"Night Shift" by The Commodores

Shame about the outfits, but this a great song, and used brilliantly by Claire Denis in the wonderful 35 Shots of Rum (2009).

Miriam Margolyes @ Masterclass (5/3/10)

Masterclass is a great series of workshops and talks by British theatre practitioners held at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London. Free to 17-30 year olds, but open to all, the events generally attract drama students or those with a general interest in theatre, film and performance. I’ve attended a few of the actors' talks previously - Matthew Macfadyen, Douglas Hodge and Brian Cox - and have always emerged inspired and energised by these performers’ generous insights into their work.

Yesterday’s Masterclass with Miriam Margolyes proved to be one of the best yet. Though confessing to nerves due to the absence of a script, the “loquacious” Margolyes effortlessly charmed and engaged the audience with her particular brand of cheekiness and erudition as she discussed how (in her words) “a short, fat Jewish girl with no neck has managed to sustain a career all these years.”

Radiating love of language and enthusiasm for (as well as fierce pragmatism about) the profession, Margolyes talked frankly and colourfully about her family background, her Cambridge years, her first theatre job (playing a West Indian woman!), the joys and challenges of radio work, the greatness of “senior” British actresses, dealing with pre-performance "terror" and being out of work, the “golden thread” that binds performer and audience, and some of her most recent roles, including Wicked and Endgame. (Of the former: “I can’t sing, so I just spoke loudly in time to the music.”) In passing she slagged off the Python boys and Max Stafford Clark (“a brilliant director - but not a very nice man”) and put two brave young actors through their paces on a reading of the "handbag" scene from The Importance of Being Earnest. (“When Jack tells Lady Bracknell he was ‘found’ it’s the most appalling thing she’s ever heard - like somebody just said ‘cunt’ or something.”) An entirely delightful and inspiring afternoon.
http://www.masterclass.org.uk/

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

An ugly amalgam of Jewish revenge movie, revisionist WWII fantasy and cinephilia self-indulgence, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds strikes me as a folly on a grand scale. The enthusiasm that I’d managed to work up for the movie sustained itself through the bravura opening sequence but the success of that set-piece only served to make the film's progressive slide into puerility all the more dispiriting. Sure, there’s stuff to appreciate – in particular, some good work from a Euro cast including Diane Kruger, Daniel Bruhl, Christoph Waltz and Melanie Laurent – but what I liked about the movie didn’t compensate for what I hated: Brad Pitt’s awful performance, the cavalier attitude to violence (the scalping scenes seem designed to thrill viewers who drooled over Reservoir Dogs’s ear-slicing), the show-offy cinema refs, the bizarre cameos (Mike Myers as a British General, Rod Taylor as Churchill), and the sheer stupidity of the whole clunking contraption. And since the movie expresses barely a shred of feeling for any of its characters, the actors' efforts finally go to waste. A horrible piece of work.

Micmacs (2009)

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s politically naïve but fairly entertaining anti-arms fantasia pits a motley crew of “salvagers” - misfits with special talents who scavenge and reuse the city’s detritus (they’d have made a good case study in Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I [2000]) - against two thoroughly evil rival arms-dealers (played with relish by Nicolas Marie and the great Andre Dussolier). The two groups come into contact via Bazil (Dany Boon), a video store employee (he lip-synchs charmingly to Bogart and Bacall) who, as a kid, loses his father to a landmine, and, as an adult, gets left with a bullet in his skull following a street shooting. Bazil decides to revenge himself against the arms barons, and his new friends - who take him in when he loses both home and job following the shooting - are, it turns out, only too happy to help him.

Though all the trademark Jeunet tics and tricks are in evidence in Micmacs - manic pacing, saturated colour, actors’ faces looming out at the viewer - this is the first movie of the director’s in which I didn’t find the style to be too assaultive. Overlooking a few laboured moments, there’s a pleasing fluidity to the film (the prologue sequence is superb, and an airport set-piece is also brilliantly done), and some great details. The Dussolier character’s collection of “treasures” - it includes Churchill’s nail clippings - is a stroke of genius, as is the sabotage enacted against it by our heroes. The film also features perhaps my favourite piece of absurdist dialogue so far this year: “He busted a lung in a hot water-bottle exploding contest.”

The actors come through, too. Boon (a very popular comedian in France, he’s perhaps most familiar to Brit audiences from My Best Friend [2006]) is adorable, and the rest of the salvagers - among them Julie Ferrier, Omar Sy, and Jeunet regulars Yolande Moreau and Dominque Pinon - also make their mark. I’m not sure that Micmacs adds up to much, ultimately, but overall it's a lively and inventive movie that keeps you grinning throughout.

In the Electric Mist (2009)

In 1996, Phil Joanou made a very decent (and underrated) adaptation of one of James Lee Burke’s Louisiana-set “Dave Robicheaux” crime novels, Heaven’s Prisoners. Starring Alec Baldwin as Robicheaux, the movie had vivid characters, excellent performances and some intriguing and surprising plot developments that elevated it above its genre. Sadly, Bertrand Tavernier’s adaptation of another Robicheaux story doesn’t repeat the earlier film’s success. In fact, In the Electric Mist (2009) is a hopelessly incoherent thriller that squanders the talents of some great actors, among them Peter Sarsgaard, Mary Steenburgen, Kelly Macdonald, Ned Beatty, Pruitt Taylor Vince and John Goodman. (Tommy Lee Jones, taking over from Baldwin as Robicheaux, is solid enough, but it feels to me that he’s been giving variations on this performance for a long, long time.)

The garbled story - updated to the 00s in order to incorporate some pointless Katrina references - attempts to mix a standard serial-killer-of-prostitutes mystery with Robicheaux’s memories of a 60s race crime (the link between the two plot strands remains indistinct) and - oddly - the protagonist’s fantasy conversations with Confederate General John Bell Hood (Levon Helm) who seems keen to help him solve the case. There’s a movie-making strand to the story too: a Civil War epic is being filmed in Iberia Parish; this leads to one of the film’s few witty touches: a cameo from John Sayles as the movie’s producer. (There's also some incidental enjoyment to be had from the outrageous character names. Top prize goes to Beatty as one "Twinkie Lemoyne." )

Unfortunately, Sayles’s cameo also makes you wish that he was at the helm of In the Electric Mist. I’ve found some of Tavernier’s French films odd and unfocused and their problems just seem intensified here. The director ladles on the Louisiana atmosphere, yet the movie never finds its tone and feels inauthentic throughout. Admittedly alot of these issues might not be Tavernier’s fault: apparently the movie was re-cut by the studio and a longer version is in existence. Whatever, someone’s made a mess of this gumbo. The 30 minute Making Of doc is much more entertaining than the silly, confused movie.

"Giving Up The Gun" by Vampire Weekend

Hot off the press, a slick and witty video for this delectable slice of Vampire-ism. Yep, that is Jake Gyllenhaal amongst those cameoing.

A Midsummer Night's Dream (Rose Theatre)

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play that I never really look forward to seeing, somehow, yet it's one that I'm almost always delighted by in the end. A miracle of clarity, fluidity and uncluttered ease, Peter Hall's new production, just opened at the Rose Theatre in Kingston, gives some fresh reasons to love the play, by presenting it as traditionally as possible. The production also has one particularly special component: Judi Dench, as Titania, a role she first played for Hall at the RSC in 1962.

A brief opening conceit has Dench as Queen Elizabeth I, giving silent approval for the play to begin, and, it appears, taking the role of Titania for herself. But, overall, this is a production that is blessedly free of gimmicks or Brook-isms. Less vigourously vulgar than the excellent last RSC production, it is elegant, intellgent, and very funny. Dench is the big draw of course, and she's glorious - never more so than when cooing with delight over ass-headed Bottom (Oliver Chris), and delivering a "What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?" that brings the house down. But the production is fully inhabited across the board. Even as it mercilessly satirises the mechanics of theatre, the play generously gives every character the chance to shine, and the actors seize those chances here. It's not just the fairy characters who supply the magic: it's there in Oliver Chris's wondrous conceit and posturing (the performance just gets funnier and funnier, culminating in a truly epic death-as-Pyramus); in Charles Edwards's wit and command as Oberon; in the grandeur that Rachel Stirling brings to Helena's unrequited love for Demetrius; in Reece Ritchie's delightful, slightly dangerous mischief-making as Puck; and in the entrancing embrace of Judi Dench's voice, speaking some of the most beautiful lines in Shakespeare. A delightful Dream, indeed.