Wonder Woman - Triumph of the Dumb (Spoiler Alert).

I know it’s customary for critics to give superhero films the free pass denied to other ‘more serious’ flicks. ‘It’s just a movie!’ people say. ‘It’s a spectacle, escapism, pure entertainment!’ Generally speaking, I would agree, but if  such a film attempts to realistically depict events on the Western Front, complete with gas attacks, maimed soldiers, and bereaved non-combatants, my expectations rise.  After all, a film that takes such a daring approach is asking to be taken seriously.

            The makers of  Wonder Woman do all of the above  but when they then show their heroine acting as a human shield in No Man’s Land, bullets and shells bouncing off her cuffs, they trivialise a situation with few equals in history for its levels of horror and inhumanity. What makes it even  more egregious is that Diana then dances in the snow with jubilant survivors from the local village. It's not far removed from Wonder Woman  being greeted by cheering inmates at the gates of a concentration camp.

                Despite the presence of the excellent Gal Gadot in the title role, Wonder Woman is a troubling film, a clumsy mess of a movie that strives to be apolitical but ultimately feels like old-fashioned U.S. propaganda.  The Germans speak to each other in English with German accents (In a film made in 2017? Really?), love interest Steve explains the geopolitical situation to his Amazonian rescuer in terms reminiscent of the current president: ‘They’re the bad guys. I’m a good guy.’  And even though Steve admits that the human race is terribly flawed, it’s still he, the only white American man in the film, who destroys the consignments of poison gas created to extend and worsen the conflict. While he is sacrificing himself, Gadot is having one of those superbattles with a fellow god where electricity comes out of their fingers.

            Attempts to diversify the cast are cack-handed: the smooth Moroccan, drunken Scotsman and stoic native American are onscreen for too little time to enable them to rise beyond stereotypes – and much of the dialogue sounds like Friends rather than what a person living in London in 1918 might say.   

 It’s all a bit unfortunate, as Gadot’s Diana has a nobility and decency reminiscent of Christopher Reeves’s Superman and it is refreshing to see such a strong female action hero who is never in need of a man’s assistance.  Hopefully, next time, the studio will keep her away from the real world with its boring complications.

P.S. If the producers are looking for a superior plotline for the sequel, they might consider using this one from the 1970s TV series:

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

  

             Though Dodie Smith was fifty-two-years-old when she completed I Capture the Castle (1949), in Cassandra Mortmain she created one of the most convincing teenage voices in literature, a protagonist who is as true and compelling as Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield.  Cassandra’s opening sentences immediately bring us into the rustic, cluttered world of the impoverished castle where she lives with her unproductive family.  ‘I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.  That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea cosy.’  An aspiring writer with a romantic attachment to her castle home and to the surrounding countryside, Cassandra’s journals chart the eventful six months that follow the arrival of two half-Americans, Simon and Neil Cotton, the heirs to the castle, and their mother.

                Cassandra’s heightened feelings of joy, excitement and despair never cloy because they feel like the authentic emotions of a seventeen-year-old for whom the world of adult relationships and journeys away from home are shockingly new and exotic. ‘I leaned back and closed my eyes – and instantly the whole day danced before me. I wasn’t merely remembering, it seemed to be trapped inside my eyelids; the City, the traffic, the shops were all there, shimmering, merging. Then my brain began to pick out the bits I wanted to think about and I realised how the day made a pattern of clothes – first our white dresses in the early morning, then the consciousness of what people were wearing in London, then Aunt Millicent’s poor dead clothes, then all the exquisite things in the shop, then our furs.’

                And apart from the fluency of the prose and the wit of the narrator (like Waugh without the jaundiced eye) it is perhaps the pure freshness of these impressions that are key to the novel’s continued popularity. Like Cassandra’s memories of that day in London, this is a novel that dances before the reader’s eyes.  

Review: Lost in France (Edge City Films, 2016)

Lost In France (Edge City Films, 2016)

Directed by Niall McCann

Produced by Nicky Gogan and Paul Welsh

               

           An affectionate tribute to Chemikal Underground, an independent record label that was home to Mogwai and The Delgados, this documentary is not quite as breezy as the colourful and kinetic opening minutes might suggest.  Director Niall McCann elicits from his interviewees some poignant reflections on the life of a musician: RM Hubbert tells of how playing live is the form of communication that best helps him to deal with his depression, ex-Delgado Emma Pollock admits that because of her love of music, her adult life has always been and will always be, about keeping herself afloat for six months at a time.

 Lost in France is not a good advertisement for music as a potentially lucrative career (Stewart Henderson laments the lack of opportunities and support for young musicians in the fragmented, profit-obsessed industry of today) but it is an excellent one for music as a vocation. There is plenty of evidence of a hearty camaraderie between the bands and their audience, and footage of joyful performances in stadiums, clubs and in a small pub in rural Brittany (see the title).  This is a warm-hearted celebration of creative collaboration and friendship.        

Bath-time: prepare for the unexpected.

               

                   With its long rows of graceful Georgian townhouses and neatly landscaped parks, it would be easy to dismiss Bath as a rather stuffy and patrician place. Unlike its near neighbour, Bristol, there is little sign of urban decay or ill-fitting post-war construction - at first sight, the city looks like it has been preserved in aspic, Disneyland for Jane Austen enthusiasts.

              Most of its major attractions – the Roman baths, the Crescent and Circle, the Assembly rooms, the museum of Bath architecture, the fashion museum – invite you to see how life was at a time when the city was awash with money and inhabited by scene-setting aristocrats like its most famous inhabitant, Beau Nash.

                But on further inspection, one quickly realises that Bath, while never gritty, is a vibrant, friendly place and a perfect location for ‘pottering about’.  As well as a wide variety of cafes that don’t just sell cream teas, there is a plethora of excellent charity shops, the best of which, Dorothy House Hospice, has a stack of records and a blue-tiled ‘listening booth’ with record player, armchair and curtain. On a similarly quirky note, there are good photo ops to be had at the display window of Broad Street Studio tattoo parlour, where two knit-hatted skeletons wave at passers-by from a vintage Volkswagen camper van.  Just up the road is Topping and Co., a warm and welcoming shop stuffed with books and staffed by enthusiastic people; regular author visits are advertised  on a blackboard outside.  

                 A short walk from the centre will take you to two richly atmospheric pubs – The Star Inn on Vineyards with its little dark wooden rooms, ale served from a barrel and resident cat, and the somewhat cooler and more rustic Bell Inn on Walcot Street.  Famous for its status as a cooperative owned by  518 customers (including Van Morrison and Robert Plant), The Bell is worth visiting for its excellent music alone. There was some brilliant sixties reggae in the main bar on the Thursday I visited, while the back room was taken over by The Smoking Duck playgroup, a highly entertaining open mic event hosted by the very funny Laurie Duckworth.  

People whose visits to England rarely get past chilly London may be surprised by the friendliness of the locals and the easy pace of this small city (and the large number of homeless people) and Salisbury, Stonehenge and Bristol are all less than hour away (though I wouldn’t recommend travelling to Bristol by car – the greater area is choked with traffic).  Like the Bath cake itself (a bun with a sugar cube in the middle of it) this city is full of surprises.   

The Pink and Fuzzy side of Stonehenge

                Stonehenge. One of the great pre-Christian sites, a mysterious collection of monumental blocks carried from afar and laid out in a fashion that is utterly beguiling. Shuffling along the path that surrounded the stones, I was surprised by the shivers that ran down my back when I saw a crow light on one of the carved lintels, an action that served to highlight the enormous size and strangeness of the stones.   

                But just as memorable as the stones themselves were some of the gifts available in the very busy shop in the visitor centre.  Standing near the back of a long queue, I saw a shelf with products aimed at pre-teen girls that included tubes of lipgloss and bags covered with pink love hearts and glitter and the word ‘Stonehenge’ written in the kind of jazzy, jagged script I associate with the late 1980s.

              I liked this blending of the ancient and unknowable with the light and sparkly, and it reminded me of watching girls walking to the St Patrick’s Day parade wearing bright green tights, shamrock earrings and cowboy hats, totally unburdened by the baggage of history and identity and just embracing the event as nothing more than a fun day out.        

                The Stonehenge/love hearts mismatch also brought to my mind another, less successful mixture of the old and the new I experienced on a tour of the Dunbrody famine ship, an immaculately restored vessel that sits in the harbour in New Ross. I was prepared for something deeply sobering but the hyper-enthusiastic guide and the actor-passengers wailing in the thickest local accents over the sick baby dolls in their arms managed to make crossing the Atlantic in a boat plagued by death and disease seem like a pantomime.   As much as I enjoyed the unintentional comedy of the tour, I felt a little sorry for those who had taken such pains to recondition the ship – I doubt they imagined they were preparing it for ‘Mrs Brown gets Cholera’. 

               But it’s weirdly refreshing that years after my visit, the words ‘famine ship’ make me smile and I’ve no doubt that when I think ‘stonehenge’ in the future, the vast stones will compete in my memory with electric pink bags. It’s funny what memory latches onto.