Thursday 18th September 2025
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A Plethora of Celebrations, the Proliferation of Vacations

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Snow days are causes for mass celebration among schoolchildren everywhere. When we’re young, we contrive to increase the possibility of a snowstorm by sleeping with wooden spoons under our pillows and wearing our pajamas inside out. In elementary school, before the advent of e-mail chains, we’d wake up before dawn and rush to turn on the television, to search anxiously in the morning news for announcements of schools closing due to the snow. We were rewarded if our school was among the cancellations listed. A two-hour delay was a sort of consolation prize. From November through February (and if memory serves, a few times in October or March or even one memorable April), these snow days, unplanned vacations from the daily grind of school, held a special place in our hearts.
But these snow days weren’t the only days off. Looking back on my thirteen years in primary and secondary education and comparing my American experience to that of British friends at Oxford, it’s become increasingly clear that we consider a plethora of occasions reason to close schools. Of course, there are the religious holidays – the Jewish High Holy Days in the autumn, Christmas and Hanukah in December, Good Friday and Easter and Passover in the spring – but in the United States, these are only the tip of the holiday iceberg. Going through the calendar of a traditional school year, the number is astonishing.
Today is the first Monday of September – Labor Day in the United States. Some schools start the day after Labor Day, but if they’ve already begun, as many have, it’s the first day when children are given a free pass. Moving into October, Columbus Day commemorates the “discovery” of our nation, and many schools use this day as an opportunity for a four-day weekend, giving children the Friday prior off of school as well.

Next comes a holiday we may share with other nations; every year on November 11th we celebrate Veterans Day, to honour men and women who have served our country. As the date marking the end of the First World War, such celebrations may be more widespread. But of course, the next holiday in November is all-American: Thanksgiving. Celebrated on the last Thursday of the month, most schools end midday on Wednesday and are closed until the following week, in order for children to have ample time to watch the Macy’s parade, help parents cook, and of course gorge themselves on turkey and sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie.

In December are the Christmas holidays, a couple of weeks all at once, encompassing New Years’ Day as well; again, similar to other nations. But little more than a fortnight following, children are given a Monday off for Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. In February, President’s Day, an amalgam of the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, is often turned into a four-to-five day break. Of course in March or April there’s another long vacation, and then at the end of May is Memorial Day. Some schools in the United States will end at this point, and others keep going for a few more weeks. All will be over by the close of June – often a few weeks prior to the Fourth of July, the national holiday of Independence Day.

Lest I forget, this brief overview includes only holidays which are officially observed, resulting in the closing of schools and sometimes workplaces. Looking at a calendar, there are a multitude of other holidays every month, ranging from the widespread (Mother’s Day and Father’s Day) to the wacky (Paul Bunyan Day), from the multicultural (months to honour Hispanic and African-American heritage, as well as a multitude of celebrations for various religions) to the educational (a day to honour teachers and a month dedicated to books). And there are the days to commemorate patriotism, both by state (Massachusetts and Maine celebrate Patriot’s Day on April 19th), and across the nation on Patriot Day, the 11th of September, and Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, on the 7th of December.

Concluding such a summary, it’s clear that we celebrate and commemorate many people and events, and find many of them reason enough to close our schools. Of course in Britain there are national bank holidays and half-term breaks, which when added together may compensate for the dearth of other closures. But until coming to Oxford, I had never realized that the marking of days out of school or work which we consider commonplace, are in fact uniquely American.

Keep rumour confined to the playground

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The past few weeks have been intensely embarrassing ones for the British media. Though we’re not verging on journalism’s expenses scandal, it is becoming increasingly obvious the extent to which the modern press are happy to run stories based on little more than conjecture; and do the rumour spreader’s job for them.

We heard one day that Charles Kennedy was imminently going to defect to the Labour Party. What was the basis for this? A shady briefing to friendly journalists, probably from within Camp Mili-E. This factless speculation worked its way through the press to the front of the broadsheets. Any sources quoted? Anywhere? No. But still good enough to print as fact. A couple of days later and we learn the rumours were groundless.

It was a similar story with Boris Johnson, who was definitely going to resign as Mayor if his Crossrail budget got cut. Was he really though, or did someone just pick up a rumour in the pub? Either way it got printed, then retracted, and we learn it had no basis in truth.

The shift of political power from the floor of the Commons to its press gallery has been well noted, and explored even more through the raft of New Labour memoirs out recently. But the problem is that it means most of what lies behind political journalism today are the carefully spun machinations of the rumour mill, spilling out of hacks’ offices through dodgy press officers and even dodgier special advisors (see the Charlie Whelan/Ed Balls duo for a definition of this).

At the end of the day though, reporters don’t cling onto the words said in a Commons debate, or scrutinise the statements of ministers. They wait around for the next leak dropped on their desk, and hang onto the hearsay casually mentioned in the press gallery. There’s nothing wrong with press briefings, and indeed the modern political press is brilliantly lively, but we do need to re-establish some basic standards or they will simply lose the public’s trust.

(P.S. Perhaps the strongest example of rumour stretched too far is the now silent story of the murdered MI6 agent. Out of some murky source came the idea that he might have been gay (landlord never saw him bring back a girl). What does that mean Daily Mail? Possibly gay man dies in suspicious circumstances? That’s clearly a drunk drug fuelled sex orgy romp death isn’t it! A couple of days later, after saturating the national papers with slanderous speculation, the more astute reader may have spotted a retraction. He wasn’t gay, there was no porn stashed in his flat, and there was definitely no bondage den. The Daily Mail print a comment piece lambasting their bad sources (read rumours). If you’re going to base your front page on such awful sources, you should probably point it out at the time.)

Play for an F.A Cup winner

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Come on, admit it… we’ve all fantasied about stepping out onto that hallowed Wembley turf to score in an important final. Well, whilst your University footballing career is unlikely to reach such drastic and dizzying heights there is a high level of prestige attached to stepping out to represent Oxford University in the annual Varsity football match.

The Oxford University Association Football Club, as it is formally known, has a long tradition of breeding sporting success and most importantly beating bitter rivals Cambridge in the show piece event each year. In Trinity term last year, Cherwell Sport’s Ralph Turner witnessed a pulsating affair at Cambridge United’s Abbey Stadium which resulted in Oxford winning on penalties after snatching a stoppage time equalizer.

The club itself has an extremely impressive heritage. Formed in 1872, the team is one of the oldest to be associated with the University. A cohort of twenty nine players have progressed from the Blues team to represent their country. Perhaps the most famous of this elite group is CB Fry who won international acclaim both in Cricket and Football, captaining his country in 6 tests from 1912 whilst also enjoying an illustrious footballing career with bitter rivals Southampton and Portsmouth.

The club currently play its matches at the Iffley Road sports ground. The first ever game at this site was a high profile affair in December 1921 which saw Tottenham Hotspur beat OUAFC 1-0.

Whilst it may not be common knowledge, Oxford University have competed in the F.A Cup. The club entered the competition between 1872-1880 and have reached the final five times, winning the trophy once with a 2-0 win over Royal Engineers at the Kennington Oval.

It is clear that the club has a extremely prestigious past, but the question is, just how does one get involved in Blues football? This year trials will take place during Freshers week and are open to all who wish to put themselves forward. Further details, and the chance to register interest can be found on the club website at www.ouafc.co.uk

So, whilst it may be a while until the Blues team grace the Wembley turf in a major domestic final, they still have an impressive history, and let’s face it there is nothing better than telling your friends that you have just joined an F.A Cup winning side!

Cherwell’s fresher glossary: part one

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Oxford slang is quite confusing at first, and may seem at times to venture into the realms of Clockwork Orange – you’ll check your ‘pidge’ (pigeonhole) in the ‘plodge’ (porters’ lodge), will sign ‘up’ and ‘down’ at the start and end of term – so here is Cherwell’s helpful guide, and some of the things we wish we’d know before we ‘came up’.

Academics
Ah, of course. Why we’re all here. Because we were the best and brightest of our various sixth forms. So people will (obviously) take their work very seriously. They’ll intimidate you with their summer reading (voluntary of course) and will leave you to wallow in your awkward ‘I don’t know the answer to that question’ silence in tutorials. Who cares? You’ll be the one with all the stories about vomming on your shoes. Who’s the real winner eh?

Bops
The awful Oxford slang for a college disco. Some are raucous and amazing fun, some are awful (Merton…) most play Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ at least once. All have potent cocktails that will burn your taste buds off. Invariably fancy dress, but it’s not like school: the cool kids all dress up. In costumes that took more time to plan than your vac essay. Seriously.

Babylove
Where the cool kids hang out. Sweaty, small and too cool for its own good. Edgy hair and ironic dress only.

Bridge
The foil of Babylove, just as sweaty. Cheesy fun. And it has a stripper pole that rugby boys tend to flock round. Unexplained. Just don’t get ‘Anuba’d’. Anuba is the bar (waiting room) you go to if the queue for Bridge is too long. You’ll be given a ticket like when you bought your school shoes from Clarks. No night can recover.

Bod
Short for ‘Bodleian Library’. Seriously, go to your fresher orientation otherwise you will never find your way round. And it’s seriously embarrassing going as a third year, and asking where you get books out from, trust me. Don’t try to take them home, you can’t, and you’ll be rugby tackled by a security guard if you try.

Crew dates.
A very unique Oxford thing. One all girl ‘crew’ (think netball team, drinking society, women’s elephant polo club) goes for a curry or to a formal hall with another all boy crew (rugby team, drinking society, general lads). Can be between colleges or uni wide. One side pays for dinner; the other provides the wine (minimum one bottle per person). General hilarity ensues in the form of drinking games and copping off with each other. Although Cherwell advises against the latter.

Collections
Beginning of term exams used to check you weren’t telling porkies about how much work you did. Taken in various degrees of seriousness – some are in exam conditions, some you’re allowed to take back to your room. Don’t panic about them, very uncool. Go for studied nonchalance instead.

Drinking societies.
Ah, infamous tabloid fodder. Some are just as elite as described – despite various equality committees trying to intervene and spoil their fun. Each college has their own, with their own bizarre traditions. Initiations are a must.
The infamous ‘Buller’ is now supposedly struggling for members- it’s now cooler to turn it down than to accept. The first rule of equally infamous Piers Gav is you don’t talk about Piers Gav (just google it). Christ Church Cardinals throw the best party every term, but don’t be fooled by the black tie. Ain’t nothing classy about their ‘cocktails’. Girls drinking societies are a bit of an oxymoron, but they do try.

Don
A college tutor. Derived from the Latin dominus meaning variously master, lord, owner, host. A strange species that comes in wildly different forms. Some are old school and will offer you a glass of wine and spend the whole hour talking about opera, some will let you call them by their first name, some are terrifying and are not to be crossed. Most cannot be fooled, and they’ve seen every trick in the book. And have probably already read that essay you’re trying to pass off as your own. You will, however, learn their traits and your own tricks for getting around them, even if it is just to avoid eye contact and sudden movements.

Entz/Entz Reps
Short for Entertainment, your Entz Reps will arrange the bops and other super fun events – think chocolate orange world record attempts. club nights as well as your Freshers’ Week, film nights, and selling tickets for club nights throughout term. Be nice to them and they’ll save you tickets and tell you what’s happening.

Essays
Ban the phrase ‘essay crisis’ from your vocabulary. It’s irritating, and if you have one, it’s your own entire fault. Yes, you will get lots of them, particularly if you do a humanity, but get over it. There’s some myhtical guideline that says you can only be set sixteen in a term. Maybe that’s not very comforting. Double spacing is your best friend (the pages multiple, like magic!). And despite what you may think, doubling the expected word count will not impress your tutor. You’re just giving them more to cover in red pen.

Examination Schools
Where Prelims, Mods and Finals are held (more on those later). On the High Street. Also where you’ll have to hand in any finals coursework. Not really a place of laughs and giggles.

Fuzzy ducks
The Brookes night, in the O2 in Cowley. Voted the fifth easiest place to pull in some lads’ mag, some time ago. Buy your ticket in advance, and take your breath mints. Not for the faint hearted.

Finals
Final examinations at the end of 3 or 4 years as an undergraduate. Some degrees are divided in to Part Ones (taken at the end of second year) and Part Twos (taken at the end of third or fourth year) much to the annoyance of people actually trying to have fun at the end of their term. Finalists can be recognized by a permanent caffeine shake and the deep scowl if people even whisper loudly in the library. Probably best avoided in Trinity term.

Fresher
First years. Will be said with distain by some second years, who have conveniently forgotten they were one just a year ago. Don’t do anything too outrageous in Freshers’ Week because the nickname ‘Fresher Slut/Lad/Douche/Sick’ etc will stick for the rest of the year. Technically you should only be called a Fresher in your first term, but no one pays any attention to that. And you’ll be told to “Down it, Freshaaaaaa!”, quite a lot.

G and D’s
An Oxford cafe – one in Cowley, one on St Aldates – specializing in ice cream and bagels. Always busy after nine as people avoid work and get their caffeine fix, but it’s expensive… But it IS open til midnight. So, swings and roundabouts.

Gown
Short and armless if you’re not a scholar, long and more batman like if you are. Also refers to the University in the phrase ‘Town vs. Gown’ – the ever-bubbling tension (apparently) between students and the normal people of Oxford.

Enter the Dragonette?

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In the frantic fortnight following the release of A-level results, the national papers are warning us that millions of pupils will be left without a place at university, doomed to wander the streets in feral hordes or to get a job at Krispy Kreme Donuts to fund their rampant mephadrone addiction. But spare a thought for Dragonette.

The irresistibly likeable Canadian disco act have already been turned down twice by the UK, and now they’re back again.Third time lucky? Will these deserving foreign students get a place in our hearts? Cherwell takes a look at their UCAS application…

QUALIFICATIONS (with teachers’ comments):

First album – Galore, 2007

Music: instantly catchy tunes with an unerring ear for pastiche ranging from Bollywood to 50s pop (A*)
English: cheerfully inept (‘Goodness I like this / Being your mistress’) but with a certain Patsy Clineish class (B)
Chemistry: mostly effervescent – saccharine-based with some acerbic compounds (A)
Food Technology: good command of texture, and everything leaves a juicy and strangely satisfying taste (A)

Second album – Fixin to Thrill, 2009

Music: Country and Western for the synth-pop generation, pure ‘n’ simple. A few cringeworthy dud tracks, but ultimately this is a cracking record. Best use of the banjo this side of the millennium in Gone Too Far (A)
PE: obsessive focus on dance. Even sex seems to be the horizontal expression of a vertical desire (A)
English: frankly not much improvement (Executive access to upper classes / So run and get me some of ’em big sunglasses’). But this is pop, so what the hell (B)
Performing Arts: the only word that comes close to describing Dragonette’s stagecraft is ‘electric.’ These guys might have supported Basement Jaxx back in the day, but right now they look capable of headlining a tour of similar magnitude (A*, assessed August 28 at 93 Feet East, Brick Lane)

INTERVIEW NOTES

Candidate (Martina Sorbara) seems candid, articulate and confident but without arrogance. And, this Oxford don cannot help adding, really quite sexy, in an American sort of way.

Asked about her lack of success with previous applications in the UK, she seemed to feel let down by her representation: ‘It’s the worst! It really is! They didn’t really have any idea what do do: they were like ‘okay, where do we put this?”

She was eager to differentiate her group from well-groomed public school applicants: ‘our records are made in a spare bedroom in my house. I consider them homespun.’ The candidate pointed to previous success in America. ‘Being the kind of band we are, we get surprised – everything grows without our knowledge. I guess you could call it a Kinder Surprise career – we’re never quite sure what’s going to be inside the egg.’ And everything is coated in sugar, I don’t reply.

The candidate admits to being adrift from contemporary music. ‘I live in oblivion a little bit. I have to force myself to listen to music. I fill up my iPod with history podcasts and stories. I got fascinated by the Dark Ages last month.’ Confesses to idiosyncratic and conservative musical taste: ‘when I get home, I just want to listen to the old records I know off by heart – Talk Talk, Nick Lowe, a lot of country. Most of my lyrics have their origins in country.’

At this point conversation spun out of control as the interviewer could not hold back any longer from asking about the band’s name. ‘We just thought it sounded like a fun word,’ said the candidate. ‘But then we discovered it was a kind of fish.’ [NB: a dragonet is a brightly-coloured fish that lurks in the mud at the bottom of the sea. We did not pursue the analogy.] When the interviewer suggested that Dragonette was a Pokemon, the candidate seemed confused and replied that Pokemon had probably stolen the name off them.

VERDICT

As much talent and charisma as previously successful scholars such as La Roux and Lights. Some might say more. For pity’s sake let’s offer them a Rhodes scholarship before they give up on Britain altogether…

Film isn’t dead

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‘Film is dead.’ So proclaims Will Self, the infamous intellectual and novelist, in an article for The Times on 28th August promoting his new book, ‘Walking to Hollywood’. As opening lines go, it’s a fairly bold one, no doubt intended to spark the reader’s interest and outrage, but, upon closer inspection, his argument actually turns out to be rather less histrionic and self-evidently incorrect than this.

He is quick to qualify his claim by explaining, ‘I don’t mean that people aren’t making films, or that other people aren’t watching them – it’s just that film is no longer the dominant narrative medium, its near century-long hegemony over the imaginations of the greater part of the world’s population has ended.’ To paraphrase, Self didactically informs us that film is no longer the central monolith of popular culture; its role in people’s lives and imaginations has diminished considerably, and its dominant cultural position has instead been replaced by a salmagundi of different institutions. He laments how, ‘When I talk to my older children… [and] their friends, I have no sense of film’s centrality for them; instead they are at the vortex of so much full-motion imagery – on TVs, computer screens, games consoles, CCTV, 3G phones – that the silver screen hovers only in their mid-distance, a ghostly presence unless animated by the next big, novelty spectacle.’

To give Self his due, his isn’t an unusual or unique position, as he proves by asking all those he comes into contact with whether film really is dead. According to his accounts, everyone from Daniel Craig to Jonathan Coe agrees wholeheartedly with his self-assuredly pessimistic mortician’s report, and he then sets about walking to Hollywood (via Heathrow) in order to track down the killer. His belief that film’s ‘cultural primacy’ has been lost would, one might assume, lead him to examine why the rise of DVDs and the internet has been so meteorically successful, as well as examining where exactly cinemas – rather than filmmakers, as Self acknowledges that ‘good – even great – movies are still being made’ – have gone wrong. Disappointingly, such an examination is nowhere to be found. Instead, his article is more of a vague eulogy for a more mythical time in movies, when one big release might define a generation: ‘Without a common horde of film references… it’s difficult to see how my generation would cohere at all. We’re stuck together by Steve McQueen tossing a baseball against a cell wall, Lauren Bacall putting her lips together to blow, Anthony Hopkins sucking up invisible fava beans…’

The first thing to notice about this last quotation is just how diverse the films that supposedly unite his generation really are; respectively, he references ‘The Great Escape’, ‘To Have and Have Not’ and ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ as cultural touchstones for people of around his age (Self is forty-eight, going on forty-nine), yet the release dates for these films span from 1944 to 1991. The second is just how recognisable these references are to any generation – he cannot seriously claim these iconic moments loom large only in the mind of the middle-aged. It is also somewhat frustrating to find oneself being spoken for in this article, as he confidently observes how those in their late teens and early twenties are no longer united by film. This observation must either be wilfully selective or else be made in phenomenal ignorance of youth’s diversity. If his children and their friends do not have film as a cultural centrepiece to their lives then fair enough, but one should take exception at his attempts to extrapolate this across the entirety of today’s youth.

Even more important is a point which Self appears to ignore entirely: the question of whether or not film remains the most significant facet of modern culture presupposes its previous dominance. While Self argues that McQueen, Bacall and Hopkins unite his generation, I am utterly certain that huge swathes of forty-eight year olds would disagree, and perhaps even fail to recognise which three films he is referring to. It is wrong to claim flatly that film has been the cultural centrepiece of the twentieth century – for many, its primacy has never been the case. With this in mind, it becomes clear that the subsequent argument – that film (or film’s primacy) has died – is equally subjective. The friends and colleagues he encounters may agree with him, but for many – including my own group of peers – film has never been more of a potent and unifying force in culture.

I fear also that Self may be viewing cinematic history through a lens darkly distorted by nostalgia. While he writes of growing up with such undisputed classics as ‘Chinatown’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’, he unfairly contrasts these with three lacklustre releases of 2008: ‘The Incredible Hulk’, ‘Wanted’ and ‘The Love Guru’. In this way, he is pitting the best that the cinema of his youth has to offer against the worst of today’s – an unfair and transparently selective technique. In fact, in my experience, 2008 was a year that proved once again film’s cultural primacy; this was the year of ‘The Dark Knight’, a film that seemed to define the summer. Going further afield, one only has to glance at India’s Bollywood to see a film industry that dwarves Hollywood in its production rates and that has ensured that films have become a unifying and staggeringly popular force all across the country. His belief that film’s cultural primacy is dead cannot really be disproved, but it can be challenged. I cannot personally think of any other cultural medium that unites people in the way that film can – it is rare for a book or video game to be so widely experienced and discussed in the way that certain films are. Film is the most democratic and inclusive of experiences, and it is yet to be bettered in this way.

Ultimately, however, Self seems unsure of exactly who or what he is attacking. He flips between lamenting the rise of choice in our lives (wistfully recalling the days of ‘three terrestrial television channels’) and attacking the current state of films and their quality. The first point is hardly fitting of a riposte, except to condemn it as nostalgia at its most simplistic and tiresome, while the second is, to labour the point, subjective. I would argue that, with films such as ‘Synecdoche, New York’, ‘There Will Be Blood’ and ‘Let the Right One In’, quality cinema is most definitely alive and well, though I will happily acknowledge its current health cannot be objectively assessed (unless done so financially). If Will Self believes that films ain’t what they used to be, then so be it, but I can only pity him for being unaware of, or stubbornly ignoring, the masterpieces that the universally inclusive medium of film continues to produce.

Review: The Secret in Their Eyes

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This is a special one. A real, real delight. Unheard of until it surprisingly picked up the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, ‘The Secret in Their Eyes’ has since left the borders of Argentina and is now finally brought to us all around the world. Having not seen the other contenders for that award, and knowing that both ‘A Prophet’ and ‘The White Ribbon’ were also very well regarded, this reviewer cannot fairly say whether it deserved to win. All he knows is that it has warmed his heart in the strangest but most sincere of ways, by being a film that is both touchingly romantic and an exhibit of aching injustice, all through the eyes of a man too gentle to deserve the tormenting of his soul for over twenty years.

That man, Esposito, never got over one of the crimes he once had to investigate when working as a federal agent, and now, as a nostalgic old retiree, he’s intent on writing a book about it to try and free himself of its pain once and for all. Through flashbacks, we learn of his life and what he went through. The crime bugging him was a rape and homicide case, in which a young, just-married woman was taken away from her lover, and the authorities then immune from real notions of justice blamed the crime on whoever they could, closed the file and moved on. As Esposito explained to his senior and then love-interest, what aggravated him so much about the case and what compelled him to fight on was the look in the eyes of the man who had been deprived of justice. The woman’s husband spent most of the next year of his life sitting on a bench in the city’s main train station, looking out for the man both him and Esposito suspected of having really committed the crime. For his sake, he fought on, reopening a case and story that continually surprises in the emotions it stirs.

It’s solemn, but it’s not all as grim as it sounds. There’s plenty of quiet humour here, especially in the film’s early stages and between Esposito and his work partner, a clumsy alcoholic who actually provides the biggest breakthrough in the case by noting that regardless of a man’s ability to change his location, relationships and work habits, no man can change his passion. Letters sent from their seemingly invisible suspect thus lead them to a football game, and in dedication to the husband’s train-watching, they spend months scouring the explosive crowd, an activity that ends up leading to both a breakthrough and one of the film’s best sequences.

It’s not possible to say much more, for it is in the context of becoming absorbed by these characters and truly caring for them that the film’s unforeseen events, when revealed to us, have their most powerful impact. You’ll just have to take this reviewer’s word for it: it’s perfectly done. A touching tale, that couldn’t have been told, acted or written much better than it is.

Review: The Girl Who Played With Fire

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There was something about the first cinematic instalment of late author Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy that made ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ that little bit better than most crime-related mysteries. That film felt fresh, frighteningly cold in both its storytelling and setting, and it gave us a ridiculously intriguing female protagonist that remained stunningly elusive throughout. That small, leather-wearing, short black-haired cyberpunk with a history of violence and sexual abuse returns here, and when embodied by a little-known Swedish actress named Noomi Rapace, Lisbeth Salander ensures that at least whilst she’s on screen, ‘The Girl Who Played with Fire’ feels as distinctively funky as the film that preceded it.

It’s a shame, then, that this second effort in the series somehow loses the magic of its predecessor in every other respect. The solid, stern-looking investigative journalist that Lisbeth accompanied on a project in the first film – Mikael Blomkvist – returns too, but now he’s working alone to help clear her name of a triple homicide charge, whilst she goes on the run and retraces her past Bourne-style in an attempt to uncover who is setting her up.

The problem is that the list of new names is so lengthy and the strands of plot so convoluted that the film, in attempting to remain loyal to the lengthy novel, just ends up displaying an awfully messy bundle of crimes. Filmmakers don’t have the privilege of detail that writers do, and when they fail to remember this most basic of lessons, the result is muddy water of the kind so clearly present here. When added to the dull, television-thriller quality of the visuals, warning alerts start sounding loud and clear.

There are mild sources of interest, most notably in the shape of a new blonde, block-like German villain. He’s like a physical and mental fusion of the Coen brothers’ gormless serial killer Gaear Grimsrud in ‘Fargo’, and the similarly stoical, silent and terrifying Anton Chigurh of ‘No Country for Old Men’. The only difference is that the guy on the murdering rampage here has a rare genetic defect meaning he never feels any pain – not even when Lisbeth uses her notorious electric zapper on his balls.

But ultimately all this falls far too short of the mark, and is a serious let-down compared to the first film of the series. It doesn’t go over old ground, but it does cover new ground in a bad way. This is without even mentioning the premature ending, which fails to tie up one too many loose ends and demands psychic abilities of its audience. After ‘Dragon Tattoo’, there were good reasons for skepticism about the forthcoming Hollywood remakes of the trilogy, but after seeing ‘The Girl Who Played with Fire’, nobody can doubt that there’s a good possibility that they might actually do a better job.

DVD Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

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For the twelve people who haven’t heard of Stieg Larsson, he is the Swedish journalist turned novelist who wrote the ‘Millennium trilogy’, a phenomenally successful crime series which has sold over 3 million copies world wide. The first book, ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’, was adapted onto the silver screen over a year ago, and has grossed about $100 million worldwide since then. Larsson tragically died in 2004 before his books were published so was unable to see what a phenomenon he had created. However, it has also been rumoured that Larsson left half finished manuscripts on his computer, so we might yet witness the release of more books and films by this talented thriller writer. Having heard all about the hype, this reporter settled down in the balmy French countryside to read all three books as ‘research’ for reviewing the DVD. How’s that for dedication?

‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ follows Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) and Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) as they try to solve a 40 year old mystery. Henrik Vanger, the retired head of a Swedish industrial dynasty, wants to learn more about the disappearance of his favourite niece Harriet and hires recently disgraced reporter Blomkvist to help him. The film becomes very dark very quickly as Blomkvist and Salander delve into the hidden secrets and lives of the Vanger family, all of which are suspected to be involved in the disappearance. Director Niels Arden Oplev keeps very close to the original material, even including the disturbing sexual and religious aspects that could have been downplayed by a less daring director. Larsson himself was an expert in right wing, anti-democratic extremism and Nazi organisations, and to ignore the more disturbing aspects of his book would have been an insult to its fans. Thus, many scenes are necessarily graphic, and the 18 rating strongly hints at some of the horrors you might witness; even pre-warned readers will find certain scenes hard to watch – they are far more hard hitting than words on a page.

The stand-out character in ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ is Lisbeth Salander. Lisbeth is different, very different, to most heroines. She lacks the usual beauty of the girl-next door or the femme fatale, instead sporting the grunge look with an all black outfit and multiple piercings and tattoos. She is a social outsider, but has computer skills (amongst other talents) like no one else; she also has a strong sense of justice, an unbreakable will and a violent streak. All of these qualities make her unpredictable and therefore completely interesting to watch. Although Noomi Rapace plays Lisbeth extremely well, the film’s audience cannot understand her as well as readers of the book do. Oplev is unable to get into her head fully through the medium of film, and as a result it is a lot harder for the audience to comprehend the complicated mechanics of her mind and see her as more than just another troubled young woman.

In fact, losing detail in the translation from page to screen seems to be a recurring flaw in the movie. Many minor characters and plot-lines are missed out in order to make the 500 page book into a more streamlined 153 minute film. This, however, means that the story loses a lot of depth and characterisation, and at times it feels that you don’t really get to know any of the characters that have been left in, particularly the two main ones. For instance, Lisbeth’s first guardian and Mikael’s boss both play huge parts in the book in adding dimension to the protagonists, but in the film they do not feature at all. Still, Oplev does certain effective things with the film, such as showing the beautiful scenery of Sweden (one suspects the Swedish tourist board may have been involved at a few points in its creation) as well as having it all filmed in the country’s native language. Oplev also introduces new scenes to tie in with the parts of the story that become jagged due to the loss of minor characters. This is done very effectively so the film adaptation feels closer to ‘Lord of the Rings’ in continuity rather than ‘Harry Potter’. However the great aesthetics don’t counter-balance the slight loss in depth that has occurred due to the editing and alterations.

Overall the film is very good: dark, tense and rewarding. Its a good adaptation of the book and perfect for those who want to experience the story telling of Larsson, but don’t have the time to read the novel. Tragically, our American cousins’ dislike of subtitled films meant that it only grossed $10 million. Predictably, a Hollywood version is on the way. It remains to be seen whether Rooney Mara will be able to pull off unconventional Lisbeth Salander, certainly not if the studio bosses have any creative input. So before the American rehashes grace our theatres, it would be best to check out the original Swedish version on DVD and its sequel, ‘The Girl who Played with Fire’.

Interview: Lola Perrin

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OK, I really screwed up this time. I went to interview a major modern pianist without having listened to her work or, indeed, to any modern piano music. It’s people like me who give journalism a bad name.

As luck would have it though, a blagging tongue honed by dozens of tutes got me halfway there, and Lola Perrin’s no-bullshit approach to music brought the interview home.

So who is Lola Perrin? Perrin is the latest pianist to be supported by Steinway, who are to pianos what Hattori Hanzo was to samurai swords. She is a minimalist composer-pianist, with deep roots in jazz. She is collaborating with the heavyweights of the art world – but more on that later. She is also, endearingly, still just a little starstruck by her own rise.

‘There was this one time,’ she says, ‘when I was due to perform at the Teatro dal Verme in Milan. That’s right next to La Scala! And a Bentley was to come and pick us up from the airport, and we were going to stay in a five-star hotel with a, erm, what do you call it?’ – she tries to grab the word out of the air in front of her – ‘a butler.’

She started out on the piano at the age of four. The youngest of six piano-playing siblings, she knew the instrument was hers by right – ‘I hogged it.’ At 13, she was invited along to exhibition classes at the Royal College of Music, and then they gave her the chance to become a concert pianist. She turned it down.

The piano still haunted her. ‘Music picks you,’ she says. ‘A born musician has no choice. You’re completely miserable if you’re not doing it.’ She read Music at university, where she began to take theory very seriously indeed. ‘You had this linear progression from Baroque to Classical to Romantic to, erm, well I suppose you’d call it Impressionism. And then you have Debussy. Debussy destroyed the Western musical form.’

And after Debussy? ‘I guess you could say that Duke Ellington was the next big composer after Debussy.’ For Perrin, jazz is the natural heir to the classical tradition. The other modern schools squandered their heritage: ‘studying a lot of twentieth-century music was very distressing for me. Listening to much of it, I feel like I’m being tortured – you can’t even tell where the end is, it’s sadistic. And when it’s over, people applaud, but I bet they’re just glad it’s finished.’

‘I started to crave narrative,’ she continues. ‘And meaning. In my dreams, the Cohen brothers would come along and make me a 10-minute film.’ She began to crave collaboration, too. As soon as she felt her style had matured, she began to reach out to other artists. ‘I had this sort of VIP list,’ she explains, ‘these artists I admired and wrote to, and only Hanif Kureishi wrote back.’

The riotously successful novelist and scriptwriter’s reply was the start of an intense exchange of emails like something out of a South American novel. ‘He said, ‘I love your tunes.’ And I said, ‘I would love to work with your work.'” Soon, he began sending her Word documents with no explanation, and she began to take them as her inspiration. They only met each other face to face two years later, at a performance of her adaptation of his short story The Dogs. ‘I was so excited,’ she remembers, ‘that I couldn’t sleep.’

‘The first thing he said was ‘we’re going to do The Turd.’ He wasn’t smiling. I remember thinking, ‘I’m a minimalist. I don’t think I can write about turds.’ Luckily it turned out he was joking.’ Since then, the composer and the writer have appeared together onstage at Latitude Festival. Their creative relationship looks set to continue. I hope they fall in love.

Her dream, however, is to write a score for multiple pianos. How many pianos? ‘Many. I’ve already done six. It sounds…like an aural jigsaw.’ She vents a shuddering breath, and her eyes close. ‘It feels so good. It’s the most expressive instrument.’

After the interview, I watch Perrin in concert at my local literary festival. She’s doing things to the Baptist church piano that have never been done to it before. Keys used to banging out ‘When I Needed a Neighbour’ and ‘Shine Jesus, Shine’ are being teased into an electrical storm of shimmering riffs and growling basslines. I find myself wondering if some of this music will linger in the piano and make all the Baptists cry come Sunday morning.

And the music sounds everything that minimalist jazz shouldn’t. It’s expressive, tempestuous, eminently listenable, occasionally a bit naive, yes, but above all this is music with something to say. Like Perrin herself. The music starts to make sense when you’ve met its composer, for there seems to be little difference between her art and her life. I begin to wonder if I didn’t meet the woman and the music the right way round after all…