Arts Reviews

It may come as a surprise to anyone who has read Mick Herron’s peerless Slough House novels, but Slow Horses, Apple TV’s high-profile adaptation of the first book in the series, is not funny. Instead, it takes Herron’s uproariously comic premise — that a group of misfit British spies, cast out of MI5 for misdemeanors exaggerated and accurate alike, have been reduced to grubbing about in a grim office on the periphery of the City of London — and plays it almost entirely straight. Gone are the laugh-out-loud one-liners and endearingly witty pieces of throwaway badinage. Instead, we have a big-budget spy thriller, polished and scripted to within an inch of its life. It’s a bit like seeing the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air reinvented as a gritty urban drama.

All the way across the Atlantic, the British literary world has been seized by John Donne fever. Katherine Rundell’s biography of the metaphysical priest-poet has led to excitable chattering about his life and work. The book, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, will be released in the US in September — a significant enough delay as to make the Declaration of Independence look like a mistake. Aside from radically different publication dates (again: would you rather have lower taxes and freedom from George III, or a brilliant Donne biography?), the specter of the far-off American continent has long since loomed large in Donne studies.

The news that Bruce Willis is to “step away” — rather than explicitly retire — from acting following a diagnosis of the brain disorder aphasia, is sad for both personal and artistic reasons. Even as a flood of stories emerge about Willis’s erratic and unpredictable behavior on film sets over the past few years, it is a bitter irony that, after a lengthy career as the tough guy hero — in Armageddon, he defeated no less an antagonist than a planet-threatening asteroid — the actor has finally been undone by his own brain. The news also makes the recent receipt of Willis’s Golden Razzie “award” for his performance in Cosmic Sin particularly cruel, not least because he was “honored” with a special category, “Worst Performance by Bruce Willis in a 2021 Movie.

Writers have all sorts of hobbies. Tolstoy liked to play chess. Dostoevsky, as everyone knows, loved to gamble. Nabokov collected butterflies; Hemingway, wives. Eugene O’Neill’s favorite pastime was drinking. Flannery O’Connor, of course, loved birds. Emily Dickinson loved to bake. T.S. Eliot was an avid sailor. As a young man he regularly sailed along the shore of Cape Ann. One summer, Eliot and some friends sailed from Marblehead, Massachusetts to Mt. Desert Rock in a 19-foot knockabout in the fog and rough seas. It was a journey of well over 150 nautical miles and could have easily ended in disaster. The sea, of course, appears again and again in Eliot’s poetry.

Cancel culture has struck again, but this time its would-be victims aren’t apologizing. The Daily Mail — a publication notorious for being “free” with its own speech — is leading the anti-cancel culture charge this month with a series of stories that point to an encouraging trend. A handful of prominent creatives are standing up to woke bullies and noting the dangers (and impracticalities) of their demands, which essentially amount to writers and entertainers forsaking their imaginative talents by only addressing things they’ve personally experienced. Except they aren’t supposed to be candid about those things, either, as they might offend someone if they’re too honest.

There are few world leaders braver than Volodymyr Zelensky. Ukraine's president spends his time holed up in his capital, defending his homeland from an onslaught of invading Russian troops. He's addressed every major parliament in the West to plead for weapons and aid. Joe Biden calls him weekly; Emmanuel Macron has started to dress like him. Given his present international standing, it's incredible to think that just six and a half years ago, Zelensky was settling down to watch himself play the president of Ukraine in the premiere of Servant of the People, the sitcom which set the stage for his political career.

Star Trek: Discovery took one giant leap for the leftist ideology that defines it in its fourth season finale this week. Enter President Stacey Abrams, leader of the thirty-second century’s United Earth. Perhaps deliberately, the sci-fi show’s writers left viewers ignorant as to whether President Abrams was democratically elected to her fictional role. Star Trek’s democratic ideals, after all, seem poorly matched to a politician who lost an election and then claimed that it had been “stolen from the voters of Georgia.” No worries, however: Abrams’s future is bright. Concluding her cameo, Abrams asks Discovery’s star Sonequa Martin-Green, “there's a lot of work to do, are you ready for that?

In the three weeks since Vladimir Putin launched his shocking invasion of Ukraine, the West has surprised the world with the severity of the economic sanctions it's imposed. No one has been more surprised than Putin himself, who believed the West too soft and his own nation’s oil too crucial to the global economy. How the West can further support Ukraine — while also avoiding the not-insignificant risk of a nuclear war — is a complex question. It will not be answered, however, by indulging in ugly prejudices or shunning Russian culture writ large. Since the war began, vandals have targeted businesses that are Russian-themed or owned by Russian expatriates.

It is a depressing statement on the banality of the film industry that the death of actor William Hurt, at the age of seventy-one, was marked by at least one obituary stating, “Avengers star dies.” Hurt, who appeared in several Marvel films as the military character Thaddeus Ross in his latter-day career, did indeed appear in the mega-grossing Avengers films Infinity War and Endgame, and I very much hope that he received some tiny portion of the films’ enormous box office receipts in recognition of his appearance. But to describe Hurt’s life and work as defined by his Marvel roles reminded me of the great Alan Bennett line about his sexuality: “It’s like asking a man who has just crossed the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Evian water.

I receive a lot of books in the mail. Perhaps you do, too. Some of these I order. Most come from publishers or authors hoping for a review. A few are gifts. I prefer to buy books at used bookstores. You never know what they might have on hand, and there’s nothing better than discovering a gem of a book by a writer you’ve never heard of. Plus, the price is always right. Independent bookstores are great, too. I’m no snob. I bought a book just the other day at the gamified Barnes and Noble in town — the atrociously overrated Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman, who read at Joe Biden’s inauguration (more on that at some point, perhaps). But I prefer independent bookstores because, like at used bookstores, there’s an element of surprise in the store’s stock.

The life story of Madonna Louise Ciccone is one of the most interesting real-life narratives of any twentieth-century star. From her Michigan origins to her world-conquering career as "Queen of Pop" and her continual, Bowie-esque reinventions, she has lasted decades in a notoriously fickle industry through a combination of chutzpah, publicity savvy and talent, to say nothing of allying herself with some extremely talented collaborators along the way. "It’d make a great film," people have said repeatedly. But what they should have quickly added is, "But Madonna herself must not write and direct it." It is a problem that only people at the highest, Olympian levels of fame face, but nobody will say no to them, no matter how stupid their ideas.

I remember enjoying Murder on the Orient Express a few years ago, when I took refuge from a real-life blizzard in a Jackson, Wyoming theater to watch Kenneth Branagh’s decadent take on Agatha Christie’s snow-covered murder mystery. It was memorably cast with big-name talent (Johnny Depp makes one heck of a sleazy bad guy) and exquisite, if sometimes over-the-top, costumes and décor. If memory serves, the movie ended as a suspenseful and satisfying cinematic treat. Death on the Nile, not so much. Branagh teased his next adaptation of an Hercule Poirot novel at the end of Orient Express, but I found his second attempt wasn't worth the five-year wait.