Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

It's been a strange year again, with not enough live performances in the mix yet.  I've already given my Awards for Film, Television and Theatre for 2022 here , so this is about other stuff that happened this year I didn't want to forget (and some things I maybe did).   The year started off with pretty low expectations and in many ways it managed to underdeliver, but there were some high spots too if you look hard enough. My fantasy children This was the year that I discovered mum-crushes.  I'm used to the usual sort, but I now follow more actors with a proud parent vibe than I do with any light lusting.  This is a worrying development and I fear it confirms that I have got old.  The main objects of my new affections this year have been the casts of Stranger Things and of course Heartstopper.  It's so exciting watching actors at the beginning of their career, when you can see all the potential starting to be realised.  For example, Joe Locke absolutely killing it in

Drum roll for the inaugural Chatterbox Film, TV  and Theatre awards 2022.  This is a really random selection and I  am sure I have forgotten some great stuff but these are the bits that have stuck in my memory.  You may be relieved I have forgotten some things, as this has turned out to be far too long, like every award ceremony you have ever seen.  May contain spoilers. Best TV Moment It was a good year for TV moments. The nominees are: Stranger Things: There were a lot of great moments in series 4.  I almost picked  Kate Bush saves Max, but really that's probably more a group of moments.  Or I could have picked one of the moments where poor Will has his romantic hopes dashed.  Instead though I have picked the iconic moment in the finale of series 4, with Eddie Munson's heroic playing of Metallica's Master of Puppets.  The game changer in the battle, sacrificing himself for his friends, and also spot on brand for the metalhead/ dungeons and dragons crossover that I remembe

His Dark Materials I've been seeing really annoying spoilers for weeks about the final series of Phillip Pullman's perfect trilogy, as for some reason it was released earlier in the US, a week at a time.  So, I already knew a little bit of what to expect, and when the series dropped on iplayer on Sunday, I started watching straight away, with a plan to watch two episodes a night.  Well that lasted on Sunday and Monday but last night, at the end of episode 6 I just couldn't stop and so tore on through right to the end.  I think this production has done the books proud, in a way that The Golden Compass just didn't.  For a start the right people are British, and there was enough time to tell the story properly enough that I didn't feel there were any glaring holes, although there were some changes made.   One of the good things was the way that the large chunks of philosophy in the last book of the series, The Amber Spyglass, was spread out very effectively throughout.

The power of stories and how we choose to believe them is the overriding theme in this slightly haunting film, and the disconcerting framing device at the beginning and the end is used to hammer the point home . Set in Ireland in the 1890s when the famine was a recent memory, the film is about a ‘fasting girl’ supposedly surviving on prayer alone, seen through the eyes of the nurse (Florence Pugh) employed to watch and report on the veracity of the claims.     Everyone has their own version of the story they want to protect, and that they are prepared to do or condone appalling things to maintain it.     We have a doctor, a scientist, convinced that the girl has found a new source of life, the religious believers, the scientific disbelievers and the journalist as well as the parents, all with their own agendas.     Florence Pugh is impressive as the nurse at the heart of this, both uncovering the stories upon stories woven together here, and adding layers of her own.     The scenery an

This was an unlikely impulse read, as I'm not usually that keen on romance novels as a genre, but I was really pleasantly surprised. I read it for two reasons,  Firstly I am still hoovering up the work of all of the Heartstopper alumni, and one of the actors will be playing the romantic lead in the film. But what sealed the deal was it was written by an American but the novel is based in Winchester and Hampshire (where I spend my time when not in London!)  Anyway,  it's a fairly standard set up for a coming of age journey, but it turned out to be a thinly disguised homage to the author's Cuban heritage full of lots of loving and rounded detail about food and culture and family.  And added to this were the locations, not just in Winchester but also accurate descriptions of one of my favourite walks along Basingstoke Canal to Odiham Castle which is not a location that tends to crop up often in bestselling novels.  Finally, the  characters were also well enough drawn that

  Continuing on my Olivia Coleman odyssey, last night I caught up with The Father.     What a fantastic piece of work this is.     Anthony Hopkins channels King Lear with his anger, frustration and bewilderment with what appear to be his three daughters.     We share his view of the world as it changes around him seeming to make no sense, and as all spirals to the devastating ending,  he and we briefly have clarity before the fog descends again.       Olivia Coleman is stunning too (of course) as the daughter with impossible choices, and makes it possible to sympathise with her decisions even while we are seeing the consequences.     Absolutely gut-wrenchingly impressive.

 I read Orlando as a teenager but haven’t been back since.  I remembered it being a feminist treatise but of course revisiting it now, the sexual and gender identity aspects feel just as important.  We tried out some cheap seats in a box, and I was a bit worried that we would have a repeat of the Noises Off debacle back in 2012 when we could only see half the stage.  In fact this turned out to be a tiny box with just the two seats that we could move about, which meant we could lean over if we really wanted to see something tucked away, so it worked out well in the end.   So, what about the play you ask? Well, it opens with 9 Virginia Woolfs (Wolves?) on stage, a chorus maybe, representing different selves I guess, but it allows for an entertaining dialogue when deciding what should happen to Orlando next.  Having an onstage dresser in the form of Deborah Findlay also gave us a narrator and guide to run alongside the Virginia chorus to keep Orlando and the audience on track.  Emma Corr

Still following the degrees of connection in my viewing I decided to follow the breadcrumb trails from Olivia Coleman and Paul Mescal which led me to finally watch this film, written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, which is (partly at least) another meditation on parenthood.  Olivia Coleman is Leda, a deliberately evocative name if I ever heard one, spending a week alone in a beachside get-away. The family that arrives to disrupt her peace is an irritant and a trigger for a series of flashes of memory about motherhood and relationship with her daughters.  Having so recently watched Aftersun, I can’t help but see this as a partner piece, but this time there is no nostalgic childlike filter to soften the edges.  The chaotic, brutal and unsparing look at the constant denial of self that parenting often requires was really on point, and the petty triumphs that the young version of Leda (an excellent Jessie Buckley) exacts are as recognisable as they are painful.  This is a woman that co

I spent lunchtime today in a cinema watching Aftersun and I feel dazed and dazzled in the way you can after too much time at the beach.   It’s a beautiful, intimate and visually stunning look back at a holiday Sophie had with her Dad in Turkey when she was 11.  There are coming of age moments certainly but overall this is a tender, if oblique, close-up of a parent though the lense of childhood, and a masterful first film from Charlotte Wells.  Paul Mescal does his semi-magical thing here, as in Normal People.  I didn’t love Sally Rooney’s book mainly because I struggled to get past Connell’s treatment of Marianne but I absolutely ‘got’ what Connell was about when I finally watched Mescal in the tv series.  Here, as Calum in Aftersun, he manages to be spectacular in his quiet portrayal of a man who is a loving, fun father but with largely unarticulated adult demons too.   The two leads have a wonderful, natural chemistry and the fragmented nature of the narrative with the use of the vid

This novel is on the Booker shortlist for 2022 and I can see why.   A Black comedy in every sense this tells the story of some mysterious murders centred on a town called Money, Mississippi.    Masquerading as an offbeat, horrific (and very funny) police procedural/murder mystery, this is a fast moving story about a family of rednecks and then an ever widening circle of white victims being murdered, with the common denominator being a dead Black man at every scene.  Using the real life lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 in the real Money, Mississippi this very quickly turns into an angry and sharp commentary on race in America today, with the caricatured rednecks as victims being a lot less real than the Black cops and suspects.   The references to the dead waking, and a whole chapter being taken up with listing the names of Black men lynched in America, together with the shocking statistics of how few of these crimes were ever investigated, let alone solved and someone punished, makes it

  As usual, I  am discovering another great bit of work, long after everyone else has moved on.....  This week I finally watched both series of The End of the F***ing World and I really loved it.    Another adaptation from a graphic novel, I hadn’t fancied the series originally, and didn't even pick it up in the deepest days of Covid lockdown although not quite sure why now.    Series 1 had quite a lot of plot to get through whilst gradually (and surprisingly delicately given the brutality of some of the scenes) peeling back the layers to find out what is really going on with the two teenagers.    Given the bleak ending to series 1 it was great to find series 2 had more time to spend on character and found a real heart as James and Alyssa  work through their redemption story.    Perfect as a black comedy, lots of blood and nastiness but also a really sweet love story about two damaged people.     Loved the slightly Wild West feel too; not sure where the locations were but that scru

  Tonight I went to see About Us at the Tower of London. A half an hour light show with music, taking us from the beginning of the universe, right through the bit of a mess humans have made of things, it was a lovely way to spend the evening (we saw it twice!).    I went with a friend I had met on the internet, someone I would never have met in t he olden days.    For all its faults, life is still better in so many ways now we have the opportunity to reach out through the airwaves to find our ‘tribe’.     I count among some of my best friends people I met on fan forums for Green Wing over 15 years ago now.  I was thinking about a    different type of connection earlier though and the great algorithm challenge of getting out of the box that systems have allocated for you.     As a theatre going lover of literature, the arts and classy dramas and a rapidly ageing music collection, I was being presented with plenty of the stuff I know I like, but how do you get access to something differe

I have a historical problem with Ibsen so went to see this one on my own so that no-one had to share any potential pain I was feeling.   I noticed there were a lot of individual theatregoers at this performance so I wondered whether I am not the only one with a bit of a mental block, but more likely because there were a lot of seats available. I love the cheap stall seats at The Bridge Theatre though - a pretty good and comfortable view, much better than many far more expensive seats elsewhere.   Simon Russell Beale (excellent as always) plays the disgraced alpha-male, angry at his loss of power and status, blaming everyone around him except himself for his downfall, and plotting a glorious return … sound familiar? The two sisters who are the recipients of his blame, and keep the blame game going by also blaming each other are played pitch perfectly by Clare Higgins and Lia Williams. Sebastian De Sousa switched on the charm as feckless son, doted on and fought over by the all

This was a play we have been anticipating for two years so we weren’t going to let the little matter of a tube strike put us off. This isn’t a subtle play but it’s certainly powerful and I’d say it is even more timely after being delayed by Covid and in this age of high populism. The play charts how an ordinary-ish man goes on a Faustian journey from going along with, then is complicit, leading to full immersion in the Nazi project of genocide. The challenge of standing up to something that you know is wrong but might be ‘Good’ for an individual but bad for others is explicitly called out and the fact that David Tennant’s Halder doesn’t believe the ‘anti-jewish rubbish’ makes his complicity even more painful as he betrays his family and friends for his own good life. We’d talked over dinner before the play about what gives life value, and had an interesting discussion in the interval about climate change protest and what is and isn’t acceptable, which shows how live these issues are. H

Just a quick note picking up on some of my thoughts today.  Late last night on Twitter, one of the lovely  young men from Heartstopper felt obliged to out himself following some appalling bullying around his authenticity for the role he had played.  Made me very sad that something so joyful has led to such personal traumas for these talented young people.  Of course, the nastiness of human nature has always been there ( See The Crucible! ) , but the scale and immediacy of the social media age makes it all so much sharper.  While many many people have leapt to his defence, the damage has been done, not to his reputation which I am sure will be unaffected, but for his wellbeing and for future actors thinking about taking on groundbreaking roles.  There is so much still to do if a teenager feels pressurised to reveal stuff that is no-one's business but his own.    Then today, one of his co-stars was revealed to have got a starring role in a new Marvel project;  along with the congratu