Author Archive: Lesley Jakobsen
Spiderhead
(Director Joseph Kosinski) (Netflix, 2022) Spiderhead, a 107 minute TV movie from a short story by George Saunders (see our review of Lincoln in the Bardo here) is a bit too long. About 100 minutes too long. Saunders kept the story short for a reason. It starts interestingly enough and maintains the tone of a Black Mirror episode throughout, (not a good Black Mirror episode though. Not like San [sob] Junipero [sob]). Steve Abnesti (A Hemsworth) is the governor (sort-of) of an island prison facility called “Spiderhead” (the name is not explained in the film and don’t bother Googling it,…
Continue Reading →Behind Her Eyes
(Directed by Erik Richter Strand, Netflix, UK, 6-part series) The only thing behind the eyes of any of the actors in Behind Her Eyes is the sad realisation that life has come to this. Adam (Tyler Howitt, below) is a sassy-but-melancholy, innocent-but-knowing, big-framed-glasses-wearing dumpling of a kid. The kind of kid that the writers of chick-flicks give a single mother when they want the audience to like her. The single mother in this chick-flick is Louise Barnsely (Simona Brown) who has the type of job that only those same kind of writers could think we’ll believe. Louise is a part-time…
Continue Reading →Afternoon of an Autocrat (Norah Lofts)
Norah Lofts (1904 to 1983), mostly forgotten in this twilight of the gods, was a popular English novelist. Afternoon of an Autocrat *(1956) is set in Suffolk, in the fictitious village of Clevely at the time of its ‘enclosure’. In Britain, thousands of ‘Acts of Enclosure’ were passed between 1604 and 1914. A passel of commissioners, (susceptible to good hospitality, spite and whim) would descend upon a village and delineate how fields and hitherto common lands were to be parcelled out to those with claims evidenced by writing, social superiority, ancient usage or bribery.^ Part One, (“Afternoon of an Autocrat”)…
Continue Reading →Six the Musical
(Her Majesty’s Theatre, 27 May 2022) Six the Musical, a pop music retelling of the story of the wives of Henry the Eighth of England was royally received in London, New York and Sydney. We are pleased to say that the Adelaide audience loved it just as much as Henry VIII adored Anne Boleyn, and not just at the beginning of it all. The capacity crowd cheered when the six wives appeared in a London pea-souper of dry ice mist and they were on their feet dancing when the queens gloriously asserted their individuality and agency at the end of…
Continue Reading →Convenience Store Woman (Sayaka Murata)
(2018 translation from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori) Keiko Furukura isn’t a convenience store worker, she is part of a convenience store. “I was wasting time talking like this. I had to get myself back in shape for the sake of the store. I had to restructure my body so it would be able to move more swiftly and precisely to replenish the refrigerated drinks or clean the floor, to more perfectly comply with the store’s demands”. Keiko is content living as a cell in a convenience store, but her family and her (very few) friends are not content. “‘Keiko,…
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