A good collection of short stories – three of which I really enjoyed very much: “The Past Perfect, The Past Continuous, The Simple Past” , “Man-O-War” and “The Digging”.

from:  http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2012/08/22/review-battleborn-claire-vaye-watkins/rCEVv1lq7qJqk5jyxdVaxO/story.html

By Mindy Farabee

| Globe CorrespondentAugust 22, 2012

Lily Glass

Claire Vaye Watkins.

‘Battleborn,” the absorbing debut story collection from Nevada native Claire Vaye Watkins, is mined from the vein of regional realism. In clean, sturdy prose, Watkins renders an American West of nuclear ash and dust and hot winds, ominous hills filled with coyotes and grizzlies and towns illuminated by “streetlights the color of antibacterial soap,” bathing her characters in a similarly stringent light. But its true setting is a Faulknerian desert of the heart, where the soil is cursed by its precious metals and one’s personal history can be just as toxic.

The essayistic opener “Cowboys, Ghosts” is the collection’s only piece to deal overtly with Watkins’s own back story. As a young man, her father, Paul, who died in 1990, fell in with Charles Manson, playing a significant role in staffing the Manson family, though he left before the murders. “[M]y mother . . . called my father ‘Charlie’s number one procurer of young girls,’ Watkins writes. “I couldn’t tell whether she was ashamed or proud of him.”

Many of the characters here suffer not so much from the need to get a moral fix on others as on themselves. Alongside the desolate road of “The Last Thing We Need,” a man happens upon a stranger’s bag of photographs that lead him back to the summer he first picked up a gun. In “The Past Perfect, The Past Continuous, The Simple Past,” a young Italian on holiday abandons his friend alone in the sandy nothingness outside Vegas and awaits the inevitable bad news of his fate at a brothel where he falls for a canny prostitute. The protagonist of “Rondine al Nido” enables the sexual assault of her best friend. In both “The Archivist” and “Graceland,” two different sets of sisters struggle their way into adulthood in the aftermath of a parent’s death.

Such unlucky pairs reappear throughout the book. In the longest and strongest story, “Diggings,” the year is 1849 and young Joshua Boyle is cajoled into following his older brother, Errol, overland from Ohio to the California Gold Rush, only to watch helplessly as Errol finds no gold but loses his sanity to its pursuit. “A promise unkept will take a man’s mind,” he realizes. “It does not matter whether the promise is made by a woman or a territory or a future foretold.”

Battleborn

Author:

Claire Vaye Watkins

Publisher:

Riverhead

Number of pages:

288 pp.

Book price:

$25.95

Catie, the narrator of “Graceland,” another of the book’s standouts, is struggling to contain a terrifying grief. Six months before the story begins, her mother commits suicide, and the pain has splintered her from her sister Gwen, who is newly married and several months pregnant. Gwen has been urging her to find comfort in the natural world, but Catie has lost her faith that the world is anything but dangerously inhospitable. “If you were the Stork and you were delivering little baby Dumbo and you had to maneuver his bundle between iron bars to lower him down to his mother,” she thinks, “wouldn’t you think twice about delivering him in the first place?”

When hope and redemption enter these stories, they do so gingerly, with the tenuousness that comes from contemplating the frail beauty of a sleeping child. Clear-eyed and nimble in parsing the lives of her Westerners, one of Watkins’s strengths is not dodging that the simple fact that love can be tragic, involving, as it does, humans so flawed, so often tender and yet incapable. “Sometimes a person wants a part of you that’s no good,” says the middle-aged father of “The Last Thing We Need.” “Sometimes love is a wound that opens and closes, opens and closes, all our lives.”

from: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-lacuna-by-barbara-kingsolver-1811038.html

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver: review

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver has a sweetness of tone but not of plot, says Jane Shilling

By Jane Shilling

5:35AM GMT 20 Dec 2009

All novels are necessarily about writing, whatever else their professed themes, but Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, her first novel for nine years, is more than usually preoccupied with the act of recording experience in words. It is a story about a Mexican-American author, Harrison Shepherd, who worked as secretary to Leon Trotsky before becoming a writer of best-selling novels.

When his work catches the attention of the McCarthyite witch hunts, Shepherd tries to outwit his accusers by destroying his journals – a lifetime’s record of friendship and artistic endeavour. But he, too, has a loyal secretary, a pithy widow, Violet Brown. When Shepherd entrusts to her the task of burning his journals, she takes the notebooks home and hides them. Years later she transcribes them, intending them as his monument.

If this multilayered confection of words and wordsmiths sounds dauntingly self-referential, there is no need for alarm. Kingsolver’s narrative is a conventional account of a colourful life. Its only other excursion into stylistic tricksiness is the inclusion of a quantity of imaginary newspaper reports and book reviews, apparently intended to emphasise that journalists and politicians are no match for proper writers when it comes to using words as instruments of truth and beauty.

Shepherd is the neglected son of a feckless Mexican beauty and a chilly American government employee. Left to amuse himself, the lonely child attaches himself first to his mother’s cook and later to the household of the artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, with whom the Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky found refuge after his expulsion from the Soviet Union.

After Trotsky’s assassination, Shepherd moves to the United States, where his novels about the Aztec empire meet with success so wild that it threatens the modest retirement in which he prefers to live. When his early association with Trotsky returns to haunt him, Shepherd decides to return to the scenes of his childhood, to a place where he knows he can vanish.

Kingsolver is a vivid, engaging writer with an evocative turn of phrase. Her publisher boasts that her previous novel, The Poisonwood Bible, was ‘Britain’s favourite reading group book’, and no doubt The Lacuna will prove just as popular, thanks to a certain sweetness that makes the complicated Kahlo/Rivera ménage sound quite jolly and renders even the assassination of Trotsky picturesque. Only a critic would complain that a book isn’t ugly enough. Readers will love it.

The Lacuna

By Barbara Kingsolver

FABER, £18.99, 527pp

Tickets (2005)

109 min  -  Comedy | Drama  -   2 December 2005 (UK)

from: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418239/

A train travels across Italy toward Rome. On board is a professor who daydreams a conversation with a love that never was, a family of Albanian refugees who switch trains and steal a ticket, three brash Scottish soccer fans en route to a match, and a complaining widow traveling to a memorial service for her late husband who’s accompanied by a community-service volunteer who’s assisting her. Interactions among these Europeans turn on class and nationalism, courtesy and rudeness, and opportunities for kindness. Written by <jhailey@hotmail.com>  

from: http://www.combustiblecelluloid.com/classic/tickets.shtml

Tickets (2005)

Rating: 3 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Citizen Train

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Buy Tickets on DVD

Compilation films rarely work out as a cohesive whole; the best we can hope for is that one of the segments will stand on its own, as is the case with Wong Kar-wai’s The Hand (from Eros) and Martin Scorsese’s Life Lessons (from New York Stories). But the new film Tickets holds up well from beginning to end, mainly because the three directors attempted to work together in a seamless fashion, blending one sequence into the next. The entire film takes place on board a train; Italian director Ermanno Olmi (The Tree of Wooden Clogs) begins with a heartbreaking tale of a grandfatherly Italian professor (Carlo Delle Piane) mooning over the beautiful assistant (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) who took care of his needs during a business trip. Sitting in the first class dining car, he eventually turns his sights toward more immediate matters. Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us) takes the reins for another story about an ex-soldier (Filippo Trojano) who now fulfils the whims of a bossy general’s widow (Silvana De Santis). His dissatisfaction peaks when he meets a couple of teenage girls from his hometown. Finally, Ken Loach (My Name Is Joe, Sweet Sixteen) directs a trio of Glasgow football (soccer) fans (Martin Compston, William Ruane and Gary Maitland) headed for a big game, when they encounter a troubled Albanian family (also featured in the first episode). Each plays like a short story ought to play, but their moods and tones are all linked. Ironically, my favorite director of the three, Kiarostami, turns in the weakest link; it does not connect as well as the other two, and it has troublesome continuity issues concerning the girls spending too much time in the bathroom. These are minor quibbles, however, and the bulk of his segment — as well as the rest of the film — is worth cherishing.

DVD Details: Facets’ excellent 2006 DVD release comes with an above average making-of documentary, actually filmed on the set (without the usual clips-n-talking heads). There’s also a booklet with biographies and filmographies of the three directors.

Starring: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Blerta Cahani, Martin Compston, Sanije Dedja, Carlo Delle Piane, Silvana De Santis, Gary Maitland, William Ruane, Filippo Trojano
Written by: Ermanno Olmi, Abbas Kiarostami, Paul Laverty
Directed by: Ermanno Olmi, Abbas Kiarostami, Ken Loach
MPAA Rating: Unrated
Language: English, Albanian, Italian, with English subtitles
Running Time: 115 minutes
Date: October 24, 2006

Road Show, Menier Chocolate Factory, London

(Rated 4/ 5 )

Reviewed by Paul Taylor

Thursday, 7 July 2011

In Assassins, Stephen Sondheim put an ironic spin on traditional American musical forms (“Hail to the Chief”, the cakewalk) to suggest that the crazies who take pot-shots at Presidents are the product of a philosophy that proclaims, “In the USA/ You can work your way/ To the head of the line”. In Road Show the composer similarly deploys the razzmattazz of vaudeville to highlight how, at the heart of the Land of Opportunity, lurks a venal, get-rich-quick opportunism.

Road Show is here receiving its European premiere in a slimmed-down, radically revised version, brilliantly staged by John Doyle. It follows the picaresque fortunes of two brothers, based on Addison and Wilson Mizner, respectively an architect responsible for the boom development of Palm Beach, Florida, and an attractive chancer whose scams dogged, corrupted and ruined his brother. At the start, their stern frock-coated father hails the new century and enjoins his sons to “make of it what you will but make me proud”. An early episode, though, in the Klondike gold rush establishes the pattern: Addison left hacking the rock, while Wilson blows their claim on a gambling saloon.

Michael Jibson, with his careworn baby face and subtle vocal artistry, superbly conveys Addison’s love-hate emotional dependency on his brother. They’re like a vaudeville double-act in which only David Bedella’s dazzling Wilson, all dark good looks and amoral pearly grin, gets to tap-dance in spangly shoes through multiple ruses (fight promotion, movie-writing etc), all presented like a spoof showbiz spectacular. The recurring visual motifs are wads of greenbacks flung into the air and a death-bed whirled around like a stage-within-a-stage. The latter eventually becomes the site for a touching gay love song, “The Best Thing That Ever Has Happened” between Addison and a handsome poor little rich kid (a spot-on Jon Robyns) who will eventually be horrified by Wilson’s cocaine-fuelled megalomania.

With the audience seated on either side of the stage, the sibling rivalry is wittily italicised. With the black-garbed tribunal-like chorus erupting into everything from Hawaiian dancers to pom-pom-waving real eastate fraud dupes, the production has terrific drive, bite and buoyancy. Road Show has had a long and troubled gestation (popping up in the US in various guises since 1999). Its European baptism in new, improved form at the Menier offers cause for ample festivity round the font.

To 17 September (020 7378 1713)

from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/8623702/Road-Show-Menier-Chocolate-Factory-review.html

4

from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Africanus_%28novel%29

Leo Africanus is a 1986 novel written in french by Amin Maalouf, depicting the life of a historical Renaissance-era traveler, Leo Africanus. Since very little is actually known about his life, the book fills in the historical episodes, placing Leo in the company of many of the key historical figures of his time, including three popes, (Leo X, Adrian VI, and Pope Clement VII), two Ottoman emperors (Selim I and Suleiman the Magnificent), with appearances by Boabdil (the last Moorish king of Granada), Askia Mohammad I of the Songhai Empire, Ferdinand of Spain, and Francis I of France, as well as the artist Raphael and other key political and cultural figures of the period.

Leo Africanus was Maalouf’s first novel. It is written in the form of a memoir.

Plot introduction

The book is divided into four sections, each organized year by year to describe a key period of Leo Africanus’s life, and each named after the city that played the major role in his life at the time: Granada, Fez, Cairo, and Rome. While filled with biographical hypotheses and historical unlikelihoods, the book offers a vivid description of the Renaissance world, with the decline of the traditional Muslim kingdoms and the hope inspired by the Ottoman Empire, as it grew to threaten Europe and restore Muslim unity.

The book is based on true life experiences which took Leo Africanus almost everywhere in the Islamic Mediterranean, from southern Morocco to Arabia, and across the Sahara.

Major themes

This novel explores confrontations between Islam and Christianity as well as the mutual influence that the two religions had on each other and on the people they governed.

Amin Maalouf

from: http://www.theroadtothehorizon.org/2008/12/recommended-leo-african.html

Recommended: Leo the African

In the need of a good reading book for this dark period of the year? Leo the African by Amin Maalouf is without any doubt one of the best books I have read since a long time.

Put onto a background of the 15th-16th century East-West or Christian-Muslim conflicts, the reader follows Hasan al-Wazzan, a merchant, traveller and writer on his travellers after being chased from Granada to Fez, in a caravan through North Africa and during his years in Cairo and Rome. From place to place, from woman to woman, he learns to drop and pick up his life and fortunes.

Amin Maalouf writes in a witty, eloquent style, becoming for a 15th century traveller. Through his words, one has no trouble fantasizing about the Souk in Fez or the river ports of Cairo. Here is the first page of his book.

I, Hasan the son of Muhammad the weigh-master, I, Jean-Leon de Medici, circumcised at the hand of a barber and baptized at the hand of a pope, I am now called the African, but I am not from Africa, nor from Europe, nor from Arabia. I am also called the Granadan, the Fassi, the Zayyati, but I come from no country, from no city, no tribe. I am the son of the road, my country is the caravan, my life the most unexpected of voyages. My wrists have experienced in turn the caresses of silk, the abuses of wool, the gold of princes and the chain of slaves. My fingers have parted a thousand veils, my lips have made a thousand virgins blush, and my eyes have seen cities die and empires perish. From my mouth you will hear Arabic, Turkish, Castilian, Berber, Hebrew, Latin and vulgar Italian, because all tongues and all prayers belong to me. But I belong to none of them. I belong only to God and to the Earth, and it is to them that I will one day soon return. But you will remain after me, my son. And you will carry the memory of me with you. And you will read my books. And this scene will come back to you: your father, dressed in the Neapolitan style, aboard this galley which is conveying him towards the African coast, scribbling to himself, like a merchant working out his accounts at the end of a long journey.

Movie Info

In 1959 Sweden, young Ingemar (Anton Glanzelius) lives with his dying mother and his nasty older brother. He survives all of life’s knocks by comparing himself to those who are worse off–such as Laika, the little Russian space dog who was rocketed to his death and had nothing to say in the matter. Ingemar begins to identify with Laika more and more as his mother’s health deteriorates, at times dropping to all fours and baying at the moon. When his mother is advised to get some peace and quiet away from her children, Ingemar is sent to live with his loveable uncle and aunt. For the first time, the boy is surrounded by relatives and classmates who pose no threat and who genuinely like him. He even has a sexual awakening. When his mother dies, he no longer rationalizes his misfortunes by comparing himself to those less fortunate; from now on, he can conjure up pleasant memories of his summer away from home to sustain him through the hard times. My Life as a Dog (Mitt Liv Som Hund) is based on the autobiographical novel by Reidar Jonsson. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

PG-13, 1 hr. 45 min.

Drama, Art House & International, Comedy

Directed By: Lasse Hallström

Written By: Lasse Hallström, Reidar Jonsson, Per Berglund

On DVD: Jun 6, 2005

Skouras Pictures

from:http://worldfilm.about.com/library/weekly/aafpr040103.htm

DVD Review

My Life As a Dog by Marcy Dermansky  Guide Rating –   I loved “My Life As A Dog” way back when I was in college. It was a movie I wanted to see again. I could always count on it making me cry, but in a good way. Because I loved young Ingmar with his profound sensitivity, his love for his dog, his need to make his dying mother laugh, his two pretty female friends. I loved him for making illicit French toast in the girl’s class at school, for his desperate attempts to rouse his miserable mother with the purchase of a toaster. For the way he looked up at the stars for answers to the hard questions. “My Life As A Dog” felt like a perfect movie to me, a simple and moving story. And then Swedish filmmaker Lasse Hallström came to America. He started with the well-done, if a bit cute, “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” and from there went on to become the king of the sentimental movie. He made overbearing, artsy films like “Chocolat” and “The Cider House Rules,” where small communities were always crowded with eccentrics and the theme music swelled. Hallström turned everything that was unique about “My Life As a Dog” into a cliché and made vapid fare disguised as art movies. I feared that “My Life As A Dog” was sentimental tripe and I knew nothing when I was eighteen. Thank goodness, the film lives up to my memory. I can continue to embrace “My Life As A Dog.” In an interview on the Criterion DVD release, Hallström acknowledges that the film is his best work, the one he compares all his other films to. Young Ingmar is a smart and wonderful sad child who invokes famous tragedies to make his own life more livable. The theme music is just right. The kooks in the small Swedish town are interesting and entertaining without turning my stomach as they did in “Chocolat,” and yes, watching Ingmar cry for his dog can still make me teary-eyed. In addition to the interview with Halmström, the Criterion DVD features a 52-minute film by the director and essays by Kurt Vonnegut and Michael Atkinson. from: http://www.flicks.com/movie/review/M/My_Life_As_A_Dog_%281987%29.asp My Life As A Dog   Also known as: Mitt liv som Hund, Mit Liv som Hund 13 Reviews total. Release date: 1987 Run length: 101 mins. Categories: Art/Foreign , Drama , Comedy Summary: Twelve-year-old Ingemar (Anton Glanzlius) has a life far too complex for a kid his age. His beloved mother (Anki Liden), once soft and loving, is now an angry invalid. His older brother (Manfred Serner) torments him daily. But there must be worse things in life, and Ingemar does not hesitate to obsess over them: people meeting freak accidents, for one, and Laika, the doomed Soviet space dog, for another. There is also his own pet dog, whose fate, it turns out, is as uncertain as Ingemar’s. But when Ingemar is sent away for the summer to stay with his lighthearted Uncle Gunnar (Tomas von Bromssen) and Aunt Ulla (Kicki Rundgren), his world begins to open in a way he could never have imagined. In their little village, Ingemar meets a menage of eccentric, good-hearted people and their interactions with him give him the strength he’ll need when things at home get even worse. MY LIFE AS A DOG, the critically acclaimed film from director Lasse Hallstrom, is sensitive, tragic, and funny. It’s a unique, offbeat but realistic coming-of-age story with rich and engaging characters and some truly unforgettable scenes.

BLOOMSBURY, £11.99 Order for £10.89 (free p&p) from the Independent Bookshop: 08430 600 030

Mornings in Jenin, By Susan Abulhawa

At the heart of a bitter struggle

Reviewed by Anjali Joseph

History of a Pleasure Seeker by Richard Mason – review

Richard Mason is, with this fifth novel, repaying the faith his publishers placed in him nearly a decade ago

History of a Pleasure Seeker by Richard Mason – review

Richard Mason is, with this fifth novel, repaying the faith his publishers placed in him nearly a decade ago

• Alex Preston
• The Observer, Sunday 22 May 2011
• Article history

Richard Mason: ‘It was always clear that he knew how to write a beautiful sentence.’ Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Robert McCrum, in a 2002 article in this newspaper, used the vast advance paid to Richard Mason for his first two books – The Drowning People and Us – as a stick with which to chastise the profligate publishing industry. While The Drowning People – written when Mason was just 18 – has a dedicated following, subsequent novels failed to wow. His latest feels like a make-or-break moment. It was always clear that he knew how to write a beautiful sentence, but one feared that Mason’s literary legacy might be defined by the numbers on his advance cheque rather than the letters on his pages.

The History of a Pleasure Seeker by Richard Mason

1. 

Piet Barol, the titular pleasure seeker, is a priapic, ambitious young man come to seek his fortune in belle époqueL’Éducation sentimentale (to which this book owes no meagre debt), Piet is magnificently gifted, not only “extremely attractive to most women and to many men”, but also a fine pianist, draughtsman and lover. We first meet him interviewing for the role of tutor to the son of the wealthy hotelier, Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts. All is not well in his gilded household. Egbert, the son, is agoraphobic. The matriarch, Jacobina, hasn’t been touched by her husband in almost a decade. Into this highly strung atmosphere comes Piet, charged with the task of freeing Egbert from his paralysing fear of the outside world. We soon realise, however, that Egbert isn’t the only one in need of help. Piet sets about liberating the libidos of the repressed family through music – championing bawdy Bizet over abstract Bach – and oral sex. While the setting is Dutch, the influences are French – think Bel-Ami, Les Liaisons dangereuses and Gide’s L’immoraliste. Amsterdam. Unlike Frédéric Moreau in Flaubert’s

The Bad Sex awards are something more than just a very British chortle at willies and bums. In describing sex, authors must use language to convey experience which lies in a realm far removed from it: a test which many of the best fail. Sex is everywhere in History of a Pleasure Seeker, and it is both well described and very funny. Piet brings Jacobina to a climax that “unfurled and billowed, hurtled her into the air: only to catch her again…” Men and women alike pounce upon Piet, sending Mason towards ever wilder flourishes of extravagant prose. Piet’s downfall comes in the form of a semen-stained dress, a fitting metaphor for the career of this sexy rake.

A “miniature silver model of a man on a tightrope, balancing precariously” appears repeatedly, representing both Maarten’s risky business enterprises and the perils of Piet’s position within the household. It’s also a symbol of Mason’s writing. History of a Pleasure Seeker could have been disastrous; instead it’s an enthralling, perfectly paced romp that breathes new life into the picaresque genre. The story ends with Piet and his new bride in South Africa and the Great War on the horizon – “To Be Continued…” Piet Borel, like a highly cultivated, bisexual Flashman, looks set to become the star of a whole series of books. And as for Richard Mason, we can finally stop talking about that advance cheque.

 from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-1386290/Richard-Mason-HISTORY-OF-A-PLEASURE-SEEKER.html

HISTORY OF A PLEASURE SEEKER

BY RICHARD MASON (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £12.99) By Eithne Farry

Handsome and charismatic Piet Barol is determined to carve out a fortune for himself in the gilded world of Amsterdam’s glittering Belle Époque.

Abandoning the provinces and his dour father, and confidently aware of his own attractions, Barol finds a job as tutor in the home of one of Europe’s wealthiest hoteliers and sets about charming the moneyed but troubled Vermeulen-Sickerts.

Young Egbert is tormented by obsessive tendencies, his sister Louisa’s independent ambitions are thwarted by the stultifying luxury of her life, whilst their mother, Jacobina, is a sexually neglected wife, whose repressed desires entices her into a dangerous liaison with her irresistible employee.

Disaster and discovery are the inevitable outcome, but with envious luck, Barol turns catastrophe into a career opportunity, en route to Cape Town, and embarks on a fresh challenge in his role as sensual adventurer, (which will be explored by Mason in future volumes).

While rich in period detail and with requisite glittering trappings, it’s the sex that is most carefully observed in Mason’s lusty romp; a series of reckless encounters with Jacobina are described in breathless detail, while Barol’s dalliance with a business man has a more muscular quality. Not for the bashful.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-1386290/Richard-Mason-HISTORY-OF-A-PLEASURE-SEEKER.html#ixzz1TXSN8oZR

Captivating… .all of its 85 minutes are shot on the mountainous borders of Iran – Iraq, with Kurdish actors – all amazingly realistic I sometimes feel like I’m watching a documentary.
The stark subject matter of the film is dealt with poignantly.

The overriding issues and the drama however is certainly real. Set after event of the chemical bombing of Halabja by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the Iran–Iraq War, this film follows two groups of Kurdish refugees (one children, being used as “mules” and the other elderly group of people trying to reach the border to get back to their homeland).

Samira Makhmalbaf , the director

Even more amazing considering that the director is a 20-year old Iranian female. This film was released in 2000, and since then she had also directed another film that I watched recently, “At Five In The Afternoon”, released in 2003. I love that one too.
I sure hope that she continues to create such great work.

Great movie, based on historical events culminating in the 1924 Olympics – about two people “running their own way”: one to confirm his place in society, and the other , running for god. Whatever my opinion is on the latter, it is still interesting to watch the determination on both of the them. I also love the film score.

From Empire Online:

Plot
The journey of two young British sprinters, marked by contrast, to Olympic glory in 1924. One, Eric Liddell, is a devout Christian running for God and refuses to race on Sunday, the other, Harold Abrahams, is a Jew, who runs to escape prejudice by means of adulation.

Review

Yet, it is not at all hippish, the detailed performances from Charleson and, especially Cross as the complicated Abrahams, give the film a gritty truth. Heroics are not a matter of purity, they are a matter of out-doing oneself.

Verdict
If you can get past the fact that its success has made it a cliché, this is still powerful, stirring stuff.

Reviewer: Ian Nathan

I love these types of films.
I don’t mind the fact that what it’s trying to convey at times comes across too consciously. I don’t mind that the script sometimes seems forced. I don’t mind that some of the acting is not the most natural I have seen. I also don’t mind that it is awashed with plot holes.
All the shortcomings are nothing compared to what the film has achieved – making a movie out of a very difficult subject watchable.
It’s a film that gently makes you think of your preconceived notions of war and those involved. This film intelligently personalises the elements of war.

Whilst it’s clear where it stands (and I share the same sentiments), it challenges us to think of the individuals within the groups involved.
It’s the whys and the hows of things.
There are violent imageries – but I I feel this is kept to a minimum and only limited to what is absolutely necessary to the story and what the film is trying to say.
There are many moments of gentle comedies as well – and this is usually peppered with social/political commentaries – one that comes to mind is the scene with the Pepsi/Coke lorry incident. Within this one seemingly funny scene, more than one or two issues were commented upon.
I just love it.

Oh, and it;s got Jon Abraham in it

HANIF KUREISHI’S MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE

Directed by Tim McArthur
Designed by Fiona Russell
Lighting designed by Howard Hudson
Produced by Peter Bull for ATS Theatre

Cast: Nalan Burgess, Yannick Fernandes, Tim Hilborne, Samantha Ritchie, Indranyl Singharay, Royce Ullah, James Wallwork

A comic and hard-hitting love story – and a vivid slice of 1980s London.

Years since leaving school together, Johnny and Omar bump into each other. But Johnny’s now in a gang of racist skinheads, and Omar’s trying to make something of himself by opening London’s most fabulous laundrette.
Of course, Omar and Johnny fall in love. And of course, it’s a lot more complicated than that…

Hanif Kureishi’s landmark, award-winning screenplay has been adapted by the acclaimed writing and directing team behind E.M. Forster’s Maurice, which played two sell-out seasons at Above the Stag in 2010.

March 1st – April 17th  2011
Tues – Sat 7.30pm; Sun 6.00pm

From: http://matthewman.net/2011/03/04/review-my-beautiful-laundrette-above-the-stag-theatre/   :

My Beautiful Laundrette, Above the Stag Theatre

March 4, 2011 · 0 comments

in Off West End/London Fringe

When adapting films for the stage, it helps to start with the right source material. Haneif Kureishi’s story of My Beautiful Laundrette, directed in 1985 by Stephen Frears in a version that made stars of Daniel Day-Lewis and the fledgling FilmFour, is the sort of intimate character piece that could very well have been adapted from a play in the first place.

The story centres around Omar, a young man who is struggling to free himself from the yoke of caring for his alcoholic, infirm father, and so who joins his uncle’s business. As a test, his uncle gives him a rundown, loss-making laundrette to run, and with the help of his old school friend Johnny and the cash generated by stealing, and selling, some drugs from an unpleasant work colleague, the enterprise becomes a success.

The age old themes of love, duty, respect and prejudice are as fresh in this stage adaptation by Roger Parsley and Andy Graham as they did in the original film. The underlying racial tensions, exacerbated by Johnny’s dalliance with the National Front, feel as contemporary as if the play were set in 2011 rather than over 25 years ago. And it is James Wallwork’s Johnny whose central performance ensures this play works. His self-confident portrayal and his undeniable love for Omar allows us to believe that the headstrong, ambitious but ultimately naive young man (played well by Yannick Fernandes) genuinely could succeed in business.

Nalân Burgess as Omar’s cousin Tania and Samantha Ritchie’s Rachel offer fine performances to counteract the testosterone on display from the other cast members. Ritchie in particular is on fine comic form as the louche mistress of Omar’s uncle Nasser, although she also displays an ability with more the dramatic in a second act monologue which, while out of keeping with the rest of the play, brings the character back from the brink of caricature.

Fiona Russell’s set capitalises on the idiosyncrasies of the Stag’s performance space, with its awkward little dogleg providing the perfect space in which to build the laundrette itself, while other interiors are cunningly hidden away until needed.

At the start of this year, it looked as if ATS would now be homeless, as The Stag pub was earmarked for imminent closure as part of the redevelopment of Victoria Underground station and the surrounding area. Thankfully, that closure has been delayed for a while longer, allowing this audacious little theatre to produce a quite special play.

My Beautiful Laundrette runs until April 10. For more information and to book tickets, visit abovethestag.com.

An enjoyable read.
Despite it touching on many issues that could appear “heavy”, the writing is amazingly fluid and never taxing.
It is also refreshing to have characters that are not victims of circumstances, and with positive attitudes to life and whatever it throws at them.
Many funny moments and some sad, reflective ones too.
Winman writes with apparent ease and the narrative flows comfortably between the contrasting moods.
Thank god for Winman! (Rabbit or not)

From: www.redonline.co.uk

2009

This is by no means an easy film to watch. However, it is worth sticking with, even if it takes all of 2 hours 40 minutes.

This is no ordinary “prison drama” – it transcends that genre. It also straddles along other genres such gangster movie and other issues such as racial, espionage/political manoeuvrings and survival instincts: ambitions and determination.

Tahar Rahim, who plays the main character “Malik” is amazingly enigmatic – he is virtually in every single scene of this film, and carried it off very well.

A Prophet

It’s a bold claim, but this masterful prison saga will undoubtedly be considered one of the great films of the year

AN EDUCATION does feel across a little preachy at times but that is inevitable and it is one of those films that does observe and comment on the way society thinks and what its values are.

It does this without any sense of judgment on the characters’ motives and actions. To me, this makes for a sterling story telling.

I imagine that this would make a good play too.

The cast is wonderful. Colin Firth in particular played his part with much understated elegance. Carey Mulligan is also a joy to watch. Sally Hawkins is also a revelation – playing against type in this film.

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Times review by Bernardine Evaristo

Into the Wild

(cert 15)

4

• 
• • Peter Bradshaw
  • The Guardian, Friday 9 November 2007
  • Article history
Critical smash … Emile Hirsch in Sean Penn’s Into the WildSean Penn has achieved a new maturity and depth as a director with this movie – though I detected some fractionally misjudged touches of machismo. Into the Wild is the affecting true story of Christopher McCandless, a bright young American college graduate who horrified his parents by sending his $24,000 law school fund to Oxfam, abandoning all his possessions and hiking off into the wilderness in search of a radical re-engagement with nature, unsullied by money or the career rat-race – all in the style of his heroes, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy and Jack London.

1. Into the Wild
2. Production year: 2007
3. Country: USA
4. Cert (UK): 15
5. Runtime: 140 mins
6. Directors: Sean Penn
7. Cast: Catherine Keener, Emile Hirsch, Jena Malone, Marcia Gay Harden, Vince Vaughn, William Hurt
8. More on this film

In 1992, at the age of 24, McCandless was found dead in the Alaskan backwoods in an abandoned bus he was using as a rough-and-ready bivouac, like a 20th-century anchorite. His life story and ecstatic passion for the natural world of North America was reconstructed from his journals, converted into a bestselling book by Jon Krakauer, and now adapted for the screen by Penn himself.

The resulting film is a richly, spaciously rendered account of landscape and moodscape: long, wordless scenes flow into each other, as McCandless heads off in search of American freedom, hitch-hiking or riding the boxcars, taking transient jobs. The colours are the rich browns, ochres and sunset yellows I associate with the indie cinema of the 1970s.

Emile Hirsch gives a very good performance as the intelligent and candid young McCandless, whose anger at the world has been allowed to uncoil now that he has finally left home and hit the road; William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden are the bewildered, grieving parents with whom McCandless stayed out of contact until the very end. There are nice cameos from Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker as the hippies who almost understand him, but not quite. And veteran character actor Hal Holbrook gives a deeply moving performance as Ron Franz, the elderly man who gives him a lift, a meal and the offer of grandfatherly love and friendship just before McCandless fatefully disappears upcountry.

McCandless is an idealist and a romantic, but he is also stubborn, driven and selfish. His need to immerse himself in nature, to throw material possessions overboard, stems at least partly from a need to punish his parents for the lies and cruelties he remembers being inflicted on him and his sister as a child. There is something regressive and dysfunctional in McCandless, a fear of human interaction. It is his unhappy fate not merely to entrance the people he meets on the highway with his unaffected charm, but to break their hearts too, by insisting on an enigmatic leave-taking. “You’re wrong if you think the joy of life comes from human relationships,” is one of the last things McCandless says to Franz.

Is he right? Just as some people get into extreme sports and extreme danger, McCandless embraced extreme nature, even scorning conventional hiking equipment and training, as just more trappings from the straight world of materialism. He was going to be truly hardcore, heading out into the wild with almost literally nothing on his back. It is almost shocking when he is shown making a bonfire of his few remaining 10-dollar bills before abandoning his car on the edge of the desert.

Nature in the raw is rarely shown in the movies to exist on its own account without an overt dramatic function. It exists in horror films and thrillers as the amoral or deceptively sweet-looking habitat of supernatural beasts or malevolent hillbillies. Solitude, likewise, is loaded with assumptions: the solitary character is a loser, a loner, a creep or a serial killer. But this picture lets nature simply be; it lets nothing happen, and does not insist on a dramatic storyline of depression or anger leading to McCandless’s death. This is an event that just happens, and is desperately sad, but does not have a narrative inevitability that you might expect in another sort of movie. And McCandless is certainly not represented as suicidal in any way.

The last weeks of his life appear to have been spent reading Tolstoy, and it is an incidental point of interest in Penn’s film that reading is important: the solitary act of just sitting there with a book, for hour after hour. How is the act of reading changed by being absolutely cut off from all human society? After a month, a year, a decade on your own in nature, would the words simply look like meaningless horizontal squiggles, as blank as the ridges in tree-bark?

Very occasionally, I felt restive with In the Wild: there are moments when it is a little self-admiring, particularly when McCandless is taking an al fresco shower, shaking droplets of water from his hair in slo-mo. At these and other moments, it looked uncomfortably like a cigarette-free Marlboro ad. But this is a serious, personal movie about what it is to be human, and what happens when we admire nature more than humanity: does it make us less than human, or do we fulfil and even transcend our humanity? There is food for thought and food for every kind of feeling in Sean Penn’s outstanding film.

Society lyrics

Eddie Vedder (Into the Wild) song lyrics

Oh it’s a mystery to me.
We have a greed, with which we have agreed…
and you think you have to want more than you need…
until you have it all, you won’t be free.

Society, you’re a crazy breed.
I hope you’re not lonely, without me.

When you want more than you have, you think you need…
and when you think more then you want, your thoughts begin to bleed.
I think I need to find a bigger place…
cause when you have more than you think, you need more space.

Society, you’re a crazy breed.
I hope you’re not lonely, without me.
Society, crazy indeed…
I hope you’re not lonely, without me.

There’s those thinkin’ more or less, less is more,
but if less is more, how you keepin’ score?
It means for every point you make, your level drops.
Kinda like you’re startin’ from the top…
and you can’t do that.

Society, you’re a crazy breed.
I hope you’re not lonely, without me.
Society, crazy indeed…
I hope you’re not lonely, without me
Society, have mercy on me.
I hope you’re not angry, if I disagree.
Society, crazy indeed.
I hope you’re not lonely…
without me.

Music for the Motion Picture Into the Wild
» More about the Into the Wild movie

“Society” written by Jerry Hannan

from:

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/11/fourteen_year-old_michigan_stu.html

Jay McDowell, a teacher in Howell, Michigan, was temporarily suspended without pay earlier this month after telling a student wearing a Confederate flag and a student making anti-gay remarks to get out of his class. At a school-board meeting on Friday, openly gay 14-year-old high-school student Graeme Taylor came to McDowell’s defense, thanking the teacher for doing “an amazing thing” in a town home to the KKK, and urging the school board to give McDowell his pay and reverse the disciplinary actions. The inspiring video has made its way around the Internet, because how cool is this kid?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC5veY34sIY

from:

http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/14-year-old-gay-students-amazing-speech-in-support-of-suspended-teacher/discrimination/2010/11/15/15163

Transcript (for hearing impaired)… and every word is a jewel! Without a ‘hem’ or ‘and’ or ‘uh’ in the whole speech!

TRANSCRIPT of this amazing video: begins with “Grand Rivers blvd. Championchevyrocks.com ad. Then, Ann Arbor student GRAEME TAYLOR addresses school board of Howell High School. (Which disciplined a teacher, Jay McDowell, for stopping anti-gay bullying!) Grand Rivers blvd. Championchevyrocks.com ad.

Ann Arbor student Graeme Taylor addresses school board of Howell High School. His father is a teacher there.

GT: My father is Kirk Taylor. He is a teacher at Hartland and he tells me about things that go on in this area and seems like a nice community. I myself am gay and I am a young person and that can cause lots of trouble.

And when you hear of things like Dr. King’s speech that one day he wanted his grandchildren, his posterity to not be judged on the color of their skin but the content of their character, I hope that one day we too can be judged on the content of our character, and not who we love.

Howell is the headquarters for the Klu Klux Klan, does that really sound great on your racism record the fact that they chose this city to come into? and you probably want to get rid of that, so how would you like more headlines like Howell denies gays, Howell doesn’t protect them.

This teacher (points) who I firmly support, finally stood up and said something. I’ve been in rooms, in classrooms where children have said the worst kinds of things, kinds of things that helped lead me to a suicide attempt when I was only 9 years old.

These are things that hurt a lot. There is a silent holocaust out there in which an estimated six million gay people every year kill themselves. It this really the environment you want for a school? Do we really want this on our record?

Now I’m saying that the best thing you can do right now is give him his pay from that day and just reverse the disciplinary action. He did an amazing thing. He did something that has inspired a lot of people. And whenever, ever, I have teachers stand up for me like that they change in my eyes.

I support Jay McDowell and I hope you do too.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/30/jake-arnott-devils-paintbrush

• Phil Baker
• The Guardian, Saturday 30 May 2009

One of Scotland’s saddest heroes, Hector Macdonald was a man of humble birth who enlisted as a private in the Gordon Highlanders and rose swiftly through the ranks to become Major-General Sir Hector Macdonald. A paragon of Victorian military virtue, “Fighting Mac” saved the day in battle after battle, distinguishing himself in Afghanistan, Egypt, South Africa and wherever else the empire needed him. Then in 1903 there were allegations of homosexuality, and Macdonald did the honourable thing: he blew his brains out in a Paris hotel room.

He is commemorated by a monument that rises over the town of Dingwall, and – less gloriously – he is said to be the model for the man in the kilt on the Camp coffee bottle. Now he has the even more dubious honour of being the central figure in Jake Arnott’s flamboyantly assured new novel, where he ends up having a memorable night on the town with none other than Edwardian occultist Aleister Crowley, the self-styled Great Beast.

Crowley and Macdonald did meet briefly in Paris, if Crowley’s Confessions can be trusted, but hardly for the magical mystery tour that Arnott writes them into here. Crowley is caught up in feuding with a rival occultist, Macgregor Mathers, and it is Sir Hector, with his nerves of steel, who coolly disarms Mathers when he threatens them with a gun. After Crowley gives him a sugared almond laced with mescaline, Hector finds himself tripping back to his days in Africa – a remarkably handy plot device – and reaches a completely new understanding of his colonial and sexual identity. By the end of the night they are deep into the occult underworld of Paris, as depicted in JK Huysmans’s novel Là-Bas, and attending a black mass.

As you would expect from Arnott, The Devil’s Paintbrush is a consummate performance. Like his London crime novels, featuring the Ronnie Kray-style figure of queer gangster Harry Starks, this is a virtuoso work of near history, with the occasional in-joke tossed in for good measure. Down there, says the old crone who shows them down a flight of chapel steps to the Satanic rites: “Là bas!” The book takes its title from the Maxim machine gun, known as the devil’s paintbrush because of the remarkable way it seemed to splosh red everywhere. We are also told it fired 666 rounds per minute – the number of the beast – which feels almost too neat to be true, but is. Elsewhere the book slides around at the aesthetic and ethical limits of what can be done with fictive faction using real names, bending the memory of historical figures and further fudging the truth of already murky areas.

There are people who think Macdonald was framed; they, presumably, would be happier not reading Arnott’s completely made-up description of what he gets up to in a London park. When it comes to magical history, Arnott seems to have taken the scissors to an occult encyclopedia. Soror Dominatibur Astris, or Fraulein Anna Sprengel, of the Order of the Golden Dawn, is reincarnated as an emissary from a later magical order, the Order of the Temple of the Orient. Perhaps only a purist nitpicker would object that this never happened, particularly since she proceeds to sodomise Crowley with a candle after the mass.

Arnott never loses sight of the genuinely tragic nature of Macdonald, and The Devil’s Paintbrush has its serious themes – social class, sexuality, colonialism – but compared to the menacingly authentic atmosphere of his London crime books this is a bit of a romp, if an immensely enjoyable one. The criminal underworld is only part of Arnott’s larger interest in queer social history. And whether it is a 60s gangster, or a bit of Edwardian beastliness, his appetite for the sordid underside remains constant; for Arnott, sleaze is a moveable feast.

• Phil Baker’s The Book of Absinthe is published by Grove

My review:

I just cannot get into this book; although it probably has little to do with the quality of the writing. Rather, it is probably my distinct lack of interest in the two worlds dealt with in this: war/military and occult/magic.
I think the premise of the book, fictionalising real life characters is interesting though.