Beauty and Barbarism: Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises

The Wind Rises

With The Wind Rises, Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki has achieved a feat befitting a master: he has crafted his final film into an elegiac farewell that at once communicates what it means to be an artist, while also being an artistic triumph itself. When I urge friends to see it, they deride the notion that a “cartoon” could be good. Pity. This animated movie is a feast for the eyes, ears, and heart, with narrative magic married to tonal complexities to form a sublime milieu. It's not a perfect movie, though, and its romantic idealism tries to find redeeming grace among irredeemable evils. It simultaneously breaks your heart and renews your belief in the transcendence of the human spirit.

Monumentally Dull: George Clooney's The Monuments Men

George Clooney and Matt Damon in The Monuments Men

It’s an unusual criticism to make of a movie that it doesn’t aim low enough. But that’s the problem with The Monuments Men, George Clooney’s new movie about a team sent by FDR to Europe in the final years of the Second World War to root out the art the Nazis stole from the countries they conquered and protect any more of the cornerstones of western civilization from being damaged. Using as source material the non-fiction book by Robert Edsel, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, Clooney and his co-writer/co-producer Grant Heslov – his collaborator on Good Night and Good Luck and The Ides of March – have set about to make a wartime adventure in the square style of big-studio entertainments of the fifties and early sixties, but they’ve done it without an ounce of cheeky wit or romance. Clooney has made the movie with a sort of middle-brow integrity, but what it really needs is showmanship – an instinct for melodrama, which he lacks entirely. He and Heslov start with a sensational story and a tantalizing cast – the seven “monuments men” are played by Matt Damon, John Goodman, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville, The Artist’s Jean Dujardin and Clooney himself as Frank Stokes, the head of the mission – and then strip the movie of just about everything that might have made it fun to watch.

To Get to The Other Side: The Bridge

Kim Bodnia and Saga Noren star in the Swedish-Danish series The Bridge

The TV series The Bridge, a Swedish-Danish co-production that first aired in 2011, begins with the discovery of what appears to be the dead body of a Swedish politician. He has been cut in two; the corpse is lying at the exact spot on the Oresund Bridge that marks the point where the borders of Copenhagen and Malmo meet. Sofia (Saga Noren), a Swedish homicide detective, and Martin (Kim Bodnia), a Danish detective, both arrive at the scene, and it’s only after Sofia has brashly claimed the case for herself, with Martin’s happy consent, that it’s found that the “body” is actually two halves of two different dead women. Sofia and Martin end up working together on the case, which expands as it becomes clear that a serial killer with a larger agenda is at work.

Masterclass Concert: Robben Ford at Mohawk College, March 7

Guitarist Robben Ford

Robben Ford has played guitar with some of the greats. Joni Mitchell, George Harrison, and Miles Davis! Those names are legendary, but Robben Ford? Not so much. He is an extremely tasty guitarist with a long career behind him, and judging by his brand new CD he should have a long career ahead of him. But last Friday he came into Hamilton to offer a guitar masterclass to the students of Mohawk College, and he stuck around to play a concert at Mohawk’s McIntyre Theatre.

The show started at 8pm but the doors opened an hour earlier while ushers walked up and down selling raffle tickets as a fun-raiser for the music programme. The prizes? Autographed posters from last year’s guest guitarist Jimmie Vaughan and a signed Robben Ford Epiphone guitar. This is an annual event which has also featured Larry Carlton. The lights soon dimmed and after a few notices the opening act came on stage. Bump City is a student band, under the direction of Darcy Hepner, which plays the music of Tower of Power. Don’t Google them, you’ll find another Bump City entirely, also a tribute to Tower of Power band but made up of much older musicians. This group appeared to have an average age of 20, and each member was filled with the energy and enthusiasm you might expect. Their half hour set showcased three different vocalists, and a horn section that was together, and had all the moves down just so. Special props to their guitarist (Braden Varcoe) who made a guest appearance during Mr. Ford’s set. But more about that later. I’ve never been much of a Tower of Power fan, but Bump City acquitted themselves beautifully and kept their promise (from their Twitter site) to “make you shake your squib cakes all night long.”

All This Useless Knowledge: Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation

The work of H.P. Lovecraft is one of popular fiction’s favourite aesthetics-du-jour. We’re still apparently enamoured with zombies, dystopias, and teenagers murdering one another, and whenever we need a cut-and-paste horror setting, Lovecraft is the first well we draw from. His lurid and eloquent prose certainly invites (and deserves) imitation, but few works have managed to bottle his particular brand of dreadful, elegant, creeping horror. With Annihilation, Jeff Vandermeer comes closer than anyone I’ve ever read.

A mysterious place known only as Area X has been isolated from humanity for decades. The government sends out expeditions to explore it and record their discoveries. Some expeditions came back dazed, unsure of what they’d seen. Some came back and contracted terminal cancer. Some came back and committed mass suicide. Some never came back at all. Annihilation follows the twelfth group, which is composed of four women – a psychologist, a surveyor, an anthropologist, and a biologist (our narrator). The characters are named by specialization and never physically described, their expertise and attitudes being the only salient information the author provides. The setting is likewise left ambiguous: Area X, and whatever lives there, might be a product of nuclear warfare, or government experimentation, or alien invasion, or any other recognizable science fiction trope. 

Musical Vaudeville: Encores! Production of Little Me

Rachel York and Christian Borle in Little Me (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Encores! at New York’s City Center opened its three-musical season at the beginning of last month with a spirited, uproarious revival of the 1962 Little Me, directed by John Rando, whose work for the series has included some of my personal favorites (On the Town, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Irving Berlin’s Face the Music). The source material for Little Me is a book by Patrick Dennis (author of Auntie Mame) that takes the form of a fictional memoir by a scandalous dame named Belle Poitrine – poitrine is French for chest – who came of age in the early decades of the twentieth century. It’s pretty much an overlong one-joke comedy, the joke being the obvious discrepancy between the innocent version of events Belle is offering and the truth that glares at you between the lines. I got tired of the novel and of Belle after about a hundred pages and put it down. But the book of the musical, by Neil Simon, though it’s overstuffed – act one is ninety minutes long – is consistently funny. Simon divided the character of Belle between an aging millionairess (impersonated in Rando’s production by the feisty Judy Kaye) and her indomitable younger self (Rachel York, belting happily and effortlessly carrying off an ingénue role she ought to be about a decade and a half too old for). Belle goes to jail for murder, resurfaces as a stage personality on the basis of her notoriety – note that Little Me predated Chicago by thirteen years – entertains the troops in the Great War and stars in silent movies, among other adventures.

Feathers In their Caps: Svetlana Lunkina and Evan McKie in Swan Lake

Evan McKie & Svetlana Lunkina (with the National Ballet of Canada) in Swan Lake. (Photo: Aleksandar Antonijevic)

The highly anticipated debuts of principal guest artists Svetlana Lunkina and Evan McKie in James Kudelka's version of Swan Lake readily explains why Toronto's Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts was packed to the rafters last Saturday night (March 8). McKie who self identifies as a dancer-actor is the Toronto-born principal dancer with Germany's Stuttgart Ballet who is internationally celebrated for his ability to dramatize a role, and make it matter. Last month, the 30-year-old McKie headlined the Paris Opera Ballet, a first for a Canadian ballet dancer. In April, he will be a featured performer with the New York City Ballet where doubtless his long lyrical lines, his buoyant jumps and aristocratic mien will get audiences there as excited as they have been this past week for his homecoming in Toronto. Russian trained, McKie has also performed with the Bolshoi, making him a choice partner for Lunkina, a star ballerina of the Bolshoi who made headlines last year when she announced she was quitting Russia for Canada following a series of malevolent threats made against her and her family at a time when the Bolshoi was rocked with violence, an acid attack on its artistic director, Lunkina's former partner Sergei Filin, being one. McKie's undisputed talent as a gifted dramatic dancer notwithstanding, she was the one everyone had come to watch. The house was filled with ex ballet dancers and au courant balletomanes, all eager to see the controversial Russian ballerina show her stuff. She did not disappoint.

East Meets West: The Good, The Bad, The Weird

South Korean cinema seems to be caught up in the rapture of a cultural renaissance. Their films crackle with the energy and inventiveness of a newly successful moviemaking machine, like Pixar at its prime, from Oldboy (2003) to Pieta (2013). I’ve never seen a better example of this than Kim Jee-woon’s The Good, The Bad, The Weird, which owes its existence to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti tour de force The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly, but diverges from this legendary source material in creative (and often hilarious) ways. It’s not really fair to compare the two – one is a literal masterpiece and the other is a fun period action feature – but The Weird models itself too closely after The Ugly to ignore the similarities.

The Good, The Bad, The Weird takes Leone’s southwestern epic across the Pacific and seventy years into the future, landing us in 1930s Manchuria, where a hitman (Lee Byung-hun, “The Bad”) is hired to rob a train of a Japanese treasure map. An enterprising thief (Song Kang-ho, “The Weird”) interrupts this scheme and escapes with the map. Meanwhile, a bounty hunter (Jung Woo-sung, “The Good”) arrives to claim the bounty on The Bad. The film plays out from there in a series of escalating (and increasingly ridiculous) chases and escapes, until The Bad, The Good, a gang of Manchurian bandits, and the Japanese Army are all chasing The Weird towards the treasure’s hidden location. Only the three title characters make it there, where they engage in a classic Leone-style Mexican standoff. So the plot is almost exactly that of The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly, albeit with a shot of Eastern flavour (the film is actually referred to as an “Oriental Western” in the end credits). It can’t exactly be called a remake, because the basic plot structure and rough character outlines are pretty much the only things that are the same. The Weird simply takes The Ugly and injects it with adrenaline – it’s almost the antithesis of The Ugly in terms of pacing, speed, energy, and humour, all of which it provides in spades. Where Leone’s film was laconic, Kim’s is hyperactive.

Neglected Gem #51: Something Wild (1961)

Ralph Meeker and Carroll Baker in Something Wild (1961)

No one in Hollywood in the late fifties and early sixties attempted anything remotely like Jack Garfein’s movie Something Wild (1961). (The movie has no connection to Jonathan Demme’s great romantic comedy of the same name, made twenty-five years later.) I first saw it on Saturday Night at the Movies when I was in high school in the late sixties, and though I didn’t know what the hell to make of it, for years afterwards my mind retained images from the dream sequence, where the protagonist, Mary Ann (played by Carroll Baker), in a gang of schoolgirls, stares at a painting with a moving eye in a museum and then endures the mocking laughter of her classmates as the features of their faces vanish. Garfein and his co-screenwriter Alex Karmel, adapting Karmel’s novel Mary Ann, had clearly absorbed the lessons of the Surrealist painters – De Chirico especially seems to haunt Mary Ann’s nightmare – as well as the Expressionist playwrights of the 1920s, and applied them to the conventions of film noir in a more florid and inventive way than anyone had previously. Visually the film noirs of the forties and fifties had always leaned toward that style; of all genres, noir was the one that gave directors and cinematographers the greatest license to import the ideas of the German Expressionist pictures of the silent and early talkie eras, and naturally that was the genre toward which filmmakers who ran away from Hitler and landed in Hollywood tended to gravitate. But Something Wild takes a more experimental approach to the narrative elements of noir, particularly the portrayal of the city as a weird and dangerous place.

Politically Radical Content That You Dance To: Sini Anderson's The Punk Singer‏

The Punk Singer, Sini Anderson’s profile-style documentary about the rock star, “riot grrrl” movement figure, and provocateur Kathleen Hanna, is a scrappy (but rousing) snapshot montage of someone who can be seen as embodying the best of the D.I.Y. spirit of the American punk culture of the ‘80s and ‘90s. At times, Hannah—the front woman for the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre—comes across almost as the scene’s Zelig: she was a friend of Kurt Cobain’s, and she was the one who came up with the phrase “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” (She actually scrawled it on the wall of his house one night, explaining that “We were so wasted. Soooo wasted. So fucking wasted!”) The movie makes a pretty fair case that Cobain was strongly enough influenced by “girl art punk” that, without Hanna and her acolytes, there would have been no Nirvana as we know it. The thought of what the 90s would have been like without Nevermind could send a chill down the spine of many folks of a certain age, not that the thought of what the 90s would have been like without Bikini Kill, or Le Tigre, should make them feel any warmer.

Play it Again: Adrian Raso & Fanfare Ciocarlia's Devil's Tale

Adrian Raso isn't exactly a household name when it comes to the Canadian music scene. Raso was born in Guelph, Ontario. At a young age, he started playing guitar beginning with rock music, but with a keen ear for Mediterranean musical forms. By 2005, he formed his own instrumental trio that drew crowds at home and abroad. Raso and his band were very successful in Italy gaining recognition for their musical skills and spirited music. His latest CD, Devil's Tale (Asphalt Tango), features the guitarist with a band called Fanfare Ciocarlia from Romania. The 12-piece brass band features trumpets, tubas and percussion in a lively, spirited mix that is fresh and optimistic. It's an album of original compositions by Raso that is immediately accessible and eclectic right from the first note.

Hard Burn: The Expanse Trilogy

I was surprised to learn that James S.A. Corey, author of the tremendous SF series The Expanse, is actually a pen name shared by fantasy author Daniel Abraham and his collaborator, Ty Franck. The three novels which encompass the series so far are so seamless and well-crafted that they hardly feel like separate books, let alone three huge books written by two different people. They combine everything I love about SF into a slick and accessible package, with the electric action of modern fantasy and the moral and philosophical nuance of classic sci-fi. These novels illustrate a fictional universe which is incredibly compelling, and it behooves any SF fan – or anybody interested in being one – to bump them up to “must-read” status. Franck built the universe of The Expanse as a singular project, initially intended to function as the setting for an online multiplayer video game. Then Abraham signed on to flesh out characters and fill Franck’s setting with a compelling narrative. 

Unlike other SF works which vault humanity into the far reaches of the universe, depict faster-than-light interstellar travel, and show people coexisting with extraterrestrial organisms, The Expanse has a more grounded speculative setting. Our species has spread out into our own solar system, but no further. Mars has been colonized, and there are agricultural and industrial outposts as far out as Neptune. An invention called an “Epstein drive” decreases travel time between celestial bodies, but forces ships to fly with extreme thrust, which causes fatal g-forces. To compensate, crew members must sit in gel-filled couches which inject them with stimulants and muscle-control chemicals, keeping them from blacking out during a “hard burn.” This is a far cry from the fantastical hyperdrives of Star Wars, blasting characters across galaxies in maximum comfort. But these depictions of advanced technology, realistic as they may be, still take a backseat to the human element – this is a very human society, driven by interplanetary politics and economies. Mars, for example, has a distinct culture, separate from that of Earth, which is removed even further still from Belter society (the nickname for those who occupy the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter). The total human population has become a vast melting pool of races, most characters sharing in an incredibly diverse genetic lineage. Martians of the Mariner Valley affect a quasi-Southern accent, and Belters have elongated skeletal frames from generations spent in lower gravity. A character might appear Chinese, but have a Portuguese name. This creates enough racial tension to make for some solid space drama (one character notes that “a certain death rate [has] to be expected” when you keep so many highly-evolved primates in the same box for months and months on end), but even that isn’t the focus of the story – simply an example of the excellent worldbuilding that defines the series.

Chekhov and Baryshnikov: Man in a Case

Man in a Case, featuring Mikhail Baryshnikov (center)

At the end of Chekhov’s short story “About Love,” the narrator Alehin reveals that only in the last moments he spent with the married woman with whom he had fallen in love – when he kissed her for the first time before she traveled away from him forever – did he understand that “when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.” Man in a Case by the Big Dance Theater, which has been traveling around the east coast and played a handful of Boston performances in the Arts Emerson series, dramatizes “About Love” and “The Man in a Case,” two of the Chekhov tales from 1898 that begin as conversations between the veterinarian Ivan Ivanovitch and the schoolmaster Burkin, who are hunting companions. And I think it’s that comment of Alehin’s that links them. The title story focuses on Belikov, a schoolteacher whose cautious disapproval of anything with the mere whiff of impropriety has the effect of making everyone around him feel constrained. Improbably, he becomes enamored of a young woman, but he can’t rise above either his prejudices or his pride. Belikov’s story, which is comic and tragic by turns – the Chekhovian balance – ends when, after he’s scandalized to observe his beloved on a bicycle and gets into an argument with her brother over her, he’s thrown down the stairs and dies as a result of his injuries, or perhaps of some combination of shame and heartbreak. He’s “the man in the case” who has sealed himself off from humanity; he seems to break out of it when he falls in love but he can’t allow that love to alter his nature. It’s quite a strange story (and, like “About Love,” a beautiful one).

Mind Games: Third Time's Not the Charm for Kyle Killen

The cast of Mind Games, now airing on ABC

Kyle Killen's career as a television writer and creator is odd, even by Hollywood standards. In 2009, despite almost unanimous acclaim by the critics, his first creation Lone Star was famously cancelled by FOX after its second episode. He moved to NBC and put out Awake in 2012. That time around he got to air the show's full 13-episode first season, but the network officially pulled the plug long before its finale – earning the show first place on my brilliant-but-cancelled list for that year. I wrote at length about Awake at the time, but even two years later it still continues to represent for me one of the best examples of what can be done within the American network television model. A fantasy crime procedural, Awake was ambitious, innovative, smartly written, subtly acted, and always deeply human – all within the frame of what was still a traditional format.  It was a show that did everything right, except of course finding an audience. Two years later, Killen is back with Mind Games, this time on ABC. Mind Games is Killen's third series and third network, and I had medium-sized hopes for the series. Unfortunately, it looks like the third time is very much not the charm for Killen. 

The Fifth Beatle: Brian Epstein's Story Gets Its Due

“If anyone was the fifth Beatle, it was Brian.” – Paul McCartney

In 1965, the Beatles went to Buckingham Palace to receive their MBEs from Queen Elizabeth II.  That’s Member of the British Empire for those of you who came in late.  It’s the first level of awards, and had traditionally been given to businessfolk and supporters of the monarchy.  But in 1965 it went to John, Paul, George and Ringo.  McCartney and Harrison quipped, “Yeah, MBE stands for Mr. Brian Epstein!”  Eppy was the businessman.  Scion of a well-to-do store owner in Liverpool, he had drifted from school to school and job to job before moving into the family business managing the NEMS (North East Music Stores) record shop on Great Charlotte Street.  He had hopes of a career in design or theatre, having studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts alongside Peter O’Toole and Susannah York.  It was at the record shop, however, that his career was made.

Legend has it that a young fan dropped in one day looking for ‘that new record from The Beatles.’  It wasn’t in stock, so Epstein ordered it thinking the group was from Germany.  It turned out the band was from Liverpool and they were playing not far from the store.  Epstein stopped by for a listen, and ended up managing the biggest group the world had ever seen.

Hannah Arendt: The Limits of Thinking

Barbara Sukowa stars in Margarethe von Trotta's Hannah Arendt (2013)

When the influential German-Jewish philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt reported on the 1961 trial of ex-Nazi Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker, it caused an outrage. Its subsequent publication as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which included a provocative postscript wherein she commented on the implications of her report, only compounded the controversy. Arendt’s critics were most upset about her portrait of Eichmann and her views on the Jewish councils organized by the Nazis. She regarded Eichmann as a pathetic little pen-pusher, a hapless clown in a glass booth, and not as a fanatical ideologue who hated Jews. Although her material on Jewish councils was only about a dozen pages and threaded throughout the book, many of her critics took umbrage at her suggestion that Jewish leaders failed to use their power to protect Jews.
 

Given that Eichmann, in his shabby and insidious mediocrity, spoke in clichés and bureaucratic jargon during the trial, he was for Arendt representative the personification of true evil. As she remarked in her postscript, Eichmann “was not Iago and not Macbeth” – no villain doing evil out of villainy since “he never realized what he was doing.” (The italics are in the original.) Neither perverted nor sadistic,” was how Arendt described Eichmann, but “terribly and terrifyingly normal.” Arendt argued that Eichmann was flawed because he could not think. Conversely, she implied that had he possessed that quality, he would never have committed barbarous acts, an implication that underestimates the torque of ideology, disregards history and ignores individual and collective psychopathology.

Red-Letter Day: Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt

Mads Mikkelsen in The Hunt, directed by Thomas Vinterberg

The Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen has proven his ability to play nice guys and even romantic leads, but with his heavy lids and puckered-up lips, on a large head riding atop an incongruously lumbering frame, he doesn’t have to work very hard to give audiences the impression that there may be something creepy and perverse about him. (Especially in the case of English-language audiences, who know him best for playing the villain in Daniel Craig’s first James Bond movie and Hannibal Lector on TV.) Mikkelsen is well-cast in Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt (Jagten, in Danish), about a divorced, fortyish kindergarten teacher who is accused of sexual assault by a little girl who’s the daughter of his best friend, Theo (Thomas Bo Larsen). Mikkelsen’s character, Lucas, is totally sympathetic, and there’s nothing ambiguous about his innocence. One day, the girl, carelessly jumbling together the events of a day that began with her brother showing her a pornographic photo, says the wrong thing to the women who work at the kindergarten, and that’s it: the snowball has started rolling. But with Mikkelsen in the role, Lucas doesn’t have to be guilty, or even act guilty, for it to be plausible that the media, and people’s lurid imaginations, would take one look at him and think, as they did with Richard Jewell and Liddy Chamberlain, “Yeah, we can work with this.”

In Secret: Lovers in Hell

Oscar Isaac and Elizabeth Olsen in In Secret

The new film In Secret has had a limited release and drawn very little notice, but it’s tense and intelligent and beautifully acted. The only generic thing about it, really, is its title. The writer-director, Charlie Stratton, has based it on Émile Zola’s harrowing 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin. Zola’s Thérèse is a young woman brought up by her aunt, who marries her off to her weak, fever-prone son Camille, whose bed the girl shared when they were children. Having relocated to Paris from the country to please Camille, they live above Mme. Raquin’s shop in a glum alley. Thérèse helps out behind the counter during the day; in the evenings she has nothing to do but cook dinner and take care of Camille when he comes home from his shipping-office job. The only distraction in her dull life is the games of dominos they play with some friends one night a week. Mme. Raquin is contented by this bourgeois existence, but Thérèse is so bored that she generally sits in defeated silence as the others play. Then one evening Camille brings one of his co-workers, Laurent – who knew the family as a boy in the provinces – home for supper. He’s an aspiring painter who speaks openly of the free-spirited world of the artist – of the women who model nude – as he executes Camille’s portrait (really a way of endearing himself to the Raquins so that he can enjoy their hospitality on a daily basis). And though at first his sensuality unsettles Thérèse and makes him dislikable to her, when she finds herself alone with him for an hour and he scoops her up in a kiss, she allows him to make her his mistress. The affair transforms her from a virtual sleepwalker to an alert, voracious young animal who finds it surprisingly easy to deceive both her husband and her mother-in-law. Eventually she and Laurent both grow impatient with the restrictions on their life together – especially Laurent, a soft, indolent character who gave up studying the law because he found it too rigorous and would like someone to take care of him so that he could quit his job and go back to the studio (out of laziness, not out of dedication to art). So he takes Thérèse and Camille rowing and drowns his friend while she watches, horrified yet paralyzed by the recognition that he’s acting on their mutual desire. Both the lovers believe that this murder will liberate them, but instead it dooms them: the image of Camille’s sodden corpse haunts their dreams when they’re apart and even after they marry – after a respectable mourning period, and with the blessing of the ignorant Mme. Raquin, who thinks of Laurent as a second son – they see that image in their bed like a ghost. It drives a stake between them and inevitably causes them to turn on each other.

Exploding on the Launch Pad: Andy Weir’s The Martian

The Martian is Andy Weir’s writing debut, marketed as “a truly remarkable thriller” and “an impossible-to-put-down suspense novel.” Like all dust jacket claims, these brandings are boilerplate, easily dismissed, and normally you’d have no reason to dispute them (or even think about them), regardless of the novel’s quality. But The Martian calls even these most basic descriptions into question, and what began in my mind as niggling doubts became full-bore distaste by story’s end. The premise – an astronaut named Mark Watney is stranded alone on a distant planet and must figure out a way to survive – is as old as the Martian hills, tracing its SF roots all the way back to Bradbury, and even Jules Verne before him. There’s no promise of supernatural or fantastic elements, because the book is “grounded in real, present-day science”. So with a tired conceit and an inauspicious focus on technical accuracy, the question is, what’s left to intrigue us? The answer, unfortunately, is: not much.

I was alternately bored, frustrated, and apathetic while reading The Martian, none of which are feelings I imagine Weir wanted to engender. Worse, I don’t think they are simply a result of personal subjectivity – I think the awful dialogue, clumsy story construction, and inane characterization will be obvious to any attentive reader. The focus of the novel is also its most glaring flaw by far: believability, or the utter lack thereof. Because the author has done his homework and presents us with many realistic space survival scenarios, we’re meant to buy into Mark Watney’s struggle. The problem is, I don’t believe that someone who talks and thinks like Watney would ever have been selected for a dangerous, expensive, and highly difficult mission to a distant planet. We’re told he’s the best botanist on Earth, and he does prove to be highly resourceful at growing food for himself, but what expert-level botanist talks like a frat boy? High academia has a way of smoothing out juvenile character traits like these, and when you’re ready to represent the best our planet has to offer in your field of study, you’re going to take it seriously. Watney doesn’t take anything seriously, and I don’t buy it for a second.

Two Classic Texts, Modernized

Tom Hiddleston in Coriolanus (Photo by Johan Persson)

Like Timon of Athens, Shakespeare’s late Roman tragedy Coriolanus is getting more attention these days than it did for years, though, like their title characters, both plays are perhaps too unyielding to make it into anybody’s list of favorite Shakespeares. Ralph Fiennes made an intelligent attempt at filming it in 2011 with himself in the title role, the warrior who wins a major victory for Rome but whose patrician pride prevents him from winning the favor of the fickle (and easily manipulated) citizens; he winds up being exiled, turning his back on Rome and allying himself with the enemy he defeated. (The bankrupt Timon turns his back on Athens when his fair-weather friends won’t lift a finger to help him and goes to live in a cave.) In Josie Rourke’s economically staged production of Coriolanus for London’s Donmar Warehouse – recently transmitted on HD in the NT Live series – the protagonist is played by Tom Hiddleston, and his performance, which grows in depth and stature as the evening wears on, is the best reason to see the show. Toward the end of the second half Coriolanus’s mother Volumnia (Deborah Findlay), who has come with his wife Virgilia (Brigitte Hjort Sørensen) and their little boy (Joe Willis) to beg him to reconsider his abandonment of Rome, makes a long speech to which Coriolanus listens without answering her or even moving from his spot. Findlay, whose performance is so hambone it verges on camp, wails and whines; after a while I stopped paying attention to her and focused entirely on Hiddleston, who conveys the influence of her pleas in the tension of his body and the way his face struggles to remain taut and unmoved while his tears betray him. It’s a small but potent acting lesson in the effectiveness of stillness and understatement.