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Be Witched

C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (directed by Sally Cookson, Br/dge Theatre)

After last year’s slightly bizarre choice, the Bridge played it safe for the panto slot, with a classic children’s literary adaptation revived from the West Yorkshire Playhouse. They end up with a curious mix of Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz and The Lion King. My guess it was twenty years since I read the novel and I never warmed to Lewis, with or without Christian allegory. I’d forgotten the evacuation context, and rather like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang it feels as if it takes forever to get to fantasyland. I can see why they did a long train sequence to offer us some initial spectacle, but it seemed to last forever. Continue reading →

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Don’t Cry Uncle

Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya (directed by Ian Rickson, Harold Pinter Theatre)

For a change from Norwegian theatre – though in practice Ibsen – I moved to Russian, and ponder whether I’ve seen this before. I’d seen The Seagull, and I think something at the Lace Market Theatre, but that may have involved sisters and orchards. I had no sense who Uncle Vanya was and whether he has nieces or nephews.
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Brief Natural Nudity

The Personal History of David Copperfield (Armando Iannucci, 2020)
Emma. (Autumn de Wilde, 2020)

There is nothing we seem to like better in the British Film Industry than a literary adaptation — and there have been great versions of Austen and Dickens in the past, so much so that it wasn’t until two hours and four minutes into Emma. that I felt we need another Austen on screen. Continue reading →

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The Lighthouse Keeper’s World is Round

The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019)

A curious psychological horror, which begins in the Empire Marketing Board zone of Drifters and goes via Knife in the Water to A Field in England, with the Total Bollocks Overdrive cranked up to twelve and then cranked up further.

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Barbikane

Tangerine Dream: Zeitraffer (Barbican Music Library, 16 January-2 May 2020)
Trevor Paglen: From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’ (The Curve, Barbican, 26 Sep 2019—Sun 16 Feb 2020)

BoardSo, the Barbican – aka the alcohol-free concert hall – was heaving and so the slightly complicated but with good sight lines for a rendezvous foyer turned out not to be a smart move. Especially when Dennis was playing havoc with the trains. But that didn’t dissuade the thousands of people who had descended for a wellness fête (and who were queueing in their hundreds for the ladies loos hidden in the bowels of the building).
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A Family of Charlatans

Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019)

This was on my list to see since I first caught the trailer – a narrative of a young working class student becoming a tutor to an upper middle class girl which was clearly going to take a right turn into horror territory. I caught up with it after the Oscar win (a win that apparently means a broken system has been fixed) and it was surprisingly or unsurprisingly full.

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Viennese Roles

Tom Stoppard, Leopoldstadt (directed by Patrick Marber, Wyndhams Theatre)

The Stoppard play is a familiar unfamiliar beast: a pastiche of a known genre or text meshed with a philosophical idea or two, told in witty dialogue. Tosh a Beckettean Hamlet at probability theory or quantum mechanics at John Le Carré. The downside for some — I don’t agree — is characters as cyphers and an emotional shallowness.

Shrugs. Continue reading →

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The Longest Take

1917 (Sam Mendes, 2019)

Once continuity editing became a thing, it was inevitable that directors would try and show their versatility by avoiding it with the longest possible takes limited by the amount of film a camera could load and thus disguising cuts in a way best shown in Hitchcock’s Rope which also has a number of very obvious cuts, as indeed does 1917 in which two soldiers walk, ride and fight their way through no man’s land in order to stop a doomed assault on the western front in which one of the soldier’s brothers will be risking his life and slowly the tension is ratcheted up with countering moments of beauty of cherry blossom and de Chirico illuminated ruined towns and Paul Nash canvases and distracting appearances from half the cast of Sherlock as we carefully balance the idiocy of the donkeys leading the lions with rather more smart generals who are aware of the deaths of the young men they are causing and so there’s a certain distaste in the distraction of formal skill from a subject matter in soldiers are trapped for nearly two hours and seemingly indestructible even at the cake and eat it assault that is over the top in at least two sense of the words as digital enhancements wear their effects on the sleeve to such an extent that one wonders if this is the dream of a dying man from a hundred minutes earlier whilst avoiding the discomfort of Atonement’s heavily augmented beach sequence.

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Art: Closing in February

I’ve gotten behind in updating my database (and still need to work out how to upload a legible file such as a PDF).

These are closing in February — those in red come highly recommended (and you may wish to prebook Blake or Rembrandt; the latter’s catalogue is now reduced).