I am a little bit in love with the naturalists in this programme. They head off on intrepid adventures through stunning, untouched rainforest in Papua New Guinea, finding fascinating, bizarre and wonderful animals at every turn – and the way their faces light up when they make a discovery just melts my heart. For a start, I am a sucker for a man who loves animals, and who could resist the sight of muscled climber/caver/adventurer Steve cradling in his arms an unfeasibly cute - and hitherto unknown to science - species of marsupial or cameraman Gordon stroking the fur of a newly discovered rat the size of a cat? But there’s something more than that. It’s the sense that they are utterly passionate about their work, and about protecting these species, and that is both touching and hugely admirable.
This series suffers from a very annoying case of short-attention-span editing, and can’t stop cutting backwards and forwards between different strands of the action, constantly reminding the viewer what is happening in each. But it is beautifully shot and the quality of the material and the enthusiasm of the people involved shines through, so this is less of an irritant than it is in some documentaries. If this programme fails to make you happy, you must have a heart of stone.
Thursday 24 September 2009
Sunday 20 September 2009
DVD review: The Wrestler
After I finished watching The Wrestler on DVD last night, I switched over to the TV just in time to see Daniel Craig and some baddies kicking each other down the stairs in Casino Royale, and I couldn’t help but notice that there seemed to be something missing. The blows lacked impact. Bond could get kicked, punched, sent flying, and get straight back up again. It just didn’t feel like he was getting hurt at all.
This is the case with the vast majority of film violence, but not in The Wrestler. There is nothing glamorous or heroic about violence here. I was watching, wincing from behind my hands as Mickey Rourke’s ageing fighter Randy the Ram was beaten, slammed to the ground, cut, and even stapled with a staple gun. This film is honest about pain. You feel every blow.
Rourke is truly impressive, investing his character with a hulking power, whilst conveying a sense of exhaustion, of being a broken man. Faced with a humiliating day job, bitterness from his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and rejection from the kind-hearted stripper he forms a bond with (Marisa Tomei), the Ram drags himself through his wrestling moves because it is all he has left. When we see him bleaching his hair and visiting a tanning salon to prepare for a fight, there is a strong sense of the fragility of his performance, the cheap tricks used to maintain it.
Perhaps The Wrestler can be read as a commentary on violence as entertainment. It certainly feels that way when we see the crowds roaring for two men, dripping with blood, slamming each other with sticks wrapped in barbed wire. But more than anything else, this is a moving account of ageing, failure, and the vulnerability of a man whose body is starting to let him down.
This is the case with the vast majority of film violence, but not in The Wrestler. There is nothing glamorous or heroic about violence here. I was watching, wincing from behind my hands as Mickey Rourke’s ageing fighter Randy the Ram was beaten, slammed to the ground, cut, and even stapled with a staple gun. This film is honest about pain. You feel every blow.
Rourke is truly impressive, investing his character with a hulking power, whilst conveying a sense of exhaustion, of being a broken man. Faced with a humiliating day job, bitterness from his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and rejection from the kind-hearted stripper he forms a bond with (Marisa Tomei), the Ram drags himself through his wrestling moves because it is all he has left. When we see him bleaching his hair and visiting a tanning salon to prepare for a fight, there is a strong sense of the fragility of his performance, the cheap tricks used to maintain it.
Perhaps The Wrestler can be read as a commentary on violence as entertainment. It certainly feels that way when we see the crowds roaring for two men, dripping with blood, slamming each other with sticks wrapped in barbed wire. But more than anything else, this is a moving account of ageing, failure, and the vulnerability of a man whose body is starting to let him down.
Thursday 17 September 2009
Review: District 9
District 9 is a film with two levels and it works very well on both of them: it is a story about aliens, with plenty of action, shootouts, and people exploding in grusome ways, but it can also be read as a film about racial segregation and injustice.
Twenty years before the action begins, a huge alien spaceship has come to a halt in the skies above Johannesburg, apparantly broken down and unable to leave. The world has had to deal with a million stranded aliens, and has done so by enclosing them all in a fenced-off slum known as District 9. A powerful corporation called MNU manages human relations with District 9 in the hope of finding out how to use the aliens' weapons technology. There are many imaginative and oddly convincing details: the use of the derogatory term 'prawn' to refer to the aliens, the attempts to classify their status and rights and the criminal trade in alien weapons that springs up all seem like believable human reactions to the situation. There is an uneasy sense of the injustices that can be commited by people who think they are only doing their best.
District 9 stars virtual unknown Sharlto Copley, who gives a great performance as MNU box ticker Wikus Van De Merwe, who becomes contaminated with a mysterious fluid that cause his body to transform bit by bit into something more and more like a prawn. He is an ordianry man, a decidedly unheroic charachter, horrified at becoming the thing he has always looked down on.
Much of the film is shot in a documentary style, with interviews with Wikus's family and collegues, although this is dropped towards the end, when the more conventional action sequences kick in. However, the best bits are the solo sequences, as Wikus, with one prawn arm and his body starting to deteriorate, wanders through District 9, dressed like a tramp and reduced to eating catfood. It is an affecting depection of how someone judged to be less than human can quickly be forced to lose his dignity and humanity.
Twenty years before the action begins, a huge alien spaceship has come to a halt in the skies above Johannesburg, apparantly broken down and unable to leave. The world has had to deal with a million stranded aliens, and has done so by enclosing them all in a fenced-off slum known as District 9. A powerful corporation called MNU manages human relations with District 9 in the hope of finding out how to use the aliens' weapons technology. There are many imaginative and oddly convincing details: the use of the derogatory term 'prawn' to refer to the aliens, the attempts to classify their status and rights and the criminal trade in alien weapons that springs up all seem like believable human reactions to the situation. There is an uneasy sense of the injustices that can be commited by people who think they are only doing their best.
District 9 stars virtual unknown Sharlto Copley, who gives a great performance as MNU box ticker Wikus Van De Merwe, who becomes contaminated with a mysterious fluid that cause his body to transform bit by bit into something more and more like a prawn. He is an ordianry man, a decidedly unheroic charachter, horrified at becoming the thing he has always looked down on.
Much of the film is shot in a documentary style, with interviews with Wikus's family and collegues, although this is dropped towards the end, when the more conventional action sequences kick in. However, the best bits are the solo sequences, as Wikus, with one prawn arm and his body starting to deteriorate, wanders through District 9, dressed like a tramp and reduced to eating catfood. It is an affecting depection of how someone judged to be less than human can quickly be forced to lose his dignity and humanity.
Wednesday 16 September 2009
The things that leap out at you on the second time of reading
It’s funny how different a book can seem when you go back to it, especially if it’s some years later. I have been re-reading Eggers’ experimental memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which I loved the first time (although I’ve never been sure about the title – it’s so awkward to actually say, it makes the speaker sound like a bit of an idiot). This time, I’m enjoying it equally, but I’m also discovering all kinds of things that I didn’t notice before, or at least, that did not stick in my memory. The context in which you read something can affect how it strikes you, can change, if only in small ways, the meaning of the book.
While still at college, Eggers lost both of his parents to cancer, in a stroke of horrible coincidence, in the space of a single winter. He was left to raise his seven-year-old brother, and this book is, among other things, an oddly touching account of their unconventional life together. I’d remembered the book’s brutal honesty about bereavement and the author’s fallibility, the experimental style, with characters breaking out of their roles to discuss the book itself, the yearning descriptions of being young and idealistic in San Francisco and the author’s sense that his strange and tragic life has made him somehow chosen, that extraordinary things, for better or worse, will keep on happening to him.
But it came as a complete surprise to me how insightfully, almost prophetically, he writes about the confessional culture fostered by reality TV and its like. Unlike other writers of ‘misery memoirs’, Eggers is sharply analytical about the need for self-revelation that drove him to write the book. He describes the feeling that by exposing his problems to a huge audience, he can somehow dilute his suffering, that his generation should purge where the previous one repressed.
This theme is most apparent in the section of the book where Eggers applies to be on reality TV show The Real World, a forerunner of Big Brother in which a group of ordinary people were filmed living in a house together, although they were free to go in and out as they pleased. What starts as a record of his interview with the producer morphs into a direct plea to the audience, a self-conscious but heartfelt attempt to explain his desperate need for self-exposure. His words should be seen as the voice of the god-knows how many ordinary people who have thrust themselves recklessly into the spotlight and opened themselves up to public mockery:
“Have I given you enough? Reward me. Put me on television. Let me share this with millions…Everyone must know. I deserve this. I have this coming. Am I on? Have I broken your heart? Was my story sad enough?”
“I need community, I need feedback, I need love, connection, give-and-take – I will bleed if they will love.”
While still at college, Eggers lost both of his parents to cancer, in a stroke of horrible coincidence, in the space of a single winter. He was left to raise his seven-year-old brother, and this book is, among other things, an oddly touching account of their unconventional life together. I’d remembered the book’s brutal honesty about bereavement and the author’s fallibility, the experimental style, with characters breaking out of their roles to discuss the book itself, the yearning descriptions of being young and idealistic in San Francisco and the author’s sense that his strange and tragic life has made him somehow chosen, that extraordinary things, for better or worse, will keep on happening to him.
But it came as a complete surprise to me how insightfully, almost prophetically, he writes about the confessional culture fostered by reality TV and its like. Unlike other writers of ‘misery memoirs’, Eggers is sharply analytical about the need for self-revelation that drove him to write the book. He describes the feeling that by exposing his problems to a huge audience, he can somehow dilute his suffering, that his generation should purge where the previous one repressed.
This theme is most apparent in the section of the book where Eggers applies to be on reality TV show The Real World, a forerunner of Big Brother in which a group of ordinary people were filmed living in a house together, although they were free to go in and out as they pleased. What starts as a record of his interview with the producer morphs into a direct plea to the audience, a self-conscious but heartfelt attempt to explain his desperate need for self-exposure. His words should be seen as the voice of the god-knows how many ordinary people who have thrust themselves recklessly into the spotlight and opened themselves up to public mockery:
“Have I given you enough? Reward me. Put me on television. Let me share this with millions…Everyone must know. I deserve this. I have this coming. Am I on? Have I broken your heart? Was my story sad enough?”
“I need community, I need feedback, I need love, connection, give-and-take – I will bleed if they will love.”
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