Top 5 Reasons Not To Bother Seeing “The Great Gatsby”.

May 17, 2013 by 1 Comment
The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby

5. Because it’s a Baz Luhrmann film. And Luhrmann doesn’t make films, he makes music videos. And they have a lan­guage all of their own.

With just three or four min­utes to get your story across, you need to paint your char­ac­ters in big bold pri­mary colours and in over­sized emo­tions. And every­thing has to be in short hand and reduced to its bare min­i­mum, so that all of the story points can be under­stood, imme­di­ately. No shot ever lingers for more than a sec­ond and a half before it’s ruth­less– and rest­lessly cut, and the next is busily inserted.

It’s breath­less and, occa­sion­ally, exhil­a­rat­ing. But hav­ing to watch 90 min­utes – or more– of all that is like being asked to read a novel in text speak. It gets weary­ing, very, very quickly.

4. Because, as the old Hol­ly­wood adage goes, the best books make the worst films and vice versa. And Gatsby, some­what sur­pris­ingly, hasn’t aged a day. It’s majestic.

3. Because, and not with­stand­ing the above, the 1974 ver­sion is actu­ally pretty good. Penned by Fran­cis Ford Cop­pola, it’s a tad rev­er­en­tial and tip­toes ten­ta­tively around its source. But what saves it is its cast­ing. Robert Red­ford is perfect.

Every­thing that makes him so sus­pect as a per­former ren­ders him ideal for Fitzgerald’s neb­u­lous, opaque anti-hero. And all of the con­flict­ing emo­tions you expe­ri­ence when watch­ing him are trans­ferred on to the fig­ure of Gatsby.

Robert Redford as Gatsby

Robert Red­ford as Gatsby

Red­ford is porn per­son­i­fied. You know that it’s all show, that there’s noth­ing there, there. Beneath the sur­face, or beyond that facade. That when­ever any­one tries that hard to make it look nat­ural, all you ever notice is all of that effort. And that there’s some­thing faintly ridicu­lous about any­one that fix­ated with and happy about how they look.

And yet, you can’t take your eyes off of him. Which means, obvi­ously, that you’re ever bit as shal­low as he is.

Until even­tu­ally, in a vain effort to jus­tify your attrac­tion, you find your­self ask­ing, what if? What if there’s noth­ing wrong with mere sur­face? What if that’s all there is?

All of which of course is exactly what the novel is about.

2. Because it’s in 3D. Which is so five min­utes ago dot com.

1. One word; Aus­tralia.

One more rea­son? Very well, here’s the trailer.

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Stephen Greenblatt’s Pulitzer Prize Winning Book “The Swerve” a Joy.

May 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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The Swerve

The title of  Stephen Greenblatt’s lat­est book The Swerve, which won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2012, is a ref­er­ence to what is arguably the sin­gle most extra­or­di­nary idea human beings have every had.

It charts the life of Pog­gio, a 15th cen­tury book hunter who chanced upon the only sur­viv­ing copy of Lucretius’ justly famed poem De Rerum Natura, or On the Nature Of Things.

Aside from being a mag­nif­i­cent poem in its own right, it is also the most com­plete descrip­tion we have of the phi­los­o­phy of Epi­cu­rus, who Lucretius was a devout fol­lower of.

Epi­cu­rus was a 4th cen­tury B.C Greek philoso­pher, who became increas­ingly con­vinced that we fail to live our lives to their fullest because we’re paral­ysed by our fear of death. Or more pre­cisely, of what hap­pens to us after. So he wrote, famously:

Where we are, death is not, Where death is, we are not.

The soul, he declared, is as mor­tal as the body. And what­ever Gods there are would hardly be both­ered one way or the other with what we mere mor­tals got up to here on Earth. He’d been able to arrive at these ideas because he him­self had been a fol­lower of the 5th cen­tury Athen­ian Democritus.

Plato and Aristotle

Plato and Aristotle

If you cut bread up into smaller and smaller pieces, the Greeks had won­dered, what hap­pens? Can you chop it up indef­i­nitely, into smaller and smaller bits of bread? Or is there a basic stuff, that can be chopped up no further?

It was from this that Dem­ocri­tus for­mu­lated his extra­or­di­nary idea; his atomic the­ory.

Not only is every­thing made up of atomic mat­ter – atom is just Greek for indi­vis­i­ble. But absolutely every­thing in the uni­verse is made up of the same basic atomic mat­ter. Trees, peo­ple, the plan­ets, sand, every­thing was and is made up of the same  stuff.

By con­ven­tion hot, by con­ven­tion cold. In real­ity, atoms and the void.

How on Earth do you look around you and log­i­cally con­clude that every­thing in the uni­verse is made up of the same, invis­i­bly small but iden­ti­cally indi­vis­i­ble stuff?! Before micro­scopes or tele­scopes, and with noth­ing more than your mind and a few equally curi­ous con­tem­po­raries to bounce ideas off of?

It took sci­ence over two thou­sand years to catch up with this idea. And it’s hardly Dem­ocri­tus’ fault if John Dal­ton then used the term “atom” in the 19th cen­tury to describe the wrong stuff.

Atoms can be divided. They have at their cen­tre a nucleus, and that can be divided into pro­tons and neu­trons. And they in turn can be divided up into the quarks that form them. So we should have saved “atom” up and used it for what we now call “quarks”.

It’s Dem­ocri­tus’ atomic the­ory that ban­ishes super­sti­tion from our lives by insist­ing that every­thing, even our souls, are mate­r­ial, and made up of the same, basic stuff.

But it also does some­thing else. It describes a mech­a­nis­tic uni­verse, deter­mined by uni­ver­sal laws. And a deter­min­is­tic uni­verse does not allow for free will. This trou­bled Epi­cu­rus hugely. And so he came up with a slight mod­i­fi­ca­tion; the swerve.

Will In The World

Will In The World

Atoms do not come together because of the laws of grav­ity and motion, he said. Pre­dictably in other words. They swerve. So mat­ter is pro­duced ran­domly. And it’s this that allows for free will.

The Swerve is Greenblatt’s fol­low up to his mag­is­te­r­ial book on Shake­speare Will In The World. Which is not merely the best book on Shake­speare, but the only one you’ll ever need to read. And this is equally good.

It describes how the Mid­dle Ages was trans­formed into the Renais­sance. And it does so by giv­ing us a win­dow on 1st cen­tury B.C Rome – Lucretius was a con­tem­po­rary of Cicero and Cat­ul­lus, and was admired by Vir­gil and Ovid. And on 5th and 4th cen­tury B.C. Athens. Which is of course where the renais­sance came from. And it man­ages to be effort­lessly eru­dite and glo­ri­ously read­able. Read it.

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Iron & Wine’s Sumptuous New Album “Ghost On Ghost”.

May 3, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Ghost On GhostIt looked as if Iron & Wine was part of that vogue for new roots Amer­i­cana that was all the rage about 4 or 5 years ago. Musi­cians seemed to be turn­ing away from dig­i­tally mas­tered lay­ers of processed synths and return­ing instead to orig­i­nal instru­ments acousti­cally recorded in lofi.

Gillian Welch and Alli­son Krauss sang on O Brother Where Art Thou. And bands like Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver and Iron & Wine enjoyed unex­pected pop­u­lar acclaim, which I wrote about ear­lier here.

Inevitably the hoi pol­loi caught on, and the result alas was Mum­ford and Sons.

In many way though Iron & Wine, aka Sam Beam, has been mov­ing in the oppo­site direc­tion all along. He might have begun in the hushed, paired down, sparse acoustic mode beloved of many a bed­room. But his sound­scape has been expand­ing ever since.

His third album, The Shepherd’s Dog from 2007, which seemed at the time to be quin­tes­sen­tially lofi, was fol­lowed by Kiss Each Other Clean in 2011, and now this, Ghost On Ghost.

With each new album the sound gets big­ger, the arrange­ments more com­plex and his plain­tive vocals are cush­ioned ever more com­fort­ably in a bed of reverb and overdub.

Gram-ParsonIn other words, he’s pur­su­ing the same course charted by Gram Par­sons and The Fly­ing Bur­rito Broth­ers in the late 60s and early 70s. And by merg­ing the rich har­monies of the Beach Boys with the graft and craft of The Band, he gives his angst an unex­pected glean.

“Desert Bab­bler”, track 2 on this lat­est album, sounds like it could have been the B side on an unre­leased Beach Boys Christ­mas sin­gle. And track 3, “Joy” could just as eas­ily have been its A side. You can see the video for it here.

Whilst the penul­ti­mate track, “Lovers’ Rev­o­lu­tion” feels like some­thing that might have turned up on Astral Weeks if some­body else had been asked to pick up the mike – you can hear it here. Before “Baby Cen­ter Stage” brings the album to a serene close by return­ing us to the realm of Fleet­wood Mac, sun­shine and California.

Pris­tine pop cased in a rich musi­cal heritage.

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Bill Bailey Celebrates the Other Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace.

April 26, 2013 by 3 Comments

TX-card-crop-pro1-1.5+(1)I was qui­etly dread­ing Billy Bailey’s Jun­gle Hero, his pro­gramme on the for­got­ten co-discoverer of Evo­lu­tion by Nat­ural Selec­tion, Alfred Rus­sel Wallace.

Few things are as tired or as tedious as watch­ing yet another so say comic being hilar­i­ously mis­matched with an incon­gru­ous topic, and sent off in search of an exotic loca­tion to use as a point­less backdrop.

Hap­pily, this was very much the excep­tion to that rule. Which was prin­ci­pally down to Bailey’s unmis­tak­able and gen­uine enthu­si­asm for his sub­ject, and their joint area of interest.

Alfred Rus­sel Wal­lace was an ama­teur sci­en­tist in the clas­si­cally Vic­to­rian mould. He spent his life try­ing to make sense of the ani­mal king­dom and our place in it. And he funded his quest by trav­el­ling to the far­thest cor­ners of the globe, col­lect­ing exotic spec­i­mens that he was able to send back home and sell in London.

located-in-southeast-asia-in-the-malay-archipelago-indonesia-indonesia+1152_12987332687-tpfil02aw-18651These twin pur­suits, of knowl­edge, and of col­lect­ing insects – and dis­cov­er­ing new ones —  are clearly shared by Bai­ley. And there really was only way for him to tell us about Wal­lace and his dis­cov­er­ies. Which was to take us with him on the jour­ney that the lat­ter made in the 1850s.

Bai­ley and his fel­low film mak­ers got every­thing just about right in this pro­gramme. The expla­na­tions of how Rus­sel arrived at the idea of nat­ural selec­tion, and of why it was that it hap­pened there, in the Malay Arch­i­pel­ago were clear and sim­ple with­out ever being over sim­pli­fied. And they were inter­spersed with just about the right amount of local colour and per­sonal anecdote.

There was a polit­i­cal slant to the pro­gramme too. Wal­lace is the for­got­ten fig­ure in the story of evo­lu­tion by nat­ural selec­tion. We only ever remem­ber the first per­son to dis­cover any­thing, and soci­ety and the sci­en­tific estab­lish­ment chose to cel­e­brate the well-bred Dar­win and not the lowly Wal­lace, despite the fact that their papers were pre­sented together.

Indeed, Dar­win was only moved to pub­lish at all because of what Wal­lace had sent him. When to his hor­ror, he dis­cov­ered that his life’s work was in dan­ger of being eclipsed by this ama­teur enthu­si­ast on the other side of the world.

BillBaileyAll of which is true. But Dar­win had been work­ing on his the­o­ries for nearly 20 years before Wal­lace had his eureka moment. But he under­stood how explo­sive an idea nat­ural selec­tion would prove to be, and he wanted to gather as much evi­dence as he could before pub­lish­ing anything.

And there were other rea­sons why the sci­en­tific world for­got Wal­lace. Like his pros­e­lytis­ing of Spir­i­tu­al­ism, and his cred­u­lous cham­pi­oning of séances, both of which he insisted on see­ing in a “sci­en­tific” light.

Nonethe­less, he deserves to be more fully cel­e­brated, and Bai­ley is demon­stra­bly the per­fect man for the job. The con­clud­ing episode is on this week­end on BBC2.

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Cronenberg’s “Cosmopolis” Unfairly Overlooked.

April 19, 2013 by 3 Comments

cosmopolis.limosceneLast year’s David Cro­nen­berg film, Cos­mopo­lis, seems to have passed most peo­ple by. Which is a shame, because it’s got an awful lot going for it.

Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel, on which it is based, cer­tainly seems in ret­ro­spect to have been remark­ably pre­scient. It fol­lows an obscenely rich and impos­si­bly young trader, played by Twi­light heart-throb Robert Pat­tin­son, who spends a day in his limo as the finan­cial world around him implodes and his for­tune evap­o­rates into thin air.

All the time, and all around him, hordes of anti-capitalist Occupy-type ne’er-do-wells stalk the streets. But far from in way panic, or even react to any of this, Pat­tin­son drifts aim­lessly from hour to hour in a state of exis­ten­tial ennui.

The novel came out in 2003. And although DeLillo had actu­ally already writ­ten the bulk of it before Sep­tem­ber 11th and the dot com crash of 2001, it cer­tainly feels like it’s a reac­tion to the impend­ing sense of doom and Armaged­don that came in the after­math. But given what hap­pened to the finan­cial world in the decade that fol­lowed, it all looks remark­ably rel­e­vant and feels sur­pris­ingly fresh.

CrashAll of this of course is clas­sic Cro­nen­berg ter­rain. Since calm­ing down from his ear­lier blood and gore fix­a­tions, Cro­nen­berg has devel­oped into one of the most con­sis­tently inter­est­ing and thought-provoking film mak­ers work­ing today.

Films like eXis­tenZ (1999), Spi­der (2002) and even the appar­ently con­ven­tional Freud and Jung biopic A Dan­ger­ous Method (2011) all explore ques­tions of our place in the world, and exam­ine notions of appear­ance ver­sus reality.

But it’s the superb and crim­i­nally over­looked Crash (1996) that Cos­mopo­lis most closely mir­rors. It falls mid­way between that and Brett Eas­ton Ellis’ Amer­i­can Psy­cho, as our hero descends on a Sty­gian jour­ney into urban alien­ation and exis­ten­tial angst. Where every­thing is sur­face, and life has lost all meaning.

robert-pattinson-as-eric-packer-in-cosmopolis_sarah_gadenPat­tin­son is impres­sive now that he’s been given some­thing grown-up to do. And his Amer­i­can accent is con­sid­er­ably bet­ter than to ought to be, if the attempts of any of this com­pa­tri­ots are any­thing to go by. Apart of course from  Hugh Laurie’s, which is obvi­ously a deli­ciously wicked joke at the expense of all of his Amer­i­can viewers.

The sup­port­ing cast of Paul Gia­matti, Juliet Binoche and the porce­lain Sarah Gadon as his even more dif­fi­dent wife are all flaw­less. And all look pal­pa­bly relieved to find them­selves in some­thing made for peo­ple of a dou­ble digit age and with a triple digit IQ.

You can see the trailer for it here.

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