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AT HOME WITH HOOTMAN: From ‘Don’t Look Up’ to ‘Toast of Tinseltown’

DON’T LOOK UP (Netflix). Astronomers Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) discover that a comet is headed to Earth, which will wipe out all life in six months. Adam McKay’s leaden satire takes the worst case scenario not merely for the planet but for the actions of the people on it.

Firstly we have to contend with conspiracy theorists who believe the comet is a hoax concocted by the global elite for their own nefarious ends. Then there’s Meryl Streep as a Trumpesque president who only takes the comet seriously when it will boost her electoral popularity. The third swipe is aimed at capitalism itself in the form of tech billionaire Sir Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance) who calls off a mission to destroy the comet when he realises it’s jam packed with trillions of dollars worth of rare metals.

Meryl Streep – Don’t Look Up

In order to qualify as a satire it a work has to be funny and this film has two to three jokes in its expansive two-and-a-half hour running time. I did like Lawrence putting off a meeting with her boyfriend’s mother for a ‘weirdly specific’ seven months, but it squanders another of its jokes concerning Streep’s death by having it telegraphed about 30 minutes before the obvious visual punchline.

The standout performance is Cate Blanchett as an ice-cold morning TV host: she’s formidable, heartless but despite her obvious flaws she’s somehow made sympathetic – and certainly the most fully realised character. Jonah Hill at least has fun playing the president’s son (who despite being an idiot has made it to being the Chief of Staff) and is a mash-up of various Trump children and their boyfriends.

I’ve no idea what the point is of Timothée Chalamet’s character: he sleeps with Lawrence and has fantastic hair but neither advance the plot.

Despite its many flaws the film holds the attention and its ending is emotionally satisfying although eminently implausible. If I were on the threshold of a violent and presumably painful death I’m not sure I’d have the stoicism needed to sit down and quietly bond with my family.

CRIME OF THE CENTURY (Sky). The world really doesn’t need satire when it can – and should – watch Alex Gibney’s four-hour documentary on America’s opioid crisis.

The best Don’t Look Up could achieve in its audience is a kind of smug satisfaction that we’re so much better than the fools in charge. Crime will induce rage and disbelief in equal measure. In summary, a pharmaceutical company invents an incredibly effective opioid painkiller but soon realises that something designed for end-of-life care for cancer sufferers would make more money if, for example, it could be prescribed for back pain.

Communities have been devastated, half a million Americans have overdosed on prescription drugs and millions more are addicted. Even when the FDA shuts down a distribution centre for the drug, Big Pharma puts up a fight and gets a law passed to stop this happening in the future – helped along by senators who received large financial donations from the drug companies. Doctors, politicians, regulators: everyone knew what was going on but were too powerless or venal to stop it.

The greed and horror of unchecked capitalism has perhaps never been so clearly laid bare. To say this makes for depressing viewing is an understatement: I’ve only seen the first part and am currently steeling myself for the second.

DILLINGER (Arrow Blu-ray). John Milius is a fascinating character, a self-styled ‘right wing extremist’ and ‘Zen anarchist’ who co-wrote hits such as Apocalypse Now and Dirty Harry. This, his first film as writer and director, has testosterone levels through the roof.

Bank robber John Dillinger (Warren Oates) is pursued by FBI Agent Melvin Purvis (Ben Johnson) through Depression-era America. There’s lots of gun battles, blood, people writhing in their death throes and women getting slapped around: it’s Bonnie and Clyde but a grittier, dirtier version.

The low budget is actually a virtue with the grubby photography giving the movie an almost documentary feel. Yet for all its realism, Milius can’t help but indulge in a bit of what I can only assume is poetic licence. When Purvis goes into a gangster’s lair by himself with all guns blazing he’s actually smoking a cigar at the same time. Although we know sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, here it’s very much a penis: Purvis is such a manly man he’s aroused by killing the baddies.

Dillinger certainly has the virtue of being made by a director not willing to compromise on his vision but greatness eludes the finished product. Oates is magnetic as the anti-hero and the supporting cast turn in great, unshowy performances, but the script doesn’t quite have depth of character or storytelling to truly engage the viewer.

Toast of Tinseltown

TOAST OF TINSELTOWN (BBC). It was with unalloyed joy that I heard of the return of a new series featuring Matt Berry’s eponymous actor. The characters have no depth, they don’t grow or learn and their exploits have as much reality as an episode of Tom and Jerry. Yet I love everything about it: from Doon Mackichan as Toast’s agent seemingly unfazed by his madcap antics to Harry Peacock as our hero’s nemesis, the equally ridiculous Ray Purchase.

While the first episode is very much business as usual, the second – which finds Toast relocated to Hollywood – is just baffling. Jokes seem to be set up but the punchline never arrives. And the quirky weirdness, which was charming in Toast of London, here gets ramped up to David Lynch proportions. The result, sadly, is an indigestible mess. Hopefully, normal service will be restored for the rest of the series.

REVIEW: Bent Double @ Komedia

Zoe Lyons has a great rapport with the audience and her likability is definitely an asset. Maybe she was having a bad evening but her material wasn’t great. There was some observational comedy (sans comedy) about people who wear wolf fleeces. We heard the old joke about teachers who work so hard that every year they need six months off. She even talked about impending middle age and being drawn to elasticated trousers because they looked ‘comfy’. If I’d been at a dinner party and someone had be saying this kind of stuff I’d have heckled them for being startlingly unoriginal.

Rosie Jones has cerebral palsy and a lot of her act focuses on her disability. Her opening gag ‘You can tell from by voice I have a disability. I’m Northern’ is a serviceable joke. In fact most of her act is, on a line-by-line basis, perfectly well written. I just didn’t find it particularly funny.

My plus-one left at this point citing tiredness. I explained that if I wasn’t contractually obliged to stay to the end I’d have considered joining him. I’m glad I didn’t as Heidi Regan was just great. She’s one of those performers who, after about 30 seconds, you realise here’s someone with a genuine wit, delivery and presence. Her confession that usually she starts her set with some ‘upsettingly graphic burlesque’ set the tone for something bit off-kilter. Her act is slightly surreal with a lovely diversion into the advice she’d give her younger self about love and life. Except her younger self  ruins an emotional speech by being annoyingly intent on alerting the authorities to the upcoming problems the world seems to be facing.

Andrew Doyle, scourge of the woke, is perhaps most famous for creating ‘radical intersectionalist poet’ Titania McGrath. He also writes for Spiked (if you’ve a spare day it’s an interesting rabbit hole). Bravely his set included a scathing attack on middle-class Guardian readers who still want to remain and have an inherent distrust of anyone who voted Brexit. Which might have been 95% of the audience. He has some great material which got the audience on board. I particularly liked his take on the latest hair-trigger offence hoo-hah involving the Tourette’s Society protesting what was basically a pun on the word ‘florets’. I’d like to write what he said but not sure I’d like to spend the next month apologising for it.

Bent Double is something of a gay Brighton institution. I think Zoe needs to work on her material, or perhaps even consider handing over the MC baton. Like any comedy night it was a hit-and-miss affair but I’d certainly say I’m glad it’s still going.

THEATRE REVIEW: Hair @Theatre Royal

 

In a game attempt to add a pinch of relevance this production of Hair opens with a name check for Donald Trump before we’re quickly whisked back in time to the era of LBJ, Timothy Leary, acid, free-love and Vietnam. We then meet a tribe of hippy drop-outs in what amounts to a series of skits on the theme of sticking it to The Man. It’s pretty much devoid of plot and there’s little to be had in the way of actual fully formed characters. But taken as an anti-establishment revue it has a handful of great songs and some spirited performances.

In the first act we get to meet the tribe which includes Claude (Paul Wilkins) who rejects his Polish parents’ upbringing by adopting a Mancunian persona. Berger (Jake Quickenden) likes sex and smoking dope. In Colored Spade Hud (Marcus Collins) explains about the limited perceptions white America has of its black citizens. We also learn about chemical pollution (Air), the current president (LBJ), the way black women like white boys and how white women like black boys. There’s a baffling interlude where a middle-aged woman gives her opinions on men with long hair being like birds in nature before she reveals herself to be a man in drag. The thread running through this all of this is Claude getting drafted to fight in ‘Nam and having to decide whether to desert or join up.

About halfway through this first act Wilkins leads the cast in a superlative rendition of I Got Life. For those five minutes the show soars; it’s a truly joyous song and the electricity generated is almost palpable. It seemed like this was the show hitting its stride but, unfortunately, it didn’t manage to quite achieve that level again. There are still some wonderful songs to come and enlisting Shakespeare as a lyricist for What a Piece of Work is Man is a wise move. But then watch out, there’s Good Morning Starshine with its nonsense chorus of ‘Gliddly gloop gloopy/Nibby nobby nooby’.

Quickenden has a great voice and is certainly likeable. Apart from the scene where for five inexplicable minutes he goes a bit Jimmy Porter by raging against his smothering girlfriend who he accuses of being a terrible nag. Is this a critique of the sexism history tells us riddled the hippy movement? And when Berger sings about looking for a ‘sixteen-year-old virgin’ is this a critique too? I’d guess the answer to both questions is: no. But I suppose it would be unfair to criticise Hair for being a product of its time.

Collins is at least given more things to do. He has the most presence of anyone on stage and makes the most of playing a conservative parent and, at one point, even giving the Mae West treatment to a risqué joke. Alison Arnopp gives a wonderful comic turn as Jeanie, investing her character with a naivety which reminded me of Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker.

This is very good production which is expertly staged. I’m pretty sure the reason it’s not a complete success is down to either the source material or my unconscionable squareness which expects a musical to have both story and characters.

Continues at Theatre Royal, Brighton until Sat 13.

For more info and tickets click here.

Festival REVIEW Silence @Black Rock

A ten-foot tall creature wearing flowing robes unveils a shabby bus from which disembark a group of ragged men, women and children. It’s certainly an arresting image, the first of many from Poland’s Teatr Biuro Podrozy which looks at the lives of these civilians both before and after the military takeover.

Culture is constantly contrasted with brutality. A large sculpture of a head (Jesus? Plato? I’m not really sure) is lifted up on to the bus as plaintive violin music eerily envelopes the wasteland at Black Rock. A man is later seen producing the music by moving a bow across the stems of flowers but then a bucket of blood is thrown, staining his white shirt red. So, yes, it’s not exactly subtle. Then the military are back with their pounding industrial rock, terrifying the population with wheels of fire or riding at them on motorcycle-driven chariots. A death-like figure on stilts rings a bell whilst pulling a child’s wooden horse. It looks fantastic but if it’s trying to tell us about a child’s loss of innocence during war it’s perhaps a tad simplistic.

Silence is an amazing experience which works at the level of pure spectacle. Though the philistine in me would advise against applying too much thought and instead just revel in its beautiful, violent theatricality.

THEATRE REVIEW: Glengarry Glen Ross @The Theatre Royal

David Mamet’s modern classic is a bleakly funny look at the world of men.

IT centres on a group of salesman as they do anything it takes to close the deal by getting their clients – though ‘victims’ might be a better word – to buy sections of real estate. They lie, flatter and cajole and believe this is the way business should be conducted. Top of the Leaderboard Ricky Roma (Nigel Harman) talks almost nostalgically about how their dubious methods make up the ‘old ways’ as if conning people out of money is part of some noble and ancient tradition.

Shelley Levene (Mark Benton) is simply going through an unlucky streak and that’s why he’s not make the kind of sales that a few years ago earned him the moniker ‘Levene the Machine’. He explains to the office manager John (Scott Sparrow) that he’s caught in a vicious circle: because he hasn’t made the sales they’re not giving him the good leads which in turn means he can’t make any sales. Levene offers to bribe John for the hallowed ‘Glengarry’ leads but can’t pay the cash demanded upfront. David Moss (David Conway) suggests to George (Wil Johnson) that they could make a lot of money by stealing the leads and selling them on. Ricky Roma meanwhile manages to make a sale without even having a lead by simply dominating a poor sap (James Staddon) he meets in a restaurant.

As much as the play is about men, it’s also about power and how quickly it can be lost. For example Levene makes an incredible sale which gives him license to humiliate John after the latter makes a terrible mistake. Only minutes later it’s Levene who is squirming as John embarks upon an action which will ruin Levene’s life. This theme is made explicit in the scene where Staddon tries to cancel the deal on orders from his wife. Even when he realises that Roma has lied to him he pathetically apologises for his behaviour and almost begs for mercy with the confession that ‘I have no power’. His pure submission to the alpha male seems to have a queasily sexual undercurrent which makes it almost hard to watch.

Harman is magnetic as the cocksure spirit of amorality who is undeniably brilliant at his job. Conway is equally good as the belligerent Moss who can even con a fellow con into believing that having a hypothetical conversation could make him an accessory to a crime. But it’s Benton who gives the stand-out performance. His Levene is almost magnificent in his wheedling desperation and the sheer chutzpah with which he’ll brazen out any of the absurd situations he gets himself into.

As a whole the play is difficult to parse. It’s certainly the case that the portraits of its characters are uniformly unflattering – what we see is a group of sexist racist dinosaurs whose sense of worth resides totally in their sense of being men. John is put down as a ‘fairy’, a ‘fucking child’, someone who should not be allowed to ‘work with men’. Is it a critique of toxic masculinity? Perhaps. But its depiction of the one ‘feminine’ character hardly offers a viable alternative.

Whatever you take from it, Sam Yates’s production is a tight, riveting piece of theatre.

Continues at the Theatre Royal, Brighton until Saturday, April 27.

For more details and tickets click here.

THEATRE REVIEW: Bottom @The Marlborough Theatre

Willy Hudson’s show focuses on a young man who is swallowed up by a London of exploitative jobs, drugs and sex where what he really wants is to find true love.

IT’S a familiar story but Hudson has so much charm, winning over the audience in nanoseconds, it’s easy to overlook the occasional fluffed line, familiar joke, and even the image of a mannikin whose legs have been smeared with chocolate spread.

He’s also very good at suggesting a man on the edge of some kind of breakdown. As he manically describes his life of frantically rushing from one low-paid job (including one where he gets paid minus £90 after making a mistake) to the next drunken night out to the next drugged night of sex it’s hard not to jump up on the stage and give him a big hug.

Hudson is honest, open and occasionally quite graphic about sex – his treatment of which often strays into the proctological. But then the show’s title should prepare you for some of the subject matter. The image that sticks in the memory is Hudson sweetly strumming his ukulele whilst singing the eternal gay mating call in the age of Grindr: ‘Top or Bottom?’.

Bottom is an immensely likeble hour of a young man sharing his experiences of  gay life in the the big city. Hopefully in his next show he’ll be able to tell a story that will offer a few more surprises in its telling.

Review by Michael Hootman

Fringe REVIEW: Mark Bittlestone: Pity Laughs @The Warren

 

THIS is a show about being an orphan and being gay with the ratio of material about being parentless to jokes about anal sex being roughly 1:9. It has some great gags, and Mark Bittlestone certainly has a winning charm which gets the audience on board. But as a whole Pity Laughs perhaps lacks focus. At first it seems to be about a gay man battling his own homophobia. But as it progresses the jokes too often centre on typical stereotypes: for example there’s an extended skit about why gay men can’t play football (too busy planting honeysuckle on the pitch) which isn’t sharp enough to be taken as a critique on homophobic attitudes, and not quite funny enough to work just as the kind of joke we’re allowed to tell about ourselves.

But the parts of the show when Bittlestone hits his stride are magnificent. There’s a wonderfully rigged quiz which aims to find out if a straight member of the audience is actually gay. One of the multiple-choice answers contains a finely wrought bucolic fantasy involving wood nymphs and a sexually insatiable Ed Miliband. And if there’s a Fringe award for Best Joke it should probably go to Bittlestone’s heartfelt reason why he wouldn’t be able to perform his show in an orphanage.

In many respects Pity Laughs feels like what I’m sure it is: an early work from a young comic. It’s a very enjoyable hour and what it lacks in complexity it certainly makes up for in some heroically filthy punchlines. It’s clear Bittlestone is a talent to watch and I’d imagine with his next show – or possibly the one after – he could graduate to comedy’s premier league.

The show is on at The Warren on May 22 and May 24.

For more information and tickets click here.

FILM REVIEW: You Were Never Really Here

If I had to sum up Lynne Ramsay’s style of filmmaking in a word it would be ‘concentrated’. Important clues about a character, or a vital link in a chain of events, might be expressed in a single shot or a couple of words. Don’t expect any long scenes of expositionary dialogue. Or, to be honest, short ones. After the credits rolled for You Were Never Really Here it took me and my friend Nick a good 20 minutes to work out to our respective satisfaction roughly what had gone on. Though we were still a bit iffy on the why. A stranger in front of us offered up a theory on one of the characters that we hadn’t even considered. But this isn’t meant as carping – though I did miss one big reveal due to some actorly mumbling – more a reflection on a very intense, occasionally fragmentary, way of telling a story.

In the first five minutes Ramsay effectively sets out her stall. Motes of dust, a man auto asphyxiating himself, a hammer covered in thick congealing blood, a terrified half-naked boy. Although you couldn’t piece together a coherent narrative you get the main idea: brutality, terror and the loss of innocence. The film proceeds as a particularly American form of nightmare with nods to other giants of the genre. Early on Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) jokingly performs the staccato Psycho shower music to his mother whilst the plot bears similarities to Taxi Driver; and it links politics to sexual depravity as effectively as Chinatown.

Joe works for some kind of agency which tracks down lost children. He gets an assignment from a Senator whose daughter has gone missing. Though the Senator has been texted the address of a house which turns out to be a child brothel where his daughter is being kept. Joe seems strangely incurious about who exactly solved the case for him, though this is just one of the mysteries which never seem to get resolved. Which doesn’t particularly matter as the film is genuinely brilliant on almost everything else. From the dowdy, depressing interiors, to the queasy sense of violence that permeates almost every scene, to Phoenix’s completely committed performance Ramsay doesn’t lose your attention for a second.

Phoenix’s portrayal is pretty much a meditation on human suffering. With his unkempt beard and basically inscrutable stare – which occasionally cracks into crying jags of anguish – he seems to alternate between Charles Manson and Jesus. What kind of person is he? Even with clues to the abuse he suffered as a kid, and the horrors he witnessed as a soldier, it’s hard to tell. Though in one scene, perhaps one of his hallucinations, there’s a comparatively long shot of a young girl who looks into his eyes and starts to cry. Whether it’s in sympathy or fear or both, it’s a brilliantly ambiguous judgement on this grizzled wreck of a human being.

Shown as part of the Cinecity Festival.

PREVIEW: Queer Films @ Cinecity Film Festival

 

Cinecity, the Brighton film festival, is showing a number of LGBT-themed films tonight and over the weekend.

The Misandrists (pictured) is the latest provocation from underground queer film legend Bruce LaBruce (The Raspberry Reich, Hustler White, Gerontophilia). It’s the story of a dissident lesbian feminist cult hiding out in the heart of “Germwomany”. The group, which calls itself the Female Liberation Army, is led by Big Mother, an influential leader who publicly pretends to be the headmistress of a convent school for abused and delinquent girls. The FLA indoctrinates its young recruits to take up the struggle of freeing all female people through a mix of revolutionary porn-making, songs about taking down the patriarchy, and even a sneaky dancing nun. But does the FLA’s brand of radical feminism hide some darker and more exclusionary beliefs? Thursday 23 at Duke’s at the Komedia.

The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin. A fond portrait of Tales of the City author Armistead Maupin, sure to delight diehard fans and newcomers alike. Jennifer M. Kroot’s affectionate tribute traces Maupin’s life from his conservative boyhood and youthful flirtation with Republican politics to his current status as beloved gay icon, raconteur, and advocate of sexual liberation. Tales of the City chronicled the daily adventures, love affairs and lives of a group of fictional friends living in San Francisco. It began life as a newspaper serial, with regular installments appearing in the San Francisco Chronicle. Kroot takes this as inspiration, structuring her film as a series of themed vignettes, incorporating talking heads, archive footage, and clips from TV and film. This film, winner of the Documentary Spotlight prize in this year’s SXSW Audience Awards, is sure to have audiences rushing back to the shelves to pick up his books. Friday 24th at Duke’s at the Komedia.

Love, Cecil is a warm but unsentimental portrait of Cecil Beaton and his work, offering the viewer an honest account of a larger-than-life and occasionally controversial character. A photographer for the Royal Family and three-time Academy Award winner – for costume design and art direction – Beaton’s publicly celebrated works are placed in intriguing context by his private frustrations and lifelong search for personal happiness. Having brought the biographical documentary Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict (2015) to the big screen, Lisa Immordino Vreeland turns her inquisitive attentions to the life and work of Beaton. Restless and multi-talented, he was a highly-regarded figure in the art world in a career spanning almost sixty years that encompassed photography, writing and theatre, film and costume design. Saturday 25 at Duke of York’s Picturehouse.

For more details and tickets click here.

 

 

 

 

 

THEATRE REVIEW: How the Other Half Loves @Theatre Royal

Rather like his recently revived Relatively Speaking, Alan Ayckbourn’s play is a farcical look at an affair and the tortured results of covering it up. The intricate web of lies lead, inevitably, to a whole raft of misunderstandings. Written five years later, How the Other Half Loves is almost experimental in the way both time and space are sliced and diced. One couple are seen eating a meal on two separate nights, with two sets of hosts, and the action flicks back and forth between the evenings. But this isn’t just showing off: it demonstrates with a heightened immediacy the way people behave in different circumstances. Or, to be brutal, how they behave to their social betters versus their social inferiors.

Bob Phillips (Leon Ockenden) is having an affair with Fiona Foster (Caroline Langrishe), the wife of his boss Frank (Robert Daws). As a cover story Fiona has said she was counselling Mary Featherstone (Sara Crowe), in a crisis due to her husband William (Matthew Cottle) having an affair. Coincidentally Bob’s covering story for his wife Teresa (Charlie Brooks) involves a drinking session with William who, he claims, is in a state due his wife cheating on him.

Ayckbourn is, of course, a master of plotting. And the mechanism of the plot is very finely crafted indeed. But the play isn’t just about making its cast jump through hoops: it’s perhaps finer that Relatively in the that it makes you feel for its characters. Mary ‘the mouse’ is, in some respects, a comic stereotype yet Crowe’s wounded dignity when she demands an apology from her husband is quietly heartbreaking.

The writer casts something of a jaundiced eye over everyone. Cottle’s William is toe-curlingly servile to his boss. But worse than that is his treatment of Mary, a woman who he believes he has made – he’s bettered her by introducing her to non-fiction works of literature, classical music and less awful clothes. In his idea of art and culture he bears more than a passing resemblance to Laurence Moss in Abigail’s Party with his leather-bound, yet steadfastly unread, Shakespeare.

There’s something pleasingly retro about the acting – especially in the depiction of classic English types which, presumably, no longer exist. Ockenden does lairy youth in a way which would give Robin Askwith a run for his money; Langrishe has the condescending grace of Penelope Keith and Daws is little short of magnificent as the upper management bod whose basic decency doesn’t prevent him from being a fool. Brooks’ Teresa is slightly harder to place – but her Guardian reading and love of Benjamin Britten imply a woman rebelling against middle-class respectability by marrying a member of the lower orders.

My one slight quibble is that the twist which ends the play doesn’t really make much sense. Despite this minor problem, Other Half is an example of Ayckbourn at his best.

Continues until Saturday 25 at the Theatre Royal, Brighton.

For more details and tickets click here.

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