★★★☆☆

Three Stars

In 1985 Mark Knopfler must have been a smug man. His band Dire Straits had just produced the nine times platinum selling album Brothers in Arms; an album produced on a Caribbean island with their good friend Gordon Sumner, aka Sting. As if life wasn’t hard enough, their concerts were almost as profitable as the businesses of the stockbroking fraternity that attended them. The ‘Geordie lad’ had very much left the dingy pubs of the East End and never looked back.

This is ironic because in 2015, Knopfler is back in the dingy pub. He’s still making a lot of money no doubt, but his attention has turned from the yuppies and returned to the down to earth grit of his formative years. This has been his line following the disbanding of Dire Straits. The resulting albums have provided a satisfying mix of folky Celtic sounds with laid-back blues-rock. This new style reached its zenith with 2010’s Get Lucky where he dropped the last vestiges of rock stardom to create a poignant and beautiful swan song to the influences of his youth. In short, he’s done the commercial stuff, he’s done the ‘return to your roots stuff’: so what’s next?

On one level his latest offering, Tracker, is a great-follow up. On another, it’s seriously lacking. Tracker is a competent and well-crafted album, and its merits as a stand-alone work cannot be denied. At the same time it’s clear that Tracker has just recycled the ‘return to your roots’ trick, yet again. To appraise Tracker is the same as appraising Knopfler’s solo work, for it is virtually indistinguishable. While this is a credit to the album, it’s a discredit to the development of Knopfler’s career.

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If you’ve never heard Knopfler’s solo work, this is the perfect place to start. All the hallmarks of his oeuvre are here. One of the standout features is the consistently pitch perfect production. From the opening notes, you can almost feel the lumbering acoustic bass of his Gibson resonating as if you were sitting right next to him. The sound is masterfully clear and well balanced yet also infused with a sense of age and grit which for a second makes you believe you really are in that dingy pub surrounded by disillusionment and despair. Then you remember it’s probably been forty years since Knopfler was in that pub or indeed felt any sense of poverty stricken hopelessness. His solo work has often assumed this tone of wistful melancholy as he recounts working class stories told through the imagined stories of hard done individuals. Tracker no less than other albums has its fair share of social realism: “We were young, so young, And always broke” or indeed “If you got no place to go, I got my home from river rats, The only home I know”. But he gets away with it; he sings with such conviction and feeling that the lyrics never feel too disingenuous or conceited. Nevertheless, the songs are so beautifully played that any cynicism is seduced into mellow complicity by Knopfler’s languorous groans, his band and his spectacular array of guitars.

All this is great, but it didn’t warrant Tracker. The above is applicable to any one of his albums. Most of them share the formula of Dickensian storytelling, impeccable production and beautiful musicianship. True, only after Get Lucky did it come together in a style properly distinct from Dire Straits, but arguably most of the elements were there since day one of his solo career. So, in answer to the question ‘what next’, disappointingly the answer is same old, same old.

I say ‘disappointingly’, perhaps this is unfair. There is undeniably a charm about the post-Dire Straits style Knopfler has eased into. I’ve seen him play in a massive arena, and despite the anonymity of the venue he still walks on stage with amicable glee as if he were one of his characters meeting a friend in the dingy pub. It’s as if the gargantuan crowd is sitting with him round a pint as he cracks some jokes with the (excellent) band. He’s in a good place and he knows it: a happy summation to his career combining his earthy roots with the flashy production and guitar work of his youth. Tracker is a happy repetition of this formula. It probably helps that the city boys on early retirement still buy the records and one might suspect that this has allowed Knopfler to slip into aging self-indulgence. However, neither can it be said that this is a lazy album; it is an eminently solid effort. Nonetheless, I still live in hope Knopfler will one day deliver a fresh third period to his career. 

★★★★☆

Four Stars

Mommy marks the fifth film in five years to be written and directed by the prolific 25-year old Xavier Dolan. Despite the critical feting his films have received, there’s nevertheless been a pervading sense that his early promise was never quite delivered upon; An expectation that he had bigger and better things coming just around the corner. Winning the Jury Prize last year in Cannes, Dolan’s Mommy has taken some time to arrive on these shores. But now, as the film sweeps into UK cinemas amidst a wave of anticipation, we find the weight of critical expectations validated, and Dolan confirmed as one of the industry’s most promising talents.

The film is a quasi-oedipal family drama which follows a trio of complicated characters unable to escape the confines of life in a Quebecois suburb. Dianne and Steve, a mother and son in a destructive, codependent relationship, pull stuttering teacher, Kyla, into their dangerous orbit when she moves in across the street. After being released from public care for disfiguring another boy in a fire, Steven moves back in with his mother, who vows to pull the pair out of the downward spiral they’ve been in since the death of Steven’s father a few years previously.

These characters help each other in a mutual struggle for survival and self-actualisation, striving for a vague notion of freedom through self betterment. Yet they form a chain of three weak links. All three are constricted in their own ways – by their minds, by their prospects, by the strength of their hope which can only stand so much. The inescapability of life, of emotion, and of circumstance form the film’s dramatic thrust. It rings achingly true.

Like previous efforts Heartbeats and Laurence Anyways, Mommy’s sprawling, unruly pacing occasionally asks a little too much of the audience’s patience, even whilst our frustration is the desired effect. Structurally, Mommy is crude and uneven, but this only draws us closer to our hyperactive, vulgar protagonists. Like its characters, the film is rough around the edges and completely exhausting, but both are also ultimately inspiring and hugely entertaining. Dolan’s masterstroke with Mommy is finding a vehicle which turns his messier dramatic instincts into virtues.

Dolan has always been an intensely emotional filmmaker, but with Mommy he surpasses himself, whisking the audience along a passionate, wild, jubilant, heart breaking roller coaster. Returning to themes which served him so well in his debut, Dolan again demonstrates his piercing understanding of the minutia of familial interactions which allow seemingly innocuous conversations between inescapably close relatives to veer wildly between love and hatred.

Even amongst the story’s squalor and pain, Dolan remains as one of contemporary cinema’s most romantic stylists. From his signature slow motion, to the not-quite-in bloom colours, his camera captures longing and frustration like no one else. We watch these characters, but we experience their inner lives through Dolan’s feel for texture and vibrancy. His intense visual flare remains in full force, though he’s reigned in his more exuberant impulses to consistently serve the story, a world apart from the draining excess which plagued 2012’s Laurence.

The film’s greatest stylistic indulgence is it’s almost square aspect ratio. It’s stifling and intense, but bluntly effective in limiting the horizons of these characters. We too find ourselves confined – aware of the inaccessible worlds and opportunities sitting on either side of the square frame. One brilliant scene sees our rebellious young protagonist spin a shopping cart wildly, lost in a brief moment of anarchic mindlessness, spinning in and out of shot, freedom fleetingly found just beyond the border of Dolan’s lens. And then finally, in perhaps the most joyous cinematic moment you’ll see this year, Dolan liberates both us and his characters. We breath together. Our joy is their joy.

The performances are uniformly flawless. Antoine-Olivier Pilon’s Steve careens across the screen in a wild, debauched, and complex performance. He’s a performer blessed with the gravitational charisma and unpredictability of Dean or early Brando. Pilon’s broad features display all the pain and confusion behind his rage, rooting the character in an understandable, even loveable realm. You can feel his conflicting instincts banging up against each other until they spill over in a blaze of violence. It’s a visceral, star-making performance.

Anne Dorval, shines once again, imbuing her long-suffering mother with a heartbreaking combination of wit and vulnerability. Dorval is an incredibly primal, physical performer, her entire being an outlet for expression. She’s the perfect canvas for Dolan to work out his troubled relationship with mother figures on, finding her. Once striking looks played against the gauche, trashy outfits Dolan has time and again clothed her in. Yet her innate ferocity allows her character’s dignity and resilience to remain beyond doubt. Susanne Clement impresses with her somewhat enigmatic portrayal of Steve’s teacher, convincingly finding the layers of steel beneath her meek surface. The central trio’s chemistry crackles with energy, carrying the story through it’s occasional rockier moments. Pilon’s and Dorval’s relationship in particular is a delight to watch.

Mommy is a film of vast human insight, but perhaps with less on its mind than it has in its heart. But for Dolan, it lays to rest the labels such as wunkerkind, or enfant terrible, which have plagued the twenty-five year old French Canadian since his teenage debut. Mommy is the work of an artist in full command of their craft. It’s the birth of a major filmmaker.

Criticism? “Darling, you must be joking, you’re not here to ‘criticise’…”

In theatre, the relationship between the reviewer and the reviewed has always been an interesting one. Writing for other culture sections, you know you’re safe. After all, when was the last time anybody made a snide comment about the latest Hollywood blockbuster, only to have to explain themselves to Tom Cruise at the Bridge smoking area? If that ever happened, you’d probably count yourself lucky…

But you probably wouldn’t count yourself so lucky if, having slated an aspiring masterpiece at the BT, you were to run into that same cast to whom you smiled so sweetly as you were handed the complementary ticket last Friday. It is this that distinguishes the relationship between the press and the stage at Oxford: sooner or later everybody knows everybody else. So how do the bitchy critics and the self-indulgent thesps coexist?

I’ve worked on the two sides of the divide and it seems to me this coexistence can lead to one of two extremes. In the first extreme there is no tension because the reviewer is complicit with the cast regardless of his/her real opinion. So, it’s all wonderful and inspired darling. In the other extreme this tension is a state of war: thesps are seen as the sort of people who look in the mirror and imagine Tom Hiddleston or Emma Watson looking back, whilst reviewers are seen as sad, lonely, English students, too talentless and too spineless to get on the stage. You need only see the fury vented in the private Facebook group of a production after a bitchy review to see what I mean. 

So why the two relationship extremes? To put it bluntly, the images the thesp and the critic have of each other are themselves extreme: from the view of the exhaustingly self-obsessed thesp to the either totally ignorant or totally self-important critic. In reality of course, not all thesps wear shirts that look like adverts for a garden center and not all reviewers spend their time decoding Ulysses in search of a friend. But the potential clash of these caricatures creates the tension that polarizes their relationship into one of either perfect harmony or mutual resentment. It’s as if both groups share the motto ‘either you love me or you don’t and given we see each other all the time, it had better be the former’. But perhaps both groups have some grounds for their view of the other. 

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Consider the scene that greets the reviewer moments after arriving at a preview. The marketing manager is having severe palpitations whilst the director is trying to give a philosophical justification for why the third dancer from the right was half a quaver out of time. The leading man/lady despairs over not bringing along Camus in this time of existential doubt; “am I good enough…”. All the while, the reviewer probably misses most of this and looks on impassively waiting for something intentionally theatrical to happen. A gesture suggesting anything less than total understanding by the reviewer is then felt to be a malicious affront. The truth is, the reviewer doesn’t have a clue one way or another about the cast’s hypersensitive deliberations. Maybe, there is some truth in the thesp stereotype…

Then again, maybe there is also some truth in that of the critic. Next time you settle into your seat at the theatre, look out for the one in the blazer seated in the front row. Observe the profound self-satisfaction as he/she eases themselves into their chair and languorously produces the Moleskine notebook. Fountain pen at the ready, the slightest stab of a smile betrays the poker face as the dagger hovers over the matted paper. The arguments of insidious intent course through their veins and a writhe of pleasure unsettles the cool before the knife plunges. That putdown, transcribed from the depths of his/her self-satisfaction and into the hands of the Oxford readership will have bled the hearts of many an aspiring star.

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In reality perhaps the drama world isn’t a Mexican standoff between the egos either side of the curtain. And what few shots are fired, resound only within the stage world. Understandably most people just don’t care. Which is why the stage section exists mostly as a sort of agony aunt column for actors “yes darling you really were a dream in Macbeth” (and with the miracle that is CTRL f, the actors don’t even have to read the whole review anymore). Yet a tension does exist and its existence and how we deal with it says a lot about Oxford’s aspiring (and potentially wild) West End.

The result, is a sort of implicit pact: the critics get to use all the big words from their critical theory textbook to write essays that have nothing to do with the plays they watch. In return the thesps get to stage whatever they like, however they like, while taking lots of black and white pictures of themselves doing it. It’s a pact that keeps both sets of egos happy but never brings them into conflict. Thesps can be ridiculous and critics snide, but by contriving mutually assured admiration they avoid mutually assured destruction. Is this peace worth the price? Perhaps a better solution is that we all stop taking ourselves so seriously. However, having suggested this to Tom Cruise at Bridge, his reaction suggests this might be mission impossible.

You and your mates don’t see each other as much. You’ve changed. They’ve changed. Your collective memory of the single, unending Saturday night of your teenage years is something you cherish, but you can’t quite recapture the magic. Deep down you intuit that things will never be the same, that you’ll never again feel the sense of true belonging you felt as a seventeen year old, chinning Glens on a freezing street corner, talking about the time you almost got with Sharon from French.

But that intuition, which will prove ultimately to be correct, is something we’re all ignoring. So here are six songs to prove empirically that absolutely nothing has changed between you, Eric and Jenna, and you’re all still brilliant mates.

Which you definitely are. Brilliant, brilliant mates.

1. Call Me Maybe – Carly Rae Jepsen

This blast of childish joy was all that anyone listened to a couple of years ago. Of course, that was when Steve still called me to hang out. Steve, if you’re out there, call me? Please? 

2. Flourescent Adolescent – Arctic Monkeys

“Do you remember how we all used to wear those hilarious coloured jeans? And yellow hoodies from H & M?” Yes Dave, I do remember. Yet I cannot reclaim the moment. Just like the easy rapport we once had, it has been lost to the black wastes of time.

Sorry, what was that you were saying about political correctness having gone something or other? 

3. When You Were Young – The Killers

An absolute classic from the golden time when your mates were still actually your mates. Less well known is the follow-up to this, titled ‘Now You’re a Bit Older and I Pretend to Myself That I Like You So As To Preserve The Memory I Have Of My Teenage Years’.

 4. Too Late (To Apologise) – Timbaland (feat. One Republic)

It’s not too late to apologise for the time you called out one of your mates for saying something stupid, and they all agreed that ‘you’d changed’. But you are too proud to apologise. And what your mate said was really stupid. But there’s a big crew reunion coming up. What should you do? Well, play it cool and do some funny dancing. Why let on that you’re trying to convince yourself that you still know who you are? It will really bum everyone out.

5. That’s Not My Name – The Ting Tings

‘I remember back at home they called me Pintmaster Flash’. But you’re not Pintmaster Flash any more, are you? No, now you’re Tim from Hilda’s. Even your old friends don’t call you Pintmaster Flash now, and anyway you only see each other for an awkward drink once every two months. Say it to yourself, go on – ‘Pintmaster Flash’. Understand the extent of your deracination as the words turn to Pintmaster Ash in your mouth.

6. Teenage Dirtbag – Wheatus

When was the last time you saw Miranda? Or Alex? Dave’s having a kid, though it seems like only yesterday he was walking around telling girls to smell his finger. When you all meet up at the pub, this comes on, and the smiles that go round diffuse the tension between you all. But later on, in your sleep, you scream the chorus into the uncaring night. Soon you will wake in the grey dawn, too fearful to articulate what you already know, that you’ll never fit in anywhere again.

Happy listening!

★★★★☆
Four Stars

Before Roger Ebert, no film critic had ever won a Pulitzer Prize or been awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. On his death in 2013, Barack Obama wrote that “for a generation of Americans Roger was the movies… The movies won’t be the same without Roger”. Steve James’ life-affirming documentary paints the picture of Ebert’s long love affair with cinema and charts his debilitating disease as it takes its course in his final days. Unafraid to get close and personal with Ebert’s at times abrasive personality, his alcoholism in his early days, or the crippling effects of his cancer, Life Itself is a stoically honest but always celebratory portrait of the most famous film critic in cinema history.

Following Ebert from his strong Chicago roots, we see him rise up through the ranks of journalism, displaying an editorial aptitude from an early age. Chicago is to become more than just his home – it is to be forever more his journalistic stronghold, and from the moment he takes up the mantle of film critic at the Chicago Sun-Times in 1967, he begins changing the game of cinema criticism. He is pestered throughout his career to move to higher-paid, more “illustrious” newspapers, but he never wavers. He remained with the paper until his death almost fifty years later.

The documentary finally sheds light on the uneasy Albee-esque catfights that took place between Ebert and his costar Gene Siskel when the cameras stopped rolling on their smash-hit review show, Siskel & Ebert & The Movies. Ebert and Siskel were two giants of their time, both bullish and stubborn, and their relationship was more like feuding brothers than fierce rivals. Together, they established the make-or-break “Thumbs up!” or “Thumbs down!” verdict that became so ubiquitous in movie marketing, but throughout their successful careers, they never ceased to grab an opportunity to outshine the other. In the film, their respective wives speculate as to what may have happened if only they had put aside their differences and come to terms with how invaluable they were to one another.

We see Ebert’s adoration of the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, and his impressively tight mingling with celebrities of the screen, harkening back to the days when critics and artists would socialise together in the same exclusive circles. In many ways, Ebert was a chip off the old block of old-fashioned critics, but the documentary asks the poignant question – did his friendly association with the stars ever compromise his criticism of their work? A light-hearted Martin Scorsese – who was firm friends with Ebert for many years – thinks not, jovially recalling a wounded response to Ebert’s crippling review of The Color of Money. It was a way of “condemning and helping”, Scorsese assures us.

Martin Scorsese isn’t the only big name to sing Roger Ebert’s praises. Ava DuVernay and Werner Herzog are among a host of other directors and artists who felt personally shaped by his acerbic craft. Even Steve James credits a large part of his success to Ebert, who lauded his first feature, Hoop Dreams, in 1994. It feels as if the entire documentary is in some way James’ way of thanking Roger Ebert for this early praise; he gives the critic a chance to review for once his own life, rather than the lives of movie characters.

Omnipresent in the film of course is Roger’s wife, Chaz, whose indomitable spirit aids Ebert through his final cancer-stricken years. The camera pokes its neck in deep into Ebert’s hospital bed, and doesn’t shy away from showing us his worst days. There are uncomfortable scenes of the incapacitating disease and the critic’s painful attempts at rehabilitation and recovery. Fighting a disease as tenacious as cancer, Ebert knows that his days are numbered, but this only forces him to continually press on with his work. By his last years, invasive surgery has had to completely remove his lower jaw, and Ebert is only able to communicate via a computerised voice system, not unlike Stephen Hawking. Stripped of the ability to speak, however, Ebert does not allow his voice to be silenced. He triumphantly and inspirationally channels his suppressed energy into online blogging and reviewing, and continues to watch and love films until his death in 2013.

Towards the end of the film, Ebert relays how he often invites a close friend to recite to him the last page of The Great Gatsby. It isn’t hard to understand why these passages resonate so effortlessly with him. Ebert relates that he is more than aware of the passage of time – “of its flow, slipping through our fingers like a long silk scarf” – especially in his final years. Like Jay Gatsby, Ebert was a firm advocate of chasing dreams. He believed in the “green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us”. And, also like the eponymous dreamer, Ebert had too come a long way to his own “blue lawn” – from a working class small-town boy in Urbana, to becoming a national celebrity and the most renowned film critic of all time.