As a book reviewer who sits on film boards and attends a fair number of arts events, I get quite a lot of exposure to the arts. It leaves me deficient in all sorts of other ways. For example, I know very little about the World Cup and nothing at all about popular TV shows, but it’s impossible to catch up with everything. My old boss used to say that in order to work efficiently in the media, if five million people are interested in something then you need to know about it, and I think he’s right. But now that most of us just work and watch, there’s too much to cover.
For every interesting item I review or mention on this site, there are a great many others that aren’t. Assuming you remotely care about what you read on blogs, I try to make the right calls and suggest new things, but it doesn’t mean you won’t like the things I don’t like (rather too many negatives in that sentence). Here, for the record, are a few of the things I haven’t liked lately.
The Film: ‘Valhalla Rising’. Nicholas Winding Refn is an interesting director, but comes a cropper here as one-eyed Mads Mikkelsen bludgeons his way through a low-fi Viking epic seemingly set on the side of a fog-shrouded Scottish hill. It’s brutal, minimalist and single-minded, but my quibble is with the marketing team in charge of this, which outrageously positions it as a sequel to ’300′. You could argue that it’s about heroism and honour, but actually it’s a bunch of neanderthals squabbling in mud. Truly deadly, but probably enjoyed by critics who wish westerns would come back. And beware Sky movies you never heard of featuring big stars – they’re known in the industry as DPV or STM.*
* ‘Direct Past Video’ / ‘Straight To Mobile’
The Play: ‘The Little Dog Laughed’. People went because the very funny Tamsin Grieg was in it and there were quite a lot of kit-off moments with fit young men – I can think of no other reason for sitting through this awful, hackneyed farrago about Hollywood fame by Douglas Carter Beane. For a really dire musical experience, try ‘Love Never Dies’. Audience almost never gets to go home. And can shrieking hen parties stop going to see shows like ‘Dirty Dancing’ and ‘Mamma Mia!’ so we can get some of our nice theatres back?
The Book: Where to begin? The boom in second-rate Nordic thrillers inspired by Stieg Larssen. Enough gloom, doom and sulky teenagers hiding murders. And incredible as it may seem, there are still novels being published about girls found murdered by serial killers who leave clues for the police – a subgenre that died years ago.
TV: Casual surfing reveals a blasted wasteland of nothingness. Use iPlayer, or wait; if it’s any good, it’ll come out on DVD – end of story.
“And can shrieking hen parties stop going to see shows like ‘Dirty Dancing’ and ‘Mamma Mia!’ so we can get some of our nice theatres back?”
No. No, they can’t.
Not until every half-remembered film or back catalogue has been turned into a singalonga experience.
That man in the photograaph….I have seen him somewhere before…
I know – he was the shopkeeper in that Ealing film ‘The Dead of Night’ who sold Googie Withers the haunted mirror. Awful man. Scared my wife to death. So he wasnt all that bad I suppose. Such lovely sensitive eyes (the man in the photograph that is, not my wife).
“Shrieking hen parties”? You mean groups of women getting together to attend the theatre? And enjoying it?
“Get some of our nice theatres back”? Who is the “we” – serious minded men who don’t laugh out loud? and back for what? A season of Ibsen? (now there’s a depressing thought.)
Women have treble voices which are high pitched when they are excited or giddy.
Oh, never mind.
At least the shrieking hen parties are going to Dirty Dancing and Mamma Mia!, and the venues aren’t filled with Puppetry of the Penis…
I am SO glad I missed that one. I didn’t believe it was for real at first. One of the women I taught with went to it and enjoyed it!