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| | | Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan review – Spock and Kirk shine in charming Enterprise revisit | | by Peter Bradshaw Sep 1, 2022 | | The 1982 sequel to the original Star Trek film, featuring a film debut for Kirstie Alley, returns to cinemas with its crowdpleasing zap and raw emotion intact The 1982 sequel to the original Star Trek feature film is now re-released: a brisker, brasher work directed by Nicholas Meyer which moved away from the more lugubrious, Kubrickian ambitions of the first film and back to the crowdpleasing zap of the TV show, importantly starting with the irresistible theme tune. However, 60s TV Star Trek would surely never have given us anything like the rather extraordinary moment included in this movie: chief engineer Mr Scott is discreetly treated for a certain ailment by Dr McCoy, because of his recent “shore leave”. Too much information there about Mr Scott’s private life. Wrath of Khan is the film that sensationally gave us the heroic and tragic sacrifice of Mr Spock, a wonderful performance of sonorous gravitas from Leonard Nimoy. That calamity traumatised its audiences and taught future generations of franchise-creators from Star Wars to Harry Potter that nothing grabs the fanbase like a big death. The Spock demise was further elevated in pop culture a decade later on the Seinfeld TV show when it was revealed that Jerry’s friend George Constanza was, in adult life, more moved by the memory of Spock’s fate than by the death of his own fiancee. Continue reading... | | | | | Three Thousand Years of Longing review – heartfelt Aladdinesque adventure for grownups | | by Peter Bradshaw Sep 1, 2022 | | Idris Elba is longing to tell his story and grant Tilda Swinton the statutory three wishes in George Miller’s heartfelt fantasy Some directors are so prestigious they get to make studio movies on the basis of one-for-them-and-one-for-me. George Miller has gone that bit further. He hit a mother lode of fan-acclaim seven years ago with his rebooted action-thriller creation Mad Max: Fury Road, but this new film – in all its oddity, sweetness and indulgence – shows he is now doing one-for-him-and-one-that’s-even-more-for-him. It’s an Arabian Nights-type fantasia which he has clearly been gagging to make for years. Fury Road was of course very personal as well as colossally successful at the box office: but Three Thousand Years of Longing is such an intensely personal passion project, spectacular yet fey, it would get any other director thrown out of the pitch meeting and beaten up. It’s the movie equivalent of an illuminated manuscript in medieval Latin kept in a safe and allowed to be consulted only by accredited scholars making notes in 8H pencil. And yet at the same time it has the innocent, colourful if weirdly defanged exuberance you’d see in the kind of family movies shown on Christmas TV 30 or 40 years ago. Continue reading... | | | | | The White Rock by Anna Hope review – Mexican gods, looters and miracles | | by Clare Clark Sep 1, 2022 | | In this deeply satisfying novel, a sacred rock provides the fulcrum for four loosely connected stories exploring ancient ritual and healing Just off the Pacific coast of Mexico, at San Blas in Nayarit, the White Rock juts up out of the sea. For the Wixárika people, who call it Tatéi Haramara or Mother Ocean, it is a sacred place. According to Wixárika cosmogony, when time began and there was nothing but boiling water covering the earth, the rock was the first solid object to be born and the origin of all life. For thousands of years the Wixárika have made pilgrimages to the site to offer sacrifices and to give thanks. In Anna Hope’s fourth novel, The White Rock, this hallowed place is the fulcrum for four loosely connected narratives. Opening in 2020 with the story of a British writer whose faith in the future, both personally and globally, is crumbling, the book travels backwards in time, first to the 1960s and a burned-out American rock star running from fame and the Feds, and then to the first decade of the 20th century as two sisters from the persecuted Yoeme tribe are seized from their mountain village and shipped south to be sold as slaves. Hope’s fourth story chronicles the breakdown in 1775 of a Spanish naval lieutenant as he prepares to sail north on a mission to map the coast of California and claim new territories for his king. Like an inverted version of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, the narrative then arcs around, retracing its steps through each story on its way back to the writer’s present tense. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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