… a frankly idiotic choice of advert to plonk right next to it.
(You may need to click on the image to see the full extent of the idiocy.)
I mean, come on…
Category: Pictures Page 38 of 46
(I originally wrote this review for Channel 4, and I linked to it in this post, but the transient nature of the internet means that the location I linked to has now been overwritten. So here’s the review in all its unedited glory [that is to say, before I trimmed it to fit C4’s specified wordcount]…)
Will Smith (no, not that one) grew up on the isle of Jersey, which may be why he appears to be obsessed with the long-running BBC detective series, Bergerac. It was – in case you don’t remember it – set on Jersey, and ran for the best part of a decade, starring John ‘him off Midsomer Murders’ Nettles as a slightly unconventional detective with a nice car and a troubled personal life.
However, as this CD set of his radio series shows, Smith is more keen on Bergerac than most people – having found an audiobook of John Nettles reading the ancient chinese book of the Tao, he decides to use this as a source of inspiration and advice in his everyday life. In his dealings with his lazy flatmate or with potential girlfriends, he turns to the oriental wisdom, as read in the sonorous tones of Nettles. On the face of it, a fairly ridiculous idea, but it works – and is often very funny – for a number of reasons.
Firstly, the whole thing is played absolutely straight. Yes, there’s audience laughter, but other than that there’s no suggestion from Smith that his decision to live his life by the Tao of Bergerac is anything other than valid. Of course, this makes it all the more ludicrous as we repeatedly see the vast gulf between his Bergerac-influenced attitudes and the world as it actually is.
Secondly, Smith doesn’t hold back in making himself a figure of fun. You might think that admitting being fixated with Bergerac was enough of an embarrassment, but there’s more – teenage years spent role-playing, snobbery in adulthood, and a total lack of knowledge of women and how to talk to them, all feature, as does a running joke that he might be denying his true sexuality. Granted, a lot of this is the character that he’s been playing in his stand-up for a while now, so if you don’t like his ‘pretend posh boy’ persona, this might not work for you. As the saying goes, ‘your mileage may vary’.
Finally, and probably most worryingly, in each of the episodes, Smith plays ‘Six Degrees of Bergerac’, in which he asks the audience to shout out the name of a film, and then attempts to link it to Bergerac in six steps or less. Spookily, a quick Google makes me think he’s not making the answers up, and that he genuinely does know the names of all the cast members and episodes. It’s an impressive trick, no question about it – but it does make me wonder if the show might not actually be the joke that it at first appears to be.
Overall, this is a funny and enjoyable show – the basic premise is bonkers enough to begin with, but add in Smith’s character and quirks, and the straight delivery, and it’s even more silly. The CDs feature some appropriate extras too – for example, ‘John Nettles reads the Letters to Hustler Magazine’ – which show that Nettles is a good sport about the whole thing.
Well, either that, or it was the only way he could get Will Smith to stop pestering him.
Given that I always seem to take the longest possible route through a sentence, you might be surprised to learn I’m a huge fan of the writing of David Mamet. He’s arguably best known for his screenplays for The Untouchables and Glengarry Glen Ross, or for the semi-fuss surrounding his play (and later film) Oleanna, all of which feature a very distinctive rhythm to the dialogue – in essence, clipped sentences, frequently overlapping. I like it – it’s a pleasant change from most other forms of dialogue which you see on stage or screen.
Which is why I was rather excited to see that Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum were starring in a version of Mamet’s play Speed-The-Plow at the Old Vic Theatre here in London, and even more pleased when m’lady got me tickets for a performance last week by way of a Valentine’s Day pressie.
Goldblum plays Bobby Gould, a rising film producer. His friend Charlie Fox (played by Spacey) brings him a sure-fire hit, an action film featuring this month’s latest star – but his temporary secretary Karen (Laura Michelle Kelly) recommends he should green-light a more worthy project, adapting a novel she’s very keen on. As he’s taken a bit of a shine to Karen, Bobby finds himself torn between a sure-fire commercial hit (honouring his friendship with Charlie) and a film of artistic merit (the commissioning of which might well lead to some sauciness with Karen).
The first act is fast and funny – Goldblum’s an enthusiastic tangle of limbs as he and Spacey exchange lines, and they’re surprisingly physical as they get more and more excited about their inevitable success. I knew Goldblum could do comedy, but Spacey surprised me in doing this so well – I tend to think of him as a more weighty and serious actor, but the jokey dialogue bounces along cheerfully here. The second act slows things down a fair bit (as Goldblum and Kelly discuss the novel that might become a film), but things liven up again in the third act when all three actors are onstage for the conflict caused by Bobby Gould’s dilemma and need to make a decision, though there are still laughs even here. Spacey’s very much in his element here – a genuine sense of barely-suppressed anger in his performance, and on more than one occasion the audience stopped laughing dead as the mood swung from funny to tense.
And the ending? Ah, that would be telling, but trust me when I say it’s a solid ending and perfectly logical given everything that’s gone before.
Overall, this is a very strong play, with a good cast (I’ll cheerfully admit I was drawn to it by the combination of a writer whose work I admire and the chance to see two actors I like live on stage, but Kelly does a fine job in their company, even if she is rather hindered by having to rhapsodise a book which sounds like a radiation-fixated version of The Celestine Prophecy). It’s on until April 26, and you can book tickets via the Old Vic’s website.
I heartily recommend it as a night out – and as it runs 90 minutes with no interval, you’ll be out shortly after 9pm, leaving enough of the evening remaining to get a cup of tea (or something stronger) before heading home.
Sometimes, you just have to lash out the cash, and hope the reviews are accurate. In fact, that’s pretty much what I’m asking you to do here, I guess.
As you can probably guess by the fact it’s linked to in the column to the right, I read and enjoy Word magazine. I like it, not least because they summarise the review using actual words, and not stars (for fun, when I see a film poster with ***** on it, I pretend it’s a plural swearword).
Anyway, in the latest issue, they had a roundup review of a handful of techno and trance albums. It might surprise you to know that I adore euphoric and/or progressive trance music, but I do (Hybrid’s a particular favourite), so I read the review with interest. In it, they referred to the album ‘Metanarrative’ by Claro Intelecto as being ‘music to stare out of windows by’. Oh, I thought, hel-lo.
A quick search (engine) around the interweb produced very little info on the CD, and the usual online sources (for example: tall one-breasted warrior woman) seemed to suggest that it would be an import for about £15, which felt like slightly more than I wanted to gamble (yes, I could download it, but I wanted to have a copy in my hands, to feel and hold and smell and okay I’ll stop now).
So, I looked around a bit more, and lo and behold I found this – the site of the label that the album’s actually issued on, where you can get the CD, including postage, for £8.95.
I’ve got mine, and if you’re into this kind of music – which, as I say, I am – it’s 40 minutes of classy trance, closing with a track called ‘Beautiful Death’ which didn’t kill me (or anyone else, as far as I know) but which is indeed beautiful. You can listen to some samples at the link above, I think, and get an idea of whether it’s your thing.
As I said earlier today: Go on, support the independent folks instead of giving money to Global Omnicorp Inc. You won’t regret it.
Q: What does Paris Hilton’s perfume smell of? A: Semen and dollar bills.
I’m very, VERY sorry.
So (as with the cliché about historic events, good or bad) I remember where I was when – just over five years ago – Baghdad was invaded by US/UK Armed Forces. I was at a friend’s house, Sky News was on, and the coverage was … well, its rather jubilant nature made it feel like we were watching Fox News, just with a Limey voice-over.
“What do you make of all this?” my friend asked. “Blair, Bush – all this?”
“I…” For once, I tried to choose my words carefully. “I question their sincerity,” I said eventually.
And as I did then, I do now; five years on, and I don’t believe they had a plan to liberate Iraq, any more than I believe that they genuinely believed that Saddam had weapons that he was hiding from them. I think the whole damn thing was a lousy lie (or a major error of judgment, but either of those is cause for resignation to my mind), with Bush trying to look butch after the security errors that led terrorists (initially trained by US forces in Afghanistan, remember) to attack the World Trade Centre, and maybe trying to finish off the job Daddy started. And Blair being weaselly and spineless and ignoring wiser heads (not to mention what was, I think, the biggest mass protest march in UK history) and putting UK troops in the line of fire for no good reason at all.
Five years on now, and the people who thought the war was wrong-headed and ill-founded can perhaps take slight consolation in the fact that they were right all along – though those of us who questioned the sincerity of the pro-war argument at the time have now found that pretty much everyone you speak to pretends that they took the same stance at the time; people I know who swallowed the line that ‘anti-war’ equated with ‘Pro-Saddam’ are now, once the true meaning of ‘Mission Accomplished’ has sunk in, claiming that they were against it all along. It’s like the way aged cockneys claim to have been in the Blind Beggar pub that night, or Liverpudlians of a certain age claim to have been at the Cavern the first time a particular band played.
It’s the kind of re-writing of events that I’ve railed against before, and will, I fear, find cause to do so again; just as people are pretending they thought and said one thing about Iraq five years ago when in fact they didn’t, so China’s political leaders pretend that they didn’t invade Tibet in 1950, or that they didn’t order the shooting of hundreds of students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 (I think you can guess where I stand on these issues, but if you can’t, let me state: I’m on the side of the facts). And in the same way, people seem all too willing to forget that Donald Rumsfeld, one of the US politicians so very keen to go to war in Iraq (to the extent that he was thinking about a military strike in Iraq within hours of the 11 September 2001 attacks) met Saddam Hussein in December 1983 as an ally.
Relationships and allegiances change, of course, but I thought I’d post this picture here by way of pointing out that, despite what some people might have us believe, we have not always been at war with Eastasia.
Now, we all know that this was clearly a placeholder caption that was meant to be properly filled in later which (for whatever reason) wasn’t.
But given the press’s current obsession with Holly Willoughby’s chest, it’s a little unfortunate that the random keyboard-pounding for a placeholder produced a letter sequence which can really only be read aloud as ‘Titty titty’, wouldn’t you say?
I found this CD the other day, and try as I might, I can’t identify the artist.
Anyone out there in blogland have any idea who it is ?
Granted, it’s probably a question of deadlines and unexpectedly intervening events, but the combined effect is to make the cover of the latest ‘ES Magazine’ (a glossy piece of bilge given away with the London Evening Standard) appear to be saying ‘Another Minghella in the press’… which is more than a bit unfortunate this week, isn’t it?
Not half as bad as Parade Magazine in the USA publishing an interview weeks after its subject had been assassinated, sure, but still…
All the more impressive because it saw print in the Murdoch-owned Times, I think this cartoon by Peter Brookes sums up the Tibet-China Olympics situation brilliantly.
As well as being a terrific draftsman, Brookes is far from averse to making a strong point, as you can see if you look at his other cartoons, which can be seen here.
Worth adding to your list of links, I’d say.