The Varnished Culture's Thumbnail Reviews
Regularly added bite-sized reviews about Literature, Art, Music & Film.
Voltaire said the secret of being boring is to say everything.
We do not wish to say everything or see everything; life, though long is too short for that.
We hope you take these little syntheses in the spirit of shared enthusiasm.
A Poor Thing Indeed
Poor Things (Directed by “Yorgos” Lanthimos – 2023)
What do Lanthimos’ “Poor Things” and M. Night Shamalayan’s “The Village” films have in common? They are the latter works of erstwhile promising directors. Lanthimos’s “The Lobster” is fabulous. As is the rightfully feted Night Shamalayan’s “The Sixth Sense”. Original, surprising and engaging works. After that, Shamalayan made the hold-your nose “The Village.” Lanthimos took a step down to the so-so “Killing of a Sacred Deer” and then nosedived. “Poor Things” is twaddle. Sadly, it looks like it’s all over for these two.
“Poor Things” has beguiled critics with its steampunk, big-sleeved art direction. But that’s all there is. The task of the aesthetic is to distract the poor viewer from the tired plot, the thin characters and heavy-handed message. Dr. Godwin “God” Baxter (Willem Dafoe) is a mad scientist of the old kind. (Yes, like Frankenstein, yawn). He creates “Bella”, a monstrous meld of an adult suicide and the brain of her baby. Bella lurches about à la Elsa Lanchester and refers to herself in the third person. There’s no sense to the rate at which, or how, she develops. We are enjoined to see the uninhibited toddler in a woman’s body, which seems counterproductive, given this film’s alleged “feminist” purpose.
Bella wants to be independent, so she goes off with seedy adventurer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffulo). Ruffulo is too old and soft-centred for this role. Dashing and irresistible he is not. Bella enjoys her independence – being locked in a chest, abducted, dancing like a maniac, working in a brothel – all the great feminist desires. She has already decided that when the fun is over she will go home and marry weedy needy Max (Ramy Youssef). As all good feminists do.
By the time Bella gets home, the viewer is sick and tired of seeing Emma Stone in every kind of see-through outfit, writhing away joylessly. Hitched to a sadist who caused her inner adult to suicide, she escapes and takes over God’s conceit of playing Dr. Moreau.
Stone does well enough with the clumsy script. The viewer cannot, however, say how Willem Dafoe performed because his entire performance is a mass of gruesome facial scar makeup and stomach tubes. Like Bella herself, “Poor Things” is a ghastly, humourless hybrid, with no sense of timing and no soul.
OK, she dances better than Florence Foster Jenkins
Maestro
(Directed by Bradley Cooper – Netflix, 2023)
Maestro is not a biopic of Leonard Bernstein, a popular and influential conductor, composer and musicologist. We do follow his career, but high and low points are marked by whirls of scenic grabs and musical snatches. The film’s focus is on Bernstein’s long and bumpy marriage to Felicia Montealegre, going from breathless first-flush intimacy, to star couple, to cold understanding, to a final tenderness. Whilst this renders the film a little thin, putting it mildly, it succeeds upon its chosen horizon.
This is due to great turns by Bradley Cooper and, in particular, Carey Mulligan, as the happy/unhappy/tolerating couple (who converse at His Girl Friday speed and with Robert Altman-style clarity). At their fashionable apartment during Thanksgiving, she tells him “you’re going to die a lonely old queen” if he is not more careful (and discreet). This prediction turns out to be true, emphasised at the moment of that prediction by the passing of Macy’s giant Snoopy balloon. There are many soirées that convey an empty Truman Capote feel, although we may have missed the famous ‘radical chic’ party as the scenes hurtled past.
Music being more talked-about than heard throughout, the longest performance piece is Bernstein’s famous conducting of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony in Cambridgeshire, where Lenny and Felicia resurrect their relationship to an extent. Bernstein was very much a ‘hands on’ emotional conductor, and this part of the gnostic discipline comes out, but we learn nothing. However, the film is well worth watching, even if it cannot teach us.
Dream Scenario
(Directed by Kristoffer Borgli, 2023)
“The general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic equilibrium.” (Carl G. Jung, “Approaching the Unconscious.”)
“Humani nihil a me alienum puto” (“nothing human is alien to me”) – Terence.
If the ‘ Viennese quack’ (according to Nabokov) Sigmund Freud is correct, all dream content is disguised wish-fulfillment. So mind what you wish. In Dream Scenario, Professor Paul Matthews (a sublime Nicolas Cage) is a balding, middle-aged academic, the type Dirk Bogarde used to play – bright, ineffectual, wistful, querulous – who is neither published (well, he’d have to write something), nor quoted (unless plagiarized) nor noticed. His wife (Julianne Nicholson) cares for him in a condescending fashion, and his daughters and his biology students find him uncool, harmless and unmemorable.
Then comes the event sociological: Matthews starts turning up in people’s dreams. Even people who have never seen or heard of him. Initially, within vividly-filmed sequences of ‘elusive dreams of private persons to which we hold no key’, he’s just there in the background, a self-conscious extra: walking by a bad car accident; raking leaves, ambling by while a girl seeks to avoid alligators by climbing on a piano; loitering during an earthquake at the college; inspecting mushrooms while a man is hunted by a blood-drenched assailant. He’s thrilled to find himself famous, and seeks to exploit this fame to get his swarm-theory book (not yet written) published. But the social-media-savvy talent agents (Michael Cera, Kate Berlant, Dylan Gelula) want him to become the face of that tempestuous refreshment, Sprite, and in the case of Gelula, to re-create an erotic dream, which turns out rather badly in real life.
The dreams start turning quite dark, in a way that sees Matthews go from curio to outcast, in an amusing and provocative reflection on the transience of fame, superficial and fragile social mores, and cancel culture, reminiscent of the recent Black Mirror episode, “Joan is Awful.” But then, like a discarded meme or an over-extended twitter-fight, the film runs out of puff, focus, and ideas, and folds like a cheap suit. The Professor (unlike ‘Frank Underwood’ (aka Kevin Spacey, another negation victim) from House of Cards) spurns an offer to be interviewed by conservative pundit Tucker Carlson; meant as a hip, woke, smirking, cultural reference, it was in fact a big ‘miss’ – The Prof. should have appeared with Carlson; it would have resurrected the character, and beguiled us in a way that the film’s conclusion did not.
The Ring in Brisbane
(Lyric Theatre, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Second Cycle: 8, 10, 12, 14 December 2023)
Like Wagner’s monumental work, the first ever staging of The Ring in Brisbane grew in the telling. It was commissioned in 2017, and advertised in early 2019, with bookings in a ‘shuffle format’ scheduled from 13 June of that year, for performances in November/December 2020. Then a Sino/American research project let a bat loose from Hell, and gross inconvenience, and death, ensued. The Ring was set aside, although not as long as Wagner did while he fretted, and tinkered, and researched. With a revised cast, it was finally staged up-north in December 2023. Touted as the first ‘digital’ version of the production (cf. Ulrich Melchinger, Kassel 1970-74; Harry Kupfer, Bayreuth 1988/1992), we’ll have a bit to say about that below.
But the 2nd Cycle was, overall, a triumph. [TVC has a few quibbles, stated below, but really, who cares?] Early mail insinuated that the Queensland Symphony Orchestra had been a tad scratchy in round 1; however, by the time cycle 2 came around, conductor Phillipe Auguin, a Ring veteran, had knocked all into shape. (I think Donner’s hammer was out of synch with the orchestra, and Siegfried’s hunting horn missed a beat once in Götterdämmerung, but these don’t even count as quibbles.) White-haired, smiling, and seemingly avuncular, Auguin, we understand, is selector’s choice in a long line of disagreeable Conductors (e.g., Toscanini, Solti, Fritz Reiner, and in the land of make-believe, Tár). But he and his musicians get kudos for a magnificent performance over 4 long evenings.
Das Rheingold opened the batting, and was fine, although one’s first encounter with Chen Shi-Zheng’s design felt like having chugged one too many martinis. Some of the staging was annoying. Alberich as a toad was woefully inadequate. The piling-up of gold to “hide” Freia was another visual fail. At the conclusion, the ascent to Valhalla, the rainbow bridge through the mist was represented by a long, luminous spike piercing the roily heavens, akin the end of the old Dr. Who programme. No problem with that, but moving side panels blundered into view, containing a digital decorative meld of colours and shapes straight out of William Morris, Leon Bakst and the Saville studio. Wotan’s and Fricka’s introduction was straight out of The Mikado.
The cast were wonderful, particularly Warwick Fyfe as Alberich (though his costume made him look like a cross between Gregor Samsa and Grizzly Adams). Deborah Humble as Fricka, and Hubert Francis, as Loge, were also stand-outs. We thought Daniel Sumegi was strangely muted as Wotan, but he roared back in Die Walküre. The lithe Rhinemaidens skipped and slid down the props with élan.
There was a closing, irritating, thigh-slapping dance number that added approximately nil, a superfluous trope appropriated from some Maoist wet-dream opera such as “Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy,” or “The Red Detachment of Women.”
Die Walküre
Perhaps the most crucial chapter in the saga was very forcefully played and sung: Lise Lindstrom has grown since her Brünnhilde in 2016 and here she was sublime, matched by Sumegi’s Wotan, their urgent discourse under a digital backdrop of circles and cobwebs, which we thought appropriate. Humble as Fricka was superb, as were Anna-Louise Cole and Rosario La Spina as Sieglinde and Siegmund. (I spoke to one of the musicians afterwards, who described playing Walküre as “fun.” We wouldn’t have put it like that, but 10/10 for enthusiasm.)
Once again, some grumbles about staging are apt. On the whole, minimalism (à la Wieland Wagner) reigned, thankfully. We didn’t understand the speedboat chassis on which characters respectively lounged and then dragged, or the table in Hunding’s hut which bastardised Brancusi, Henry Moore and the worst of modern plastic art. But the dragon of fire encircling the sleeping Brünnhilde was terrific, evoking memories of Elke Neidhardt’s Adelaide Ring.
Siegfried
The night belongs to Siegfried and Stefan Vinke, who continues to grow in the role, along with Lindstrom’s Brünnhilde. Sumegi, now the ‘Wanderer’, his bête noire Alberich (Fyfe), Andreas Conrad as Mime, Andrea Silvestrelli as the voice of Fafner, and Celeste Lazarenko as the athletic Woodbird (actually, her stand-in), are very good. Liane Keegan sings at low volume, which suits the portent of Erda’s warnings, undermined as they are somewhat by her strange garb, making her seem like the fifth Banana Split. And there are more dancers, twirling their infernal ribbons, which might have put the orchestra a bit out of time.
Götterdämmerung
This is the closest Wagner gets to the Nibelungenlied, and it is a most satisfying closing-of-the-circle, well done by all, in particular the real hero of the whole saga, Brünnhilde. Once again, we worried that either she or Siegfried would fall off the rock – it looked over 15 feet high, with no guard rails. Also, while it was pushed into position by the camouflaged minions, it creaked quite noisily (WD-40, anyone?). We did, however, like the Wizard of Oz-like door under which Alberich gets into a sleepy Hagen’s head, and the hunting ground, a wintry array of Patagonian mountains and a moon that went from Melancholia to Lord of the Rings.
The director had decamped after Cycle 1, we heard, having urged his players to declaim impassively (!) – We suspect this bit of directorial chauvinism was disregarded by the players once the director left, given the work represents one of the loftiest heights of romanticism, and is a pre-Freudian masterpiece, fortunately played as such. But if our mail is accurate, it does explain something of the sterility of aspects of the operas in this production. Chen has been reported as saying “Opera as a performance, as theatre, isn’t my cup of tea.” However, the production did spurn the wan flatulence of Regietheater.
In any case, and notwithstanding the truly idiosyncratic staging of the world’s final immolation – Brünnhilde and a Mechano warhorse around and atop a pile of generic supermarket tins, doused in bleach, while a truly crazy bunch of CGO swirled about – could not defeat the simply gorgeous music, song, and emotion as we all ‘saw the world end.’ Andrea Silvestrelli, highly effective earlier as Fafner and Hunding, was, as a sonorous and vigorous Hagen, outstanding in a crowded field of sheer brilliance. The audience gave a long standing ovation that was neither phony nor excessive.
Götterdämmerung, at curtain
Digital Effects
The digital effects were generally impressive (hundreds of LED screens, video material and sensors in the ensembles), although often they were too busy, distracting, or intruded for reasons unclear to this correspondent at least (“Effects without causes”?). The technology will enable future productions to be more portable and economical, but as tended to be the case in this production, the risk is the temptation to explore the medium at the expense of clarity and concision. The drizzled titles at the start of each opera included Chinese characters (we surmised, translations), which were neither ‘provocative’ nor ‘insightful.’ But the visuals were often beautiful: for example, the falling golden leaves in Die Walküre, which owed much to digital effects; and the funeral procession to the Trauermarsch in Götterdämmerung, which did not. It was brave to try it and it has, quibbles notwithstanding, succeeded.
The Ring remains one of the peaks of western art, a necessary rampart, still, against the barbarians and their scrobbling retinues.
A Thank-you to the Richard Wagner Society in Queensland
At the splendid Tattersalls club in Brisbane on the afternoon of 9/12/23, RWSQ gave one of a series of receptions to celebrate the Ring in its fair city. Wagnerians had come from far and wide. The President of the Society, Rosemary Cater-Smith, was regrettably indisposed; Professor Colin Mackerras AO gave the welcome and introduced the Society’s new patron, Heldentenor Bradley Daley, who belted out Siegfried’s song whilst he forges Nothung. Being within a few paces of Bradley, the force of his voice was particularly powerful.
(Incidentally, TVC, as usual, funded attendance at the Brisbane Ring out of its own shallow pocket.)
Continue Reading →Back to Otto’s
(Southbank, Brisbane, December 2023)
We were last at Otto in 2021 – and had a wonderful lunch. Dinner this time, and just as good, actually even better. It was prefaced by a 90-odd minute power cut at our hotel (and the Queensland Premier hadn’t even formally stepped down yet) but after we were able to return to our room and freshen up, it was a short walk along the Brisbane river to this lovely restaurant.
Service was impeccable; tables were not too close but not overly distant either. We were under cover but over the water’s edge, making us feel both daring and comfy.
L had Paccheri ai Frutti di Mare, long tube pasta with Moreton Bay bug, squid, blue swimmer crab, confit tomato, garlic, chilli and basil. Despite the abundance of ingredients, it was light and finely balanced. P plumped for Anatra, duck breast sliced into bite-sized chunks, with rich cherries, roasted baby onions and almonds – lovely. By the time we’d helped that down with a Le Battistelle Montesi Soave Classico, the only room for dessert was a glass of champagne.
Otto is a perfect special occasion restaurant.
View to the bridge
Saltburn
(Directed by Emerald Fennell, 2023)
Why would any middle or working class young person accept an invitation to their aristocratic University chum’s stately pile? Every movie-goer knows that the guest will have the wrong clothes, the butler will despise them, something bad will happen and lives will be Changed Forever. There is of course the very slight chance that the young person will end-up filthy rich as a result of their visit. Perhaps that’s why they keep turning-up on foot at the magnificent iron gates, having somehow missed the serf who was sent to the station to meet them.
“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
We’ve all seen this film before. Indeed, we at TVC saw it only last week but then it was called ‘The Lesson’ and the visitor was a tutor. As in the ‘Lesson’, the aristocratic family in ‘Saltburn’ has an elder son called Felix (here played as a blithe and gilded type by Jacob Elordi) but there’s a maze rather than a pond. As in ‘The Lesson’, the aristocratic father is played by Richard E. Grant but whereas in ‘The Lesson’ he could have been Withnail’s QC cousin, here he has nothing at all to do. Rosamund Pike has a lot more to do as Elsbeth, the family matriarch who is – for reasons which are not at all clear – quite taken with Felix’s lower class guest Oliver (Barry Keoghan). In fact, Keoghan is completely miscast. He is odd looking in a Joel-Egerton-with-a-fake-nose way but entirely without silky charm. He jars. Unaccountably, the aristocrats all love him, until they don’t. Oliver is a fish out of water everywhere – at home (in one of the best scenes he ‘pays’ a surprise visit to his parents), at Oxford, and of course, at Saltburn.
The film looks marvellous, but that’s easy. There’s Oxford porn, fashion porn and big house porn. Actually there’s plenty of real porn as well, which is ugly and completely cringy. 2000’s music is nicely used, in particular, MGMT’s ‘Time to Pretend’ during the obligatory brilliant young things’ debauched party scene, and ‘Murder on The Dance Floor’ (Sophie Ellis-Bextor) for the splendid mad dance through the house.
“..but does the collar match the cuffs?”
Alison Oliver is the fragile and rather stupid daughter Venetia and does well enough. Archie Madekwe as Farleigh, a cousin and hanger-on, is very good; he’s likeable despite himself. Reece Shearsmith appears briefly as a bootlicking tutor. Special mention goes to Ewan Mitchell as a nasty and probably insane mathematics student. The always excellent Carey Mulligan is a delight as eccentric friend of the family and another hanger-on, Pamela. (But see her in as an avenging angel in director Emerald Fennell’s sensational 2020 film, ‘Promising Young Woman’).
The film is slow to get going. There are improbabilities in the script and it’s undercooked. We don’t even know what Felix is reading at Webbe College. (Naturally Oliver is reading English). On the whole it’s amusing enough, at times shocking. Perhaps the whole thing is best thought of as a fairy tale, but it is certainly not a morality play. We have all seen this class warfare, fish-out-of-water film before and we know where it’s going. Six Degrees of Separation, The Go-Between, The Talented Mr. Ripley and – towering over even these – The Servant – got there earlier and did it better.
[Minority Report: A new low in high-born squalor. Bloody and yet at the same time, anaemic. P would rather watch Accident or read Brideshead Revisited.But not Harry Potter…]
Raw
A film by Lumin Sports, produced by Henry Jones, shot by Henry Jones and Jack Shephard (November 2023)
The Great and the Good (plus your correspondent) gathered at Glenelg Football Club on 8 November to view an advance screening of this short, brilliantly produced, and exhilarating view of the 2023 finals campaign, viewed from within the inner sanctum.
Lumin ( https://luminsports.com/ ) is an expert qualitative data company, specialising in enhancing sporting analysis and performance. It’s flagship visualisation platform, “Arc, was launched in early 2019 as a way for technical and non-technical decision-makers in professional sporting teams to interpret complex athlete and team data to ultimately make better, more accurate and faster decisions.”
Lumin has been informing the Glenelg Football Club’s work for a little while now – its core competency is in high-quality data delivery. It is not a documentary company. However, its short piece, “Raw,” recently released on You Tube, outshines most of the documentary films washing though the internet, podcasts, and legacy broadcasting. It started life as an off-topic curio, a 10 minute focus on Matt Allen. Then the Tigers finished on top at the end of the minor round and so the story grew in the telling. The Lumin team had full access to the inner sanctum during the campaign, and so the film documents the tactics, strategy, analysis, psychology, camaraderie, media commitments, blood, sweat and tears, as the Bays drove for Premiership # 6.
All the key personnel are in view and the interviews are insightful. Just one example: High Performance Manager Tom Stevens explains that whereas a normal week’s regime will be about 21 kilometres, in the week before the GF it’s dialled-down to 16.5 (because there’s no game a week later). Prominent throughout of course is the Senior Coach, Darren Reeves, and we are reminded at the start by Head of Football, Paul Sandercock, how remarkable it is that he was only appointed less than a year ahead of Grand Final day. An envious supporter of another team commented on our post on the Grand Final thus: “What team starts the year with no coach and a Club in disarray and then takes all the toys…?”
Some of the language in the film is a bit ‘raw,’ but that’s footy. “Raw” is a little gem. Check it out on You Tube (and if you have a smart TV, it is even more impressive on a large screen).
The Lesson
Director, Alice Troughton; Screenwriter, Alex MacKeith (2023)
‘The Lesson’ should be good. It has lots of literary talk, Richard E Grant demonstrating his special scenery-chewing skills, Julie Deply mooching about, a big moody house with a pond. Note the pond. Grant is J M Sinclair, a famous novelist of the bad-tempered, autocratic variety. Julie Deply is Helene, his long-suffering wife who has some art curator job which is glamorous and doesn’t require any work, so she mooches about. Their needs and those of their miserable, lazy but talented son Bertie (Stephen McMillan) are tended to by the butler/cook and all knowing factotum Ellis (Crispin Letts). Liam (Daryl McCormack) drops his post graduate studies at Oxford to become a live-in tutor, assisting Bertie in his preparation for the Oxford entry examination. Naturally J M has writer’s block and can’t finish his latest book. Naturally Liam is writing his first book. J M works on a computer and Liam writes in longhand – Note that. Hovering over all is the ghost of Felix, the Sinclair’s elder son who committed suicide. The hints as to where this is all going are dropped like hammers in the hands of careless tradies. J M’s pronouncements right at the beginning about writers’ inspiration hit the viewer on the head like a hammer. The name of his novel is a really heavy hammer. Liam’s photographic memory for text looks suspiciously like a weighty item with which to beat tired plots.
The story galumphs along along a well-worn path. We have all been on this path before. Well, all of us but these characters. Well-read as they are, they don’t seem to see the hammer-shaped mountain of clichés and contrivances in front of them. Tell the agency that you didn’t take the gig after all and enter into a private agreement with the Sinclairs? Brilliant idea, Liam. Agree to critique Sinclair’s writing if he’ll critique yours? What could possibly go wrong, Liam? The ‘twist,’ when it finally meanders into sight, is no surprise, it’s only a slight bend after all and the hammers have flattened it.
The actors are all marvellous but they have little to do. The house and its grounds do most of it for them. Peering into and out of windows is important, as is leaning on the Giverny-style bridge. Sipping soup elegantly in the candle-lit dining room is a must. (The power’s gone out. ‘Bang!’ Did someone drop a hammer on the fuse box?)
So, it should be good, but it’s not. Don’t bother to go to see it. Let this be a lesson to you. Stay at home where you are safe from falling hammers. Read a decent novel instead.
Continue Reading →Barrie Kosky’s Das Rheingold
(Palace Nova, October 2023) Reviewed by Philippa Thomas
Barrie Kosky’s Das Rheingold worked superbly in the live screened London Royal Opera performance seen by some lucky Adelaide Wagner lovers at our Palace Nova Prospect cinema this month. The screening included a short explanatory interview with Kosky and conductor Antonio Pappano, where Kosky explained that his own planned Ring cycle deals with “recognisable human beings with all their flaws” within a context of “the unexplained“. His stress is on the origins from Greek tragedy rather than Norse mythology. Many opera critics have reviewed this production positively – both Pappano’s conducting and the strong cast having “no weak links” (Andrew Clements The Guardian 12/09/23). It is also noted in the media press that even though Pappano is shortly leaving his post as Music Director of the ENO, he will return to conduct the remainder of the Kosky Ring Cycle.
Each scene of Rheingold here happens among the charred ruins of the huge, dying ‘World Ash Tree’ which seems a clear reference to mankind’s despoiling of our planet. The Earth goddess Erda appears first on stage, and inhabits each scene as the ever-present observer, sometimes hiding her face in despair. Kosky has cast her as an impossibly ancient, vulnerable and totally naked figure, no longer able to protect her realm, but Erda is mute, her role beautifully sung off-stage by Wiebke Lehmkuhl. In the beginning, the Rhine maidens emerge from ash tree’s sprawling roots while a stream of gold leaks out of it from a subterranean Nibelheim. Soon appearing on stage, Alberich’s slave workers, tiny children wearing deformed adults’ head costumes, who are frantically collecting and carrying off the liquid gold, complement the overall grotesquery of the storyline. The final rainbow “bridge,” rendered as torrents of glitter as the gods approach Valhalla, does convey Wagner’s majestic and magical vision of the gods’ world.
The costumes are, of course, contemporary but not too over-done or stereotypical; for example, the gods in one scene are all suitably aristocratic, sporting Edwardian polo-playing breeches, boots and polo clubs, while the Rhine-maidens in revealing black and glitter garments, heavily made-up, cavort and frolic like vulgar music hall dancers teasing to the absolute extreme their audience of one – Alberich.
The cast are uniformly excellent in their singing and their acting fully is realised in screen close-up. In the Adelaide cinema screening, this viewer especially enjoyed Sean Panniker’s Loge. This fire god, twirling and smirking, is truly unnerving. Christopher Maltman’s excellent stage persona and voice renders a convincing and even sympathy-deserving Wotan. Christopher Purves as Alberich is no dwarf, but clumsy and sinister and thoroughly convincing as Wotan’s obsessed rival. He is also vocally very impressive “with his own arresting baritone” (Sam Smith’s review in Opera Online). For this Wagner fan, Kosky’s start on the Ring tetralogy was absolutely worth seeing!
[This review originally appeared in the October/November 2023 Newsletter of the Richard Wagner Society of South Australia. It is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author.] [TVC adds: This review sounds as though Mr. Kosky might be finally hitting his straps, after the disastrous The Magic Flute and The Golden Cockerel.] Continue Reading →The Following Events Are Based On a Pack of Lies
(Foxtel Go. Binge) (2023) Creators: Ginny Skinner, Penelope Skinner; Directed by Robbie McKillop and Nicole Charles.
The name and set-up of this sleek five-part ITV series leave the viewer suspecting a twist at the end. So that the reader will not be disappointed, we will tell you that the twist never comes. The narrative is pretty straightforward, if not always credible. But that’s ok. This is bite-sized entertainment of the fairly predictable, non-demanding type, with fairy-tale themes.
While pushing her bike around Oxford wearing a peculiar, self-designed red cape, our heroine, middle-aged sad-sack Alice Newman (Rebekah Staton) spots her Big Bad Wolf, the man known as Dr. Robert Chance (Alistair Petrie). Chance, under a different name, was her husband. He disappeared years ago, having cheated Alice, her family and friends in a fake investment scheme. Before and after his marriage to Alice, Rob cheated other women who, (or whose survivors) appear in documentary-like interviews from time to time. A nice touch. It’s rather odd that Alice hasn’t seen Dr. Chance before, because he is a well known eco warrior and intimate of Sir Ralph Unwin, (Sir Derek Jacobi) a David Attenborough type. Alice is reluctantly assisted in her plan to expose Chance by her father, Bill (Karl Johnson) and is suspected of insanity by her partner Benjy (Julian Barratt). Indeed, she appears unhinged and dazed most of the time. Rob, in the meantime, has inveigled himself into the affections of a famous fantasy writer, Cheryl Harker (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a lonely widow. Rob sets about undermining and defrauding her too, in the most heartless way. Alice befriends Cheryl. Rob moves into Cheryl’s dragon-themed mansion. Drugging, delusion and daftness ensue.
There are some questions. Why does Rob stay in the house when he’s been outed? What happened to Sir Ralph? Who was the mysterious man to whom Dr. Chance spoke frequently on the phone? Why did he deliberately allow himself to get badly burned during one of his earlier scams? Why didn’t Oxford University expose his doctorate as a fake? How did Alice get a comatose Rob upstairs?
It’s beautiful to watch, the main players are sterling, especially Petrie as the evil mastermind with a truly pathetic side. Jean-Baptiste is a delight. There’s overacting, interesting clothes, lovely interiors. The plot does require the suspension of belief at times, but this is a fairy tale after all, complete with white rabbits, knights, a maze and an evil-step-sister-like boss named Juno Fish (Romola Garai). It is uneven; in particular, a misplaced court scene and, in the final episode, a serious take on the injustice done to women both jar. The tone of the myth and magic party at the end is simply odd messy. An attempt at humour using a cliched movie line falls flat. Despite all that, it is fun to watch. It must have been fun to make.
‘Are we having fun?’
