Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 11/31: how do you want to, how should we, feel about everything and nothing when we die? (suggested by Francis Irving)

Philosophy  Jude Law says something on this very subject in that Shakespeare interview book I reviewed the other day. At first he’s speaking about the change in Hamlet’s attitude to life, but then he opens out with:

“We all start with great optimism and exuberance and belief, then we end up realising that life can be fucking hard and brutal – a grunting, sweating weary life – but we can choose to bear it. What’s the choice? But then while we’re bearing it and while it can be brutal, and not as shining and joyful as perhaps it was when we were six or seven years old, we also have to be ready for anything, and that in itself makes it extraordinary. The rest is silence.”

Which I think you’ll agree is an reasonably insightful comment not just on the play but on life in general. It’s also the main theme of Woody Allen’s film Whatever Works (which I wrote about along with a bunch of other Woody Allen films earlier this year) and probably the key topic of all drama since Sophocles spoiled everyone’s relationship with their mother (cf, Hamlet again). How to make the most of the time that we have and reconciling that with the fact that for most of us the experience won’t be that great?

Jeff Goldblum’s character in The Big Chill suggests that he can’t get through a week without making one or two really good rationalisations and that’s probably the level most of us work towards. During this financial crisis when unemployment is due to rise to levels even higher than usual, no matter how much we hate our jobs we’ll tell ourselves “Well, at least I have a job”. If we’re in an unsatisfactory relationship, we might say “Well, at least I’m with someone.” For some of us, that’s enough.

But what we have to be careful of is not comparing our own achievements against others. That really is depressing. If the world wide web has offered the ability to expand our horizons beyond our street or town, there’s also now the chance to read about the lives of an infinite number of people who are better looking than us, have better jobs and more attractive partners. Blogger-envy has given way to Twitter-envy but you have to wonder how most of these people fit it all in.

Essentially we're all trapped in a Sisyphian state of uselessly pushing a rock up a hill only to watch it falling down the other side knowing that we'll only be perilously nudging it back up again.  Of course, Sisyphus was trapped by the gods in his never ending task for being a bad person and I don't think that's a fair assessment of everyone.  But I think it neatly demonstrates now many of us, in search for a purpose in life, ultimately find ourselves striving within acts of futility, continuing to do so even when we're given reasonable evidence that we are indeed wasting our time.

Oh how I’ve agonised. Everything I do seems to be a waste of time especially a waste of my leisure time; I always assuming I'm watching the wrong kinds of films, listening to the wrong kinds of music, reading the wrong kinds of text and anyway couldn’t I be doing something more useful than any of those three? Shouldn’t I be giving all this time to charity instead of selfishly wasting it in front of All The President’s Men once again, marvelling at the Burlesque soundtrack (spotify) or guffawing at Charlie Brooker’s latest column?

What I’ve decided, my big rationalisation if you will, is that I’ll never be happy. No matter what I do, I’ll always feel like I’m wasting my time. So it’s best just to meander on, do the best with the opportunities that open themselves up to me, and make do.  In other words, the state Jude Law describes in the quote at the top of this piece and Woody, or his avatar Larry David says at the close of his movie (because on this point pop culture and academia tend to intersect):

I happen to hate New Year's celebrations. Everybody desperate to have fun. Trying to celebrate in some pathetic little way. Celebrate what? A step closer to the grave? That's why I can't say enough times, whatever love you can get and give, whatever happiness you can filch or provide, every temporary measure of grace, whatever works. And don't kid yourself. Because its by no means up to your own human ingenuity. A bigger part of your existence is luck, than you'd like to admit. Christ, you know the odds of your fathers one sperm from the billions, finding the single egg that made you. Don't think about it, you'll have a panic attack.

Which is a cop-out. A platitude. Someone else's words. But I don’t have a better answer than that.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 10/31: Apocalypse Now (suggested by @linkmachinego)

Film Hearts of Darkness: A Film-makers Apocalypse is one of my favourite films. Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper’s gathering together of Eleanor Coppola’s behind the scenes footage of the making of her husband Francis’s mad expedition into Manila to shoot a Vietnam war movie is one of the reasons I became interested in film and probably fuelled my obsession not just in what happens on screen but who’s pointing the camera. Too many great moments to list (“There were too many of us, we had access to too much equipment, too much money, and little by little we went insane.”) but rest assured it's impossible to watch the elder Laurence Fishburne in quite the same way once you’ve visited upon the teenage version, spaced out on a boat. His character in Apocalypse Now was not much of a job of acting.

I saw Hearts of Darkness before Apocalypse Now. In fact, so obsessed was I with this “making of” that for years I banned myself from watching the Vietnam war film itself lest I taint the version of it I’d conjured in my imagination from the few fragments that appear in Bahr and Hickenlooper’s work along with the surrounding 8mm b-roll. Myths are rarely less potent than reality and I couldn’t imagine the vérité shots of Martin Sheen falling off the wagon could really be improved by being shot and edited on 35mm film with a soundtrack by The Doors. Plus, please remember, that at this time Apocalypse Now had been gone from the cinemas for over a decade and only really existed in a pan-scan version which would look even less epic on the 14” portable in my bedroom.

But eventually I succumbed when a widescreen version of the film was released on VHS and inevitably it wasn’t as good as the epic I had in my head.  Not Coppola’s fault, of course, and whilst it was far from the classical Hollywood mode, it just didn’t reflect the frenzy of its creation. I remember being slightly bored that first time around, impressed by the visuals but unable to rationalise the need for the pop philosophy. Willard’s decent into madness seemed strangely abrupt with only the mother's letter scene really effecting me (I was at university and homesick). I also remember being a bit angry that not more of Marlon Brando’s improvision had made it to the final cut.

On subsequent viewings, especially in its Redux version, my appreciation of Apocalypse Now has increased. The element of boredom I’d detected in that first viewing is an important part of the experience. Coppola is attempting to recreate the monotony of war, the long periods of listlessness when someone can spend too much time in their own company, inside their own head, punctuated by moments of utter horror when anything can happen and you’ll most likely watch your best friend receiving bullet assuming you’re not hit yourself. Little by little Willard goes insane but it's not until he reaches Kurtz that he really falls off the deep end, but in a measured way, in a way that allows him to complete his mission.

All of which, after some reflection, many years of reflection, only increases my appreciation of Hearts of Darkness and how ably it demonstrates that Coppola’s real achievement was not to let his own frenetic need to complete the film be reflected on-screen and that he was able to craft such a coherent piece of work from the years of footage collected during principle photography and in a way that directors with far larger budgets and shooting under relatively perfect conditions seem incapable of. Now, what I’d really like to see is the four-hour bootleg version which is apparently knocking around. Nothing can be as good as the version of that film I have in my head …

Follow @linkmachinego here.

Soundalikes #34: Francis Monkman meets Murray Gold

Music Doesn't the first bit of the theme to The Long Good Friday:



Sound a bit like the Eleventh Doctor theme?

"a fresher batch"

Coffee How to get the best out of Starbucks. Insider knowledge from a barrista on Reddit. Much of this seems like it could be relevant in the UK:

"If you come in and ask for a cup of coffee and see that the little red light on the brewer is blinking, ask politely for a fresher batch, or just go with a pour over. The red light starts blinking after an hour. At my store, we're pretty strict about the 30 minute time limit on our coffees, but other stores aren't."

I'll add two things:

(1) Not all of the available sizes are on the menu. If like me you don't need a vat of coffee and just want something that's closer to an ordinary household mug, ask for a "short". It's cheaper and leads to less wastage because you'll drink it before it goes cold.

(2) At the moment if you buy some of the VIA instant coffee (which as the linked article says is nicest and more authentic in its Italian form) using a Starbucks gift card you can get a free tall coffee from the menu and anything from the menu.

Shakespeare on Stage: Thirteen Leading Actors on Thirteen Key Roles by Julian Curry.

Julian Curry spends much of his introduction to Shakespeare on Stage: Thirteen Leading Actors on Thirteen Key Roles justifying the need to record the thoughts of actors in the first place. An actor himself (long career, cv long enough to fill the RSC’s theatre programme), he understands correctly that though critics have their place in putting a play within its historical context and examining its themes, its only by talking to those employed to stand in front of an audience and make that rabble of coughers and coat wearers believe a character has a soul, that the emotional truth of the words can be understood.

Shakespeare On Stage gathers interviews with thirteen prominent actors, in which they’re asked if they’ll, as Curry says, “be willing to reveal if not how they acted, at least what they did.” This is not a book to dip into looking for theatrical anecdotes though a few do creep out. It is instead a record of a range of productions and how a given character fitted into the ensemble, how the decisions taken by the actor in conjunction with the director impacts on both the audience’s understanding of the plot and sometimes how that production fits within the historical legacy of the play.

Oh the riches! Judi Dench reminiscing about her Juliet for Zeffirelli at the Old Vic in 1960(surely the performance The Guardian’s Michael Billington recently revealed to be his favourite of the past fifty years). Ian McKellen on his classic Macbeth opposite Dench for the RSC and Ralph Fiennes returning to the mind of Coriolanus, and the Almeida show which has inspired his new film version. Some are shorter than others; sometimes Curry’s time with his subject was limit, but sometimes he’s simply fulfilling his prophecy from the introduction that “it’s a mugs game to get actors to talk about their craft”.

Shakespeare’s problems, romances and comedies are given equal weight however, which makes a change from similar exercises that tend to concentrate on the tragedies under the assumption that they’re more psychologically complex. I’d not realised Rebecca Hall played Rosalind for her father, Peter, in Bath in 2003 and Derek Jacobi, in expounding on his Malvolvio, relishes the chance to talk about something other than his several hundred appearances as Hamlet. Most valuable perhaps is Penelope Wilton on Measure for Measure morally ambiguous nun Isabella. Her material might be very site specific, but her comments on why the character stops speaking towards the end (she’s dumfounded) only increase my appreciation of this most overlooked play.

Hamlet is represented by Jude Law. Unlike most of the interviews which are looking back retrospectively on a production, Curry was able to grab Law right in the middle of the show’s run at the Donmar Warehouse last Summer (2009) and so he’s capturing an actor in the thick of his thought processes about the character before he’s consolidated his feelings as to whether he achieved what he set out to. As many actors do, Law says that he wants to find something new every night, bring spontaneity to his text, mostly because he doesn’t want the bigness of the nightly endeavour to overwhelm him. In places, he clearly sees aspects of himself in the character, just as the best actors should.

Though Curry has chosen to arrange the interviews in alphabetical order, I wonder if chronological order by production date wouldn’t be just as useful so that the reader can have an idea of how the Shakespearean acting has developed over the past fifty years from Dench to Law. For the most part, theatre is ephemeral and fleeting and this book goes some way to recapturing what we’ve missed – even those productions that have been filmed for the studio aren’t absolute recreations of what the theatre audience enjoyed. Despite his modest claims, Curry has produced a document which should be of use to acting students searching for inspiration, as a research tool for theatre students and for the general audience seeking a different set of insights and perspectives on the canon.

'Shakespeare on Stage: Thirteen Leading Actors on Thirteen Key Roles' by Julian Curry is published by Nick Hern Books. £14.99. ISBN: 9781848420779.  Review copy supplied.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 9/31: 'Shakespeare on Stage: Thirteen Leading Actors on Thirteen Key Roles' by Julian Curry.

Theatre Julian Curry spends much of his introduction to Shakespeare on Stage: Thirteen Leading Actors on Thirteen Key Roles justifying the need to record the thoughts of actors in the first place. An actor himself (long career, cv long enough to fill the RSC’s theatre programme), he understands correctly that though critics have their place in putting a play within its historical context and examining its themes, its only by talking to those employed to stand in front of an audience and make that rabble of coughers and coat wearers believe a character has a soul, that the emotional truth of the words can be understood.

Shakespeare On Stage gathers interviews with thirteen prominent actors, in which they’re asked if they’ll, as Curry says, “be willing to reveal if not how they acted, at least what they did.” This is not a book to dip into looking for theatrical anecdotes though a few do creep out. It is instead a record of a range of productions and how a given character fitted into the ensemble, how the decisions taken by the actor in conjunction with the director impacts on both the audience’s understanding of the plot and sometimes how that production fits within the historical legacy of the play.

Oh the riches! Judi Dench reminiscing about her Juliet for Zeffirelli at the Old Vic in 1960(surely the performance The Guardian’s Michael Billington recently revealed to be his favourite of the past fifty years). Ian McKellen on his classic Macbeth opposite Dench for the RSC and Ralph Fiennes returning to the mind of Coriolanus, and the Almeida show which has inspired his new film version. Some are shorter than others; sometimes Curry’s time with his subject was limit, but sometimes he’s simply fulfilling his prophecy from the introduction that “it’s a mugs game to get actors to talk about their craft”.

Shakespeare’s problems, romances and comedies are given equal weight however, which makes a change from similar exercises that tend to concentrate on the tragedies under the assumption that they’re more psychologically complex. I’d not realised Rebecca Hall played Rosalind for her father, Peter, in Bath in 2003 and Derek Jacobi, in expounding on his Malvolvio, relishes the chance to talk about something other than his several hundred appearances as Hamlet. Most valuable perhaps is Penelope Wilton on Measure for Measure morally ambiguous nun Isabella. Her material might be very site specific, but her comments on why the character stops speaking towards the end (she’s dumfounded) only increase my appreciation of this most overlooked play.

Hamlet is represented by Jude Law. Unlike most of the interviews which are looking back retrospectively on a production, Curry was able to grab Law right in the middle of the show’s run at the Donmar Warehouse last Summer (2009) and so he’s capturing an actor in the thick of his thought processes about the character before he’s consolidated his feelings as to whether he achieved what he set out to. As many actors do, Law says that he wants to find something new every night, bring spontaneity to his text, mostly because he doesn’t want the bigness of the nightly endeavour to overwhelm him. In places, he clearly sees aspects of himself in the character, just as the best actors should.

Though Curry has chosen to arrange the interviews in alphabetical order, I wonder if chronological order by production date wouldn’t be just as useful so that the reader can have an idea of how the Shakespearean acting has developed over the past fifty years from Dench to Law. For the most part, theatre is ephemeral and fleeting and this book goes some way to recapturing what we’ve missed – even those productions that have been filmed for the studio aren’t absolute recreations of what the theatre audience enjoyed. Despite his modest claims, Curry has produced a document which should be of use to acting students searching for inspiration, as a research tool for theatre students and for the general audience seeking a different set of insights and perspectives on the canon.

Annotations: Liverpool Blogs at Social Media Cafe Liverpool.

Annotations All being well, I've just spent part of this evening giving an entertaining and informative talk on the history of Liverpool Blogs to the Social Media Cafe in Liverpool, during which I've promised to post an annotation of the talk so that people will have links to all the relevant websites in one handy place.

Or I've stuttered my way through a Power Point presentation, in which it's as though I was seeing each new slide for the first time having forgotten what I was going to say and then shouted out about this annotation right at the end or even after the talk has finished. Either way, here are the relevant/irrelevant links:

My first attempt at a blog, the archived posts.
My first post about the Sugababes.
The real first post.
My interview with Annette from this blog's 5th birthday.
Metafilter, community blog.
Linkmachinego.
Updated UK Weblogs.
I’m Belle de Jour. The Times. November 15, 2009.
How Belle de Jour's secret ally Googlewhacked the press. The Guardian. Wednesday 18 November 2009.
Me and Belle de Jour – “Could it be Brooke?” @ Linkmachinego
Best British Blog competition @ The Guardian
Imperial Donut.
Blogging like it’s 2000 by Katy Lindemann @ Seemingly Unconnected
London Bloggers directory.

The Manchizzle.
The University of Manchester.
North West Enquirer @ Wikipedia.
The post from here in which I highlight being included in the North West Blogwatch.
The Manchester Blogroll @ The Manchizzle.
Manchester Blog Awards.

Liverpool Blogs.
Fried Chicken.
Liverpool Blogs introductory post.
Ellen Loudon.
BritBlog.com.
FriendFeed.
Twitterfeed.
@shakespearelogs.
The Hamlet Weblog.
Just Liverpool Blogs.

[And you wouldn't believe what I had to leave out...]

Update:

Here's the Powerpoint presentation too for your edification. I hope to write up a textual version of the presentation when I have the time. Possibly in the new year. Allow it to marinate for a bit longer.

Liverpoolblogs

View more presentations from feelinglistless.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 8/31: How has blogging changed in the last nine or ten years? Both from personal and overall perspective (suggested by Karie Bookish)

About This blog reaches its tenth year in six months. Having visited sections of the archive for various reasons, I’m surprised by how little the content has change. Pick an average week in August 2004, and there’s the usual mix of culture linkage and commentary on some big cultural event, in that case the Olympics. You can disagree, but I don't see the changes here that I've noticed in other blogs. There might have been the odd refocusing of emphasis here and there, from links to long form writing and back again, but it ebbs and flows usually with how far I can lift my writer's block.

Since you want my opinion (because I’ve wanted you to want my opinion), I think that if anything my blogging has become more self-conscious. As soon as someone I knew offline first mentioned that they read my “website”, personal blogging per se stopped. There are parts of the archive for you to discover, especially from the early days, which are far more open than I would ever be now. Events that would naturally have found themselves written about in this space, I’ve deliberately self-censored. But I do think that’s true of most old-schoolers. We’ve learnt through experience that if there’s something we don’t want people to know about, the first thing to do is not put it up on our blogs.

Personal blogging itself has become rather old school lately too. If Facebook has replaced the application of wanting to keep family and friends abreast of recent developments, Twitter has offered the ability to present even more instant opinion, with the hundred and forty-character limit and excellent way of focusing the mind. I’ve made a point of keeping this blog updated with something daily, but there are certainly ideas which have inescapably been lost to micro-blogging which in the past would more naturally have become three whole paragraphs or at least a paragraph with a blockquoted extract in the middle, which seems desperately time consuming by comparison.

As I predicted somewhere in those archives, corporate blogging has also rather hijacked everything. There are three flavours; large media organisations using the platform to offer content that would previous have appeared on static pages in a time dated format with comments, large media organisations that employ the blogging format for all its convenience and try to retain some element of personal blogging even if the content is as impersonal as hell and companies employing blogs to sell their wares, from music to film to cereals. With their pots of money and giant staffs, it’s become increasingly difficult for personal bloggers to calve out their own niche.

Which suggests the biggest change in blogging in the past ten years. It’s become aggressively difficult to be truly original anymore. Sometimes it feels as though we’re all sitting around reviewing the same bits of culture, linking to the same websites, embedding the same videos, feeding on whatever new thing has filtered down from 4Chan via Reddit or the A-list linkers (with the Tumblr platform designed for just this application). No two blogs are exactly the same, most express the personality of the writer, but I can see it happening here, wincing as I link to yet another Guardian interview even if it is the best thing I’ve read that day. What’s the point in doing this if we’re not trying to be brilliant ourselves?

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 7/31: TV comedy? Can't recall reading you writing much about it so I'd be interested to know your tastes. Especially since I'd... ..argue that The Trip, Getting On, Grandma's House, Bellamy's People, Rev, etc are pretty much the pinnacle of recent UK TV. Then there's loads of US stuff: Community, Parks and Rec, 30 Rock, Party Down, Modern Family, Louie... It's a golden age! (suggested by @inthesoup via Twitter)

TV There’s a reason I don’t write much about sitcom. I don’t watch much sitcom. I’ve seen precisely none of the sitcoms you’ve listed though I am looking forward to taking The Trip in one long chunk when I’m enjoying a self-devised Michael Winterbottom season next year (whilst simultaneously trying to deal with my Steve Coogan issues). To increase your shock and awe, I haven’t seen more than half an episode of The Office either. Or Curb Your Enthusiasm. Or many of the other “classics” you’re probably thinking of. In fact, about the only sitcom I remember properly making time for this year was The Thick of It.

Since I have most of them recorded, six episodes here and there nestling neatly on a dvd I do wonder why I haven’t sat down with any of them for an evening as I plan to with The Trip. Part of the problem is that identified by Alison Graham in her review 2010 column in the nearly Christmas Radio Times, the one with Matt and Mike and Kathy on the cover. She says that the problem with the modern BBC sitcom is that it isn’t funny and that’s certainly part of my reticence. Very rarely has British sitcom outside of the obvious classics delivered on laughs, more interested in character and drama than the simple joke. The reason Not Going Out worked was because it was unashamed of its own genre.

But paradoxically I become very tired with sitcom if there isn’t much in the way of character development, an element of change. That’s my issue, probably, since sitcom to an extent is based on repetition then variation on repetition. But when I think of the sitcoms I’ve truly loved they’ve had an element of drama, or more specifically soap opera. The Friends changed significantly over their ten years and grew and much of the humour developed from that, discovering marriage and parenthood. Also true of Fraser and to some extent Red Dwarf (though that became less funny as soon as the writers decided it was more about sci-fi concepts than people). Victor Meldrew changed over time as he accepted his life as a retiree, even mellowed to some extent.

The other truth is that I simply prefer comedy drama or drama with elements of comedy. What The West Wing, Gilmore Girls, My So-Called Life, everything Joss Whedon’s ever produced, Moonlighting, Party Animals, 24, Lost, e.r. (in its prime), Being Human, Misfits, Mad Men, Northern Exposure, Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who (to name a couple) all share is the ability to be laugh out loud funny in the middle of the melodrama, funnier even than most sitcoms. Many of these shows are turned out by writers who’ve previously worked on sitcom or both, not least the writing machine that is Jane Espenson, but often somehow manage to produce even better material, I’d wager, because they have much better defined characters to play about with.

Which isn't to say I won't get around to watching your favourite sitcom at some point. I just don't know that they can sustain the amazingly high laugh rate of The West Wing, even in the later John Wells years, especially when Alison Janney is acting at full pelt or those astonishing Gilmore Girls episodes when eighty pages worth of dialogue are hammered through in forty minutes. As the convoluted plotting of Lost became even more convoluted, it had to draw in elements of farce and lashings of irony. And I’m yet to find a more perfectly paced piece of comic television than My So-Called Life’s penultimate number in which most of the young cast find themselves progressively connected to the Chase family’s bed after Rayanne handcuffs herself to it.

Follow @inthesoup.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 6/31: Five things -- small, big, in-between, whatever -- you are grateful for right this second (suggested by Kat Herzog)

Life My flat looks out over Sefton Park and the River Mersey in one direction and Toxteth and the city centre beyond in the other, and on a clear day the Welsh mountains beyond that. If ever there was a place to enjoy and judge the changing of the seasons its from up here, so if there’s something to be grateful for at a time like this it’s the view from my window. Even after nearly twenty years, even in the middle of the suburbs, it’s a landscape which is ever changing, always surprising. Even yesterday, late in the afternoon, we were greeted with a phenomena new to us, but known from a song, the mist over the Mersey, whipping across the surface as though a cloud had swooped from the sky to drift across the water like one of the sea gulls. The few photographs I’ve taken over the years barely capture the majesty of the landscape, even if some of that landscape has now been blotted out by the new giant Tesco on Higher Park Street. But then everything will disappear behind the trees once spring and summer return and we’re reminded that we live above the tree tops.

With Veronica Mars, creator Rob Thomas takes a fairly hokey premise, a teen detective in high school, but applies all the sass and character of noir, Christie and just a touch of Conan Doyle, whilst injecting the class struggle of The OC (or Dickens) whilst simultaneously making it as mysterious and complex as a 70s conspiracy thriller. Veronica’s best friend is murdered and whilst she works to discover who amongst the wealthy citizens of her home town is really guilty, takes on cases from her school friends and whatever her father, a private investigator, can’t cope with. As four or five storylines jostle for attention in an episode, it’s sometimes difficult to understand everything which is happening, and as in the best drama, the meaning of some scenes develops as each layer of information is pulled away but unlike the worst drama, there are always answers. In the lead, Kirsten Bell catches the mood perfectly, Philip Marlowe in the body of a teen queen, and there’s a huge, perfectly chosen supporting cast. Joss Whedon has said it is his favourite tv show, and two seasons in (just beginning now with the difficult college years), I can absolutely understand why.

When writing this post, I forgot patronising and lonely. I was a bullied teenager. There’s no room for the details, except to say that I can well believe what this report says about such things having the power to change a person. Something which helped, in the end, was to begin to think of all the bad things about myself, what I’m least pleased with and then whenever I was bullied, I could always point to those and think, well, you can’t say any worst to me than I think of myself. When asked “Who is the real Stuart Ian Burns?” I decided, rather than joking around a bit and leaving myself open for whoever this Jen is to come back with a potential rejoinder that I was in some way stretching the truth, I decided to be as brutally honest as I could and write down, time and experience adjusted, all of the things I’d point to when I was being picked on. I’m very grateful that a few people replied suggesting that’s not how they seem me at all. I suppose my problem is that I’ve never quite managed to convince myself otherwise, like a psychological feedback loop.

I’ve always been a huge fan of The Guardian’s theatre review staff, and particularly Lyn Gardner and Michael Billingham. I especially admire how they’re able to combine brevity and detail, within just a few paragraphs giving a flavour of a production, a synopsis and a thorough critique with some humour and whilst I’m sure much of that comes under the heading of “doing their job” and there are plenty of other writers just as a capable, few I’d wager have this depth of experience. On Friday, Billingham handed out one of his rare five-stars (only his second this year, I think) to the RSC’s Romeo and Juliet calling the best version he’s seen in fifty years and suggesting Mariah Gale's Juliet is “the best since Judi Dench”. The difference between him saying it and most others is that we know that he’s probably seen dozens of productions in the mean time and because his hyperbole is so rare, it must be something special (please film it for next Christmas, BBC and Illuminations, purlease). No wonder Gardner seems so grumpy during her Peppa Pig review on the same page (though you have to love that she somehow references Beckett in there).

Both Billingham and Gardner must be as grateful as I am for the spell check function on word processors, especially as I offer these opinions, most of which I’m attempting to keep within five or six hundred words simply so that I’m not still tapping away on Christmas Day as happened in 2006, the last occasion when I attempted something this labour intensive. When I was at college, I always considered the word lengths on essays, especially those with self-selected titles were cruel and unusual, particularly difficult to keep within, often writing hundreds, even thousands of words more than were required (my dissertation needed to be 15,000, I wrote 25,000 and was allowed to eventually submit 19,000). What I realise now was that these were supposed to be not only academia’s way of focusing ideas, but also a subliminal suggestion as to how much actual work we should have be putting into the piece, how we should be prioritising our time. If only I’d known that as spent days reading everything I could on the subject of Laura Mulvey’s gaze. It’s good to impose these limits which is why all five of these paragraphs are just two hundred words long.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 5/31: Is it really going to be all right? There is so much Gloom and Doom. There is no Doctor to save us. Will we survive? (suggested by @thatneilguy via Twitter)

Psychology If you want to localise that “we” it all depends on what you assume to be “surviving”. If it’s walking around and breathing, that should be fine. If it’s cultural well being, that’s less certain what with the cuts to education and Murdoch and Cowell almost controlling everything we see and hear but as long as there are books and paintings and Regina Spektor we should be ok on that too. There’ll always be doom and gloom but the trick is to bathe in the shards of light in between and try to tolerate the rest.

Besides, depending upon who you listen to, the Doctor wouldn’t save us even if he was here anyway. In the old 90s Doctor Who novel Interference by Lawrence Miles, we offered a glimpse of the timelord’s thought processes. The Eighth Doctor (McGann) is being tortured in a Saudi Arabian jail (yes, really) and during his ordeal, a fellow captor, Badar, a kind of Salman Rushdie substitute, berates him for not changing the history of Earth wholesale, not, for example, killing Hitler.

The Doctor warns him about the web of time and how any changes he consciously makes leading the collapse of creation, but Badar suggest that this is just a cover story because he’s too scared to try and that in fact when he says that he doesn’t become “involved” in local politics, whenever he does take side – for example with humanity against some alien threat or other – it’s all about politics – and what makes Earth so special anyway?

The implications of in relation to the question are stark. Essentially what this does is tell us that if the fictional Doctor could somehow pop through the walls of reality into our dimension, he wouldn’t interfere anyway, that he wouldn’t save us, barring the sudden appearance of an alien battle fleet. Certainly, if Torchwood is anything to go by, the wars we’re currently enduring are happening in the Whoniverse anyway (and so by implication 9/11 was an event there too).

My understanding is that if he’s aware of an event, he can’t or shouldn’t change it, and that since “local politics” of our dimensional mirror are close enough, that he’d cop out on us too, no convenient landing of the TARDIS when some idiot presses the wrong button or there’s too much shouting. As far as I can remember, there’s no word in Interference or anywhere else on what his attitude to disasters is but if The Romans, The Fires of Pompeii and The Visitation are any indication he’s just as apt to causing them, especially if there’s fire involved.

Arguably that has changed a bit in the new series.  He interferes on Starship UK because he sees a child crying and there's the whole Waters of Mars business in which he simply couldn't help himself, even to the point of arguably becoming a monster himself.  But it's inconsistent.  What about the two blokes who are exterminated in after the Doctor riles up the Dalek for shits and giggles and his basic lack of remorse afterwards?  Given that we're supposed to enjoy his alieness, I suspect that when faced with this new reality, he'd be inclined to leave us to rot and spend the next forty-five minutes in the TARDIS with Amy.  I know I would.

In other words, even with the inexplicable appearance of a fictional construct, we’re on our own. But away from those five paragraphs of Who related cynicism, I do genuinely think that we will be ok. We will survive. Of course we will. As Woody Allen says in Hannah and Her Sisters, “The heart is a resilient muscle” and that goes for the rest of humanity too. Even after a nuclear holocaust, you’d have to hope that there’d still be a few of us knocking around on a remote island ready to get things started again. As the wise mug says, all we need to do is “Keep Calm and Carry On”.

Follow @thatneilguy here.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 4/31: "Everything is a remake of something before" vs. "Everybody's rebooting existing characters/universes with new stories" (suggested by @oneswellfoop on Twitter)

Film The use of the word “remake” can be puzzling and inconsistent so I'd like firstly to define what I mean when I say remake. What I think of a remake is when a story, which originated as a film is remade as a film. The Steven Soderbergh's Solaris is generally spoken of a remake even though the director went back to the original source book and went from there. New film adaptations of Shakespeare plays are increasingly referred to as “remakes” even though that’s silly. Comics adaptations are also pegged as such even though again they’re just another look at the material. Peter Jackson’s King Kong is a remake. So’s Gus Van Sant’s Psycho. Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is not and neither is the American adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

With that out of the way, from flicking through the December issue of Empire magazine, the one with the motion captured Tin Tin on the cover, you could assume that the only product in production at major studios are adaptations, reimaginings, sequels and remakes. Nearly every page includes news, views and interviews in relation to some adaptation of a comic or book or television series or in some cases a sequel to what was an original idea. In a review section that includes the likes of Machette, Paranormal Activity 2 and Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, the Mike Leigh film, Another Year with its publicity still of a couple of retirees tucked up in bed looks like an oasis of integrity in a desert of opportunism.

The implication of the original statement that adaptations and sequels and remakes are a recent phenomena, this is some new opportunism. They are not. It is not. In the silent era, films were sometimes remade (and this is the purest form of remake) out of necessity because the original copy had worn out, or were pirated by another company by filming them again (which eventually led to the likes of Edison placing their logo within the set to demonstrate it was an original). It wasn’t too long after sound became flexible enough that whole film series sprang from comics, the likes of Batman poorly recreated in black and white serial shorts.

Much of the product in the original old Hollywood studio system was based on something, a stage play, a book and very often newspaper or magazine articles. The recently reissued It Happened One Night, the ancestor for decades of screwball romantic comedies was based on a short fiction, Night Bus by Samuel Hopkins Adams, admittedly extensively reworked by Capra and his collaborator Robert Riskin. It was rare for Hitchcock to produce something original from his early silents through the close of his career. Truly original ideas are rare. Even the so-called original screenplays nominated at the Oscars are most often inspired by real life events or are biographies.

Because you can’t argue with the metrics. Inception is an anomaly. All of the highest grossing films of the past twenty years and even before, both by year and together in a chart are based on existing properties or franchises; even Pirates of the Caribbean began as a theme park ride. Adapt something already in existence, especially if it's a best selling book or well visited theatre production and you have a built in market and if you’re able to grow what you’re selling beyond its core audience you’re onto a winner. Hollywood and beyond makes these things, and has always made these thing because we want to see them, or at least some of us do. Even if the result is rubbish.

Finally watching Transformers 2 recently, I think I’ve witness the nadir of the type (though I’m willing to accept that as we’ll see which ever film raped your childhood you’ll no doubt consider your nadir). Not able to really afford the toys, I was still an avid reader of the British comic from the first issue onwards until it finally went out of print years later. What Simon Furman and his fellow writers accomplished there was astonishing; they took a toy line, developed a mythology and managed to give all of the robots specific personalities, a code of honour and importantly make us care.

The first film, despite importing some of the human characters, trashed that mythology, mostly ignored the personalities and generally had little regard for what had gone before, resulting in a work that was everything Furman et al had been fighting against. In the second, the original machines are barely on-screen and entirely interchangeable, the new, messy character designs no help in trying to identify them. The central story, a fairly derivative quest narrative is driven by the human characters, the accompanying Transformers, all new creations simple (and on two counts racist) comic relief.

In other words a film demonstrating everything that is wrong with this kind of film. Its box office was still huge, but even now analysts are wondering how many of those people actually enjoyed watching the film; the criticism of both its star and director are telling. No wonder there’s a collective groan whenever some new piece of cultural heritage is being ploughed over. My previous nadir, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy failed because it took everything that was right and funny and quotable about Douglas Adams’s original scripts, words worked over tortuously and slowly until they passed his stringent standard and paraphrased them.

Yet somehow I still have a high sense of anticipation for the new version of Judge Dredd, the aforementioned Tin Tin, Tron Legacy and even have a vague hope that the next Transformers will be the best of the series. Because years ago, even before the first Transformers, I came to the conclusion that Hollywood could adapt or remake whatever it likes. It could even take a crack at Doctor Who if it wanted to or offer up a remake of When Harry Met Sally. Cultural sacred cows, I have a few, but everything is up for grabs, and they can do what they want with the mythology, change everything.

Because actually, in the end, the extent to which the property matches its source is less important than if the resulting film is good. The Lord of the Rings films took many liberties with the original text but I haven't met many fans of the books who hate the films. Same with Harry Potter. Robert Downey Jnr’s Tony Stark is barely recognisable from the figure in the comics yet readers of the Iron Man comic have embraced him. Offering another adaptation of Solaris would seem like sacrilege beyond Tarkovsky’s definitive presentation, yet Soderbergh created something that respected both properties and produced something new and very special. Indeed.

About the only real argument one could logically against the concept of adaptation per-se is in relation to books. A book is a one-to-one communication between the author and reader; the former controlling and crafting the experience and imagination of the latter. After a film adaptation, that experience is irrevocably interfered with; it’s impossible to read Pride and Prejudice without your favourite actress inhabiting the character of Elizabeth Bennett and I’ve recently heard adults chatting nostalgically about the time when they had their own version of Harry, Hermione and Ron in their heads instead of the actors who’ve made the characters their own.

So you never know, the rem- ... sorry ... reimaging of Buffy might be quite good. It's possible.

Follow @oneswellfoop here.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 3/31: Review two "atypical" anime series: Kemonozume (full of japan-ised french "new wave" moments & explosive surrealism) and Kino no Tabi (full of elegy & parable) (from Konstantinos in the comments)

Animation Kino no Tabi, or Kino’s Journey: The Beautiful World is in the tradition of the highly episodic “caravan” series, stories in which a character or team of characters turn up in a new locale every week and create change, either in their environment or themselves. Usually the goal is either adventure (Doctor Who, Wagon Train), home (Quantum Leap, Star Trek: Voyager, Ulysses 31, Red Dwarf) or as is the case in this, spiritual enlightenment.

Kino’s a teenage girl who travels a techno-fantasy world riding Hermes, a talking motorcycle, experiencing and learning about the customs of each of the countries she visits, spending at most three days and two nights tere because she assumes that this will be quite enough time to learn almost everything you’d need to know about a place. It’s an animated travelogue of sorts but instead of offering interesting trivia and cultural observation ala Ewan McGregor, it’s more concerned with investigating parable.

The anime series, of which I’ve managed to see a few episodes, is adapted from manga and I suspect betrays the original’s wordiness. Each of the stories pinions around a scene in which Kino sits before a representative from a given culture who reveals their customs to her; she doesn’t do much “investigating” exactly because travellers between these countries are such a rarity, they’re only too happy to offer some exposition to them as a way of making them understand.

In other words, it’s a show which, though unconcerned with plot and character in the strictest sense is still very much about storytelling. Where it not for the sudden burst of violence (there’s a rather bloody stand-off in one episode), this would be ideal for children, who as I did when listening to Michael Horden read Kipling’s Just So Stories on Jackanory, can really tap into the allegorical elements noticing for example, how religion can impact on our daily lives, directly or indirectly.

Kids too would probably overlook the fact that to an extent it’s also really rather boring. Though I can understand that the storytellers are attempting to offer a series which is meditative yet satirical, and there are some quite emotive moments too, Kino’s a bit of a blank presence and her dialogue with Hermes, full of repetition and aphorism lacks the element of the absurd that makes the likes of David Lynch or Beckett so compelling (admittedly that's a rather unfair comparison but it'll do).

On the other hand, the animation is superb. Though often quite static, the landscapes are invitingly picturesque, especially in the opening episode when Kino drives through a deserted city looming Inception-like overhead. The third episode features four stories in completely different locales, one inspired by Venice, a gondola drifting through narrow flooded streets.  It's certainly ambitious and I would imagine, also because of the sheer number of character designs required, a labour of love.

Checking for other opinions, Kino’s Journey does seem to be an acquired taste. Plenty of people welcome this experimental reliance on atmosphere, especially anime connoisseurs who can see its points of difference, one even suggesting that it “stands out as an incredible testament to the power of the medium” which is the kind of praise usually saved in the west for PiXAR. Nevertheless Kemonozume sounds like much more kind of thing. Do you know where I can find it?

"whole sheep and whole cows"

People Say what you like about the leaked US embassy cables, the writers aren't without a certain sense of humour and storytelling ability. A perfect example is this report on a wedding feast in Dagestan, whose author is like a modern Samuel Pepys:

"Though Gadzhi's house was not the venue for the main wedding reception, he ensured that all his guests were constantly plied with food and drink. The cooks seemed to keep whole sheep and whole cows boiling in a cauldron somewhere day and night, dumping disjointed fragments of the carcass on the tables whenever someone entered the room. Gadzhi's two chefs kept a wide variety of unusual dishes in circulation (in addition to the omnipresent boiled meat and fatty bouillon)."

Though a link doesn't appear on the main page, there is an RSS feed for all The Guardian's coverage of the cables here.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 2/31: Who is the real Stuart Ian Burns ? (from Jen in the comments)

Psychology He is a failure. He’s socially inept, tiresome, fundamentally disappointing when you meet him and swiftly outstays his welcome. He’s never entirely sure how far to take a conversation and has the suspicion that he’s often still talking well past the moment when interesting becomes boring becomes can I leave now please? That’s because he desperately wishes that he was more intelligent and erudite than he is, that he’d read more of the right kinds of books so that consequently he’d have the ability to speak with fluidity on subjects that matter rather than those that probably don’t. In other words, he’s constantly in a state of over-compensating.

He’s also physically repulsive, the kind of person fellow passengers on buses do their utmost to avoid sitting next to and who leads to tutting when he sits next to them. His smile is creepy.  He has a big nose.  His hair is never quite right because he has an oddly shaped head which is too small on top and over big at the bottom. He’s never particularly had any dress sense, favouring a tie-dyed multicoloured shirt and blue polyester jacket as his undergraduate apparel, polo-shirts through the late nineties and has now settled on white t-shirts and the kinds of jeans he's always worn, only rarely varying the colour of a jumper when necessary.  He’s also scruffy.

He lacks ambition. His self-esteem issues stretch back many years and to such a degree that he de-values his own achievements and is self-deprecating to a fault. He’s too busy explaining why he can’t do something to notice what he can accomplish, wallowing in pity to such an extent that he’s stagnating. He’s even answering this question in the third person in an attempt to disassociate himself from himself but knows that despite the self-flagellation he’s purposefully not really answering the question anyway. He knows that all of the above is open to change but lacks the initiative or drive to go through with any of it.  He's tired, jaded and scared.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 1/31: Are the Liberal Democrats facing decades in the political wilderness after shooting themselves massively in the foot by alienating their largest area of voting support ie. students and first time voters? (from Franchesca Pueller via Facebook)

Politics You would think so given the vitriol which has been directed at the party and its leader Nick Clegg over the past few months. The Lib Dems have gone from being the party “everyone” ignores, to loves, to hates within the space of about six months or the space of a single series of Have I Got News For You, which isn’t bad going considering they’ve already generally been in the political wilderness for a couple of decades without much influence at least on a national level.

After being a supporter for nearly two decades, I’m currently in a kind of ideological limbo, absolutely understanding why they decided to enter a coalition with the Tories (rather than a simple "understanding"), accepting the reasons for many of the cuts, appreciating that to an extent they’ve become the political fall guys for another party which is attempting to show a human face, but also unable to defend many of the more idiotic decisions, such as the garotting of the arts and the BBC.

To an extent, especially in relation to the tuition fee debarkle (for want of whichever word you're thinking of), the Lib Dems have been unlucky because they’re being criticised for the very thing that set them apart from the other two main parties during the last election and before – being specific about their manifesto pledges.  The Tory manifesto is a bit tentative on the point and has this to say on the subject (including repayments):

- consider carefully the results of Lord Browne’s review into the future of higher education funding, so that we can unlock the potential of universities to transform our economy, to enrich students’ lives through teaching of the highest quality, and to advance scholarship; and,

- provide 10,000 extra university places this year, paid for by giving graduates incentives to pay back their student loans early on an entirely voluntary basis.

With an additional promise to “pay the student loan repayments for top Maths and Science graduates for as long as they remain teachers” (something we've not heard much about since). The Lib Dem Manifesto, though mentioning the word "student" less, dedicates a whole section, employing much more direct language:

Scrap unfair university tuition fees for all students taking their first degree, including those studying part-time, saving them over £10,000 each. We have a financially responsible plan to phase fees out over six years, so that the change is affordable even in these difficult economic times, and without cutting university income. We will immediately scrap fees for final year students.

In government, the coalition have cut funding to universities and are effectively making up the shortfall by letting the universities increase tuition fees three fold saddling students with the extra debt (though they won’t have to pay the required loans back until they’re earning £21k up from £15k).  Which is a bit different to Scotland where tuition fees have been scrapped altogether.  Now, what's unfair?

Essentially, if the Lib Dems had blanded things out and not done what they’ve always done which is make eye-catching pledges and silly photo-opportunities in a desperate attempt to get noticed, pledges they assumed they'd never have to put into practice (still generally only managing to be eighth in the news running order even on the Today programme), they wouldn’t be in the position of being charged with giving up their principles or some such now.

I don't know the extent to which this will effect the young vote.  Many of the students protesting now and saying that they'll never vote Liberal Democrat again will be in a different life position in four years time and although we all have the ability to hold grudges, as we've discovered time and again, people also have very short memories when it comes to politics.  Voter intentions can flip in a matter of days, even hours, especially in this mad new wired world.

To give a specific answer to your question, at a local level, things definitely are shifting. Councillors are defecting and strongholds like Liverpool have fallen to Labour who will no doubt have a resurgence as the curious split between who people will trust with their bin collection and who they’ll trust with their defence heads off in a different direction favouring red rather than gold with independents and small fringier parties also reaping some of the benefits.

But I don’t think the Westminster Lib Dem vote is actually going to wobble that significantly next time, despite the exodus too of some disgruntled ex-Labour voters back to their natural home. Even though Lib Dems like me don’t like the many of the cuts and don’t like what's being nodding through, we're also still so anti-Tory and anti-Labour that we’re really rather stuck. We might go Green, or we might not bother to vote, but we inherently want to take part properly in the political process which means holding our noses if we have to.

To take that a step further, here’s my prediction for what will happen in 2015.  Because of the cuts, the Tory vote will decrease, the perennially undecided heading to Labour instead, but because of uncertainly over an untested party leader, not enough for Labour to have a majority, the proportion of the vote we saw last time essentially reversing with the Lib Dems piggy in the middle again. Then it’ll be up to Milliband and Labour to decide whether they believe the Lib Dems aren't too toxic to form a coalition with or if they’ll just go it alone...

About Review 2010 begins tomorrow. Sadly, the long introduction I was going to write will have to wait because, well wouldn't you know, considering the weather, I think I have cold coming on (sore throat, tummy upset, tiredness, everything).  Luckily, the first salvo are all written and set to auto post. I hope you enjoy them.

Liverpool Biennial 2010: Epilogue

Art The Liverpool Biennial completed yesterday and though I missed the closing moments due to work, like Sachiko Abe's final performance at AFoundation, I did think of it and wondered why it had effected me so much this year. Was it that the main theme "touched" had worked its teeth into me or just that because I'd decided to really work at seeing as much as I could for the benefit of this blog, it has just repaid me in kind.

After day one, the excitement continued with the launch in the main hall of St George's Hall, the most entertaining moment of which was watching Lewis Biggs battle against the racket of a performance work, a pile of steel drums being erected in the centre of floor (see above), only once stumbling over his words, then the expectation of the crowd that music would ensue only to find the volunteers posing for pictures.

As my bus passed up Renshaw Street on its usual route into town this morning, I couldn't help peering at the visitor centre hoping for signs of life, that perhaps the Biennial had decided to give it just one more week.  Just one more.  But apart from signs of a final party last night, bottles and paper plates on the picnic tables, the interior lights were off for the first time months.  All gone now.

Eyewitnesses: When Jacobi Met Burton.

Derek Jacobi talks to The Observer on the occasion of his first Lear and offers this touching anecdote I've not heard before about meeting his childhood Hamlet, Richard Burton:

"it must have been 1977, I did a couple of days on a film with Burton and I reminded him of this schoolboy Hamlet and he said, very sweetly, that yes, he remembered. And he said, 'What are you doing now?' And I said, 'Well I'm about to play Hamlet at the Old Vic.' And he said, 'I'll come and see you.' And he did. And he came around afterwards and said, 'Do you want to go out for dinner?' And I said, yes, great, and as we were walking out of the dressing room, he said, 'Do you mind if we go and stand on the stage? I haven't stood on that stage for 25 years.' So we stood on the stage and I said, 'As a schoolboy, I sat up there and watched you playing Hamlet on this stage.'"

"I'm the ugliest man that's ever presented a programme"

TV The Guardian has a fabulous interview with Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley on the subject of the ITV morning show Daybreak and its disasterous launch. They're bullish, self-depricating yet defensive and their chemistry underscores that most of the show's problems have nothing to do with them and everything to do with the content. Chiles on the bad press:

"I get up at quarter to four," he says. "I get in the car at five past four, I say hello to the driver, he says hello to me. We both say how knackered we are, and then I read the papers. And I read that I'm the ugliest man that's ever presented a programme, I read that my close friend and co-presenter Christine is a social-climbing slag, and that the programme is the worst thing anyone's seen, and it's tanking, and it's a complete failure. I've read all that by the time I've gone round the Hogarth roundabout, so my day bottoms out at 4.15am. And then people say the problem is I'm grumpy. Well, a) I'm grumpy for a reason; and b) if you have got your arse in your hands, is there anything worse than somebody telling you to cheer up?"

This might yet be seen as the closest they'll get to infamous Bruce outburst on Big Night Out -- unless Chiles goes through with his promise herein to get out of his contract by saying the one word you can't ever get away with saying on television at that time of the morning.