Culture

Women get paid less in Hollywood. Surely the budget for the female variation on Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Thirteen could have stretched to Ocean’s Twenty? Still, Gary Ross’ crime caper is right on the money. The franchise remains familiar — perhaps too familiar — but Ocean’s Eight feels fresh, with its gender-flipping of Rat Pack clichés, and an ensemble strong enough to ensure that there are at least two good female leads on the screen at any one moment, and never a man in sight. Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock) is the sister of the late Danny, George Clooney’s character in Ocean’s Eleven and Thirteen.

Niall Ferguson’s decision to disengage with students and their politics is wrong. While such a statement may bring glee to those on the left and may displease Ferguson himself, Ferguson’s reaction to his admitted bad judgement involving Stanford students is deeply problematic. Specifically, after being caught suggesting some fairly unethical behaviour regarding his engagement with students, Ferguson penned a response in The Sunday Times where he stated that he learned a few lessons from his work with these Stanford students. Included in these lessons was the idea that “Student politics is best left to students” and as such, he is returning to his ivory tower – tweed jacket on – and “retreating to my beloved study. It is time to write another book.

Back in the mists of prehistory, when I was eight, dinosaur films followed a set pattern. The dinosaurs themselves would be cheerfully unpalaeontological; women would wear improbable outfits; volcanoes would explode. Then, in 1993, courtesy of Steven Spielberg, came a sea-change. Jurassic Park was that cinematic rarity: a science fiction film that succeeded in influencing the science it was fictionalising. The story of a theme park populated by resurrected dinosaurs, it offered a portrayal of Mesozoic fauna that was as close to authentic as could then plausibly be achieved. For the first time, computer-generated imagery was used to portray dinosaurs as scientists had come to envisage them: agile, bird-like, smart. The impact was profound.

Leon Vitali is an actor who passed through the looking glass of Stanley Kubrick’s camera and became Kubrick’s right arm. When the documentary film maker Tony Zierra discovered Vitali’s story while investigating Kubrick’s final, flawed film, Eyes Wide Shut, he decided to first make a film about Vitali, who is sixty-nine and not in good health. This is only fair, as Kubrick took over Vitali’s life, admittedly with Vitali’s consent. Kubrick is an object of worship to film lovers and the people who merely work in film. The critics have tended to go along with the cult, though Pauline Kael and Roger Elbert both expressed strong reservations.

Lucky bastard. Such are the words that come constantly to mind while you’re reading Clancy Sigal’s two volumes of posthumously published autobiography. Blacklisted as a (self-confessedly lousy) actor for refusing to name names in the McCarthy era, working as the agent for the likes of Peter Lorre, Rod Steiger and — sigh — Barbara Stanwyck in 1950s Hollywood and freelancing on Fleet Street in countercultural London (including reviewing films for The Spectator), Sigal was at the centre of every piece of action going. Should Black Sunset and The London Lover ever be gathered into a single volume (perhaps taking Sigal’s earlier memoir, Going Away, along for the ride), ‘Been there, done that’ would make a good catch-all title.

The film awards season is over and Cannes has been handed back to wealthy holiday-makers, yet the #MeToo movement shows no signs of slowing down. Morgan Freeman is the most recent addition to the ignominious list of film producers, directors and actors who have had accusations of sexual harassment made against them since #MeToo took off in October last year.Allegations against the 80 year-old Freeman, star of The Shawshank Redemption, emerged last week on the day before Harvey Weinstein handed himself into police in New York on charges of rape. The charges against Weinstein are serious; he should stand trial and, if found guilty, face a lengthy prison sentence.

‘I’m bipolar and have ADHD and multiple personality disorder,’ Roseanne Barr once said. ‘But they’re now all in remission due to the powerful drugs I smoke.’ In the same interview, Barr described herself as ‘on the autism spectrum’, and said, ‘I talk directly to God within my own mind and need no intercessor.’ Clinically speaking, Barr is as mad as a bag of badgers. Professionally speaking, disinhibition is no handicap in a comedian, and frequently mistaken for honesty. Socially speaking, she is the kind of person compelled to share her madness. She is the kind of person who was born for Twitter, and consequently should wear a pair of thumbless gloves whenever she is online.

Even the most cursory glance at the classical period reveals the central place that birds played in the religious and political lives of the two key Mediterranean civilisations. Their gods, for example, were often represented in avian form, so that the Athenian currency bore an owl image, which was intended as a portrait of the city’s patron, Athene. ‘Owls to Athens’ was a proverbial expression, much like ‘coals to Newcastle’. From North Africa to the shores of the Black Sea there are still Greek temples dedicated to Zeus that are topped by weathering stone eagles as symbols of their supreme deity, while the imperial legions of Rome fought under an eagle standard for much the same symbolic reasons.

‘That was some weird shit,’ George W. Bush is said to have muttered after Donald Trump’s desolate inauguration speech of January 2017. ‘I couldn’t have agreed more,’ wrote Hillary Clinton in What Happened. Americans cannot agree on what has happened to their country, other than that everything has gone wrong. Is it ‘white supremacy’ and patriarchy, or the collapse of the white working class and the decay of patriotism? The symptoms too are polarized, beyond mutual comprehension. The leading cause of young black male deaths is murder, but the leading cause of young white male deaths is suicide. The weirdness of these linked statistics has a common source.

Ronan Farrow is currently the most wonderful wunderkind in the United States, at least on the Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. Former news chat show host for the MSNBC network, Rhodes Scholar and former foreign service officer, recent winner of a Pulitzer Prize for exposés on nasty sexual misconduct which brought down both Harvey Weinstein and the attorney general of New York, author of a new book of foreign policy deep thoughts and gossip. And all at age thirty and half! Not only does Farrow embody the anti-Trump zeitgeist right now, he has a freehold on the future, whether inside the next Democratic administration or in broadcast media. His ma is Mia Farrow; his paternity, complicated.

During a dozen years in Belfast I collected a number of political coffee mugs, hailing from both sides of the divide. Unionist designs including the heartbreakingly punctuated ‘Ulster Say’s No’ (not merely to the Anglo-Irish Agreement; no to everything) and the impressively witty ‘Reservoir Prods’: four toughs in shades identified as ‘Mr Orange’ and ‘Mr Boyne’, etc. The republican mugs exhibit no such sense of humour, which won’t surprise you. Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams stare sternly from their porcelain. Worse, the mugs from the Sinn Fein bookshop are cheaply decorated with decals, which are less robust than the inked unionist ones, and tend to melt in the dishwasher.

Here in the English-speaking world, the hours after work and before dinner are known as the ‘reverse commute’. We spend these hours standing on trains, sitting in cars, or pedaling for our lives. Over there in France, these hours are called the ‘cinq à sept’. Although they may also involve being pressed up against other people, the sequence of postures is different. Strange, then, that so many skilled workers have left France. Stranger, still, that so few skilled foreign workers have moved there. You’d think they’d be banging at the door. Isabelle, the heroine of Claire Denis’ Let the Sunshine In, is so committed to the ‘cinq à sept’ that she does it round the clock.

It’s quite commonplace now to say that people’s lives and careers have been ruined by #MeToo ‘witch-hunts.’ But witches weren’t ever real; sexual assaulters are.Like many women, I love the idea of Me Too as a relay of shame; that every victim who stands up and names what happened passes on the blame to an assaulter who will have to remember that he was so undesirable he felt it necessary to force himself on someone who didn’t want him – feel the fear and pass it on!In most cases that hasn’t happened. The big ugly New York ones – Weinstein, who conveniently looks like the archetype sweaty sex-pest and Eric Schneiderman, the ghoulish attorney general – are thrown overboard. The younger, prettier ones have basically got away with it.

The HBO program Silicon Valley has a recurring joke. Every time some eager young Zuck pitches a business idea, he caps it by promising to “make the world a better place” through whatever inscrutable software enhancement he’s trying to sell – “through Paxos algorithms for consensus protocols”, “through canonical data models to communicate between endpoints . . .” and on and on. It’s pretty funny. Faux-philanthropy is not just for incel code-ninjas.

Tom Wolfe has died at the age of 87. In 1998, William Cash interviewed the great author for The Spectator: Yes, Tom Wolfe does own one of those 12-room Upper East Side apartments, as he wrote in Bonfire of the Vanities, 'the mere thought of which ignites flames of greed and covetousness under people all over New York, and for that matter, the world'. Contrary to reports in the British press, however, the 68-year-old dandy New Journalist, self-styled Zola of Our Times, does not resemble Bela Lugosi with 'cracked lips' and the blood sucked from a 'ghastly livid-white' face. Although he does wear a cape at night and has rarely been seen out in public in the last year, he looked extremely well in his whipped ice-cream suit.

Racer and the Jailbird is a terrible name for a film. It sounds like an unsolicited tribute to that sorrily misbegotten Seventies’ genre, the action-comedy buddy movie—like Freebie and the Bean (1974) or Smokey and the Bandit (1977). But it is not. Nor, though the trailers for Racer and the Jailbird misrepresent it as such, is it a sexed-up, souped-up heist movie for knuckleheads and chuckleheads, like Gone in Sixty Seconds or Baby Driver, but with sexy Europeans instead of Nicholas Cage looking like he’s been shot with an elephant tranquilizer, and then put in someone else’s dentures because he’s still a bit woozy. Racer and the Jailbird is none of these things, probably because it isn’t really Racer and the Jailbird at all.

Draggle-tailed guttersnipe. Squashed cabbage leaf. Bilious pigeon. These are some of the insults hurled at Eliza Doolittle by Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. The musical is undergoing a Broadway revival this season, the first in 25 years, with Lincoln Center Theatre’s production directed by Bartlett Sher. Sexual politics may be under the spotlight, in keeping with Lerner and Loewe’s original, yet it's the British class system takes centre stage. Set in London, at the turn of the 20th century, My Fair Lady is the story of a flower-selling street urchin, Eliza Doolittle, as she becomes the willing subject of a social experiment conducted by ‘speech scientist’ Henry Higgins. It’s the tale of a self-made woman.

Cynically timed to minimise news coverage, Katy Perry’s decision to bury the hatchet with Taylor Swift just as things are kicking off big style in the Middle East is nevertheless huge news. The parallels between the Swift/Perry crisis and the historic tensions in the Middle East have long been impossible to ignore. Both have come to define a generation, and both have at times seemed utterly unresolvable.

Some actors reach greatness via pure commitment – shedding pounds, adding them, living in character for months on end, all but transforming into the role they’ve decided to play. Marlon Brando, Christian Bale, Daniel Day-Lewis, and if I may hazard an addition (a somewhat non-traditional nominee), the United States of America.Can we nominate a whole country for an Oscar? A Tony? Can we do that? Can someone check on that? That’d be beautiful. You know what I mean? Beautiful. The best. Beautiful people, beautiful acting. Wow. For approximately the past two years, my country, or the better part of it, at least, has stared into the mirror, and feigned astonishment, as if candidate-cum-President Donald J.

If you were to revisit the house you grew up in, would you take a look at your old bedroom? The answer is yes, of course you would—unless, that is, you are Ronit, Rachel Weisz’s character in Sebastian Lelio’s Disobedience. If you are Ronit, you will instead ponder your late father the rabbi’s rich collection of Talmudic literature, then kiss Esti, the lost love of your teenage years, with tongues. There should a joke here about pastrami and tongue sandwiches, but Disobedience has no jokes. Adapted from Naomi Alderman’s novel, Disobedience is set in an Orthodox Jewish community in London. Jews are supposed to be smart and funny, but this lot are slow-witted and mirth-impaired, like black-clad, black-hatted Stepford Wives.

It is now fifty years since the événements of May 1968, when young Parisians lobbed onobble stones at the police, occupied the Sorbonne, and launched the Boomers’ long march through the institutions. That makes it fifty years since Jean-Luc Godard lost the plot—never a good idea if you are a film-maker. Godard has made plenty of films since 1968, but no one cares. You can see some of Godard’s post-1968 films on YouTube. They’re all terrible—didactic and boring. Perhaps Godard admitted as much when he called his split-screen analysis of middle-class family life Number Two. The split in the screen, like the one in Godard’s mind, was dialectical. Many people lost their minds in 1968 through psychedelic drugs.

A doozy of a correction from the New York Times. On Sunday the Gray Lady published a profile of Campbell Brown, the CNN anchor turned head of news partnerships at Facebook, by Times tech reporter Nellie Bowles. All was going well until Bowles got onto the social media site’s new video series platform: 'Ms. Brown wants to use Facebook’s existing Watch product — a service introduced in 2017 as a premium product with more curation that has nonetheless been flooded with far-right conspiracy programming like "Palestinians Pay $400 million Pensions For Terrorist Families" — to be a breaking news destination.' Wait, what?

Is Jon Hamm’s name really Jon Hamm? Or is it a stage name, meant to telegraph his acting style? When an actor is called Slim Pickens, you know he’ll never play the Dane. Hamm is the name at the top of the bill in Beirut, and preserved pork is what he delivers, thinly sliced in the style of a television actor stretching his talents to the full two-hours, and with a rancid aftertaste. Too bad, really, as Beirut has the elements and characters of a good thriller. That is because the elements and the characters are familiar from other thrillers. The scriptwriter, Tony Gilroy, has written four Bourne movies.