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 House and its Head
(by I Compton-Burnett)
Ivy Compton-Burnett* must have had a strange family life (just look at her hair). She was the seventh of her father’s children and the first of her (less than affectionate) mother’s five. A brother died of pneumonia, another on the Somme. Two of her sisters (“Baby” and “Topsy”) committed suicide together one Christmas Day. None of the twelve had children. None of the girls married.
Certainly her books are about strange families. The Edgeworth family of A House and its Head is unhappy, decidedly in its own way. The solipsistic father Duncan is oblivious to his (first) wife’s misery and to the contempt of his daughters and his nephew Grant. The family and their peculiar friends, including the insufferable Dulcia and the sinister Gertrude Jekyll, jab and snipe at each other via the agency of formal, often impenetrable dialogue. They are all terribly proper and yet, when two truly shocking things are done by major charcters, they’re virtually passed over with a shrug.
The elusive, idiosyncratic style is difficult, but becomes easier as the undercurrents of vice and mendacity become clearer. A truly engaging book – but not one for readers who need likeable characters. There are none in this book.
* Compton-Burnett was English. Naturally, the name was pronounced ‘Cumpton-Burnit’. Although she was English, it was not Tony Abbott who made her a Dame.
Continue Reading →The Babadook
As usual, the Australian film industry has worn its thin skin off patting its own back in praise of a predictable, derivative mess. “The Babadook” (even the name is a yawn) has some (very) minor suspense, good acting from the major characters and awful acting from some minor characters. The script is amateurish and lazy. If this film were shorter, it might make a workmanlike student film.
Every poor horror film requires most or all of these elements:
- A cute, shaggy pet dog. Preferably white.
- An insect infestation.
- A concerned and mild-mannered neighbour or work colleague of the opposite sex.
- Ludicrously severe government officials.
- Contemptuous police.
- A large, unnaturally dark house; the topography of which is unclear. Curtains, a basement and lamp-lit corners are mandatory.
- A large-eyed, unsmiling child making unsettling appearances, arms straight at the sides.
- A struggling single mother fighting the cruel world in defence of her troubled darling.
- A comparison between said poor but decent single mother and pampered monied mothers.
- Something odd being disgorged by a major character.
- Snippets of scarey old black and white cartoons and films.
- Shots of a large tree.
- A vulnerable child being bullied to breaking point by another child while oblivious adults make pointed conversation nearby.
- Someone shoots backwards up the stairs.
- A character slams a door shut against something scarey, and shuffles backwards across the floor on their haunches (no-one really does that).
- An item left on the doorstep.
This film has every one of these, plus others which I cannot mention because they would serve as “spoilers” – as if you didn’t already know them all. The worst thing is, it’s not even unintentionally funny.
The TVC cat couldn’t keep his eyes open during The Babadook
The Good Terrorist
(Doris Lessing)
Once a vice is renounced, a delusion pricked, one looks back at it with second sight. It took the 1956 Hungarian massacre, in which Soviets deployed tanks against civilians, to budge Doris Lessing to resign from the British Communist Party. Fierce and radical, she could not resist casting some light on the leftish radicals of a new era – Thatcher’s Britain.
It is to her credit that we are engaged by the story of the dreariest, most self-centred, whiniest, galactically feckless soft cell in the history of modern terrorism. Their ‘earth mother’, Alice Mellings, a thirty-something going on nine, actually draws a measure of your sympathy in Lessing’s expert, ironic hands as she tidies and quacks her brood into line, protecting them from the real forces of fear or authority. And when the group actually manage something (the book came out not long after the IRA attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton), you just know that – like Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon – Alice will ‘take the fall’ (and, like Mary, so she should).
Brighton Hotel 1984 (The Daily Mail)
Andrei Rublev
(Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky) (1966)
The great painter of iconography in medieval Russia is given a splendid, challenging (and long) tribute in this startling chain of magnificently filmed events, the mud and the blood and the tears, the acts of ruin and of creation making a kind of gritty surrealism over seven loosely connected episodes, the kind of picture Dostoevsky might make. Patience is repaid with interest.
Reversal of Fortune
(Dir. Barbet Schroeder) (1990)
A contemplative, but playful account of a cause célèbre. Millionairess Sunny von Bülow’s vegetative state persisted from 1980 to 2008 (when she died, aged 76). The cause of this coma was alleged to be an injection of insulin by her second husband, Claus von Bülow, a classicist and former assistant to oil king J. Paul Getty.
The Bulows did not giggle much during mealtimes.
Bülow was convicted by a jury in 1982 and this film, based on the book by his appellate counsel, Alan Dershowitz,concentrates on the relationship between legal team and client during the appeal to the Rhode Island Supreme Court, seeking to reverse the convictions of attempted murder. The structure is intriguing, with theories, strategies and machinations presented (satisfyingly) on multiple levels and through numerous shifts of time. Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close, as the strange, rich, unhappy couple, are superb, as is Ron Silver as Dershowitz. “Two packs of Vantage, please. Oh yes, and a vial of insulin.”
Primer
(Dir. Shane Carruth) (2004)
Two commercial engineers create a time machine by accident and start bumping into their other selves. Made on a shoe-string, incomprehensible, with confusing exposition and techno-chat designed to cover gaps in plot, this film is, nevertheless, engaging and different – nice, weird playing by director Carruth and Dave Sullivan as Aaron and Abe.
Black Swan
(Dir. Darren Aronofsky) (2010)
Natalie Portman is no Divine Zucchi as she samples various vices in an attempt to turn Odette into Odile. A heroic attempt by all concerned to synthesize the struggle and sacrifice of art looks and even feels impressive but, alas, is artless, a cliché, and ludicrous.
The Barber of Seville
(Opera Australia) (2007)
Another can’t-miss piece, perhaps the greatest opera buffa of all, with typical Rossini touches – beautiful young lady, thwarted passion, a nasty guardian, identity confusion and a comically manipulative mastermind – was staged by OA over the country in 2007.
Rossini’s score is uneven but joyous, featuring many popular melodies (e.g. the smash cavatina Largo al Factotum Della Citta – “Figaro sù, Figaro giù! Figaro quà, Figaro la!”). TVC saw the production in Melbourne (14/4/07), when there was last minute shuffling of the cast, Figaro being laryngeally inflamed, and replaced by his servant. The key role of Rosina (mezzo) was taken by Emma Matthews (high soprano) who was wonderful (but Warwick Fyfe, as disgusting old Dr Bartolo, seemed a little off-form, quite unusually for him).
Silly set; lovely orchestral work by Richard Bonynge.
Continue Reading →The Imitation Game
(Dir. Morten Tyldum) (2014)
There have been many books and indeed many films concerning Enigma and Ultra. All are unsatisfactory to varying degrees. The present effusion suffers from a common defect. It is hard to engage us, in cinematic terms, by presenting decryption, or its value in the war effort: one is visually dull, the other incalculable. One is left to stage moral dilemmas or descend to caricatures of hobbits in Bletchley huts, sledgehammering us with reminders that queer little folk can do great things.
Turing and his colleagues in Hut 8 were crucial to the effort to break the Enigma code machine in WWII but hardly unique – there were hundreds of other acts and ideas that contributed to cracking the codes and keeping that achievement secret, playing out from the early 1930s. Turing’s vaunted Banburismus procedure was abandoned and the bombe machines he invented (to compute the socket plugs and wheel combinations set on the enigma) were successfully upgraded by others. There was no eureka moment but a series of them. And the ethical predicament posed by ‘cracking’ enigma, leading to Ultra, was a multi-dimensional operation by MI6 that had little to do with Turing, who, of course, had to cope with certain secrets of his own.
At least The Imitation Game is one of the better of the crop – contrast the notorious U-571, which features gallant Yanks rescuing an Enigma machine from a German sub (they didn’t) and tricking an enemy destroyer into sinking the sub (they didn’t). But ultimately it seques into a misleading mishmash of A Beautiful Mind, Little Britain, Dad’s Army and Rain Man. Although Benedict Cumberbatch is fine as Turing, Keira Knightley (here assuming a meld of Kate Winslet and Helena Bonham-Carter) archly leads a supporting cast of stiff upper lip types. Better to read Enigma:The Battle for the Code by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore or Codebreakers edited by Hinsley & Stripp (with a short chapter by Joan Murray, nee Clarke).
Continue Reading →Solar
(by Ian McEwan)
An amusing novel, in which the somewhat clunky cogs of plot are lubricated with humorous observations about the commercialisation of the Religion of Climate Change, the dopier aspects of feminism, sloth, urban myths, modern travel, class and scientific research. Unfortunately the oil fails the mechanism at the end, at which point it grinds to a rather noisy and unlikely meltdown. Worth reading but…I realised partway through that I had in fact read it before and could barely remember it.
Continue Reading →