The Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister’s visit, binge Oxford and the future of the Turl Street Dash. After that, the weekly whirl through the lifestyle pages.
Blog Page 2066
Here’s What You’ve Missed: 4th Week
We look back at 4th week’s theatrical highlights as audiences have their say on The Trinity Players’ ‘Our Country’s Good’ at the Burton Taylor Studio and Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Ruddigore’ at the Keble O’Reilly.
Win tickets to see Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s MICMACS
Cherwell is offering a unique opportunity to win 12 pairs of tickets for MICMACS THIS SUNDAY (21st), a film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet the director of Amelie and Delicatessen.
As Sandra Hebron, the critic The Times British Film Institute Festival describes,
“Is it better to live with a bullet lodged in your brain, even if it means you might drop dead at any time? Or would you rather have the bullet taken out and live the rest of your life as a vegetable? Are zebras white with black stripes or black with white stripes? Is scrap metal worth more than landmines? Can you get drunk by eating waffles? Can a woman fit inside a refrigerator? What’s the human cannonball record? All these questions and more are answered in MICMACS, the latest dazzlingly cinematic outing from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, a satire on the arms trade which grounds this director’s cinema of fantasy firmly in reality. Dany Boon leads a terrific cast including André Dussolier, Dominique Pinon and the matchless Yolande Moreau in a thrilling comedy about one man’s plan to destroy two big weapons manufacturers, with a little help from his friends. Few directors are more imaginative and inventive at creating their own distinctive on-screen worlds (Delicatessen, Amélie), and the aesthetic sensibility at play in MICMACS is breathtaking. Better yet, it works in tandem with pacy, edge-of-the-seat storytelling and no end of visual gags and witty wordplay.”
The screening will take place in Oxford Phoenix on Sunday 21st February at 11am. Please e-mail [email protected] as soon as possible to receive the tickets.
Nigel Lythgoe: We need to end ‘disposable celebrity’ culture
The Oxford Union can be a disorganised place. Despite their having inviting the producer of So You Think You Can Dance, Blind Date and Gladiators Nigel Lythgoe, there seemed to be a confusion both with who is hosting the speaker and where the speech is going to be held. Lythgoe wasn’t impressed.
“Well, there are loads of things going on here internally at the moment, you see,” explained the Treasurer of the society.
“Well, I could have been here or at the Ritz,” quipped ‘Nasty Nigel’ demonstrating that since judging Popstars in 2000 neither his wit nor his straightforward nature have diminished.
Lythgoe doesn’t stay away from controversy. Recently, during season 4 of So You Think You Can Dance Lythgoe sparked outrage when he criticised male Ballroom couples. “I think you’d probably alienate a lot of our audience… I’m really one of those people that like to see guys be guys and girls be girls on stage. I don’t think I liked it, to be frank,” he said. But it didn’t start there: the tabloids first coined the ‘Nasty Nigel’ nickname when as a judge of Popstars he said to Kym Marsh, “Christmas has gone, but the goose is still fat”. No wonder the British public had a love/hate relationship with the predecessor of Simon Cowell.
But it wouldn’t be fair to form an opinion about Lythgoe judging by Daily Mail reports about his activities. The man himself complains about tabloids splashing about his supposed relationship with Jerry Hall – in fact they are only “really good friends”, and he has a girlfriend anyway.
We cannot forget that despite his youthful appearance, Lythgoe is 60 and was been there when the reality TV industry took off. He knows all too well how to manipulate the press. He has learnt far too much about “delusional contestants at talent shows”, has choreographed the “charming, gentlemanly” Gene Kelly and lived through the cut-throat aspects of the show business, just as Simon Cowell ripped off aspects of Pop Idol to form X-Factor. It is him who is more likely to manipulate the media (he concludes that he didn’t do anything about the Jerry Hall story, as it fuelled So You Think You Can Dance press coverage) than the media controlling him.
But, after 10 years of experience, what has he to say about celebs? “The truth is”, he confesses, “most celebrities are media-whores who will do most anything to remain in the spotlight…Years ago it was believed you were famous…because you were great. Nowadays it appears you’re great…because you’re famous.” So far, no-brainer. However, he goes on to claim that Hollywood studios no longer protect their stars in the long-term. They are only focussed on the promotion of a single film or a CD and hence are quite happy to publish star’s dirty little secrets since it might help that one movie they’re working on. As a result, “Young movie stars are being cast aside at earlier and earlier ages. According to some observers, ‘Where once 30 was the ‘use-by’ age, it has now dropped to between 21 and 25′”. He adds, “Hollywood doesn’t need established players such as Julia Roberts or Brad Pitt to generate a hit. High profile stars can no longer be relied upon and are not as valued as they once were because they can be replaced so easily.”
Without a sign of guilt he admits that “disposable celebrity” (created by his own genre of TV), based on 15-minute-fame concept, needs to come to an end. It’s the role of Hollywood studios to “protect and serve” stars who have talent and potential. “If we don’t, then I believe we’ll be inconsistently successful with our projects and, eventually, without long-term plans, we will all crash and burn along with Warhol’s ‘surrogate children’. I do not see a future in disposability.”
That is a curious statement from a man who played a large roll in the creation of the reality TV cult in Britain and who introduced Pop Idol to America. He almost sounds hypocritical as he slams the short-term culture of the shows. But I don’t think he did go into TV for ‘higher’ cultural purposes in the first place. He did it for fun – he admits that his favourite TV show is “Gladiators” because of its sheer scale and fun factor. He probably did it also for the money (he is still jealous of Cowell’s money, he confessed to a national tabloid).
Yes, he sees the flaws and the problems of the short-sighted TV but boy, it’s way too much fun to escape.
Fifth Week Comfort Food
From tahini to jelly beans, and marmite to macaroni cheese, Marc Kidson asks what people in Oxford are eating to fend off those Fifth Week blues.
Next week, tune in for more video recipes from Kidson’s kitchen.
BNC intruders chased out
Last Sunday, a group of Brasenose undergraduates took the law into their own hands and apprehended three women on suspicion of robbery.
Duncan Morrison, Matthew Osman and ‘Tricky’ Wilson performed a citizens arrest on three woman who had hidden in and later run from Brasenose.
But police later confirmed that no crime had taken place and the women were allowed to go free.
“Their brave vigilante action was all in vain,” said Theo Barclay, a Brasenose third year. “We viewed them as college heroes.”
Thames Valley police confirmed that they had been contacted by a group of international students who were concerned about the theft of a games console, but explained that a misunderstanding appeared to have taken place.
The girls entered Brasenose College, followed by a group of Asian exchange students, one of whom appeared to think they had taken his games console.
There the girls caught the attention of Morrison and Osman, who thought that they were acting suspiciously.
“We saw these pikeys in college trying to find an exit, going up and down stairs and trying to find a way out,” said Wilson.
The group had been led to believe that the girls had taken a games console from one of the exchange students.
“Someone beckoned me over and told me they’d stolen something,” said Wilson. “Someone said this girl had a knife.”
According to Morrison, it was at this point that the girls became rude and he, along with a growing number of students, led the girls from close to the college library to the lodge area. Morrison took the step of asking the duty porter to step in.
The situation escalated and the girls started to act confrontationally towards Morrison. “All I was trying to do was to diffuse the situation and get the poor man’s PSP back”, he said, “it was now that they became a bit more threatening in their behaviour.”
One proceeded to push Duncan Morrison and this led the on duty porter to call the police and shut the college gate in order to stop the girls from fleeing.
At this moment, the gate was opened by two shocked Brasenose students who saw the girls run past them.Morrison, Osman and Wilson gave chase onto the High Street. Morrison then spotted the girls, approached them and placed them under a citizen’s arrest. Wilson found a police officer who arrested the three girls and thanked the trio for their assistance.
However, it later emerged that the police were originally contacted by the exchange students from McDonald’s on Cornmarket Street, and a spokesperson for Thames Valley police outlined that it was their understanding that the students believed a group of three girls had stolen the item.
The spokesman added that it transpired that the owner of the console appeared to have simply misplaced the item, and that since there seemed to have been a misunderstanding about the incident, no further action would be taken by the police.
On being told that no theft had taken place, ‘Tricky’ Wilson said that he felt “a bit hollow”.
“I feel very conned,” he said, “conned by all of them.”
But Brasenose students still praised Duncan Morrison’s spontaneous actions.
Charlie Marr, a first year History undergraduate, commented, “Duncan displayed chivalrous, brave and courageous behaviour and deserves all the praise he can get.”
Morrison explained that he “simply thought that it was the right thing to do.” He added that he was enjoying the praise of his fellow students and that it “was all in a day’s work”.
Fine Dining: An Ashmolean Affair
True story: walking over Magdalen Bridge the other day, I get a call from a girl at a London PR agency. Do I want to go and eat at a restaurant she represents? It’s in a village in Oxfordshire and it’s just won back its Michelin Star. Well, I tell her, it’s miles outside Oxford and horrifically expensive and therefore totally irrelevant to the vast mass of Cherwell readers, but it’s a free meal, so of course I’d be delighted. I email Marta, Cherwell editor, and offer to take her, hoping that if I ply her with plenty of expensive food and wine she might not sack me next time I’m three days late with my copy. I settle back to anticipate a happy evening of gluttony. The next day, I get an e-mail from her boss: the restaurant is ‘reviewing their PR opportunities’ and so they don’t actually want any critics to come after all. Sorry, do keep in touch, and all that. I’m devastated, but much, much worse, I now have the unhappy chance of telling my editor that the posh dinner she was looking forward to is now off; demotion to deputy assistant recipe writer surely beckons.
Marta took pity, but I was still puzzled. Surely no PR agency can be so stunningly incompetent as to offer a critic a meal and then withdraw it the next day (particularly a critic as powerful and internationally-renowned as the principal restaurant writer of Cherwell). Now I know why they got so nervy; ‘Michelin-starred chef quits restaurant in row over “poncey food”‘ reported The Times yesterday. The owner, it reported, didn’t like the Michelin-starred food the chef was cooking, because he though it was too ‘sophisticated’ and expensive for the local residents (of the famously impoverished county of Oxfordshire). He wants to serve burgers and chips instead; the chef, the hugely-talented Ryan Simpson, understandably thought this was a little below his dignity, and walked out, taking all the kitchen staff with him. Good for Ryan.
The Ashmolean Dining Room has been reviewed by just about every national paper going since it opened last term, but I only got there on Tuesday. It is, as the name suggests, a pleasant room on top of the newly-refurbished Ashmolean museum (what do you mean you haven’t gone yet?) where you can get a bite to eat after admiring the Greek pottery, or, if you’re a philistine like me, you can go in the evening after the Museum’s closed to enjoy the view of Oxford college rooftops (this was, in reality, rather disappointing; the only college you can see by night is St John’s, and who wants to spend an evening staring at them?). Despite the unfortunate aspect, the food is actually pretty good.
Pot roasted partridge with cotechino sausage and the distinctly unappetising-sounding ‘wet polenta’ was a fat, well-cooked bird tasting suitably gamey, with some really good sausage on the side. The ‘wet polenta’ was more damp than wet, but was pretty good nevertheless. Ben never gets to eat interesting food because he’s a vegetarian, but his pumpkin and chickpea tagine was as good as anything without dead flesh can be. My baked egg custard tart was superb, sweet and eggy and full of punchy cinnamon. It’s not cheap – most of the mains are £17.50 and for three courses and some decent wine you’d be lucky to get out for less than £60 a head – but there aren’t any other central Oxford restaurants of the same quality that are cheaper. In fact, I might go so far as to say that there aren’t any other central Oxford restaurants of the same quality at all, and certainly none with as nice a room. There’s even an outdoor terrace for summer. It’s almost enough to make trooping past the vases downstairs seem worthwhile.
Rating: 4/5
In short: Makes museums fun
Review: The Lovely Bones
After watching this film, I found its title more accurate than one might think —’lovely’ applying to the fleetingly lush beauty of this new production, and ‘bones’ being a grisly apt word for death and destruction, not easy viewing for 10am on a Monday morning.
The film, based on the internationally best-selling novel by Alice Sebold, follows the life, death, and afterlife of Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), a 14-year old girl whose murder sends shockwaves through a small Pennsylvania town. Susie narrates from her front-row seat in heaven, trying to guide her shattered, grieving family to her neighbor and murderer, the eerie Mr. Harvey (Stanley Tucci). The ripple effect of her mysterious disappearance and horrific murder extends to Susie beyond her brief life, and she is stuck in the ‘in-between’ world until she can see that justice is served.
Ronan, whose dramatic whispering and gasping earned her an Oscar nod for best supporting actress in Atonement, falls flat here. Her dreamily sighed narrations sound cloying and forced—and, God help me, almost over-dramatic in a story about rape and murder. Tucci, however, plays an excellent sinister villain, planning out the murder of his next victim in his khakis and the safe cocoon of unassuming American suburbia. Sarandon is also predictably excellent, as Susie’s brassy grandmother, who wears too much eyeliner and says everything she is not supposed to.
This is undeniably a Peter Jackson production—the man definitely loves his lengthy epics. He does an excellent job with the suspenseful parts of the film, creating a few heart-pounding scenes that, at times, I could barely view through my fingers. Though the real-life element can be captivating, it is the imagined reality of the otherworld that didn’t seem to appeal. Jackson imagines the ‘in-between’ as a lurid Technicolor fantasyland; I sometimes half-expected Frodo’s curly mop of hair to emerge from the sweeping mountain landscapes of limbo. But it is Jackson’s interpretations of the more gruesome parts of the novel that are the most disturbing. Where Sebold succeeded in the novel was in the grace and dignity she allowed to even the most horrific of moments—here, Jackson’s overly vivid interpretations wallow in the muck and gore. Watching Tucci haul Susie’s body around in a burlap sack was physically sickening, made all the worse by the accentuation of sound as he drags it across his basement floor and hurls it into a rusting iron vault.
This movie wasn’t overly bad, and I’d even go so far to say that it was engrossing and touching at times. But it is doomed from the start as an adaptation of a novel that combines so many genres of fantasy, crime, romance, and melodrama. It lacks the beauty and grace of Sebold’s work, leaving this film as just a pile of bare bones that are far from lovely.
3 stars
Should France ban the full Muslim veil?
Conan Mckenzie, Lady Margaret Hall
‘The burqa is a uniquely isolating garment’
One of the British tabloids’ favourite stories, which they wheel out several times a year almost without fail, is the ‘Muslims are taking over’ piece. It can be adjusted to suit different times and different outlets, but it is essentially homogenous, a one-size-fits-all insta-story ready
to be resurrected whenever there’s a bit of a slow news day. The story may be about proposed Mosques, requests for Korans in local libraries or lessons on Ramadan in schools, but the cumulative narrative never changes. According to this narrative, Muslim immigrants, with their veils, their Sharia Law, their Mosques and (never explicitly stated, but always implied) their habit of occasionally exploding, are engaged on a great mission to transform the country into an Islamic state, street by street, town by town. It’s an absurd distortion of the facts, but, like most stories that appear in the great British press there’s a seed of truth in amongst the exaggerations and falsifications.
The British government’s approach to immigration over most of the last sixty years has been dictated by the doctrine of multiculturalism, under which immigrant groups are encouraged to form their own communities and maintain the old cultural traditions that they brought with them from their previous homes, including those traditions that so annoy the tabloids. Multiculturalism hasn’t been entirely successful; separation, it turns out, tends only to encourage fear and suspicion amongst the majority community about the minority; hence the tabloid scare stories.
The French have a better system. Their approach focuses not on multiculturalism but on assimilation, on encouraging new immigrants to discard the trappings of their old countries and cultures, and instead to integrate into mainstream French society. To this end Muslim children are required to abide by French secular norms and are forbidden from wearing headscarves in school, just as Catholic children are forbidden from wearing visible crucifixes. Now Nicholas Sarkozy wants to go one step further, and ban adult women from wearing the burqa, on public transport and in all publicly-owned buildings in France. This policy is a continuation of the long-standing French emphasis on immigrants adopting French cultural norms. But the importance goes beyond cultural tradition; the burqa is a uniquely isolating garment, because by hiding a woman’s face, it prevents other people from having any sort of meaningful interaction with her. It cuts its wearer off from society, and isolates her from the community (sometimes involuntarily; there is considerable anecdotal evidence that many Muslim women are forced to wear a burqa against their will). The burqa makes a mockery of France’s aim of integrating immigrants into society.
France has, so far, done a reasonably good job of preventing recent immigrants from retreating into their own ethnic communities; banning the burqa in public buildings will continue the good work, and enable Muslim women to play a full part in French society. That way, the French tabloids will have nothing to complain about.
Myriam Francois-Cerrah, Meida Representative, Oxford University Islamic Society
‘The integration debate, of which this the latest manifestation, is poorly veiled racism’
No one in France actually wears a ‘burqa’, the traditional garb imposed by the Taliban on women in Afghanistan. By using the term, Sarkozy was using a mental slippage technique which allowed people to feel like they were opposing oppression in Afghanistan through supporting state oppression of women in France. Less than 2000 French women actually wear a face veil which explains much of its mystic and the inability to focus on the bigger picture.
The real issue all women face is the struggle for self-determination – the struggle to make choices for themselves about themselves, unfettered by over-zealous clerics or patronising presidents. Muslims who wear the face veil fully support security procedures requiring their identification and have cooperated fully to this end. The core of this debate is not about security or Sarkozy’s alleged passing penchant for these women’s rights, otherwise he might have consulted at least one in the mock commission set up to ‘investigate’ the face veil. Rather, it is about vote betting in identity-crisis ridden France.
The integration debate, of which this the latest manifestation, is poorly veiled racism. White French men in power telling Arab women what’s best for them, is just the latest expression of neo-colonial arrogance. Historically, Arabs needed emancipation from their debased state of being through the imposition of ‘French’ culture. Today, many French can’t tolerate the thought these former ‘barbarians’ turned citizens might have a say in defining modern French identity.
The ripples of this discriminatory legislation will vindicate already widespread islamophobia and racism. French Muslims of Maghrebi ancestry are the victims of 68% of racist violence and face a 26.5% rate of unemployment compared with 5% overall. Young women in headscarves are already excluded from schools and public pools for adhering to their religious conviction and some women have been unable to marry, vote or take exams. In the case of immigrants, the irony is self evident: women are now being turned away from state-sponsored French language classes!
Supporters of the ban claim they are fighting for women’s dignity but few things could be quite as humiliating as being turned away from an office, denied entry to a hospital or escorted out of public transport. This legislation limits women’s participation in the public sphere and there is nothing empowering about that. Even through a burka, the instrumentalization of women’s bodies for electoral ends is clear for all to see.
