Helena bonham carter

Monday

Amelia Butler-Gallie

Twenty-five years of Fight Club and American Beauty

Sound the alarm: hypermasc beefcakes all over the world have an anniversary to celebrate! Beware women, children and the effete, this year marks the twenty-fifth birthday of both David Fincher’s notorious psychodrama Fight Club, adapted from the debut novel by Chuck Palahniuk, and Sam Mendes’s equally notorious American Beauty, which has gone from Oscar-winning acclaim to being a punchline on chat shows and animated comedies alike. If you haven’t seen Fight Club, shame on you. Go to Hulu and binge away. Revel in its anarchic ludicrousness and head-to-head carnage; inhale the feculent atmospheres of Lou’s Tavern and Tyler’s dilapidated mansion house, all tied together through Fincher’s iconic desaturated color palette. It is all too easy to taste the blood, sweat and tears.

Fight Club

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

The generation gap over J.K. Rowling

I’ve often thought that a candid fly-on-the-wall documentary about the production of the Harry Potter films would be considerably more entertaining than any of the lackluster pictures themselves (Alfonso Cuaron’s excellent Prisoner of Azkaban duly excepted). Alan Rickman’s recent diaries suggest that the sets were unhappy, frantic places where actors were seldom allowed to create memorable characters and where the focus on the juvenile performers meant that one of the finest British ensemble casts ever assembled often functioned as little more than expensive set-dressing. Yet more than a decade after the final film, the actors continue to command headlines, some of which is thanks to Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling’s views on the trans issue.

Tuesday

David Prycejones

My debt to Royaumont

As ruins go, Royaumont is as good as any. French roads also being what they are, Royaumont is about 45 minutes from Saint-Denis, the cathedral in Paris where the kings of France are buried, and perhaps 20 minutes from Chantilly, where as much English as French is spoken on the racecourse. Beginning his reign in the 13th century, King Louis IX chose Royaumont as the site of one of the Cistercian abbeys he was building. Dying while on crusade in North Africa, he probably never saw what was reputed to be the most magnificent of all Cistercian abbeys in the whole country, the rival of Mont Saint-Michel or Fontevrault. Royalty notwithstanding, the Vatican singled him out for canonization.

royaumont