Cinema

Should we hop on a call? Let’s touch base. Let’s take this offline. Let’s circle back to your last slide deck. Let’s get those action items actioned by close of play. We need stakeholder buy-in. We need deliverables. We need to make sure you’re aligned with company culture. We’re concerned you’re not leveraging your core competencies. After careful consideration, management has made the difficult decision to terminate your contract. We’re committed to helping you with this transition. Corporate jargon is zombified language. These euphemisms and elisions are the soulless husks of words, meant to blunt the sharp edges of human emotion (sorry – ‘maintain professionalism’). And they often leave you feeling a sneaking sense of dread.

A three-hour Japanese epic about a classical performance art (kabuki) isn’t the easiest sell, I’ll grant you, but I’ll give it my best. Kokuho is multi-award winning. It is the highest grossing live-action film in Japan ever. It is sumptuously filmed. It is masterfully sweeping. The kabuki itself is stunning, so much so that you may one day wish to visit the kabuki theatre in Tokyo, although be warned: the shortest production is four hours. Some last all day. Looked at this way, you are getting off lightly here. I felt entirely immersed in a world I had known little about Directed by Lee Sang-il, and adapted from Shuichi Yoshida’s two-part novel, the film is a drama spanning 50 years.

Some time in the next few weeks, a great ocean liner will be lost at sea. One of the greatest, in fact. When the SS United States made its maiden voyage in July 1952, it was the last word in transatlantic liner design. In an age of ocean-going elegance, the ‘Big U’ was the newest, the sleekest and the swiftest. To this day, it holds the Blue Riband – the all-time record for the fastest transatlantic crossing by a passenger ship. Now, after five decades rusting in dock, and a series of unsuccessful preservation attempts, the United States is about to make its final voyage. Stripped of masts, fittings and its massive red, white and blue funnels, it will be towed out and sunk as a diving reef off the Florida coast. It’s heartbreaking to admit that this might be for the best.

For someone who has directed two of the three highest-grossing films of all time – and if we include Titanic in the mix, three of the top five – James Cameron struck an unusually modest figure at this week’s premiere Avatar: Fire and Ash. When asked at the screening whether its inevitable box-office success would result in the planned fourth and fifth films being produced, the erstwhile King of the World responded “I’m not even thinking about four. Are you kidding me? I'm unemployed right now.” Admittedly, Cameron’s definition of “unemployed” is rather different to that of most people, whether they be A-list directors or the less fortunate.

Slavoj Zizek        Hegel thought that, in the movement of history, the world spirit passes from one country to another, from the East to the West. Something similar happened at the beginning of the 21st century: the world spirit passed from cinema, the art of the 20th century, to the TV series.

At the receptionist’s desk in Cosprop’s studio and costume warehouse, a former Kwik Fit garage, the sloping bleakness of Holloway Road is held at bay by a small chandelier, brassy lighting and a bound guest book. It’s a bit stagey, like a filmset for a cheap foreign hotel or an expensive shrink’s office, quite out of place in the real north London high street. But as the entrance to a costume house that builds worlds and people out of bits of fabric, feathers and jewels, it’s appropriate. Suspend all disbelief, ye who enter here. Cosprop was founded by the costume designer John Bright in 1965.

The third and supposedly final Downton Abbey picture released in American cinemas this Friday. Ominously subtitled The Grand Finale – oh how I wish, given the residual camp elements within the show, that it had instead been called The Final Curtain! – it supposedly wraps up the story of the Grantham family, the privileged idlers who inhabit the eponymous grand house, and their unusually devoted and long-serving staff, all of whom converse with their superiors on easy and intimate terms that bear precisely no relation to how the English upper classes have ever spoken (or been spoken to) by their servants in history. Still, if you’re looking for historical accuracy from Julian Fellowes’ Downton, you are not going to find it.

A campaign is under way to rename the West End’s Duchess Theatre after the playwright Terence Rattigan. Supported as it is by the likes of Judi Dench and Rattigan Society president David Suchet, there’s evidently a desire to right a historical wrong. Author of classics such as The Browning Version, The Winslow Boy and Separate Tables, Rattigan was known for his poise, melancholy and restraint, all of which put him at odds with the coterie of upstart writers of the 1950s – still amusingly known as the Angry Young Men. It’s an oft-repeated chapter of theatre history that arch-kitchen-sinkers such as John Osborne made the environment virtually impossible for Rattigan to work in. Rattigan joked about it at the 1956 opening of Look Back in Anger.

Mickey 17 is the latest film from the South Korean writer-director Bong Joon-ho, who won an Oscar for Parasite and made Snowpiercer and Okja. It’s a dystopian sci-fi satire starring Robert Pattinson twice over (all will be explained) but while it initially kicks some decent ideas around, it eventually descends into a cartoonish, sub-Armando Iannucci comic caper with, as far as I could ascertain, nothing fresh to say. It’s not the biggest disappointment I’ve had in my life but it’s up there. The film is set some time in the future and Pattinson plays Mickey 17, a crew member on a space-colonisation mission who, in the opening sequence, has fallen into a deep crevice on the ice planet that is Niflheim. (I’ve always had my reservations about Niflheim; ask anybody.

Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new opera Festen opened at Covent Garden earlier this month, and reader, I messed up. I broke my own golden rule with new operas: don’t do any homework, don’t try to memorise the plot, and whatever you do, don’t revisit the source material. The aim is to experience the new work on its own terms. That’s hard enough, given the PR onslaught that precedes any Royal Opera première – the way the classical establishment circles the wagons, and the unspoken consensus that certain living composers (including Adès, Benjamin and Turnage, though not Judith Weir, curiously) are simply too big to fail. But no: I rewatched Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 Dogme movie, twice, and it was the wrong decision. Inevitably, and unfairly, you cross-reference.