The trailer wasn’t promising. Comprised of car chases, exploding helicopters and multiple reminders that this was another joint project between Damon and Greengrass, it did nothing but fuel a worrying expectation: that Green Zone would be nothing more than a money-spinning continuation of the Bourne saga which we’ve all seen before. Thank God it wasn’t.   

It’s thanks to Greengrass that I can say the following with conviction: I came out of Green Zone feeling rewarded for staying with him. Yes, there is plenty of action. But the action does not feel majestic in the same way the perfectly coordinated New York car chase in The Bourne Ultimatum did. This is manic, messy stuff, set on the streets of hell; and Green Zone really does capture the mayhem of those streets, in a way that makes it feel much more authentic than the desolation implied by The Hurt Locker.

All this is set to the backdrop of a complex, political plot, loosely bound by the findings of Imperial Life in the Emerald City, an excellent piece of investigative journalism that detailed the Iraqi reconstruction project undertaken by the Americans, and reminded us of what a shambles it was. There is an excellent scene that captures the book’s sentiment in the space of three short minutes: the camera swings across the Baghdad skyline from the streets of chaos to the government palaces. In the latter you find Washington bureaucrats, naively planning Iraq’s democratisation and totally oblivious to the looting and futile search for WMDs outside.

It is Paul Miller, played by Matt Damon, who leads this quest, which he becomes increasingly suspicious of when the intelligence proves unfruitful time and time again. At this point we get the predictable characters responding to Miller’s anger: ‘the reasons don’t matter.’ His job is to execute, not to question. And everyone seems to share this sentiment, except for one CIA official (played, excellently, by Brendan Gleeson), who Miller teams up with to try and uncover the truth.

The film follows this line of thought through an enthralling two hours. We meet Freddie, a civilian seemingly alert to the path his country was on under Saddam, yet equally suspicious of the American mob that he hopes will somehow save it. We see the Guantanamo-style conditions under which prisoners were kept. We meet even more of the naive US officials that convince themselves they’re ‘doing a good thing here.’

In short, we are treated to a rich insight into the occupation of Iraq, and are given a thorough reminder of the worrying fragility underlying the justifications for being there in the first place. Admittedly this is accompanied by a healthy dose of action, but the motives for its inclusion are legitimate. This is not Bourne. Miller says more in Green Zone than Bourne says in the entire trilogy. But the dialogue nevertheless retains a sense of efficiency, and this is undoubtedly intentional, for Green Zone is not a psychological analysis into soldiers, nor does it pretend to be. Its actors and their action scenes are a medium for a timely reminder: namely, that we were almost certainly misled. And Greengrass’s other films (cue United 93), are testament to his desire to say this.

4 STARS

It’s been a confusing winter for films. As I write this Avatar is still number one in the UK box office, and why shouldn’t it be? The world that James Cameron has created, if not the dialogue or plot, is ground-breaking. When I left the cinema the real world seemed dull. Yet as I look at the box office charts the film at number two is an entirely different affair, in many ways a blast from the past, a veritable stegosaurus next to Avatar.

Yet The Princess and the Frog is a case of a few steps back and huge leap forward for a company that seemed to have been lost in the modern world. While Disney combinations with Pixar have been well thought, well scripted and well made this cannot be said for the 2D animation. You’ve probably forgotten Treasure Planet, but if you’d been forced to sit through it on DVD with a younger cousin then you too would have it seared forever on your memory. Yet in late 2006 John Lasseter, Chief Creative Officer at Disney, announced that the studio would be leaving CGI to Pixar and working exclusively with hand-drawn animations. The first product of the revitalised studio is The Princess and the Frog.

Theis film’s quality was far from assured; Disney proved plenty of times that it’s possible to make a bad hand-drawn animation. But it seems that returning to this more basic style reminded Disney of what it’s meant to be; endearing. Spending painstaking hours on a few seconds of footage makes every moment valuable and The Princess and the Frog has an attention to detail that is unparalleled almost anywhere outside of Studio Ghibli. Indeed Lasseter is in a large way responsible for the huge fan base that films like Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke enjoy in the west and the influence of Miyazaki is evident in the glorious backgrounds of New Orleans in the twenties. Choosing such a music-rich setting was putting pressure on a soundtrack to deliver but Randy Newman’s jazz soundtrack proved successful in echoing, if not quite matching in quality, that of The Junglebook.

The plot is a clever reworking of the Grimm Brother’s Frog Prince where rather than returning the frog prince (Bruno Campos) to human form the unsuspecting Tiana (Anika Noni Rose) falls prey to the same Voodoo magic and becomes a frog herself. Some may cry that this runs a bit close to Shrek, but you are forced to forgive because what follows is an original and enchanting story. We dive into the swamps of the Mississippi pursued by a villain, Dr. Facilier (Keith David), as terrifying as any of the studios creations since the Bogeyman in Tim Burton’s stop motion The Nightmare Before Christmas. Throw in a trumpet-playing alligator (Michael-Leon Wooley) and a Cajun firefly (Jim Cummings) and you are on your way to a proper Disney film. Yes it may be predictable at its heart but what films that are essentially aimed at children aren’t?

The Princess and the Frog may not break new ground but it makes good use of a tried and trusted format. Much has been made of Tiana being the first black Disney princess, a fact that is worthy of note as a shocking indictment of another of Disney’s past failings. Hopefully the film will become truly significant for the era that it heralds, a return to the golden ages of the 50’s and 90’s when children’s films were not churned out for the plastic toys of Disney films you found at the bottom of your Happy Meal. It will take up half as much of your money, half as much of your time but it will charm you more than any combination of lanky smurfs ever could.

Nazi Literature in the Americas. Readers confronted by the cover of Bolaño’s recently translated book might already find something incongruous between the title and the author. Those not new to his life story may wonder why he would commit himself to documenting the lives of fascist writers. After all, this is the man who was once a confirmed Trotskyite. This is the man who spied for the resistance against Pinochet. This is the man who was detained in Chile for suspected terrorism.

But isn’t this surprise and disorientation what Bolaño hoped for? He always enjoyed being different. Revolution flowed in his blood, not only in terms of politics, but in literature too. Born into a culture with a celebrated literary tradition, he was not content merely to seek to emulate other eminent South American authors like Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez. Indeed, he actively tried to distinguish himself from them, dismissing the latter as a ‘man terribly pleased to have hobnobbed with so many Presidents and Archbishops’ and claiming that magic realism in general ‘stinks’. Predictably, he made enemies, but his innovation also led to him being heralded as the saviour of Latin American literature.

For much of his life he lived in decadence; it was only when he was diagnosed with liver cancer, just over ten years before his death in 2003, that he was at last able to focus his talent, publishing in quick succession acclaimed works such as The Savage Detectives and By Night in Chile. Nazi Literature in the Americas was published in Spanish in 1996, but has only recently been able to reach, shock and entertain a global public.

So what is Bolaño playing at in Nazi Literature in the Americas? The first words we encounter claim that ‘the rich seam of Nazi literature has, until now, been sadly under-explored.’ When initially asked by friends which book I was reviewing, I mumbled the title, rather embarrassed and worried that it might be thought that I suddenly had turned to reading right-wing propaganda. But if we dare to look inside, we instantly realise that Bolaño has not suddenly decided to praise fascist literature. Instead, he has dedicated himself to creating one of the most novel, scary and scathing pieces of satire of recent time. He writes an encyclopaedia of the extreme right-wing artists of both Americas. They are vibrant characters. They are prolific writers. They are politically active. And they are completely fictional. Into a real historical landscape – he mentions Hitler, Franco and Perón – and against a literary backdrop which includes references to Ibsen, Dr Johnson and Césaire, amongst others, we see writers who existed in no world other than the fertile environment of Bolaño’s mind.

In a style of writing which shifts between the discourses of literary criticism, political propaganda, thrillers and gossip magazines, Bolaño forms genre difficult to place, to describe, or even fully to understand. The writers are mocked, from their ridiculous names – Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce, for example – to their laughable legacies. The biting humour used to refer to poems like I was happy with Hitler – apparently ‘misunderstood’ by everyone – is equalled by the caustic dismissal of the writers’ characters; one of the supposedly great authors is summarised and dismissed as ‘a soccer player and a Futurist’.

Yet the book isn’t just a case of one laugh after another. Bolaño raises deeper political and philosophical questions. Indeed, the most formidable aspect of the book is perhaps the abyss between the words on the page, written by Bolaño – the enthusiastic, ignorant, and racist biographer who fails to see the inconsistencies in his own praise – and the words the true Bolaño intends us to read behind the text. This gap succeeds in condemning both these imaginary authors and those foolish enough to appreciate them and their views. Finally, a lingering concern is implicit in the text: literature is written and remembered by the victors. If fascism had triumphed, would this be the intellectual world which we admire and from which we are supposed to learn? Not a thought to be taken lightly.

This book, then, is a form of literary prank. But like the best of jokes, there is a seriousness behind it which stays with us perhaps even longer than the punch-line.

Walking into the starkly lit first room of Chris Ofili’s retrospective at the Tate is overwhelming to say the least. Huge paintings propped up against the otherwise blank walls clamoured for my attention: knowing where to start was the immediate challenge.

Even when I’d decided on an individual painting, it was difficult to decide where to focus. The sheer content of the paintings is astounding: layer upon layer, media upon media, the clippings, paint, glitter, and, of course, elephant dung. This is what Ofili has come to be known for, and it’s hard to miss. It protrudes from the Holy Virgin Mary, a portrait where a lump of dung forms one of the woman’s nipples. It makes up the entirety of the sculpture Shithead, a lump of dung smiling crookedly with human milk teeth. Immediately revolting, one can’t help but be amused.

Humour pervades Ofili’s early works. Giant portraits such as Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy collage the faces of black icons, stuck on bare female legs, scuttling in and around the picture with that universal ‘celebrity’ grin that is so numbingly familiar. Race, perhaps the only constant throughout the exhibition, is not above parody: the famous black faces are not all good role models: Tiger Woods grins up from the bottom corner, appropriately balanced on a woman’s thighs.

His subject matter is also profoundly serious. No Woman No Cry, which won Ofili the Turner Prize in 1998, is a portrait of a woman crying tears of collaged pictures of Steven Lawrence, whose racially-motivated murder exposed the ‘institutional racism’ of the Metropolitan Police.

The climax of the show, however, comes in the next room. Led through a dark, wooden hallway, I found myself in The Upper Room, containing a series of twelve profile portraits of monkeys looking towards the central ‘mono oro’, in a reenactment of the Last Supper. The disciples are identified with the Hindu monkey god Hanuman, as the guiding pamphlet helpfully instructs, inviting multi-layered religious interpretations. Whatever these may be, this was a highly compelling climax. These fixed, menacing expressions of the monkeys’ provide intense focus. The glitter of Ofili’s early works is no longer brash and playful, it is alluring. The elephant dung becomes a frame, elevating each portrait.

Out of this vault, I was back in the light, back in an art gallery, and presented with Ofili’s drawings, my personal favourite episode within this varied retrospective. Lively, sexy, and funny, pencilled mini-Afro heads form lines to make bigger patterns – flowers in Afro Daze – or faces in the series Albinos and Bros with Fros. The pencil outlines of the whitened black faces are almost farcical: the black icon in its photo-negative. On the other side of the wall, the black and white outlines are replaced by the voluptuous untitled watercolour series. Crimson red lips and bright blue eyes seem to protrude from the beautiful shapes of the even, dark skin.

What Ofili loses in texture he replaces with colour in the following, final rooms, yet the mood becomes increasingly sober, even sombre. The vast, powerful canvasses look inwards rather than outwards. Faces are covered, avoiding rather than entreating the viewer. The neon colours are shocking and excluding: the clashing yellows, oranges and greens of Rising of Lazurus complicate and dualize the figures. Ofili’s move to Trindad signals a clear change in his painting. The environment envelopes the individual; expression is no longer centred on the person, but their place within a sensual, mysterious setting.

Ofili’s retrospective is energetic, lively, but deeply moody. Profound changes in his work are sensitively reflected by the gallery’s arrangement. Whilst the final figurative rooms are masterful, my fascination was rooted in the earlier parts: the portraits of black men and women, the alluring fierceness of the monkeys. It was this series that, for me, provided the exhibition’s climax. Although the final pictures did not provide a finishing flourish, I look forward to his next output. Who knows what direction it may take?

Chris Ofili is at Tate Britain until 16th May. Admission £10/8.50

Since meeting in Michaelmas 2008, the St. Catz duo Ro-to-the-Land and The Great Gartini – Roland Lasius and Tom Garton – have gone from strength to strength, rising to fame as the winners of RAG’s 2009 Oxford’s Got Talent competition. The boys unashamedly style themselves as an eclectic fusion of virile guitar riffs that will haunt you for nights, intricate, satirical rap lyricism, and falsetto warbling to put Justin Timberlake to shame. The impossibility of pigeonholing this messy double act into a fixed genre is part of the band’s offensive charm. The ladies love it. Darlings of the JCR/MCR open mic circuit, R2tL&TGr8G are not afraid to insult their audiences’ sensibilities with crass jingles, both glamorising and interrogating the exploits of middle class adventurers.

We interrupted Tom and Roland holed up in their writing zone: much of their dishevelled attire and “bohemian” décor struck us as shameless self-promotion. Regardless, a sincere degree of mystique and paradox shrouds the heart of their oeuvre. Building dreamy spires into the bitches and bling topos of late 90s hip-hop, their material blends two at first seemingly opposed social dimensions. Their lyrical world, peopled by third generation Brasenose Classicists who ‘don’t give a shit if their family’s all fascis’, is as much indebted to the epigrams of Oscar Wilde as to Eazy-E’s 1993 classic ‘Real Compton City G’s’. Pressed further, they baldly claim inspiration from Busta Rhymes, Al Green, and the grime scene – an interesting framework for songs about private healthcare, city jobs and incontinence. Their future plans include ‘more of the same really’ and a myspace page. Rumours of a debut album bubble throughout the Oxford music scene but remain, at present, unconfirmed.

In the murky corridors of St. Anne’s, an electronica revolution is brewing, PRDCTV (pronounced ‘Productive’ for the less vowel averse amongst you) is third year St. Anne’s psychologist Alex Lloyd.

Influenced by seminal 21st century electronic pioneers such as Four Tet and Bonobo, Alex began writing as PRDCTV in the summer of 2008. His tracks are painstakingly sampled and pieced together from bedroom recording sessions, emerging as fluid patchworks of exquisitely lush, organic folktronica. Branded the “Oxford Don” by XFM DJ and cult icon John Kennedy, Alex has been commissioned to do a number of remixes for artists such as Patrick Wolf and These New Puritans. Just before Christmas, PRDCTV signed to Ninja Tune, an independent label which is home to the likes of Bonobo, Mr. Scruff, Roots Manuva and The Cinematic Orchestra to name but a few.

We can look forward to PDRCTV’s first full length offering in early 2011, and, if his debut EP It’s Never Too Late To Have A Happy Childhood is anything to go by, we can expect glitchy samples strung together with verve and panache.
If a full time degree and time consuming solo work were not enough, Alex also runs the Oxford-based electronica label Geometric Records, home of Envelope and Jack Cleverly. 

In the claustrophobic black space, hemmed in on all sides by the audience, three apparently unrelated couples play out their own private battles; a husband and wife with AIDS fight over a single life-saving prescription, a mother and father’s relationship slowly deteriorates as they argue over their missing child-soldier son, and the eponymous Mary and her sister spit words at each other in the meeting room of a prison where Mary waits to be stoned to death for killing her parents’ murderer. By the end of the play, each of these apparently separate strands will have been brought together to show their ultimately tragic connection.

These are all stories that that will be familiar to the audience from newspaper articles about third-world countries. However, Debbie Tucker Green’s instructions concerning her characters are clear: all should be white, and the play should be set wherever it is performed, bringing this distant action straight into a familiar modern sphere.

The simple costumes set the characters immediately in our own space and time, so that they could have just walked in from the street. The script itself however, places the actors in an only half-recognised world.

Tucker Green’s script is highly demanding, elliptical and almost poetic, with lines repeated and spoken over each other, and nothing ever quite explained. The actors deal well with this, and bring to the often singular, obscure words a greater depth, and a fierce energy. The quick-fire dialogue is woven by a skilled ensemble group – each couple has a truly believable dynamic relationship. Whilst the choice of east-end accents lends the play a grittiness it needs, they are a predictable choice and sometimes slip. It might have been more interesting to see the same scenarios played out in clear cut Oxonian vowels.

The endless arguing and the elongated silences can feel a bit frustrating and drawn out at times, although, having said this, there are powerful moments that stand out suddenly from the rest. The Mother and Father scenes – Evie Jackson and Tim Kiely – are intensely performed and the closely interwoven lines bubble over each other with real emotion. The slowly burning dynamism of the couple backing away from a silent, machete-wielding child is another point where speech and action come together brilliantly. At other times, and despite the efforts of a skilled cast to create movement and action, the script overtakes them, and can feel like a performed poem.

All in all, the play is well performed and the tense acting and controlled setting combine to create a thought-provoking production.

3 stars

Stoning Mary is at St. John’s Auditorium, 5-6 March, 7.30pm

On the 22nd February, Cellar was the place to be if you wanted to check out some of the best student acts that Oxford has to offer. We sent some reviewers along to check them out:

Liam Howarth:

Concept: Man with beard plays guitar and sings

They say: ‘The best beard in Oxford?’

We say: Soulful tunes delivered with a subtle finesse. Electrifying blues sang in French and Björk covers bring joy to
the world.

Lydia Baylis

Concept: Man with guitar accompanies brilliant singer

They say: ‘Blissful Harmonies Guaranteed’

We say: No kidding. It is the plight of the early acoustic to have to fight the crowd, but after a quiet start, she pulled no punches. Heart-wrenchingly moving cover of Radiohead’s ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’

Claudia Costa

Concept: Girl with guitar looks alot like Joan Baez and plays folk.

They say: ‘Bruce Springsteen/Accordion/ Double Denim’

We say: Owes just as much to Regina Spektor or Baez as she does to the Boss. That’s no bad thing, mind. However, her early slot combined with her popularity meant people tended to talk through her set, or, more disruptively, shush people. Which was a big shame.

Sonny Liston

Concept: Nine-piece folk collective

They say: ‘Formerly Dear Landlord’

We say: Just as good as under the previously ‘John Wesley Harding’ inspired moniker. Beautiful and playful interplay between the (many) instruments, and they’ve written some real gems. 

The Oxford University Light Entertainment Society – I mean no disrespect – is undeniably nerdy. Beards abound, as do comedy German accents, onstage and off, and I’d be surprised if there was a single person in the room who wasn’t au fait with most of the Discworld oeuvre. That said, I am too, and if you know at heart you’re not too cool for Terry Pratchett then Villainy may well be worth a look.

The Society is a charitable organisation and often performs in local schools, and at times I wondered if the brand of humour in this script by Fabienne Styles might work better on a slightly younger, less jaded audience. Nonetheless, there were still a number of genuine laughs; one mad scientist bemoans the state of the graduate job market, claiming to have turned to the powers of evil after being rejected by Glaxo-Smith-Kline; and pose-pulling superhero Captain Protector (Martin Corcoran) describes himself as a ‘defender of the innocent – especially if they’re good-looking’. His assistant Mindy (Sasha McKenna) was quietly hilarious, acquiescing seemingly without objection to a surreal S&M relationship with a man whose previous sidekick asked uncomfortable questions such as ‘why do I have to use the whip?’

I’m told the production features ‘six and a half’ original songs, one of which is a winning adaptation of the traditional folk song ‘Spanish Ladies’ bewailing the loss of a broken death-ray. Chorus number ‘The Good Guys Always Win’ is perhaps best summarised as charmingly rickety, though in their defence many a rhyme between ‘Ivy’ and ‘blithely’ gets a star all by itself. Elsewhere Jonathan Sims as Satan demonstrates the full capacity of his sinister eyebrows, and opens the show with a sympathy-for-the-devil themed tango duet which looks set to be instantly engaging.

Sustaining interest is a possible issue – the jokes have an approximate hit-rate of 50%, and I’m not sure how long it will take for the zaniness to wear slightly thin, but for twenty minutes at least it was more endearing than annoying. A scene about politically correct anarchists (I think) fell quite heavily flat, a victim both of acute standing-in-a-line syndrome and a terrible acronym, but to their credit a later running joke about ‘W.A.N.K.E.R.S.’ succeeds against all the odds.

In preview the plot lacked coherence, but in a full production with scenes in order I imagine this problem will solve itself. The humour would benefit from being more deadpan, and physicality was frequently unfocused and static; but to take this production too seriously as drama would be to miss the point. It’s fun, it’s silly, it’s for charity, and if I was fifteen I’d probably have loved it. But for a post-Pratchett cynic, it still manages to be at least lightly entertaining.

3 stars

Villainy is at the Wadham Moser Theatre, 9th March- 11th, 7.30pm

The Duchess of Malfi is by no means an easy play to do well – its central character is the most complex of tragic heroines and its message open to much debate. I was thus interested to see what Jack Hackett and Tom Moyser would emphasise in their production. The answer? Very little. When I could hear the dialogue, which was rarely (the actors seemed entirely oblivious to the squeaking floorboards which drowned out much of the speech), it still felt more like a reading of the play than a performance. The actors were not for the most part untalented; they, and their performances, just seemed to lack direction.

Hannah Daly (as the title character) and Robert Williams (Ferdinand) put in the two best performances. Daly managed to endow the duchess with a (later tragic) dignity, even when ravenously devouring apricots in the late stages of pregnancy, and the clarity and passion of Williams’ words was a breath of fresh air for the audience. Though he should probably watch that his performance does not slip into melodrama in an attempt to counter the under-acting of some of those around him. Harriet Lebus’ death scene (as Julia) was also impressive – it was a pity that she had only a relatively minor part, since she could have greatly enhanced the production.

But in any performance of The Duchess of Malfi it is the presentation of the character of Bosola which is most important for the success of the production. Nik Higgins, however, was entirely inaudible for most of the preview, which verged on the comic when he was in conversation with actors who were in fact projecting. This was frustrating enough for someone who knew the plot – for an audience new to the play, being able to hear Bosola is key. Higgins’s quiet monotone was not the only annoying aspect of characterisation. The idea that Antonio (Jari Fawkes) and Delio (Lewis Godfrey) could only express their friendship through overly frequent ‘man hugs’ was slightly laughable. Many of the relationships lacked subtlety and so believability, making me painfully aware at all times that this was a student play.

Performing the play in the Old Dining Room at Teddy Hall also seemed to create problems. There had clearly been little thought as to how to make the setting work to the play’s advantage (as the team behind Samson Agonistes managed so well in Merton chapel last week). It felt as if the play was being put on in a less than ideal space. The centrality of the duchess’s chair, framed by the elaborate panelling, was probably the one good design decision, but much of the time, design and script did not work together. For instance, Ferdinand’s sinister entrance into his sister’s bedroom was weak and anticlimactic, as he had to walk in through the audience, rather than appearing behind her. While limitations on entrances and exits are understandable, Ferdinand’s entrance from behind seemed like a basic and achievable requirement here.

All in all, the directors’ efforts seem to have gone into the mechanical necessities of putting on a play rather than any artistic vision. Some of the actors can obviously act and act well at times, despite a lack of unity, but they are let down by a watery production and one that adds little to the history of Webster in performance.

two stars

The Duchess of Malfi is at Teddy Hall, Sunday 7th March – Wednesday 10th, 7.30pm