Category Archive: FILM
The First Monday in May
Let Mrs Pratt be a warning to you, Ms Wintour.
(dir. Andrew Rossi) TVC attended a premiere of this film which officially opens on May 12. Vogue editor, the infamous Anna Wintour (time to lose the bob, Anna) and Andrew Bolton (director of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) plan The Met’s most-attended fashion exhibition – “China: Through the Looking Glass” and the astounding opening party. Is fashion art? On a par with “The September Issue” and “Dior and I“. Fascinating for fashionistas. Not for anyone else. MINORITY REPORT BY Peter I respectfully agree: this was rather fascinating, albeit a little too long, with some repetition. What…
Continue Reading →Manon Lescaut
(Puccini, NY Met, 5 March, 2016) TVC had not seen this early Puccini but was pleasantly surprised. It’s a Puccini, of course, so a rural, low-born tart will get uppity and be handed a disproportionate retribution as her fate, but whilst the story is the messy result of being written by a committee, it is uncomplicated (albeit piecemeal), heartfelt and in the end, very moving. There are flat bits – the café twittering at the beginning reminds one of the rubbish music theatre Valli is forced to do in The Third Man – but the music shows the composer’s great talent and there are numerous Wagnerian…
Continue Reading →Shattered Glass
'This is BS, and worse, it's rife with comma errors!'
(Dir. Billy Ray) (2003) All is not well at the o-so-holy New Republic…the in-flight magazine of Air Force One (well, when Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama are aboard). It seems their star reporter, Stephen Glass, has been cooking-up stories! Hold the presses! Has he dissed Bernie Sanders as a Marxist? Pointed out that Obama has sub-contracted US foreign policy to the Russians? No. He’s made up stuff. This is an earnest, pretty well-made morality tale, with solid performances, but it suffers from over-earnestness, tin and thin character development, and, mostly, a lack of scripting to sell-us against a prevailing…
Continue Reading →Renoir is a Pissoir
Renoir – Reviled and Revered (Dir. Phil Grabsky) (2015) at Palace Nova There are so many suggestive connections in the impressionist and post-impressionist world. In this well-made and balanced documentary film, several connections are made that help us follow a radical turn (arguably, in retrospect, a wrong turn) in the course of visual art and demonstrates the technical challenges of representation and meaning. Beautifully photographed and tastefully edited, it actually enhances some of the work of Renoir, the major artist under review. I don’t think the unnerving novelty of impressionism was more concisely and clearly put than by E. H. Gombrich: “outraged people would…
Continue Reading →Male Death Fantasy
(The Dirty Harry franchise as an emblem of the moral imperative in violence) Every boy, at some stage, has this daydream: he sits calmly while a bunch of thugs harass and bully him. But then they push his Mum / Sister / Girlfriend around. And boy becomes Man, psycho Man in fact, dealing out pain and destruction to the astonished thugs. By extension, this feeds the vigilante film genre, which started with silent films (where the hero bested the villains and saved the heroine in the final reel), through all those westerns and cop shows, through Death Wish and on, up…
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