Films!

Now I'm an officially published film critic mere moments away from my first invitation to Sundance, it would be remiss of me not to cast an appraising eye over the films I've watched in the year just past. All in all it's been a pretty good year, although that's not saying much: since I'm incredibly busy and important I tend not to watch things I'm fairly certain I'll despise, so that narrows the field quite a bit. But hey, maybe I'm being unfair to Pixels.

Just to make things even easier (and to strengthen my aloof indie credentials) I've decided to exclude all sequels, remakes, reboots, and extensions of existing franchises from this overview. Lord knows there have been enough of those. Let's not even begin to think about how many people have already spooged over The Force Awakens. Given that and the fact that no matter what anyone says it'll still make all the money in the world, throwing in my two cents ("it was all right") might seem even more pointless than the rest of this. 

Far and away the best film I saw this year was The Lobster, the English-language debut from Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, perhaps best known for his surreal, hauntingly visceral satire Dogtooth (you'll never look at a dumbbell the same way again, I'm telling you). Boasting probably the most impressive cast I've seen since The Grand Budapest Hotel (at least until Hail Caesar! comes along), The Lobster is an equally deadpan pitch-black comedy in which single citizens of a dystopian future are shipped off to a hotel resort and given 45 days to find a partner, failing which they are turned into an animal of their choice. It really is refreshing to see a satire on society's obsession with relationships, but maybe that's just because I'm bitter and lonely. Despite, or perhaps because of, all the characters speaking in quasi-autistic monotone, the humour is spot-on, yet the romance that develops between Colin Farrell and Rachael Weisz's characters is still convincing, leading to an incredibly hard to watch final act. Best viewed with a large group of people - ideally a cinema-ful of people collectively squirming in discomfort and nauseating tension during the last ten minutes. An absolute gem.

Noah Baumbach has had a busy year - he's had two films out to meet the year's intellectual-New-Yorkers-exchanging-witty-dialogue quota. After 2013's Frances Ha we can now add While We're Young and Mistress America to that list. The former is perhaps slightly more accessible to those not familiar with Baumbach's style (although I would still suggest The Squid and the Whale as a starting point) - it's a pretty straightforward comedy-drama in which a modern-minded couple (Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts) meets a younger, hipstery couple (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried). Generational hilarity ensues, with a lot of commentary on what constitutes a documentary in a world where everything is filmed. Mistress America is a more contemplative screwball comedy about idolism, the pitfalls of university and post-university life, and how to make apple bongs. Quirky! Mind you, Greta Gerwig is fantastic in this, and her relationship with her sister-to-be Tracy (Lola Kirke) leads to some of Baumbach's best quick-fire riffing.

A couple of thrillers worth checking out - Ex-Machina, from Alex Garland (of 28 Days Later fame) explores the nature of AI by way of the Turing test - but things are not all they seem. Its Star Wars credentials are pretty strong, with Domhnall Gleeson and Oscar Isaac filling the main roles and Alicia Vikander (who's had a very good year) as the alluring, enigmatic android under scrutiny. It relies more on ideas than traditional sci-fi thriller tropes, though there's still plenty of suspense to go round. Elsewhere, It Follows sees the triumphant screen debut (as far as I know) of the STD - Sexually Transmitted Demon. I'm not the first to make that joke, nor will I be the last, but stay with me, there's more to this. The film follows a group of teenagers being pursued by a murderous, shape-shifting demon that can only be escaped by sleeping with a new victim and passing the demon on to them. It's very rare to see film classed as a horror be as effective as It Follows, but it really is. It's not particularly scary by most standards, but it certainly has its moments and builds its tension extremely well, certainly better than the bajillion Paranormal Activities and Insidiouses out there. Aside from that it's a very clever story with a fantastic retro-style Carpenter-esque soundtrack that gives the film a sense of timelessness and a slightly off, unnerving tone. 

Now if I were doing some kind of mock-award ceremony for this year I would create an entirely new category based on this next film, to go alongside "The Gummo Award for Most Eclectic Soundtrack" and "The Whiplash Award for Least Necessary Romantic Subplot". I'd call it "The Meadowland Award for Most Unremittingly Grim Drama". Seriously, there is not an ounce of levity to be found in this one. It should be prescribed to curb excess serotonin levels. That said, Luke Wilson and Olivia Wilde are both fantastic in this as two grieving parents coping with their son's disappearance, and it will certainly deliver an emotional high of sorts.

Next, as dictated by the unwritten code of the burgeoning film critic, the obligatory section on foreign language films. The Dance of Reality introduced me Alejandro Jodorowsky, one of the most surrealist filmmakers of all time. Didn't have a bloody clue what was going on (one of the characters opera-singing every one of her lines didn't help) but visually it's very impressive, which I understand is a signature of Jodorowsky's. Certainly an interesting experience, although overall it was too impenetrable for my philistinian mind. Maybe I'll have more luck with El Topo. Probably not, though. I had more luck with The Tribe, despite the fact that it's all in unsubtitled Ukranian sign language. The story, set at a school for the deaf, has to be interpreted entirely visually, although some of the more explicit scenes need little explanation. Worth seeing just for its uniqueness (at least silent films had intertitles).

Right, just to wrap up a few others: 

The Falling - Arya Stark faints a lot.

Slow West - Michael Fassbender kicks ass and takes names in the Wild West.

Turbo Kid - Mad Max on bikes.

What We Do In The Shadows - Flight of the Conchords make a vampire mockumentary.

Phew. Well done if you've got all the way through. Traffic figures mean a lot to me.

My New Year's Resolution is to spend my time a lot more productively. Maybe I'll get a job and everything. Who knows?

The Unexpected Virtue of Machiavellian Theatre

So this evening I went to see an adaptation of Niccolo Machiavelli's famous political essay, 'The Prince. A milestone, in many regards. First, I'd never watched a French play before, not least a comedy, so this would be an interesting test of my French, which at time of writing still comes with an accent that is 'too' English. In the words of a Ukrainian, no less. Second, this impromptu soirée took place mere hours after my SECOND EVER gym session of 2015. *Insert sound of party poppers and tooters here*. I won't say how long it's been beforehand, but suffice to say the life I lead does not lean kindly towards my waistline and general sense of worth as a human being. Did you know I got through both series of An Idiot Abroad in just one week? Anyway, the Prince is also the first play I've seen since watching Birdman (my current view count of that stands at 3), the inarticulately awesome Best-Picture-Oscar Winner (for what it's worth), which will certainly linger longer in my mind than the over-inflated, plotless, admittedly well-soundtracked Boyhood will. I mention this because several moments in the Prince (which, for the most part, I understood. Guess the last few years haven't been a complete waste of time.) reminded me very much of Birdman, from a studio light falling on a character's head (I think this time it was intentional), to a cast member who was a dead ringer for Zach Galifianakis, to a character standing around in a pair of white briefs. I'm not ashamed to say I chuckled a fair few times during the show. Actually, I'm not ashamed at all, since each laugh signified that I'd understood something (unless it was visual humour, of which there was a lot). Now, I haven't actually read the Prince and couldn't even find it in me to speed-read the Wikipedia page, so my knowledge of the content before going in was somewhat limited. I was however intrigued to see how a political treatise could be transposed onto a stage, especially one that just seemed to be a list of bullet points for how to be a good prince. Quite well, as it turned out. So here's the rundown: the play is set up like a series of X-Factor auditions for aspiring princes (and one princess, though the term was never used). Niccolo Machiavelli himself presided, with the host/NM's PA rolling things along. The humourous outcomes of the various tests (including laser guns, a galette, and half a Peugeot - a 'coupé', if you will) was well interspersed with what I assumed to be actually quotes from the text on how to control the people and be a good prince in general. Still don't quite understand where the King stands in all of this. I'd do a more detailed summary but I'm nothing if not incredibly concise so to those left hanging I suggest reading the book or flying out to Tours to catch it before its runtime ends in a few days. So overall, solid acting, accessible humour even to an ignorant rosbif such as myself, minor (thank God) audience participation, a few bizarrely off-key moments and a pretty intelligent twist ending added up to a PRETTY DAMN GOOD evening out. Even though the people I was with were too tired to go for drinks afterwards so I missed jazz night at Strapontin. AH WELL.

Conclusion: great stuff, would be even better with Edward Norton in it.

So yeah.

By far one of the hardest things about starting this blog (besides thinking of what to actually write for the damn thing) is coming up with a suitably punny title to convey my shatteringly acerbic wit to those who don't know me. So far the best I've thought of is 'Singin' in the Touraine' (because the weather here has been doing its best to rival that of England in deepest summer) but sadly my capacity for singing leaves a lot to be desired, and I'm a stickler for accuracy in humour. Not to mention that I've never actually seen the original film. I'll think about it.

So yeah. At time of writing you find me midway through my year abroad, having survived/endured/actually more or less enjoyed  three months in St Petersburg, elevating my spoken Russian above that crucial divide between very bad and merely bad. I wish I was joking. As with most things in life, though, it was certainly a formative experience and a heck of a learning curve in many respects. I'll be going back there in a few months, so I guess I haven't been entirely put off. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating the negatives a bit too much. There were some pretty good times out there, and I'm sure the problems I faced out there were far from unique when it comes to years abroad. Or indeed to any visit to Russia.

But enough about that. I'm all about the here and now, which at this moment happens to be late February in Tours, France. I've been here since early January and will be until April and can safely say (without any designs on comic hyperbole) that it's been much more like what I expected a year abroad to be. Maybe it's because I speak French a hell of a lot better than I do Russian, albeit with an accent that has been known to make other English people laugh. In that regard, I've been working on my r's for some time now and can only be improving. I'm on a course at the Institut de Touraine, which has been great so far, linguistically, grammatically, culturally and socially. Unlike the place I was at in St Petersburg there are a fair number of other English speakers around which makes downtime a lot more fun. My host person is very friendly and has helped my day to day conversation no end (something which is tricky enough for me in English, let alone in a language where I burble about half the time trying not to get the Russian neurons in my brain involved).

So, here's hoping my experience here will provide enough fodder to keep this blog alive for a while. A bientôt.