Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

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 o...

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 sol...

  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 slight...

  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 th...

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 fou...

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 Marve...