The very first notes provide a nearly exact echo of Stravinsky but thereafter Lindberg occupies his own ground: thick layers rumbling aggression
Posted in General on 20. Aug, 2010
The very first notes provide a nearly exact echo of Stravinsky, but thereafter Lindberg occupies his own ground: thick layers, rumbling aggression, an odd, quasi-pastoral interlude for flutes. The even-tempered progress of the piece might perhaps be usefully broken by occasional moments of Lindbergian spikiness, but its 20-minute duration is never short of musical adventure.Any performance by Evelyn Glennie usually offers plenty of adventures, and Tuesday’s premiÿre of David Bedford’s Percussion Concerto was no exception. The composer provided Glennie with a cornucopia of instruments, not all of them strictly percussive. Through some passages she wore a corset of bells that tinkled every time she shimmied across the stage, in others she knelt and studiously cranked up four spinning tops while filling out some ethereal and jazzy glockenspiel runs.At such moments she might have been a shaman enacting some ritual, or a child in her playroom, utterly absorbed and therefore utterly absorbing.
With such exotica as batonka (an arrangement of plastic drainpipes) and rain-pipe also playing their part, eye and ear were perpetually engaged. Unfortunately, the orchestra (the English Sinfonia under Nicolae Moldoveanu) had less distinctive music to make, as if Bedford didn’t want us to miss anything that Glennie did. Perhaps it was less a concerto than a percussion solo with orchestral accompaniment.Scottish Opera’s ‘Parsifal’ is at Theatre Royal, Glasgow (0141 332 9000), 4.30pm Wed Mar 15, 1pm Sat Mar 18. Could it be that the current fad for excessively protracted running times is a macho thing, the film industry’s equivalent of adolescent boys comparing the lengths of their penises in school lavatories? “Mine is 20 minutes longer than yours,” I can imagine one film-maker boasting to another in the men’s room of the Polo Lounge. “Maybe now it is,” replies his grudging rival, “but just wait till you see my director’s cut!” Or something of the sort. In any case, of this week’s new movies, Michael Mann’s The Insider runs for 155 minutes, Luc Besson’s Joan of Arc for 141 minutes, and both of them would have benefited from radical surgery.
Could it be that the current fad for excessively protracted running times is a macho thing, the film industry’s equivalent of adolescent boys comparing the lengths of their penises in school lavatories? “Mine is 20 minutes longer than yours,” I can imagine one film-maker boasting to another in the men’s room of the Polo Lounge. “Maybe now it is,” replies his grudging rival, “but just wait till you see my director’s cut!” Or something of the sort. In any case, of this week’s new movies, Michael Mann’s The Insider runs for 155 minutes, Luc Besson’s Joan of Arc for 141 minutes, and both of them would have benefited from radical surgery.
The Insider is a conspiracy thriller of a species that Sidney Lumet (Serpico, Prince of the City, Q & A) used to polish off every half-decade or so between two hack jobs. Like Mann’s earlier movies, it can claim a host of admirers and has even been described in the current Sight and Sound, and possibly elsewhere, as a masterpiece. What, to my knowledge, no one has troubled to point out is just how predictable it is.Every so often I receive a reader’s letter begging me not to reveal too much plot in advance, but even to synopsise the first half-hour of The Insider (which is, to be fair, based on a story that isn’t merely true but relatively recent) risks frustrating potential punters, since the development of its premise never once diverges from the beaten track. Cast adrift by the powerful tobacco corporation of which he had been for years a compliant employee, a resentful research chemist (Russell Crowe playing Kevin Spacey) decides, with the collusion of a pugnaciously idealistic producer from CBS’s 60 Minutes show (Al Pacino playing Al Pacino), to blow the whistle on the cigarette industry’s covert manipulation of a cancer-inducing additive in its products.Crowe’s character is happily married, his wife has instant misgivings about the consequences of his revolt, their lavish suburban home is heavily mortgaged, his former employers retain a slimy crew of malevolence-oozing lawyers, not all of CBS’s personnel are as high-minded as the ex-hippie Pacino – and if you can’t figure out how these elements are going to cohere, then you haven’t seen too many crusading Hollywood movies.
I even managed to predict that Crowe would become a schoolteacher in the end, though I did fail to anticipate that, as one of several closing title-cards informs us, he would be voted teacher of the year.There’s something irresistible about this kind of narrative, and perhaps its very predictability, as with old-fashioned westerns, courtroom dramas and Agatha Christie whodunits, is an integral part of its charm; ultimately, one wouldn’t want it any other way. So the movie is enjoyable, even if monstrously overlong; even, too, if Mann does his darnedest to spoil the fun with the overkill of a hyperventilating visual style, whose portentous shadow-pools and indecipherably close close-ups keep us guessing throughout as to what exactly it is we’re looking at.I might also mention the obtrusive background (or rather, foreground) music, the surprisingly crude recourse to the pathetic fallacy – a thunderstorm on the soundtrack when things start to go wrong, an ordinary cellar filmed as spookily as though cellars were automatically sinister places – and, above all, the fact that the climactic, lingeringly slow-motion shot is of Pacino, not Crowe, though the latter is surely the story’s real hero. You can beat the tobacco industry, but you can’t beat the star system.As for the Besson film, it’s unquestionably the most incompetent of all Joan of Arc treatments, not excluding Joseph Santley’s 1942 farce, Joan of Ozark, with the rubber-faced Judy Canova as a hillbilly visionary. So Monty Pythonish is its evocation of the Middle Ages, so deliriously reminiscent of The Life of Brian is its handling of the religious vocation, I began to fantasise that it wasn’t actually about Joan at all but about another woman born on the same day.Viewed from that angle, its numberless absurdities – the infant Joan (the spitting image of Hayley Mills) skipping over a Lorraine hillside as ecstatically as Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music; the grown-up Joan (Milla Jovovich) as a boyish, sexy androgyne on whose luscious lower lip one would love to curl up in a foetal position; Dustin Hoffman as her spectral Conscience, her Jiminy Cricket; the nutshell description of Gilles de Rais, her faithful companion-at-arms, later an infamous paedophile serial killer, as “formidable to men, fascinating to women” (what about “fatal to children”?); the Asterix-like battle scenes, etc – at least make a semblance of sense.I could go on, but what’s the point? Joan of Arc is easily mocked; it’s also, however, in one sequence, an out-and-out atrocity The sequence in question comes right at the start. During a brutal raid on their village by the English army, Joan’s elder sister conceals the young girl behind a flimsy wooden door. Menaced with a fate worse than death by a boorish soldier, the sister flailingly fights back, only to be skewered by a lance that also penetrates the door and comes to a quivering halt no more than inches from Joan’s petrified features. At which point, as if that weren’t enough for the spectator to mull over, the sister, now in the throes of an agonising death, is raped after all by the soldier, the same wooden door rocking back and forth, still inches from Joan’s face, to the rhythm of his pelvic gyrations.How’s that for invention? Why did no one think of that before? One has always known that Besson was one of the world’s worst film-makers Now one knows what kind of human being he is..
Official Name: Republic of Congo. One of two neighbouring countries with Congo as their official short-form name (the other being the Democratic Republic of Congo), differentiated by foreigners by the names of their respective capitals: Congo (Brazzaville) and Congo (Kinshasa)
Official Name: Republic of Congo. One of two neighbouring countries with Congo as their official short-form name (the other being the Democratic Republic of Congo), differentiated by foreigners by the names of their respective capitals: Congo (Brazzaville) and Congo (Kinshasa).
Language: Officially French, but Kongo languages and the local patois of Monokutuba and Lingala are common.Population: Estimated at 2,668,000, comprising 15 ethnic groups (predominantly Bantu) and 75 tribes. The Kongo account for about 45 per cent, the Bateke 20 per cent, and the Mboshi about 16 per cent of the population.Size: 132,046 square miles, half of which is rainforest. Belgium would fit into it about 11 times.National Dish: Chicken dishes such as yassa (with lemon), nsusu na buha (with groundnut paste), piri piri (with pepper) are typical, served with rice and spinach. Other traditional ingredients include cassava or manioc, banana, plantain, groundnut paste and ginger.Best Monument: Brazzaville is situated on the west side of Malebo Pool on the river Congo.