Film review

The hotly anticipated second cinematic take on Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi classic Dune rolls into theaters this week. Billed as an adaptation and "not a remake" of the now infamous 1984 misfire by David Lynch, the new Dune arrives in two, two-hour-plus chapters. “Part I” is a marked upgrade from that butchered Lynch release (he lost creative control and the film was edited down to just over two hours). It's sharper, more conformable in its saga duds, and as you can imagine, the use of modern computer effects goes a long way to offset those cheesy sets and clunky models. Set some 8,000 years in the future in a galaxy far, far away, Dune, much like Star Wars (or is it Star Wars, much like Dune?

Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood is Quentin Tarantino’s most pleasurable film since the first installment of Kill Bill. It’s delightful pop esoterica, blending the sensational disposability of a pulp novel with an antique edition of Playboy filled with crackling cigarette ads you can practically inhale off the page. The film is a visual banquet with a daft machismo that puts Tarantino out of step with the marketing plans of today's priggish e-cigarette smoking snoots. Ultimately, Once Upon a Time... is a stylish fairytale where the two anti-heroes are a neurotic leather-clad TV cowboy named Rick Dalton (Leonardo Di Caprio in his funniest performance) and Cliff Booth, a sadistic and square-jawed drunk who feeds his dog canned slop, played by Brad Pitt.

Rock music is always so close to parody that the best and best known fictional film about a rock tour is This Is Spinal Tap. Rolling Thunder Revue, new on Netflix, is a rock documentary — a rockumentary, if you will — about Bob Dylan’s ‘Rolling Thunder’ tour of December 1975. Its producer is Martin Scorsese, who made The Last Waltz in 1976, when rockumentaries had yet to become mockumentaries by default. Really, it was the musicians who made The Last Waltz, and Scorsese who turned that material into not just one of the best concert films, but also a sharp-eyed study of musicians and the music business.

Tolstoy tried to write a history of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, but found that his story required the broader canvas of fiction. We like to think that fiction emerges from reality, and that a novel, which is as much as species of hallucination as it is a social document, might retain enough of its physicality to be, as we say of War and Peace,’realist’. But the traffic between fiction and reality goes in both directions. ‘What force moves the nations?’ Tolstoy asked in the philosophical coda that, returning fiction to history, he added to the end of War and Peace. The discipline of history, its reliance on facts, was at the heart of the Enlightenment.

Rory Stewart, who is awfully polite about wanting to be Britain’s next prime minister, has apologized for smoking opium while walking in Afghanistan. It was politeness that got him into trouble in the first place. Stewart says he felt it would have been rude not to take a deep drag on the pipe when it was passed around at the wedding he had wandered into, as one does when one is walking in Afghanistan. What happens in Herat stays in Herat, except of course, if one of your qualifications for the top job is your stint as Prisons Minister. Not a good look, as the Pashtun say. Jeremy Hunt, another ministerial candidate to replace Theresa May, has confessed to drinking mind-altering yoghurt when traveling in Asia.

About halfway through the Swedish space saga Aniara, I realized that there is no future. Or at least no alternative future for us in space. For a genre set in a distant future, space movies haven’t changed in decades. The limits of the form, and the techno-dystopian implications of the flight from reality, were mapped out in the Fifties and Sixties. The peak space movies were all made a long time ago: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff (1983), and Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 (1995).

To understand the differing status of the arts in Britain and France, compare the publishers in Bridget Jones’s Diary and Olivier Assayas’s new film, Non-Fiction. In Bridget Jones’s Diary, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) is an underwear-obsessed cad who gets his comeuppance when he is beaten up by Colin Firth. In Non-Fiction, Alain Danielson ruminates philosophically about what the ‘digital transition’ means for civilization, and indulges in plenty of Cleaver-style trifling with the staff, but gets away with both. We are reminded that ‘intellectual’ is a compliment in France but a dirty word in Britain, and that sex is dirty in Britain but intellectual in France.

Remember hygge, the Danish art of warding off existential horror by suffocating your fear and trembling beneath a soft blanket? The cult of coziness is a Scandinavian speciality. You too would insist on marshmallows in your hot chocolate if there was a howling blizzard outside your window — in May. You too would feel like making the best of living alone with a cat and a set of matching sofa pillows if you had no choice but to live alone like Agnetha from ABBA in ‘The Winner Takes It All’. It was a Dane, Søren Kierkegaard, who wrote Fear and Trembling. This is not a novel set in a Danish dinner party, but a reflection on patriarchal authority and the uses of religious despair.

American conservatives don’t usually like Marxist guerrillas, but they make an exception for the Kurds. So do American socialists. The further left you go, the more you feel the burn of contempt for the Kurds, until eventually you go far enough left to find yourself in the company of those who support the Kurds’ enemies. Our friends on the left have principles, you know. It isn’t sufficient to survive genocidal attacks and build a gender-neutral people’s militia. You have to hate America and Israel too. A bit of Islamist zealotry doesn’t go amiss either, for the decadent Western nostril is happy to mistake the stink of Islamism for the red rose of socialism.

Nietzsche trained as a cavalryman, but injured himself attempting an unorthodox dismount. His last public act was to throw himself sobbing around the neck of a flogged horse in Turin. In the decades after the philosopher was carried to the asylum, we put horses out to pasture. Our constant companions, first domesticated on the Eurasian steppe some four- to six thousand years ago, were displaced by a new symbol of mobility and freedom, the internal combustion engine. In Farewell to the Horse (2017), the German historian Ulrich Raulff identifies the moment we abandoned our real four-legged friend as the moment we became modern — which is to say, lost amid freedom. If Americans are more lost than most, it is because they have more freedom than most.