Film Review: Inside Out

I always feel a sense of relief when I see a new Pixar film for the first time. Or almost always; let’s not talk about CARS. Or CARS 2, for that matter. Their shtick is thorough, no-stone-left-unturned filmmaking. They turn every last stone, clean it, polish it and throw it away if it’s not good enough. They are the geologists of cinema, and, unlike geologists, everyone likes looking at their rock collection. So when I go to see a Pixar film, the perfectionist in me is anxious for confirmation that this sort of hyper-anal approach yields results. Pixar’s latest film INSIDE OUT has been in development for six years. Think about what you were doing six years ago. Unless you’re a medical student or an anchorite, chances are you’ve done a lot of different things in six years. Pete Docter hasn’t. He has spent all of those six years making just one thing really, really good. And it is, thank God.

The requisite Pixar opening short is a twee tale of volcanic romance based on a slightly weak lava/love pun, accompanied by a song on the ukulele that has been plinky-plonking away in my head ever since. C+. Then the film proper kicks off, and succeeds at the unenviable task of dispatching some quite technical exposition about the mechanics of the film at a pace brisk enough to stop you sliding into gloss-eyed vacancy. In brief: plucky 12 year old Riley experiences an existential crisis when her family move from wholegrain Minnesota to a new house in the terrible vegan badlands of San Francisco, and the film charts her psychological turmoil through the misadventures of her emotions, personified as little figures living in the physicalised landscape of her mind. Spot the Dog this ain’t.

It’s a shame that they decided to use the family dinner scene for the trailer, because it’s probably the least original and charming section of the film, relying on cheap, overused Men are from Mars type gags. On the whole, INSIDE OUT avoids cliché admirably, and conveys abstract emotional concepts with a light touch. All cruft has been excised from the script; everything is either a joke (and a funny one) or it’s a well-integrated plot device for use later on in the film, and more often than not it’s both. The interplay between the inner world of Riley’s psychology and the outer world of her life with her parents is also handled deftly; neither feels like a disappointing break from the other. And it looks gorgeous. Through some sort of 3-for-2 deal on dimensions at the cinema I went to, it was perversely cheaper to see the film in eye-gnawing 3D, but this turned out to be a rewarding accident. Time has been put into rendering the interior of Riley’s mind as expansively as possible, which is nice to look at when the near-infinite recesses of her cognitive terrain really do appear to recede from you.

Being Pixar, they get their pick of more or less whoever they want in the way of voice actors, and they picked well. Amy Poehler and Phyllis Smith are perfectly antithetical as Joy and Sadness, and Richard Kind’s loveable tones make even the potentially grating imaginary friend character Bing Bong delightful. I’ve since read that Kind was actually crying when he delivered one of the film’s most heart-wrenching lines, and at times watching this did feel a bit like being punched in the soul in the way Pixar have such a knack for. In fact, it was so moving that I started to wonder how much fun this film really is for children. I heard several blubbing infants in my vicinity at key moments of sentiment, and a friend reported to me that a five year old of her acquaintance had spent the whole 90 minutes squeezing his mother’s hand and saying he didn’t like how it made him feel. For a U-rated film, INSIDE OUT says some quite sobering things about the pain of growing up, and even veers thrillingly close to being about straight up depression. I defy any adult to see it and not do some serious navel-gazing about their own psychology, let alone a child. But, on balance, I imagine the film encourages self-reflection of a positive kind, and of a kind that children are probably not prompted to do enough by, say, MINIONS. INSIDE OUT could easily have been a clumsy hash at a convoluted, smart-arsed idea. But not with Pixar behind the wheel. Good old Pixar. Well done you.

Fiction review: Wake Up, Sir! – Jonathan Ames

Wake Up, Sir! By Jonathan Ames – Review

Wake Up, Sir! wears its identity as a P. G. Wodehouse homage on its sleeve, not least by the choice of title. But with sexual dysfunction, casual drug use, and crabs spreading like wildfire, we are a long way from Totleigh Towers.

Jonathan Ames’s novel was first released across the pond in 2004, but is finally making its UK debut this year. In America, Ames has gained a cult following for his graphic novel The Alcoholic and for penning the HBO series Bored to Death, starring Jason Schwartzman. Over here, however, he is still something of an unknown quantity.

Wake Up, Sir! follows the misadventures of a troubled young novelist, Alan Blair, and his personal attendant named, you guessed it, Jeeves. Much like his namesake, Ames’s valet is forever wafting in and out of rooms, which in Wodehouse conveys Jeeves’s peculiar blend of ubiquity and discretion, but in Ames it leaves you wondering whether the gentleman’s gentleman might be a figment of his master’s addled imagination. And addled it certainly is; where Wooster was getting squiffy at the club and stealing policemen’s helmets, Ames’s hapless protagonist is getting stratospherically baked and pretending to be leading an extra-terrestrial mission in a 50s B-movie, wondering  “I don’t know if they have sergeants in the navy, but maybe they have them in space navies’.

Ostensibly, the plot charts Alan Blair’s departure from his Aunt and Uncle’s house in New Jersey after they threaten to send him to rehab for alcoholism, and his time at the Rose Colony, an artists’ retreat in upstate New York. Blair, whose default response to a difficult situation is to plot a way to kill himself, is steered gently away from the various rocks that the Rose Colony presents by a placid, affable Jeeves.

As a devotee of Wodehouse, I approached this book with a measure of scepticism, but I was pleasantly surprised. Ames is every bit the rightful heir to Wodehouse’s legacy of razor-sharp turns of phrase and acutely funny social observation; on his arrival at the Rose Colony, after being checked in by a softly-spoken receptionist, Blair confides to the reader that ‘People who speak in whispers are almost always insane. They want to draw you near so they can kill you.’ Ames’s novel has great deal of charm and wit, which only occasionally strikes one as overly self-conscious, where puns are stretched a touch too thin: ‘Jeeves was showing a great deal of sangfroid at the sight of my dried sang’.

As it wends on, the novel goes from very funny to funnier still, and the latter half particularly is laden with quotable lines. On his affection for dogs and letters, Blair reflects: ‘Unfortunately I have very little contact with dogs and receive almost no letters. I should probably start correspondence with a dog pound and combine the two pleasures’. But Ames does not restrict himself to the humdrum jollies that we expect from a classic Jeeves narrative – be warned, Wake Up, Sir! is, in places, absolutely filthy.

One of the greatest strengths of Ames’s prose is his knack for descriptions of people’s appearances; the passage outlining the swollen, orange Dr. Hibben in his eye-popping seersucker suit is a real treat. Ames’s residents of the Rose Colony are expertly drawn caricatures, from a chronic masturbator and clammy-palmed neurotic to a proud but emotionally fragile poet. He has taken evident fun in naming his cast of misfits, not quite at the vaudeville level of Cyril Bassington-Bassington or Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, but Alan Tinkle, Reginald Mangrove and Sigfrid Beaubien are all pleasingly daft.

Blair himself is a Woody Allen-esque figure: well-meaning but depressive, quintessentially Jewish and intensely likeable even in his prejudices. Ames’s protagonist devotes lines and lines to his contemplation of something he vaguely calls ‘The Homosexual Question’, and finds his mind drifting during a moment of passion to the possibility of his contracting AIDS through the cut on his broken nose. However, one feels that these concerns come from a place of naivety rather than malice.

The only notable misfire was the sex scene, ever the challenge for an author, which was a little squirm-inducing, not least for Ames’s having plumped for ‘her sex’ as a euphemism for ‘vagina’, surely one of the least palatable options. He does better when the offhand absurdism of Blair’s interior monologue creeps back in: ‘Her breasts, like giant eggs-over-easy, lay on her chest. That might not sound appealing, but I happen to love eggs.’

Yes, it’s obvious as an anxious novelist to write about an anxious novelist. But Ames’s writing is so funny and well-executed that you cannot resent him this easy target. Writing a Jeeves story for the modern era could easily be a shallow, if amusing, pursuit, but Ames’s novel elevates itself above the level of mere parody. There are a clutch of moments that are genuinely, and unexpectedly poignant. Blair’s account of the rituals he performs to feel closer to his dead parents is sincerely touching, and all the more startling for its appearance among the daftness and ribaldry of the rest of the novel. It reminded me of the pronounced effect produced when somebody who is usually sarcastic suddenly comes out with something sincere. One line that has stayed with me in the days since finishing Wake Up, Sir! captures so succinctly the awful pushmi-pullyu of heartbreak:

[I] wanted to ask for a second chance, but more than that I wanted to do whatever she asked of me, and she was asking me to become a stranger, so that’s what I would do.

The novel’s comedy also deflects attention from what is actually quite a realistic (and, one suspects, drawn from life) depiction of alcoholism; the cycle of hopeful resolution, temptation, relapse and self-loathing.

Jonathan Ames has done that rare thing of producing a pastiche that exceeds the status of an imitation. It is undeniably Wodehousian, not to mention Rothian, but it has enough individual character to support its own weight. The ending of Wake Up, Sir! leaves ample room for subsequent instalments in the narrative (from this you can infer that Blair does not, in fact, get round to killing himself), and I for one would welcome them.

Film Review: Insurgent

For the uninitiated, here is a potted history of the DIVERGENT universe. The action takes place in a post-apocalyptic city, in which the citizens are divided into 5 factions according to their personality types: Candor, Dauntless, Amity, Abnegation and Erudite (pronounced ‘Eryudite’, in a way that is peculiarly maddening). There is, it then transpires, a further category called ‘Divergent’, which refers to somebody who doesn’t slot neatly into any of the factions. Divergents are considered dangerous for reasons not too closely examined, and they become the targets of a manhunt by the movie’s lead baddie: ice queen and power-dresser Janine (Kate Winslet). Our heroine Tris Prior is, of course, one such person.

So, there are five groups of people to follow, which isn’t too difficult in the first instalment because each faction wears different types of clothing. But by the time the action of INSURGENT takes place, the faction system has broken down, and everyone is busily disguising themselves as people from other factions. This is incredibly confusing. The problem is greatly exacerbated by the proliferation of scenes that take place in sinister simulations and people’s dreams. INSURGENT suffers from that classic problem of the difficult second film in a trilogy, in that you do need to have seen the first one pretty recently in order to follow what’s going on. As a result, there is a glut of expositional dialogue about the faction qualities, which gets old fast.

In many ways, this is typical dystopian teenage whiffle; a special girl realizes she is truly special because she has emotions and can kick people. Hey, Katniss Everdeen. Like her Hunger Games counterpart, Tris Prior spends a lot of time running around in forests, having emotional showers and saying things like “I never wanted any of this”. In fact, a good deal of the dialogue could appear in any young adult action movie of the last decade: “You can’t protect everyone”, “I’m not as strong as people think”, “We need to find that very special one”, yada yada yada.

The majority of the film is taken up with Tris and her cohort simply moving between different places, usually by jumping on and off moving trains which this franchise has an inexplicable fetish for – along with people getting stuck in the neck with needles. It would not be an exaggeration to say that someone gets injected with something in or near their neck every 10 minutes in INSURGENT. This is matched in frequency only by the occurrence of fistfights, which are admittedly quite bad-ass on the whole.

(SPOILER ALERT)

By the close of play, we discover that the city in which they live (isolated from the outside world by a scary wall which for some reason nobody seems at all curious about) was an experiment designed to save the rest of the world from some unspecified end-of-days horror that has taken place. The Divergents are the key to earth’s salvation. Somehow. The logic of the film is even washier than you expect from this sort of movie. “I know it doesn’t make any sense, but you have to trust me”, says Tris to her troubled-but-sexy boyfriend Tobias. They really missed a trick in not using this as the film’s tagline. What was the ‘experiment’? To create Divergents, or by their real world name, well-rounded people, by making conditions as difficult as possible for them to exist? How is it supposed to work? How do the simulations work? Why do people in the simulations look like they’re sitting in an inflatable pool chair that hasn’t been blown up properly?

INSURGENT is noticeably a middle movie of three, but it isn’t as bad as it could have been. The performances are universally solid, including a turn from WHIPLASH star Miles Teller, and there is enough advancement of the DIVERGENT plot here to keep one interested.

@ImogenWK

Film Review: The Theory of Everything

THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING is British cinema’s latest glossy biopic, based on the recently published memoirs of Stephen Hawking’s first wife, Jane. It’s an attractive subject matter for a film: science meets emotion in the face of adversity, and you can almost feel the self-satisfaction radiating from the screenplay writer in the neat opening dialogue about the ‘physics of love’. This is the binding metaphor of the film, and they set it up nice and early. The film gets off to a slightly rocky start, partly down to the necessity for some clichéd footage of Cambridge students having a jolly old time on their bicycles and some uninspired sequences of them standing in front of chalkboards, frowning at some Very Hard Maths.

As the film goes on however, characterisation becomes one of THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING’s stronger suits; several well-observed moments demonstrate the depth of thought that has gone into this, for instance Jane’s compulsive checking of her clip-on earrings at the Cambridge ball she attends with Hawking in the early part of the film. Although, the film does fall into the trap of clumsy signposting on a couple of jarring occasions; Stephen’s response to Jane’s impassioned admittance of love for him is ‘That’s a false conclusion’. We get it, filmmakers: Stephen Hawking is a scientist.

The film feels long, and I suspect this wasn’t a clever symbol for the improbable onward march of Steven Hawking’s own lifetime; an improbability that the film glazes over for reasons I couldn’t discern. The question of how Hawking stayed alive so long after his initial prognosis of 2 years to live is unanswered in the film, a head-scratcher second in magnitude only to who, out of Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne, has the bigger teeth. The issue that niggled the most in the film however, was the depiction of Jane as wife. Perhaps because they’ve made the film while Hawking is still alive to see it, THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING fell short of a genuinely insightful portrayal of the difficulties experienced by carers of the severely disabled. You do feel sorry for Jane, raising three children and being sole carer for her husband, but there was a lot more that the film could have said about her struggle, given that it focused so tightly on their relationship.

Eddie Redmayne’s performance is rightly lauded. There were in fact no weak links in the cast, but Redmayne achieves the impossible in making his portrayal of Steven Hawking at the nadir of his physical capability touching, believable and, importantly, watchable. I can’t be the only person who harboured Simple Jack-type foreboding before seeing the film itself. Although the film fails to go deep enough on certain key issues, it powerfully conveys the helplessness of losing control of your own body, aided by numerous slow, painful shots of Hawking attempting to perform everyday tasks.

There have been a number of inevitable comparisons to THE IMITATION GAME, but the comparison feels a little trite. Aside from the obvious thematic similarity of brilliant scientist with personal difficulties, the films take completely different approaches. THE IMITATION GAME is first and foremost a pseudo-thriller about World War II espionage, and secondarily a biography. THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING is a much more line-toeing, traditional account of a famous person’s life. And perhaps this is my gripe with the film, insofar as I have one: it slots too neatly into its genre. If you were to strip the film down to its bare structure, it could be any one of a host of weepy biopics: early years, emergence of their brilliance, life-changing event, beginning of personal love story, personal love story suffers due to life-changing event, gaining success and fame at cost of personal love story, love story breaks down at peak of success and fame, close with goose-bump inducing speech demonstrating person’s greatness.

That said, THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING is a supremely good example of this familiar format. Where it means to make you shed a tear, it succeeds; you laugh when it wants you to, and those all-important goosebumps are duly induced. It does what a good biographical film should do; it leaves you with a deeper understanding of a famous figure as a vulnerable human being, and for that reason alone it is worth seeing.

@ImogenWK

Film Review: Fury

David Ayer’s latest film follows grizzled Sergeant Don “Wardaddy” Collier (Brad Pitt), commander of a Really Big Tank and his gritty crew; Boyd “Bible” Swan, Trini “Gordo” Garcia, Grady “Nickname” Travis, and wide-eyed newbie Norman, played laudably by Logan Lerman. They are part of the American (distinctly not Allied) forces who strove towards Berlin in the final months of the WW2, and ‘Fury’ is the name of their tank. So far, so war movie.

How many films have been made about the Second World War by now? Not to mention acclaimed TV series like Band of Brothers and The Pacific. Countless. So what makes this one worth seeing? Well, for one thing, it nails ‘visceral’. We really feel the intensity of bitter aggression by 1945; there’s lots of nice earthy swearing, mud everywhere, and some truly sensational violence. FURY is not a film to eat your dinner in front of. Burning men shooting themselves in the head, disgustingly realistic fight scenes, eye-gouging, mass shoveling of dead bodies, and that only accounts for the first half hour. One particularly appetite-scuppering scene sees new guy Norman cleaning off the blood and, grimly, even a sloughed off portion of face belonging to the last guy who held his job from inside the tank. The interior tank scenes are a marvel, and the claustrophobia of the space is done better than in any war film I can recollect.

There are some genuinely unusual scenes, including a sublime shot of an impending dogfight from beneath, and a brilliantly tense and awkward scene in which the American soldiers secure a home-cooked breakfast care of some terrified German women. Where the cinematic fare is less unexpected, it is still done excellently well. I noticed particularly that the scene in which Fury rolls into close-range battle with a German Tiger, featuring camera angles right down the muzzle of the tank gun, had people sitting in the seats behind me clutching their armrests and gurning with anxiety. Fury may be structurally baggy; before the major standoff scene that closes the film, there’s no build up of events, rather a series of unrelated missons for the tank gang to complete, but it works here where it wouldn’t in another film, because it helps to convey the terrible drudgery of war, the endless roll of combat to combat. Most notably of all, Shia LaBoeuf, thinly disguised by a moustache, surprised me by not ruining the film and, further than that, dare I say it, putting in a good performance. In many ways Ayer’s film succeeds in stretching above the vast canopy of war narratives on screen, each with their own operatic soundtrack, khaki-metal-soil colour palette and jaded sargeants. This is not easy to do.

There is, inevitably perhaps, the occasional resounding flop in the script; somehow Brad Pitt’s climactic verdict that ‘ideals are peaceful, history is violent’ doesn’t hit the aphoristic target it was supposed to. There should also be a universal veto on this interchange, which I could swear happens in every other action film: “Sargeant? I’m scared.”, “I’m scared too.” There is, however, a far more fundamental problem with Fury.

Displaced and exhausted German civilians traipse across the landscape. A starving woman picks meat off a warm, dead horse. Desperate child soldiers, recruited by Hitler in the last months of the war, surrender to the mercy of the Americans. Wardaddy, knowing that he must ensure his protégé’s survival, forces Norman to shoot a weeping German soldier in the back of the head. The message is clear: war is hell, for everybody, and humanity doesn’t come into the equation. Indeed, Wardaddy tells us himself “We’re not here for right or wrong”. OK. Got it.

How can it be, then, that by the end of this film, we are supposed to be rooting for the Fury team as they scream (and I am not paraphrasing) “Fucking Nazis!” and gun down row upon row of German soldiers? Wasn’t the whole point the lack of clearly defined goodies and baddies that, in reality, characterizes a war? That Brad Pitt’s character can only be an anti-hero, because there ARE no heroes? That the idea of a hero is rooted in concepts of right and wrong that, as he himself told us, do not apply? It is far from clear how David Ayer wants us to feel about any of this. Does he just want to do SAVING PRIVATE RYAN? Paint the Germans as evil Kraut bastards, hell-bent on the destruction of the earth? And then the final moment of inconsistency, in which an SS soldier’s mercy is the sole reason Norman survives the battle? This isn’t a case of falling between two stools, in some thought-provoking, morally ambiguous sort of way; it’s a case of jumping wildly between the two stools, and the result is unsettling viewing.

FURY ends up being an extremely American film, a fact that shows itself not least in the deeply earnest bible verse quotations. And as an extremely American film, it should not surprise us that duty in the face of danger and self-sacrifice for the greater good on the part of US soliders should ultimately be the theme. But it felt for a while like FURY wanted to say something a bit more exciting than that. Instead of sticking to its guns and saying that there is no right and wrong, Ayer’s film ended up saying something more like ‘there is no right and wrong, but Americans are more right than anybody else is’.

@ImogenWK

Film Review: Effie Gray

Frocks! Crockery! Antiquated facial hair! Another sumptuous period piece from the pen of Emma Thompson (SENSE AND SENSIBILITY), and this is truly a costume drama that deserves the name. We are presented with an endless parade of gorgeous 19^th century gowns in the softest of soft focuses, and I can only assume that a rabid milliner was let loose on set. EFFIE GRAY is a retelling of the relationship between John Ruskin (Greg Wise), Stones of Venice author and sub-Arctic cold fish, and his young wife Euphemia “Effie” Gray, played by Dakota Fanning. Fanning has apparently aged over the intervening years since her 2004 breakout role in MAN ON FIRE, but the casting of an only-recently-adult child star in the role of Effie is suitably skin-crawling. As the film wends on, their marriage reaches rock bottom, from whence Effie is finally rescued by the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais (Tom Sturridge), Ruskin’s portrait painter.

Thompson’s script is typically well-judged, and manages to avoid the ‘Idiot’s Guide To…’ feel that biopics sometimes make inevitable. Under her leadership, EFFIE GRAY flies its colours proudly as a feminist film, particularly through the character of Lady Eastlake, played (of course) by Thompson herself, who asks Effie across the chatter of their husbands ‘Who are you when you are not “Mrs. John Ruskin”?’ The opening sections of the film feel like the unseen half of a Jane Austen novel, the part after the dashing, cravatted gent has slung a ring on his chosen gal, in which they actually have to be married for the rest of their lives, and in this aspect the film is at its most engaging. One of the best scenes sees Effie and Ruskin standing awkwardly in their garden, wondering ‘what do married people do?’. The script also edges nimbly around the famous, bawdier details of the Ruskins’ sexless marriage; John Ruskin’s real-life disgust at Effie Gray’s pubic hair is substituted for a more vaguely implied distaste for her naked figure.

In places the cinematography is stunning; the dark, claustrophobic lighting of the scenes in Denmark Hill do a good job of conveying the oppressive drawing-room monotony of Effie’s married life, paired with the encroachingly loud creaking floorboards as she drifts around the house in a state of total ennui. It would be too easy to paint (hur hur) John Ruskin as a monster; Thompson has made the more interesting decision to largely demonize Ruskin’s overbearing mother and father for his failings, rather than the man himself. There is an exquisitely bleak scene in which Ruskin has a furtive under-covers fumble, lying not two feet away from a wide-awake Effie that succeeds in making us feel deeply sorry for them both. Ruskin’s dastardly parents are played superbly by David Suchet, whose appearance sometimes made the film feel like an episode of Poirot centered on a mysterious proliferation of mutton-chop sideburns, and Julie Walters, being deliciously, downright horrid.

Unfortunately, the film rather loses its steam in the second half. I very much wanted not to find it a little boring and overlong, mostly because Emma Thompson is everybody’s favourite person and secretly-desired godmother figure, but Effie Gray does amble at a slightly dreary pace. Tom Sturridge made Millais seem less like a 19^th century painter and more like a modern day public school boy, but his introduction to the film comes as a welcome relief, just at the point when you think that if you have to watch another frosty domestic scene between the Ruskins you might just dissolve with tedium. There are just a few too many melancholy trudges through Scottish moorland, a few too many tense dinners of scraping soup spoons, and Dakota Fanning is, ultimately, slightly too wet a blanket to remain engaging over the course of the whole film.

If Effie Gray was a work of art, it would be a late-period Rothko: Bleakly beautiful to look at, but you wouldn’t want to look at it for 108 minutes. 

Effie Gray is out now on general release, certificate 12A, although I took a 12 year old with me on this viewing, who delivered the verdict that the film was ‘a bit rubbish’.

Film Review: The Riot Club

THE RIOT CLUB is the film adaptation of Laura Wade’s acclaimed 2010 play Posh, a story about a lavish dinner party thrown by fictional dining society and group of baddies The Riot Club. The change of name from stage to screen was in all likelihood an effort to make the film more accessible to, well, everyone who isn’t an Oxbridge graduate but, given the movie’s content, one wonders why they even tried.

The film follows Miles (Max Irons, the son that Jeremy Irons publically wondered if he could legally make his husband under new gay marriage laws) as he fops his way through his first term at Oxford University, tapping at his Macbook, having sweaty undergraduate sex in oak-panelled rooms and generally not winning us over in the way he was presumably supposed to. It became difficult to feel sorry for poor old super good-looking, privately-educated Miles as he inexplicably fails to do anything to protect his girlfriend from the film’s more unpleasant events, beyond making a chiseled/confused expression and asking his new pals ‘why are you doing this?’ over and over again.

A good job was done in casting – the club’s members are suitably loathsome, although one isn’t sure if Douglas Booth is doing any acting or is just naturally that smug looking. I suspect some kind of genius was behind the casting of Natalie Dormer as the prostitute, who looks eerily like a sexed-up version of the film’s Normal Gal heroine, Lauren, played by Holliday Grainger.

The whole thing feels like a P.G. Wodehouse-penned episode of Skins, with all the stilted dialogue of the latter, which is a little surprising given that Laura Wade wrote the screenplay. One particularly grievous example sees two giddy students on a roof while Alt-J (how young and cool!) fuels a shindig beneath them exclaiming that going to Oxford is like ‘being invited to 100 parties all at once’. Yuck.

That said, the film hits its stride in the second half, where the events and the script start to match the play more closely, and things take on a genuinely sinister and disquieting tone. Where Miles doesn’t quite pull on your heartstrings, Gordon Brown (no, not that one) as the painfully earnest pub landlord practically yanks them out of your chest with his hammy fists. So much greater is the strength of the second half that I was left doubting the need for building the slightly flat extra narrative around the pre-existing plot of the play at all.

THE RIOT CLUB will not, one thinks, be popular with Oxford University’s admissions department for making the place look like a nightmare of merlot and wankers, nor indeed with the current ‘Bullingdon Club’-spawned Cabinet on whose antics ‘The Riot Club’ is not-at-all based. But, if you like floppy haircuts, old building porn and soft class commentary, this is a film for you.

If THE RIOT CLUB was a soft drink it would be Diet Coke – not bad in and of itself, but not as good as its original format.

Hawkin’s Bazaar and the Very Sexist Christmas

I spent the Christmas before last with my father. My Dad is a man for whom buying presents has never been a natural skill; I recall one year when all my siblings received an identical mug in the shape of a meerkat’s head. Everyone loves a good meerkat, right? However, that holiday season, he gave me what is easily my most treasured Christmas present ever. Feeling anxious about what to get us all, my Dad enlisted the help of a company called Hawkin’s Bazaar, which made pre-filled stockings according to the recipient’s age and gender. My brother received the ‘Teen Male’ version, which contained cool, interesting things like small gadgets and puzzles. My sister got the gender neutral kids version. The one he, quite reasonably, selected for me was called the ‘Adult Woman’ stocking. I will now tell you what Hawkin’s Bazaar thinks Adult Women want for Christmas:

Item 1: Soap

The first item I pulled out, eyes misty with yuletide anticipation, was a bar of His ‘n’ Hers soap. The ‘His’ section was a sliver at the end of the bar, with ‘Hers’ written across the rest. I furrowed my brow at the naff joke, but oh well, I can always use more soap. Don’t want to stink my way into the new year.

Item 2: Flower seeds

I don’t do gardening, and my Dad looked over, furrowed his brow too and admitted that he hadn’t actually checked the contents of the stocking before giving it to me. But we laughed, and I carried on opening my gifts. Here, things took a turn for the ludicrous.

Item 3: A pair of washing up gloves

These were a gorgeous pink pair of Marigolds, but with a sexy, girly twist. They had fluffy (fluffy? Have these people ever washed dishes before? Fluff and dishwater are no fantasy pairing) cuffs, with little diamante embellishing around the words ‘Not just a scrubber!’ My Dad and I began to look visibly uncomfortable. My little sister asked me why I was sad, and if I might like to play with her Rubik’s cube.

Item 4: Lemon flavoured lip-balm.

Nothing wrong with lip-balm, I hear you say. Shiny lips are nice, stops them getting too dry, everything scoring a big fat ‘neutral’ on a litmus test for sexism here. All true. Except that it said ‘God, I’m so bloody blonde sometimes’ on the lid, next to a picture of a fifties housewife clutching her head in despair. Also the lip-gloss tasted like fairy liquid, which made it just that little bit more galling.

Item 5: A ‘Make your Own Glitter Mosaic’ kit.

Because sure, all a girl really wants is some sparkly rocks to stick on other sparkly rocks. Better make sure I do it with my new gloves on though, wouldn’t want to chip a nail! I looked over to see my brother pull out a remote control helicopter.

Item 6: A drawing pad

This was a 100 page doodling notebook containing pictures of buff men on which the nether regions had been erased. It was my job to re-provide these needy guys with their junk, using a fluffy pink pen helpfully provided. At this juncture, my Dad snatched the stocking off me and began trying to confiscate the more offending items.

Item 7: A ‘join the dots’ game.

In case I wasn’t satisfied with all the poorly drawn penises the last present would afford, Hawkin’s Bazaar had me covered: I could draw lines between numbered dots to create yet more genitals. Dad buries his head in his hands and begins muttering about needing to check on the pigs in blankets.

Item 8: A Terry’s Chocolate Orange.

My Dad put this one in himself, but fuck you “Terry”, take your patriarchal confectionary somewhere else! WHERE’S TERRI’S CHOCOLATE ORANGES, HUH?? Or something.

So, instead of compiling our own sexist selections of Christmas gifts like Neanderthals, why not let Hawkins Bazaar do the leg-work for you? With ‘New Contents for 2015’, this year’s stocking will be sure to thrill. My predictions include a gold lamé strip of Microgynon, and a plastic steering wheel that you can affix to the glove compartment of your husband’s car.

Theatre Review: Daniel Kitson’s Analog.ue

I first heard of Daniel Kitson at the Edinburgh Festival in 2011. I had never been before, had less than no idea about who or what to see, and would have gone to practically any show with a persistent enough flyerer. So, naturally, I asked more seasoned festivalgoers for their recommendations. And more often than not their given tip, whispered with wide-eyed reverence, was to try to get a ticket to see this man Daniel Kitson. I say ‘try’, because in 2011 Kitson’s Edinburgh show was a one-off, midnight gig in a cafe that went on until dawn. Because ‘trying’ involved standing outside in the bracing Scottish rain for several hours, I did not end up witnessing this fabled performance. But having seen ‘Analog.ue’, I wish profoundly that I had done.

His latest show comprises 90 minutes of a recorded story, which I will not ruin for you here, inter-cut with commentary and photographs documenting how the show itself came to be. The story is recorded on 30-odd reel to reel tape machines in segments, which have to be stopped and started in order for the story to flow. These tape recorders begin the show stacked up at the back of the deep stage space, and are painstakingly collected and positioned by Kitson in time for each new section of the story. It is a rather unusual format, for a rather unusual man. Sidling onto the stage at the National, Kitson cuts a very unlikely figure. He himself is silent, the only audio being his recorded voice, as he busies himself (and it certainly keeps him busy) with the mechanics of setting up each tape recorder, in between scratching his head over the machinery and taking sips from a cup of tea.

The story itself is full of perfectly rendered humdrum detail, funny without trying too hard to be so, with the bittersweet tone that audiences will recognise from Kitson’s other narrative shows. Analog.ue is both technically ambitious and oddly humble, and, although Kitson has trodden the boards at the National before in his show It’s Always Right Now Until It’s Later, its appearance in the hallowed bowels of the Lyttleton Theatre is a surprise in itself. The sensation of sitting in a dark room with 800 other people listening to the crackle and deep hum of a single tape recorder is quite startling. It was a sensation of which everyone became palpably more aware when a technical difficulty forced Kitson to do an on-the-fly repair job, leaving ten uninterrupted minutes of hush before Kitson broke his self-imposed vow of silence with a gentle ‘Um, I’m not sure what’s happened here.’

The use of the tape recorders, as befits its titular reference, is the focus of this show, which for the first half an hour teetered dangerously between genius and gimmick. I think it ended up falling on the former side, however I did harbour a small wish that Kitson had done just a little bit more with them. Having evidently put in the hard graft and hours of getting the tape recordings to work one after the other on each machine, it would have been a small step to experiment further with their capabilities; perhaps layering them in some way would have prevented the niggling feeling of repetitiveness that began to creep in towards the show’s close. But I am nit-picking, in a show that is overwhelmingly louse free.

I suppose Kitson is a comedian, however the term seems wanly limited in his case. This is because Daniel Kitson is a comedian who will do a surprise show over-night in a cafe for 6 hours. Daniel Kitson is a comedian who shuns television appearances because of a lack of creative control. And, apparently, Daniel Kitson is a comedian who will individually source and purchase dozens of ancient reel to reel tape recorders, in order to tell a story. All this makes Kitson difficult to categorize, but the fact that he straddles the boundaries between comedy, theatre and performance art with such unassuming confidence accounts for much of his appeal, an endearing vagueness that leaves you unsure of what you’ve just seen, but certain that you’re glad you saw it.