★★★☆☆

Three Stars

It is hard to hate Insurgent. Equally, it is hard to love it. The film inspires indifference, nothing more, nothing less. It falls conventionally into place alongside all teenage-fiction inspired movies which have unfortunately plagued cinemas since the pitiful Twilight Saga commenced in 2008. Since then we have endured a chain of predictable teenage supernatural- romance movies including Beautiful Creatures, Beastly, and Mortal Instruments amongst many others. More recently, and perhaps having achieved wider acceptance into the world of cinema is The Hunger Games.

It is a shame that Insurgent has been so widely compared to The Hunger Games. Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games Trilogy, never attempts to conceal the brutality of the world which she has created and the message of her books is precise and powerful. Veronica Roth, author of The Divergent Trilogy however seems heavily aware of her teenage audience and the narratives are artificially fluid with an awareness of future screen adaption. The Divergent films will not break free from its predictable teenage-fiction label, because it bows to these conventions too easily.

Insurgent follows guilt-stricken Tris (Shailene Woodley) and pouty pretty-boy Four (Theo James) along their wanderings of the ruins of Chicago, in a world organised into ‘factions’ defined by personality traits. Before their 119 minutes of screen time comes to an end, Tris and Four manage to visit firstly Amity Faction, then the Factionless, the Candor Faction, and even the Erudite Faction. They’ve attempted to escape from bad guy Jeanine (Kate Winslet) and her magic box, and then attempt to fight Jeanine and her magic box. The film becomes rhythmical; intense conversation, fighting, running, intense conversation, fighting, running, and so on.

The scenes change rapidly; no conversation lasts for longer than five minutes, resulting in clichés and dramatic phrases hanging at the end of each passage. The insertion of haunting dreams about Tris’ past deeds, does nothing more than force Insurgent deeper into its teen-fiction genre. Conveniently there is always someone who can come to the rescue at the last moment, whether that be on a cargo train, at Candor headquarters, or in an experimental laboratory at the centre of the Erudite.

The problem however, lies more with the exhausted genre of the film, rather than the film itself. The narrative is interesting enough and quite entertaining. Lead actress Shailene Woodley is exceptional in her performance as fearless Tris Prior, and alongside her, the cast perform moderately well. The special effects are outstanding and the cityscape shots are remarkable in their detail and vivacity. Anyone not acquainted with the last ten years of cinema would find this film gripping and revolutionary in its visual material and narrative.

Elements of the story even come as a refreshing surprise; for instance, the unreliable personality of Four’s mother and the shifting allegiances of various persons. It is a pity however, that the unpredictable and original ideas within the film can be counted on one hand. Whilst having taken inspiration from The Matrix and undeniably The Hunger Games, this film marks a period in contemporary cinema where futuristic settings are starting to all look, sound and function in the same way.

Tris is a strong character, physically and mentally. She does not allow her relationship with Four to define her. Rather, she is constantly taking the lead and shows no physical vulnerability. Four, it seems, is much more emotionally enwrapped with her and passively follows through with her choices. The snorts of disgust I overheard in the cinema from a group of teenage boys after witnessing Tris’ new, shorter haircut highlight the alarming conventions which continue to dominate the image of women in contemporary film. If the female is to be a strong protagonist, then she must be generically beautiful, vulnerable and submissive to her male counter-part. Insurgent does not conform to many of these conventions, and for that, it is worthy of praise.

Yet as a whole, Insurgent doesn’t particularly stand-out. Indeed the film is more exciting than the novel and clears up some of the details at the end that don’t make a whole lot of sense; even if this sense of confusion still lingers at the end of the film-adaption. What exactly is the whole faction ecosystem testing? It doesn’t quite seem to add up.

But the fast-pace soon forces the viewer to forget about the details which aren’t entirely compatible. The film is engaging and amusing even if it seems to lack an emotional core. If you are looking to spend two hours on passive entertainment then Insurgent is the perfect choice for you! Begin the film without any expectations, and you may even be pleasantly surprised.

★★★★☆

Four Stars

Vengeance, violence, and the flames of passion: these are the order of the day in Wild Tales. Damián Szifron’s rambunctious collection of shorts links six stories through the assertion that the vengeful capabilities lying just under the surface of the common man could at any time boil over, and bring an end to orderly civilisation as we know it. The Argentinian Oscar-nominee premiered to a rapturous response at last year’s Cannes festival (with some sources alleging a ten minute standing ovation) but is only now opening to audiences around the UK. Good news, then – it was worth the wait.

The film is never truer to its mission statement than in the fourth segment, arguably the centrepiece. In it, a demolitions expert (played to perfection by Ricardo Darín) is being worn down to a nub by his circumstances. Experiencing difficulties at home and at work, it’s more than he can take when he finds his car being repeatedly towed by a corrupt corporation for supposed parking infractions. Herein lies the genius of the film – each segment sets up its characters in mundane situations which are utterly recognisable, from the car-towing to a serious bout of road rage, to an immaculately planned wedding reception which goes horribly awry. Wild Tales examines ordinarily-functioning members of society who are just a stone’s throw from total breakdown, and it’s the familiarity of these premises which give the film its universal appeal.

The meltdowns which follow are invariably a joy to behold, and to give away more plot details would be to spoil the glee with which we voraciously watch events unfold. Safe to say, though, that Szifron must be singled out for particular praise – he is the sole writing and directing credit for each of the six episodes, which is surely crucial to the stylistic and thematic cohesion that the film enjoys (an issue on which other anthologies, often with a different helmer for each story, stumble).

Szifron’s vivid imagination is on display throughout as he plays around with an assortment of genres (segments lean variously towards thriller, horror, melodrama) and structures (the first story is just a few minutes long, a flawless distillation of an idea, while others opt for a slow burn – or indeed a rapid, fiery, ultraviolent escalation) and through it all he never loses sight of the central examination of humanity’s potential to revert to its baser instincts. Composer Gustavo Santaolalla and cinematographer Javier Juliá also contribute to the film’s impeccable craftsmanship, and each dramatic set-piece (there are several which will leave you stunned) is beautifully shot and realised – on a technical level, the film leaves nothing to be desired.

That’s not to say that Wild Tales is faultless, however – maintaining the energy crucial to this premise for the full two-hour runtime proves a difficult task, on top of which there’s something inherently exhausting about restarting and committing yourself to six separate storylines. By the fourth or fifth segment, I was beginning to struggle to fully invest myself in the new scenarios, and it felt as though the film had lost a little of the first half’s giddy irreverence and fervent potency. I hesitate to place the blame with Szifron’s execution so much as the inherently problematic structure, and suspect that the film would have benefitted from having either fewer stories (one supposes there’s a reason 3 is something of a magic number for anthologies) or more narrative/character through-lines, if only to provide something to hold onto when going from one story to the next.

That said, Wild Tales at its worst still has a great deal to offer, and when firing on all cylinders (as it frequently is) the film is euphorically anarchic. Szifron’s directorial voice is a fascinating combination of Luis Buñuel’s satirical bite and keen sense of the line between absurdity and the banal, and Pedro Almodóvar (who, one is not surprised to discover, has a co-producing credit on this film): here, Szifron emulates Almodóvar’s ability to put his characters through the emotional ringer in colourful and sadistic ways whilst always treating them with the utmost affection and respect.

The result is a film which knows exactly when to pull the trigger, and send everything snowballing into uncontrollable violence. Wild Tales invites us to journey with its characters into oblivion, and how can we decline when the ride is this much fun?

★★★★☆

Four Stars

In recent years, there has been a definite societal shift in the way we discuss mental health. In fact, the main change has perhaps been the frequency with which we discuss it at all. Charities such as Mind and Calm (the Campaign against Living Miserably) have hugely increased profiles nationally, whilst here in Oxford, OUSU’s ‘Mind Your Head’ campaign has worked to challenge the stigma of mental health amongst students. With the general election approaching, political parties have been tripping over themselves to describe mental health as a priority. Yet funding has been cut by 8% since 2010 whilst referrals have increased by almost a fifth, and the Minister of State for Care has himself described children’s mental health services as “not fit for purpose”.

It’s in this context that BBC2’s Nurse has been broadcast, adapted from the successful Radio 4 show of the same name with the original team of writers. The show stars Esther Coles as Liz, a community mental health nurse visiting her wide array of ‘service users’, the majority of whom are played by Paul Whitehouse in astonishingly good make-up and prosthetics. Among the most memorable characters he plays are the softly-spoken, utterly charming Herbert, mourning his erectile dysfunction while gently acquiescing to the onset of dementia, and Billy, a tattooed, muscular ex-prisoner with crippling agoraphobia, who is simultaneously helped out and held back by his moustachioed friend Tony (Simon Day), who consistently interrupts his appointments with Liz.

It is in these harmful relationships between patients and those around them that Nurse makes its clearest points. Both Billy’s friend Tony and Graham’s overbearing, morbidly obese mother actively maintain cycles of dependency, while Lorrie’s next-door neighbour and would-be sweetheart Maurice quite simply cannot take a hint. Coles is utterly believable in these scenes, and indeed throughout the series, balancing warmth, humour and understanding with her patients and a bluntness and even outright anger at those who threaten her patients’ recovery. She has her own issues in her personal life, and the snatched moments between appointments in which she makes a phone call, sings along to the car radio, or grabs a bite to eat, add to her total credibility in the role.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, the sketches which work best are the often the ones which make the least attempt to be funny. In the first episode, Rosie Cavaliero’s ‘crazy cat lady’ is actively anti-comedic, deconstructing the familiar trope by stripping it back to its achingly sad reality. Whitehouse’s finest performance, and the program’s biggest emotional punch, comes as the son of an Alzheimer’s suffering mother who is convinced that her son never visits her – he lives with her as her full-time carer. Forget The Fast Show, forget Harry and Paul, try to forget those godawful insurance adverts, and watch Whitehouse as a straight dramatic actor in these scenes – he is extraordinary.

Blending Getting On’s brusque gallows humour (unsurprisingly, both Coles and Whitehouse have family who are mental health workers) with Rev’s deft emotional poignancy, Nurse is a beautifully written, exquisitely acted piece of television comedy. It’s in its willingness to restrain itself from seeking out laughs at every opportunity, that it finds a far more emotionally satisfying humanity.

★☆☆☆☆
One Star

There were clearly high hopes for the big screen adaptation of the first of Joseph Delaney’s fantasy novels about a young Spook’s apprentice, but a seemingly never-ending gestation period in post-production limbo seemed to set its fate in stone. With such a tumultuous history behind it, it’s no wonder that the final result is a shambolic mess of medieval sword-and-sorcery drudgery. Somewhere along the line, Russian director Sergei Bodrov’s pseudo-epic venture into English language filmmaking seems to have somehow got more than a little bit lost in translation.

The film follows “Spook” Master Gregory, a chivalric protector of humanity against supernatural forces, played by a dazed and confused Jeff Bridges. After his apprentice is killed in action, Gregory hurriedly seeks a replacement to take on the evil Mother Malkin – who takes the form of Julianne Moore in complete Goth attire when she isn’t a gargantuan dragon. After a remarkably brief search, Gregory chooses scrawny but good-hearted Thomas Ward (Ben Barnes) to take up the mantle of his next apprentice, all because he is the seventh son of a seventh son (AKA: an ancestry.com nightmare), and because Thomas is plagued by recurring visions of their quests together.

It must surely take some effort to reduce actors of Jeff Bridges’ and Julianne Moore’s calibre to such painfully empty performances. Bridges appears to have sourced Gregory’s voice from somewhere between Gandalf the Grey and Bane from The Dark Knight Rises. He pushes out each word with the intonation of an asthmatic chimpanzee, fashioning a character even more inaudible and incoherent than his Rooster Cogburn in 2010’s True Grit. Julianne Moore should have been blessed with a deliciously juicy ice-queen – as fun and playful as Susan Sarandon in Enchanted – but instead she can’t make head or tail of dialogue unfit for a pantomime villain. You’d have thought the onscreen reunion of these Big Lebowski stars would have been something magical, but there isn’t a single spark between them.

Bodrov evidently didn’t have much of a plan for his performers. The English actors are sporting American accents, the American actors are sporting English accents, and Swedish actress Alicia Vikander is caught somewhere in between as the pointy-shoed two-dimensional squeeze. Even Olivia Williams as Thomas’ mother, harbouring a major plot secret of her own, doesn’t appear to have a clue what is going on, and a sorely underused Djimon Hounsou spends more time in beast-form than he does in person. We can’t blame him.

It seems that even the filmmakers get tripped up over the muddled ridiculousness of the plot at times. At one point, Thomas literally steps into the shoes of the audience and screams at his master what’s on everyone’s lips, “you have to explain things!”, to which Gregory nonchalantly retorts, “no time!”. It’s funny how one minute Gregory is barking that there is absolutely no time to lose when Thomas pesters him with questions the screenwriters clearly couldn’t be bothered to answer, but then all of a sudden there is ample time for a lengthy training session montage, simply because Thomas asks for it (and says “please”).

Undoubtedly intended to launch a fully fleshed fantasy franchise, audiences will be profoundly disheartened by this vacuous first (and thus probably only) installment. There is simply no escaping or excusing the vapid dialogue, the chaotic artistic direction (Thomas Ward is consistently clad in something of a “medieval” hoodie), and the overbearing feeling that the film wants to be over and done with faster than we want it to be. What a tragic waste of time and talent.

Writing in the New Yorker, Kenneth Goldsmith is one of many voices currently championing the Internet and Postinternet movements in art and literature. Goldsmith’s increasingly regular articles discuss the development of this latest art form and argue passionately for its significance and centrality in our digital culture. And he is right. Online arts have today visibly progressed from a niche to a mainstream interest, gaining media attention, exhibition spaces and serious academic scrutiny. The most recent New Left Review, for example, includes a review of Astra Taylor’s The People’s Platform, a critical study of culture in the digital age. Just this week, even, the poet Rupi Kaur’s banned Instagram post  brought online art into the limelight as the story, and the artist’s powerful response, circulated on social media via the Huffington Post. Postinternet art now seems to be an established presence, but what exactly do we mean by ‘Internet’ and ‘Postinternet’ art, and where is this movement taking art and literature?

Internet art, as a useful starting point, is art that is (usually) digitally made and shared using the internet, making particular use of the interactive and communicative possibilities of the web to create an Internet-reliant aesthetic experience. Internet artist Jess Mac, as a perfect example, makes art from emojis and Google Images, and and shares them on her tumblr, which has the tagline, “What happens on the internet, stays on the internet.” The postinternet movement, then, clearly follows on from this, but evidently doesn’t refer to a break from the Internet – culture is ‘post-Internet’ in the same sense as it is post-Freud or post-Marx. Art and literature considered postinternet engages with the web and with society after the invention of the web: it breaks the online confines of internet art, entering into physical gallery spaces and printed books. As a movement too has its own distinct aesthetic characteristics, which are largely brought forward from internet art: garish graphics, the love of objet trouvé and an unrelenting use of pastiche and parody. 

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“What happens on the internet, stays on the internet.”

American poet Steve Roggenbuck’s YouTube videos are seminal works of Internet poetry, collages of pop-culture references, offbeat snippets of invented dialogue and Whitman-esque carpe diem sentiments, set over slowed-down trance songs and frenetic, stirring post-rock tracks. Roggenbuck’s most recent video there is no morning sky anywhere (2015) is a mosaic of recordings of conversations and poetry readings (by himself and other poets), only beginning the poem-proper in the last minute and a half, which is accompanied by overlapping video clips and crummy graphics. The video treads the line between online and real life, between internet and postinternet, knowingly translating a physical, pre-internet art form (poetry readings) into digital media, only to parody itself with an ostentatious display of its internet-ness in the lo-fi filter and early-internet-style graphics at the end of the video. 

The website Rhizome is currently host to an online exhibition of poetry, called ‘Poetry as Practice’, which publishes a new poetry work every Monday for 6 weeks. Penny Goring’s contribution DELETIA is a sprawling epic of sound clips, gifs, images and YouTube clips, with Goring’s face crudely edited into images throughout. It looks much as though she dragged a net through a Tumblr dashboard and emptied the contents into a Powerpoint – the result is disarmingly poignant, if at times esoteric. The piece relies on the audience’s interaction to scroll through the pages and play videos, exploiting its particular medium for its aesthetic ends: Internet poetry is notably indebted to McLuhan’s “medium is the message”.

What is central both to Goring’s and Roggenbuck’s poetry is its multi-modality, the use of images, video and audio alongside and even as the ‘text’ of the poem; it is even multimodal in the sense that they both distribute their work online and in print version. It is this multimodality which makes postinternet art and poetry so easy to talk about in conjunction – textual and visual elements merge in the familiarly readable manner of the meme. Postinternet culture offers little distinction between art forms, favouring the play between different media: in music, for example, its aesthetic clearly informed the artwork for Vektroid’s album Floral Shoppe as well as the early music videos and lyrics of rappers Yung Lean and Allan Kingdom.

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Artwork for Floral Shoppe by Vektroid

 Another notable feature of Internet art is its chaotic blending of styles and periods, its garish juxtaposition of emojis and Renaissance painting, Walt Whitman and Yolo, combined with its ironic sense of nostalgia, where it celebrates the aesthetics of early computer graphics – it harks back parodically to a paragon of the virtual, lampooning a conventional artistic nostalgia for some notion of realism and art that can be founded on the natural or material world. The Tate Britain’s ‘1840s GIF Party’ picked up on this by inviting contemporary artists to make GIFs out of paintings from the gallery’s 1840s room. British artist Joe Webb responded playfully by giving Roussel’s The Reading Girl an iPad to play with and had Watts’s The Minotaur talking a selfie with an unfortunate amount of redeye. Webb is most famous for his prolific collage work, the method of which is key to the Internet art and literature movements, which recycles cultural materials – images and phrases, for example – into new artworks, enacting quite literally the postmodern parody of form in a way only possible in the information-saturated digital age.

What is most interesting about the move from internet to postinternet culture is how it parallels the liquidation of the boundaries between cyberspace and the real world; the synthesis of the material art predating the internet and the virtual reality of early internet art. The internet is dragged into art galleries and poetry books, while Walt Whitman and the 1840s are rehashed and remoulded in cyberspace. As Bickerton notes in her piece for the New Left Review mentioned earlier, this merger of online and real life is more than a cultural creation, but the product of a pressing reality today with which we are all familiar: Google’s 3D profiling merges information from our search queries, social media and physical whereabouts – our ‘knowledge,’ ‘social’ and ‘embodied’ persons – for its targeted advertising.

The individual of late capitalism lives in this dual reality: online and offline are not separate worlds. Postinternet art and literature reflects how the spaces we inhabit and communicate through have changed and are changing, and as such has an importance in broader interpretive and perceptive contexts, but also brings with it a new set of questions of production and reception for the creative industries – will internet poetry be to publishing houses and poets what Spotify is to record labels and artists? Meanwhile, art and literature plumbing the depths of postinternet culture is some of the freshest, interesting work being put out today, that is also perhaps the most accessible and relevant. There is, undoubtedly, a certain tongue-in-cheeked poignance in Roggenbuck’s mock-aphorism, that real life “is just the manure of our online life”. 

This year’s highly anticipated Game of Thrones Season Five launches in the US on 12^th April 2015 and the next day for eager UK viewers on Sky Atlantic. The blockbuster television series has been widely followed in the media over the last six months, and now, with less than two weeks to wait before the broadcasting of the first episode, every Game of Thrones fan worldwide is anxious with excitement. Shot in a mere 240 days, Season Five has utilized 151 sets in five countries and – besides their 166 cast members – over 1000 crew members and 5000 extras.

Adapted from George R. R Martin’s fourth and fifth novels in his spectacular ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ Series (Book Four: A Feast for Crows and Book Five: A Dance with Dragons), Season Five is rumoured to be “shocking” and “pushing the boundaries of the way we view television”. With producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss’ decision to stray from some of the novels’ particulars to keep audiences on their toes, fans have been warned that some characters will die who do not die in the books, amongst many other significant changes from the novels.

Season Four ended in a flood of dramatically extravagant events including the epic full-length episodes of the battle at the Wall between the Wildlings and the Night’s Watch, and the first encounters of the mythical Children of the Forest. More controversially, the distressing fight between Oberyn Martell and The Mountain concluded in one of the most graphic and traumatic deaths seen so far in the 18+ rated television series, causing shock and outrage worldwide. The Seven Kingdoms have been left in ruin. The manipulative and scheming Littlefinger has fled the capital and enveloped the elegant Sansa Stark in his dark plots, exposing his warped romantic attraction to her, and his previous murderous involvements.

The death of the much-hated young King Joffrey at his own infamous Purple Wedding and the almost-total destruction of the Stark family, as well as Tyrion’s harrowing trial and murder of Tywin Lannister, have all left Westeros  significantly weakened. Westeros now lies in the clutches of the hate-filled Cersei Lannister, whose feud with Margaery Tyrell will only intensify in Season Five. The beautiful Daenerys Targaryen – though stronger than ever, and with dragons who seem to grow ever powerful – is encountering trouble whilst managing her newly conquered cities, and it is believed that her narrative will now, much to the delight of her fans, take a central role throughout the following season. Neither Bran Stark nor Hodor however will be making appearances, as their part in the story had already reached the end of Book Five in Season Four.

Season Five will be encountering new faces such as the High Sparrow, the Sand Snakes and Slave Trader Yezzan. There will also be the re-visitation of some older familiar faces such as the vulnerable Myrcella Lannister, living as a ward in Dorne amongst the outraged people of the murdered Oberyn (whose death was caused entirely by the Lannister household). Rumour has it that the mysterious face-adapting Jaqen H’ghar will also be making a reappearance of sort. Characters are said to be venturing into strange new lands including Dorne and Braavos. An exciting new set location includes the world-famous Alcazar Palace in Sevilla, Spain, and also the stunning historic town of Dubrovnik, Croatia. Sophie Turner, who plays Sansa Stark, states, “There are some massive moments, perhaps even more shocking than the Red Wedding… There’s a lot of blood, a lot of death.”

It has been widely reported that the usual controversy surrounding Game of Thrones will continue, with Season Five containing its expected dosage of strong sex, nudity and violence. Sexual violence, it has been unofficially informed, will also be a theme that the upcoming season shall be exploring. Kit Harington, however, who plays Jon Snow, says that he likes the controversy attached to the show, declaring, “I think it’s what makes our show our show… I don’t think it’s controversial for the sake of it.”

Jon Snow, one of the principal characters to the plot of Game of Thrones, is said to hold a very important role in the following season. No one could forget the significant ‘look’ given to him by the Red Woman at the end of Season Four, suggesting a dark interest in him that will not be dropped. In November 2014, David Benioff and Dan Weiss’ visit to the Oxford Union, accompanied by Kit Harrington (Jon Snow) and John Bradley (Samwell Tarly), implied a strong importance on the currently unknown identity of Jon Snow’s mother – not necessarily for Season Four but for the series as a whole. Only time will tell.

Game of Thrones is certainly at an exhilarating stage of its development, and its millions of fans worldwide hold their breath in anticipation for its release on the 12^th April 2015. Soon social networking sites and the media will explode with suitably related Game of Thrones material and with the forewarned dramatic developments. No doubt Game of Thrones Season Five is going to cause every bit of fuss it deserves.

For us, Summer approaches with every day that passes. But in Westeros, for our many beloved characters and equally for those we love to loath, Winter is coming.