Tune in for the very first A Damn Fine Cup of Culture podcast as Mege and Matt discuss Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, as well as a bit of chat about Paul Verhoeven’s Elle and Matt Reeves’ War for the Planet of the Apes. Expect mild spoilers, references to Wonder Woman and a bit of Michael Bay mockery – everything that’s needed for a hot, steaming, tasty cup of culture! Continue reading
Tempora mutantur
… and we change with the times.
What’s that you say, though? Didn’t we change just recently? You may very well say that, but let’s face it, sometimes it takes a change to get the grey matter going, and then, over the next couple of months, it comes up with a new, better change.
Why is it better, you say? Because it involves coffee.
Every inch a King
As this blog as much as the many BILLY shelves in my living room stacked with DVDs and Blu-rays can confirm, these days my main media are probably film and TV. However, when I was young, and well into my 20s, I was very much a librophile first and foremost, which is also what determined much of my education and my early professional path. And while he wasn’t there when I got started on a lifelong love of books pretty much as soon as I learned how to read, Stephen King was probably the first writer I obsessed over.
I don’t know when I last read one of King’s novels, but it’s definitely been at least ten years. I don’t much feel the need to return to his world, to visit our old haunts in Castle Rock and Derry. Although it may sound arrogant or pretentious, I’d say I’ve outgrown him – but, and perhaps more importantly, I’d also say that I grew up as a reader in the company of Stephen King.
Blood takes guts
On the outside, Julia Ducournau’s Raw seems like an endurance test. There are reports of audience members fainting and vomiting, interrupted screenings and official complaints. And all of these people have seen the R-rated version, not the original, unreleased NC-17 version. During the show I was in, a guy left twice, his girlfriend stayed on, but all three of us fidgeted and squirmed more than once. Yes, Raw is hard to watch, but once you think you can cope with the blood and guts, you will find one of the best-told horror flicks in a long time. Like Lady Macbeth last week, Raw is a feature debut in a double sense: Julia Ducournau directed her own feature-length screenplay, and Garance Marillier, who plays the main role of Justine, is a newcomer. (SPOILERS AHEAD) Continue reading
Dark candle in a dark room
Reader, we are not in Jane Austen country anymore. Any Austen adaptation must end in a marriage, whereas Lady Macbeth starts with one, not a happy affair, and it gets worse from here on out. The source of this story is, of course, that famous Scottish play, and then there is Nikolai Leskov’s novella Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District from 1865, which is said to be loosely based on a real crime. William Oldroyd’s movie, from a screenplay by Alice Birch, could have approached the character of Lady Macbeth from one of those angles. Instead, the movie shows us a young bride called Katherine who initially does not object to be married to a wealthy nobleman who resides in a bleak, solitary country estate. The troubles start during their wedding night: the husband is a gruff alcoholic and under his father’s thumb. He orders her to undress and face the wall, and then he puts out the light and goes to sleep. She discovers that he is impotent and wants to keep her indoors. The mood of the movie has more in common with Wuthering Heights than any Merchant-Ivory movie. Continue reading
War is monkey hell
Technically, War for the Planet of the Apes is a triumph. There are no two ways about it. The fully computer-generated ape protagonists aren’t perfect all of the time just yet, but they have heft and weight and they’re expressive and believable – and while I cannot say how much of the performance is the work of the actors and how much is the animators’, all of these deserve all the praise they receive and more. Outside fully animated films of the Disney and Pixar kind, I cannot remember a film that relied so heavily on non-human protagonists where, after a few minutes, you accept and stop thinking about the fact that the leads in the story aren’t the same species as you.
For Jeanne, 1928-2017
Today, legendary French actress Jeanne Moreau died at the age of 89.
Sometimes a third chance is all you need
Back in 2013, if you liked your crime to be character-driven, if you were keen on small towns whose idyllic surface belies the darkness below, if you were looking for something altogether less surreal and more British than Twin Peaks, then Broadchurch was a good option. The series wasn’t novel in its plot or themes, but it delivered its tale of a small community being brought to the breaking point by a horrible crime with honesty, sensitivity and the kind of cast that would make grown men weep.
So how do you ruin a series that was rightly lauded as excellent and, more importantly, that told a complete story? You make a second series that is badly plotted and that signals its pointlessness at every twist and turn. And yes, it did make grown men weep.
The only way is up, baby!
Change is coming. In fact, change has already come. You may have noticed the dearth of ads on the site – unless you’re one of the naughty boys and girls who use Adblock, that is. If you look up at your browser’s address bar, you might notice a change of URL as well. It’s been time to retire the Goofy Beast – we’re now called eaglesonpogosticks.com, which I’m sure we’ll regret soon as the God of Search Engine Optimisation banishes us to the nether regions of the web.
That’s not all, though: thanks to the new and shiny WordPress plan we’re on now, we have so much storage space, we don’t really know what to do with it. I’m sure we’ll come up with an idea, though. Any day now something’ll pop into our brains. Any… day… If we still haven’t come up with anything cool, snazzy and oh-so-early 21st century by autumn, you can tell us off.
So, with no further ado, welcome to eaglesonpogosticks.com and farewell to goofybeast.wordpress.com. We’ve had a lot of good time and we’ll miss you.
That was the end of the world… and I feel fine
The Leftovers was already an odd beast in its first season. Here’s a series about a world where, on October 14 three years ago, 2% of the world’s population just vanished. Poof. You may have been sitting at breakfast with your family, you may have been getting in the car where you’ve just put your infant after shopping for groceries, you may have been in the middle of having a tryst with someone not your wife – and from one moment to the next, they’re gone. Your highschool sweetheart that you occasionally see at the store? Gone. The old man who touched you when you were a kid? Gone. What’s this? The Rapture?
