Spectator Life

With the recent Netflix release of Jake Gyllenhaal’s nordic-inspired The Guilty, as the nights draw in, what better time for a smorgasbord of films from the land of the midnight sun?  The Guilty is a remake of the 2018 Danish film of the same name about a troubled 911 operator who attempts to come to the rescue of a distressed caller.  Since the literary, TV and movie phenomenon of Nordic Noir first broke out from its Scandinavian confines in the 2000s, the genre has become an established part of UK culture, along with cosy lifestyle cousins hygge, lagom and lykke.

So, is it farewell to the Friends Cat Grooming Car playset with Kitten, and the Disney Princess Ariel, Belle and Cinderella set? And what about Olivia’s Electric Car toy, Eco Education Playset? Or the Ninjago Legacy Fire Dragon Attack? Or the City Great Vehicles Refuse Truck? Lego, you may have gathered, is to eliminate gender stereotypes from its products, including labelling that marks toys for boys or girls. Look up Lego for boys or girls on Argos or similar, and you’ll see the full horror of what that entails. The girls’ stuff has a pink or mauve element plus a kitten or a princess or a castle or a hairdresser (though the Eco Education set has its very own wind turbine).

As soon as he had beaten Deontay Wilder last weekend, Tyson Fury gave thanks “to my Lord and savior Jesus Christ”. He said that he was going to pray for his fallen opponent. He has said that when he was recovering from depression and mental illness he “couldn’t do it on [his] own” and got down on his knees to ask God for help: I went down as a four hundred pound fat guy but when I got up off the floor after praying for like twenty minutes...I felt like the weight of the world was lifted off me shoulders. Most media reports glossed over these (admittedly eccentric) expressions of Christian piety, but the clips of Fury praising Jesus for his victory went viral for good reason.

The news that Russia has beaten Tom Cruise and NASA in the latest bout of the space race – by sending actress Yulia Peresild and director Klim Shipenko to the International Space Station to film a movie – almost certainly heralds a pointless new low in cinema. Just like the difference between erotica and pornography, we all know that you don’t need to go in to space to shoot a film about it. In fact, it’s almost certainly better if you don’t. I’m all in favour of method acting ­– whether it’s Timothy Spall sporting a paintbrush for his role in Mr Turner or Adrien Brody getting to grips with Chopin for The Pianist – but propelling actors into space defies the principal purpose of the space movie.

If No Time to Die and the inevitable 007 re-runs on ITV haven’t already sated your appetite for Bond-style espionage thrills, there’s a veritable smorgasbord of spy movies available to assuage your hunger. Some of the actors who portrayed Bond also essayed secret agents of a different stripe, with Sean Connery (The Russia House), Pierce Brosnan (The Tailor of Panama), Daniel Craig (Munich, Archangel) and Timothy Dalton (Permission to Kill, The Rocketeer) all dabbling in non-007 cloak and dagger roles. For such a long-lasting and successful franchise, it’s perhaps odd that the producers (Eon) haven’t yet contrived to release any 007 film spin-offs.

Every few days some celebrity ninny will call for the scrapping of marijuana laws, saying that it will take the drug out of the hands of criminal gangs. And all kinds of conservative-minded people will gravely nod their heads at the idea. But those looking to condone cannabis use through the law should think about the consequences of such a move. All crime is caused by law. If we had no laws, there would be no need for those expensive police, courts and prisons to enforce them. There would be no crimes. There would be no criminal gangs. But there would still be a lot of people doing stupid, wrong things. Decriminalising cannabis won’t make its impact on society any less potent.

 October plays host to one of my very favourite jamborees across the entire spectrum of the arts, namely the London Film Festival. One of the myriad joys of an arts festival is the tantalising opportunity it offers to deviate from our cultural strait and narrow and try something out of the ordinary. We can rest easy in our festival wanderings, knowing that everything has been curated by experts in the field. Under this reassuring aegis of selection, we find ourselves emboldened to roam far and wide, often encountering en route the very artists who have made the work, as festivals love nothing better than to offer a Q&A in congenial surroundings.

Denis Villeneuve's eagerly awaited remake of Frank Herbert's sci-fi novel Dune features a host of barons, dukes, and princes living under a Galactic Emperor. In his dystopia, Herbert depicts a highly stratified society of competing guilds, noble houses, human computer schools (‘Mentats’) and religious cults, with a Padishah Emperor playing them off against each other to retain his place at the top of the heap. Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) the son of a ruined Ducal house rises to become a Madhi-like figure on the planet of Dune, the only source of ‘Spice,’ a substance that both enables faster-than-light space travel and prolongs human life.

The tragic case of Gabrielle Petito attracted international interest for various reasons: the mystery of her disappearance, the double mystery of her boyfriend disappearing and, perhaps most significantly, the fact that the pair had been traveling together and documenting their journey on social media. People had an almost proprietorial interest in the case. Somehow, it belonged to the internet. Also relevant to the scale of the attention attracted by the case was the popularity of the ‘true crime’ genre.

Two years ago I tried to become a lorry driver. Everyone told me it wasn’t the right time, and I should have done it five years ago. 'It’s a mug’s game now,' they said. 'You’ll be sitting around waiting for a job.' Still, everything I ever did was five years past its prime - buying a house, visiting Prague, becoming a stand-up comedian; all these things were a joyful wild west five years before they occurred to me, apparently, so I wasn’t bothered about hoovering crumbs. I’d moved to Devon, the circuit had forgotten me and I needed something to do. Besides, I really love driving. Driving for me means freedom, but it was hard won. I failed my standard UK test twice and wondered if there was a country where passing is easier.

Something's in the air in Hollywood. It’s the whiff of A-list celebs who’ve given up washing. Jake Gyllenhaal recently revealed that, ‘more and more I find bathing to be less and less necessary.’ Cryptically, he added, ‘we naturally clean ourselves,’ without explaining how he keeps himself smelling of roses while avoiding soap and water. Hollywood’s new dirty dozen is said to include Brad Pitt and Ashton Kutcher. Kutcher and his wife Mila Kunis have said they ‘seldom’ take the trouble to bathe. Power-couple Dax Shepard and Kirsten Bell offered this stern warning to anyone on the brink of a morning shower. ‘You should not be getting rid of all the natural oil on your skin with a bar of soap every day.

Have you ever wondered what Vladimir Putin thinks when he watches a Bond movie? When the credits roll at the end, does he glance at his mobile phone and wonder if anyone else is listening? Does he stroke his cat and gaze meditatively at the wall-to-ceiling fish tank in his dacha and feel some unease? James Bond is made up – and everyone knows it. But just like The Crown, 007 has a habit of shaping global perceptions for better or worse. Why else did China  censor the Skyfall's Shanghai scenes and cut out references to torture by the Chinese authorities, however fantastical the plot may have been?

It's National Inclusion Week when we all come together to 'celebrate everyday inclusion in all its forms'. This year's theme is 'unity' where 'thousands of inclusioneers worldwide' are being encouraged to 'take action to be #UnitedForInclusion.' In the bewildering world of identity politics, however, there is one group of excluded individuals you won't be hearing much about. As a demographic, they suffer from all kinds of discrimination and yet social justice activists seem uninterested in their plight. Unlike oppressed minorities, this particular group may be in the majority and yet they garner little in the way of sympathy from anyone, barring their mums, perhaps.

And so to Whistling Straits, a venue with a name so ridiculous it could only be something to do with golf. The Ryder Cup is on us again, that biennial experiment to discover which overweight American is loudest at shouting ‘get in the hole!’ Golf shouldn’t be about artificial passion. Don’t get me wrong, the game itself is not without merit. For various work reasons I’ve spent a bit of time at professional tournaments, and the players are likeable, down-to earth people from ordinary backgrounds who just happen to be incredibly skilled at hitting a small ball into a small hole that’s far away. They’re as different as could be from the Bossy Accountant types who make amateur golf such a repugnant spectacle.

Most Brits will be aware of the Emmys, if at all, as the event that this year generated lots of social media outrage because apparently all the celebrities should have worn masks but didn't. But few will have any idea who won or who was even nominated: unlike the Golden Globes or the Oscars, they too often seem to feature shows we've never heard of on American TV networks with lots of acronyms.

This week’s biggest social media panic that isn’t about Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s balls comes to us from the Wall Street Journal, in a bombshell report titled ‘The Facebook Files.’ According to WSJ reporters, a trove of internal documents from the secretive social media company reveals that, despite much protest (and congressional testimony) to the contrary, Facebook’s executives know better than anyone that their platform is a place of chaos and social destruction. The multi-part series digs into everything from content moderation to curb ‘anger’ to Facebook’s efforts to promote the COVID-19 vaccine.

BBC2’s mid-19th century Arctic whaling drama The North Water is earning critical praise for its gruelling depiction of seafaring life above the 66th Parallel. Murder, deceit, starvation, shipboard homosexuality (willing/unwilling), cannibalism (or at least hints of it in The North Water), an irate polar bear and deliberately scuttled ships feature in the drama. If you’re thinking that the scenario of The North Water sounds familiar, you’d be right, as these elements were all present in season one of The Terror (2018, AMC), which was finally shown earlier this year, also on BBC2.

One of the great things about touring in the age of audio books, is that you can use your time driving between gigs, with nothing more to concentrate on than other half-tons of steel and rubber hurtling down 'Smart' motorways at suddenly varying speeds, to really binge on reading. I’d long been meaning to expand my knowledge of George Orwell. I’m pretty familiar with his better, or at least better known, essays and I have of course regularly scaled his Two Last Peaks, Animal Farm, and 1984. I've read Animal Farm so often that it has become a sort of catechism, and if it had a tune I could probably sing it right through.

More than any other season, autumn brings to mind change. Perhaps it's the sense of letting something go. The movement of the seasons is present in New Zealand artist Angela Heisch’s first solo UK show at the Pippy Houldsworth gallery, entitled Burgeon and Remain. Her semi floral abstracts represent the peak of summer and her use of bright colours are a warm welcome before we head into a darker time of year. The limitless feel to these paintings suggests growth and change, provoking a playful engagement. Stepping closer to these conceptual forms, I want to leap inside them. They are interactive and dramatic with a curious sense of mischief to them. The repeated spinning symbols grow outwards and seem to communicate to each other like trees.

What is it about Westerns? They are the Chinese takeaway of film – they’re no one’s first choice, they haven’t been fashionable in living memory, and yet you never have to look too hard to find one. One might also compare Westerns to cockroaches or sharks; pre-Jurassic survivors who have seen off much mightier beasts time and again scuttling from the dark shadows after the latest apocalypse. So here’s a prediction: Hollywood’s finest will be dusting off their chaps and six-shooters in years to come, long after the present glut of comic-book led mega franchises have hung up their CGI leotards for good.

For those disappointed by the humorless and deeply earnest treatment of the contemporary campus experience in the 2020 TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, the new Netflix series The Chair will be a welcome tonic. Over its punchy six half-hour episodes, the show, co-created by the actress Amanda Peet and produced by her husband David Benioff, deals with the iniquities of contemporary university life. Its setting is Pembroke, a fictitious minor Ivy League campus somewhere in New England. The action is mainly seen from the perspective of the English department chair Ji-Yoon Kim, a Korean-American academic who fears that her promotion has been brought about through ‘diversity issues’, rather than merit.