Shows, Films and Books.
Here, cut for length, are a few things I've seen or read in the last couple of weeks.
Watching Spamalot is a weird experience for the longtime Python fan. Much of it is comfortingly familiar. Some of it (particularly the sequences which were lifted pretty much in their entirety from the film), is familiar, but jarring in not being performed exactly the way you remember it. Some of it is at once gratuitously familiar but newly invigorated with a refreshing twist. And some of it is completely and utterly new, but given that this is largely the songs there's a certain familiarity there too, as Spamalot pastiches the cliches of Broadway just as lovingly as it does its own canon. But then, what else would you expect from a musical which promotes itself with posters that read "With a cast of Less Than 100!" and "featuring 19½ songs not appearing in any other west end show!"
The cast were excellent, though sadly I didn't get to see Tim Curry in the role of Arthur; his run finished a few weeks earlier. But as it turns out the true star of the show is the Lady of the Lake, part character and part show-stealing diva, played and sung quite magnificently by Hannah Waddingham.
Spamalot was nominated in seven categories at the Laurence Olivier theatre awards, but in the end didn't win any of them. I can't say I'm surprised; it's not in any way groundbreaking. But it was hugely entertaining and I'll be only too happy if there's a DVD release.
Pan's Labyrinth is set in 1944, in a small army outpost during the spanish civil war. Ofelia is a 12 year old girl, fond of books and with an overactive imagination. She and her pregnant mother Carmen have come there to be with Carmen's new husband, the outpost's sadistic captain. Repelled by both her stepfather and the horrors of the war around them, and fearful of her mother's worsening health, Ofelia is visited at night by a faun called Pan who offers her a place in another world, but only if she can complete three tasks for him.
Whether Pan and his world are real or merely a fantasy Ofelia has created that she can withdraw to is ambiguous; nothing separates the fantasy world from the real one except that it happens out of sight of the adults. Further confusing the matter is that the world Ofelia escapes to is almost as macabre as the one she is retreating from.
This is a dark fairy tale, well told and well executed. But I felt it wasn't quite as good as I'd been led to believe; I think the praise Neil Gaiman heaped on it may have set my expectations a bit too high. Nonetheless, well worth seeing. (Incidentally, if you ever try to see a film which you think too obscure to get any attention, but which you found out about because Neil Gaiman spoke highly of it on his blog, turn up early.)
This weekend I saw a poster for police community relations in town. It had a picture of a uniformed officer, with the message "It's a two way relationship between me and the community." Which is all very well; I just think it would've been better if the officer had looked a bit less like Simon Pegg...
Hot Fuzz is the second film from the Shaun of the Dead team of Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and director Edgar Wright. Pegg plays a hardened and highly commended police sergeant from London who is forced to adapt to the more sedate pace of life in Sandford, the long-undefeated holder of the Best Kept Village Of The Year award. Nothing ever really happens there, apart from the odd... accident.
Hot Fuzz is pretty much exactly what you'd expect from the team that gave us Shaun. The cast is rather larger this time round and many of the characters are sketched out in reliable rural comedy thumbnails. But for the major players there's perhaps a fraction more depth and subtlety than there was before. The humour is as strong as ever, and once again there are many moments where the background music directly references the action at the time. (I was particularly chuffed to note that as Pegg takes his first drink in the village pub the jukebox played XTC's "Sergeant Rock".) My only concern is that the Pegg/Wright/Frost team are settling into their own stylistic bubble in much the same way as the Carry On films did, and how long they can sustain that I don't know. But for now, if you enjoyed Shaun... you'll have just as much fun seeing Hot Fuzz.
As an aside, while talking about whether they'd had any gun training for the film during his recent appearance on Top Gear, Pegg recounted an incident from the filming of Spaced. In one scene Nick Frost's character had to assemble a rifle blindfolded as part of his TA training. Frost had therefore taken a replica rifle home with him and was practicing the routine in his front room. He finished the assembly, pulled off the blindfold, and found himself face to face with eight police officers in body armour pointing rifles at him. Oops.
On the book front, I've just read The Interpretation Of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld. It's set in New York, 1909, and as Sigmund Freud is making his first visit to America, a debutante is found strangled in her apartment. The following night another girl is attacked, but though she survives she is unable to speak, and is suffering from hysterical amnesia.
A few years back I read Caleb Carr's The Alienist. Also set in New York around the same era, it involves a hunt for a serial killer in which a small group of forward-thinking detectives, aided by a doctor with radical theories about conditioned behaviour, attempt to construct from the ground up the science we now know as psychological profiling. It's an excellent novel, (and its sequel, The Angel Of Darkness, is pretty good too), which was largely what inspired me to take a chance on this one. But where Carr's books focus on the profiling of the killer, The Interpretation Of Murder applies psychoanalysis to the victim. It's also a far more convoluted book; while the profile in The Alienist gradually becomes fuller and clearer, the events in this case become ever more contradictory. As background to all this the characters diverge into discussion of Freud's theories, including a condensed version of the historical breakup between Freud and Jung. But Rubenfeld manages to do so without ever overwhelming a first rate historical thriller.
Watching Spamalot is a weird experience for the longtime Python fan. Much of it is comfortingly familiar. Some of it (particularly the sequences which were lifted pretty much in their entirety from the film), is familiar, but jarring in not being performed exactly the way you remember it. Some of it is at once gratuitously familiar but newly invigorated with a refreshing twist. And some of it is completely and utterly new, but given that this is largely the songs there's a certain familiarity there too, as Spamalot pastiches the cliches of Broadway just as lovingly as it does its own canon. But then, what else would you expect from a musical which promotes itself with posters that read "With a cast of Less Than 100!" and "featuring 19½ songs not appearing in any other west end show!"
The cast were excellent, though sadly I didn't get to see Tim Curry in the role of Arthur; his run finished a few weeks earlier. But as it turns out the true star of the show is the Lady of the Lake, part character and part show-stealing diva, played and sung quite magnificently by Hannah Waddingham.
Spamalot was nominated in seven categories at the Laurence Olivier theatre awards, but in the end didn't win any of them. I can't say I'm surprised; it's not in any way groundbreaking. But it was hugely entertaining and I'll be only too happy if there's a DVD release.
Pan's Labyrinth is set in 1944, in a small army outpost during the spanish civil war. Ofelia is a 12 year old girl, fond of books and with an overactive imagination. She and her pregnant mother Carmen have come there to be with Carmen's new husband, the outpost's sadistic captain. Repelled by both her stepfather and the horrors of the war around them, and fearful of her mother's worsening health, Ofelia is visited at night by a faun called Pan who offers her a place in another world, but only if she can complete three tasks for him.
Whether Pan and his world are real or merely a fantasy Ofelia has created that she can withdraw to is ambiguous; nothing separates the fantasy world from the real one except that it happens out of sight of the adults. Further confusing the matter is that the world Ofelia escapes to is almost as macabre as the one she is retreating from.
This is a dark fairy tale, well told and well executed. But I felt it wasn't quite as good as I'd been led to believe; I think the praise Neil Gaiman heaped on it may have set my expectations a bit too high. Nonetheless, well worth seeing. (Incidentally, if you ever try to see a film which you think too obscure to get any attention, but which you found out about because Neil Gaiman spoke highly of it on his blog, turn up early.)
This weekend I saw a poster for police community relations in town. It had a picture of a uniformed officer, with the message "It's a two way relationship between me and the community." Which is all very well; I just think it would've been better if the officer had looked a bit less like Simon Pegg...
Hot Fuzz is the second film from the Shaun of the Dead team of Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and director Edgar Wright. Pegg plays a hardened and highly commended police sergeant from London who is forced to adapt to the more sedate pace of life in Sandford, the long-undefeated holder of the Best Kept Village Of The Year award. Nothing ever really happens there, apart from the odd... accident.
Hot Fuzz is pretty much exactly what you'd expect from the team that gave us Shaun. The cast is rather larger this time round and many of the characters are sketched out in reliable rural comedy thumbnails. But for the major players there's perhaps a fraction more depth and subtlety than there was before. The humour is as strong as ever, and once again there are many moments where the background music directly references the action at the time. (I was particularly chuffed to note that as Pegg takes his first drink in the village pub the jukebox played XTC's "Sergeant Rock".) My only concern is that the Pegg/Wright/Frost team are settling into their own stylistic bubble in much the same way as the Carry On films did, and how long they can sustain that I don't know. But for now, if you enjoyed Shaun... you'll have just as much fun seeing Hot Fuzz.
As an aside, while talking about whether they'd had any gun training for the film during his recent appearance on Top Gear, Pegg recounted an incident from the filming of Spaced. In one scene Nick Frost's character had to assemble a rifle blindfolded as part of his TA training. Frost had therefore taken a replica rifle home with him and was practicing the routine in his front room. He finished the assembly, pulled off the blindfold, and found himself face to face with eight police officers in body armour pointing rifles at him. Oops.
On the book front, I've just read The Interpretation Of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld. It's set in New York, 1909, and as Sigmund Freud is making his first visit to America, a debutante is found strangled in her apartment. The following night another girl is attacked, but though she survives she is unable to speak, and is suffering from hysterical amnesia.
A few years back I read Caleb Carr's The Alienist. Also set in New York around the same era, it involves a hunt for a serial killer in which a small group of forward-thinking detectives, aided by a doctor with radical theories about conditioned behaviour, attempt to construct from the ground up the science we now know as psychological profiling. It's an excellent novel, (and its sequel, The Angel Of Darkness, is pretty good too), which was largely what inspired me to take a chance on this one. But where Carr's books focus on the profiling of the killer, The Interpretation Of Murder applies psychoanalysis to the victim. It's also a far more convoluted book; while the profile in The Alienist gradually becomes fuller and clearer, the events in this case become ever more contradictory. As background to all this the characters diverge into discussion of Freud's theories, including a condensed version of the historical breakup between Freud and Jung. But Rubenfeld manages to do so without ever overwhelming a first rate historical thriller.