July viewing

Thought I’d better round up a few things I’ve seen recently, just to prove I’m not dead, or worse.

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Heart in the Park is the latest brand to be added to the ever-growing list of summertime mini-festivals taking place in Hyde Park. If you think my paying to attend a Heart FM event instantly destroys any lingering sense of reviewer credibility and makes me a properly middle-aged sod then you’d be right on both counts. But, well, Chic were playing, and the weather was going to be nice and that.

We arrived in time to catch some of Eliza Doolittle. My dad used to sing “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag” to me, a song familiar from his own youth. Although music has always recycled itself to appeal to new generations, I still can’t quite get my head around a young pop artiste singing a remixed version of it in 2013. Bizarre.



Unfortunately Chic were bedevilled with sound problems from the off, the Hyde Park sound system again not proving up to the task. Once those were finally sorted (which at least gave Nile Rogers the chance to essay a bit of banter), the second half was great, albeit without the element of surprise that their revelatory Glastonbury set had brought.

Although, what with this and Daft Punk, Rogers is enjoying the brightest of renaissances, it does raise the question of why he was ever a forgotten man in the first place. Perhaps because disco, being rooted in black and gay culture, returned to being perceived as outsider music once its heyday had passed, and whilst the mostly white mainstream media has always kept the rock’n’roll flame burning, disco ended up as a wedding reception/cheese room genre with nobody to stick up for it.

Plus, disco is the sound of eternal optimism, whereas the more conflicated emotions of rock automatically confer associations of depth, deservedly or not. But it’s a lot harder to write a happy song and make it endure. When you see this stuff performed balls-out by the tightest set of musicians imaginable, you realise how accomplished it is. And they make it sound effortless as well as fun.

J-Lo and her umpteen costume changes then had to be endured before the coming of our star of the evening, Mr Lionel Richie. Lionel is an odd one to pin down really - one of those artists whose earlier credibility has long since been eclipsed by later-period cheesiness, strange cosmetic touch-ups, his progeny’s questionable televisual antics, etc. Whatever merits Hello ever had as a love song, the only thing most people will associate with it now is that bloody video

The secret to Lionel’s success as a performer is that he knows all this, and he's not remotely bothered. This was old-school showmanship from a seasoned pro who has been pushing the buttons of crowds for years. Sometimes at a festival, it doesn’t matter whether the songs are particularly good, in your humble opinion - only that everybody knows them, and enough people go mental for them to sweep the rest of you along. All Night Long and Dancing on the Ceiling are copper-bottomed guarantees in that regard. The unfeasibly summery weather didn’t do any harm either.

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I wonder if Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke or Julie Delpy ever imagined when making Before Sunrise that those characters would prove so beloved as to spawn a trilogy that some are even putting above the Toy Story saga as the greatest ever?

Before Midnight picks up the story of Jessie and Celine ten years after their Parisian reunion and on the cusp of middle-age with all its associated baggages (jobs, kids, ex-partners).

The interesting thing about these films is that they’re as much about the deficiencies of language as they are about talking. Most of the couple’s arguments stem from the universal problems of not being able to find subtle enough words to express one’s true feelings. That one of them is a writer is surely a deliberate irony. Indeed, the look on Hawke’s face as his son says goodbye through the airport gate says more than any stack of dialogue pages ever could.

This is pure film-making of a kind rarely seen anymore, carried along solely by character and conversation. (Though I suppose the landscapes do help - these would be somewhat different films if they’d been meeting up in Skegness and Blackpool.) I would argue that the middle third of Midnight is something of a drag, however. The dinnertable scene with its assembly of couples in various phases of life and love felt contrived, however valid the points it made. Ultimately, who cares about all these other characters (especially the stock old English luvvie, for goodness sake)?

Once Jessie and Celine leave the others to it and start walking to the hotel though, the film builds and builds to a wonderfully-judged finale. These people aren’t perfect, and even struggle to be likable at times, but they are recognisably, often excruciatingly, human. Watching them grow old with us is a pleasure.

See you in a decade’s time then folks?

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Also caught up with Wreck-It Ralph last week, which sees Disney attempting to out-Pixar their Pixar buddies. Although the concept of video game characters coming to life once the game stops owes an obvious debt to Toy Story, the central idea of a bad guy who wants to be the hero is appealing, and things start out promisingly. The city behind the arcade machines where the characters mingle after they “clock off” of an evening is well crafted (leaving aside the question of whether old 8-bit fodder would really stand side-by-side with state of the art machines in a modern arcade), and real effort has been made in matching the voice cast to the characters, Jane Lynch being the highlight.

However, most of the plot, which involves Ralph trying to retrieve a medal he earns by dubious means at the beginning, takes place within a garish, candy-coated Mario Kart ripoff called Sugar Rush, which doesn’t really represent the best use of a universe which has been set up so nicely. Plus, the film fails to find the rich emotional seam mined so successfully by Pixar's best works - although the characters can see human kids playing their games through the screen, it’s hardly the same as the bond which links Buzz, Woody et al and their owners, and I never really cared for whatever was at stake. This wouldn’t have been a problem had there been more (or better) gags, but Wreck-It Ralph ends up failing to find a convincing identity of its own.

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Finally, just to add a bit more variety, I saw Al Murray perform at Balham’s Comedy Festival. I was slightly wary going in, as the general consensus seems to be that many of the fans Murray has acquired on his Pub Landlord’s progression to arena tours are there to laugh with the character rather than at him. All such highfalutin’ nonsense goes out of the window once the man takes the stage though - everyone on the front few rows gets a battering (particularly the policeman - almost enough to make even the staunchest Guardian reader feel sorry for him), as do the Greeks, the Scots, the bankers, all young talent show wannabes and pretty much everyone else really.

Murray plays the crowd like a fiddle throughout, but much of the show consists of properly thought-out material, both cleverly constructed and dextrously delivered - the denunciation of the EU in particular is a marvellous torrent of invective-laced facts. Although of course, as he would say, it’s more complicated than that.

This post is up far too late as the festival finished last week, but judging from this year’s impressive line-up  it’ll be worth making a note in your diary for next year, or whatever people do with fancy calendars on their phone tablets or what-have-yous these days.

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