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It was always going to be an iconic moment – the first public post-wedding kiss between Prince William and his blushing bride, Kate Middleton – but somehow this classic Royal Wedding image is made even more memorable by the blonde-haired tot in the far left hand corner.
The baby bridesmaid with hands clamped firmly over her ears and a fretful frown notched across her brow is Grace van Cutsem, the 3-year-old god-daughter of Prince William, and an internet-meme in the making.
Like a high-class infant photo-bomber, little Gracie has managed to spoil enhance a historic image with unexpected panache.
The poor mite seemed pretty unhappy with the level of noise going on, initially the result of lots of raucous cheering from the crowds as Wills executed his long-awaited smooch with the new Duchess of Cambridge.
As if that wasn’t enough, there followed an eardrum-shaking fly-over by World War II era planes 
- including a Spitfire, Hurricane and a Lancaster – which did not appear to improve Grace’s mood – see photo no.2.
Perhaps she is simply getting tired of the whole rigmarole of being a bridesmaid, for she is clearly a flowergirl-of-choice when it comes to a certain kind of wedding – see here and here for two previous engagements.
Here’s hoping that in the formal photographic mementoes of the day, the adorably pouting Ms Grace is not cropped out.
Posted in Watching | Tagged Grace van Cutsem, Prince William, Royal Wedding, Wills and Kate | 1 Comment »
Detective Sarah Lund, played by Sofie Gråbøl
If you’re not already watching The Killing, the stylish Danish police thriller showing on BBC4, you’ve got a treat in store.
Head down to the iPlayer where you’ve got a month to catch-up on the 10 episodes you’ve missed so far – episodes 11 and 12 are on Saturday night.
The plot may tread familiar territory – a teenage girl goes missing, a couple of quarrelsome detectives get on the case – but in execution, the show’s Danish creators have done something exceptional.
They leaven the dark tragedy of Nanna Birk Larsen’s disappearance with a parallel story of political intrigue, set against the backdrop of Copenhagen’s mayoral election.
Troels Hartmann, a troubled candidate for city mayor, played by Lars Mikkelsen
And they counter-balance the familiar science of the police procedural with an insight into the broader impact of the girl’s disappearance.
Thus we spend almost as much time with the family of 19-year-old Nanna – her stalwart, hard-working father Theis; her warm, loyal mother Pernille – as we do with the two detectives searching for her.
Most importantly, by casting the subtle, magnetic Sofie Gråbøl in the role of detective Sarah Lund, the producers have provided a deeply watchable lead who acts as a centre of gravity for each episode.
As Lund wades deeper into the mystery, she never loses our attention and rarely tests our sympathy – except perhaps in her personal relationships, which increasingly suffer from her workaholic devotion to the case.
A kind of yang to Lund’s yin, Lars Mikkelsen, with his blonde good looks and striking cheekbones, is equally compelling as the liberal politician Troels Hartmann, whose campaign to become mayor is constantly on the brink of being derailed by unknown forces.
At times it’s hard not to compare The Killing to the BBC’s State of Play, another gripping TV series that begins with a tragedy involving a young woman, but which is more deeply embedded in the political world. The Killing does not quite match the compact panache of the BBC series, although that is partly by nature of its far longer running time – 20 episodes compared to State of Play’s six. It does offer comparable levels of suspense. Ten episodes in, we still don’t know what happened to Nanna on the night she disappeared, although pieces of the jigsaw are beginning to emerge.
Posted in Watching | Tagged danish drama, review of the killing, sarah lund, the killing, TV drama | 10 Comments »
Sofia Coppola‘s latest film, Somewhere, won the Golden Lion for best feature at this year’s Venice Film Festival. The trailer – true to form – looks ravishing. And the song that accompanies it, ‘I’ll try anything once’ (the Strokes’ haunting demo version of ‘You only live once’) is a perfect complement.
But while I’m a fan of her picturesque settings, thoughtful pacing and eminently stylish fittings (music, clothes, actors, it’s all good) there’s something about Ms. Coppola’s favoured plotlines that niggles. Granted, I haven’t yet seen Somewhere, so I’m pretty much going by the trailer and the poster – risky. Still.
What do we know? Our two lead characters, played by Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning, are not just ‘somewhere’. They spend their time in environments of extreme luxury. They have their every whim catered for. They bask in sunshine, swim underwater, lay about in bed ordering room-service, eating ice-cream and watching films. Sometimes, beautiful, slender, glamorous people enter their lives.
Most of the time the main protagonist is troubled – in spite (in spite!) of his luxe life. Who would have guessed it? And who would have guessed that spending ‘quality time’ (that means, basically, any time at all) with your beautiful, talented, playful daughter might make you a little bit happy?
I enjoyed Lost in Translation. I surprised myself by enjoying Marie Antoinette, quite a lot. I’m sure I will enjoy Somewhere. But my problem is: how could one not? It’s furniture porn, hotel porn, fashion porn, travel porn, all parcelled up with a cool soundtrack.
Perhaps this isn’t fair. After all, great art often comes from telling stories about the places you know best, and Coppola apparently based Somewhere partly on her own experience, travelling around hotels with her father.
And there are moments of genius: the shot of Stephen Dorff having a plaster mask made of his face is a great natural metaphor, full of pathos.
The truth is, I would really like to see Sofia Coppola, who is undoubtedly talented, make a film that isn’t set in five star surroundings. There is something so hypnotic about watching these poor rich people with their neuroses, their addiction to opulence, their everyman need to be loved. It’s fun to watch them just traverse the locations, like watching an exclusive travel show. But I’d like Coppola to challenge herself and her audience, by going somewhere that isn’t naturally beautiful, and then making us watch.
Posted in Watching | Tagged Elle Fanning, sofia coppola, somewhere, Stephen Dorff, trailer of the week, venice film festival | 1 Comment »
I was lucky enough to get invited to last week’s Mercury Prize, and although my after-work race to get there from east to west (well, Southwark Bridge to Mayfair) was somewhat stressful (I was cycling, due to the tube strike, and then for some reason the entire Strand was cordoned off), it was well worth the journey once I arrived. Though I was late and didn’t feel mightily glamorous as I stuffed my cycle jacket into my handbag and dabbed the sweat from my forehead, I needn’t have worried: it was almost pitch black in there, apart from tasteful spotlights and a few glitter balls. My table was also universally lovely.
Most importantly, I didn’t miss the two acts I was most excited to see: Laura Marling and Mumford & Sons.
Ms Marling was pretty electrifying as usual: her voice so pure and clear and never missing a note that the whole room seemed to hold its breath while she sang. Mumford & Sons were also feet-tappingly excellent.
Neither act won the prize, although it was interesting to hear how many of the nominees fell somewhere on the indie-folk spectrum. In contrast, the winners – the xx (which as the Guardian tells us, is strictly lower-case) – aren’t folky, but have a unique sort of spare, electronic sound.
The most exciting bits of the evening were hearing bands I didn’t know anything about and realising I liked them. One example was Foals singing Spanish Sahara, which has this insistent, growing beat and beauty that quickly becomes hypnotic.
I Am Kloot’s Northern Skies was sweet and listenable, and Becoming a Jackal by Villagers is a beguiling mix of melancholy and mischief. Corinne Bailey Rae was amazing to hear, because her voice was so malleable and she sang like a jazz queen, although when I later listened to parts of her album online, they seemed overproduced: live, her talent is far more stunning.
All in all it was a good night and I’ve since bought all the tracks above. To that extent I have fallen into the trap that is the true function of the Mercury Prize – to sell records by raising awareness – but that’s ok: my music collection is all the richer for it.
Posted in Going Out, Listening | Tagged Laura Marling, mercury music prize, Mumford and Sons, spanish sahara, the xx | Leave a Comment »
Christopher Nolan‘s first film to hit the big time was Memento, a dark, genre-bending piece of cinema starring Guy Pearce, the script for which Nolan co-wrote with his brother Jonathan.
He followed that up with Insomnia, which pitted Al Pacino against a villainous Robin Williams in a perpetually light Alaska. Though somewhat less original than Memento, it still did the job of a psychological thriller very well.
I wasn’t super keen on The Prestige, with Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman as rival magicians, but with Batman Begins, and later, The Dark Knight, Nolan returned to the visionary filmmaking he demonstrated in Memento.
I’m hoping that Inception, with its stellar cast and mindboggling conceit – Leonardo DiCaprio can mess with your dreams (like a better looking version of the BFG?) – will prove to be another Nolan masterwork.
Posted in Watching | Tagged christopher nolan, Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio, trailer of the week | 1 Comment »
Is it just my hormones or is this the cutest trailer ever?
French filmmaker Thomas Balmes has made a documentary starring four babies, born and being raised in four very different locations: Mongolia, Namibia, San Francisco and Tokyo.
Look out for ace Namibian baby balancing a pot on head while walking.
[P.S. I know it's been a long time since I last posted anything, indeed SO long that even my DAD wants to know what's going on... to which my only excuse is that I've been busy learning things, about the retail sector, and then the media sector. But with the summer lengthening of the days, I am hopeful I will find time to blog more often.]
Posted in Watching | Leave a Comment »
The Rhone river, seen from a Domaine Vernay vineyard
Christine Vernay was on holiday in Missouri when she got the call. It was August 12 2003 and the French vineyard owner was not due to return home for 10 days; the harvest on her Rhône valley estate would begin in late September. But then a friend from Condrieu called her husband’s mobile phone.
“The grapes have ripened early. You need to come home now,” he said.
France was sweltering in the most extreme heat wave on record. Christine and her husband, Paul Ansellem, caught the first flight back but by the time they reached the vineyards most of the grapes in their 18 hectare estate had shrivelled on the vine.
Instead of rows of plump, light golden fruit, the couple found shrunken berries, burnt brown by the sun. “We’d never seen anything like it,” says Christine, a petite 52-year-old mother of two, who took over the renowned Vernay estate from her father in 1997. She scrambled to arrange a harvest within three days of their return. Even so, the vineyard produced only half its usual volume of wine that year. The grapes were simply too desiccated.
Ms Vernay’s experience offers a stark preview of what scientists say could be the future of the wine industry in southern Europe. Heat waves like that of 2003 will occur with increasing frequency in coming decades, they predict, while average yearly temperatures will continue to rise.
Martin Beniston, a senior climate scientist at the University of Geneva, and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says: “Current research suggests that by the end of the 21st century, one summer out of two will be at least as hot as 2003. Which implies that certain summers may be even hotter. Where one heat wave summer can have a beneficial effect on some grapes, several in a row would take a heavy toll on all but the most robust species.”
Since 2003, every summer but one – 2007 – has been hotter than the average of the 30 years before, according to France Météo, the meteorological office. This summer was France’s fifth hottest since 1950, with the average temperature 1.3° C above normal.
In August, for five days in a row, temperatures in southern France reached 40° C; in Languedoc and Beaujolais, grape-picking began in late August, while even in northern France wine growers are preparing for a premature harvest.
“It will be a very early vintage, without a doubt,” says Jean-Louis Vézien, director of CIVA, the Alsace organisation of wine growers and handlers.
Franck Thomas, European sommelier of the year in 2000, believes the result is already altering French wine “profoundly”. “If you harvest earlier . . . the alcohol content is higher [and] it unbalances the wine. For instance, with red wine, you have the maturity of the alcohol but not the tannins coming from the skin. So you lose the freshness, and the wine becomes tart and unpleasant.”
He is not alone in his concern. In August, Thomas and 49 of France’s top chefs, sommeliers and wine producers wrote to Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, arguing that climate change was threatening the survival of the wine industry and pushing for France to demand a 40 per cent cut in global carbon emissions by 2020 at this December’s Copenhagen conference.
“French wines, jewels of our shared, cultural heritage, elegant and refined, are in danger,” they wrote in the letter, which was published in Le Monde. Their fear is that rising temperatures in southern Europe could render centuries-old practices of wine growing irrelevant. Grapes across the Mediterranean would roast on the vine before reaching full maturity.
France’s position as a revered producer of wine is thanks to centuries of cultivation, after the Greeks and the Romans imported techniques of viticulture into the Burgundy, Bordeaux and Rhône regions. But it rests on the delicate balance of climate and soil.
“France’s primacy at the top level of winemaking is an accident of nature,” says Alun Griffiths, wine director at Berry Brothers & Rudd. “France just happens to be in the perfect position to make a range of fantastic wines. It’s considered a reasonably marginal climate – just a bit farther north in Britain it’s not quite hot enough; Africa is too hot.”
If that changes, the specificity of certain wines could be destroyed for ever, according to Franck Thomas. “In 2003, the wines lost their identity. It was very bizarre. Wine from the Loire valley tasted like wine from the Rhône. If we don’t do something now, in 30 years we will have that problem every year.”
The village of Condrieu is about 40km south of Lyon, and overlooks the wide Rhone river at its only turn. Curving upwards from the Rhone are rounded, lumpy hills; not terribly high, but steep.
As far as the eye can see, vineyards stipple the light brown hills with green. The vines grow in orderly, narrow rows, defying the inclines, as if someone has combed the hills with a green-fingered brush.
Ms Vernay’s father, Georges, made 54 harvests before handing over the running of his Condrieu estate to his daughter. In all but two of those years, the harvests fell at the end of September. Now that has changed.
“Since I took over we’ve had 10 consecutive years in which our harvests have been about 10 days earlier than normal,” says Christine Vernay. “The vineyards are a witness to climate change as it is happening now. Of course we can think of ways to adapt in the short-term, but it’s most important that we start stopping or slowing down the change in climate. Otherwise we are facing real catastrophe.”
This article was first published in the Financial Times, here.
Posted in acclimatizing, Travelling | Tagged climate change, climate change and wine, domaine vernay, financial times, french wine | Leave a Comment »
I got a bit of a shock the last time I decided to check out the 25 most played list on my ipod. In the two years that I’ve owned it, a number of key tracks have jostled for space there; every so often I’d download an album or a few songs, and from those, one or two tracks might make it.
There were the stalwart inheritance tracks; the music that I work to; the music I go to sleep to when my brain’s still working. Let’s just say the churn rate was very low.
Imagine my surprise when one artist and his one and only album managed to supercede every other track on my ipod after just three months, taking not just the no.1 and no.2 and no.3 spot in the most listened to list, but every other spot until the album runs out.
If you know Bon Iver, and his 2008 solo debut, For Emma, Forever Ago, you may understand. It’s an incredibly beautiful album. 
It’s not brash or pushy. The first time you hear it, it doesn’t get you in a stranglehold; it’s more of a gradual, stealthy bewitching. By the third and fourth times you don’t really want to hear anything else. I didn’t consciously listen to the whole entire album on repeat hundreds of times, but that’s what must have happened.
The ‘Iver’ in Bon Iver is pronounced like the French ‘hiver’ for winter. His real name is Justin Vernon, and the story of For Emma – how it came about, from what pain and solitude it sprung – is beautiful and worthy of myth-making in its own right.
You can learn about it here, in a short, sweet video interview Vernon did with the Guardian, that includes an acoustic performance of one of the album’s best tracks.
You can also listen to track 3 on the album, Skinny Love, here.
Posted in Listening | Tagged bon iver, for emma forever ago | Leave a Comment »
The Guardian’s latest audio slideshow: a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the set design for A Streetcar Named Desire, which is currently playing at London’s Donmar, starring Rachel Weisz. It’s informative, beautiful and brief enough to enjoy in a coffeebreak at work. Plug in your headphones and press play.
Posted in Listening | Tagged audio slideshow, behind the scenes, streetcar named desire, the guardian | Leave a Comment »
Very few directors make successful films about poverty, or about the people whose lives are spun out in its shadow. It’s not only that Hollywood producers have little interest in the subject, the blame also rests with us, the audience. It’s rare that we feel inclined to watch truth in all its hopeless chaotic injustice.
Perhaps this vacuum exists because the stories behind contemporary poverty seem too familiar, too inevitable. Because we know there are no simple solutions and therefore happy endings are unlikely.
In 19th century England, many outrages were brought to light through parliamentary lobbying, popular fiction or local campaigners. In Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies we meet Tom, a child chimney sweep, who
cried half his time, and laughed the other half. He cried when he had to climb the dark flues, rubbing his poor knees and elbows raw; and when the soot got into his eyes, which it did every day in the week; and when his master beat him, which he did every day in the week..”
The book proved a partial catalyst in the passing of the 1864 Act for the Regulation of Chimney Sweepers. Dickens’ Oliver Twist helped usher in reform of the workhouses.
Perhaps these past social wrongs – child chimney sweeps, malnourished orphans – were in some sense easier than ours: easier to identify, to condemn, to regulate. The abuses we are left with seem truly obstinate. If you watch Lukas Moodysson’s heartrending film, Lilya 4-Ever, about sex trafficking – one of the worst scourges of our society – you will be left feeling not only traumatised but also powerless: there are already laws against it, there are whole police divisions working on it, and yet still women are being trafficked for sex.
All of this is partly why the Dardenne brothers are cultural heroes of our time: they make films that star the poorest and most marginalised of our society. The other reason is that they are simply outstanding film-makers.
Their latest film, Lorna’s Silence, is about an Albanian immigrant in Belgium, who wants to open a snackbar with her boyfriend. In order to do this, she must become a citizen. So she marries a heroin addict, on the proviso that after some time, they will divorce. The problem is, the heroin addict starts to get better. And her underworld handler, who arranged the marriage, has another scheme: Lorna is to marry a Russian mafia member who also needs citizenship, and if necessary, kill her addict husband. Talk about moral dilemmas.
Exploring the limited options of impoverished people in tight corners is a Dardenne speciality. Their 2005 film, L’Enfant, which won the Palme d’Or, is shocking because it shows with brutal honesty what happens when a ‘child’ – someone who, though adult, has been given no moral or ethical guidance – conceives their own child. It is a film that, like Moodysson’s Lilya, is difficult to watch, yet it manages to be compelling, and more extraordinarily, to make us care deeply for its damaged protagonists.
These are filmmakers on the outskirts of the industry, and their films are only ever given limited release; they do not promise escapism. But still we should be grateful they exist at all.
Posted in Watching | Tagged Dardennes, L'Enfant, Lorna's Silence, poverty in film | Leave a Comment »
When Edgar Rice Burroughs was 35, he decided to try his hand at pulp fiction. He’d already been a soldier, a railway policeman and a pencil sharpener wholesaler. Inspired by the pulp magazines in which his pencil sharpeners were advertised, he concluded that he could write stories “just as entertaining, and probably a whole lot more so”.
His first novel, serialised in 1912, was set on Mars. For his second, he chose another “alien” territory: the African jungle. Burroughs, who lived in Chicago, had never been to Africa. Nonetheless, one of the most enduring fictional icons of the 20th century was born.
Tarzan was a sensation, swinging effortlessly from novel to comic book to cinema screen. Since 1912, Tarzan and the Apes has been translated into 56 languages, while the character has spawned almost 15,000 comic books and 42 feature films.
A new exhibition at Paris’s Musée du quai Branly tracks Tarzan’s impact on popular culture. Curator-anthropologist Roger Boulay spent 18 months amassing hundreds of items, ranging from first editions of the novels, which he acquired on ebay, to a stuffed crocodile and a tunic made of panther fur from Mali. He is most interested in the power of association: how cultural iconography is played out in different eras and media.
One of the first objects in the display is an arrangement of glossy miniature toys: a plastic Batman, a Catwoman and a Tarzan glued together like an ultra-contemporary triptych. Boulay made this himself, and has placed it close to a painting of Hercules by Toussaint Dubreuil, dating from 1618, and some suspended Disney figurines.
Clearly, they are related, these strapping, sinewy superheroes. The overlapping genres – painting, sculpture, promotional toy – testify to the easy translation of myths across time, the appeal of an archetypal figure, in this case the superhuman navigating a hostile natural world.
The highlight of the exhibition is a treasure-trove of original comic storyboards, including those by the master illustrators Hal Foster and Burne Hogarth, alongside a room devoted to the Tarzan films. The hand of the censor is evident in both media, as the eroticism inherent in the myth became too outrageous for regulators. There is a beautiful scene censored from the 1934 film Tarzan and His Mate, in which Jane swims naked underwater, while a 1947 comic storyboard showing a topless Jane appears with the revised version, in which she is more modestly attired in a leopard-skin bikini.
Elsewhere, a huge figure of King Kong, borrowed from the promotional department of Peter Jackson’s 2005 film, signals not only our post-Darwin obsession with primates, but also the repetition of a familiar scenario played out in Tarzan and the Kong narrative: the vulnerable white woman snatched by a primitive beast. A more explicitly transgressive version is also on show, a first edition of the 1925 erotic novel Ouha King of the Monkeys, in which a millionaire’s daughter falls in love with an orangutan.
Disappointingly, Boulay does not interrogate the disturbing context of these images. As Alex Vernon points out in his book On Tarzan, they reflect a deep-seated anxiety over interracial relationships, extending from colonial times into the mid-20th century. Burroughs (pictured right) neutralised the issue by making his ape-man the descendant of British nobility, allowing Jane a relationship with a primitive “other” while protecting her from its real implications.
Raymond Corbey, an anthropologist and specialist in the ape-man phenomenon, says that if the exhibition does not unveil the “true” Tarzan, it is not necessarily Boulay’s fault. “These images of Africa as the ‘other’ are deeply ingrained in European cultural identity,” he argues. “It’s very hard for a curator to overcome that. The rhetorical force of the images is so strong it can overpower any attempt at deconstruction.”
The exhibition is in many ways fun; visually exhilarating and light-hearted. But in celebrating a western pulp version of Africa, Tarzan! seems at odds with the ethos of the Musée du quai Branly, which opened just three years ago with the express purpose of displaying non-western art. Boulay insists this is the point: his focus is the myth of Africa as perpetuated by the Tarzan stories, not the reality.
But the museum has surely missed an opportunity in bypassing Tarzan’s more troublesome elements. The ape-man character and his continued popularity is ripe for deconstruction; in 1999, Disney created a Tarzan who exists in an Africa without Africans. Black characters were entirely removed from the narrative. The studio seemingly didn’t know what to do with the deeply racist presentation of Africans in Burroughs’ novels. In itself, this cultural evasive action is fascinating, and could have been usefully explored. Instead, the exhibition ultimately schools us in nothing but the power of myth itself.
This was first published in the FT arts section.
Posted in Going Out, Thinking | Tagged edgar rice burroughs, king kong, musee du quai branly, tarzan, tarzan and the apes | 1 Comment »
In terms of telling complex stories to mass audiences, film is the most effective communication medium we have. So I’m pretty excited about this new film: Fair Game will document the Valerie Plame affair.
It’s a story that truly deserves to be immortalised on celluloid, providing an astonishing insight into the depth of iniquity reached by the Bush administration and the ruthless power of a corrupt political machine.
Directed by Doug Liman, who made The Bourne Identity, Swingers and Go, it also stars two of my favourite actors, Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, and is due for release some time in 2010.
Posted in Watching | Tagged fair game, judith miller, naomi watts and sean penn, valerie plame | Leave a Comment »
The last of this year’s Reith lectures by Michael Sandel, professor of government at Harvard University, is fascinating and incisive, going straight to the heart of the dilemma facing our political leaders today: how to learn from the financial crisis and find a new way of governing.
Sandel manages to make his analysis accessible while instructive; as one listener wrote on twitter: “Listening to podcasts of Sandel’s Reith lectures on way to work is like taking my brain to the gym”.
You can listen to all four of the lectures on the BBC iplayer.
Some highlights here:
For three decades, the governing philosophy of the United States and Britain was defined by the faith that markets are the primary instrument for achieving the public good. The financial crisis has put this faith in question.. The era of market triumphalism has come to an end. But we have yet to find our way to a new governing philosophy. Even President Obama has yet to articulate one…”
As a governing philosophy… the task of correcting market failures is too humble and too narrow. Democratic governance is radically devalued if reduced to the role of handmaiden to the market economy. Democracy is about more than fixing and tweaking and nudging incentives to make markets work better…”
The flight from moral judgement and moral argument in politics predates the era of market triumphalism. It found expression – on both sides of the Atlantic – beginning in the 1950s and 60s, partly as a reaction against fascist and communist ideologies, and partly as an attempt to spare politics from becoming embroiled in religious strife. And it also reflected a growing faith in economics as a value-neutral science.”
Posted in Listening | Tagged iplayer, michael sandel, reith lectures | Leave a Comment »
Bomb disposal scenes are a surefire shortcut to suspense. Doom-laden while at the same time full of hope; engrossing but maddeningly tense. The pared-down simplicity of the narrative – after all, there are only two possible endings when a bomb is within inches of your protagonist – is easy for audiences to grasp and even easier to hold onto. And the tiniest, momentary actions, the snip of a coloured wire, weigh heavy with potential catastrophe.
All this should help Kathryn Bigelow‘s new film The Hurt Locker, which follows an elite bomb disposal unit in Baghdad, escape the curse of unpopularity that’s beset Iraq-themed films thus far. Her refusal to wade into the ideology of the war could also make the film slip down a little easier with patriotic americans.
The film promises to be more than just a succession of mindless set pieces: Bigelow is an artist who studied painting before moving to Hollywood; she’s also an intriguing, provocative aesthete of violence, whose first short film in 1978 showed two men fighting, accompanied by an academic voiceover deconstructing the scene and its significance. That fascination with destruction as art – the “cinematic heart attack” – translates into incredible film-making. You can have a peek at her style – courtesy of the NY Times - here.
And, obviously, in the trailer below.
Posted in Watching | Tagged jeremy renner, kathryn bigelow, the hurt locker, trailer of the week | Leave a Comment »
This is an incredibly beautiful film.
You can see it, all 90 minutes of it, on youtube, for free.
It took 2 and a half years to make, with 500 hours of footage filmed across 54 countries.
It may make you cry.
In 50 years, in a single lifetime, the earth has been more radically changed than by all previous generations of humanity”
An hour and a half might seem a long time to devote to a documentary but I promise you every single perfectly shot image will show you something you have never seen before, have never contemplated or never fully understood.
Posted in acclimatizing, Watching | Tagged climate change, home, yann arthus-bertrand | Leave a Comment »
“Climate change is not something that is waiting to happen. It is having a real impact, on communities and individuals around the world. Some of them are losing their islands. Others have lost their farmland”
So says Kofi Annan in the short film “The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis“, released to coincide with a new report on the human impact of climate change by the Global Humanitarian Forum last Friday.
The report’s headline figure – 300,000 people are already dying each year because of climate change, and that number will rise to 500,000 deaths a year by 2030 – sounds scary enough to provoke some kind of action. But then again, that’s what the Stern Review was meant to do in 2006. Unfortunately, precious little has been achieved in the intervening three years, despite the added impetus of the four IPCC reports in 2007. Which begs the question: why are all these reports falling on deaf ears?
Richard Cable, writing in the BBC’s Blog of Bloom, is scathing about the GHF effort, complaining that the report:
“contains so many extrapolations derived from guesswork based on estimates inferred from unsuitable data sets that you have to ask some serious questions about the methodology.”
Pretty strong criticism. The calculations in the report are based on data provided by the World Bank, the World Health Organisation, the UN, the Potsdam Insitute For Climate Impact Research, major insurance companies and Oxfam. The GHF report admits in its very first pages: “These figures represent averages based on projected trends over many years and carry a significant margin of error. The real numbers could be lower or higher.“
Of course it’s essential to interrogate the information we are fed, and for that reason Cable is doing us a favour by questioning this report’s accuracy. Not all predictions are created equal. And I don’t know enough about prediction methodology to evaluate the value of GHF’s numbers, but I do know that in 2000, climate change killed 150,000 people, according to the UN and the World Health Organisation. Which is enough to make it a pretty big killer.
Aside from that, I find Mr Cable’s criticism interesting and enlightening in itself, because his problem with the report exactly pinpoints why we typically find it so difficult to engage in the climate change issue. So much of climate change science is about projecting into the future, and thus – inevitably – relies on “guesswork” and “extrapolations”.
I first got a sense of this problem in 2007, when researching an article on climate refugees. The leading expert on the subject is Professor Norman Myers. He told me he’d struggled to get anyone to listen to his concerns on the phenomenon since he first wrote about it in 1995. He explained:
I feel (environmental refugees) is one of those sleeper issues that is bubbling away in the background and gathering pace. It’s very unfortunate. It’s against all humanitarian instincts and yet it’s as if the global community has turned its back on this…
This is a prime example of what I call scientific uncertainty and public policy. In many ways we know there’s a big problem out there but we don’t have any exact objective figures as yet. But we do know it’s in the many millions. At the same time we almost certainly know it’s not a hundred million.
If you go to a policymaker and say we’ve got a big problem, they say, tell me about it, tell me an exact number… and if you say well we’re not quite sure yet, they’ll be so pleased, they’ll say “Come back and tell me when you are sure“. Because that’s a good way for them to sidestep the issue.
“Come back and tell me when you are sure” is shorthand for what the world has been telling climate scientists for decades. No-one likes being wrong, and no-one likes spending time, money or energy on a threat they don’t believe in. So far, so human. But how much evidence do we need? Now that actual climate refugees are knocking on the doors of developed nations and asking for aid, Professor Myers’ expertise is back in demand, and funnily enough his figure of 200 million refugees by 2050 – which he first suggested in 1995 – is now being promoted as news. Myers himself has admitted this figure is based on “heroic extrapolations”. For now, it’s the best we have. There’s a lesson here.
Faced with possibilities, probabilities and very few certainties, we’re forced to make informed judgements, based on a set of questions such as:
* why would this person or organisation lie to me? One of the reasons governments took Nicholas Stern’s report so seriously was because he was not an environmental activist but an economist, and he looked at climate change in order to predict its likely economic cost.
* What qualifications does the predictor have, and what is their track record? The Met Office, for example, publishes statistics on how accurate their weather forecasts are – pretty darn accurate, actually.
* And, is there a consensus view that we can compare this prediction against? For instance in the climate change debate, the IPCC’s exhaustive Nobel Prize winning reports are a pretty good scientific consensus to work from.
Based on the criteria above, I have personally come to the decision that climate change is real, is spectacularly urgent, and is a threat to the survival of the world in the coming century if we don’t act now. It’s of course possible that if we do, we will avoid the worst case scenarios that scientists have begun to predict. Which would be great. Bonus – we get a healthier, more sustainable planet AND we don’t face global catastrophe. Hmm. Somehow I’m more concerned that the human tendency to wait til the last minute, even deciding to ‘sit out’ projected disasters in the hope that they’ll never happen, could yet retain the upper hand.
Posted in acclimatizing, Thinking | Tagged anatomy of a silent crisis, blog of bloom, climate change, norman myers | 2 Comments »
Sometimes trailers don’t do justice to a film. Other times, they showcase a certain magic that the actual movie sadly never attains. I have a feeling that might be the case with Terminator: Salvation, which has been notching up some pretty miserable reviews since it was released on May 21st in the US.
Stephanie Zacharek in Salon complains the film has “no brains and no soul; it’s just a mass of stiff, creaking metal joints”, while the Hollywood Reporter says it’s “terminally sullen”.
More supportive – while riffing playfully on the same robot theme – is A.O. Scott in the NY Times, who starts off by calling it “sturdy and serviceable” – hardly ringing praise – but goes on to applaud the film’s “brutal integrity”:
With its clanks and creaks and broken-down contraptions, this movie is a battered Wall-E to Star Trek‘s sleek and seamless Eve.
Which is fitting, since part of the point of the Terminator movies is to register ambivalence about technological progress, which fills our lives with all kinds of cool, convenient stuff that somehow brings an intimation of our eventual obsolescence.”
I quite like the sound of that, but as with any cult franchise, there are of course many purists squirming in horror at the idea of the ridiculously named McG trying to steer the Terminator behemoth into glory. As my interest in the films was fairly late acquired (I was far too scared to ever watch them before I was officially allowed to aged 18, and only then because my dad told me they were works of considerable cinematic achievement), I don’t feel too concerned about where the franchise goes next – I’m just happy the others were made, and so well. I am however, slightly put off Christian Bale after I heard his ridiculously aggressive on-set rant against the director of photography on the film. Unbelievable scenes.
Terminator: Salvation is in UK cinemas from Wednesday 3rd June.
Posted in Watching | Tagged christian bale, terminator salvation, trailer of the week | Leave a Comment »
As I’m sure you’ve already pencilled in your diary, the final of the Eurovision song contest takes place in Moscow, tomorrow night.
The UK has somehow made it into the final despite the appalling dullness of its entry, It’s My Time, sung by Jade Ewen. I wouldn’t bother clicking on the link if I were you. Much more entertaining is Norway’s entry, written and sung by a 23-year old called Alexander Rybak. It’s appropriately eurovision-awful but in the best way possible.
Mr Rybak, who looks roughly eleven years old, is like some kind of demonic violin-playing elf crossed with Dan Radcliffe. His lyrics are hilariously bad (“That was then, but then it’s true”) while his background dancers seem to be enacting a scissor-kicking mythical narrative that bears no relation to the song itself. The whole effect is curiously pleasurable.
Posted in Listening | Tagged Alexander Rybak, eurovision 2009, eurovision norway, fairytale eurovision | 2 Comments »
UPDATE, April 2011:
Almost two years after Rodrigo Rosenberg died, the real, bizarre, and chilling truth about his death has come to light and been beautifully explained by David Grann in The New Yorker. You can read the article here.
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Rodrigo Rosenberg was born in Guatemala in 1962. After completing an undergraduate degree at Rafael Landivar University, he studied international law at the University of Cambridge, and later took a masters in commercial law at Harvard.
In 1987, Rodrigo Rosenberg co-founded his own law firm, Rosenberg Marzano Marroquin-Pemueller & Asociados. He had four children. He was appointed Vice Dean of his old alma-mater, the Law School at Rafael Landivar.
Last Sunday, while Mr Rosenberg was cycling through Guatemala City, he was shot dead.
In the video Mr Rosenberg made predicting his own murder, he does not come across as a deluded conspiracy theorist. Dressed smartly, he enunciates clearly, explaining why he believes his impending death would be the work of the Guatemalan president, Alvaro Colom. The urgency of what he is saying is clear only in the way his lips purse when he finishes a sentence, in the careful calmness he keeps, as if understanding that anything too agitated would undermine his case.
According to the Wall St Journal, the video was made last Wednesday. You can watch it here:
While hundreds of Guatemalans took to the streets to call for Colom’s resignation after the video was shown on local television, the President held a press conference to vehemently deny the claims, saying:
The death of attorney Rosenberg has been used by political opportunists and traditional conspirators linked to organised crime to confuse public opinion and attack the top authorities.”
President Colom has requested that the FBI and the UN help investigate. Yesterday, the FBI arrived in Guatemala. A full English translation of Mr Rosenberg’s written message is available here.
Posted in Listening | Tagged Alvaro Colom, Guatemala, Rodrigo Rosenberg | 2 Comments »
