Eclipse

This was the morning of the solar eclipse, apparently. We were taking their word for it: the professionals. The astrologers and that new breed of scientist-celebrities – whether the fame concourse was being corrected or simply devouring every facet of culture in order to stay alive, who could say..

There were warnings of the ‘selfie phenomena’ – this being the first eclipse to occur since everyone has a mobile device appropriated for the sole use of taking self-portraits in various settings and surroundings. This, apparently, could lead to people accidentally looking at the sun for minutes. This is the level to which we have sunk as a species.

Despite all the excitement stirred up by the risk of blindness, we were left taking their word for this cosmic event when the mornings weather drifted into a dreary overcast haze. An opaque heavy fog blanketed the sky and prevented us from seeing anything, even after applying the usual Instagram filters.

An elderly woman beside me on the train looked up out the window, ‘No eclipse for us’ she says to me with a smile, ‘I remember the last one – I imagine you were very young but I remember it very well. It wasn’t so much the way it looked, but the chill that followed. How dreadfully cold it became so quickly. It made you realise you wouldn’t get far without the sun’. Humbled by her previous experience you could tell she longed to feel it again, chasing the dragon on the 08:38 Victoriabound.

She paused in thought, now with the attention of the neighbouring seats – ‘When is the next one? 2026? Hmm I’ll be very old then..’ her soliloquy trails off, bleary blighty has forced the question of morality on this poor woman – not the best start to this Friday morning.

March 20, 2015 0

Blame it on the Pop

Pop music is pretty abstract when you think about it. Working in an officespace beside a radio has forced me to think about it, and how much a value my life as a result. It gives artists poetic licence to spout absolute nonsense so long as it’s catchy. To tread the well worn path of those that came before, and to leave their mark as an empty looping jingle in your brainspace. One that makes you want to go through your eyes to scratch them out. Songs about love ~~and~~… that’s most of them. New love, lost love, love locked-down etc. There is something truly bizarre about pop music (how bizarre?) – something that everyone seems to buy into and chooses not to acknowledge: the clotheless emperor that appears to you in the car, in shopping centres and in the background of adverts; every time you look around he’s dancing there with his bare naked body right in your face. At first it was my patience being tested now I fear it’s my sanity.

As a genre the defining feature is popularity. So really it shouldn’t be a particular style but an evershifting trend. It becomes somewhat paradoxical to consider how a pop band would start out, or how a pop song is released. How do you predict popularity? It seems many a boardroom has been filled with executives working out how to capitalise on the interests of the public; how to turn an artform into a cashcow – like a team of robots trying to work out the allure of a flower for the sole purpose of catching bees. Continue reading “Blame it on the Pop” →

March 14, 2015 0

HTTYD2 or: How I Learned to Train My Dragon and Love the Bomb

I sit nervously waiting with three other journalists in a suite of the Soho Hotel. Having just seen a preview of How to Train Your Dragon 2 we await writer/ director Dean Deblois for a roundtable interview. This is immediately before an interview with Cressida Cowell, the author of the series of books from which the films were inspired. We make some stilted conversation when I learn that these professional writers are all in fact parents. I was not a parent at this particular juncture and so felt that they already had a deeper connection with the film, this along with the publications they represent: one writes for a literary magazine aimed at young and aspiring authors, one an esteemed nature magazine, and the other writes about families… or something. My focus is elsewhere at this point as I can’t shake the feeling that I don’t belong here. I seem to echo their own bafflement when I tell them I’m writing for the RAF… “I guess they like things that fly”.

httyd2 poster — Look how happy everyone is…

How to Train Your Dragon, I realise whilst watching the night before the event, has a strong anti-war message. Not only that, it uses planelike symbols as the threat – spraying fire onto the village where civilians live. Maybe the anxiety is kicking in but the message is definitely there. I admire the film for this reason though I could do without this feeling, knowing that I am attending this event as the villain. Continue reading “HTTYD2 or: How I Learned to Train My Dragon and Love the Bomb” →

March 4, 2015 0

Two Night Stand (2014)

Written for RAF News Feb 2015

Opening to what is sure to be the trope of contemporary rom-coms, Two Night Stand begins with Megan (Analeigh Tipton) creating an online dating profile – filled with every hesitation, deliberation and embellishment.

Megan, the low-key manic pixie, has just broken off her engagement with her high-school sweetheart, and after graduating finds herself doing nothing – bumming around the apartment to the behest of her roommate. Following another tale of a twentysomething graduate starved of ambition and not knowing what to do with herself, just as Kiera Knightley’s Megan in the recent Say When (serious), this Megan isn’t so much looking for meaning in life as a one night stand to get back on the horse.

The eventual winner of this no-strings agreement is Alec (Miles Teller): a sardonic stoner who manages to offend his lucky catch as soon they wake in his Brooklyn apartment the morning after. But when she tries to make an exit and storm off, it appears that they have been snowed in by a freak blizzard and so must stay put and bask in the awkwardness of this forced situation.

Unfortunately so must we as the audience – with awkwardness that isn’t always intentional. Two Night Stand definitely reaches for comedy over creating chemistry between its characters, and so the intimate scenes feel out of place with a whiplash of tone change – especially when the cheesy clinking music cuts short and leaves you with enough silence to hear Alec breathing. There are some laughs throughout but the match of this big eyed, elfin, beauty with the dry and cooly distant Alec plays out just as you would expect… with utter convenience. There are some laughs throughout and it has a cutesy charm that keeps you entertained, but it is largely inoffensive and forgettable at that.

A couple of notes:

There was something quite jarring about this film that I couldn’t quite put my finger on at the time. It met it’s indie-film-quota before the titles and yet it looked all shiny and clean. It seemed that this polish revealed which parts were just cheap, tacky plastic…

The roommate and her boyfriend were cringe-worthy awkward with no charm or believability. They felt like glossy, unapologetic devices for the story. The sound design clashed with the images as sound levels veered wildly and the awful demo-music samples didn’t even last as long as the scenes. At one point Megan’s nose stud jumps nostrils while in a side profile close-up.. whilst her face fills most of the screen. These little mistakes were amplified by the look and feel of the thing.

Maybe Dan Harmon’s right when he says that romance is a condiment for a story, not the meal itself.

February 13, 2015 0

Selma (2014)

Written for RAF News Jan 2015

In the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, and after the supposed break up of segregation in the States, Selma picks up in the south where things don’t seem to have changed much at all – where four girls have been murdered by white supremacists and where black citizens are still prevented from registering to vote.

When Dr. King (David Oyelowo) hears this news, he decides to use his platform to bring attention to this continued injustice by arranging a march from Selma to Montgomery Alabama.

Although Dr. King is introduced accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, he is not shown to be an outright hero but a passionate and charismatic preacher who knows how to use a stage and move a crowd. No film had until now focussed on Dr. King and so it comes as a pleasant surprise that director Ava DuVernay avoids the pitfall of deifying this cultural icon and instead shows him as a man – a complex figure complete with all his faults and foibles.

Oyelewo’s King presents the contrast of the man on and off stage: speaking with a measured poetic rhythm that erupts into familiar passionate cries when in front of a crowd, but thoughtful – at times doubtful and doubting even – behind closed doors.

In showing this side to Dr. King, Selma is able to shift focus to the issues at the core of the film and observe the people that marched together on that momentous day, exploring their individual stories and struggles. In a sense Selma looks at the human side of a legend, showing Dr. King to be an ordinary person, and the extraordinary side of regular people as they came together to stand up against oppression.

February 9, 2015 0