daasgrrl

It feels like ages since I've updated - I've been so lazy, and it's been so hot. Like, record-setting, power-grid-breaking hot. I didn't actually realise "catastrophic" fire danger warnings existed - it stopped at "extreme" when I was a kid. And we lost power for a few hours on Friday night (local fault, not load shedding) when it was still around 40C (about 104F) so I ended up lying on the sofa clutching an ice pack by candlelight. I realise other places in the world are hot, but they're set up for it - like, if you go to Singapore or Dubai, air-conditioning is pretty much standard. Whereas at home we only have portable fans that at those temperatures really only work when you're sitting right in front of them. My PC would only function for about half an hour at a time before its fan started going crazy. Fun times *g* But now we've hit a temperature range at which my brain actually functions again, so I thought I'd do a quick write-up.

Saw, um, xXx 3: Return of Xander Cage (!), which is the kind of movie I never thought I would see. I haven't seen either (presumably) of the prequels, nor any of the Fast and the Furious movies, which I am told spawned this franchise. Whatever *g*. I offered to go along and see it out of the goodness of my heart, and because having seen a trailer, it didn't look like it would be too painful. It did end up having some nice things going for it:

1) the cast were the most thoroughly diverse group I've seen in a a movie for a very long time, which is still rare enough to be notable. The female lead was Indian, which may or may not explain the Hindi version that was also showing locally
2) I enjoyed seeing Toni Collette and Samuel L Jackson a great deal, even though I'm not entirely sure what they were doing in this movie
3 ) I've never seen Van Diesel in anything - heard the name, but couldn't have told you what he looked like. He was pleasant enough - kind of like a genial Bruce Willis. And I did like the action sequence at the beginning where he steals something from a South American (I think) transmission tower, then skateboards madly down the hill with a countdown timer ticking away... and it turns out he was stealing a satellite TV receiver so the impoverished community below can watch the crucial football (soccer) match which is just about to begin *g*
4 ) Donnie Yen deserves a entire point to himself - had never heard of him before (although I had heard in passing of the Ip Man movies), but I really enjoyed his character in Rogue One (Chirrut Îmwe), and spotting him in the xXx trailer (along with Toni Collette) was one of the major reasons I was willing to watch this film to begin with. I'm now a fan - he's very charismatic.

Apart from that, it wasn't dreadful, but it wasn't particularly appealing either. Mostly, it was very action-y and... loud. That kind of loud where changes in volume begin to lose their meaning and you just have to sit tight and wait for it to be over. But the cast were generally charming, and Donnie Yen was cool :)

Then saw Split, the latest from M Night Shyamalan, starring James McAvoy as a man with 23 personalities and counting. He kidnaps three teenagers, who are faced not only with his existing personalities, but with the threat of a new and immensely dangerous new one that may be on the brink of emerging.

I adore James McAvoy, and this is his movie. Obviously he gets to showcase some very distinctive and memorable 'personalities', including the challenge of portraying one personality attempting to masquerade as a different one, which was particularly interesting. The costume changes help with this, but there are very nice scenes where he switches personalities without changing clothes, and there's never the least doubt about 'who' he is. He was great, as always. Also excellent was Anna Taylor-Joy as Casey, the troubled teen who is the other main focus of the movie. The trailers are slightly misleading in that this film really is Casey's story every bit as much as - or even more than - Kevin's, and she more than holds her own against McAvoy. I also loved Betty Buckley, who played Kevin's psychiatrist. I don't really know who she is, but she's like an American Judi Dench *g*.

Overall, I thought the movie was solidly well done and gripping up until the ending, which was just... weak. It was one of those endings that just made me itch to rewrite it in my head. I felt that in the end Shyamalan was too in love with Kevin (who, let's face it, is a focus-pulling character) to see that it was really Casey's story, and should have ended with her, not him. In a way this is the flipside of the other issue I had, which is that Kevin was such a fascinating character, but we didn't hear very much about his past and how he 'became' this way (apart from one admittedly terrifying childhood flashback). If we had learned more about him, then the ending may well have felt more justified. Also, I greatly dislike self-referential creators. Yes, you made other movies, Shyamalan, we remember, thanks ever so much. Now how about you just concentrate on this one?

After that there was one more Bowie tribute show - Celebrating David Bowie - at the Opera House. This has toured internationally, and the big thing about it was meant to be that it featured musicians who had all played with Bowie (of whom Earl Slick was pretty much the only one known to me, but okay). I have to say that despite everything about this show being one step up in all respects from the one I saw at the Enmore - venue, musicians, singers - I was still underwhelmed. There were a handful of genuinely spine-tingling moments, and the saxophonist, drummers/percussionists (both of them), most of the guitarists, and the string quartet were amazing, but... still. I did try and think about what I thought it lacked, and it pretty much boiled down to "narrative".

I know, it's a rock concert, what kind of narrative would you expect? But I'd say that a lot of what appealed to me about Bowie was his theatrical quality, and that many of his songs were in fact stories, some more obviously so than others. And even a good rock concert does have a certain structural progression, at least musically. This show, like the other one, just felt like a bunch of random songs that the musicians wanted to do, arranged in no particular order - and while the musicians may well all have worked with Bowie, only the introduction contained any personal memories of him. It was literally: "and now we're going to do this next song". Several times - not once, but repeatedly - people couldn't even get the words right, which just annoyed me no end. However, everyone seemed well pleased in general, and people were encouraged to get up and dance (and I did, and it was fun). But I'd had more than enough after 165 minutes (it was a three-hour show) and we left at the first encore.

I still think there's room somewhere for a "proper" retrospective, where his music might be strung together with projected photographs and anecdotes and memories to create a show about Bowie and his life and work, rather than just being an extended playlist of his songs. But maybe that's just me.

Then there was the NT Live screening of No Man's Land (Pinter) starring Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. I must say I've never seen a Pinter play, and while I did like the theme and idea of being trapped in limbo (as you might expect from the title) which reminded me a bit of Beckett, I didn't find the same kind of memorable whimsy or wordplay that I enjoy in Beckett's plays. The play is a four-hander, in which wealthy Hirst (Stewart) meets a man called Spooner (McKellen) at a pub, and brings him home for some mutual drunken storytelling. There are also two mysterious younger men who hang around Hirst - one of whom claims to be his son, but likely isn't, and his friend Briggs. Hirst appears to be in decline, and next day confuses Spooner for an old friend, while the young men appear to be his long-term employees. Nothing happens, and goes right on not happening until the play ends.

I did find a handful of interesting themes in the play - there definitely seemed to be some kind of gay undercurrent going on, what with Spooner admitting to spying on people on Hampstead Heath, and the unspoken relationship between Foster and Briggs, and how they met 'on a street corner'. However, that's as far as it goes, and they do go on to talk about women a great deal. Hirst's confusion (which Stewart attributes to dementia) is also interesting, and I like the idea of Hirst's house as this waiting-room where people who have nowhere better to go congregate and wait for whatever comes next. The lines about how no man's land is a place where nothing every changes or grows (or something) did make for a genuinely chilling and memorable ending - McKellen delivers them perhaps slightly out of character, but to incredible effect. It's just that it takes the entire play to get there. And they're both fantastic actors - McKellen especially. I always worry a bit about 'name' actors, whether they'll really be any good on stage, but they were brilliant, and I really don't think anyone could have delivered the lines any better. After some of the things I've seen lately, it was such a relief to see something where the lines actually had weight and meaning and understanding behind them rather than the actors just hurling them machine-gun-fire at each other and pretending that it constitutes "rapport". Owen Teale (Briggs) and Damien Moloney (Foster) were also both very good in what were clearly 'support' roles.

But... on the other hand, I didn't see that the play really justified all the love and talent and effort put into it at all. It felt very abstruse, very white, and very male, the kind of play designed for snobbish theatre critic cries of, "well you just don't understand its greatness". It might well reward studying, but it doesn't speak to me enough to want to bother. (And yes, as always, I fell asleep several times *g*.) However, I have to say the Q&A shown after the screening was delightful. Stewart and McKellen obviously adore working with each other, and there were lots of lovely stories, such as when they talked about their previous experiences with Pinter, and Patrick Stewart admitted he saw the play three times while Gielgud was doing it, loved it, but didn't understand it at all. Hee.

There was also a discussion of what different audiences were like, which was fascinating - they pointed out quite correctly that London audiences were in effect 'international' audiences (having often come from all over), and hence did not have a predictable feel to them, while they found that the farther-flung parts of England had very distinguishable local characteristics when the company toured there. Another amusing segment involved director Sean Mathias calling out Stewart for getting the giggles during this performance - while he carried on magnificently with his back to the audience, the camera lingered on McKellen's face, and you could see he was desperately trying not to laugh. I only noticed this part, not what prompted it, but the director was all mock-despairing, "this was being screened live to a huge audience, how could you?". Oh, and there was the saga of the glass throwing, too - every night, Hirst hurls a glass across the room, and in this particular performance, it shattered beautifully on the floor, which apparently it's only done four or five times - mostly it just lands on the rug and rolls. Which led them to talk about the time the actor playing Foster made his entrance, but the glass was obstructing him, so he kicked it away... and it flew into the audience. I do love anecdotes like that. So I guess if you include the great performances, the play's handful of interesting ideas, and the Q&A, the experience overall was still very worthwhile.

Which brings me to what was probably the best, or at least the most consistently appealing, of the lot - Hidden Figures. This is a 'based on a true story' movie about three African-American women (amongst a division of others like them) who worked for NASA back in the day when they were trying to get a man into orbit - in preparation for maybe, one day, sending a man to the moon. I wanted this to be good so much that I worried it wouldn't be, but it ended up being everything I wanted. It does blow my mind a bit to see segregation and the fight for civil rights running parallel with NASA trying to put a man in space, a juxtaposition I haven't seen made so starkly before. The three women - Katherine Goble (Taraji P Henson), Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae) and Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer) - all worked as 'colored computers', where obviously 'computer' means that they computed things, but I think it's also a nice underlining of the theme in that we now think of 'computers' as inanimate objects.

This movie just pushes a lot of my personal buttons - women who can math (I breathed a sigh of appreciation when Henson pronounced 'Euler' correctly, unlike some movies), people fighting for their right to be recognised as equals, NASA and the space program, great acting all around... and while we're at it, fabulous outfits *g*. I pretty much enjoyed everything about this movie, and incidentally, remained wide awake and engaged throughout. The movie does really centre around Goble, who supplied and rechecked crucial calculations for John Glenn's orbital flight, but I particularly loved Jackson's character and her sheer fearlessness about getting what she wants. And I think Vaughn's battle to get a supervisor's position nicely captures the importance of names and titles in showing respect. I do have to spare a special mention for Paul Stafford, who as Goble's snooty superior/co-worker most resembles the 'villain' of the piece, because, um, you see, he was played by Jim Parsons, who I instantly recognised as being Walter's human double in The Muppets (2011). So literally every time he appeared on screen being a dickhead, the little stereo in my head would crank up with: "Am I a maaaan? Or am I a muppet? If I'm a man... that makes me a muppet of a man." It was immensely, if inadvertently, entertaining. ANYWAY. I loved all three of the women and their stories, and will now go read the book. I'm sure some will say the movie is a romanticised, glamourised portrayal, and in some ways it is, but at the same time there's nothing wrong with a feel-good movie where women - especially women of colour - get to come out on top and be the larger-than-life heroes of their own stories. In short: movie is good. Go see :D