In the aftermath of David Bowie’s death on Sunday, January 10, the internet has exploded with various articles on his life, his lasting effect on nearly all aspects of modern pop culture, and his most recent and final album Blackstar, which came out only two days before the artist succumbed to liver cancer, a disease he had been battling for over a year. Most articles written about Bowie focus on his ability to vacillate between and combine music styles within the same song and to immerse himself in various characters of his own creation. The BBC, as well as other publications over the artist’s more than forty year career, has taken to calling him a musical “chameleon” after one of his own songs, while the Guardian has released a plethora of articles covering nearly every aspect of his personal and professional life, and The New Yorker has taken a much more sentimental look at Bowie’s own personal character.

While Bowie certainly did have a knack for recreating genres and taking sounds and styles he heard to new extremes, it is sometimes taken for granted that there really was just one man at the root of all these performances and characters, and perhaps that’s how Bowie himself preferred things. In his early career, Bowie, or David Jones as he was originally known, struggled to find one set group of musicians that he could cooperate with creatively before finally deciding to present himself as a soloist, which is how he has remained in public perception ever since, despite the numerous duets and brief experimentations with more group-oriented collaborations.

As a child he quickly took to any sort of artistic effort, playing various instruments from the piano to the ukulele, and immersing himself in dance. The thought of a young Bowie striving to achieve stardom through whatever mode possible brings to my mind something Johnny Depp said about a year ago now at a film premiere where he called the idea of actor-musician crossovers “a sickening thing,” despite the fact that he himself dabbles in music. Depp may, however, have had in mind the series of Disney Channel actors and actresses that had transformed into pop stars after their sitcoms’ main constituent of viewers had aged out of the Disney fan base, rather than figures like Bowie. Regardless, David Bowie’s various forays into different fields of performance, especially at a time when modern art itself was swiftly disengaging from the dogmas of genre, speaks more to his own expansive capabilities than it does to any hungry pursuit of fame and fortune.

What has most struck me about David Bowie’s character, after watching what amounts to only a handful of the numerous clips from his interviews available online, is the difference in the way that Bowie interacted with the press as compared to the clips we see of celebrities being interviewed today. While it has become common practice to closely examine the quality of the line of questioning directed at performers in recent years (Recall, for example, the response to that painfully awkward interview with Cara Delevigne last year), artists have been dealing with dismissive, baiting, and sometimes just plain rude interviewers since at least the mid-twentieth century. Despite his loud costumes and vibrant on-stage presence, Bowie comes across as shy and aloof during most of his interviews, even during one conducted in 1964 regarding his involvement in the “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long Haired Men” as a teenager. Although the artist seems to have become a bit more open to discussing his own personal feelings in addition to his music, revealing to an interviewer at the BBC in 2002 how shaken he was by the World Trade Centre attacks in New York and that he has an “orientation towards the apocalyptic,” Bowie still seemed to take a certain delight in contradicting all of his interviewer’s attempts to analyse the meaning of his new collection of songs.  

In the coming years, fans and rock history scholars (surely there must be a degree for that somewhere), having been freed from the potential for rebuke from the man himself, will try even harder than before to break into the psyche of this rock legend, potentially altering the legacy that Bowie left behind. In some ways, Bowie’s newest album seems to preempt any attempts to co-opt his life story, though thus far it has only led to further speculation. It’s safe to assume that the artist would be happy to know that people will continue to enjoy and be awed by his music for generations to come, but his work has also always seemed to be more of a project in personal improvement, with Bowie striving constantly to best his own creativity and stretch the boundaries of conventionality, rather than an effort to reveal himself to the public. Perhaps then the best way to listen to his music, and his new album in particular, is not to listen with judgment about what each lyric or chord signifies, but rather just to listen and appreciate.

• Let’s start with the obvious. The Golden Globes. They kind of function as the Oscars’ maitre d’, guiding all the big names to their metaphorical tables of cinematic success, and letting everyone know who probably needs to make sure they’re wearing semi-practical frockery on next month’s most famous red carpet. Here’s looking at you, Jennifer Lawrence. The idea is, if you get a nod or a gong at the Globes, it’s seventy percent certain you’re going to end up in exactly the same category, or winning exactly the same trophy, at the Academy Awards next month (bugger for the thirty percent who get their Globes as consolation prizes, but hey — it has to happen, and at least you get something shiny this year). Notable winners were Lawrence (as per usual) for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy, Brie Larson for Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Kate Winslet for Best Supporting Actress and The Revenant for Best Drama Motion Picture. Writing’s on the Wall scooped the expected but possibly undeserved Best Original Song trophy. The most exciting win (at least, I think so) was Ennio Morricone’s Best Score award, accepted on the elderly maestro’s behalf by Quentin Tarantino. Please let this mean that the musical genius is back in the Hollywood fold. But, of course, everyone’s more interested in… yup, you guessed it, Leonardo DiCaprio. Is he in the running? Is he? Finally? Well, he nimbly picked up the Best Actor gong for his turn in The Revenant (which, along with Bridge of Spies, looks set to be this year’s biggie). But, ya know. They’ve teased us like this before. PLEASE, ACADEMY GODS. PLEASE JUST PUT THE WORLD OUT OF ITS COLLECTIVE MISERY AND GIVE LEO A SHINY GOLD MAN ALREADY. We’ll know a bit more on Thursday, when the Oscar shortlists are announced.

• Speaking of Jennifer Lawrence, and her all round talent / affable precocity, the twentysomething serial award-snatcher looks set to team up with yet another costar old enough to be her… well, I don’t know, but it’s Javier Bardem, and I have fewer problems with this than I apparently should have as a Good Woman; because yes, there’s a major issue of implicit imbalance in an industry where a young woman can’t find a decent actor within her own age bracket, but also – hello! It’s Javier Bardem. He’s phenomenal. Should Bardem join her (it’s as yet unconfirmed he definitely has the gig), they’re going to be working under the watchful eye of none other than writer-director Darren Aronofsky, according to Variety; and therefore I can only have high hopes that this will be a gilded masterclass in all-round good (and deliciously eccentric) cinema. Awaiting with limited patience.

• If, and I can only say if, Guillermo del Toro really does end up working with James Cameron on Cameron’s recently proposed collaboration, I can only hazard a guess at the weird and wonderful, crazy lunacy of genius filmmaking that will result. Cameron is reportedly getting del Toro on board for a remake of a 1966 movie, Fantastic Voyage. Just listen to this premise: “a bunch of scientists and a submarine are shrunken to atomic size and injected into the body of a scientist whose life is under threat” (thanks, Empire). Now, picture del Toro’s very particular aesthetic, as demonstrated in Pan’s Labyrinth and Crimson Peak. Now, imagine what this film’s canvas probably demands: internal organs brought to life as a kind of gothic architecture, rapid rivers of blood, massive globules, the human body its very own derelict fortress. It’ll be Hellboy meets Holby City. I’m such a sick person. I really, really hope this gets off the ground. 

After watching the New Years Day special of Sherlock, I tried to imagine what went through Mark Gatiss’ and Stephen Moffat’s heads as they wrote the last sentence of their script. Rubbing their hands, I imagine, Gatiss might have leaned over and whispered seductively in Moffat’s ear (it is my head, no judgement) ‘those kids are going to be AMAZED. So are those women. It was a dream… a feminist dream.’

And perhaps, if no one had ever seen Sherlock or Dr Who before, The Matrix or Inception, our minds might have really been blown. As it was, Sherlock’s attempt to escape the ‘Mind Palace’ conceit felt eerily reminiscent of the Doctor’s fear of being forever trapped in his Confession Dial. It’s all getting a bit predictable. 

To briefly summarise the plot: Sherlock and Watson meet in Victorian England and decide to share a flat at 221b Baker street. Together they work to solve the mystery of the ‘Abominable Bride’, a woman who committed suicide, but seemingly rose from the dead to kill her husband and several other dastardly men. Sherlock and Watson eventually discover that the woman faked her death, and that the ghostly effects were achieved by a series of optical illusions, with the aid of a group of co-conspirators. The conspirators are in fact a group of women campaigning for suffrage, and Sherlock allows them to continue murdering the dastardly men because their cause is ultimately just. However, as the episode progresses a couple of clues reveal that the Victorian World cannot be real. Various anachronisms creep in, as Mycroft declares that ‘the virus is in the data’, and Sherlock mis-genders the murder victim. We come to learn that the entire Victorian episode is only an imaginative space of Sherlock’s mind palace, to which he has retreated to meditate on whether Moriarty, his Arch Nemesis who had previously killed himself and framed Sherlock for his murder, has faked his own death. After exorcising his demons in a scene by the Reichenbach Falls, Sherlock wakes up in the present day, and concludes that Moriarty could not have faked his own death, and is in fact dead after all. Or is he? 

Some of the episode was brilliant: like Mrs Hudson’s refusal to speak in protest of the small part she plays in Watson’s accounts of their adventures, or when Watson grows a moustache, supposedly in the attempt to keep up with the illustrator. Sherlock has always been characterised by wonderful exuberance and titillating dialogue. The relationship between Mycroft and Sherlock was, as always, brilliantly characterised, as Mycroft steadily eats himself to death just to beat Sherlock in a bet. Basically, the episode was fantastic while it remained a self-enclosed Victorian special, leaving the audience to draw parallels between the Victorian entities and their modern day counterparts. Moffatt studied English as an undergraduate, and there is a lot in his script that can be recognised as typical English student flaws: a fascination with theory and the ‘meta’, which can eventually lead an essay, or in this case a TV show, over the edge of self-indulgence. Self-indulgence, that is, encapsulated by Sherlock crying ‘elementary dear Watson’ as he throws himself off the Reichenback falls to escape from his ‘Mind Palace’. 

As for the cult of Satanic vengeful females, I’m quite divided. Part of me, with my baser film instincts, loves a secret murderous cult as much as the next woman. Certainly the discovery in St Trinian’s II that the world was ruled by a society of patriarchal free masons (true) who were trying to suppress the fact that Shakespeare was actually a woman got me very excited. But Sherlock‘s tone is different. The Ku Klux Klan robes? And the underlying assumption that the feminist movement was started up by a load of bitter, jilted brides? It’s exactly what you would expect from a load of middle-aged men trying to imagine what to role out for the Cumberbitches. 

It’s important to stress that Moffat and Gatiss are Napoleons of the TV world. The first series of Sherlock ranks perhaps with the best television made in my lifetime. Moffat is the man who wrote such Dr Who episodes as ‘Blink’, ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’, and ‘Silence in the Library’. But he now seems to be a victim of his own success, churning out the same stuff over and over again. Together, Moffat and Gatiss have tried to replace good narrative with gimmicks and dreamscapes. It’s time to get back to the fundamentals of plot and character – it’s elementary, Dear Watson.

The Bridge Series 3 aired on BBC 4 between November and December, and given the wait, lasting the best part of two years since Series 2’s dramatic conclusion, expectations were as high as ever. And they did not disappoint. (Cue my début attempt at reviewing, so bear with me here, folks, and needless to say, major spoilers ahead.)

The series saw, of course, another meticulously-planned string of murders, spanning Denmark’s capital and the neighbouring southern Swedish city of Malmö, across the Öresund Bridge. It was the character development of Malmö Police’s Saga Norén (Sofia Helin), however, and her battles with her mother and her family history throughout the series, which engaged the viewer the most, and differentiates it well from the previous two, all for the purpose of deepening our emotional investment in her as the nail-biting grand finale approached.

The eventual killer, Emil Larsson (Adam Pålsson), proved satisfactorily unsettling in his quest to rid the world of the people who had made his life, it can’t be denied, such a misery – although his creepiness may have been somewhat overdone (the same goes for funeral director-come-full-time stalker Annika Melander, who turned out to be Emil’s estranged adoptive sister). 

The series saw a parallel chain of deaths in Saga’s life which led to her mental stability unravelling on screen, with the murder of her boss and good friend Hans providing a link into the criminal investigation. Her personal investment in finding the perpetrator subsequently allowed for a telling scene in the final episode, when tasked with rescuing Emil from his noose alongside his biological father, Freddie Holst, the last person he had sought to murder. Her reluctance to save Emil’s life was wholly uncharacteristic. A similar transgression by her former Danish investigative partner, Martin Rohde led her to report him, one of her closest and only friends, landing him in prison for murder at the end of the previous series. This signals a clear transformation in Saga; she gained emotional penetrability under the pressures of Hans’ murder, her estranged father’s death, and her mother’s staging of her own suicide to make it appear that she had murdered her. 

Additional characters complemented the series well, even if surrogate-mother Jeannette’s young lover Marc were too feckless for words most of the time. How CEO Anna Ekdahl’s affair with the 17 year-old son of her best friend exactly tied in with anything, though, I am still not quite sure.

Henrik Sabroe (Thure Lindhardt)’s replacement of Martin as leading Danish detective worked well. While Martin is certainly missed by viewers, Henrik’s gentler approach played out very well alongside Saga, whose increasing reliance on Henrik for support served to flag her inner turmoil to the viewer all the more, while his own over his family’s old disappearance ought not be overlooked.

When Saga returned to the railway track site of her younger sister’s suicide from years previously for the series’ gut-wrenchingly vivid climax of her almost-suicide, I filled with dread. With her life progressively torn apart across the series, it seemed the writers had done their best to make me fall off the edge of my seat with fear for the life of the character I have grown so much to admire. Sofia Helin’s performance of Saga’s critical moments was second to none, while Lindhardt’s portrayal of Henrik’s desperate attempt to convince Saga to choose to live, and aid him in his private investigation of his wife’s newly-confirmed murder, and children’s disappearance was compelling.

Whether the powers that be grant us another series is yet to be seen, but the programme remains one of the best on TV, subtitled or not. Five stars.

Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, The Hateful Eight, begins with a slow succession of images: snow-capped mountains, seemingly endless forests, and crisp winter light breaking through foreboding clouds. After the title is emblazoned across the screen, we cut to a close-up shot of a crucifix which slowly – or rather, painstakingly – zooms out to reveal a horse-drawn carriage gently plodding through the snow. 

This opening sets the pace for much of the rest of the film, and thereby highlights the main problem with it: it is far too drawn-out. The running-time of almost three hours is not a problem in itself, especially with Tarantino’s decision to include an interval halfway through to assist the audience in regenerating their attention spans. What makes it problematic is that for much of the first half we are led on a sluggish, surprisingly tangential journey, first through the snow in the carriage, and then inside and around Minnie’s Haberdashery (which serves as the setting for the rest of the film’s action, barring some flashback scenes). I imagine Tarantino intends for this overly naturalistic pacing to serve as a way of immersing us into the world he has created, so that he can then slowly build tension until it culminates with the first spilling of blood just before the curtain falls on the first act. 

There are two issues with this decision. First, we never fully accept that the world in which we are being immersed is naturalistic in composition. Tarantino’s films hold a not unfair reputation for being over-stylised, post-modern tales with intricately woven plots. Thus, knowing that you are sitting in a Tarantino film produces a set of expectations that the director himself, for all his scene-setting and pacing, cannot shake. It certainly does not help that he insists on brazenly introducing the film as ‘the 8th film by Quentin Tarantino’ in the opening credits, but even without this attempt at cleverness I doubt many will believe that tension (and bloodshed) will not make a starring appearance, even if such an appearance is delayed and slow-building. The second issue is that the script’s first half is slack and loose – there is a fine line between intrigue and boredom, and Tarantino fails to place the first half of the film on the desired side of it. 

It is a shame, because the characters themselves are all varied, all interesting, and given a more tightly-wound plot would produce a fascinating and thoroughly exciting set-up. We know Tarantino is perfectly capable of creating a scene which holds the audience’s attention in its building of tension, not least in the flawlessly executed milk scene from Inglorious Basterds. It is thus sad to see him miss the mark so flagrantly here. 

Some may take issue, as they do with many of Tarantino’s films, with the depravity of every single major character in the film. Those who do are likely members of the tribe of cinema-goers who affirm Jackie Brown, with its clear protagonist, to be Tarantino’s best work. This is of course a matter of taste, but there is certainly no hero to this story. For a while, we are offered it in the form of Samuel L. Jackson’s Major Marquis, but such a notion is destroyed spectacularly when he takes on the mantel of storyteller, in a proudly shocking retelling of the torturing and sexual assault of a man at his hands. Whilst Jackson continues to provide most of the film’s laughs, he stops being our hero. The film’s conclusion situates Walton Goggins’s Sheriff Mannix as the closest thing to a hero that we get, both in his victory over the Domingray gang members and the seeming reformation of his racist disposition. But Mannix is a comically caricatured, rather meagre hero, and in any case such a title is applied to him too late in the film for audiences to have much time to appreciate him as such. 

But the lack of a clear hero should not be regarded as a fault. Instead of giving us a character whose side we can back, Tarantino presents a grotesquely comical spectacle of blood, brains, and balls. In this way, the film’s second half can be seen as a modern cinematic updating of the Jacobean revenge tragedy genre. It is ironic, then, that the pacing of the film’s first half would be better suited to the stage. (Interestingly, even Tarantino himself seems to understand, implicitly at least, that his story takes the wrong medium, for he splits the film up into ‘Chapters’.)

Stylistically, the film is far less overblown than what we have come to expect from Tarantino. Costumes are historically accurate and largely lacking in quirkiness, and Robert Richardson’s cinematography does well to both portray the bitter cold of the natural world outside and contrive a claustrophobic stage within Minnie’s interior. The prevalence in the film’s final chapter of split diopter shots in many ways reflects the complete breaking down of any pretence of naturalism, in their Tarantinoan proclamation of artificiality. The jarring marker of the beginning of this move towards artificiality comes at the very start of the second act, when Tarantino himself provides a voice-over narration of what the characters have done in the fifteen minutes of the interval, before going on to pause the scene, rewind the tape, and rewrite the narrative to include a plot point that will dictate the course of the rest of the movie. Such a bold opening to the film’s second half is jarring in the best way, as it immediately alleviates the film of its naturalistic heaviness and imbues it with a postmodern playfulness. Tarantino finally produces some spectacle. 

Yet spectacle is by its nature often hollow and one-dimensional. In a film where no one gets what they want, it is hard for one to grasp hold of any point other than the repeated exhibition of entertaining gruesomeness which so permeate the film’s latter scenes. Ending the film with the final reveal of the content of Marquis’s forged letter (something which has been referred to throughout) thus seems fitting, for the letter, like the film, is significant only insofar as it is an exercise in hollowness.

 “Something happened on the day he died

Spirit rose a metre and stepped aside”

Ziggy Stardust, The Thin White Duke, Aladdin Sane and his other inventions had all stopped living years ago, but no one expected David Bowie himself to die so suddenly. Two days after his last album Blackstar was released, he passed away in his hidden fight against cancer.

“He trod on sacred land he cried loud into the crowd”

Almost thirty albums, countless successful tours with exceptional sets, and ongoing musical experiments have made him an admired artist in Europe as well as on the other side of the Atlantic. But what fascinates me most is his capacity for renewal. Every new creation revealed another aspect of his impressively diverse abilities: he marked the world of pop with his hit ‘Let’s Dance’, played with the conventions of rock music in ‘Looking for water’ and dazzled the whole world with his innovative and powerful voice in songs like ‘Life on Mars?’.

“’I’m a blackstar, I’m a blackstar.’”

The androgynous boy who started out in London as David Jones has left the music world with an immense legacy, two generations of fans attached to his songs, and a set of questions. It seems just too perfect for someone who liked to create characters for himself to die at such an exciting point in his career. If The Next Day didn’t ask much deciphering of the listener, the meanings of the tracks from Bowie’s last album, Blackstar, will remain obscure. While we try guessing what exactly “the villa of Ormen” represents, listening to his timeless creations is the best we can really do – and perhaps that is how he meant it to be.

Here is the team’s short and arbitrary selection of David Bowie’s most known and appreciated works

 ‘Life on Mars?’, Hunky Dory (1971)

‘Rock’n’Roll Suicide’, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)

‘The Jean Genie’, Aladdin Sane (1973)

‘Station to Station’, Station to Station (1976)

‘Warszawa’, Low (1977)

‘Ashes to Ashes’, Scary Monsters (1980)

‘Space Oddity’, Love You Till Tuesday (1984)

 ‘I’d Rather Be High’, The Next Day (2013)