This quiet, lovely Japanese ensemble piece is much haunted. It is haunted by the constant presence of Junpei, the older son whose death by drowning is the cause for the family gathering this film records. It is haunted by the Japanese film maker Yazojiro Ozu and, in particular, his Tokyo Story whose pale but intense […]
Carlos Fuentes, Happy Families (Bloomsbury) £8.99
One thing connects the sixteen stories in Carlos Fuentes’ Happy Families: despair at the state of modern Mexico. The first story’s ‘family like any other’ live mostly in separate rooms, clinging to fantasy notions of both their country and their chances within it. Elsewhere we see corrupt priests, faded actors, lovers separated by the expectations […]
E. L. Doctorow, Homer and Langley (Little Brown) £11.99
When John Updike died last year, various critics suggested that Philip Roth was the last remaining of the great American novelists. Even at the time, this was hard to take at face value. It seemed nothing more than a kneejerk reaction from the same critics whose glowing reviews of Roth’s annual postings from the frontiers […]
Life on Earth: Music from the 1979 BBC TV series. Composed by Edward Williams. Trunk Records 2009 (JBH034CD).
While lacking a childhood nostalgia for the various incarnations of Sir David Attenborough’s long-running nature series – a nostalgia expressed often by many British friends and colleagues – I have in recent years developed a profound respect for what is, by North American standards, very exotic television programming. What would be relegated to the public […]
Avatar (2009), dir. James Cameron
According to the inverse law of action movie length vs. depth, every too familiar nuance of this nearly three-hour ‘epic’ can be recounted in a couple of breaths: A disabled ex-soldier is sent in to improve relations with an indigenous population who stand in the way of some economically precious natural resource. Inevitably, he grows […]
John Baldessari, Perfect Beauty/Pop Life, Tate Modern, London
Walking around London at present, it’s easy to think that Pop Life is the only exhibition on offer at Tate Modern this winter: Jeff Koons’ silver bunny shines at you from innumerable billboards like a sanitised version of Donnie Darko’s rabbit nemesis desperate for your cash. Were this the case, you might feel ready to […]
Sarah Arvio, Sono with Visits from the Seventh (Bloodaxe Books) £9.95, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
For all Sarah Arvio’s obvious intelligence, culture, technical adroitness and articulacy, I struggled with this book. In the end I didn’t feel the struggle brought anything like enough reward. My feeling of a fundamental aridity was at its most acute in Sono. The poem – a sequence of forty-two “cantos” arranged in generally blank verse […]
The BYG Deal. A “Finders Keepers” Production (FKR025CD).
I’ve just spent the morning with the 24-page booklet that accompanies the latest release from Manchester-based reissue masters Finders Keepers. The write-up in small print is a history of an obscure but seminal French record label that formed out of the wind-blown ashes of the May ’68 student demonstrations in Paris. It tells this via […]
Maurice Carême, Défier le destin – Defying Fate, trans. by Christopher Pilling (Arc Publications) £9.99
The Belgian author Maurice Carême (1899 – 1978) is apparently much loved and seen as a major figure in his homeland. I read this volume with growing respect and a growing sense that for all their absence of obvious difficulty these were poems that would reward extensive rereading. Carême’s predilection for short (sometimes very short) […]
Katalin Varga (2009), dir. Peter Strickland
Peter Strickland’s Katalin Varga is a revenge tragedy set in a part of modern-day Europe so remote that people still turn the hay by hand, put strangers up for the night and where a lone woman can drive her son on a horse and cart for miles between villages. Yet it is a place where […]
Three New Titles, reviewed by Ian Pople
20 Canadian Poets Take On the World, ed. Priscila Uppal (Exile Editions) $24.95 Anne Compton, Asking questions indoors and out (Fitzhenry and Whiteside) $15.00 Carmine Starnino, This Way Out (Gaspereau Press) $18.95 To accuse a book of generosity of spirit can be to suggest rather a generosity of ego. But generosity of spirit is what […]
New Collections from Liz Almond and Brian Johnstone, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Liz Almond, Yelp (Arc Publications) Brian Johnstone, The Book of Belongings (Arc Publications) Liz Almond’s new collection introduces us to a wide world, full of sensual pleasures but also of cruelties, pains and dangers which she suggests we must actively face and face down if we are to live life to the full. “Rosita Rules […]
Valerie Rouzeau “Pas revoir – Cold Spring in Winter“ trans. Susan Wicks; Arc Publications
Pas revoir, Valerie Rouzeau’s brilliant sequence of poems on the death of her father, is challenging in many ways and on many levels. The linguistic demands posed by its verbal dislocations and fragmentations, its allusiveness, and multiple lexical ambiguities would have put it completely out of reach of my French if I’d attempted to read […]
Vetiver, Manchester Academy 3, 7 September 2009
If we could travel back in time (and what good story doesn’t begin with a time machine?), pick up a few core members of the Grateful Dead, bring them and their gear forward and get them to release an album of Curtis Mayfield covers, one of the songs on that record (likely an Impressions-era Mayfield […]
Prefab Sprout. Let’s Change The World With Music. Kitchenware Records
When is a new Prefab’s album not a new Prefab’s album? When it was written and recorded in 1992-93, and isn’t played on by anyone other than Paddy McAloon. And therein, perhaps, lies the problem. McAloon is incapable of writing a bad song. He also has that touch of the truly great songwriter in that […]
Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (Jonathan Cape) £18.99
For readers whose wrists are still aching from nursing Thomas Pynchon’s previous novel, the gargantuan Against the Day, Inherent Vice – his latest bulletin from his own alternative version of America – may have arrived with unseemly haste. Yet at a mere 369 pages, this new work is not only lighter in terms of its […]
Sin Nombre (2009), dir. Cary Fukunaga
With so much debate today focussing on immigration, it seems strange that so few films have looked at the topic. Hollywood rarely goes near it for anything other than a new slant on romantic comedy (remember Green Card?) and Michael Winterbottom’s In this world remains a fairly rare instance in European cinema. Yet the immigrant […]
Broken Embraces – Abrazos rotos, (2009) dir. Pedro Almodovar
Ever since taking the best foreign picture Oscar for Todo Sobre mi Madre, Pedro Almodóvar has seen anything he does loved by the majority of his fans, regardless of its actual quality. His films can belabour under ridiculous plots or drift along without even the merest hint of narrative progression, and praise will still be […]
No Wonder, Claire Urwin, 24:7 Theatre Festival
Manchester’s 24:7 theatre festival, which showcases new writing, directing and acting talent, is now in its fifth year, this time staging an impressive 21 hour-long performances across its seven days. For writing and directing team Claire Urwin and Guy Jones it represents a second opportunity to stage their single act play No Wonder in Manchester […]
Vladimir Mayakovsky, Pro Eto – That’s What trans. by Larisa Gureyeva & George Hyde (Arc Publications)
The eyes of Mayakovsky’s lover and muse, Lily Brik, bore out at you from the cover of this important new edition of Mayakovsky’s long poem, Pro Eto. Lily Brik occurs elsewhere in the book; in the text, which she haunts, but also in the astonishing photomontages for the poem by Alexander Rodchenko, which are published […]
Jerichow, (2008) dir. Christian Petzold
(Edinburgh International Film Festival) German feature Jerichow made its UK debut at 2009’s Edinburgh International Film Festival on 19 June, and is arguably more appealing and straightforwardly enjoyable than many of the more high-profile premieres screened there so far. Benno Furmann plays brooding ex-soldier Thomas, deep in debt and with few prospects, who moves into […]
Away We Go, (2009) dir. Sam Mendes
(International premiere, Edinburgh International Film Festival) Coming just four months after the UK release of his last film, Revolutionary Road, Away We Go is something of a departure for respected film and theatre director Sam Mendes. The compositional beauty and sinister, or, at least, restless, undertone for which he is renowned have been replaced with […]
Katyn (2007), dir. Andrzej Wajda
The iconic beginning to this film – Polish refugees run from both sides onto a bridge, one side running from the Russians, the others running from the Germans, and the equally iconic, relentless slaughter which end the film, will be well known to anyone who has looked at the reviews of this remarkable document. Equally […]
Basil Bunting, Briggflatts (Bloodaxe Books) £12.00
In 1979, Donald Davie wrote that ‘Briggflatts is where English poetry has got to, it is what English poets must assimilate and go on from.’ Why hasn’t that happened? One reason for the critical occlusion of Bunting is that late-modernism itself can be a bit of a cul-de-sac. On the DVD that accompanies the text, […]
Manic Street Preachers, Venue Cymru Llandudno, 26 May 09
One of the great things about living in Manchester is its closeness to contrasting day-trip destinations. So when the trend for big bands to tour less obvious, often seaside, locations offered the option of The Manic Street Preachers plus afternoon tea in genteel Llandudno, I didn’t take much convincing. Arriving just as the band took the […]
Mark Wallinger curates The Russian Linesman; Leeds City Art Gallery
In our era of shows curated with an exhaustive, almost claustrophobic, focus on a single artist or art movement, Mark Wallinger’s show The Russian Linesman at Leeds Art Gallery is a rare beast. Touring after a stint at the Hayward in London, the show takes in sculpture, painting, drawing and video art, and ranges in […]
Reality Hack: Hidden Manchester, Urbis, Manchester
Urbis’s latest city-themed exhibition offers a peak at the startling beauty of some of Manchester’s neglected vistas. Photographer Andrew Paul Brooks has sought high and low for scenes of enchantment tightly woven into the city’s fabric. The result is an impressively presented, if slightly blinkered, survey of hidden Manchester. With his camera, Brooks has documented […]
James Fleming, Cold Blood (Jonathan Cape) £16.99
Ian Fleming is reputed to have said that he wrote the James Bond books for warm-blooded, heterosexuals to read on trains. In Cold Blood, his nephew James Fleming takes that one step further by writing a book that will not only appeal to the same readership, but whose subject is warm-blooded, heterosexual and actually on […]
Encounters at the End of the World (2007), dir. Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog’s new film is a documentary about workers on a scientific research base in Antarctica. It has many of the hallmarks of his previous documentary work, including stunning panoramic shots, the vaguely creepy off-camera voice that sounds like it could be enticing Hansel and Gretel to come into the gingerbread house, and, of course, […]
John Updike, Endpoint and Other Poems (Hamish Hamilton) £12.99
The cover of John Updike’s final book bears two phots of the author: the one on the inside of the fly leaf is taken by his wife Martha, and shows a smiling Updike, presumably caught in an unguarded moment of familial intimacy; the Jill Krementz photo that forms the cover is a more familiar Updikean […]
A Number, Caryl Churchill, The Library Theatre
Caryl Churchill, A Number, The Library Theatre until May 9 Caryl Churchill’s 2002 play deals with a contentious issue, human cloning, but is as interested in making cloning into a metaphor as it is in ethics and science. The play’s success depends on a difficult balance between argument and feeling, exploring ideas and manipulating […]
Duplicity (2009), dir. Tony Gilroy
With a name like Duplicity and two big Hollywood leads, this film makes no secret of its genre. A spy thriller aimed squarely at a mainstream audience I approached it with some apprehension, being renowned for my failure to follow recent Bonds, Bournes and even Batmen. A couple of encouraging reviews and the fact that […]
The Burning Plain (2008), dir. Guillermo Arriaga
There are some writers whose work is identifiable within the space of a couple of sentences. Guillermo Arriaga makes his directorial debut with The Burning Plain, but it’s a film that’s also almost instantly identifiable, bearing as it does the same hallmarks as the numerous films he’s written. Anybody who’s seen Babel, The Three Burials […]
Glenn Brown at Tate Liverpool; George Always, Portraits of George Melly by Maggi Hambling, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
The paintings in room one of Glenn Brown’s exhibition at Tate Liverpool are versions of sci-fi sublime: science fiction landscapes with cities on planets, swirling gas-clouds and nebulae with space stations. These are huge wall-sized canvases; often enlarged from small air-brush cartoons in sci-fi magazines. Brown’s debts to the romantic sublime of John Martin are […]
Glen Duncan, A Day and A Night and A Day (Simon & Schuster) £14.99, 241pp
The time of Glen Duncan’s new novel A Day and a Night and a Day is post-9/11 and America is nervy. Augustus Rose, a mixed race sixties radical, has infiltrated a group of extremists in the hope of avenging the death of his lover Selina in a fictional 2002 bomb in El Corte Ingles in […]