Forgotton Anne - well-reviewed graphically beautiful adventure game, with particularly satisfying animation as Anne runs, climbs and jumps her way across a darkened cityscape. Intelligent (if predictable) storyline too, as young Anne gradually comes to realise the corrupt nature of the regime she services, in this world of forgotten and abandoned objects presided over by an elderly clockmaker.
Bach B Minor Mass - performed by English Voices conducted by Tim Brown in Cambridge Summer Music Festival, sung with one voice to a part rendering the counterpoint (sometimes eight-fold) crystal clear, an aural equivalent of ultra-high definition TV, all the parts remaining perfectly distinct with your attention drawn first to one singer then another. A truly astonishing performance.
Groupe Acrobatique de Tanger Halka, performing as part of Milton Keynes International Festival. A great family show (my four-year-old grandson kept on turning round to tell me "I love it!") full of astonishing acts skill and strength, woven together with characterisations and humour.
Selling Politics, by Laurence Rees – 1992 book written to accompany the better-titled BBC TV series ‘We Have Ways of Making You Think’. The TV made a big impact on me at the time, for its demonstration of how the basic techniques of mass persuasion were effectively worked out by Goebbels, the brilliant (if twisted) Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany and the originator of the “great truth” that propaganda must first be entertaining and never try to give its audience information. In the book, successive chapters shows how Goebbels’ principles were, knowingly or unknowingly, taken up by political campaign managers after the Second World War, their effectiveness enhanced and exacerbated by mass television, culminating in the (then) contemporary political campaigning of Ronald Reagan and the UK political parties in the 1992 elections. The final chapter speculates that in the future these trends could make it possible for someone of no political experience but substantial media presence to be elected to high office. Scarily prescient!
Eye in the Sky - nail-biting dramatisation of a classic ethical dilemma (do you fire a missile to kill a group of terrorists about to launch a bomb attack, if you know you will also kill a twelve-year-old girl selling bread just outside their compound?) with tremendous performances by Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman in his last role.
Incredibles 2 - not quite as good as the original but still way more fun and sophisticated than almost all other superhero films. Effectively it's an old sitcom trope (mum goes out to work so dad has to look after the baby), but given new life with the Pixar treatment. Anyway, the baby-with-superpowers joke was the best of the three high concepts from the original film (the others being superheroes-living-in-suburban-obscurity and rejected-fan-as-supervillain). Another fine 60s-inspired score from Michael Giacchimo.
The Martian - Robinson Crusoe meets Apollo 13 in neat hardcore SF thriller. We didn't mean to stay up so late, but once started we had to watch to the end to see he got home safely.
Essential English for Journalists, Editors and Writers - updated edition of the classic revered text by Sunday Times editor Harold Evans. Full of really practical tips, with (negative) examples, of how to write or re-write intros, background and headlines, useful not only for journalists but any writer or editor who wants to attract and keep the attention of their readers. (Which should be all of them, really.)
Grayson Perry: Rites of Passage – Channel 4 TV series, contrasting sharply with the BBC/OU series on rites and rituals broadcast over the same weeks. Rather than doing the usual and boring thing of "here's a strange and unpleasant ritual, and here's another", this was truly engaged and high-risk documentary-making: the observation of a ritual in Bali, Papua New Guinea or wherever was only the preliminary to Grayson Perry's creation of a corresponding ritual with and for people in the UK. Most moving was the first programme on Death, which featured a ritual for a couple whose teenage son had been killed in a road traffic accident and a pre-death funeral for a man with terminal motor-neurone disease. Skilled, safe, sound work, which I bet he discussed lots with his psychotherapist wife.
The Marvellous Mechanical Museum / Rodney Peppe’s World of Invention - linked exhibitions at Compton Verney. Beautiful designs, of course, in the former case going back to the 18th century, but most striking was the numerous wooden cam-driven automata being built NOW by artists in (surely) rebellion against digital technology which would be the most obvious way of controlling the movements: for example, the Wolf in Sheep's Clothing and Baba Yaga. Most charming was the gallery-filling set of kinetic sculptures called A Quiet Afternoon in the Cloud Cuckoo Valley, by Roland Emmet, who made Caractacus Potts' inventions for the film of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: true English whimsy from the post-war era.
Telephones - 7 minute video by Christian Marclay, made of clips from classic films all featuring people using telephones. Very enjoyable, though I don't think I'd have the patience for his follow-up film doing the same with clocks, though apparently that is tremendous even without sitting through the full 24 hours.
The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro - sad and haunting novel, about an elderly couple making their way across a post-Arthurian landscape, as traditions of hospitality give way to hostility, suspicion and superstition, and the fragile peace between Briton and Saxon threatens to turn to open conflict once again. The buried giant of the title, I think, is the past, or memory of the past: a mist clouds the memory of everyone, not just the elderly, so that people are forgetful of what happened an hour previously as well as what happened many years ago. At first, this forgetting is presented as an entirely negative thing, but then we start to wonder: is it the forgetting of past conflicts and massacres which has enabled the Arthurian peace to stand? And is even the dear old couple's loving way with each other only possible because they forget or choose to overlook the slights and wrongs which have gone between them before? There's no happy ending, but then (look at Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go) Ishiguro doesn't do happy endings.
A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine d'Engle - prize-winning American children's novel from the early 1960s. Apart from its bolshy but likeable heroine, the SF is much of its era - warping spacetime (several years before Star Trek popularised the warp drive) and a decidedly dodgy caricature of Soviet-style centralist communism - but overlooking that I can appreciate now, what I wouldn't have done at the time: the powerful use of body language and poetic imagery to describe the unimaginably strange (the experience of translocation, the encounter with totally alien life forms). And Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who (several years before her doctoral relative appeared on British TV) and Mrs Which make a great trio of wyrd sisters. I wonder what the recent film does with the story.
Love You to Bits - well-reviewed charming and ingenious puzzle game, in which little Cosmo searches for the missing pieces of his beloved robot girlfriend across 28 strange worlds. The basic puzzles are kind - it's always clear what actions are possible, so if necessary you can complete the levels through elimination - but the way they unfold is beautiful and impossible to anticipate. My favourite level is the secret laboratory, where mad scientists are torturing animals and creating monsters; by the end of the level, the monsters have escaped and are torturing the scientists. However the bonus hidden objects - each a momento of Cosmo and Nova's life together - are very challenging to find, and I've often had to resort to a walkthrough.
No comments:
Post a Comment