FilmReviewJust as Lé os Carax made an uneasy attempt in Pola X to find a modern screen idiom for Melville's Pierre, or the Ambiguities, Andrzej Zulawski here tries to film Madame Lafayette's 17th-century novel The Princess of Cleves, set in a France of the near future.
The result is a bizarre, extended melodrama with its own strange sense of urgency. However, its operatic emotions are never anything other than absurd, and the theme of marital fidelity is entirely lost in the blizzard of commercial and sexual modernity with which Zulawski bombards us. Read More...
Book of the dayFictionReviewFrom a boys’ wild weekend to fortysomething crisis … male fragility falls under the spotlight in a novel of two halves
There’s a nod to Alan Sillitoe’s classic about postwar working-class life, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) – and the 1960 film starring Albert Finney – in Andrew O’Hagan’s ebulliently dark novel about a group of Ayrshire lads coming of age in Thatcher’s Britain. Twenty-year-old Tully Dawson, a machinist in the local factory who “impersonated Arthur Seaton … by taunting his boss all week and drinking pints of Black and Tan all weekend” is the wisecracking ringleader of this gang. Read More...
Reel historyNoahNoah: an unholy mess drowning in unbiblical detailRussell Crowe tries to add depth to Darren Aronofsky's flood blockbuster, but it's sunk by preposterous embellishmentNoah (2014)
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Entertainment grade: D–
History grade: Fail
Noah is a figure in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the last of the antediluvian patriarchs.
AgeMost historians, apart from the really way-out ones, accept that Noah is a mythical figure – there being no evidence for his existence outside ancient folkloric tradition. Read More...