The Oscars - The Missing Best Directors

How can Ang Lee win the Best Director Oscar? I'm mystified. There were five directors missing from those nominated, all of whom were, in my opinion, more deserving than any on the list. In order of choice, these are:

Katherine Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty

Quentin Tarantino for Django Unchained

Ben Affleck for Argo

Paul Thomas Anderson for The Master

Tom Hooper for Les Miserables

I was hardly in agreement with most of the eventual winners. For me, the prizes should have gone to Silver Linings Playbook for best film, Katherine Bigelow for best director, Denzel Washington for best actor, Jennifer Lawrence for best actress (at least that is one), Alan Arkin for best supporting actor, Amy Adams for best supporting actress, David O Russell for best adapted screenplay and Quentin Tarantino for best original screenplay (there is another tick).

This was a year when the Oscars were spread around. Argo only won best film because everyone realised that Ben Affleck didn't even get nominated for best director. The first time this has happened since 1989. How weird is that. It was no surprise to me that Silver Linings Playbook had nominations in all four acting categories. It was all down to the writing and missing out in the screenplay award is baffling.

Surprises at Oxford Playhouse

When an Alan Ayckbourn play comes locally, I will be there. His latest, and 76th play, is strangely sci fi. His trademark style of witty family drama is this time encapsulated well in the future. Technological advances are there to behold, including what it means to live a lot longer. And can relationships stand the test of this much longer time frame.

So there is much to enjoy in this subtle take on how the future might effect us. All wrapped up in Ayckbourn's clever writing. The play is in three acts with two intervals, partly because six actors play thirteen characters and costume changes are required. So the first break after 45 minutes seems far too early after a slowish first act. But all that changes in the superb second act where the plot development is entirely satisfying.

The acting is very good. I thought that Bob Champion was excellent. He only plays one character, and he glues the whole thing together. His relationship with his young daughter is the focus of the first act, when he seems quite withdrawn. That all changes and he becomes smart, engaging and powerful. The most amusing character is Jan, the android. Unforgettable.

The only disappointment of the evening was the empty seats, the theatre was less than half full. That does nothing for the atmosphere. Ayckbourn mentions in the programme his earlier reluctance to write science fiction as "possibly the female percentage (of the audience) would find it unwatchable". I guess he was right.

Tring Book Club - The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and The Last September

I always thought that a pilgrimage was a religious journey, but Harold Fry's walk to save Queenie Hennessy is something quite different. Call me a sentimental old fool, but there is so much to enjoy in Rachel Joyce's debut novel. There are times when I thought the lump in my throat would actually produce a tear. In the early chapters I thought this is a nice easy read, a quite unchallenging story of a fellow retiree walking, sort of accidentally, from Kingsbridge in Dorset to Berwick on the border with Scotland. But as Harold is quite unprepared for his journey by foot, it becomes a trial of the human spirit.
As he walks, he thinks about his life with Maureen, almost an estranged wife for the last twenty years. Left at home, Maureen pours over the same heartbreaking existence. As Harold's walk progresses, so the story of their lives becomes clearer. These memories are interludes in the real time progress of Harold's journey. Not only are we surprised and elated by most (but not all) of the people he meets, but his unpreparedness gives way to some highly emotional scenes along the way.
The writing is straightforward, no literary tricks are needed here. That is probably why the book has missed some prize shortlists, and is at the same time so popular. However, there are dark times as well as good. The latter can propel you to heights that few books can do. And this is why it gets five stars from me. There is one big secret that is revealed late on that I guessed very early. But even this is not all that it seemed.
Harold walks in his "yachting" shoes. I actually own four pairs of varying age and perfection. I always thought they were "deck" shoes, but I find that "yachting" or "boat" shoes are equally accurate. Sorry about that. In the end, I guess the writing is pretty manipulative, but who doesn't like a bit of manipulation. Certainly not me.

I have to admit that I had had not heard of Elizabeth Bowen, but it turns out she was a highly respected novelist and short story writer. "The Last September" was published in 1929 and takes it theme from when the author herself was eighteen and living in her childhood home in Ireland in 1920.
The story of an English country house in the middle of Ireland at the start of "the troubles", is quite interesting. But the occupation of the British Army and the rise of the IRA only rumble in the background and hardly effect the lives or consciousness of the country house set. Danielstown is the home to Sir Richard and Lady Naylor and their orphan niece Lois, whose story this is. Also living there is Laurence, an unrelated nephew. There are many comings and goings, tennis parties, lunches, walks in the country, dances and visitors. So not much of a plot, but an undercurrent of how this can not go on for ever.
Lois is at a crossroads - "I must do something" as she has no future plans. Her romance with a young British officer seems a distraction more than anything. She is lacking in any real character, but then at eighteen with a sheltered upbringing, this is no real surprise. And that itself is a flaw in the book. The snobbish Lady Naylor could have been the one really interesting character, but she only comes into her own near the end.
What distinguishes this novel from any I have ever read is the prose. Never have I had to read the same passage twice so often. It seems to me that Elizabeth Bowen was writing in an ultra modern way for the 1920's. Sometimes it actually comes off, but more often I gave up trying to understand what she was trying to say: "the house became a magnet to their dependence" - "an apprehensive interchange with her own reflection". There are whole paragraphs that are far more ambiguous than these two extracts.
So I found this a frustrating read. Sometimes boring, occasionally startlingly brilliant, but overall the language frequently had me wishing to have done with it. I will be very glad to get back to a modern novel.

The Following Series 1 Episode 4 - Stumbleine

Every so often I hear some music on the TV that I have never heard before. The song at the end of Episode 4 of The Following is a case in point. It really went well with the aftermath of this week's action. The music is by a Bristol musician and producer called Stumbleine. The song is Fade Into You (featuring Steffaloo) from the album Spiderwebbed. Check it out on YouTube.

The first anniversary of my first run - Wycombe Rye Park Run

It was kind of appropriate that on the year to the day I did my first run with Alison, I ran the Wycombe Rye Park Run for the first time. The Rye was where I did some running some 28 years ago. But it did not last. I seemed to be able to do a mile or so and then hit a brick wall, and I was never able to go any further. This was probably because I was running too fast, and did not have the lung capacity I now have from swimming. Also I guess I did not have the right kit. If I'd had a trainer as I do now, things may have been different.

So it was quite poignant that here I was, back at The Rye on a Saturday morning, running 5K with 70 other people. So a smallish field, on a cold but sunny morning. For the first time I went off too fast. I thought Alison was up ahead, but I had left her trailing. I suffered for that and was glad when Alison overtook me at the 1K mark and  I could follow her for the next 2K. It was then I felt much stronger and dashed off to finish marginally outside my record time at MK.

What was it like going back to where I used to run? Strange in a way, but it only felt familiar from knowing the park, not having run around it. But I enjoyed the morning, especially coffee and cake at John Lewis afterwards.

Zero Dark Thirty, Flight and Warm Bodies

Three very different movies, but the best trio I have seen for some while. Zero Dark Thirty is not a happy movie. The hunt for OBL is an uncomfortable experience. I felt very nervous all the way through, although we all know what happened in the end. But it is film making of the highest quality, and what we have now come to expect from director Katherine Bigelow. Why she misses out on an Oscar nomination is quite absurd. The acting is very good, led by the excellent Jessica Chastain. The location  photography is mesmerising, almost documentary in feel. However there are times when the dialogue is hard to hear, but that is the only fault. The first half's dispiriting failures of the hunt is more than compensated for the second's gripping denouement. It was interesting to see late on the unexpected arrival of British actors Mark Strong, Stephen Dillane and, amazingly, John Barrowman. And the reminder that the Pakistan military academy was less than a mile away!

I thought Flight was an outstanding movie, in no small part due to Denzel Washington in the lead role of an alchoholic in so much denial, he still thinks he is fit to pilot a passenger jet. His role as Whip Whitaker has led to an Oscar nomination for best actor, and I have not seen a better performance, including DDL. John Gatins has written a superb original screenplay and will push Quentin Tarantino close for the Oscar. Robert Zemeckis directs his first live action movie since 2000, and has lost none of his brilliance for manipulating our emotions. His opening sequence of the crash is spectacularly gripping, but is no contest for the presentation of an alchoholic's destructive nature. Awesome.

Almost as good was Warm Bodies. This was a highly original, sometimes extremely funny and touching, Rom-Com-Zom. It starts with our narrator (wait for it), a zombie young guy, moaning about being one of the undead. Yes, you know I dont like narrators, but this one is so witty and likeable. He cannot speak, so we hear what is in his head. The opening sequence in an airport full of zombies is really funny. I will never forget the zombie security gate guard. But our hero's relationship with a human young woman makes for a wonderful story. When he is getting to know her, he tells himself not to be so creepy. As if being a zombie is not creepy enough. Jonathon Levine has done a great job adapting the novel by Isaac Marion and directs with style and gusto. Promises well for the future. The acting is OK. Nicholas Hoult and Teresa Palmer as the star crossed lovers (look out for a balcony) are quite adequate. The soundtrack is the icing on the cake. John Waite, Guns and Roses, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan (Shelter From The Storm - terrific) Roy Orbison and The National and others. Films like the last two is what I love about the cinema.

Brandi Carlile at Islington Assembly Hall

When Brandi Carlile's concert on 26th April 2010 was cancelled because her travel arrangements were effected by the ash cloud, and then the rearranged date for 21st October was also cancelled, I had to wait nearly three years for her to appear in the UK. Was it worth it? Definitely. And we had songs from her terrific new album Bear Creek to listen to.

Last week my heart sank when I heard it was an acoustic only performance. But I needn't have worried. Brandi and the twins (Tim and Phil Lanseroth) are staggeringly good musicians, and Brandi's fabulous voice was better for the absence of percussion and electrification.

Islington Assembly Hall was sold out for two nights . I went on Wednesday, the second night. I joined the 500 standing on the main floor, while another 200 had unreserved seating in the balcony. This intimate, and beautifully restored venue, meant we were all pretty close, to the stage and each other. Few we may have been, but the atmosphere was brilliant.

The event got off to a great start with Holly and The Wolf in support. Brandi came on at 9pm and belted out the opening track Hard Way Home from the new album. We were then treated to excerpts from all of her four albums, including many favourites. Although I cannot remember her singing Before It Breaks, that would have been my particular choice. Listening to three guitars accompanying Brandi's voice was perfect. However I did miss Brandi's piano on some of those slow numbers.

There were also a couple of covers. You've Got A Friend (with Holly) and Joleen had the audience singing along, and Nothing Compares To You was saved till last. We were also asked for requests and duly got Turpentine amongst others. A highlight was when Brandi and the twins sang What Can I Say" without microphones. I thought we might not hear my current favourite song That Wasn't Me from the new album, but Brandi saved it until the end. So I went home very happy. A truly fabulous evening, and the best value concert ever at £15.

There are excerpts from the concert on YouTube if you google "Brandi Carlile Islington". Nine songs from Wednesday and fourteen from the previous night. Together they make almost the whole playlist. Great to relive the experience.

One thing to note, I was a little mystified when Brandi mentioned her wedding to partner Catherine Shepherd being instrumental in her arrival in the UK a month ago (I had wondered why she came so early), when she actually married her in Boston in September last year. As it turns out, this was the third ceremony as Catherine was brought up over here, and this was obviously for her family and friend's benefit. No wonder Brandi was the happiest singer I have ever seen on stage.

BAFTA Screenplay Winners

Hooray! The BAFTA awards for best screenplays got me out of my seat. Quentin Tarantino won Best Original Screenplay for Django Unchained and David O Russell won Best Adapted Screenplay for Silver Linings Playbook. For me, these were the best two films of the year, but then I always believe that the best writing makes for the best film. That is why Margin Call did it for me last year.

I was pleased that Argo won best film with Ben Affleck winning best director. At least it kept out Lincoln and Les Mis.

Ksenia Ovsyanick

I do not pretend to be an expert on ballet, but when I published my post on English National Ballet's performance of Sleeping Beauty at Milton Keynes, I did note:

But the one dancer that caught my eye was Ksenia Ovsyanick dancing for the first time as as the Lilac Fairy, one of the main roles. So it was to my surprise after the performance to see she is listed on the ENB website as one of the lowly artists. In 2008 she was just one of Lilac Fairie's attendents. But last night she danced a role normally reserved for Principal Dancers, and at one matinee on the tour she actually dances the lead. She is still quite young, but to my uneducated eye, this is a future star.

At the end of January, at the National Dance Awards, she was presented with the prize for the Outstanding Female Performance (Classical). Amazing.

Les Miserables, Django Unchained and Lincon

I cannot remember a more harrowing experience at the cinema. This is my surprising verdict on Les Miserables, especially as I found the stage version so much more uplifting. In the theatre we were, perhaps, insulated from the darkness of the story. Detached from the action on the stage, engrossed in the singing, the orchestra (no comparison between live music and that on film), the performances and the occasional fun, I thought this was an intelligent and fulfilling musical. But on film, the story drew me in, and seemed unremittingly savage. Here the action is far more vivid and explicit. The director, Tom Hooper, has brought us up close and personal to the main characters,  most of whom are deeply troubled souls. So we are completely devoid of wit or humour. Even the comic "Master of the House" turns into a quite nasty scene. There are prolonged close ups of the stars when they are singing, probably a by product of them singing live. I also felt that here we had actors singing, rather than singers who can act. I was never able to think of them as the characters they played, but as Russell, Hugh, Ann etc performing. Therefore, only the fairly unknown Samantha Barks as Eponine was totally convincing. Don't get me wrong, this is still a highly memorable movie. There are some great cinematic moments. And when you think we were paying under £10 a ticket and the theatre was £60, it was certainly value for money.

You can always rely on Quintin Tarantino to be original and outrageous. Django Unchained is a western Jim,  but not as we know it. This is a highly uncomfortable picture of slavery in the southern states of America. A reminder that the horrors for the negros transported from Africa did not stop on the ship. The 13th Amendment is still some way off. Is Tarantino the Shakespeare of our time? Who else writes new stuff that is popular and intelligent at the same time. If Shakespeare lived today, his work for cinema would be just as bloody. Perhaps Tarantino lacks the subtlety of the bard, but his references to early movies (this time the spaghetti western) is not unlike how Shakespeare raided old stories of his time. Back to Django. The dialogue is as enthralling as anything Tarantino has done before. The story is exciting and shocking. The acting is first class. Jamie Foxx, Christolph Walz  are superb, but are surprisingly topped by an almost unrecognisable Samuel L Jackson as the horrible Uncle Tom. An Oscar waiting to happen. There is a lot of violence, and I mean a lot. That is probably why Tarantino was not nominated for best director, when he should himself have been close to the Oscar.

What I wanted to say about Lincoln has already been said. This is the review in The Daily Mail. Thank goodness someone thought the same as me about everything. A worthy movie, but one that is interesting more than involving. I liked the man in Lincoln's cabinet who walked out when he started on another of his interminable stories. A boring man, completely untrustworthy, but a big political manipulator. Daniel Day-Lewis does a good job, but am I the only one who thought his high pitch did nothing for his character. For once, the score by John Williams did nothing for the movie.

Steven Spielberg has admitted Lincoln is the first film he’s directed wearing a tie.
So respectful and stodgily solemn is his Oscar-nominated film it looks as if Spielberg directed it in a 19th-century frock coat with white kid gloves, and on bended knee.
It’s not all bad. The film offers a minutely detailed account of the political wrangles leading up to the adoption by Congress of the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery across America.

It succeeds in showing Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) as a political fixer, not above bribery and being economical with the truth.
If you’re gripped by the minutiae of 19th-century American politics, it’s moderately enjoyable.
Its message for today is partly about the importance of idealism with regard to racial equality, but it’s also — very topically, in the light of Barack Obama’s tribulations — about the need for compromise.This is most powerfully dramatised in the reluctant decision of Lincoln’s ally, Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) to tone down his radical, racially egalitarian beliefs in order not to scare off the Right. Jones’s moments of light relief and irreverence — though far too crude for the historical context — steal the picture, and will probably win him Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars.
James Spader’s portrait of W. N. Bilbo, a cheery rogue who did much of Lincoln’s dirty work, is also watchable. Sally Field, as Lincoln’s neurotic wife Mary, has a thanklessly nagging part, but does at least manage to reveal a side of Honest Abe that was slightly human.
Day-Lewis looks the part and supplies plenty of gravitas, with welcome traces of a dry sense of humour. He remains, however, a mythic, super-heroic icon of leadership, speaking in wise parables and high-flown rhetoric.

Loyal: Sally Field stars as First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln

The sad truth is that Spielberg and his writer Tony Kushner are offering a phoney, sanitised version of Lincoln. Most modern re-evaluations of the Republican President suggest that he was not the liberal that present-day Democrats would like him to have been.
The real Lincoln believed in whites’ superiority over blacks, condemned miscegenation and was keen to ship black slaves off to overseas plantations after the abolition of slavery.
You’d never know it from Spielberg’s film, but the anti-slavery 13th Amendment originated not with Lincoln but with a petition campaign by early feminists called the Women’s National Loyal League. The film wildly exaggerates the President’s role in ending slavery and virtually ignores black people’s contribution.
The most prominent abolitionists included newspaper editor William Garrison, heiress Angelina Grimke, novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe and the freed slave Frederick Douglass. Not one of these is mentioned in Lincoln.
The film most culpably leaves out the fact that, while events in this picture were occurring, southern slaves were already rebelling and seizing the land where they worked.
Nowhere in the film is any mention by Lincoln or any of his allies of the strategic advantages of ruining the slave-based southern economy, and freeing millions of slaves behind enemy lines, many of whom would then fight for the Yankee army.
This is high-minded hagiography, and too much of it resembles a Disneyfied waxworks show with an animatronic version of Daniel Day-Lewis intoning speeches by the great man in a reedy tenor, while John Williams’s sub-Aaron Copland score strains for sonorous solemnity.
Spielberg ends the film with Lincoln’s assassination, but here again the director’s decision to show the event from the point of view of Lincoln’s young son has the effect of infantilising history.
The murder by John Wilkes Booth was not as Spielberg portrays it, an isolated event, but part of a political coup, with two other assassination attempts plotted simultaneously against Lincoln’s vice-president and secretary of state.
Spielberg is always a professional, and the film is never less than well-crafted. Though some will find it a tedious talkathon, it’s quite a bit more enjoyable than his last venture into similar territory, Amistad. But I don’t see it doing well on this side of the Atlantic.
There’s none of the flair, fun or originality that mark Spielberg’s finest work. It was a patriotic inevitability that this very American film would receive multiple Oscar nominations, but if it does win at the Academy Awards it will be more for worthiness than for artistic or historical merit.

Abigail's Party at Oxford Playhouse

The classic Mike Leigh play from 1977 is touring again, this time with a brand new cast. It did seem a little dated to me, but after a slow start, the loughs came thick and fast. The cast were obviously having great fun, especially Hannah Waterman as Beverly.

I actually cannot remember having seen the TV production as the plot was completely new to me. There is a huge amount of (mock) alcohol consummed on stage so I bet the takings at the bar at the interval were well above normal. The director, Lindsay Posner, has created a fine staging of this production for the Theatre Royal Bath, and the tour director Tom Attenborough gets the best from the new cast. A fun evening.

PS The orange decor is more from the late sixties than 1977. Our chairs, carpet and curtains in 1968 all had orange in them. Yuck!