Annie Get Your Gun

A sad fact we all have to deal with: musical theatre has embraced Lloyd-Webber. But seeing Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun restored my faith a measure in the 'musical' genre and reminded me that when music, dance, story, lighting and acting all come together successfully, you have sure-fire entertainment on your hands.

The musical traces the life of Annie Oakley (Jane Horrocks), a small-time crackshot who starts touring the States showing off her shooting, and becomes so successful she even tours Europe. But running parallel with her success are her attempts to win over Frank Butler (Julian Ovenden), a rival gunslinger who takes her under his wing but quickly comes to resent her natural ability and showmanship (showwomanship? showomanship?). As Annie becomes more and more of a hit, Frank withdraws his affections from her; the drama builds towards a final confrontation, where Annie must decide between her reputation as a sharpshooter and her love for Frank.

Horrocks and Ovenden were both on top form: Annie was dopey without being idiotic, and sarcastic without being cynical; Frank meanwhile lived up to his playboy reputation as he swaggered about the stage exuding charm and style. But there was also tenderness in both their performances, and They Say It's Wonderful stayed in my head for days after viewing. It was an onstage chemistry that drew in the audience and captivated.

Of course, something must be said for the staging. Once again, part of the charm of seeing this production was its setting, as the stage of the Young Vic was transformed into a saloon bar, with four pianos at the base of the stage. All the music was provided by these pianos, thrillingly played live. A couple of simple tricks and a sparse setting transformed the stage to a backstage set, a train, a boat and even a swish New York apartment. It was simplicity that further empowered the spirited performances from the ensemble. Annie's lullaby to Jessie, with hums and howls from the Native Americans, was especially touching.

And musically? Well, I mentioned the pianos, but really the clincher was the fact that this isn't Lloyd Webber. The songs have a depth and beauty that far exceeds more recent musicals, and it was truly a pleasure to be lifted by such melodies and transported far beyond my seat in the third row. It's the fact that the songs are not structured so conventionally as to be tedious. The refrains may repeat, but they are never repetitive. Indeed, the repeated structures just affirmed a level of care in Berlin's composition that was thrilling and complemented by the coherence of the production.

I wondered about Sitting Bull and Jessie's performances, the former for being too stilted, the latter for being clumsy, but I think it is too much to judge too fiercely. They hardly marred the performance as a whole for me.

A great afternoon's entertainment.

***

2009

Jane Horrocks, Julian Ovenden

by Irving Berlin

dir. Richard Jones

Choke

I've not read any Chuck Palahniuk before. In fact, I struggle to pronounce his surname. But I've seen Fight Club and I saw the trailer for Choke and when it fell into my lap, and I was failing to sleep, I thought "Ok, why not?". So perhaps I've come to this novel from completely the wrong angle, from the angle of a guy who doesn't really appreciate what Palahniuk's done before, and really just saw that there was choking and sex addiction in the film trailer and wanted to check it out.

There is choking. By that, I mean, Victor, our anti-hero, chokes himself in restaurants to make ordinary people into heroes, as he's discovered that just about anyone likes to be made to feel like a hero, and will, in addition, reward financially the person they've saved. He's doing this for a good reason though, and not because he's a low-down scumbag: his mother is dying of a degenerative brain disease at a local hospice, and just to keep her there costs $3,000 a month. That's the second strand, the mother-son relationship, as his visits start to become more and more strange, as more and more of the old women start to believe he is the one responsible for personal tragedies they each suffered many years before. And the third strand of the narrative? Sex addiction. Victor is a sex addict. He can't help himself. In fact, he goes to three different sex addiction self-help groups a week, just to get more sex.

Don't go kidding yourself, though. The sex is in no way beautiful or erotic or in any way enticing in this book; it's grimy, it's banal and worst of all, it's a bit horrible. There's something pukesome about the way Victor refers to his member as his 'dog', and the way in which he lists to himself the different things he can think about to prolong his orgasm: rotting meat; grandmothers; car crashes; suppurating pores. This isn't sex to be enjoyed, either for him or the reader, but to be put up with and struggled through until the eventual release. Perhaps Palahniuk is a genius, for rendering what should be scintillating as mundane and off-putting, uncomfortable and so starkly factual as to be terrifying.

There's a plot there too, as the three strands come to some kind of climax - can Victor kick the addiction, stay the course with his choking so as to save his mother? And just what is the secret behind his parentage that he so desperately seeks? A twist in the tale early on pushes the reader down a slightly different path, as we begin to re-evaluate his actions in a new light, but the eventual final twist left me a bit let-down. I suppose it might have been that I was reading too fast, on a flight to London, and didn't give the import of the finale the chance to hit home, but I couldn't help but feel that Palahniuk was chasing a similar shock-ending to Fight Club and had just missed it.

Still, it's eminently readable, and goes down a treat, if you can stomach some rather graphic, disgusting sexual discussion, and the fact that as Victor claims, he is a loser that you don't want to read about. His voice is certainly compelling, as he moves between the mundane, the graphic and his own personal obsession with medical terminology. The repeated phrases were at times impressive and amusing, but at other times grated a little too much. It felt too consciously crafted for my liking, and too obviously so. I think I need to read a little more Palahniuk before I pass further judgment.

***

2001

by Chuck Palahniuk

Pineapple Express

It's a straightforward challenge: can two chain-smoking dopeheads make good to save their own skins? Put another way, what happens when you force two perpetually high quasi-losers into situations where mary-jane is no longer helping and numbing and merely a hindrance?

That said, the question seems to suggest that Pineapple Express might be some kind of serious look at weed smoking. It's not. From the opening sequence (a delightful homage to mobster movies in grainy black-and-white), to the various set-pieces of the film (car-chase, household royal-rumble, final mega-showdown complete with Hollywood of the 90s huge fauxplosion), this film had me giggling. As my observant co-viewer suggested, perhaps it was really one to enjoy while high, because while the content was amusing and absurd in equal measure, it never really rose to the level that the two protagonists were supposedly at - almost blind in a drug heaven, in other words.

Those two protagonists, Dale (Seth Rogen) and Saul (James Franco) make a good go of it. There are some delightful exchanges of dialogue, particularly:

Dale: I'm sorry, that sounded really mean... just to hear that, it sounded mean.

Saul: No, I see. The monkey's out of the bottle now!

Dale: What? That's not even... a figure of speech.

Saul: Pandora can't go back in the box - he only comes out!

I found myself quietly touched by their love-hate relationship, as well. It managed to steer clear of becoming a pathetically homoerotic menage-a-deux, while also introducing an element of care and affection that, to my mind, heightened the comedy. I struggled to be amused by the more overtly man-on-man sexually themed moments, but there was tenderness that did prompt a smile. In a similarly vein, the film managed to steer clear of a happy-ever-after for Dale in the standard sense, which was pleasing. Eff Hollywood, and all that.

However, while Franco and Rogen performed well, Franco in particular, and even with some wonderfully wild additional characters (Danny McBride's Red, a Buddhist friends-first dealer who betrays just about everyone in the film, for instance), the film remains fairly episodic, and perhaps would have been better suited as a series of weed-ventures than one long film. As noted, some sequences were both hilarious and enjoyable, but there were also notable dips in the film when it almost seemed like the director was just killing time before the story moved on into another bit of fun. That, to me, combined with no cinematographic or musical highlights, left me wanting far more than what I received. I'd happily watch Franco and Rogen again, but either this is just an eminently quotable 'grower', or a three-star watch-n-discard.

***

2008

Seth Rogen, James Franco, Danny McBride

dir. David Gordon Green

Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk

The second of Boris Akunin's Sister Pelagia novels proved to be just as much, if not more, of a treat than the first, Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog. Beginning in medias res and immediately from where the first book left off, we are plunged into a tale that is structurally and suspensefully superior.

As Sister Pelagia and the Bishop Mitrofanii thought they had finally got to the bottom of the mysteries surrounding Mitrofanii's aunt and her bulldogs, they are confronted by a monk who has sped from New Ararat, a monastic community within Zavolzhie, Mitrofanii's province, to report that St Basilisk, the site's patron, is now haunting the region and warning monks of grave danger in the area. Pelagia of course wishes to investigate, but Mitrofanii feels that this is no matter for a woman, especially not a superstitious nun. Instead, he dispatches a series of other representatives. First, his protege of sorts, Andrei Lentochkin, whom Mitrofanii is keen to convert to Orthodoxy, makes his way to New Ararat, but his letters report failure, and eventual sectioning in the local mental institution. Second, the chief of police, Lagrange, a clear-headed man of courage and action, who meets with his death. Finally, Mitrofanii's trusted advisor, Matvei Bentsionovich Berdichevsky, the third member of Pelagia and Mitrofanii's inner counsel, sets out to get to the bottom of things. He too suffers a reversal of fortune.

All is left to Pelagia, and her ingenious use of disguise, to try to work her way to the bottom of the mystery. But time is against as Mitrofanii, after so many failures, succumbs to a debilitating heart disease and is laid low in his bedchamber. On arrival at New Ararat Pelagia quickly realises all is not as it seems, as the militaristic community veils many oddball characters and crazed individuals, and the lines between the madmen of the institution and the townsfolk are hardly drawn at all. Assumptions and false accusations lead her down a torturous path, where every new revelation throws up further questions and challenges to her, all building to an exciting crescendo - can she find out who has been masquerading as Basilisk, what his message really means, and save Berdichevsky and Lentochkin before it is too late?

A riveting read. I can't wait to get my hands on the third part, Sister Pelagia and the Red Rooster. In the meantime, I've ordered the Fandorin novels to keep me going!

***

by Boris Akunin

Assault on Precinct 13

Well, this will be a short one. I have some excellent novel reviews hanging over me that really need to be written, but thankfully, little needs to be said about this film because there is so little to say (unless exploding and pouring forth a stream of vitriol counts... that's barely good reviewing practice though).

The plot is mind-numbingly simple: cops (inc. Ethan Hawke) closing up a precinct on New Year's Eve find themselves required to contain a certified cop-killer (Fishburne), whom some dirty cops, led by Gabriel Byrne then come after. They're all bad, basically. As is the film. Perhaps it was the atrocious dialogue that killed this for me, as I struggled even to laugh out loud at the absurdity of some of the lines, especially the 'meaningful' exchanges between Hawke and Fishburne as they are forced to ally themselves together to survive the assault.

Plot twists seem glaringly obvious and the violence is needlessly brutal, without adding anything to the film at all. It's not stylised violence one might see elsewhere and it's certainly not tongue-in-cheek gore for entertainment's sake. I honestly can't see what it, or the wooden performances, were hoping to achieve.

I tired so much of this film by about halfway that finishing it was a labour in itself. Thanks for nothing, Richet.

***

2005

Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, Gabriel Byrne, Maria Bello

Dir. Jean-Francois Richet

Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog

First published in Russian by Boris Akunin, I picked up this translation of the first in a series of books that followed on from Akunin's success with his Erast Fandorin novels. Here his new protagonist and investigator was no longer a Sherlock Holmes hero of derring-do, but a nun, Sister Pelagia, who teaches literature and gymnastics at the local convent, and is relied upon heavily by the bishop, Mitrofanii. Rounding off the trio of core characters is the loveable Matvei Bentsionovich Berdichevsky, converted to Christianity, assistant district prosecutor and father of thirteen. These three form the heroes of the novel, champions for justice in their distant backwater province of Zavolzhsk.

The plot follow two strands: Mitrofanii's aunt asks him to find out who is killing off her beloved white bulldogs, bred for their pure white coats except for one brown ear, their squatness and above all, their slobberiness. It seems like a petty request from a mad canine sympathiser, but Mitrofanii sends Pelagia to investigate, just on the off-chance something is awry. At the same time, recently arrived from St Petersburg is a canonical inspector, sent to cause trouble and stir up discontent in the province, by hook and by crook.

Fans of the Fandorin series have suggested that the leisurely pace of the Pelagia novels is a disappointing change; however, I found myself fully engaged not only with the characters, but with Akunin's wit in relating provincial Russian of the 19th century so wonderfully. It was brought to life for me by the manner in which the lazy laidback nature of the province was mirrored in Akunin's own conversational and humorous style. Other reviews have described the Pelagia novels as workmanlike. I can think of no higher praise, and it certainly highlights Akunin's artistry in bringing together such a relaxed but involving story. I'm now onto book 2, Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk - so far it reads as intriguingly as it's predecessor.

One final point. At one time in the story a certain Mrs Polina Lisitsyna arrives on the scene. She is everything Pelagia is not - glamorous, demure, highly sought after and beautifully turned out. Pelagia groans when she hears that Polina is to be involved in the investigation. I won't reveal the twist, of course, but well worth the wait.

***

by Boris Akunin

District Nine

What happens when you're really into science fiction, you've just got out of film school, you're South African and thus involved with complex questions surrounding racism and then Peter Jackson offers to bankroll your project? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you end up making a film a bit like District 9.

District 9 takes the premise that aliens do exist and in fact have made it to Earth. But, through interviews with journalists, sociologists and collected scientists, we discover that they didn't land over New York or Hollywood, but over Johannesburg. Rather than rush out, invading army style, they were found to be malnourished, disorganised and suffering severely. An aid camp is immediately set up to support them. Twenty years pass, and the camp becomes a slum; anti-alien sentiment rises in Jo'burg, and MNU (Multi-National United) is contracted to evict the aliens to a new camp, District 10, outside of the city.

Stylistically director Neill Blomkamp has plumped for quasi-documentary filmmaking. Snippets of interviews fill us in with information about the alien arrival very swiftly, and are interspersed with news broadcasts and what appears to be a film crew following the hapless MNU employee, Wikus Van De Merwe, who has been chosen nepotistically to organise the serving of eviction notices to the aliens. It is through Wikus' eyes, or at least, with our eyes on him, that we gain the greatest insight into alien-human relations. Wikus is blase and crass in dealing with the aliens, or 'prawns' as they are dubbed, and even though one knows something is going to go wrong, it is hard not to laugh at how incompetent Wikus proves himself to be.

When things do in fact go wrong, and Wikus finds himself without friends or support, and indeed being pursued by his own company, the film shifts a gear from edgy mockumentary, where the challenge of dealing with race sits side by side with Wikus' ongoing commentary, to nearly-action flick. I say nearly, because I felt that it never quite became full-blown. Or at least, it never leapt the gap into blockbuster territory, as the South African accents and range of camera styles kept that distance from the standard Hollywood action flick. I appreciated that.

What really struck me was just the range of emotions it elicited in me. Yes, there were some difficult questions being posed about racism, and since the film's release the director's handling of the Nigerians in the film, who are portrayed as soulless bandits out only for profit from the hapless aliens, so debased they even eat alien flesh in the hope of magically gaining alien strength, has come into question. But I was also laughing at the natural comedy of the goonish Van De Merwe, and touched as the twist in his life left him at times vomiting and at times in tears. As he squats on a rubbish dump and starts to push cat food into his mouth, only to cry, his face was wracked with the pain of knowing what he was becoming, and what he had lost. That, to me, was a touching moment. Although there was the suggestion of a happy ending, it was not spelt out for us. Perhaps to allow for a sequel, but perhaps because where the strength of the film lay was in the fact it may have had a Hollywood budget, but it wasn't governed by some of the 'laws of filmmaking' that govern many American films in recent years.

***

2009

Sharlto Copley

Dir. Neill Blomkamp