| | | The Tragedy of Macbeth review – Denzel Washington delivers a noirish nightmare | | by Peter Bradshaw Dec 31, 2021 | | Frances McDormand and her co-star hit top form in Joel Coen’s austere reimagining of Shakespeare’s Scottish bloodbath What’s the point of another Macbeth movie? It wasn’t that long ago we had Justin Kurzel’s big realist version, with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. Well, there’s always a point if the film is as compelling and visually brilliant as this. Director Joel Coen, working for once without brother Ethan, has delivered a stark monochrome nightmare, refrigerated to an icy coldness. With Shakespeare’s text cut right back, it’s a version that brings us back to the language by framing the drama in theatrical, stylised ways: an agoraphobic ordeal in which bodies and faces loom up with tin-tack sharpness out of the creamy-white fog. Coen’s visual contrivances have something of Kurosawa and Welles, with some German expressionist shadows, and this looks like a crime drama from the 30s or 40s – but entirely naturally rather than as an interpretative affectation. Bruno Delbonnel’s cinematography is pellucid and austere and Stefan Dechant’s magnificent production design imagines Macbeth’s castle as a giant, rectilinear modernist house, with chilly courtyards bounded by vast vertiginous walls and corridors that extend like some sort of open-plan death row. Continue reading... | | | | | Rock Dog 2: Rock Around the Park review – hectic sequel with an all-over-the-place plot | | by Phil Hoad Dec 31, 2021 | | This follow-up to the 2016 flop makes a scattershot attempt at fusing celebrity satire with a riotous musical plot “Fans are fickle. You never know when taste might change. It’s a numbers game, and I’m going to play it,” says Bodi, the guitar-hero hound from the village of Snow Mountain. While Rock Dog 2 nominally denounces selling out, perhaps mindful of how the 2016 original – one of the most expensive Chinese-produced animations ever – bombed, it hectically plays the numbers game itself. Half modern entertainment-biz trawl, half nostalgic Asian rural fable, this messy sequel tries to cover both western and Chinese angles – and toss around enough scattershot energy to keep everyone happy. Bodi’s power-pop trio True Blue are the hottest new act on the block, their music radiating cyan energy waves out to their following. But they have popped up on the radar of Lang, a music-impresario sheep with a fluffy pompadour and British Invasion accent, who has multiple agendas: not just to separate Bodi from his bandmates by teaming him up with starlet Lil’ Foxy, but to shut down Rock’n’Roll Park where the city’s diehard guitar warriors keep the flame burning. Meanwhile in Snow Mountain’s Tibet-style fastness, Bodi’s family are fretting about his sudden fame – though, making a killing selling keychains to True Blue-mad locals, possibly succumbing to the mania themselves. Continue reading... | | | | | Penelope Lively: 'Beatrix Potter seemed so exotic, unlike my world of palm trees' | | by Penelope Lively Dec 31, 2021 | | The author on reading Peter Rabbit in Egypt, the allure of Lawrence Durrell – and the humour of Stella Gibbons My earliest reading memory
Beatrix Potter, of course. That wonderful, uncompromising prose: “The dinner was of eight courses; not much of anything, but truly elegant”, “the lettuces had been so soporific”, “the dignity and repose of the tea party”. I was in the house where I grew up, outside Cairo, in Egypt. I had never been to England, so Potter’s verdant backdrop of gardens and cottages, in those incomparable illustrations, was exotic and alluring, so unlike my own humdrum world of palm trees, donkeys and camels. My favourite book growing up
Andrew Lang’s Tales of Troy and Greece. I was hooked on that late Victorian retelling of the Homeric myth. And there was a personal relevance: I was right in there – Penelope – though unfortunately with the wrong part. Penelope is described as wise and good, qualities that did not appeal, whereas Helen is beautiful. Continue reading... | | | | | Amy Schumer: 'If you can just keep your family speaking to each other, that's a win. Sometimes it's not doable' | | by Benjamin Lee Dec 31, 2021 | | Along with her female co-stars, Schumer speaks about how making The Humans – and having a baby – helped her reassess her life. And, perhaps, a previous review written by her interviewer … ‘Talking about The Humans always becomes like a therapy session,” Beanie Feldstein says, a few minutes into a group chat about the oppressive and unsettling adaptation of Stephen Karam’s Pulitzer-nominated play about a family gathering at Thanksgiving. Karam’s haunting and quite brilliant directorial debut reimagines a quirky dysfunctional-family drama as an eerie, anxious horror movie set in the New York equivalent of a haunted house: a crumbling downtown apartment. It’s a place that forces his characters to confront the brutal realities of who they are, who they’re not and who they’re stuck with. It also forces us to do the same. Amy Schumer and Feldstein play sisters, and Jayne Houdyshell, who won a Tony for playing the role on stage, their mother. Richard Jenkins, Steven Yeun and June Squibb round out the cast. “It evokes so much emotion,” Schumer says of the film. “And it made me feel better about my own family, our trauma and struggles. If you can just keep your family speaking to each other, that’s a win. And sometimes it’s not doable.” Feldstein refers to it as a drama that “gets in your guts”, while Houdyshell agrees that “it makes you feel raw”. Continue reading... | | | | | | | Mothers, Fathers and Others by Siri Hustvedt review – a confrontation with motherhood | | by Lara Feigel Dec 31, 2021 | | Memoir, psychoanalysis, feminist theory and literary criticism combine in a thoughtful essay collection that observes motherhood from every angle Motherhood has always been central to some strands of feminism, while being wilfully left out of others. From the campaigners fighting for children’s rights to their mothers after parental separation in the 19th century, to literary figures – such as Adrienne Rich in the 1970s and Rachel Cusk in the 1990s – who have made space for maternal ambivalence, women have battled to claim maternity without becoming trapped within it. Now, as issues of surrogacy and trans motherhood pose fresh challenges, feminism’s confrontation with the issue feels newly urgent. Siri Hustvedt joins the fray with a mixture of directness and obliqueness. She takes on motherhood from every direction, combining memoir with ethnography, the history of science and psychoanalysis, literary and art criticism. The book begins with lovingly detailed portraits of Hustvedt’s mother and grandmother, and moves through essays on Wuthering Heights, the art of Louise Bourgeois, the nature of viruses and misogyny to end with a long tour de force exploration of the horrific death of Sylvia Marie Likens in 1965. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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