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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