UYk/XBVKPSoVGfI/AAAAAAAAIFU/X0aIVUxcmWIi1IA3pRM5OhwUu3zgcmdwgCLcBGAs/s1600/william-f-buckley-statue-hillsdale.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-duHRli48UYk/XBVKPSoVGfI/AAAAAAAAIFU/X0aIVUxcmWIi1IA3pRM5OhwUu3zgcmdwgCLcBGAs/s400/william-f-buckley-statue-hillsdale.jpg" width="400" height="233" data-original-width="920" data-original-height="537" /></a><br /><br />
Alvin Felzenger's biography of Buckley, <b>A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley</b> (2017), is a fine companion-piece, finding its niche (in bookshelves not ill-served by Buckley biographies) in focusing on his relationships with presidents from FDR to George W. Bush, via various other people he didn’t like much, and Reagan. While it’s a little too short, shallow and limited in scope to match a political biography like Jean Edward Smith’s <i>FDR</i> or T. Harry Williams’ <i>Huey Long</i>, it’s also enlightening and highly entertaining: Felzenberg’s research feels very comprehensive and, but for a little repetition and some shortcomings imposed by the restrictive structure, it’s nicely written too. Some of Buckley’s putdowns made me laugh out loud. It's a shame he was such a snake.<br /><br />
Continuing my obsession with FDR's cabinet, I also read <b>The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins</b> (2009), one of my political idols. Kirstin Downey's book is a little dry in places, but superbly researched. Perkins created the American welfare state, while providing for her mentally ill husband and daughter, then spent her last years living in a house with 30 left-wing college students, and there is honestly nothing cooler than that. And after enjoying the Slow Burn series on Watergate, I decided to investigate whether Tricky Dicky really was as terrible as he always appeared. Answer: mostly. <b>Richard Nixon: The Life by John A. Farrell</b> (2017) makes a case for Nixon being somewhat misunderstood, and certainly no one-dimensional HUAC bully in his early days, but from his first state senate campaign he's slippery, dangerous and undemocratic, and by 1972 he was absolutely off on one. There's no quibbling with Farrell as a scholar – his book is stuffed with primary sources – but I was rather bored by the end, and found Nixon's contradictions simply too legion to reconcile, at least by myself.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dzPFHxwYkxI/XBVKajnD6FI/AAAAAAAAIFY/tUtO4eHHHOMOedZ_s5fvUNm_uL44AxvAgCLcBGAs/s1600/devilbar6401.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dzPFHxwYkxI/XBVKajnD6FI/AAAAAAAAIFY/tUtO4eHHHOMOedZ_s5fvUNm_uL44AxvAgCLcBGAs/s400/devilbar6401.jpg" width="400" height="208" data-original-width="640" data-original-height="332" /></a><br /><br />
Erik Larson's <b>The Devil in the White City</b> tells the tale of a serial killer stalking Chicago as the city welcomes the World's Fair of 1893. At first the true crime narrative is rather more dynamic than the story of the fair, but by the end I felt that had switched around. It's grisly and unquestionably sensationalist (I have almost no stomach for true crime), but I certainly wasn't bored.<br /><br />
You don't get many books about the Nazis, so it was nice to happen across Julia Boyd's <b>Travellers in the Third Reich</b> (2017), an impressively diverse anthology that nevertheless feels more like a collection of interesting sources (many of them previously unpublished) than a book in its own right. The perspectives from artists, diplomats, politicians, writers, tourists, scholars, the hard left and the far-right, the duped and the clear-sighted, the oblivious and the righteous are full of fascinating details, from the sights, smells, sounds and neediness of Nazi Germany to moments of insight, absurdity, incongruity, comedy and tragedy. But they’re marshalled with a distinct lack of finesse, Boyd’s writing full of clunking segues that aren’t really necessary, and a leaden-handed, simple self-righteousness that – while on the side of right – doesn’t make the book the searing moral audit that she imagines. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2505458445?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">I've harped on about it all a bit more here.</a><br /><br />
This is where, for completism's sake, I also throw in Philippe Sands' <b>East West Street</b> (2016), which I read too late for last year's list, and which traces the genesis of the terms 'genocide' and 'crimes against humanity', coined by two very different lawyers from Lwow, the home of Sands' grandfather and subject of a litany of Nazi atroicities.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XUZOBsqVmFM/XBVKo07kRmI/AAAAAAAAIFg/LYlWu5sklaQP1B8jOSw-NmSs-_Ug1DSeACLcBGAs/s1600/michelle-obama-sexual-assault.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XUZOBsqVmFM/XBVKo07kRmI/AAAAAAAAIFg/LYlWu5sklaQP1B8jOSw-NmSs-_Ug1DSeACLcBGAs/s400/michelle-obama-sexual-assault.jpg" width="400" height="318" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1271" /></a><br /><br />
And then there are the books that weren't much good. I'm a big fan of Jon Ronson's work, but his Kindle-only book, <b>The Elephant in the Room</b> (2016) is so slight that it's barely there: a shallow rehash of old Alex Jones with a minimum of on-the-spot reporting and a couple of funny one-liners. Michael Wolff's notorious <b>Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House</b> (2018), which briefly captured the zeitgeist, was gossipy and mildly illuminating on the various factions competing for power, but hardly trustworthy, which supporting characters clearly whitewashed if they gave decent access to the author. <b>Lonely Courage: The True Story of the SOE Heroines Who Fought to Free Nazi-Occupied France</b> (2017) is a completely fascinating story given severely botched treatment. There are a few gripping passages and at times the book evokes the brutal lottery of wartime espionage, but the facts – and stories – are marshalled in erratic, haphazard manner, so it’s difficult to stay immersed in the material, or indeed to remember (or follow) who everyone is. Stroud’s writing style is also clunky and repetitive: light on quotes and with a truly singular use of commas. It all seems rather half-finished.<br /><br />
Probably worst of all is Michelle Obama's autobiography, <b>Becoming</b> (2018). The most interesting bit is when her daughter gets chased by a cheetah, and that turns out to be a dream. Aside from moving reminiscences detailing her father’s decline, those early scenes with Barack, and some brief passages in the final stretch about gun violence and misogny, it all feels so crushingly banal: an astonishing story turned into 420 pages of work-family balance, in safe, quasi-inspirational corporate language. I couldn't tell if she wasn't who I thought she was or if this book has just had all the life and fire focus-grouped out of it.<br /><br />
<b>Arts</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ECgpxNbUn6U/XBVLBvcVVxI/AAAAAAAAIFw/xW5kCOXI9FgTcN73Akr1BkmRXqwSX2TCgCLcBGAs/s1600/large.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ECgpxNbUn6U/XBVLBvcVVxI/AAAAAAAAIFw/xW5kCOXI9FgTcN73Akr1BkmRXqwSX2TCgCLcBGAs/s400/large.jpg" width="400" height="266" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="332" /></a><br /><br />
Brett Anderson's <b>Coal Black Mornings (2018)</b> is a terrific memoir, tracing the author's life from his austere, eccentric satellite-town childhood – dominated by a domineering father who was obsessed with Franz Liszt and often wandered their council house dressed as T. E. Lawrence – to the cusp of stardom with singular indie heroes, Suede (<a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com/2011/05/review-suede-at-brixton-academy-may-19.html">who are, of course, the greatest band of all time</a>). There’s the odd moment of repetition, cliché or pre-emptive defensiveness (perhaps unsurprising given the unwarranted kicking he received from a bitchy music media in the ‘90s), but it’s most often a total joy. Anderson is extraordinarily insightful when dealing with his music and the creative evolution of his band, searingly honest when required – his pathological aversion to gossip being wedded to an unblinking emotional sincerity – and possessed of a notable capacity for both a telling detail (which is hardly unexpected) and a droll one-liner (which may well be). The passage in which he shrugs off supposed influences to explain that he has always been more inspired by a lover, a friend or a flat than by someone else’s album made my jaw drop. Because of course, but who has ever said that? If your pulse doesn’t quicken over those last four pages, you are dead. Or even worse: a Blur fan.<br /><br />
We finally got to see Orson Welles' final movie this year, thanks – unexpectedly – to Netflix. Before that, your best bet was to read Josh Karp's invigorating, deadpan book: <b>Orson Welles's Last Movie: The Making of 'The Other Side of the Wind'</b> (2015), which traced both its haphazard production and the farce that followed. It's so much fun, at least now that there's a happy ending.<br /><br />
I also enjoyed, with some reservations, Otto Friedrich's <b>City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s</b>, which inspired a recent series of <a href="http://www.youmustrememberthispodcast.com/">You Must Remember This</a>. A personal history of ‘40s Hollywood, which for this author means Thomas Mann, Berthold Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg, labour unions and anti-semitism, as much as Gene Tierney, Rita Hayworth and Louis B. Mayer (and much more than Cary Grant, whose conflicted, confused and confusing existence is bizarrely consigned to the ‘boring’ pile). Friedrich shapes secondary sources into a narrative that at its best is panoramic and at worst somewhat bitty, but always elegantly written and highly readable. Some of the stories he tells have since been debunked and others are over-familiar (at least to massive Old Hollywood nerds), but there’s plenty that was new to me, and his contextualising is first-rate, as he explains how Hollywood got its water, America got racist and Bugsy Siegel got shot. Depending on your tastes, though, Friedrich’s endless sneering may begin to pall – aside from <i>Double Indemnity</i>, he is dismissive of just about everything and everybody, deriding most books and films and recordings as bad or brainless or embarrassing, and thinking the worst of almost everyone he encounters. In Brechtian fashion, he seems to take a particular delight in debunking heroism: toppling or dismantling those ‘40s figures that (left-leaning) history has since judged as stoic and virtuous – among them, John Garfield – an agenda which arguably undermines his objectivity, and is also really fucking depressing. I enjoyed it when he did it to Ronald Reagan, though, which just shows the double-standard I operate under.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zpCm0Z0VKvE/XBVLU8RlVOI/AAAAAAAAIGA/JKIzqIbWqGURsPgUeq1vUHFHRBlFZgPjACLcBGAs/s1600/themiraclewoman-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zpCm0Z0VKvE/XBVLU8RlVOI/AAAAAAAAIGA/JKIzqIbWqGURsPgUeq1vUHFHRBlFZgPjACLcBGAs/s400/themiraclewoman-2.jpg" width="400" height="302" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="377" /></a><br /><br />
Sadly I didn't enjoy <b>A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel True − Volume One (1907-40)</b>, which is clearly a labour of love, but also a mess, and something of a trial. It’s good in spots, particularly in its vivid sketches of the young Frank Fay, but it’s frequently long-winded – offering laborious descriptions of interior furnishings, interminable lists of names who attended events or belonged to certain Hollywood clubs, and every finger injury Stanwyck ever sustained – while often irrelevant when striving to be wide-ranging. Most disappointing of all is its vague and uninteresting portrait of Stanwyck, Wilson apparently so close to her subject (and so indebted to her subject’s family and friends) that she skirts shyly around topics like adultery and domestic abuse (though eventually engaging with the latter), neglects to confront the myriad contradictions of Stanwyck’s early life, and fails to articulate how the actor’s wellsprings of emotion were fed by her life’s surfeit of tragedy. I love a door-stop biography, particularly one about ‘20s and ‘30s America, and Stanwyck is one of my favourite actors, but <i>Steel True </i>massively outstays its welcome. As better critics than I have already pointed out: Wilson is a book editor in need of a book editor. This book is 860 pages long and ends when Stanwyck is 33.<br /><br />
<b>Theory</b><br /><br />
is not something for which my brain is necessarily equipped, but I did try, reading Ha-Joon Chang's <b>Economics: A User's Guide</b> (2014), because I have been pretending to know about economics for years, simply regurgitating a few facts I remember from A-level politics. Chang's admirable attempts to create an accessible work unfortunately lead to him explaining who Martin Freeman is, but not what supply side economics is, but I have remembered at least two more facts for when I'm shouting at people I don't know on Twitter.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Tv2HX9JLVV8/XBVPZIGz7-I/AAAAAAAAIGk/xx5pFtIx6dw6NB3tnYFrZsUUUmohPENmgCLcBGAs/s1600/51Wb5WUB%252BkL._SX308_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Tv2HX9JLVV8/XBVPZIGz7-I/AAAAAAAAIGk/xx5pFtIx6dw6NB3tnYFrZsUUUmohPENmgCLcBGAs/s320/51Wb5WUB%252BkL._SX308_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="199" height="320" data-original-width="310" data-original-height="499" /></a><br /><br />
<b>God's Funeral</b> (1999) by A. N. Wilson purports to chart the decline of theism and faith within 19th century intellectualism, but doesn't quite do that, instead offering witty, wide-ranging pen-portraits of many major thinkers. I found it a lot livelier than Rupert Shortt's well-meaning but stodgy <b>God Is No Thing</b>, which has rare moments of profundity – like when examining scripture to debunk the idea that Heaven is a Christians-only club – but is hard to grasp. Or indeed read.<br /><br />
<b>Football</b><br /><br />
is always more comfortable ground for me. Jonathan Wilson's <b>Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics</b> (2004/2013) is still mentioned in hushed tones and rightly so, challenging much of what I thought I knew about football, and giving me an arsenal of good stories in the process.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qnjWlMBFjic/XBVLn9Q_pTI/AAAAAAAAIGQ/xuM8pWUbm8YAESDj56svJ1kUznCpzIMHwCLcBGAs/s1600/gazza-holland.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qnjWlMBFjic/XBVLn9Q_pTI/AAAAAAAAIGQ/xuM8pWUbm8YAESDj56svJ1kUznCpzIMHwCLcBGAs/s400/gazza-holland.jpg" width="400" height="267" data-original-width="700" data-original-height="467" /></a><br /><br />
Pete Davies' <b>All Played Out</b> (1995), the 'inside story' of my favourite World Cup (1990), is often cited as <i>the</i> great football book, so I picked up a copy to read between televised matches this time around. Boy can Davies write – and write emotively – when he wants to, ruminating on the suffocating horror of a visit to Auschwitz or the bitter glory of England’s semi-final defeat, and his access to Bobby Robson and his squad is truly remarkable, but too much of the book is about his personal itinerary, which evokes the breathless, sleepless insanity of what he terms ‘Planet Football’ but isn’t terribly compelling in itself, and makes the book an odd jumble of elements, alongside some laboured running jokes, and a little too much score-settling (though Davies is nothing if not even-handed in his portraits of the press, the fans and the England camp). His book is more incisive and insightful than James Erskine’s thin, glossy film adaptation, capturing some essential truths about what football gives us, and operating as a vivid snapshot of a turning point in the sport’s culture – hooliganism juddering in its death throes as rampant commercialism raps on the door – but it’s more uneven and self-indulgent than I expected: in World Cup terms, a Denilson rather than a Ronaldo. Andrew Downie's <b>Doctor Socrates</b> (2017) was more a Dunga, lacking the grace and spontaneity of its cult subject, and making claims about his political credos that it simply couldn't cash.<br /><br />
<b>Comedy</b><br /><br />
<b>James Acaster's Classic Scrapes (2017)</b> is rather wonderful. I laughed out loud on the first page, and carried on in a similar vein from there. This succession of stories about Acaster messing stuff up, often in spectacular fashion, is inevitably uneven but frequently painfully funny. The story about the singer in his nu-metal band is genuinely one of the funniest things I have ever read (it made me cry with laughter on a train) and ‘Fell Foot Sound’ and ‘Cabadging’ are both classics, though there’s at least one great joke in even the most minor scrapes, and the cumulative effect – with most of them littered with callbacks – is joyous. Though the efforts to segue from one tale to the next are a little laboured, and Acaster’s written voice isn’t always as striking as the one he employs in stand-up (I think because it shouldn’t just be the same, even if sharing that sublime deadpan incredulity), now and then he’ll throw in something moving or profound. Mostly though it’s just very, very funny, which is really what you want from a comedy book. I haven’t laughed this hard at a book in a couple of years.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TJd-vEPVV20/XBVLxElD6uI/AAAAAAAAIGU/0EOlWfTo7YId-jJCOr6bfL0V93b9iSqvgCLcBGAs/s1600/john-robins-and-elis-james-wear-it-for-war-child-1487691420-article-0.jpeg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TJd-vEPVV20/XBVLxElD6uI/AAAAAAAAIGU/0EOlWfTo7YId-jJCOr6bfL0V93b9iSqvgCLcBGAs/s400/john-robins-and-elis-james-wear-it-for-war-child-1487691420-article-0.jpeg" width="400" height="194" data-original-width="618" data-original-height="299" /></a><br /><br />
And finally: <b>Elis and John present The Holy Vible: The Book The Bible Could Have Been by Elis James and John Robins (2018)</b> My favourite podcast in the whole wide world becomes – if not my favourite book in the whole wide world – then definitely a book. And a proper book: not a lazy cash-in, but a labour of love (Elis’s labour not quite as heavy as John’s) from the two greatest men in the world (except my dad and Tom Waits). Individual chapters – typically written by one or the other – can be deeply beautiful, especially John’s on Queen and Oxford, and Elis’s on Gorky’s and the Welsh language, but my favourite bits are the interactions between the two, which is obviously the great joy of a double-act, and especially this one. Those are spotlighted in two chapters that consist purely of comic riffs – an editorial decision necessitated by Elis’s lack of administrative prowess and concurrent submission of a chapter that was “absolute dogshit” – and in the numerous, hilarious footnotes, which are mocking, appealing, affectionate and full of lovely and familiar in-jokes. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2588868553?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">A bit more here if you want it.</a><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Thanks for reading. Live stuff next, then filums.Rick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com0London, UK51.5073509 -0.1277582999999822351.1912379 -0.77320529999998222 51.8234639 0.51768870000001777tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-25241608602575440532017-12-21T16:23:00.001+00:002019-06-10T12:52:25.776+01:00Review of 2017: Part 3 – MoviesI’ve cut back a bit on film-watching in recent years, aiming for a slightly more balanced and healthy existence, but movies are still a huge part of my life. Here’s my top 10 of 2017, plus a few personal recollections of the year, and 13 older films I ‘discovered’ in 2017, and which you might like too.<br /><br />
Parts <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/2017Books.html">1 (books)</a> and <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/2017Live.html">2 (gigs, shows and exhibitions)</a> of the year in review are up on those links.<br /><br />
<b>My 10 favourite films of 2017</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IdP-ohdjGzQ/WjvLKGTbk2I/AAAAAAAAIAE/KOa3jNJE1RAIvx1y_SOUbA0gkU9tO1qLACLcBGAs/s1600/344195937.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IdP-ohdjGzQ/WjvLKGTbk2I/AAAAAAAAIAE/KOa3jNJE1RAIvx1y_SOUbA0gkU9tO1qLACLcBGAs/s400/344195937.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="609" data-original-height="343" /></a><br /><br />
It's been a great year at the cinema: I rarely see a new film as good as this year's #3, let alone two even better, and there are so many up-and-coming directors doing interesting work. This list is based on films which received a general release in the UK this year, so it includes some films from <i>last</i> year's London Film Festival. To read about some of the best movies coming up next year, including Guillermo del Toro's masterwork, <i>The Shape of Water</i>, <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/LFF2017-P2.html">you can go here</a>.<br /><br />
<b>Bubbling under (but still marvellous):</b> <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/london-film-festival-part-1-rebecca.html">Christine</a></i>, <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-beguiled-2017/">The Beguiled</a></i>, <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/LFF2017-P2.html">The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)</a></i>, <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/london-film-festival-part-1-rebecca.html">Tower</a></i>, <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/call-me-by-your-name/1/">Call Me By Your Name</a></i>.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>10. Paddington 2</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XiZVyHqbpLg/Wjue2AITzNI/AAAAAAAAH-M/EtO8-6l1hywjKNtPgUCZyfsnTzhz8CJ5ACLcBGAs/s1600/Paddington-2-513c9f2.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XiZVyHqbpLg/Wjue2AITzNI/AAAAAAAAH-M/EtO8-6l1hywjKNtPgUCZyfsnTzhz8CJ5ACLcBGAs/s400/Paddington-2-513c9f2.png" width="400" height="201" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="802" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Director:</b> Paul King<br />
<b>Cast:</b> Ben Whishaw (voice), Hugh Grant, Sally Hawkins, Hugh Bonneville, Brendan Glesson<br />
They did right by Paddington again. The prison sequences are all kinds of lovely. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/paddington-2/">Full(ish) review.</a><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>9. Battle of the Sexes</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-U9GV807luJA/WjuhkSCaPkI/AAAAAAAAH_M/2mKcB1i5UBsi7SQKUAz-HqqpcLGpz-Z9gCLcBGAs/s1600/169761-full.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-U9GV807luJA/WjuhkSCaPkI/AAAAAAAAH_M/2mKcB1i5UBsi7SQKUAz-HqqpcLGpz-Z9gCLcBGAs/s400/169761-full.jpg" width="400" height="266" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="681" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Director:</b> Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris<br />
<b>Cast:</b> Emma Stone, Steve Carell, Andrea Riseborough, Sarah Silverman, Bill Pullman<br />
A hugely uplifting, entertaining movie, with a typically dynamic central performance from Emma Stone, who inhabits the character of Billie Jean King almost entirely, as the tennis legend breaks away from the sexist tennis establishment, confronts the fact she's a lesbian, and gears up for the eponymous match, opposite self-styled 'male chauvinist pig', the shy and retiring Bobby Riggs. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/LFF2017-P2.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>8. The Salesman</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Le7-h2f8e98/WjufIkFOPFI/AAAAAAAAH-U/LaOJ5B8LXzYhKXdxDiWTDmNNNk8UXXlGACLcBGAs/s1600/download%2B%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Le7-h2f8e98/WjufIkFOPFI/AAAAAAAAH-U/LaOJ5B8LXzYhKXdxDiWTDmNNNk8UXXlGACLcBGAs/s400/download%2B%25281%2529.jpg" width="400" height="167" data-original-width="348" data-original-height="145" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Director:</b>Asghar Farhadi<br />
<b>Cast:</b>Shahab Hosseini, Taraneh Alidoosti, Babak Karimi, Farid Sajadhosseini, Mina Sadati<br />
An utterly compelling moral thriller from the writer-director of <i>A Separation</i>, Asghar Farhadi, about a couple (Shahab Hosseini and Taranah Alidoosti) whose marriage is thrown into turmoil by the hand of fate, as they prepare to appear together in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. It contains a late shock so well-executed that it made the person next to me in the cinema do a little fart. Now that's movie-making. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/london-film-festival-part-4-xavier.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>7. Tickling Giants</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-02yOIFnoNmU/WjufUYkcWNI/AAAAAAAAH-c/N8Hxp74D2zYyz4MxHYDvK25O0AatDmyVgCLcBGAs/s1600/Tickling-Giants-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-02yOIFnoNmU/WjufUYkcWNI/AAAAAAAAH-c/N8Hxp74D2zYyz4MxHYDvK25O0AatDmyVgCLcBGAs/s400/Tickling-Giants-2.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="1280" data-original-height="720" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Director:</b> Sara Taksler<br />
A wonderful documentary about 'the Egyptian Jon Stewart', Bassem Youssef, a heart surgeon who becomes a TV satirist and national hero following the Arab Spring. As the political climate festers and the military intervene, his potshots at authority start to divide the revolutionaries, leading to protests, boycotts and threats, but he and his staff remain unyielding – at least at first. After one of the writers says she doesn’t care about the outcry, a colleague asks if she’d care to provide a more diplomatic answer. “Yes,” she replies. “I don’t give a shit.” I expected <i>Tickling Giants</i> to be insightful and powerful, but not such fantastic fun as it is, and if you’re worried that Egyptian humour won’t translate across language and cultural barriers, you couldn’t be more wrong. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/london-film-festival-part-3.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>6. Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-g3uHaa0cxa4/Wjufg5l6fYI/AAAAAAAAH-k/hfR695P36x45RKfKAavADwRsDw97WaxzQCLcBGAs/s1600/Star-Wars-The-Last-Jedi-6-1-600x337.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-g3uHaa0cxa4/Wjufg5l6fYI/AAAAAAAAH-k/hfR695P36x45RKfKAavADwRsDw97WaxzQCLcBGAs/s400/Star-Wars-The-Last-Jedi-6-1-600x337.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="600" data-original-height="337" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Director:</b> Rian Johnson<br />
<b>Cast:</b> Daisy Ridley, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, John Boyega, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Kelly Marie Tran
The first sequel that feels like a film on its own terms. It's also a tremendous antidote to gung-ho macho heroics, plays deliriously and drolly with our expectation of good-bad guys, and features the coolest new series vehicles since <i>Return of the Jedi</i>'s speeders. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/star-wars-the-last-jedi/">I wrote this piece just after emerging, dazed and happy, from the cinema.</a><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>5. I Am Not Your Negro</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yG6jfgDgPd0/WjuftAt0QiI/AAAAAAAAH-o/TfMak9eeWYQLvrju4PjyZJPzZ-Gaw58gwCLcBGAs/s1600/maxresdefault%2B%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yG6jfgDgPd0/WjuftAt0QiI/AAAAAAAAH-o/TfMak9eeWYQLvrju4PjyZJPzZ-Gaw58gwCLcBGAs/s400/maxresdefault%2B%25282%2529.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="1280" data-original-height="720" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Director:</b>Raoul Peck<br />
<b>Cast:</b> Samuel L. Jackson (narrator)<br />
A profoundly powerful polemic that forces you to view the African-American experience through the piercing gaze of writer, thinker and activist James Baldwin, who speaks with authority, insightfulness and a broiling anger about the way his people have been exploited, abandoned and killed by their own country. It's a superb film in itself, and it also <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/2017Books.html">turned me onto Baldwin's writing</a>, which has been one of this year's greatest joys, and changed the way I look at myself and the world. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/james-baldwin-absolute-beginners-and.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>4. Fences</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nuQ4NBATZVE/WjugCgY0GjI/AAAAAAAAH-0/g-N23x37ir8DaL9C103v8OxLkYWXkVMzgCLcBGAs/s1600/viola.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nuQ4NBATZVE/WjugCgY0GjI/AAAAAAAAH-0/g-N23x37ir8DaL9C103v8OxLkYWXkVMzgCLcBGAs/s400/viola.png" width="400" height="242" data-original-width="985" data-original-height="596" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Director:</b> Denzel Washington<br />
<b>Cast:</b> Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Stephen Henderson, Jovan Adepo, Russell Hornsby, Mykelti Williamson<br />
An astonishing drama, based on August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which tells an archetypally American story in the manner of Eugene O'Neill or Arthur Miller, but does so to elucidate the African-American experience, which as <i>13th</i> so eloquently expressed, is the result of decisions that have never been in their hands. It's both extraordinarily original and utterly timeless, with a polemical power that comes along rarely, and two of the finest performances in years. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/emily-watson-fences-and-hollywood.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>3. La La Land</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-OOoUtA-FhSQ/WjugJT1kmgI/AAAAAAAAH-4/gguML3VRwtY8YPsNEmCzlYgfSjjdxPtVQCLcBGAs/s1600/rs-la-la-land-3d3a431a-8329-4539-b953-51e2d61a396c.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-OOoUtA-FhSQ/WjugJT1kmgI/AAAAAAAAH-4/gguML3VRwtY8YPsNEmCzlYgfSjjdxPtVQCLcBGAs/s400/rs-la-la-land-3d3a431a-8329-4539-b953-51e2d61a396c.jpg" width="400" height="210" data-original-width="1200" data-original-height="630" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Director:</b> Damien Chazelle<br />
<b>Cast:</b> Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, John Legend, Rosemarie DeWitt, Finn Wittrock, Jessica Rothe<br />
The problem with contemporary musicals is the undercurrent that says: “Isn’t this wacky, we’re doing a musical!” It was musicals’ everyday nature, their centrality to the national psyche that made them so magical. Somehow Chazelle has made that live again. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/london-film-festival-part-1-rebecca.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>2. Certain Women</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AMs9pJw_jX8/WjugPgXopyI/AAAAAAAAH-8/h7vapU2aWVIhLrVV2qUEP7XfqtUCOdgIwCLcBGAs/s1600/UKR_9mar150186_rgb-0-2000-0-1125-crop.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AMs9pJw_jX8/WjugPgXopyI/AAAAAAAAH-8/h7vapU2aWVIhLrVV2qUEP7XfqtUCOdgIwCLcBGAs/s400/UKR_9mar150186_rgb-0-2000-0-1125-crop.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="900" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Director:</b>Kelly Reichardt<br />
<b>Cast:</b> Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, Michelle Williams, Lily Gladstone, James LeGros, Jared Harris<br />
A film of unwavering, unflinching honesty and quiet poetry – from Williams’ piercing, scarcely likeable performance to that shot of a rogue truck tumbling off the road – a gift from a filmmaker at the very peak of her powers. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/london-film-festival-part-3.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>1. Moonlight</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0itqrEjWJx0/WjugbzNhrcI/AAAAAAAAH_A/nXqlNug0l6UUSyMZB1uJ41UlY9YEt_ZngCLcBGAs/s1600/5760.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0itqrEjWJx0/WjugbzNhrcI/AAAAAAAAH_A/nXqlNug0l6UUSyMZB1uJ41UlY9YEt_ZngCLcBGAs/s400/5760.jpg" width="400" height="240" data-original-width="700" data-original-height="420" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Director:</b> Barry Jenkins<br />
<b>Cast:</b> Trevante Rhodes, Ashton Sanders, Alex Hibbert, André Holland, Jharrel Jerome, Jaden Piner, Naomie Harris, Janelle Monáe, Mahershala Ali<br />
An enveloping, once-in-a-lifetime film about the constancy, malleability and complexity of human nature, the pain and ecstasy of love, and the world's vicious but not quite unrelenting assault on the weak. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/rauschenberg-moonlight-and-simon-peggs.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>Five obsessions that defined my year in movies</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HyCBZIE-rBw/WjvD-tH607I/AAAAAAAAH_c/ULO_k2-wzr4G9MhXwS3MbaiHF3ykkqBFgCLcBGAs/s1600/ambergfstairs2.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HyCBZIE-rBw/WjvD-tH607I/AAAAAAAAH_c/ULO_k2-wzr4G9MhXwS3MbaiHF3ykkqBFgCLcBGAs/s400/ambergfstairs2.jpg" width="400" height="301" data-original-width="850" data-original-height="640" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Orson Welles</b><br />
My intense infatuation with Awesome Orson flares up every three or four years. This time it was <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-magnificent-ambersons/1/">a first big screen viewing of <i>The Magnificent Ambersons</i> that set it off</a>, sending me on a fast-paced journey through established classics (<i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/citizen-kane/">Kane</a></i>, <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/touch-of-evil/">Touch of Evil</a></i>, <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-trial/">The Trial</a></i>) and oddities both remarkable (<i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-immortal-story/">The Immortal Story</a></i>) and not (<i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/journey-into-fear/">Journey Into Fear</a></i>,
<i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/too-much-johnson/">Too Much Johnson</a></i>). Though <i>Ambersons</i> will never be seen again in its proper state – having been cut by a third against Welles’ wishes before release, with the culled footage dumped in the sea – it also cast its spell on me more thoroughly and enduringly than ever before. I’m still thinking about it now, three weeks later, and I haven’t been able to look at any other film in the same way since. It’s the greatest thing he ever did and, even in its butchered form, one of the key works of screen art, with a look, a feel and an atmosphere – playfulness giving way to an exhausted, defeated malaise – that is like nothing else in cinema.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cqje-gvl02g/WjvEP9CtQPI/AAAAAAAAH_g/m9CqceVbEMkQaeF-kpOUeqS3mGfRZ0maACLcBGAs/s1600/C2ZyaCPXgAEDQiv.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cqje-gvl02g/WjvEP9CtQPI/AAAAAAAAH_g/m9CqceVbEMkQaeF-kpOUeqS3mGfRZ0maACLcBGAs/s400/C2ZyaCPXgAEDQiv.jpg" width="400" height="298" data-original-width="661" data-original-height="493" /></a><br /><br />
<b>The big screen</b><br />
<a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/list/films-ive-seen-at-the-cinema-in-2017/">More than half the films I saw this year were at the cinema</a>, thanks to both the BFI’s magnificent programming and a newly rekindled love of the big screen experience. There’s still nothing quite like it, and it’s got me off my arse and out of the house and then back on my arse to catch films I love, that I have on DVD, but that I’ve never quite <i>seen</i> before. After experiencing countless movies ruined by dodgy prints or the Odeon’s laissez-faire attitude to keeping a projector in focus, I’d begun to see digital as a simple solution, especially after the great 4K job done on films like <i>The Third Man</i>. One of my favourite film writers, Ian Mantgani, took me to task a while ago for such naïvete, and he was right. Seeing Minnelli’s <i>The Cobweb</i> on film – the widescreen image tactile, its brash colour scheme turned a touch gaudy – or <i>Ambersons</i> with grain and flicker and the odd scratch, the soundtrack a little screechy now and then, but as it was shot and should be seen, is the ideal filmgoing experience, and one which perfectly polished pixels are never going to be quite able to match. Having said that, if the print is a hissy, fuzzy mess, don't take the piss by putting it on.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nvob2dLzy2k/WjvJT1KcgPI/AAAAAAAAH_w/GhCRYI8wKnIfVsAc6V49C2b9p2DjTZ4KgCLcBGAs/s1600/raise-main.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nvob2dLzy2k/WjvJT1KcgPI/AAAAAAAAH_w/GhCRYI8wKnIfVsAc6V49C2b9p2DjTZ4KgCLcBGAs/s400/raise-main.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="825" data-original-height="464" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Titanic films</b><br />
As I mentioned in passing in my books review, my friend Jess and I are watching all the films we can find about the Titanic. Our grand experiment is in its infancy, but we have managed <i>Titanic</i> (<a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/titanic-1953/1/">good</a>), <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/titanic-1997/1/">Titanic</a></i> (great), <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/a-night-to-remember/">A Night to Remember</a></i> (excellent) and <i><a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/raise-the-titanic/">Raise the Titanic</a></i> (absolute shit), and we’ve secured further titles for 2018 already. Next up: <i>S.O.S. Titanic</i>.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Q8D4c0hWUFA/WjvJe6lmSsI/AAAAAAAAH_0/WXIpWIu1a-c-7imoCtQV7SIO0xcCNRdnQCLcBGAs/s1600/lillian-gish-5-500x350.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Q8D4c0hWUFA/WjvJe6lmSsI/AAAAAAAAH_0/WXIpWIu1a-c-7imoCtQV7SIO0xcCNRdnQCLcBGAs/s400/lillian-gish-5-500x350.png" width="400" height="280" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="350" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Lillian Gish</b><br />
There haven't been quite the opportunities to further my Gish fandom that previous years have offered, but I've done my best. I tracked down three more of her films: <i>The Greatest Question</i> (<a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-greatest-question/">a derivative but persuasive star vehicle</a>), <i>The Cobweb</i> (<a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-cobweb/">a big, bold Minnelli soap with Gish in an unusually large supporting role</a>), and <i>The Battle of Elderbush Gulch</i> (<a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-battle-at-elderbush-gulch/">more a historical curio than A Good Film</a>), and <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/the-wind/2/">saw a watchable version of her 1928 classic, <i>The Wind</i>, for the first time</a>. Anyway, we're very much in love, even though she died in 1993.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fJUICRm2bcs/WjvJmvzzZEI/AAAAAAAAH_4/KDlFJdP3IuoWc5BCs-ejBuVGBH4GQSx2ACLcBGAs/s1600/truffaut-580.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fJUICRm2bcs/WjvJmvzzZEI/AAAAAAAAH_4/KDlFJdP3IuoWc5BCs-ejBuVGBH4GQSx2ACLcBGAs/s400/truffaut-580.jpg" width="400" height="268" data-original-width="580" data-original-height="388" /></a><br /><br />
<b>François Truffaut</b><br />
I finished my voyage through the lesser-known works of François Truffaut, drawing the inescapable conclusion that this is one of those rare times the popular canon has it right: some of them were crap. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/list/the-films-of-francois-truffaut-ranked-by/detail/">Here's the full list of his 22 features</a>, with plenty of reviews to go with it.<br /><br />
It's also important to mention at this point that IN OCTOBER I MET DANNY DEVITO.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>13 'discoveries' of 2017</b><br /><br />
Perhaps because many of them were on at the BFI, this year's discoveries are perhaps a little less obscure than in previous years (a notable dearth of 1930s B-movies, sorry), especially if you're interested in seeing the established 'classics' of world cinema, but hopefully there'll be a couple that are new to you.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mam17JMF_BA/WkTuks32IJI/AAAAAAAAIBQ/mbps3is7yAoACY84Xb8iUjaBLcpDc0nzgCLcBGAs/s1600/chloe-in-the-afternoon.jpeg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mam17JMF_BA/WkTuks32IJI/AAAAAAAAIBQ/mbps3is7yAoACY84Xb8iUjaBLcpDc0nzgCLcBGAs/s400/chloe-in-the-afternoon.jpeg" width="400" height="303" data-original-width="427" data-original-height="323" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Chloe in the Afternoon (Éric Rohmer, 1972)</b> – The last – and greatest – of Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, with businessman Frédéric (Bernard Verley) torn between his marriage to quiet, repressed academic Hélène (Françoise Verley) and the sensual, erratic Chloe (Zouzou), who returns to Paris six years after driving his best friend to the point of despair. Shot in 1.37:1, reinterpreting Murnau’s Sunrise for the sixth time, and equipped with an unreliable, self-justifying narrator who’s obsessed with women, it feels like the summation of the series, and also its cleanest, clearest and most narratively inventive example: full of profound insights and observations wrapped in a light, sexy, playful exterior that simply doesn’t prepare you for what’s coming. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/love-in-the-afternoon-1972/">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<b>Cria cuervos (Carlos Saura, 1975)</b> – A miraculous film, quite unlike anything else I’ve seen, that plays out on the face of its young heroine (Ana Torrent from <i>Spirit of the Beehive</i>) and exists in that strange place between memory, reality and fantasy, as scenes bleed one into the next, and Torrent recalls her authoritarian, adulterous father, conjures the gentle spirit of her neurotic mother (Geraldine Chaplin) and cautiously negotiates a new, lonelier life in the bosom of her strict aunt’s family. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/so-long-farewell-auf-wiedersehen-adieu.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Gji6keeFjEE/WjvdbkksTVI/AAAAAAAAIAY/U-b_hgjHu98pJrB3ZcaTPjXxEyyYZU9GwCLcBGAs/s1600/35126617.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Gji6keeFjEE/WjvdbkksTVI/AAAAAAAAIAY/U-b_hgjHu98pJrB3ZcaTPjXxEyyYZU9GwCLcBGAs/s400/35126617.png" width="400" height="226" data-original-width="680" data-original-height="384" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Le Trou (Jacques Becker, 1960)</b> – Jacques Becker's final film is a tough, meticulously detailed and incredibly suspenseful prison break movie, as four men awaiting trial acquire an apparently callow, privileged new cellmate (Mark Michel), while preparing their painstaking, painfully slow escape from the Big House. Cast mostly with non-professional actors (as opposed to unprofessional actors, like Marilyn Monroe) and based on an autobiographical novel by José Giovanni, it works as both a gripping thriller and a socialist allegory about class, co-operation and bourgeois hypocrisy. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/le-trou/">Full review.</a> I saw Bertrand Tavernier talk about Becker, his great hero,
<a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/my-journey-through-french-cinema/">at the BFI in September</a>.<br /><br />
<b>The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)</b> – A pulsating, gripping, brilliantly-directed docu-drama about the Algerian revolution, which works as a history lesson, a thriller and a study of a handful of memorable characters on both sides of the battle, all augmented by Ennio Morricone's exceptional score. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/dorothy-mcguire-battle-of-algiers-and.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-IPeTBVKWqEo/WjveLYwRCPI/AAAAAAAAIAg/8P95p5ik2xIPAqJB2gUF_XF-HBDUAYe6QCLcBGAs/s1600/site_28_rand_150454984_slv_spader_627.gif" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-IPeTBVKWqEo/WjveLYwRCPI/AAAAAAAAIAg/8P95p5ik2xIPAqJB2gUF_XF-HBDUAYe6QCLcBGAs/s400/site_28_rand_150454984_slv_spader_627.gif" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="704" data-original-height="396" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Sex, Lies, and Videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989)</b> – For all its rough edges (or perhaps because of them), Soderbergh’s debut still looks astounding. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/sex-lies-and-videotape/">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<b>Claire's Knee (Éric Rohmer, 1970)</b> – The Rohmerest Rohmer film ever (hot French people talking unreliably about love and sex amid beauteous locales), with great acting, stunning Nestor Almendros photography and some of the finest examples of Rohmer defining his characters, their dynamics and his audience's perceptions through understated and apparently effortless composition. Laura > Claire, tho.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-N4PuALJtb-w/WjvegIqu5HI/AAAAAAAAIAk/aTOVBKwusBstzsPg0xoz3r8y3fwFOyZ2gCLcBGAs/s1600/download%2B%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-N4PuALJtb-w/WjvegIqu5HI/AAAAAAAAIAk/aTOVBKwusBstzsPg0xoz3r8y3fwFOyZ2gCLcBGAs/s400/download%2B%25281%2529.jpg" width="400" height="224" data-original-width="300" data-original-height="168" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Babette's Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987)</b> – A film full of painterly imagery, complex truths and quiet wisdom that echoes long after the curtain has fallen, and the virtuosic storytelling − hopping between time-frames, mood and media − takes the breath away. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/film/babettes-feast/">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<b>Prick Up Your Ears (Stephen Frears, 1987)</b> – Near-perfect biopic of gay '60s playwright Joe Orton (Gary Oldman), focusing on his volatile relationship with live-in lover, Kenneth Halliwell (Alfred Molina), powered by a superb Alan Bennett script, and Oldman's best performance. 'Synthesisers by Hans Zimmer'! <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/so-long-farewell-auf-wiedersehen-adieu.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-s1U2Li1g16s/WjveoSe2MDI/AAAAAAAAIAo/zkRkP9SQJOYX44KMAndmCBFOtvyrNC5zgCLcBGAs/s1600/spirited-away-1200-1200-675-675-crop-000000.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-s1U2Li1g16s/WjveoSe2MDI/AAAAAAAAIAo/zkRkP9SQJOYX44KMAndmCBFOtvyrNC5zgCLcBGAs/s400/spirited-away-1200-1200-675-675-crop-000000.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="1200" data-original-height="675" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)</b> – We meet Chihiro just minutes after an emotional farewell to her old friends: she’s sitting in the backseat of her parents’ car, as they trail a moving van to their new home. The family stop to investigate what seems to be an abandoned theme park, and soon the parents have been turned into pigs, Chihiro’s life has been saved by a boy who it turns out is a dragon and also a god, and she’s been forced to find employment in a fully-functioning bathhouse populated by ghosts, assisted by a multi-armed man who lives by a furnace with his friends – sentient bits of soot – and under the cosh of giant-headed Thatcher-a-like Yubaba, whose beloved germaphobe baby is bigger than she is. That’s the first 20 minutes. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/Chameleons.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<b>Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969)</b> – So much for the tolerant left.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9MyI4WSbzDY/Wjve4ZVoiaI/AAAAAAAAIAw/xCqHIMRzrYwZZxa4LLGQHNyxjIbSE7kPwCLcBGAs/s1600/deuxieme_souffle_03.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9MyI4WSbzDY/Wjve4ZVoiaI/AAAAAAAAIAw/xCqHIMRzrYwZZxa4LLGQHNyxjIbSE7kPwCLcBGAs/s400/deuxieme_souffle_03.jpg" width="400" height="230" data-original-width="550" data-original-height="316" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Le deuxième souffle (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969)</b> – A violent, grimply poetic underworld epic from Jean-Pierre Melville, with Lino Ventura as a brutal train-robber – obsessed with his own personal conception of honour – who escapes from prison only to be drawn inexorably towards a heist plot. Relatively unknown within the Melville canon, it takes a little while to find its rhythm, but once it does it's stunning, with mesmerising set pieces and several superb supporting characters, including ironic, omniscient police inspector Paul Meurisse, and Denis Manuel as a short-tempered gypsy gunman.<br /><br />
<b>All This, and Heaven Too (Anatole Litvak, 1940)</b> – An exceptionally classy melodrama, with Bette Davis giving one of her most extraordinary performances as a silhouette of a woman who enters the Duc de Praslin's tempestuous household in Paris of 1848 to act as the governess, falling in love with her master and becoming beloved of his children, before incurring the formidable wrath of his jealous, unstable wife. It's a beautifully balanced and restrained performance, with the star often saying one thing and playing three more, her heroine having to keep her emotions in check, know her place in society and her household, and juggle the conflicting responsibilities to her employers, her charges and herself. She's a character rarely permitted to speak honestly, but yet at every instant we know what she's thinking. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/bette-davis-shaun-sheep-and-best-pun.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8iQl-bRJw24/WjvfBFDTJ2I/AAAAAAAAIA0/KGx9OrW_Jkc3A2LwwuckYAyuAhXUO8uZgCLcBGAs/s1600/Mouthpiece13.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8iQl-bRJw24/WjvfBFDTJ2I/AAAAAAAAIA0/KGx9OrW_Jkc3A2LwwuckYAyuAhXUO8uZgCLcBGAs/s400/Mouthpiece13.png" width="400" height="295" data-original-width="1457" data-original-height="1074" /></a><br /><br />
<b>The Mouthpiece (Elliot Nugent and James Flood, 1932)</b> – Few pre-Code films were ever as sweet and affecting as this one, in which William’s noble prosecutor reacts to tragedy by reinventing himself as an amoral shyster for the underworld (with a moustache, naturally), only to be changed back by the guileless southern office waif (Sidney Fox) he’s been trying to shag. It’s a little clumsy in places, and mistakes audacity for humour, but it’s saved by the performances. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/revel-in-my-balanced-lifestyle-as-i.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Thanks for reading.Rick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com0London, UK51.5073509 -0.1277582999999822351.1912379 -0.77320529999998222 51.8234639 0.51768870000001777tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-38429226028855274492017-12-20T16:37:00.000+00:002018-04-20T11:47:54.040+01:00Review of 2017: Part 2 – Live<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3ckuedVo1_A/WjQBbHOVFMI/AAAAAAAAH6k/KYPLmXKBuJMFXfN3uglspPP4RjpOUyAWQCLcBGAs/s1600/rah_43453931451.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3ckuedVo1_A/WjQBbHOVFMI/AAAAAAAAH6k/KYPLmXKBuJMFXfN3uglspPP4RjpOUyAWQCLcBGAs/s400/rah_43453931451.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="860" data-original-height="484" /></a><br /><br />
I'm not blasé about how lucky I am to have the job I do, to live in London, and to have just enough money to go to some incredible events (provided I don't go on holiday, and shop at Aldi quite a bit). In 2017, I've strolled around the Royal Albert Hall auditorium laying out Santa hats as Chrissie Hynde sang '2,000 Miles', gone for an extended drink with the Pern team after a day of filming with Christopher Eccleston, Paul Whitehouse and Nigel Havers, met Billy Bragg (straight in at #1 on the Nicest Celebs spreadsheet) and been to a celebration of Joe Orton featuring his sister Leonie, Kenneth Cranham and John Lahr. I've seen <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/GasFoodLodging.html">Allison Anders talk about <i>Gas, Food Lodging</i></a>, Bruce Robinson and Richard E. Grant discuss <i>Withnail & I</i>, and <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/kate-hepburn-112263-and-elia-kazans.html">Kazuo Ishiguro reveal a deep love of screwball comedy</a>. And through jobligations and a fast finger on the F5 button, I've been fortunate enough to go to the BAFTAs, Oliviers, the London Film Festival and the athletics world championships, and to see John Grant interview Elizabeth Fraser. It's been a bit daft.<br /><br />
That's everything that doesn't fit into my rigorously regimented Part 2 of the Review of the Year, which is split into Gigs, Shows and Exhibitions:<br /><br />
<b>Gigs</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nke_rtdQzJM/WjPFU6dk3QI/AAAAAAAAH4Q/exbSbj91UWkYZYRinTD_N06LQZX2P2h9QCLcBGAs/s1600/DCoX2SZXoAAoPBg.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nke_rtdQzJM/WjPFU6dk3QI/AAAAAAAAH4Q/exbSbj91UWkYZYRinTD_N06LQZX2P2h9QCLcBGAs/s400/DCoX2SZXoAAoPBg.jpg" width="400" height="305" data-original-width="1200" data-original-height="916" /></a><br /><br />
<b>12. The Best of Elmer Bernstein (June, Royal Albert Hall)</b> – A fantastic concert showcasing Bernstein's pioneering work in everything from epics to comedies, Westerns to romances, and nature documentaries to sweaty, cynical, claustrophobic fag-end noirs. It was cosy, conversational and emotionally overwhelming in turn. Bernstein’s rhapsodic homage to/pastiche of classic Hollywood music – evoking the very history of Hollywood and composed for a ‘60s TV show called <i>Hollywood and the Stars</i> – was a revelation, captivating me with its sweeping, Steiner-esque beauty. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/revel-in-my-balanced-lifestyle-as-i.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AYD3Y8CFXyA/WjPIPNuZ3PI/AAAAAAAAH4k/d6wBCcIALJkAQeKM-7b2Gmy9ojEPa4jGACLcBGAs/s1600/martha-wainwright-sage-gateshead-jan-2017-17010443.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AYD3Y8CFXyA/WjPIPNuZ3PI/AAAAAAAAH4k/d6wBCcIALJkAQeKM-7b2Gmy9ojEPa4jGACLcBGAs/s400/martha-wainwright-sage-gateshead-jan-2017-17010443.jpg" width="400" height="267" data-original-width="400" data-original-height="267" /></a><br /><br />
<b>11. Martha Wainwright and Ed Harcourt (February, The Roundhouse)</b> – An often brilliant evening in the company of one of the 21st century’s most compelling performers. Her new record is patchy, but she is such a mesmerising performer that she can wring brilliance from almost anything, her hips rotating sensually, her foot coming off the floor and her knee up towards her chest again and again in a mannerism that seems both inexplicable and inevitable, as much a part of her act as her easy humour, constant between-songs swearing and that unapproachable voice, racing over the octaves, blasting the roof off the Roundhouse or staying husky, deep and disgruntled somewhere in her larynx. Leonard Cohen’s 'Chelsea Hotel #2' is the highlight: among the most remarkable things I’ve ever seen or heard, at a gig or anywhere else (even after a false start in which she leaps straight into the second verse). At one point she’s crouched on the floor, her voice somewhere in the rafters, her heart somewhere in Hell. There are versions of it on YouTube, one from 10 years ago, another when she started doing it again live in December – clutching a lyric sheet, skitting around the tune – but nothing will ever come close to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1vAlBZdUMQ">the way she sang it that night in February</a>. It was revelatory. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/review-martha-wainwright-and-ed.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mlNMIWmXUek/WjPIY-6zK0I/AAAAAAAAH4o/zHfz3U_zlFIxNuI0BDecElaiFAGLie9CwCLcBGAs/s1600/The-National-Hammersmith-Lindsay-Melbourne_-24.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mlNMIWmXUek/WjPIY-6zK0I/AAAAAAAAH4o/zHfz3U_zlFIxNuI0BDecElaiFAGLie9CwCLcBGAs/s400/The-National-Hammersmith-Lindsay-Melbourne_-24.jpg" width="400" height="267" data-original-width="1500" data-original-height="1000" /></a><br /><br />
<b>10. The National (September, Hammersmith Apollo)</b> – The best band since Suede (it's true, check your paperwork), and one of the most viscerally exciting live acts around. After three solid years of touring Trouble Will Find Me, they seemed keen to get away from it, delving further back into their catalogue and playing nearly everything from their new record, Sleep Well Beast. Highlights were a blistering 'The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness', a hushed, harmonised 'Dark Side of the Gym' featuring support act This The Kit, and a brass-backed take on that stuttering, syncopated hymn to escapism in a hellhole, 'Fake Empire'. My only quibble is that Matt Berninger, one of the most gifted lyricists of his generation and a dynamic stage presence, can't sing in tune live. It's not <i>that</i> hard.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Kyc4QHbiRXY/WjPF3oN0LYI/AAAAAAAAH4Y/wEhtKCbeBjwQRqjcpyapWL2XbpVayTwaQCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_2867.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Kyc4QHbiRXY/WjPF3oN0LYI/AAAAAAAAH4Y/wEhtKCbeBjwQRqjcpyapWL2XbpVayTwaQCLcBGAs/s400/IMG_2867.JPG" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="1593" data-original-height="1196" /></a><br /><br />
<b>9. Jens Lekman (March, Oval Space)</b> – Glorious. Imagine how good he is when he doesn't have the flu. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/review-jens-lekman-at-oval-space.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dO3NEOtbwIU/WjPPEF8SmXI/AAAAAAAAH44/zAJgTJcS6e85BpSrol6YazHifQwqoZORgCLcBGAs/s1600/DQpK9tDWAAAcsNR.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dO3NEOtbwIU/WjPPEF8SmXI/AAAAAAAAH44/zAJgTJcS6e85BpSrol6YazHifQwqoZORgCLcBGAs/s400/DQpK9tDWAAAcsNR.jpg" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="1200" data-original-height="900" /></a><br /><br />
<b>8. David Ford's Milk and Cookies (December, Bush Hall)</b> – Every Christmas, the protest-singing multi-instrumentalist puts down the economics textbook and plays a covers show <a href="https://www.reverserett.org.uk/">for charity</a>. Milk and cookies are on sale from a table at the back. This was the first time I'd been (though I've seen Ford live twice before), and it was a total joy, Ford effortlessly judging the mood as kicked off with 'Free Fallin' ', put his heart into a Whitney cover ('Didn't We Almost Have It All'), and played a joshing bromantic duet with Tom McRae (John Waite's 'Missing You'), between self-penned classics and randomly generated 'requests'. At one point, he asked the audience to sing a succession of notes, then used them as the synths for an inspired take on 10cc's 'I'm Not in Love'. What a treat. See you next year. I've put up a setlist (from memory) <a href="https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/david-ford/2017/bush-hall-london-england-3e1add3.html">here</a>.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Q6iusBq8EUM/WjPRtZwQIuI/AAAAAAAAH5E/3-2E_ZayWxkjEf2KFxi2D0BTBjFJmOIWwCLcBGAs/s1600/maxresdefault.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Q6iusBq8EUM/WjPRtZwQIuI/AAAAAAAAH5E/3-2E_ZayWxkjEf2KFxi2D0BTBjFJmOIWwCLcBGAs/s400/maxresdefault.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="900" /></a><br /><br />
<b>7. Mike Heron and Trembling Bells (August, Cafe Oto)</b> – As I said in the books review, my summer was commandeered by a burgeoning infatuation with the Incredible String Band. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/warren-william-girl-from-north-country.html">Robin Williamson's show at a Putney pub was distinctive and enjoyable</a>, but ISB-free and dragged down by his wife's tuneless vocals. That felt in keeping with his character, and so did Mike Heron's hits set, backed by Glasgow folk-rock outfit, Trembling Bells. After support by a bad poet and a good young folkie, they took the stage for eight Incredible String Band numbers, including mesmeric versions of 'Douglas Traherne Harding' and 'A Very Cellular Song', probably the best thing Heron ever wrote. Pushing 75, he couldn't take a lead on all the numbers, so a backing singer unconvincingly deputised on 'Maya', but his voice has held up pretty well, and there's no questioning the enduring, singular quality of the material, nor the talent of his polished but flexible ensemble. He ended the show by duetting on the ISB rarity, 'Bright Morning Stars', with his daughter. <a href="https://twitter.com/rickburin/status/895042654760775680">Immediate reaction.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mabJfN6ZZKw/WjPTg8yOriI/AAAAAAAAH5Q/qeHyUySiEfkB59tazUfSNsLo3m6-iF0cQCLcBGAs/s1600/C_5W9NbXoAAKRwo.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mabJfN6ZZKw/WjPTg8yOriI/AAAAAAAAH5Q/qeHyUySiEfkB59tazUfSNsLo3m6-iF0cQCLcBGAs/s400/C_5W9NbXoAAKRwo.jpg" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="1200" data-original-height="900" /></a><br /><br />
<b>6. Yasmine Hamdan (March, Scala)</b> – Every time I see her live, Lebanese electro-grunge pioneer Yasmine Hamdan features in this list. She topped it in 2014. The crowd was full of people farting and petting, but the performance itself was packed full of Hamdan's easy sensuality, instinctive creativity and megawatt charisma. The aftermath was somewhat spoiled by Yasmine not remembering me (we once hung out for like three hours) and then proceeding to offer me a fist-bump, which I misjudged and shook hands with. I can hear you cringing from here. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/yasmine-hamdan-at-scala-john-grant-at.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ftxsKM3Q9EU/WjPwMF0sRZI/AAAAAAAAH5g/cEwmxln1ZW0PaqrxQQ9nQADvWPrSgzIMwCLcBGAs/s1600/DLKjKiaXkAIqYhN.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ftxsKM3Q9EU/WjPwMF0sRZI/AAAAAAAAH5g/cEwmxln1ZW0PaqrxQQ9nQADvWPrSgzIMwCLcBGAs/s400/DLKjKiaXkAIqYhN.jpg" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="658" data-original-height="494" /></a><br /><br />
<b>5. Susanne Sundfør (October, Union Chapel)</b> – For me, one of this year's happiest musical discoveries, along with my numbers 10, 7 and 1. I saw her at the Scott Walker Prom in July (more of which later), and quickly became besotted. Y'know, musically. This show at London's most tranquil, atmospheric and welcoming venue (though the pews aren't ideal if you're a handsome 33-year-old press executive with a bad back) leant heavily on her new record, Music for People in Trouble, and its stylistic siblings: songs like 'Walls' and 'The Brothel', introspective, teasingly extroverted synth-folk ballads a world away from the stomping electro-pop of 2015's irresistible Ten Love Songs. Occasionally the show dipped into plonky nothingness, but there were stand-out moments from 'Reincarnation' to Paul Simon's 'American Tune', and when Sundfor rips the lid off that extraordinary voice for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSoH_BJVijo">'Trust Me'</a> (a heart-stopping version) and the year's best song, 'Undercover', there's simply no feeling comparable.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-B0kQ5KpVeQs/WjPxRgw3bEI/AAAAAAAAH5o/smjzQr5nrUs-0-a1SXO8oNFwKmKtzVURgCLcBGAs/s1600/C-2pj9aXgAIII-r.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-B0kQ5KpVeQs/WjPxRgw3bEI/AAAAAAAAH5o/smjzQr5nrUs-0-a1SXO8oNFwKmKtzVURgCLcBGAs/s400/C-2pj9aXgAIII-r.jpg" width="300" height="400" data-original-width="900" data-original-height="1200" /></a><br /><br />
<b>4. John Grant (May, Union Chapel)</b> – My first ever visit to Union Chapel was to see Review-of-the-Year stalwart John Grant, staying true to his reputation as rock's nicest genius with a charity show (to fund a kidney transplant for his friend Oleg) full of rarely-aired fan favourites ('Global Warming', 'You Don't Have To') and definitive versions. His 'Glacier' was the greatest I've ever heard, and I've seen him duet on it <i>with Kylie</i>. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/yasmine-hamdan-at-scala-john-grant-at.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7nvjy5SJ7vo/WjP2I73oT-I/AAAAAAAAH54/Fr7si0pQ2sEOW6k_WsD7UMi58fWUwS7tgCLcBGAs/s1600/DBGuCzoXkAETKD-.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7nvjy5SJ7vo/WjP2I73oT-I/AAAAAAAAH54/Fr7si0pQ2sEOW6k_WsD7UMi58fWUwS7tgCLcBGAs/s400/DBGuCzoXkAETKD-.jpg" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="400" data-original-height="300" /></a><br /><br />
<b>3. Seu Jorge (May, Royal Albert Hall)</b> – I loved <i>The Life Aquatic</i> from first sight, and one of its great joys is the Seu Jorge soundtrack: Portuguese-language covers of Bowie songs that give it so much of its poignant, perfect atmosphere. This year he toured those songs for the first time, pitching up at My Office for an intimate, conversational show. It was uplifting, unique, but deeply moving too: speaking very personally to the sell-out crowd, many of them sporting those iconic red beanies. “I am glad to see so many members of Zissou Team here,” says Seu. (A Team Zissou member calling Team Zissou 'Zissou Team” is the most Team Zissou thing ever). When a hidden screen comes down and his backdrop is <i>The Life Aquatic</i> and you realise that though it’s only 13 years, it’s already 13 years, and that the passing of time set to music is a rhapsodically poignant thing. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/review-seu-jorge-at-royal-albert-hall.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ry4QX9NQzUY/WjP8kFWxp6I/AAAAAAAAH6I/NHD4lOrcQJgUG5Oi1Cz5AHt1Jyc-1JZHQCLcBGAs/s1600/p059qw17.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ry4QX9NQzUY/WjP8kFWxp6I/AAAAAAAAH6I/NHD4lOrcQJgUG5Oi1Cz5AHt1Jyc-1JZHQCLcBGAs/s400/p059qw17.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="976" data-original-height="549" /></a><br /><br />
<b>2. Prom 15: The Songs of Scott Walker: 1967-70 (July, Royal Albert Hall)</b> – Perhaps the best show I've ever seen at work, a stunning reinterpretation of Scott Walker's early solo work from four of the most distinctive musical voices of later generations. Backed by Jules Buckley's impeccable Heritage Orchestra, each brought something different to the show, representing a different facet of Walker's mercurial persona: John Grant power and eloquence, Richard Hawley an urgent, tuneful melancholy, Jarvis Cocker a stage presence in place of the voice required to do Walker's songs justice, and Susanne Sundfør the insolent sensuality and super soaraway top notes. I'd come for Walker and Grant, but left as a Sundfør superfan. I first saw her in the soundcheck, doing something strange to 'The Amorous Humphrey Plugg'. By the end of the song I couldn't wait to hear more, and when she stepped out to sing it in Bond-theme style that night, I was just a foot away. It damn near lifted me to the ceiling. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GUNAtrDhOg">You can watch it here.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-e13pyv6mQT4/WjQALuvsE0I/AAAAAAAAH6U/zlQz9JhRO9wl2IvPj2478Ca8duOK7fC5gCLcBGAs/s1600/Capture.PNG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-e13pyv6mQT4/WjQALuvsE0I/AAAAAAAAH6U/zlQz9JhRO9wl2IvPj2478Ca8duOK7fC5gCLcBGAs/s400/Capture.PNG" width="400" height="223" data-original-width="560" data-original-height="312" /></a><br /><br />
<b>1. Father John Misty (November, Hammersmith Apollo)</b> – In which the psychically tortured confessional artist puts on the most joyous pop concert of the year. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/misty.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<b>Would you like some more?</b> I've written about plenty of other shows, from <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/why-i-love-fdr-and-other-stories.html">Jackson Browne being pretty damn great</a> to <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/review-angel-olsen-at-roundhouse.html">Angel Olsen being pretty damn poor</a>, and <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/review-richard-thompson-at-cadogan-hall.html">Richard Thompson not really being arsed</a>.<br /><br />
<b>Extra bits:</b> Here are the best three pieces I wrote for the Royal Albert Hall blog this year:
- My best pun of the year headlines <a href="https://www.royalalberthall.com/about-the-hall/news/2017/january/woodwind-and-bernstein-six-classics-from-a-movie-music-legend/">this piece about Elmer Bernstein's greatest hits</a>
<a href="https://www.royalalberthall.com/about-the-hall/news/2017/march/behind-the-scenes-of-brian-pern-a-tribute/">- Go behind the scenes at the filming of Brian Pern: A Tribute
</a>- And, after the untimely passing of the great Tom Petty, <a href="https://www.royalalberthall.com/about-the-hall/news/2017/october/remembering-tom-petty-1950-2017-looking-back-at-the-life-and-work-of-a-rock-legend/">I wrote about seeing him live in 2012</a><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>Theatre</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PWzpTfdpJSU/WjqPTHP0a9I/AAAAAAAAH9A/oENDIXTSA3wTmPyJpi7HD8QhxYSPXEiAwCLcBGAs/s1600/Prom%2B34%2B%2526%2B35_CR_BBC%2BMark%2BAllan_6.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PWzpTfdpJSU/WjqPTHP0a9I/AAAAAAAAH9A/oENDIXTSA3wTmPyJpi7HD8QhxYSPXEiAwCLcBGAs/s400/Prom%2B34%2B%2526%2B35_CR_BBC%2BMark%2BAllan_6.JPG" width="400" height="252" data-original-width="1000" data-original-height="631" /></a><br />
<i>Yes, I like this sort of thing, what exactly is your point.</i><br /><br />
<b>7. The John Wilson Orchestra presents Oklahoma! (August, Royal Albert Hall)</b> – This counts, right? A semi-staged performance of Rodgers and Hammerstein's morally incomprehensible 1943 musical, in which the hero decides that a mentally ill love rival who owns pornography doesn't deserve to exist, and tries to convince him to commit suicide. Helluva show, though, powered by John Wilson's tight, exuberant orchestra, as a first-rate ensemble conjured Oklahoma from thin air with the help of a washing line, a couple of chairs, and impeccable song-and-dance smarts. Robert Fairchild was unquestionably the stand-out, but a mention too for Marcus Brigstocke. When I heard he was in it, I thought that was funny. It wasn't, but he was. I'd forgotten too how much great music there is in Oklahoma! I'll always prefer Rodgers and Hart to Rodgers and Hammerstein, but I prefer Rodgers and Hart to most things.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3ZLxpSFIWQw/WjqPo1yIJVI/AAAAAAAAH9E/PYOKQ7rXqOg7tSlwT5-ssBxgu1lO5WhewCLcBGAs/s1600/Leanne-Cope-in-An-American-in-Paris-Original-Broadway-Cast-Credit-Matthew-Murphy-2.jpg.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3ZLxpSFIWQw/WjqPo1yIJVI/AAAAAAAAH9E/PYOKQ7rXqOg7tSlwT5-ssBxgu1lO5WhewCLcBGAs/s400/Leanne-Cope-in-An-American-in-Paris-Original-Broadway-Cast-Credit-Matthew-Murphy-2.jpg.jpg" width="400" height="267" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1067" /></a><br /><br />
<b>6. An American in Paris (March, Dominion Theatre)</b> – An explosive, intelligent stage version of MGM’s 1951 masterpiece, direct from Broadway, which sags now and then in its book, but offers unmissable entertainment of a type rarely seen in the West End. It was the first night too, so Leslie Caron turned up to take a bow. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/review-american-in-paris-at-dominion.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-FjeppXrsXqQ/WjqPw5sCsLI/AAAAAAAAH9I/PkeEkqY5z6YSm4hjZvyS900P2ZrBCjZ0gCLcBGAs/s1600/sheila_atim_marianne_laine_shirley_henderson_elizabeth_laine_in_girl_from_the_north_country_at_the_old_vi_-_h_2017.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-FjeppXrsXqQ/WjqPw5sCsLI/AAAAAAAAH9I/PkeEkqY5z6YSm4hjZvyS900P2ZrBCjZ0gCLcBGAs/s400/sheila_atim_marianne_laine_shirley_henderson_elizabeth_laine_in_girl_from_the_north_country_at_the_old_vi_-_h_2017.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="1296" data-original-height="730" /></a><br /><br />
<b>5. Girl From the North Country (July, The Old Vic)</b> – A jukebox musical of Bob Dylan album tracks, allied to a Depression-era melodrama, and nearly as good as that sounds. Its greatest virtue was Shirley Henderson's performance. I've never been that taken with her, seeing her in films, but she had such a presence and physicality, flitting between pitiful and sensual, rabid and comatose, that I was transfixed. Though I tend to have a problem with portraits of mental disintegration which are big and tic-laden (as the journalist Tim Lott once wrote, a realistic piece of fiction about mental illness would just be very boring), this one managed to be funny, intelligently allegorical, moving and somewhat unpleasant, without traversing into unbelievability or hysteria, while her moments of lucidity unveiled an unexpectedly beautiful voice, shot through a Scandi-Minnesotan lilt. It was her, the songs and the atmosphere of quiet desperation that stayed with me, but mostly her. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/warren-william-girl-from-north-country.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Im4fhiz8HKQ/WjqP-xi3WbI/AAAAAAAAH9Q/xmHQ9CqLOV0NCQj8HM5sl9kpwBhb6RWZACLcBGAs/s1600/Jason_Pennycooke_Thomas_Jefferson_with_West_End_cast_of_Hamilton_-_Photo_Credit_Matthew_Murphy_js3ifr.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Im4fhiz8HKQ/WjqP-xi3WbI/AAAAAAAAH9Q/xmHQ9CqLOV0NCQj8HM5sl9kpwBhb6RWZACLcBGAs/s400/Jason_Pennycooke_Thomas_Jefferson_with_West_End_cast_of_Hamilton_-_Photo_Credit_Matthew_Murphy_js3ifr.jpg" width="400" height="200" data-original-width="700" data-original-height="350" /></a><br />
<i>Pennycooke as the dandyish Francophile, Thomas Jefferson.</i><br /><br />
<b>4. Hamilton (December, Victoria Palace Theatre)</b> – The top four could be in any order, really: I've been incredibly lucky to see four shows so thrilling and affecting in a single year. Lin-Manuel Miranda's Broadway sensation makes it to the West End in considerable style, delivering for an audience so hyped that they were whooping with barely-contained delirium when the lights went down. The writing is magnificent – two small moments that just blow me away are Lafayette's appearance in 'Guns and Ships' and "... we dream in the dark for the most time", a wail of impotence in the stand-out number, 'The Room Where It Happens' – and the staging and playing aren't far off. Rachel John (as Angelica) and Giles Terera (as Aaron Burr) are both incredibly classy performers, and there's explosive, pint-sized support from Jason Pennycooke. The West End audience seemed to retain its comfortable fondness for warbly show tunes (the cheesy if unquestionably effective 'One Last Time') over lightning-paced wordplay, but the atmosphere was something special all the same.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-p3UbgEl0qcc/WjqQQl3i6RI/AAAAAAAAH9U/0bm7vCiKL-8LHEm39zqmhmEO1KVudlLxgCLcBGAs/s1600/16_0.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-p3UbgEl0qcc/WjqQQl3i6RI/AAAAAAAAH9U/0bm7vCiKL-8LHEm39zqmhmEO1KVudlLxgCLcBGAs/s400/16_0.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="768" data-original-height="432" /></a><br /><br />
<b>3. Angels in America (July/Aug, National Theatre)</b> – The first half, <i>Millennium Approaches</i>, was astonishing: a clear-headed, literate and ambitious piece of art, lit by the NT's masterly, expansive stagecraft and a stunning ensemble. Part two, <i>Perestroika</i>, wasn't quite in my sweet spot, its abstract and metaphysical elements sometimes more confusing than compelling, but taken as a whole it was a vivid presentation of an extraordinarily ambitious, eight-hour play, with a sprawling focus but an enduring, unblinkered humanity. The performances from Nathan Lane (as Trump's mentor, McCarthyite lawyer Roy Cohn), Denise Gough and the relatively unknown James McArdle were absolutely terrific.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-33P-vGIcoeI/WjqQaOpXyxI/AAAAAAAAH9Y/wu9RXlmmTwQPWRoJp0NAEGZg7m5pW58KwCLcBGAs/s1600/Laura-Donnelly-Caitlin-Carney-and-Paddy-Considine-Quinn-Carney.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-33P-vGIcoeI/WjqQaOpXyxI/AAAAAAAAH9Y/wu9RXlmmTwQPWRoJp0NAEGZg7m5pW58KwCLcBGAs/s400/Laura-Donnelly-Caitlin-Carney-and-Paddy-Considine-Quinn-Carney.jpg" width="400" height="267" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1067" /></a><br /><br />
<b>2. The Ferryman (August, The Gielgud Theatre)</b> – What I always imagined theatre might be, and yet rarely is: both political and personal, with a specificity that gives it its universality, and a crackling, super-charged atmosphere that here buzzes with desperation, danger and the particular energy of unspoken love. Written by Jez Butterworth and directed by Sam Mendes, it stars Paddy Considine as a former IRA heavy whose tranquil farm life remains in the shadow of his brother's unresolved disappearance, setting up your expectations only to subvert them or – in the case of a moment of lucidity amidst the fog of dementia – time and heighten cliche with such effortlessness that it works just the same, before a descent into inevitable, ironic violence. Everything about the play is first-rate, but especially Laura Donnelly as the missing brother's wife. The play was based on Donnelly's own experiences, and her knife-edge performance is warm, tortured and erotic – sometimes all three at once.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wY4OHx77J98/WjqQhv1XYfI/AAAAAAAAH9c/aQP57sbhAuoO6ik9_awkYNr28PV6qG9ngCLcBGAs/s1600/hamlet-andrew-scott.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wY4OHx77J98/WjqQhv1XYfI/AAAAAAAAH9c/aQP57sbhAuoO6ik9_awkYNr28PV6qG9ngCLcBGAs/s400/hamlet-andrew-scott.jpg" width="400" height="267" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1067" /></a><br /><br />
<b>1. Hamlet (April, Almeida Theatre)</b> – Andrew Scott's Hamlet is the best I've seen − probing, philosophical, introspective and bitterly witty − and this intimate, innovative, cleanly modern production rises to meet him, keeping your attention rapt and your emotions engaged. He's also the first to whom I've felt a natural and personal connection, and it runs deep. He's groping in the dark, beset with an impotence of action from which he's trying to rip himself free, questing for self-knowledge, while praying for a relief from it. He's an existential Hamlet: thoughtful, melancholy, feeling deeply, a decent, anguished, emotionally tender Prince with an adolescent's loathing of hypocrisy and duplicity, a child's guilelessness, and a self-loathing born of immobility in the face of dishonour. In pegged black trousers and a collarless shirt, barefoot or in shiny black shoes, stripped to a vest highlighting his voluminous biceps, or dressed in cream and white for the graveyard scene, the wiry, wild-eyed Scott commands the stage, and all of your attention. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/review-hamlet-at-almeida-theatre.html">Full review.</a><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>Exhibitions</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BOaLLLYj048/WjuLKV1tx9I/AAAAAAAAH98/iA_Tjnhvfc8VbJK2cf1UkaGx3MNEijITACLcBGAs/s1600/152727new.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BOaLLLYj048/WjuLKV1tx9I/AAAAAAAAH98/iA_Tjnhvfc8VbJK2cf1UkaGx3MNEijITACLcBGAs/s400/152727new.jpg" width="286" height="400" data-original-width="638" data-original-height="892" /></a><br /><br />
<i>"The bees are getting suspicious."</i>
My favourite exhibition of the year is on until April: the V&A's wonderful <b>Winnie the Pooh: Exploring a Classic</b>, which approaches its topic from the angle of E. H. Shepard's perfect illustrations. That was presumably through necessity, as Shepard's drawings are part of the museum's collection whereas the smaller number of Milne items are borrowed, but it offers a fascinating new perspective on the works, examining Shepard's preparation (sketches from life in the rural locations), his subtle tricks (lengthening Piglet's snout to bury it in a balloon, showing his ears streaming back in the force of a gale) and his genius, while celebrating a creative marriage of two forceful, remarkable talents that extended to the artistic layout of the text, which echoed and so enhanced the stories they were telling. Don't miss the little side-room which takes that one step further! The rooms are full of life-size recreations of the drawings, including a Poohsticks bridge with an electronic river, and of remarkable insights and artefacts. The best are the alternate, unused Shepard sketches, among 270 drawings that he donated the museum in 1973. What I also found fascinating, looking at a gallery of later Pooh editions illustrated by Shepard,
is that it was only in his dotage that his colour portraits began to work. His watercolour paintings, at least in these reproductions, seem blocky and charmless, but when he returned to the subject in his eighties, his eyesight failing, he opted instead for simple washes over his old ink drawings, and it's those indelible editions (making Pooh's jackets red, where sometimes they'd been blue) which have become definitive – and rightly so. There are a few references to the abhorrent D*sney bastardisation of the books in the opening room, but otherwise we're fine.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JbvIR0liVoM/WjqQrZikqBI/AAAAAAAAH9k/AWfOoGTg8EIFTeF6FwJHq3cZ-nRDxdPrQCLcBGAs/s1600/pre-press_gp584_death_of_a_working_hero_2016_-_email.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JbvIR0liVoM/WjqQrZikqBI/AAAAAAAAH9k/AWfOoGTg8EIFTeF6FwJHq3cZ-nRDxdPrQCLcBGAs/s400/pre-press_gp584_death_of_a_working_hero_2016_-_email.jpg" width="304" height="400" data-original-width="481" data-original-height="632" /></a><br /><br />
Grayson Perry's small-scale offering at the Serpentine Galleries, <b>The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever!</b>, made me very happy: a sly, self-referential and extremely funny collection, from a vase decorated with delicately hideous cartoons of the Brexit mob to a tooled up motorbike for his teddy bear and (my favourite), a pastiche of miners' gala banners that contrasts the vilified 'archetypes' of the contemporary working class with the hazy image of their forefathers' macho monochrome nobility.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-48TbCLt1h9U/WjqRL2WAwuI/AAAAAAAAH9o/zNAtecr2pBk1rG2sBm981yN-xBLOgzcrQCLcBGAs/s1600/Capture.PNG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-48TbCLt1h9U/WjqRL2WAwuI/AAAAAAAAH9o/zNAtecr2pBk1rG2sBm981yN-xBLOgzcrQCLcBGAs/s400/Capture.PNG" width="280" height="400" data-original-width="280" data-original-height="400" /></a><br /><br />
I saw two great exhibitions at the British Library, as well as their enjoyable Harry Potter one: a collection of Jane Austen's teenage writings in the Treasures gallery, and a fine study of the failed communist experiment – already in tatters by 1920 – in <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/revel-in-my-balanced-lifestyle-as-i.html"><b>Russian Revolution: Hope, Tragedy, Myths</b></a>. The Imperial War Museum's <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/warren-william-girl-from-north-country.html">People Power</a> exhibition was impressive, multi-faceted and a little unfortunate in having to follow the V&A's Disobedient Objects, which is one of the best exhibitions I've seen since moving to London, and dealt with a similar theme: public protest.<br /><br />
If you like the idea of going into a warm hut and trying not to stand on some butterflies, then I'd really recommend the Natural History Museum's ever-popular <b>Sensational Butterflies</b> (seriously, it's terrific).<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Pu1M84oJZc4/WjqRTOMeh0I/AAAAAAAAH9s/TJwe6Scm8bkjMm3C22BRXMbRvcCXHZK1wCLcBGAs/s1600/38630f8089753490b178cf46ec5a290d.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Pu1M84oJZc4/WjqRTOMeh0I/AAAAAAAAH9s/TJwe6Scm8bkjMm3C22BRXMbRvcCXHZK1wCLcBGAs/s400/38630f8089753490b178cf46ec5a290d.jpg" width="267" height="400" data-original-width="1067" data-original-height="1600" /></a><br /><br />
My favourite of the art exhibitions was Tate Modern's <b>Soul of A Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power</b>, which had its philosophically impenetrable collections of twigs, but also works like Benny Andrews' provocative, 'Did the Bear Sit Under a Tree' – with its challenging, tactile 3D created partially by using an everyday zip for a mouth – and Betye Saar's 'Sambo's Banjo', its gaudy exterior covered in the infantilising, dehumanising racism of a blackface caricature, while its inside contains a black figure strung up for a lynching. Saar said, though, that the plight of the black man in America was not hopeless, destiny was in his hands, and so a sniper rifle lies within reach, waiting for him to free himself. I was less enamoured of the Rauschenberg exhibition, though it contained <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/rauschenberg-moonlight-and-simon-peggs.html">the greatest factual description of an artwork ever written</a>, though American Dream at the British Museum got me thinking about the ways we see America, and <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=american+dream">the ways it sees itself</a>.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Thanks for reading.Rick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-50729860944812533822017-12-20T14:00:00.000+00:002017-12-28T09:50:41.240+00:00Review of 2017: Part 1 – BooksOne of my new year's resolutions for 2017 was to read a book a week. And, ladies and gentleman, I did it. *inexplicably waits for applause from readers who are too busy raising a family or tending the sick to read a biography of 1930s gossip columnist Walter Winchell*<br /><br />
I come here not only to brag, though, but to share. Here's a whistle-stop tour of the high and lowlights of my year of books.<br /><br />
<b>Fiction</b><br /><br />
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My favourite book of the year, and the only thing to make me cry in 2017 (I am hard), was Kazuo Ishiguro's justly-celebrated <b>The Remains of the Day</b>, (1989) a work of sublime brilliance with a guarded, reticent narrative voice that gradually unfurls the book's devastating secrets, both professional and personal. From its gloriously stilted ruminations on motoring and "bantering" to that incomparable climax, in which the floodgates open, just an inch, it's the book that taught me the most about writing and about life. Another book that was incredibly special to me was <b><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/ways-of-looking-at-america-reviews-262.html">Timequake</a></b> (1997), by my favourite writer and human, Kurt Vonnegut. Supposedly his final novel, though it's not exactly a novel, it's been unjustly dismissed, perhaps because he spends such little time and effort dealing with his alleged plot: that of luckless citizens (including recurring character Kilgore Trout) forced to endure a ‘rerun’ of the past decade following the ‘timequake’ of the title, in which they go through every moment of every day of every year in exactly the same way, the only novelty being that they are aware this is happening. Instead, he leaves us with just "choice cuts from the carcass" of that story, shooting off at glorious tangents. The book shakes with pain and sadness in its early passages, as Vonnegut details his crippling writer’s block and rails at the innate cruelty of the world, appearing almost defeated by it. After all, he says, “No-one asks to be born”. Soon, though, he’s brimming with brilliance both comic and humane, picking himself – and us – off the floor and arming us with compassion, insight and practical ideas for combating the societal plagues of poverty, loneliness and despair. I see it as a self-help book for sarcastic socialists.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wmNJHvV9M9s/WjpoZqSBAwI/AAAAAAAAH7M/n1Zfq-h1lpY6iUuqldIoCLVJu1TDdA8LACLcBGAs/s1600/TreeGrowsInBrooklyn.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wmNJHvV9M9s/WjpoZqSBAwI/AAAAAAAAH7M/n1Zfq-h1lpY6iUuqldIoCLVJu1TDdA8LACLcBGAs/s400/TreeGrowsInBrooklyn.jpg" width="275" height="400" data-original-width="280" data-original-height="408" /></a><br /><br />
<b>A Tree Grows in Brooklyn</b> (1943), I knew from Elia Kazan's 1945 adaptation: despite considerable competition, his first and best film. The source novel doesn't just come with deleted scenes, but a greater scope in terms of time and characterisation, though its great virtue is what it shares with the movie: its detail, its unsentimental sensitivity and <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/so-long-farewell-auf-wiedersehen-adieu.html">its atmosphere of hard-won wisdom and desperate yearning</a>. Another American classic, recently added to the canon, is John Williams' <b>Stoner</b> (1963), an extraordinarily sad, straightforward but poetic book about a life: that of ungainly farm boy William Stoner, who becomes an academic but finds disappointment and disillusionment in the compromise of adulthood. I picked up <b>The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay</b> (2000) because I loved the front cover (in fact, <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=kavalier+and+clay&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj_gtC125jYAhUpBsAKHdKlAEkQ_AUICigB&biw=1239&bih=707"><i>all</i> of its front covers are amazing</a> ), and it was wonderful, so Rick 1, Cliches 0. After 150 pages I was wondering how it had won the Pulitzer, 450 later, I was wondering if it was possible to give it some more. Telling the story of an ink-stained immigrant comic book artist fighting Nazis on the page and in secret, it's a tremendous feat of storytelling, completely impossible to second-guess, with a consistently confounding sense of irony, and a mind that won't always allow its warm, beating heart to get what it wants. I'll be reading much more of Michael Chabon's work.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BVje0U7bMNA/Wjpo743Bq3I/AAAAAAAAH7U/m6y9sdFtlD0e1AyMQ9kjNx1UQlsJoBfpwCLcBGAs/s1600/647121.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BVje0U7bMNA/Wjpo743Bq3I/AAAAAAAAH7U/m6y9sdFtlD0e1AyMQ9kjNx1UQlsJoBfpwCLcBGAs/s400/647121.jpg" width="255" height="400" data-original-width="303" data-original-height="475" /></a><br /><br />
Another author I 'discovered' this year was Elizabeth Taylor (my first reaction being, predictably enough, "I bet she's crap, it's easy to get a book deal if you're famou- oh, it's a completely different person). Her 1957 book <b>Angel</b> is an impeccably restrained work by a great and hilarious author, about a poor and humourless one. Its heroine is Angel Deverell, who seeks to transcend the pathetic life of servitude mapped out for her, through sheer, incandescent genius. Her genius, though, isn’t for art but for matching the taste of the public, which greets her epic, florid, ‘risqué’, wildly inaccurate tour-de-force, The Lady Irania, with little short of hysteria, catapulting the waspish, selfish and humourless egomaniac into a life of which she has merely dreamt, and yet has dreamt relentlessly. Similar in subject matter, but not as rich in scope, was Jane Gardam's fascinating, funny <b>A Long Way From Verona</b> (1970), which also deals with a brutally honest teenage writer and outsider in a vanished England. And like <i>Angel</i>, it has an innate, fierce unpredictability and a rapturously distinctive voice (ideally utilised in a first person narrative) which, by definition, make it nothing like <i>Angel</i>. Its wartime Yorkshire setting is intrinsic – the story set against the mercilessness and the brutal lottery of war, even on the Home Front – and it crashes into the narrative, but it isn’t a book about war. It’s a book about Jessica Vye and the world she inhabits, ridicules, abhors and attempts to negotiate, with uncertainty and arrogance and perseverance, and a conviction that never shakes, but does latch onto passing whims, and falls prey to her explosive temper.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-x7L9Ca53lpo/WjppFO-vOwI/AAAAAAAAH7Y/5lFEEobL6IkKNY2pBXK0U4HcISeiWu8SQCLcBGAs/s1600/60483.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-x7L9Ca53lpo/WjppFO-vOwI/AAAAAAAAH7Y/5lFEEobL6IkKNY2pBXK0U4HcISeiWu8SQCLcBGAs/s400/60483.jpg" width="259" height="400" data-original-width="308" data-original-height="475" /></a><br /><br />
One of the greatest treats of the year was Truman Capote's <b>Music For Chamelons</b> (1980). Comprising six short stories, seven conversational portraits, and a non-fiction (?) centrepiece about a serial killer, it's a book of extraordinary grace, incisiveness and honesty which further bolstered my impression that Capote remains one of the most important, original and underestimated writers of his era. Fuck his artificial image as a catty, trivial, morbid starfucker, and study the work: dark, devastating, morally decent writing shot through with his actual character, the shadows of an encroaching darkness creeping across the sun-dappled idyll of his New Orleans childhood. Perhaps my favourite piece is 'Dazzle', a multi-layered story with a time-shifting perspective that’s about love, fear and guilt, as Capote relives the story of his paternal grandfather, a fortune teller and two terrible secrets: one comic, the other tragic. It is flecked with wonder, touched by horror, and redolent with an unstudied compassion for his younger self, before a climactic sucker-punch that knocked me sideways. But it’s just one masterpiece among many.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XqJUDdfzUV4/WjppUkVmvFI/AAAAAAAAH7c/1sT3xv_z-rs-7MtBBshFHgsQkBvuZno1gCLcBGAs/s1600/9780140017892-us.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XqJUDdfzUV4/WjppUkVmvFI/AAAAAAAAH7c/1sT3xv_z-rs-7MtBBshFHgsQkBvuZno1gCLcBGAs/s400/9780140017892-us.jpg" width="240" height="400" data-original-width="300" data-original-height="500" /></a><br /><br />
<b>The Heart of the Matter</b> (1948) was my favourite of this year's two Graham Greene books: a masterwork about Scobie, a rigorously upstanding colonial policeman in an unnamed African state, whose unimpeachable integrity is challenged by his capacity for pity and lust, threatening him with eternal damnation (at least in his fevered Catholic mind). Greene <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/why-i-love-fdr-and-other-stories.html">crystallises the nature of memory in 56 words, the colonial experience in a sentence or two, and the nature of its protagonist through a description of a room containing <i>nothing of his own</i></a>, all within the first five pages. <b>The Quiet American</b> (1955) covers similar ground, and both starts and ends tremendously, with real economy coupled to mystery or revelation, but the mid-section isn't as compelling, plodding in places. That was matched pound-for-pound in terms of nihilistic bleakness by Jack Kerouac's miraculous <b>Big Sur</b> (1962), a sort of journal of self-abasement, written in his familiarly roving, unstinting style, and basking in naturalistic, colloquial language, in the juxtapositions of ideas and words, in the unvarnished, unprettified honesty of a man at the end of his tether, who despairs at his lack of 'human beingness' and yet displays both the compassion, innate, clear-sighted judgement of character and the ruthless, pitiless self-awareness that is being human. Camus's short, unsparing <b>The Fall</b> (1956) was a little light on laughs too: a brilliant book which is radically conceived, simply written, and almost endless in its potential interpretations, though it is, primarily, a book about conscience, judgement and the loss of innocence. And I completed the cycle of six 'proper' Jane Austen novels with the witheringly sarcastic <b>Northanger Abbey</b> (1917): not quite the spoof of Gothic literature suggested by its reputation: that's merely one of its many facets, and accessible at that.<br /><br />
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Those are all the cast-iron classics, but I found joy in plenty of other fictional forms: in the parts of <b>The Amber Spyglass</b> (2000) dealing with Lyra and Will, and in Pullman's new voyage into the world of His Dark Materials: <b>La Belle Sauvage</b> (2017), a very wet story of nobility, bravery and sacrifice: moving, magical and brilliantly sentimental, though with some increasingly samey imagery and a villain who was more nasty than novel. Other British authors I explored included Ian McEwan, whose <b>On Chesil Beach</b> (2007) relies so heavily on its ending to enter the pantheon of the greats that it seems a truly special book only in retrospect; John Mortimer, author of <b>The Sound of Trumpets (1999)</b>, an astute, immersive, neatly (and viciously) plotted book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2178238260?book_show_action=false">with a few shortcomings</a>; and Nick Hornby, whose concentration of hard-earned wisdom in the accessible and funny <b>High Fidelity</b> (1995) took me completely aback.<br /><br />
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My further adventures in Philip Roth were mixed: <b>The Ghost Writer</b> (1979) is the first book narrated by his serious-minded, horny and human alter-ego, Nathan Zuckerman, and a vigorously and continuously brilliant story of three father figures and a barely acceptable reverie, but <b>I Married a Communist</b> (1999) felt like a pale retread of <i>American Pastoral</i> and <i>The Human Stain</i>. It has some great passages, and credit to Roth for twisting something as tangible as HUAC into a story about his enduring preoccupations (irony, chance, the unknowability of everyone), but his resistance to capitalising on his premise's obvious potential may be ultimately what scuppers it. I really liked <b>The Lathe of Heaven</b> (1973) by Ursula K. Le Guin, a high-concept slice of sci-fi with a sure sense of its self, but Stephen King's stab at a time-travelling tale, <b>11/22/63 (2011)</b>, was less impressive: blessed by <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/kate-hepburn-112263-and-elia-kazans.html">a gripping, meticulously plotted story and an unexpected moral grace</a>, but also overwritten and overlong, with clunky prose, a silly climactic dystopia and a lot of superfluous, blunt humour.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EVieHFS9Kkk/WjpptiRIxuI/AAAAAAAAH7s/EjW__kZ1sQY9it-w7F1CwzQNxwBK-11lQCLcBGAs/s1600/9780452286757.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EVieHFS9Kkk/WjpptiRIxuI/AAAAAAAAH7s/EjW__kZ1sQY9it-w7F1CwzQNxwBK-11lQCLcBGAs/s400/9780452286757.jpg" width="272" height="400" data-original-width="306" data-original-height="450" /></a><br /><br />
Donald Trump's favourite book, which he definitely hasn't read, is <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/ayn-rand-hunt-for-wilderpeople-and-13th.html"><b>The Fountainhead</b> (1943) by Ayn Rand</a>, a strident, remarkable, often ridiculous crowdpleaser that lays out her philosophy of ‘objectivism’, in which self-interest is the driving force of progress. It's violent and nasty and has a lot to answer for, but it’s also enormously readable – far more so than I was expecting – with a patented contrariness and counterintuitiveness in its language and ideas, a starkly impressionistic vocabulary full of “smears” and “smudges”, “parapets” and “porticos”, and bursts of sudden, shocking violence: in its architecture, its relationship with an imperfect world, and its characters’ creativity and cruelty. The first time that visionary architect Howard Roark reshapes a hackneyed, ignorant design by slashing thick black lines through it, you can’t help your heart beating a little faster. Her earlier book, <b>Anthem</b> (1937), rewritten and republished after her success with <i>The Fountainhead</i>, is less arresting, but not bad: a short, precise critique of totalitarianism, with flashes of stark, brutal poetry, as Equality 7-2521 learns to love and question and create.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-FjMYtV5x0Mk/WjpsNqrkaGI/AAAAAAAAH8s/u8z43GFlCt49YhKiT6EkQnEzSdCX_dxrwCLcBGAs/s1600/17143.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-FjMYtV5x0Mk/WjpsNqrkaGI/AAAAAAAAH8s/u8z43GFlCt49YhKiT6EkQnEzSdCX_dxrwCLcBGAs/s400/17143.jpg" width="260" height="400" data-original-width="260" data-original-height="400" /></a><br /><br />
I also read several books about race and diversity, a couple of them novels. James Baldwin's <b>Go Tell It on the Mountain</b> (1953), the first book by the great poet-philosopher of the Civil Rights movement, isn't the easiest to read or to like, with a relentlessness that becomes more like reputation, complex characters and an obscure frame of reference – the intricacies of rebirth within a specific section of the black Christian church – but it's well worth it: a deep and profound and sustaining work. <b>Mudbound</b> by Hillary Jordan (2008), a white author writing about race in the late-1940s, is the opposite: a pageturner that's undoubtedly sincere, but ends up feeling rather synthetic and shallow. I read both that and <i>On Chesil Beach</i> before <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/LFF2017-P2.html">I saw the movie adaptations at the London Film Festival</a>.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-khjRMhUqJpY/WjpqIzlJcSI/AAAAAAAAH78/8b7c8vvv7K44zKopMu8Ic21F1tlnt_ERQCLcBGAs/s1600/2319439.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-khjRMhUqJpY/WjpqIzlJcSI/AAAAAAAAH78/8b7c8vvv7K44zKopMu8Ic21F1tlnt_ERQCLcBGAs/s400/2319439.jpg" width="243" height="400" data-original-width="289" data-original-height="475" /></a><br /><br />
Among my books about movies was one piece of fiction: Nathanel West's legendary work, <b>The Day of the Locust</b>, nasty, nightmarish blast of Hollywood alienation, full of foreboding. Written in Hollywood’s greatest year, the near-mythical 1939, it’s an unremitting horror story in economic sentences: an acidic counterpoint to Steinbeck’s contemporaneous novels, depicting the unified masses not as a humane, nourishing whole, but as a blankly vicious mob, hooked on an unfulfilling dream, and chillingly ripe for fascism. It's still not as sour as Kingsley Amis's <b>The Folks That Live on the Hill</b> (1990), though, a mystifyingly joyless, poisonously misanthropic book about an outwardly avuncular academic and his troubled family. It makes the early '90s in England seem like the most awful place on earth.<br /><br />
<b>Children's books</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-f2I70Jkax0U/WjpqabfediI/AAAAAAAAH8A/5pex5teyK0YsukmrTSx0fu2PYplPXHPbACLcBGAs/s1600/JOR2.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-f2I70Jkax0U/WjpqabfediI/AAAAAAAAH8A/5pex5teyK0YsukmrTSx0fu2PYplPXHPbACLcBGAs/s400/JOR2.jpg" width="264" height="400" data-original-width="270" data-original-height="409" /></a><br /><br />
Two absolute stunners this year. The first was <b>Journey to the River Sea</b> (2001) by Eva Ibbotson, a beguilingly beautiful novel about orphan Maia, who travels to Brazil in the early 1900s to stay with distant relatives. There, she’s tormented by her new-found family, but finds solace in her friendships with governess Miss Minton, a child actor named Clovis King, and a mysterious boy named Finn, while discovering escape in her exploration of the seductive, enrapturing world of the Brazilian jungle. It’s timeless but modern, character-led but immaculately constructed, and paints a vivid and unforgettable portrait of early 20th century Brazil, while drawing much of its humour and conflict from the virtues and vices of Englishness. It’s unquestionably a great book, but perhaps more importantly it’s a good book: rich in human decency, and as deeply and desperately moving as anything I’ve read in years. It knocked me absolutely sideways, and by the end I was choked to let it go. The second was Allan Ahlberg's <b>The Bear Nobody Wanted</b> (1992), concernsing a nameless bear who arrives off the production line feeling smug and superior – after all, a bear’s character is defined by his facial features – only to be tossed into a bin, rescued, rejected, burnt, used as a duster, savaged by a dog, repaired, briefly welcomed, relegated, forgotten, lonely, nameless, catatonic and bombed by the Nazis, en route to a happy ending. A couple of other favourites were lovely gifts from close friends: <b>Katy Laura and the Dream Boat (1984)</b> and Dr Seuss's inspiring <b>Oh! The Places You'll Go</b> (1990).<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>Non-fiction</b><br /><br />
In terms of non-fiction, I tend to read 20th century history – especially biographies – and about cinema, but if my interest is piqued by a subject, or I feel hopelessly out of my depth when I hear it talked about (which is often), I'll try to read up about it. I know the limitations of my brain, though, and that rule applies more to, say, philosophy or fast bowling than, for example, chemistry.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-i0lfUayqbZE/WjpqsyrZPKI/AAAAAAAAH8I/M2k8PvIjbeUvAV5YShM3uzyDF8908rhUQCLcBGAs/s1600/51al8IkmXLL.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-i0lfUayqbZE/WjpqsyrZPKI/AAAAAAAAH8I/M2k8PvIjbeUvAV5YShM3uzyDF8908rhUQCLcBGAs/s400/51al8IkmXLL.jpg" width="260" height="400" data-original-width="325" data-original-height="500" /></a><br /><br />
The two best biographies I read in 2017 were Neal Gabler's <b>Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity</b> (2007) and Jean Edward Smith's <b>FDR</b> (2000). The two characters weren't unrelated: FDR was Winchell's hero, and the president's unexpected death sent the muckracking tabloid-journalist-turned-political-commentator spinning, with no North Star, towards McCarthyism. Smith's moving, powerful book shows how America's greatest president, for all his errors and failings, dragged the country up from its knees <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/why-i-love-fdr-and-other-stories.html">(I've written about it at length here)</a>. <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/so-long-farewell-auf-wiedersehen-adieu.html">Gabler's incredibly entertaining mix of biography and social history</a> explains much that has happened since: after all, Winchell's protégé was Trump's mentor.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uxZNBE0XaP4/WjprA11DVhI/AAAAAAAAH8M/yBY-hNvcUiwIToITuWnnOB_fN1CsDA6RwCLcBGAs/s1600/5136wZ0uXIL._SX333_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uxZNBE0XaP4/WjprA11DVhI/AAAAAAAAH8M/yBY-hNvcUiwIToITuWnnOB_fN1CsDA6RwCLcBGAs/s400/5136wZ0uXIL._SX333_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="269" height="400" data-original-width="335" data-original-height="499" /></a><br /><br />
I also enjoyed Evan Thomas's <b>Robert Kennedy</b> (2000), which rejects the lionisation and demonisation of RFK for something more complex and credible: a psychologically insightful portrait of a decent but deeply-flawed subject who felt deeply, erred frequently and grew through tragedy to become a great man. And I finally got around to John Lahr's celebrated <b>Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton</b> (1978) prior to seeing him speak at the BFI's brilliant <i>What the Butler Saw</i> event (part of an 'Orton at 50' celebration that also included 'Loot' at the Park Theatre): a literary biography that remains controversial for its fatalism, psychological studies of Orton's work, and sympathetic approach to his murderer (and lover), Kenneth Halliwell, in whose crime Orton is supposedly complicit. I thought it was exceptional. In the 'bad biog' corner, we have <b>Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin and a Century in Two Lives</b> (2013) by Karen Wieland <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2185031101?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1">which stank the place out in its interminable closing chapters</a>. It's not entirely without merit, but I'm sure you can find better.<br /><br />
Another sub-par film book was Anne Helen Petersen's <b>Scandals of Classic Hollywood</b> (2014). The author is currently being pilloried for <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/ten-long-years-of-trying-to-make-armie-hammer-happen?utm_term=.mfexP1zxq#.pnKRLz2RQ">her nasty pseudo-woke take on the career of Armie Hammer</a>, but <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/Chameleons.html">I was calling her book on Harlow, Brando et al 'unsatisfying' months ago</a>. <i>Easy Riders and Raging Bulls</i> author Peter Biskind's <b>Down and Dirty Pictures</b> was a highly readable account of the indie film distribution wars of the 1990s, which painted Harvey Weinstein as a cruel, capricious, manipulative, finagling, terrifying bully, but missed the story. Biskind responded to this accusation by saying that covering the rape allegations would have made his story "juicier", from which we can deduce that he's an absolute waste of a human being and shouldn't be listened to any more.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bj-zqxRnvt0/WjprSN8VbdI/AAAAAAAAH8Y/nqzWqccnzRUV4KQQkSXYRuC5GylPEN0JACLcBGAs/s1600/41KzCtcR3BL._SX353_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bj-zqxRnvt0/WjprSN8VbdI/AAAAAAAAH8Y/nqzWqccnzRUV4KQQkSXYRuC5GylPEN0JACLcBGAs/s400/41KzCtcR3BL._SX353_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="285" height="400" data-original-width="355" data-original-height="499" /></a><br /><br />
There were a couple of film books I just loved. Pamela Hutchinson's brilliant new study of <b>Pandora's Box</b> (2017), in the BFI Film Classics series, is an extremely astute, readable reading of a fascinating film, explaining the enduring appeal and allure of both the picture and its heroine, the shimmering, sensual, black-helmeted Lulu: chauvinist avatar turned feminist icon. Paul Seydor's unapologetically obsessive <b>The Authentic Death and Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid</b> (2015) is invaluable for anyone who's still not quite over Peckinpah's imperfect 1973 masterpiece. I collected its liveliest revelations in <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/Garrett.html">this blog entry</a>.<br /><br />
My younger brother bought me a copy of Rob Young's <b>Electric Eden: Uncovering Britain's Visionary Music</b> (2012) for my birthday, which was why I spent the entire summer listening to the Incredible String Band, and saw both of the band's visionary songwriters live. It's an elegant, passionately-argued history – and defence – of British folk music from its origins in the pastoral socialism of William Morris and classical composers Holst, Vaughan Williams and Delius, through to Kate Bush, Julian Cope and Talk Talk in the 1980s. The meat of the book is a conversational, amusing and astute evocation of the British folk boom of 1965-74, with vivid, condensed portraits of the likes of Pentangle, Fairport Convention, John Martyn and ISB, their origins, obsessions and place in the canon impeccably but accessibly explained and elucidated, alongside that of an abundance of odd, often forgotten contemporaries, from the bleak and furious art rock of Comus to a moonlighting Playaway presenter involved in naked pagan rituals.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yg483MrY8zQ/WjprxguoEOI/AAAAAAAAH8k/daw9jytUxSgAwIUZ0LKo09KZgGciMSrPwCLcBGAs/s1600/34661984.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yg483MrY8zQ/WjprxguoEOI/AAAAAAAAH8k/daw9jytUxSgAwIUZ0LKo09KZgGciMSrPwCLcBGAs/s400/34661984.jpg" width="251" height="400" data-original-width="298" data-original-height="475" /></a><br /><br />
Patti Smith's <b>Just Kids</b> (2010), a memoir of her life with idiosyncratic, doomed artist Robert Mapplethorpe, <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/Chameleons.html"> is probably what you'd expect from one of the most important and pretentious voices in modern music</a>: at its best, uncommonly insightful, raw and moving, but decreasingly revelatory and compelling as it progresses, with Smith slipping into unbearable posturing with increasing frequency and intensity. By contrast, I unequivocally adored Robert Webb's wonderful <b>How Not to Be a Boy</b> (2017), an extraordinarily perceptive, funny and moving memoir about masculinity, familial relationships and loss. I lost my mum at 17 too, but Webb – with his characteristic self-analytical unsentimentality – shows how I could have used that to get laid at university. Bit late now. Even the incidental, throwaway gags (like the one about David Mitchell "bumming some fags in a pub") are fantastic.<br /><br />
<b>Lost at Sea</b> (2013) <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/peter-lorre-sunset-song-and-enrapturing.html">was yet more Jon Ronson goodness</a>, each of his (sometimes formulaic) features revealing something about humanity or the world we inhabit, whether looking at bravery, open-mindedness or the rationalisations we make for being callous. Speaking of being lost at sea, my friend Jess and I have been watching all the films we can find about the Titanic. After seeing <i>A Night to Remember</i>, I read the 1955 source work by Walter Lord, an invigorating, intensely moving work that counterbalances the tragedy of the sinking with the triumph of the rescue, which is exhilaratingly brought to life. The chapter headings may be the greatest ever written, loaded with emotional import: most of them made me want to burst into tears.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-I7wBfn0jWY4/Wjpr_4-y9yI/AAAAAAAAH8o/wjuYlAA29jwuIe2-zjpUWgrFoSj1hEPdACLcBGAs/s1600/Denyingtheholocaust.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-I7wBfn0jWY4/Wjpr_4-y9yI/AAAAAAAAH8o/wjuYlAA29jwuIe2-zjpUWgrFoSj1hEPdACLcBGAs/s400/Denyingtheholocaust.png" width="261" height="400" data-original-width="460" data-original-height="706" /></a><br /><br />
The release of <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4645330/">Denial</a></i> made me finally get around to reading Deborah Lipstadt's <b>Denying the Holocaust</b> (1993), a self-congratulatory, endlessly repetitive book that's on the right side of history. Its most interesting aspects are the way it anticipates the far right's move into suited respectability – a move far more advanced now than then – and her astute, academicised rejection of presenting hate speech as a credible force in a two-sided debate (note to Piers Morgan: you do this whenever you're feeling unpopular, so several times a month). It's quite long-winded and dry, though, so congratulations to David Irving for getting to the end of it so he could sue her for libel (and lose, lol, the twat. *SPOILERS*).<br /><br />
The prize for the year's most unpleasant book (I'm not sure why there's a competition, but there is) goes to <b>Black Dahlia Avenger</b> (2015) by Steve Hodel, <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/dustin-hoffman-black-dahlia-and-bent.html">who remains convinced that his dad was one of the most notorious serial killers in American history</a>. The revolting close ups of a severed corpse turned out to be Not Really My Thing, and I'm pretty sure Hodel's wrong, though his father was unquestionably a monster.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1FGjxcTNM1g/Wjpp1GY9I1I/AAAAAAAAH7w/ViPyx8Ig2XMhPhgyWU9PJo0BVc9SnJXiACLcBGAs/s1600/9780140022377.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1FGjxcTNM1g/Wjpp1GY9I1I/AAAAAAAAH7w/ViPyx8Ig2XMhPhgyWU9PJo0BVc9SnJXiACLcBGAs/s400/9780140022377.jpg" width="265" height="400" data-original-width="331" data-original-height="500" /></a><br /><br />
Being enormously woke and therefore attractive to women at music festivals, I read a few books on diversity. One of them was superficially about cricket: the tremendously readable if choppily non-linear <b>Fire in Babylon</b> (2015), which tells the story of the brilliant West Indian sides who played under Clive Lewis and Viv Richards. At times it reads more like a series of loosely connected newspaper features than a coherent, complete history, but exploring subjects from slavery to seam bowling, it explores the phantom nation at the team's centre, how its success fostered racial pride in Britain's booming black immigrant population, and the fires of injustice that burned within the side's most remarkable players. James Baldwin's miraculous <b>The Fire Next Time</b> (1963) <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/Baldwin.html">simply changed the way I see, and engage with, the world</a>. <b>Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People about Race</b> (2017) was, I think, an attempt to do something similar for Britain in 2017 but, reader, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2204591027?book_show_action=false">it was shit</a>.<br /><br />
My final book of the 52 was James Naremore's <b>The Magic World of Orson Welles (1978/89)</b> (more about him in Part 3 of the annual review, I've been on a Welles bender), an acclaimed study that's great (if brief) on the director's technical innovation, and incisively considers his essential duality, but undermines the validity of its often valuable psychological and thematic analysis through an overly Freudian approach that sees sexual repression everywhere, rather than just in <i>The Trial</i>.<br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UlirYpd9UII/WjpsfgKQshI/AAAAAAAAH8w/_kNEV4hmhZsPAxXWy8XV2NaGH5Ym9o09wCLcBGAs/s1600/2015_47_orson_welles.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UlirYpd9UII/WjpsfgKQshI/AAAAAAAAH8w/_kNEV4hmhZsPAxXWy8XV2NaGH5Ym9o09wCLcBGAs/s400/2015_47_orson_welles.jpg" width="400" height="250" data-original-width="1280" data-original-height="800" /></a><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
Thanks for reading. My resolutions for 2018 are to keep plugging away with my own writing and to be kinder. I probably won't blog about that. Unless I am <i>very</i> kind.<br /><br />
Part 2 will be about LIVE STUFF.Rick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com0London, UK51.5073509 -0.1277582999999822351.1912379 -0.77320529999998222 51.8234639 0.51768870000001777tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-83218705356437596672017-11-08T13:14:00.000+00:002017-11-08T18:55:07.233+00:00REVIEW: Father John Misty at the Hammersmith Apollo<i>Tuesday 7 November 2017</i>
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SH-ilcx4PEA/WgL81mQXsKI/AAAAAAAAH3w/r6K42m0ozmkeX0W5HPTGm2WZCpYvk0zjACLcBGAs/s1600/DOEMTUYW4AEXoRM.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SH-ilcx4PEA/WgL81mQXsKI/AAAAAAAAH3w/r6K42m0ozmkeX0W5HPTGm2WZCpYvk0zjACLcBGAs/s400/DOEMTUYW4AEXoRM.jpg" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="1200" data-original-height="900" /></a><br /><br />
I’d listened to Father John Misty a little and dismissed him as “not really for me” (I reasoned that I didn't have room for a whiny, self-obsessed white man in my life aside from myself), but my brother and my friend Katie wanted to go, so I took the plunge. In revising for the gig, my Last FM (helloooo, 2003) tells me that I’ve listened to his songs 151 times in the past week, and by the end I was brainwashed. Sorry, ‘a fan’. And even his proselytising about the evils of religion, which seemed to be operating at the level of a GCSE textbook, began to make sense to me (a Catholic) when I read about his background, and understood the writing to be more about white-hot anger, lived experience, existential desperation and the repugnant hypocrisy of evangelist America than in-depth theological debate.<br /><br />
From interviews – and reputation – though, I was still expecting the morose, meandering, confessional Misty who turned up to a gig the day after Trump’s inauguration, did a rambling 15-minute speech, played a 13-minute song and then went home. Instead, we got a proper pop show: a sensational pop show – 24 songs across two hours, with confetti cannons, a band <i>and</i> a string and brass ensemble, a dazzling light display and Tillman’s full repertoire of struts, poses and guitar moves (and when I say ‘guitar moves’, I don’t mean his guitar-playing, I mean him taking his guitar off and flinging it halfway across the stage to a roadie, mid-song), but with enough room for the sincerity, the lamentations, the howls of protest and shards of bitter wit that make him one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary music.<br /><br />
There's almost no between-songs chat (a few 'thank you's and 'good to see yer's), it's just the music: the bearded Tillman, his hair slicked back, in a flowery shirt and black suit, his drainpipe trousers accentuating his slender legs, and the heeled boots just right for cutting a dashing silhouette as he's frequently backlit in a mist of pink or codeine white.<br /><br />
We kick off with 'Pure Comedy', climaxing with that explosive realisation that religion is "the kind of thing a <i>madman</i> would conceive!”, complete with panto-esque ‘loony’ gesture, 'Total Entertainment Forever' – an irresistible, rockabilly paean to just how fucked we are – and 'Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution', most people’s favourite on the album. I’m still wrestling with the song’s philosophy (is he foggily denouncing leftism or acerbically critiquing the comfort of capitalist conformity?), but it’s a definite Tune, and when the confetti cannon explodes on “Industry and commerce: toppled to their knees”, creating a red, mirrored supernova, everybody loses their shit. After a somewhat muted 'Ballad of the Dying Man' (and so the first four songs from the current record), we dip into the old stuff, including a plaintive, insistent, seductively reimagined 'Nancy From Now On', a lovestruck, crowdpleasing 'Chateau Lobby #4' (“You left a note in your perfect script/’Stay as long as you want’/And I haven’t left your bed since”) with Tillman striding around the stage like a Butlins redcoat, and a conversational 'When the God of Love Returns There’ll Be Hell to Pay', as he has a few choice words with his maker. The pay off, “Oh, my Lord/We just want light in the dark/Some warmth in the cold/And to make something out of nothing sounds like someone else I know” sounds like vintage Vonnegut in the land of Steinbeck, and I don’t have higher praise than that.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-91nNJpICntE/WgL89ot3t8I/AAAAAAAAH30/EMQlfSpZ04gj_5nbMqRRMPxlCIb0rIcdwCLcBGAs/s1600/DOEMTUlWAAA7E4E.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-91nNJpICntE/WgL89ot3t8I/AAAAAAAAH30/EMQlfSpZ04gj_5nbMqRRMPxlCIb0rIcdwCLcBGAs/s400/DOEMTUlWAAA7E4E.jpg" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="1200" data-original-height="900" /></a><br />
<i>I didn't spend much of the gig taking pictures. Will this do?</i><br /><br />
There are Misty songs I don’t like much, and if a couple of them are banal live – ‘A Bigger Paper Bag’ and the interminable ‘So I’m Growing Old on Magic Mountain’ – others are given an individuality missing on record, and extraordinary life. ‘Only Son of the Ladiesman’ is chokingly broken amidst the country-rock sound, ‘This Is Sally Hatchet’ becomes a great lost Beatles song, ‘When You’re Smiling and Astride Me’ so fragilely self-mocking, and ‘Strange Encounter’ sensitive and vulnerable as it moves from Misty’s familiar boasting that he has sex with a lot of women to something like tentatively self-justifying self-realisation ("Yeah, I'm a decent person/Little aimless"), the perfect counterpoint to the disposable fun of, say, ‘I’m Writing a Novel’. 'Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow', by contrast, is an absolute bastard live: a sleazy love poem that turns increasingly belligerent and violent, with Tillman spitting its bitter denouement, "Why the long face, jerkoff? Your chance has been taken," into the crowd.<br /><br />
And then there are the songs I can never get enough of, like ‘The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt’ – basically his ‘Idiot Wind’, a character assassination of a woman he’s just slept with, which would be completely indefensible if it wasn’t so beautifully, rhythmically sung, and so incredibly funny:<blockquote>She says, like literally<br />
Music is the air she breathes<br />
And the malaprops make me want to fucking scream<br />
I wonder if she even knows what that word means<br />
Well, it's literally not that</blockquote>
And ‘Bored in the USA’, a chronicle of depression, a portrait of a wasteland of a homeland: America’s culture reimagined alternately as The Road, or as a tacky, narcotised, identikit, subprime, debt-ridden monument to nothing, guarded over by white president Jesus – the whole song springing from a profound pun for the ages. Tonight, though, the “white Jesus” that he pleads to becomes “honky-tonk Jesus’”, and the President Jesus just “President Anyone”. ‘The Memo’, one of the best songs on his current record, Pure Comedy, is mostly more pointed than despairing, and its targets are more specific and less existential, though its conclusion is similarly bleak, depicting a world in which people “won't just sell themselves into slavery/They'll get on their knees and pay you to believe”. Live, it comes with its wild card intact: a voice generator increasingly barking out mundanities and platitutdes: “This is totally the song of my summer,” “This guy just gets me” and “Music is my life”, as Tillman himself asks: “Just quickly, how would you rate yourself in terms of sex appeal and cultural significance?” “Do you usually listen to music like this?” and finally “Can we recommend some similar artists?” All three songs are just wonderful live – faithful but raw and immediate – though screening the video for ‘The Night…’ was kind of pointlessly distracting.<br /><br />
The main set ends with ‘Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings’ and then a climactic ‘I Love You, Honeybear’, a rousing, glorious version that catapults it high into my favourite Misty songs, with Tillman making his second foray into the crowd, playing both the woodland indie messiah and the pop god, as the confetti flies and the singer performs the laying on of hands, as he pleads: “Don’t give into despair/Cause I love you, honeybear.”<br /><br />
What I loved – and what most surprised me – about the show was how much thought, effort and enthusiasm had clearly gone into it: into the choreographed stage moves (though never so choreographed that there's no room for him to extemporise as he's swept away by emotion), the lighting that creates an icon out of his silhouette, the reshapings of older songs. Tillman’s distaste for the entertainment industry doesn’t translate into a contempt for his fans, as it does with so many artists. As a mentally ill bloke myself, I can understand that sometimes his interviews are car-crashes, and that he has good gigs and bad gigs. I know too, of course, that it need not necessarily constitute an enormous challenge for a man to behave nicely towards a roomful of people who adore him and his art. But I’d thought of him as probably being a bit of a dick, and that didn’t come across at all. He even did an extended encore: ‘Real Love Baby’ – which is pleasant, but could have been written by anybody – and the tedious ‘Magic Mountain’ followed by something extraordinary: his shopping list of contemporary ills (some real, some imagined), ‘Holy Shit' incorporating a mid-song freak-out and seguing straight into an explosive, furious grunge version of the waspish, self-annihilating character study, ‘The Ideal Husband’, which ends with him lying on his back on the stage, writhing around on the floor as he screams: “Wouldn’t I make the ideal husband?” Yes, Josh, you probably would.<br /><br />
One of the gigs of the year. I’m a fan now. A convert. I left the Apollo moved and exhilarated. Speechless. I’m glad I took up that ticket offer.<br /><br />
<b>SETLIST:</b><br /><br />
Pure Comedy<br />
Total Entertainment Forever<br />
Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution<br />
Ballad of the Dying Man<br />
Nancy From Now On<br />
Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins)<br />
Strange Encounter<br />
Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow<br />
Only Son of the Ladiesman<br />
When the God of Love Returns There'll Be Hell to Pay<br />
A Bigger Paper Bag<br />
When You're Smiling and Astride Me<br />
True Affection<br />
This is Sally Hatchet<br />
The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt.<br />
Bored in the USA<br />
The Memo<br />
I'm Writing a Novel<br />
Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings<br />
I Love You, Honeybear<br /><br />
<b>Encore:</b><br />
Real Love Baby<br />
So I'm Growing Old on Magic Mountain<br />
Holy Shit<br />
The Ideal Husband<br /><br />
(Source, as ever, <a href="https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/father-john-misty/2017/eventim-apollo-london-england-43e0b7d3.html">setlist.fm</a>)<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
I'm only really reviewing movies now (and only <a href="https://letterboxd.com/rick_7/films/reviews/by/added/">here</a>), but last night had such an impact on me that I thought I'd write a little about it. Thanks for reading.Rick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com0London, UK51.5073509 -0.1277582999999822351.1912379 -0.77320529999998222 51.8234639 0.51768870000001777tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7246324592600373028.post-2068902038746217592017-10-16T18:01:00.000+01:002017-10-16T18:03:27.395+01:00Next year's best films: London Film Festival 2017 round-up − Part 2Here are my 10 favourites from the BFI London Film Festival 2017. To read about the less good films, please toddle on over <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/LFF2017-P1.html">here</a>. And thanks for reading, it makes me happy.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>10. Wrath of Silence</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NxfgHuDkY-w/Wd4G17sB73I/AAAAAAAAHzQ/8LyiPsArA8khZG-TUKgngZcfcgAa49e7ACLcBGAs/s1600/wrath-of-silence-song-yang-as-zhang-baomin-3-lff17-445.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NxfgHuDkY-w/Wd4G17sB73I/AAAAAAAAHzQ/8LyiPsArA8khZG-TUKgngZcfcgAa49e7ACLcBGAs/s400/wrath-of-silence-song-yang-as-zhang-baomin-3-lff17-445.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="830" data-original-height="467" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Director:</b> Yukun Xin<br />
<b>Cast:</b> Wu Jiang, Yang Song, Wenkang Yuan<br />
<b>Country:</b> China<br />
<b>UK release date:</b> No release confirmed<br />
<b>Rating:</b> 3/4<br /><br />
A genuinely unusual take on that old chestnut, the 'psycho looking for his missing kid' flick, but used to interrogate the iniquities of contemporary Chinese society (without anyone involved in the production gettinh killed), as a mute miner – left behind by the rapid pace of progress – engages in a bleak, apparently hopeless quest that's punctuated by moments of dark comedy and bone-crunching action (there's a lot of him just kicking people really hard).<br /><br />
The final shot could have used a bit of work, but the ending is otherwise superb, a fitting capper to a film with a few rough edges (cartoonish villainy, an opening that's more confusing than intriguing, a little mid-section bagginess) but interesting ideas, superb imagery – that in-camera shot of the desert giving way to the city! – and the best exhausted fight scene in aeons. Clever title too.<br /><br />
It's basically Kurosawa's <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/ways-of-looking-at-america-reviews-262.html">High and Low</a></i>, but for China in 2017. Having said that, and as the director acknowledged, there are no state officials involved in wrongdoing: the corruption shown is all in the private sector, even if it's high-ranking lawyers who operate within the public realm and increasingly dominate Chinese society.<br /><br />
... and curiously, like my previous film in the festival, <i>Wonderstruck</i>, it hinges on a mute person and a taxidermical diorama. This one's good, though.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-u4uo2lpIftY/WeTgVRaxlKI/AAAAAAAAH2Q/JBojUDr8cTcrTB__r5c6NN9qyA6YoGX-ACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_4997.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-u4uo2lpIftY/WeTgVRaxlKI/AAAAAAAAH2Q/JBojUDr8cTcrTB__r5c6NN9qyA6YoGX-ACLcBGAs/s400/IMG_4997.JPG" width="400" height="260" data-original-width="1585" data-original-height="1032" /></a><br />
<i>Director Yukun Xin (centre), his producers and friends, outside NFT1 at BFI Southbank.</i><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>9. Our Time Will Come</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-62nHZcQMnUA/WeTa-s1Q-wI/AAAAAAAAH1Y/Ze4AZJkk8NsqIyc-yHWO47Kj3k0qnImDgCLcBGAs/s1600/hero_Our-Time-Will-Come-2017.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-62nHZcQMnUA/WeTa-s1Q-wI/AAAAAAAAH1Y/Ze4AZJkk8NsqIyc-yHWO47Kj3k0qnImDgCLcBGAs/s400/hero_Our-Time-Will-Come-2017.jpg" width="400" height="167" data-original-width="1200" data-original-height="500" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Director:</b> Ann Hui<br />
<b>Cast:</b> Zhou Xun, Eddie Peng, Wallace Huo, Paw Hee-ching, Jessie Li<br />
<b>Country:</b> China<br />
<b>UK release date:</b> No release confirmed<br /><br />
<b>Rating:</b> 3/4<br /><br />
Stories from the Chinese underground: a film of great moments, appreciable humanity and unapologetic feminism, those virtues triumphing over some more prosaic flaws, like irregular pacing, a curious framing structure, and a few flirtations with propaganda and artifice.<br /><br />
It's a film of wit, stoicism and sincerity, with two key scenes ruminating on honour and duty that recall those towering triumphs of French cinema, <i>Grand Illusion</i> and <i>Army in the Shadows</i>, for which one can forgive some improbable (but dynamic) action heroics, a monochrome round-table that just made me think of Woody Allen, and a few too many scenes of people wrapping things up in blankets.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>8. Angels Wear White</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NR4vWiu5BvY/WeTbWKG4zgI/AAAAAAAAH1c/IugQLmOjmhsJZBus4lHMVAS_LAOhsThbgCLcBGAs/s1600/20170908-044108463.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NR4vWiu5BvY/WeTbWKG4zgI/AAAAAAAAH1c/IugQLmOjmhsJZBus4lHMVAS_LAOhsThbgCLcBGAs/s400/20170908-044108463.jpg" width="400" height="200" data-original-width="720" data-original-height="360" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Director:</b> Vivian Qu<br />
<b>Cast:</b> Vicky Chen (as Qi Wen), Zhou Meijun, Mengnan Li, Weiwei Liu, Jing Peng <br />
<b>Country:</b> China<br />
<b>UK release date:</b> No release confirmed<br />
<b>Rating:</b> 3.5/4<br /><br />
An excoriating moral thriller about the destruction of innocence – though not, director Vivian Qu says, the debasement of "purity" – which follows two girls left behind by the pace of progress in China: an 11-year-old abandoned to the appetites of a police commissioner, and the 15-year-odd runaway (Vicky Chen), doing odd jobs in a hotel, who's the only witness.<br /><br />
The film's closest analogue is probably <i>Half Nelson</i> – and not just because Qu and Dardennes cinematographer Benoît Dervaux get the most out of some playground tunnels amongst other quasi-surrealist diversions. Like that film, it's an intelligent, consistently surprising heartbreaker that never goes for the soft option when a tough lesson will do.<br /><br />
The writer-director of another Chinese film in the season, <i>Wrath of Silence</i> (see #10), said he steered clear of criticising state officials, as his scripts had to be cleared by the censorship office. Qu (who offers a heroic lawyer where Wrath's was corrupt) clearly doesn't give a shit, and this painful, richly symbolic work – which keeps its violence off camera, and any sentiment or sensationalism off the screen – is a vivid indictment of a society that simply isn't looking after its kids.<br /><br />
Angels Wear White isn't some worthy lecture, though, and while it's slightly uneven, it's a bleakly vibrant, well-acted, quietly poetic, furious film about desperation, the potential for change, and systematic, state-sanctioned abuse masquerading as justice and progress.<br /><br />
It's also the best Marilyn Monroe film since 1961.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dqRqTTrYVBo/WeTi6TuCKyI/AAAAAAAAH20/EWRY2njUkFcV8CFmRl2Ai_EsJX5xr1nlwCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5048.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dqRqTTrYVBo/WeTi6TuCKyI/AAAAAAAAH20/EWRY2njUkFcV8CFmRl2Ai_EsJX5xr1nlwCLcBGAs/s400/IMG_5048.JPG" width="400" height="272" data-original-width="1451" data-original-height="985" /></a><br />
<i>Dervaus and Wu trying to ignore the weirdo with the mobile phone all up in their grills.</i><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>7. On Chesil Beach</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WDbE9-s2KmY/WeTbnHLJOjI/AAAAAAAAH1k/ewnRpBaF1Ks0v_vx8z2wfbSQvY2cHTIhACLcBGAs/s1600/On-Chesil-Beach-3-620x354.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WDbE9-s2KmY/WeTbnHLJOjI/AAAAAAAAH1k/ewnRpBaF1Ks0v_vx8z2wfbSQvY2cHTIhACLcBGAs/s400/On-Chesil-Beach-3-620x354.jpg" width="400" height="228" data-original-width="620" data-original-height="354" /></a><br />
<i><3 Saoirse Ronan. After </i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/totoro-les-400-coups-and-in-desert-<br />with.html">Brooklyn</a> <i>and this, I'm starting to think she can do no wrong.</i><br /><br />
<b>Director:</b> Dominic Cooke<br />
<b>Cast:</b> Saoirse Ronan, Billy Howle, Emily Watson, Anne-Marie Duff, Samuel West, Adrian Scarborough<br />
<b>Country:</b> UK<br />
<b>UK release date:</b> 19 January 2018<br />
<b>Rating:</b> 3.5/4<br /><br />
For almost its entire length, this adaptation of Ian McEwan's 2007 novella is close to perfect: the beautifully-modulated, restrained story of a strait-laced couple in the still strait-laced early '60s who look back on their often idyllic courtship from the claustrophobic environs of their honeymoon suite.<br /><br />
McEwan and director Dominic Cooke don't change much of the book: they and their cast just subtly externalise feelings that were elucidated as thoughts on the page, and cast off a few memorable moments that might alienate or unwittingly unnerve a cinematic audience (a spasming muscle, jizz on the face).<br /><br />
The leads are brilliant, particularly Saoirse Ronan as the sexually repressed violin prodigy Florence, and if a couple of elements don't quite work − McEwan's slightly embarrassing fixation with Edward (Billy Howle) liking a good ruck, and Anne Marie-Duff's simplistic scenes as his mother, which are tonally off − those are offset by passages of understated lyricism and rich, convincing romance which clash gloriously with the hysterically uncomfortable wedding night, from the inedible none-more-1962 meal (rendered gloriously on the screen: slice of melon with glace cherry, anyone?) to Edward rolling off the bed because he can't have sex with his shoes on.<br /><br />
When the explosion comes, and it does, it's heartbreakingly portrayed, and one of those sequences that works so well because it's so faithfully rendered. Then McEwan starts to write new scenes that were merely summarised in the book, and all bets are off. The first three − dealing with Edward and his family − are minor but quite satisfying, especially the one with his father, and the fourth is an absolute belter, a slightly obvious but incredibly affecting scene set in a record shop in 1975.<br /><br />
If only they'd ended the film there, as the next has Edward explaining not just the moral but also the text of the story, before a closing sequence set in 2007 that has some of the worst Old Person Make-Up that I've seen: he looks like he's been badly burned, and the rest of the cast are only slightly less ridiculous. Yes, the moment that it's all leading up to got to me, even while I knew I was being manipulated, but from Edward's risible stance at the crease onwards, it's an embarrassing and completely unnecessary coda.<br /><br />
Look, lads, you've got a while till the general release, how about heading back and having another go? Because most of this movie is bloody brilliant.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>6. Battle of the Sexes</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JKz4feR8tJA/WeTcDbQzlNI/AAAAAAAAH1o/JGPY_AWuidE8Po0rZHIgQMHcDRQpuZ3TACLcBGAs/s1600/emma-stone1.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JKz4feR8tJA/WeTcDbQzlNI/AAAAAAAAH1o/JGPY_AWuidE8Po0rZHIgQMHcDRQpuZ3TACLcBGAs/s400/emma-stone1.jpg" width="400" height="267" data-original-width="1200" data-original-height="800" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Director:</b> Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris<br />
<b>Cast:</b> Emma Stone, Steve Carell, Andrea Riseborough, Sarah Silverman, Bill Pullman<br />
<b>Country:</b> USA<br />
<b>UK release date:</b><br />
<b>Rating:</b> 3.5/4<br /><br />
A hugely uplifting, entertaining movie, with a typically dynamic central performance from Emma Stone, who inhabits the character of Billie Jean King almost entirely, as the tennis legend breaks away from the sexist tennis establishment, confronts the fact she's a lesbian, and gears up for the eponymous match, opposite self-styled 'male chauvinist pig', the shy and retiring Bobby Riggs.<br /><br />
When I heard about the movie, I thought it might be dressing the occasion up as something it isn't, but it gets Riggs right − played by Steve Carell with great subtlety and chutzpah as a slightly pathetic hustler who plays the press like a violin − seeing the villain (represented by Bill Pullman's Jack Kramer) as the society that allows his phony chauvinistic bluster to land.<br /><br />
Almost everything about the film is first-rate: the montages (I love a sports montage!), the pacing, much of the dialogue, it's just the one-dimensional nature of the human villainy (Kramer, Margaret Court) and the overt on-the-nose social commentary that feels too shallow and Hollywoodised: Alan Cumming's character, a gay costume designer, seems to have wandered in from <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/lucille-ball-hunger-games-and-strange.html">The Hunger Games</a></i> and just doesn't seem real. The audience loved him, but he's so magic gay: an acerbic queen who's really a wise and profound guardian angel.<br /><br />
On the whole it's a really lovely film, though: incredibly fun and with such a deep, appealing performance from Stone: that penultimate scene in the changing room is so perfectly played, so complex and apposite, when most movies would have given her an unconvincing and sentimental fictional heart-to-heart with Riggs that explained her character and justified his.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-scPuJlC34Hs/WeTirsSDZgI/AAAAAAAAH2k/aG7rsRlvbnMAFfI2O_j8AfT-oIjWihaeQCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5006.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-scPuJlC34Hs/WeTirsSDZgI/AAAAAAAAH2k/aG7rsRlvbnMAFfI2O_j8AfT-oIjWihaeQCLcBGAs/s400/IMG_5006.JPG" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
At the midway point, let's pause for some trivia.<br /><br />
<b>Cinematic celebrities spotted:</b> Mike Leigh (at the next film in the list), Terry Gilliam at the #1 movie.<br />
<b>Most comfortable screen:</b> Vue Leicester Square: Screen 5<br />
<b>Most exciting screen:</b> Odeon Leicester Square (shame about the leg-room)<br />
<b>Best loos:</b> Vue Leicester Square.<br />
<b>Worst loos:</b> Empire Leicester Square, somehow worst than the portaloos at Embankment Garden Cinema.<br />
<b>Best Q&A:</b> <i>The Florida Project</i> for the lolz and adorableness, <i>Angels Wear White</i> for the insights into Vivian Qu's creative process.<br />
<b>Worst Q&A:</b> The pretentiousness of <i>Zama</i>, both film and Q&A, wound me up. Red carpet feeds (I saw <i>The Battle of the Sexes</i> and <i>3 Billboards</i>) aren't for me, I just find the fawning absolutely unbearable, and though Emma Stone fielded her questions with a bit of humour and panache, and Martin McDonagh offered some insights into the genesis of his film, there's not much that one can really say to questions like "How are you so brilliant and gorgeous?"<br />
<b>Most exciting person to see in the flesh:</b> AUBREY PLAZA FROM <i>PARKS AND REC</i>, especially as I was just about certain that she wouldn't come over for the film.<br />
<b>Request for next year:</b> Please, more variety in the Q&As for the really big screenings: these always just centre around the same two questions (To the writer/director: 'How did you come up with the idea?'; to the stars: 'How did you get on board?' or 'What did you think when you read the script?'), and subsequently the same two answers, while the format is so rigid that there are never any follow-up questions. As a result, they're nowhere near as insightful as the Q&As for smaller events. It's such a wasted opportunity and makes it seem like we've just got the stars over from Hollywood for a fashion parade. Considering the incredible amount of preparation that clearly goes into this amazing festival, it seems really half-arsed.<br /><br />
All in all, though, it was just such a magical and exciting 11 days, and I feel so privileged to have been able to go to it at all, let alone to so many exciting events.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>5. The Meyerowitz Stories: New and Selected</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3QUeE4171AU/WeTcNE8E0yI/AAAAAAAAH1w/QMU4FgSYFj0AxUuiSJdXwaYUh1Uh5XoAgCLcBGAs/s1600/meyerowitzstories-adamsandler-benstiller-waitingroom.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3QUeE4171AU/WeTcNE8E0yI/AAAAAAAAH1w/QMU4FgSYFj0AxUuiSJdXwaYUh1Uh5XoAgCLcBGAs/s400/meyerowitzstories-adamsandler-benstiller-waitingroom.jpg" width="400" height="199" data-original-width="780" data-original-height="388" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Director:</b> Noah Baumbach<br />
<b>Cast:</b> Adam Sandler, Grace Van Patten, Dustin Hoffman, Elizabeth Marvel, Emma Thompson<br />
<b>Country:</b> USA<br />
<b>UK release date:</b> 13 October 2017 (on Amazon)<br />
<b>Rating:</b> 3.5/4<br /><br />
A moving, frequently hilarious comedy-drama – sort of 'Woody Allen's <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/westival-andrew-scott-and-genius.html">The Royal Tenenbaums</a></i> – about a family living in the shadow of impossible oft-married patriarch and undiscovered sculptor, Harold Meyerowitz (Dustin Hoffman).<br /><br />
It has perhaps a couple of endings too many, and Emma Thompson misses the mark as a ditsy New York alcoholic, but the rest of the cast is great, some of the comic, character-rooted flourishes are instant classics – Sandler and Stiller's conversation about business, the way Hoffman runs (I tell you, if he'd done this in <i>Marathon Man</i>, it would've been twice as good) – and there are several darkly comic passages addressing neuroses that frequently debilitate me: Stiller asking a nonplussed nurse if he's abandoning his father by going to a meeting, Sandler's summation of his dad's legacy.<br /><br />
In fact, Sandler has several scenes here that are superb, and if his familiar excesses occasionally intrude (or at least call to mind his dual life as the shittest thing on screen), he's now started giving so many good performances that he's in danger of becoming liked and respected. The call with his daughter (Grace Van Patten) early on in the picture is a beauty.<br /><br />
<i>The Meyerowitz Stories</i> is a really terrific film, Baumbach's best since the unassailable Frances Ha, and yet after 10 minutes I thought I was going to hate it, the director setting it up as a film about privileged, self-serious New York intellectuals with their meaningless problems, before tipping us a huge wink with a line about houmous.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>4. You Were Never Really Here</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-duAfJTpU528/WeTcSitNJyI/AAAAAAAAH10/rzIM-oiZYOE1QTu74Pdm_ckdq4NzgcHrgCLcBGAs/s1600/screen-shot-2017-08-30-at-2-49-08-pm.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-duAfJTpU528/WeTcSitNJyI/AAAAAAAAH10/rzIM-oiZYOE1QTu74Pdm_ckdq4NzgcHrgCLcBGAs/s400/screen-shot-2017-08-30-at-2-49-08-pm.png" width="400" height="215" data-original-width="780" data-original-height="420" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Director:</b> Lynne Ramsay<br />
<b>Cast:</b> Joaquin Phoenix, Ekaterina Samsonov, Alessandro Nivola, Alex Manette, John Doman<br />
<b>Country:</b> UK/France/USA<br />
<b>UK release date:</b> No release date confirmed, but probably February<br />
<b>Rating:</b> 3.5/4<br /><br />
Well what did you think a Lynne Ramsay noir with Joaquin Phoenix as a hitman would be like?<br /><br />
Ramsay can write great dialogue, but with a Hitchcockian desire to tell stories using just pictures, that visual imagination – CCTV action sequence ftw! – and her matchless ear for apposite pop music, she rarely needs it. Admittedly she loves a long arthouse silence, so your tolerance for her work may depend on whether you do too, but once this one gets going it's unmissable.<br /><br />
There's Phoenix out intense-ing himself to a Jonny Greenwood score, a deeply moving Jonathan Ames story that invokes and updates the likes of <i>Taxi Driver</i>, <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/turnin-of-earth-searchers.html">The Searchers</a></i> and <i>A History of Violence</i> without ever feeling like a retread, and a lot of people being twatted in the head with a hammer. Really, what more could you ask for?<br /><br />
Except, of course, the star and director turning up pissed to the screening and spoiling the festival director's Q&A with a mixture of in-jokes and gratuitous flirting.<br /><br />
I just can't get over that line in the politician's dining room, this film's inspired inversion of "Let's go home, Debbie." It damn near broke me.<br /><br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EVrWRbPCFJo/WeTmWCnGwlI/AAAAAAAAH3A/uj4ZwV63CjcuC38sQrZ_U4Yu3CV2Ltl7wCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5068.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EVrWRbPCFJo/WeTmWCnGwlI/AAAAAAAAH3A/uj4ZwV63CjcuC38sQrZ_U4Yu3CV2Ltl7wCLcBGAs/s400/IMG_5068.JPG" width="400" height="328" data-original-width="1280" data-original-height="1051" /></a><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>3. A Fantastic Woman</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-oNsY560SRTc/WeTcaaomDWI/AAAAAAAAH14/B35I7UOfU7UTkPc05fYT8a_3c_sxHO8PgCLcBGAs/s1600/201712954_1-h_2017.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-oNsY560SRTc/WeTcaaomDWI/AAAAAAAAH14/B35I7UOfU7UTkPc05fYT8a_3c_sxHO8PgCLcBGAs/s400/201712954_1-h_2017.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="928" data-original-height="523" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Director:</b> Sebastián Lelio<br />
<b>Cast:</b> Daniela Vega, Francisco Reyes, Luis Gnecco, Aline Küppenheim, Nicolás Saavedra<br />
<b>Country:</b> Chile<br />
<b>UK release date:</b> 2 March 2018<br />
<b>Rating:</b> 3.5/4<br /><br />
This is really, really good.<br /><br />
<opens a can of wasps>I'm always struck by the sky-high ratings on IMDb for bad LGBT movies, and wonder if it's attributable to a) the comparative paucity of these films, meaning that we should celebrate those we get, regardless of their technical or artistic deficiencies (the extension, I suppose, is the tribalistic mindset this engenders, in which you can't judge them as bad films, as they're not just films); b) my lack of insight into what these films should be doing in relation to their audience and LGBT issues in 2017.</can of wasps><br /><br />
Anyway, no such ruminations necessary on this one, it's fucking brilliant: a dazzling, poetic, sometimes dream-like Chilean film about a trans woman (Daniela Vega) trying to hold it together – and reach some point of resolution – after the death of her boyfriend. I should mention that his family aren't helping.<br /><br />
Vega has the most fascinating face and the camera makes the most of it, not least in a dazzling nightclub sequence that moves from pain to sensuality to a fantasy dance number, but there's such depth to her characterisation too, and the film's refusal to give her easy, sassy victories is uniquely satisfying, grappling profoundly and humanely with issues that are both specific and universal.<br /><br />
The effect is of a Dardennes story adapted by Almodovar, but I haven't seen anyone like Vega before. I'm not sure she can really sing classical (the best use of 'Ombra mai fu' is now and forever in Humphrey Jennings' seismic short film, <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/humphrey-jennings-vera-drake-and-my-new.html">Spare Time</a></i>, Handel fans), but the rest of the music's a treat, with British composer Matthew Herbert delivering an audial dreamscape that like the script, photography and performances serves to conjure a very particular mood.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Bz_lN1MdLKs/WeTiY3DddnI/AAAAAAAAH2g/MffHIY4fwJcW46rlNX6ITmAhauek7nhnACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_4999.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Bz_lN1MdLKs/WeTiY3DddnI/AAAAAAAAH2g/MffHIY4fwJcW46rlNX6ITmAhauek7nhnACLcBGAs/s400/IMG_4999.JPG" width="400" height="244" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="977" /></a><br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>2. Bad Lucky Goat</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-J5VKD8VgmHU/WeTcimfA2dI/AAAAAAAAH18/vfV9-AQNwDYntRm4pbtnpDHWR3tKwxDXgCLcBGAs/s1600/Imagen%252Bfija004-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-J5VKD8VgmHU/WeTcimfA2dI/AAAAAAAAH18/vfV9-AQNwDYntRm4pbtnpDHWR3tKwxDXgCLcBGAs/s400/Imagen%252Bfija004-1.jpg" width="400" height="168" data-original-width="1000" data-original-height="420" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Director:</b> Samir Oliveros<br />
<b>Cast:</b> Jean Bush, Kiara Howard, Ambrosio Huffington, Honlenny Huffington, Elkin Robinson<br />
<b>Country:</b> Colombian<br />
<b>UK release date:</b> No release confirmed<br />
<b>Rating:</b> 4/4<br /><br />
I was expecting <i>Brewster's-Millions</i>-with-a-goat, I got something like the very essence of charm: a wonderfully atmospheric story of burgeoning sibling friendship, set on a Caribbean island, about a brother and sister who accidentally wreck their parents' car by running over a goat, and hatch one scheme after another to try to get level.<br /><br />
Colombian director Samir Oliveros shot the film on Providence Island (an old colonial outpost owned by Colombia) using non-professional local actors, a score written by local musicians (several of whom play on screen) and the locales as another character in a way that recalls a film of escape, change and geographical flavour that I've always loved, Seducing Doctor Lewis. <i>Bad Lucky Goat</i> is very funny when it wants to be, though it's not packed with jokes: much of the joy lies in its genuinely offbeat sensibility and its deceptively lofty ambitions.<br /><br />
Oliveros, who'd made just one previous short and is now doing a master's in LA, told me (as I was bothering him in the lobby) that he shot this one "guerrilla-style" and is now learning how to be a professional filmmaker, ideally in Hollywood. I hope that training doesn't erode the instinctive brilliance of this debut, which is fast-moving but laid-back, packing an astounding amount into its 76 minutes, dealing with themes of superstition, familial loyalty and accidental goat slaughter, and featuring beautiful performances from the two young leads − both of whom are now eyeing careers on screen. Like the rest of the cast, they adapted Oliveros' English-language script into their phonetic local language, Creole, and I could listen to their slang-heavy exchanges all day.<br /><br />
I got lost in its world, and while the film's trip to the cockfights may be a bit of a rude shock to myself and my other libtard cucks, it ultimately did little to dispel the film's very special atmosphere.<br /><br />
***<br /><br />
<b>1. The Shape of Water</b><br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-r4j6nkxiYGQ/WeTcscakGYI/AAAAAAAAH2E/t6YMQhvTnNMuVkLf53KRoKP_OmQjAAfSwCLcBGAs/s1600/shape2.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-r4j6nkxiYGQ/WeTcscakGYI/AAAAAAAAH2E/t6YMQhvTnNMuVkLf53KRoKP_OmQjAAfSwCLcBGAs/s400/shape2.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="900" /></a><br /><br />
<b>Director:</b> Guillermo del Toro<br />
<b>Cast:</b> Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Stuhlbarg<br />
<b>Country:</b> USA<br />
<b>UK release date:</b> 16 February 2018<br />
<b>Rating:</b> 4/4<br /><br />
Guillermo del Toro's wonderful fable – "my favourite thing I've ever done" – is kind of like <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/the-nicholas-brothers-arrival-and-sound.html">Arrival</a></i> starring <a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/somewhere-in-time-john-candy-and-my.html">Amélie</a>, as a shy, mute cleaner (Sally Hawkins) at a government base begins to communicate with the aquaman in the tank, and feels the first flickerings of love.<br /><br />
Set – like my previous film at the LFF, <i>On Chesil Beach</i> (see #7) – in 1962, it's really about today: a plea for tolerance in the light of Trump and co's war on Muslims, blacks and gays, and a monster movie in which the monster isn't the Other, it's right-wing, gung-ho America, represented here by Michael Shannon, as a psychotic vet in a teal Cadillac who'll beat the living shit out of anything that doesn't conform to his very specific notion of a person. The toxic machismo and vicious hatred of otherness isn't restricted to him, though, it's endemic: and hiding behind the most benign of fronts.<br /><br />
Shot in a rich, stylised palette of greens and browns (admittedly more <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/summer-round-up-2011-part-two-reviews.html">City of Lost Children</a></i>), set partly above an old, working cinema and filled with little visual effects – though with a creature who's delightfully and resolutely real – it reminded me of nothing as much as <i>Amélie</i>. That 2001 movie might be the last time I felt quite so charmed by a lead character as by Hawkins' Eliza Esposito, whose increasingly appealing, steely, sexy performance recalls that holy trinity of great mute turns: Dorothy McGuire in <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/mesrine-and-why-robert-mitchum-was-in.html">>The Spiral Staircase</a></i>, Samantha Morton in <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/fallen-idol-great-depression-and-woody.html">Sweet and Lowdown</a></i> and Jane Wyman in <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/jane-wyman-confederacy-of-dunces-and.html">Johnny Belinda</a></i>, and is just as full of nobility and pathos; just as lacking in gimmickry.<br /><br />
There's nice work too from Richard Jenkins, who is frequently held hostage in underwhelming comedies, but showed in Tom McCarthy's 2007 masterpiece, <i><a href="http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/visitor-army-and-filleting-fish-reviews.html">The Visitor</a></i> that he's just about the best actor in America when he can be bothered. As Eliza's gay flatmate, a struggling, alcoholic advertising artist, he's never self-pitying or trite, and those traits no more define who he is than the fact he's bald.<br /><br />
The plot is fine: diverting, involving and well-balanced between moments of intrigue, suspense and humour, but it's the passages of poetry that completely bewitched me, including one sequence in a waterlogged bathroom that took the breath away.<br /><br />
There's another beguiling flight of fancy that memorably references <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c08wiEyVuak">Fred and Ginger's 'Let's Face the Music and Dance'</a>, and music is critical to this film: Hawkins and Jenkins engage in an impromptu tap, Alexandre Desplat equips her with the most enchanting theme, and del Toro exhibits his great love for – and understanding of – classic Hollywood by including several clips from old Fox musicals, including Bojangles and Shirley Temple in <i>The Little Colonel</i> and colour clips of Alice Faye and Carmen Miranda rendered in the monochrome of '60s tube TV. Realising that I was in a cinema in which a modern audience was being forced to watch old footage of Alice Faye, and listen to a short monologue discoursing on her ill-fad career was just the most delightful thing.<br /><br />
So… a sci-fi, a horror, a monster movie, a romance, a Cold War thriller, and a history lesson about Alice Faye: this genre-bender is many things, but above all it's an emotional experience, a clear-sighted, glowing-hearted picture with some of the most beautiful imagery and a performance I'm going to be rhapsodising about for weeks, months, years.<br /><br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nCizS9vcvNg/WeTiy9ONv7I/AAAAAAAAH2s/U1SpSuECwKMe_GRm9g5tBZD06pxDzYb_wCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5037.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nCizS9vcvNg/WeTiy9ONv7I/AAAAAAAAH2s/U1SpSuECwKMe_GRm9g5tBZD06pxDzYb_wCLcBGAs/s400/IMG_5037.JPG" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a><br /><br />
<i>Del Toro, his producers, and Richard Jenkins. Sally Hawkins got ill.</i>
***<br /><br />
Thanks for reading.Rick Burinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08881210028902623964noreply@blogger.com0London, UK51.5073509 -0.1277582999999822351.1895294 -0.77595179999998221 51.8251724 0.52043520000001775