I realise that I’m pretty much alone in the world in my admiration of Quantum of Solace, the last Bond movie. But why do so many people have such a problem with it? My colleague Fred Hogge has come up with the solution in this terrific post about the film, and the Twenty Minutes That Make No Sense. It’s the kind of clear-eyed, rigorous analysis that most newspaper critics have all but given up on, which is one of the reasons why reviewing is in such a fragile state: read and learn, Peter Bradshaw …
In April 2008 Benjamin Cook, a writer for Doctor Who Magazine, emailed Russell T Davies, lead writer and executive producer of the series, to ask if he’d consider offering some insight into the actual creation of the show, “the nuts and bolts of the process, from start to finish”. Two years later, as Davies hands over to the brilliant Steven Moffat we have the complete (seriously: this is a 700 page book) transcript of their correspondence, Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter.
Much like his Doctor Who episodes, this book is fast-moving, funny, suspenseful, hugely sentimental and occasionally self-indulgent, but it’s as honest, revealing and self-critical as any writer has ever been in print. It’s also, unlike most of the “how-to” books that try to teach the craft, written by a hugely successful screenwriter at the absolute top of their game, and, with its strict chronological format, by someone who genuinely doesn’t know if it’s all going to work out:
Here’s more [script] … but it’s absolute bollocks … Tonight this feels like a space-opera runaround. I don’t like it much. It’s too big, it’s daft, the Doctor arrives too late and does nothing all episode. It’s lame shit. It feels like we’re going to spend millions of pounds of licence–fee-payers’ money on silly rubbish.
But other than the fact that all writers have moments of self-hatred (no surprises there), what can Davies teach us about how to write TV?
1. On characters: There is a real, vivid selfish streak running through these characters, and that’s very me. I love writing that into characters. Too many TV characters are just “nice”. Make them selfish — naturally selfish, as we all are — and they sing. Allow the bastards to be lovely, allow the heroes to be weak, and then they’ll come alive.
2.On dialogue: Dialogue is just two monologues clashing. That’s my Big Theory. It’s true in life, never mind drama! Truest phrase ever: ‘The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.’ Fran Lebowitz said that, and I bloody love it.
3. On making the audience care about the characters: I think what you’re talking about is story, not character. You care about a character because they’re in the story. You’ve chosen this story, you’ve switched on this programme, you’ve picked up this book, you’ve paid to see this film,and that’s where the caring comes from. Your choice. Your investment. From thereon in, it’s up to the story … if the story doesn’t work, the characters aren’t served … I’d just say: don’t think about it. Ever, Don’t sit there thinking, will anyone care about my characters? Put your energy into making the characters real, and honest, and true, and interesting, and three-dimensional — and the caring should follow. Like a dog.
4. On making choices: Any story can go in any direction. It’s not what you write, it’s what you choose — and I’m good at choices. By the time I come to write a lot has been decided. Also, a lot hasn’t been decided, but I trust myself, and scare myself, that it’ll happen in the actual writing. It all exists in my head, but in this soup. It’s like the ideas are fluctuating in this great big quantum state of Maybe. The Maybe is a hell of a place to live. As well as being the best place in the world.
5. On finding your voice: It’s so important to start writing, because then the process never, ever ends. Finding your voice isn’t the last stage, just another stage along the way. You reach the top of that mountain, only to see a whole, bloody endless range of mountains waiting beyond. You’ve a million more things to reach for, a million more variations on your voice to articulate. Because your writing always lacks something. Mine does. Moffat’s does, even Paul Abbott’s does, everyone’s does, and that’s why we spend the rest of our lives, still typing away in the dark, trying to get better. Until we die.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband gave a very interesting speech this week about the links between diplomacy and science, and how, in an increasingly connected world, each can and must help the other. The core of his argument was that, just as the twentieth century saw a move from Newtonian to quantum physics — that is, from a sense of the universe as ordered and regulated to one that embraces uncertainty — so the twenty-first will see a similar shift in international relations:
First, international relations has long been premised on the idea of a ‘balance of power’. The international system tended towards equilibrium and self-correction, as states sought to balance each other’s economic or military strength; an echo of the world of Newtonian Mechanics. But today, a defining feature of our world is the tendency towards imbalance and asymmetry, mirroring the world of Quantum Mechanics. Think of the emergence of asymmetric tactics of terrorist organisations, leading not to a stable balance of opposing force, but chronic instability. Or of the damaging positive feedback loops that are driving runaway climate change and that built up unsustainable financial imbalances between emerging and existing powers.
Second, the actors involved in international relations today are no longer just nation-states: global NGOs, multi-national businesses, media and social networking sites, formal and informal international institutions all constrain and shape the preferences and actions of states. Science has gone through a similar shift. Newtonian mechanics was predicated on globes in orbit around each other. In quantum mechanics there is of course a more complex interplay of different forces.
Third, Newtonian science was modelled on discrete independent systems, while Quantum mechanics accepts that everything is inter-connected. It is therefore striking that interdependence is a defining feature of modern international relations. Foreign policy is no longer a game of risk or chess in two dimensions; it is more multi-dimensional. As a result, the world is more unpredictable and more uncertain. Every action does not have an equal and opposite reaction; sometimes it is the small interventions that catalyse major change. So in Pakistan, where I was this weekend, it was not the billions of dollars in US funding of the military that triggered the Pakistani military to take on home-grown terrorists; it was the product of public outrage at the images of a 17 year old girl being flogged by Taliban militants in Swat Valley. Foreign policy today is about managing interdependence and uncertainty, and finding the game-changing interventions that break the deadlock.
He goes on to point out some of the ways in which science can help us answer some of the most significant foreign policy challenges ahead:
Science can help us answer some of the foreign policy challenges we face. First, scientific progress can achieve breakthroughs that diplomacy cannot match. The development of commercially viable Carbon Capture and Storage mechanisms, or advances in the technology for low-carbon vehicles can have a major impact on our ability to forge the green revolution we need to avoid climate change. Genetic improvement of crop plants could rescue many millions from the endless cycle of poverty, hunger and violence that infects so much of our world. And in areas such as cyber-security, bio-defence or early warning systems for natural disasters, it is science that holds the key to our future security.
Second, science can help forge consensus where there is political division. As Thomas Paine once said, “an army of principles can penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot”. During the Cold War technologies to verify arms control agreements were a rare focus for joint working between the USA and USSR. In Europe, CERN helped rebuild links between nations – establishing the first post war contacts between German and Israeli scientists and keeping open relations between Western and Eastern Europe. Science can and should be used to break down barriers of the twenty-first century, particularly those between the Western and Muslim-majority countries. Projects like the new Synchrotron light-source in Jordan are leading the way, bringing together scientists from Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, Iran, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, Turkey and Pakistan to build a bright light-source for cutting-edge experiments in materials science and biology.
Third, is science’s power to shift debates and catalyse political action. This is critical if we are to protect and promote global public goods for future generations, as climate change illustrates. It was been the convergence of views within the scientific community that has set the political tone of the debate in recent years. Indeed the IPCC rightly won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for its efforts to forge global consensus around the science. Although we did not secure from Copenhagen the ambitious, legally binding treaty that this Government and I am sure many of you wanted, no-one can deny how far the global debate has come in the last few years. And with an eye to the future, scientists and diplomats must continue to work together not just on climate but on resource scarcity more generally. I’ve talked previously about an impending resource crunch – with foreign policy increasingly shaped by shortages of energy, food and water. Scientific collaboration to establish a shared understanding of the risks and solutions will be critical to mobilising action and preventing a world of new tensions and stresses from emerging.
This is an important statement of confidence in science in a week when it’s been under attack, particularly of course the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has admitted to mistakes in its predictions of Himalayan glacier melt. While it’s important that we continue to question every scrap of data, it’s alarming to see scepticism about science growing just when we need it more than ever.
Just as every year deepens our understanding and respect for animal intelligence, so recent research is uncovering impressive new evidence about our early ancestors. Having been largely dismissed as little more than idiots — more proof, if it were needed, that history is written by the winners — Neanderthals are now emerging as more sophisticated, more ambitious and more socially developed than we thought. The latest proof, as reported in The Guardian this week, suggests that Neanderthals in Europe were wearing jewellery and make-up as long as 50,00 years ago. This doesn’t just mean an understanding of decoration — and potentially therefore of symbolism and ritual — but also of complex mining processes and transportation across Europe.
Wow. As Mr Punch would say, “That’s the way to do it!” Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a magnificent purring beast of a book, seductive, sly and sinuous, slinking through the savage corridors of the court of King Henry the Eighth. Like a Stanley Kubrick film (and he would have loved this novel), you feel right from the outset that you’re in the hands of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing and is completely in control of their material. And even better, more than six hundred pages later, Mantel leaves you wanting more.
All this, and she’s telling one of the best-known stories in the land. Whether it’s David Starkey or The Tudors on television, The Other Boleyn Girl at the movies or the latest book by Alison Weir, the Henry business is booming, and you can’t help approaching Wolf Hall wondering if it’s going to feel a little over-familiar. But Mantel has a ferocious sense of purpose, and an injustice to be righted: in this story Thomas Cromwell is the hero and the saintly Thomas More his foe. More, of course, is generally presented as an angel, the honest man who died for his beliefs. And frankly, once you’ve been played by Paul Scofield (in Fred Zinneman’s A Man For All Seasons) you’ve got an unfair advantage. Cromwell, on the other hand, is often seen as Henry’s thug: the blacksmith’s son who rose to power through expedience, bombast and physical threat. Here, however, the tables are turned, and Cromwell placed right at the centre: this is his story, beginning, in the novel’s opening paragraph, with a violent father, and small expectations for his life:
‘So now get up.’
Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned towards the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, could kill him now.
Blood from the gash in his head — which was his father’s first effort — is trickling across his face. Add to this, his left eye is blinded; but if he squints sideways with his right eye he can see that the stitching of his father’s boot is unravelling. The twine has sprung clear of the leather,and a hard knot in it has caught his eyebrow and opened another cut …
I’ll miss my dog, he thinks.
The great virtues of the novel are here: the urgent, journalistic present tense; the tight control of focus, visual, intellectual and emotional; and the precise attention to detail — that unravelling boot — that brings the past to life without ever screaming “look at my research!”. As the story develops, and Cromwell grows up — there’s no extended childhood, just a jump cut to his adult life — Mantel adds warmth and wit and sparkle: this is one of the funniest, as well as most moving, novels of the year. She has also created a spoken language that feels absolutely authentic. Is it accurate? I don’t know, but it does what matters: it feels true. She writes scenes so taut, so loaded and so simple that every screenwriter should read this. Here’s a moment early in the book, in which Cromwell realises his attraction to his sister-in-law, Johane Williamson:
He picks up his candle. He backs out and closes the door. He pinches out the light, turns the lock and gives the key to Johane.
He says to her, “It seems such a long time since there was a baby in the house.”
“Don’t look at me,” Johane says.
He does, of course. He says, “Does John Williamson not do his duty by you these days?”
She says, “His duty is not my pleasure.”
As he walks away he thinks, that’s a conversation I shouldn’t have had.
The heart of the book is King Henry’s desperate search for an heir. Now in his forties, with a queen who’s older than himself, Henry needs a male successor to keep the country united: the question is, at what cost? Cromwell, More, Cardinal Wolsey and, best of all, the creepy, ambitious Boleyns (father and two daughters) are entangled in an endless, intricate succession of plots and counter-plots, each character distinct and vivid in the light of Mantel’s gaze. She delights in the machinations of politics, and there’s enormous glee in the dialogue between Cromwell and his mentor Wolsey, a witty proto-Mandelson who knows the end is near. But there’s a deep and moving sadness too, as Cromwell suffers personal tragedy — well concealed in public behind his “murderer’s face” — and forgoes happiness for power.
Mantel is already working on its sequel, and I’m not sure she should be allowed out until she’s done. Because Wolf Hall is one of those rare novels that’s not so much a book as an enchantment, something that you wake from, slightly startled, and that shimmers in the air of everyday. It makes the world look slightly different, and you long to meet its characters again.
So — one week into 2010 and already our understanding of the world is radically different. The most frustrating element of the evolution vs. creationism debate that raged (particularly in the US) last year was the creationists’ portrayal of science as equally unwavering in its beliefs, when nothing could be further from the truth. There’s nothing less dogmatic than science, the very heart of which is eagerness to discover something new, and potentially game-changing.
And this is. In a disused Polish quarry, a group of researchers has uncovered evidence that animals were walking at least 18 million years earlier than we’ve ever thought before. This is a significant change in our understanding both of when and where we first made the transition from the water to the land. Since 2006 the assumption has been that the intermediate creature was the tiktaalik, which lived 375 million years ago:
But this discovery suggests a walking animal 395 million years ago. As today’s Guardian reports:
The prints will further “shake up” scientific thinking over human origins … because they show tetrapods thrived in the sea, which is at odds with the long-held view that river deltas and lakes were the necessary environment for the transition from water to land during vertebrate evolution. ”The closest elpistostegids were probably contemporaneous with these tracks,” said Philippe Janvier of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. “We now have to invent a common ancestor to the tetrapods and elpistostegids.”
Jenny Clark, a palaeontologist at Cambridge University, echoed Janvier’s belief that the findings would force scientists to re-examine their beliefs about the timing of the transition to land. “It blows the whole story out of the water, so to speak,” she said. Clark added that it may also give pause for thought over what drove fish from water to land in the first place. Some theorised that tetrapods originally went ashore to lay their eggs out of reach of aquatic predators, or that their ancestors grew legs to scurry from pool to pool. She had favoured the notion that fish emerged from oxygen-deprived waters in order, quite literally, to catch their breath. None of those theories was supported by the Polish find, she said.
The National Gallery’s current exhibition, The Sacred Made Real, is one of the most original and thought-provoking of the past year (it finishes on January 24th). It brings together some of the greatest Spanish paintings of the 17th century, including works by Velasquez and Zubaran, alongside a number of painted wooden statues of the period, most of which have never left Spain before.
These statues, which have tended to be dismissed as little more than kitsch by Northern European critics, are a revelation: exquisitely made, beautifully painted and full of emotion. There are monks, there are saints and sinners — Pedro de Mena’s Mary Magdalene Meditating on the Crucifixion is particularly striking, and you won’t forget Juan de Mesa’s gruesome severed Head Of John The Baptist — but above all there are Christs, pleading, dead or dying, suspended from the cross.
If you want to understand a religion, look at its art. This is unmistakably Spanish Christianity: where Northern European is restrained and closed, and Italian celebratory and lush, this is raw and unashamedly emotive, almost literally wearing its heart on its sleeve. This is the religion that pours out of Spain’s Moorish heritage, a savage Inquisition and the scorching, unforgiving sun, and these are not the stern, dignified Christs that you’d seen in a German cathedral but stripped and bleeding, butchered to death. And they are brutally realistic, not just in their modeling and colour, but often in materials too: real cloth folds around their loins, some have teeth of carved ivory, and glass eyes give them a spooky, liquid stare. This is a faith that sees Christ’s suffering not as a story from the past but as a day-to-day reminder of just what his sacrifice entailed.
There’s something rather ghoulish, almost car-crash about these statues: they feel less like something you’d see in a cathedral than a clip you’d see on YouTube, then wish you hadn’t looked. They’re painfully explicit, a pornography of pain, and you can’t help wondering if it became a bit competitive: who could render the most realistic, most authentically upsetting model of a man in agony?
And that’s what’s strange and powerful about them. Most art, even still art, is in essence animation: bringing what has never lived to life. And most paintings are pure character: there’s realism, yes, but it’s all in the service of the story. The setting, the other characters, the frame, all serve, however “real” the portrayal, to illustrate a narrative we’ve all known all our lives: what we’re seeing on the cross is Jesus, in his various pictorial forms. These statues, on the other hand, aspire to documentary: they are (mostly) life-size replicas of appalling human suffering. And the effect actually shocks you from the story into real human pity, in a way that paintings rarely ask.
It’s a strange and slightly uncomfortable experience, this show, and the atmosphere in the Sainsbury Wing basement is hushed and respectful, half gallery, half crypt. Whatever the power of painting — and there’s some magnificent art here too — these statues deliver a shiver that very few images alone can match. They may be overwrought and glossy, but they are, nonetheless, a potent demonstration both of a raw faith in religion, and a real fear of human pain.
There’s been a lot of talk about Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, much of it around its apparent betrayal of its source. How dare he portray Holmes as some kind of scrappy action hero? That’s almost as bad as putting on a fake Cockney accent when your mum is Lady Leighton. But —
Holmes is a kind of scrappy action hero. Conan Doyle’s original has studied boxing, martial arts and swordsmanship. He’s handy with a revolver (although, just as in the movie, he generally forgets to bring his own), strong enough to bend a poker (why does that sound like some kind of Victorian double entendre?) and agile enough to take on — and knock out — one of London’s champion boxers. He wears tails in the drawing room, rags on the street and a ratty dressing gown at home, and he tends to smell of whatever vile chemical he’s been working with that morning. He’s also a manic depressive, a voracious reader of the tabloids and a regular user of cocaine, which would guarantee him a top job in television, were it not that he’s also highly intelligent with a genuine interest in people.
I love the Sherlock Holmes stories (not the novels: apart from The Hound of the Baskervilles they’re pretty tedious) and grew up on the Jeremy Brett series, but Robert Downey Jr. is as good as any Holmes we’ve seen: dangerous, mercurial and brilliant, you can see why Watson loves him, Lestrade loathes him and London’s villains tremble at his name. Ritchie and his screenwriters (Simon Kinberg, Anthony Peckham, Michael Robert Johnson and Lionel Wigram) also restore Watson to his rightful role as brave companion rather than bumbling fool, and in doing so have freed Jude Law to be a terrific character actor rather than a reluctant leading man. There’s also sparkling support from Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler and Mark Strong, who manages to play the fiendish Lord Blackwood without even a moustache to twirl. And there’s London. We’ve grown so used to Victorian London on a BBC budget — fifteen orphans and a hansom cab — that it’s a thrill to see it with a Hollywood one. Crammed with people, choked with smoke, this is a throbbing, pungent industrial metropolis. Reflecting this, Ritchie sets his action less in drawing rooms and libraries than in dry docks, slaughter houses (a very scary sequence involving Rachel McAdams and a giant bacon slicer) and laboratories: this is the port and factory of the world.
So why, after a hugely enjoyable first hour or so, is the movie ultimately disappointing? The problem, as so often with big thrillers, is a massive misjudgement of scale. In the first half of the movie, Holmes and Watson are — well, being Holmes and Watson: cracking conundrums, annoying the police and searching for a missing midget (they’re always in the last place you look). In the second half they’re saving the world, and this is where the film goes awry. As Stalin famously put it, “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic”, and nowhere is this truer than in big budget films. Do we care about Ms McAdams being turned into pancetta? Hell, yes. But do we care about Mark Strong and his followers taking over the world? Well — not really. Time and again, film-makers feel that to increase the suspense of the audience they must increase the scale of the story. But in reality, the opposite is often true. When a story becomes too big it becomes statistics, and the audience stops caring what will happen, because we lose any real sense of threat.
Hitchcock always understood that the “big” story — the stolen military secrets — was essentially irrelevant: that what we cared about was Eva Marie Saint and Cary Grant. James Bond has been successfully reinvented by focusing on Bond and the people around him, rather than lasers in space. And the best episodes of the relaunched Doctor Who have been its smaller, more intimate stories — Blink, The Girl In The Fireplace, Silence In The Library — rather than its “end of the universe” epics.
Sherlock Holmes is a hugely confident, clear-sighted start to a franchise. It’s funny and charming and exciting, and I’m looking forward to more of Downey, Law and McAdams. I’m also looking forward to more Moriarty, the villain in the shadows of this film. But let’s not forget that Conan Doyle’s climax was not the entire world in peril, but Holmes and Moriarty, alone at the edge of the Reichenbach Falls.
John Guare is the playwright best known for Six Degrees of Separation, which became a terrific film starring Will Smith and Stockard Channing and is now being revived in London. There’s a funny and insightful interview with him in today’s Guardian, including his thoughts on his current obsession, Amanda Knox:
“She’s a complete blank,” he says. “You can project anything on to her. Is she Henry James’s Daisy Miller, an innocent young girl who goes to Europe for experience? Or is she Louise Brooks, the woman who takes what she wants and destroys everything? Or is she Nancy Drew caught up in Kafka?” … “When the police started questioning her, her response was to do cartwheels and the splits. I love that. That’s when I fell in love with the story. That’s when I thought” – he smiles, potential building – “this is my kind of murderess.”
Guare’s plays haven’t always been successful, but they’re always ambitious. And he’s a passionate advocate of the importance of emotional truth over literal accuracy in drama:
[Guare] combines the fantastic and humdrum in accordance with the Henry James principle of the “balloon of experience” – that is, “an audience will go anywhere with you as long as you, the writer, keep your hand on the string. You don’t want to lose the balloon. I love that image.” … When he first saw John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, he was amazed and disappointed. “Where is the revolution?” he asked. Now, he says, “What I hate about kitchen-sink dramas is [this idea] that the set is real, therefore you’re going to be seeing truth. You have to earn truth. Truth can’t be a part of the fact that people appear to talk that way and live in that room. You’re looking for the poetry in something, and I don’t mean poetry in the fancy sense. Naturalism believes by just replicating a thing you give the truth, rather than earning the truth.”
Theatre in Britain at the moment is great shape, partly because it’s happy to aim higher than reality (and which is why Enron is a better play than The Power Of Yes), but our film and television often (with honourable exceptions like Lynne Ramsay) feels hamstrung by its determination to feel “real”, and its reluctance to soar beyond the everyday. While this is well-intended, it’s short-sighted: Doctor Who and Torchwood, with their manipulative politicians, over-weening corporations, secret prison systems, sweat-shops and eco-collapse feel like more accurate barometers of Britain in the Noughties than a slew of more “realistic” television dramas, just as Trainspotting and 28 Days Later feel like truer reflections of our times — and our fears — than any number of more supposedly “authentic” portrayals of contemporary life.
One of the few things that truly differentiates humans from animals is that we talk naturally in metaphors. Metaphors are, in essence, the application of emotion to fact: not “this is what I saw” but “this is how it felt”. And that’s really what stories are: the feeling of what happened.
So let’s hold onto that balloon.
It may sound like the Orange Film Board’s version of Jaws, but it’s true: 70 sharks off the coast of Australia have been fitted with tags that send lifeguards a text message when the animals come within 500 metres of the shore. The tags, which give researchers real time GPS tracking of the sharks, will also provide new information about their migration patterns, leading to a better understanding of shark behaviour, and some important clues for conservation.
For the first time, chimpanzees have been observed using tools to chop up food into smaller, bite-size portions. This is a real breakthrough in our understanding of animals’ use of tools, because it’s about preparing food rather than simply reaching it. In other words, we have known for a long time that chimps use sticks to reach into bees’ nests, or rocks to break nuts open, but this is the first proof that they are using tools to make food easier to eat. As the BBC reports:
Kathelijne Koops and Professor William McGrew of the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, University of Cambridge, studied a group of chimps living wild in the Nimba Mountains and came across stone and rocks that had clearly be used by the apes to process Treculia fruits. These fruits, which can be the size of a volleyball and weigh up to 8.5kg, are hard and fibrous. But despite lacking a hard outer shell, they are too big for a chimpanzee to get its jaws around and bite into. So, instead, the chimps use a range of tools to chop them into smaller pieces. Ms Koops found stone and wooden cleavers, as well as stone anvils used to fracture the large fruits. All were covered by the remains of smashed fruit and seeds. The cleavers were clearly used to pound the fruit, rather than the fruit pounded upon the stones.
The more that we learn about animal intelligence, the more advanced we discover them to be. The latest research suggests that some monkeys are capable not just of applying individual words to objects, but of quite sophisticated grammar. As Wired reports:
Campbell’s monkeys appear to combine the same calls in different ways, using rules of grammar that turn sound into language. Whether their rudimentary syntax echoes the speech of humanity’s evolutionary ancestors, or represents an emergence of language unrelated to our own, is unclear. Either way, they’re far more sophisticated than we thought. “This is the first evidence we have in animal communication that they can combine, in a semantic way, different calls to create a new message,” said Alban Lemasson, a primatologist at the University of Rennes in France. “I’m not sure it has strong parallels with humans, in the way that we will find a subject and object and verb. But they have meaningful units combined into other meaningful sequences, with rules imposed on how they’re combined.”
Lemasson’s team previously described the monkeys’ use of calls with specific meanings in a paper published in November. It detailed the monkeys’ basic sound structures and their uses: “Hok” for eagle, “krak” for leopard, “krak-oo” for general disturbance, “hok-oo” and “wak-oo” for general disturbance in forest canopies. A sixth call, “boom,” was used in non-predatory contexts, such as when calling a group together for travel or arguing with neighboring groups. Impressive as that was, however, it was still relatively one-dimensional, not much different from verbalizations heard in many animal species, from other non-human primates to songbirds. The team’s latest findings, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describe something far more complicated: syntax, or principles of word sequence and sentence structure.
Though some researchers have ascribed syntax to animals, it’s never been formally demonstrated — until now. “People have criticized the use of ’syntax’ to describe animals just because they produce sequences of sound. They say that each unit has no meaning, that no rules explain how they’re combined,” said Lemasson. “Here we have rules of combination.” For example, male monkeys called “boom boom” to gather other monkeys to them, but “boom boom krak-oo krak-oo” meant that a tree or branch was about to fall. Adding a “hak-oo” to that sequence turned it into a territorial warning against stray monkeys from neigboring groups. Multiple “krak-oo” calls added to an original “krak” meant not only that a leopard was in the area, but that it posed an immediate threat.
Full article here.
A couple of weeks ago I was talking with a British film producer about the movies we’d seen lately that had excited us. And we both came to the conclusion that we’d been much more thrilled, more stimulated and more surprised by recent stage performances than by anything we’d seen in cinemas. Shows like Internal or It Felt Like A Kiss, which challenge narrative conventions, create extreme emotions and immerse their viewers in new worlds feel infinitely more exciting than the well-crafted but ultimately predictable stories that most films are content to tell.
Most.
Because Where The Wild Things Are is the exception: a film that is so beautiful, so unpredictable, so complete in its own logic and so entirely real within its own dream narrative that it feels as live, spontaneous and unexpected as the very best theatre. It’s also (and this is a recommendation, not a warning) a film that left more adults crying than anything I’ve seen this year.
You’re probably familiar with the basics: Max, a young boy frustrated by the impositions of the grown-up world, travels to the land of the Wild Things, who appoint him their king for a brief time, after which he returns to his own life, both chastened and exhilarated by the adventures he has found. It’s a book that most American children are brought up on, although we should not forget that it has always been a controversial one. Ever since first publication it has been criticised for being too dark, too frightening or quite simply too strange for kids, a criticism, of course, led entirely by adults: children, just as with the works of Roald Dahl or Edward Gorey, have always wholeheartedly embraced the complexities of Sendak’s world.
And it is complex, both in the traditional and psychological senses of the word: this is not a world of simple good and evil, but of shifting loyalties, confusing motives and sudden, often frightening changes of mood. For the world of the Wild Things is the world as felt through the eyes of a child, a parallel that’s brilliantly established in the first scene of the movie, when a thrilling snowball fight turns ugly, and laughter turns to tears. In Max’s eyes, as in any child’s, a casual remark from a parent can mean everything or nothing, depending on his mood, and when his mother (Catherine Keener) refuses to play with him, Jonze makes us feel exactly why Max runs away into the night.
After a dangerous journey he arrives on the shore of the Wild Things’ land. And this is where, unlike almost every movie in which children step into a magical world, Wild Things gets it exquisitely, perfectly right. Because just as any child’s imaginary world feels as real — often more so — than the real one, this feels entirely authentic, just like the Wild Things themselves. Huge, shambling, loveable, dangerous, they soon discover the new arrival, and it’s clear that Max could just as well become their dinner as their king. Luckily he manages to convince them not just that they need him, but that he has the necessary experience to rule, and so, despite some reservations, he’s soon crowned leader of the pack.
But power has its perils, and Max quickly discovers that, while the Wild Things are happy to be ruled, they expect a good deal in return. This is the heart of the film, as each of the Wild Things emerges as an absolutely distinct character, while at the same time reflecting different elements of Max’s life back home. The vocal performances are extraordinary: unlike most animated movies, where stars record their voices separately, often literally phoning it in, the Wild Thing actors rehearsed together as a company, and the extra work pays off. These are award-worthy performances, particularly James Gandolfini as Carol and Paul Dano as Alexander, while Catherine O’Hara as Judith is a Woody Allen-worthy kvetch. And as the story deepens and darkens, and everything becomes uncertain, we’re forced again to wonder — will the Wild Things, to save their country, be forced to eat their king?
If all this sounds unlike most children’s movies — well, it is. Wild Things doesn’t offer easy answers, and its consolation is hard won. I think that children will enjoy it, but that, quite properly, it will provoke some complex conversations, and perhaps some troubling dreams. Because while most kids’ films are about a child, Wild Things is about being one, in all its joys, terrors and uncertainties. It’s a film that I wish had been around when I was one, because it’s the film you’d want to show to adults to remind them what it’s like. And it’s a movie that, for adults, is about what we have lost: the feelings, the places and the people who have slipped beyond our grasp. Where The Wild Things Are is one of the most emotionally daring pictures that a major studio has made, and for all the reported complexities and disagreements of its production we should credit Warner Brothers for their courage. Because in a world that’s full of movies that offer bland, synthetic comfort, Wild Things is a troubling reminder that we are all, when it comes down to it, just monsters howling in the dark.
“I lied like a maniac.” That’s Orson Welles’ own self-appraisal, in his interviews with Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, explaining how he got his first work in professional theatre — after, by his own account if no-one else’s, having briefly been a matador in Spain. Welles is one of history’s great fabulists, cheerfully lying both off-screen and on, culminating in my favourite of his movies, the brilliant, barking F For Fake. In this extraordinary movie Welles presents himself as a magician, charlatan and prankster, gleefully deconstructing both his own myth and the wider world, and reinventing cinema along the way. Here’s the introduction to the movie, which sets out his agenda for the film — and establishes the task that any actor playing Welles must face:
That dangerous, dazzling charm, that self-awareness, that baroque fluidity of self-expression is a daunting challenge for an actor, even when, as in this film, he is playing Welles at 22. Welles, after all, at 22, had already mastered theatre and radio, and was well on his way towards directing the most influential movie ever made. Fortunately, in Christian McKay, director Richard Linklater has found his perfect Welles: bombastic, seductive and deadly, with that permanent air of half-amusement, one eyebrow cocked in irony as the voice rumbles stealthily beneath.
The story is straightforward, archetypal: a young actor (Zac Efron) gets a job at Welles’ Mercury Theatre in the last week of rehearsals for Caesar: Death of a Dictator, Orson’s ground-breaking version of Shakespeare. He watches the master at work, falls in love with his assistant (Claire Danes) and learns the simple lesson: never meet your idols, for fear of discovering the truth. But the real pleasure of the movie is not the plot, but the performances, and Linklater’s brilliant choreography of a theatre company at work. It was shot, very rapidly (Linklater calls it “a movie made on its feet”) in the Isle of Man, in the real Gaiety Theatre, and the authenticity both of its location and its company of actors shines through every moment of the film. Zac Efron is terrific, neatly undercutting his star power with a real lightness of touch, and a self-deprecating humour that hints at Cary Grant, while Claire Danes shines as a young woman who knows just what she has to surrender in order to follow her dreams: there’s a steel beneath this story that cuts through the sugar on the top. There are also a raft of great supporting performances, including Ben Chaplin as George Coulouris and a brilliant James Tupper as Joe Cotten, all crinkly hair and roguish charm.
This isn’t an “important” film, or a ground-breaking film, or an essential film. It won’t change your life, and it’s certainly not, as the posters proclaim, “the feel good film of the year”. And I’m an Orson Welles obsessive, so I’m not sure you should take my word for any of it. But it’s a kind of film that is important, and a kind of film that’s increasingly rare: a beautifully-written drama with complex, fascinating characters, every one of whom is chasing their own particular dream. In a world that’s short of heroes, there are few more enticing than Welles, if only because he’s such a bewitching, bewildering villain.
“All women in Hollywood are known as sex symbols. You’re sold, and it’s based on sex. That’s O.K., if you know how to use it … I’ve learned that being a celebrity is like being a sacrificial lamb. At some point, no matter how high the pedestal that they put you on, they’re going to tear you down. And I created a character as an offering for the sacrifice.”
In one of the best ever episodes of HBO’s Entourage, movie star Vincent Chase, on the hunt for a new agent, is subjected to a series of presentations in which each agency in turn promises that he will be not just a star, but a brand:
Now, I’ve never seen a Transformers movie. And I haven’t yet seen Jennifer’s Body, which opens in the UK this week after a disappointing run in the US. But I can’t help knowing who Megan Fox is, because she’s everywhere. And if you ever doubted the accuracy of Entourage’s portrayal, check out this New York Times piece, which is one of the most candid (and paradoxically concealing) accounts ever given of what it’s like to live in the eye of the media storm.
“Why do you want to dance?” “Why do you want to live?” Powell and Pressburger’s dance masterpiece The Red Shoes is back in cinemas this Christmas, To whet your appetite, here’s a splendid New York Times piece by Manohla Dargis about the film and its context, and here’s Powell and Pressburger biographer Ian Christie on the movie’s restoration.
Fantastic Mr Fox is some kind of miracle: a children’s movie that might just be the most grown-up picture of the year. It’s also a remarkable collaboration between two distinctive artists, Wes Anderson and Roald Dahl, that doesn’t compromise either of them; despite being his first adaptation this is as much an Anderson movie as Rushmore or The Darjeeling Limited, with which it shares many of its themes.
The central premise is a simple one. Mr Fox likes stealing chickens. He knows that this is dangerous — as a young fox he and his wife were almost killed in one fatal raid — but it’s part of his nature and it makes him feel alive. But when his most ambitious raid goes wrong he and his family become targets, as three vicious local farmers, Boggis Bunce and Bean, vow revenge. As the farmers’ plots become ever more elaborate, and not just the Fox family but their neighbours come under threat, can Mr Fox save his family, and at what price to their community?
All of this is beautifully executed in stop motion animation, lovingly hand crafted. The world of the film is lush and stylised, blending elements of the English countryside with touches of the American West: as well as moles and badgers there are beavers, gophers and a single, terrifying wolf. Many of the details — clothes, furniture and props — are from Dahl’s own life: the book was his most autobiographical novel, and Anderson and his co-writer Noah Baumbach lived in Dahl’s own house while writing the script. It’s also very funny, blending Anderson’s wry humour with elements of slapstick — there’s a motorcycle chase that Nick Park could be proud of.
But what makes Mr Fox so stunning is its family. The plot of the movie is the hanger, but the family is the clothes. This is as funny, poignant and observant a depiction of a family as anything we’ve seen this year. It’s a portrait of a marriage under pressure, as Mr Fox’s exploits put the family at risk; and, in the film’s main subplot, its a story about children, and the subtle status shifts and jealousies they face. The Fox family have one son, Ash (Jason Schwartzman), who is shy, hesitant, bookish: in his own word, different. At the beginning of the movie they are joined by his cousin Kristofferson, who is everything that Ash is not: confident, athletic, comfortable in his skin. And as Ash realises immediately, he’s the son that Mr Fox would have wanted, with some of his own cocky swagger, insouciance (he’s played by George Clooney) and style.
This is the heart of the story. There’s a moment, early on, as Mr Fox watches the two boys competing at diving and casually compliments Kristofferson while lightly mocking his own son, where you see how easily children are damaged – not by deliberate cruelty, but by not quite thinking hard enough – and how Mr Fox’s narcissism puts his family at risk. It’s pitch perfect writing and directing, and suggests that Anderson picked the perfect collaborator in Baumbach, the writer-director of The Squid and the Whale.
He could also have hardly chosen a better cast: not just Clooney and Schwartzman, but Meryl Streep, Michael Gambon and Anderson regulars Owen Wilson and Bill Murray, as Mr Fox’s badger lawyer. Together these diverse collaborators have created a timeless, endlessly rewatchable movie that expands and deepens Dahl’s story while remaining true to its fantastic, foxy heart.
