Politics, Pop, Books, Movies
'What follows is not really a thriller, any more than a Francis Bacon painted society portraits. Adapted from Jonathan Ames book, it does to Liam Neeson revenge-flicks roughly what Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver did to the Death Wish movies: it breaks the genre up and boils it down to a lean 85 minutes, driven by a central performance by Phoenix as bruised and bloody and tender as sirloin. If the test of great acting is to make it physically impossible to imagine the actor in any other role than the one you were watching, then Phoenix here nuzzles up to the greats. He acts with his entire body, the way the silent movie actors used to, starting with his shoulders, hunched like a grave-digger’s, and moving down a white, pudgy paunch, lacerated with scars and slack with self-neglect, as if the harm he doles out to others is just overflow from the harm he dishes out to himself. Some actors make you worry for what they will do to others. Dangling himself idly from a train platform, Phoenix makes you worried for what he will do to himself. Sometimes suicidal is more dangerous that homicidal. The performance is, in other words, everything Ryan Gosling thought his was in Drive and wasn’t. The violence, when it comes, is almost a relief from from the twitchy flashbacks— images of asphyxiation from to Joe’s childhood, and his experience in the Gulf war — that assail him like panic attacks. Ramsay’s powers of obliquity come into their during Joe’s one-man invasion of a brothel, shot and edited using only grey security cam footage showing Joe’s path: a door opens on one floor, a hammer blurs in the corridor of another, a body crumples in a third and so on, all to the sound of Rosie & the Originals ‘Angel Baby’ on the soundtrack, interrupted with every cut. What Ramsay seems to understand as perhaps no filmmaker has since John Boorman in Point Break , is that what makes violence violent is not physics it’s internal thermodynamics: the damage done to souls not bodies. It’s a film about damage.'— from my Sunday Times review
' In another filmmaker’s hands —Almodovar, say — Marina might have been a tower of righteous, high-heeled indignation, delivering one stinging retort after another. Lelio’s has loosed such a force of nature before, in his 2013 breakthrough film, Gloria, about a divorced 28-year-old on the single circuit, determined not to go gently into the good night. Here, he takes the opposite tack, with mixed results. We don’t see Marina’s grief for a long while. Instead, she takes out her anger on a small punching bag that hangs by the door of her apartment and numbly walks the streets of Santiago, seeing Orlando everywhere. It is a fiercely internalized performance — the anti Almodovar — Vega’s expression hovering between quiet dignity, sublimated anger and a look of steely defiance that is, in turn, further provocation to the outside world. There is a thread of masochism here — Marina’s refusal to explain or defend herself edging into something more belligerent and self-martyring. When bruises on Orlando’s body draw the attention of a detective (Amparo Noguera) who specializes in sex offenses, Marina skips appointments and obfuscates, and thus has to endure a humiliating physical examination. “How should I treat him?” whispers the medical orderly as if she were not standing right there. This is awful but it was avoidable: the detective was initially sympathetic. You may lose count of the number of scenes in which Marina is taunted, insulted, threatened, roughed up, or labelled a monster, with Vega rising above it all, a wronged saint, impassive and long-suffering. The conception of her character is at times only a trifle more nuanced than that punching ball.' — from my Sunday Times review
' The casting of Robbie is not the only debt the film owes Scorsese. Directed with winking brio by Gillespie, who made Lars and the Real Girl, and told in mockumentary form, featuring multiple unreliable narrators, a cast of gotta-love-em white trash sociopaths, and a script that would bring a blush to the cheek of a sailor, the film is essentially Goodfellas on ice. And if that sounds like fun, it is, for most of the time. The script, by Steve Rogers, performs a balletic reversal of audience sympathies around the issue of class. In a sport dominated by lissom, long-limbed pixie-figures whose smiles seemed stuck in a fifties time-warp, Harding was the ugly duckling, picked on by the press as “white trash” and “old Thunder Thighs”: a hardscrabble, rough-edged scrapper with garish blue eye-shadow and home made costumes who stubbed out cigarettes on the blade of her skates, strutted out onto the ice and nailed perfect arabesques to an accompaniment of ZZ Top, hurling expletives at any judges who docked her marks for deportment. What’s not to love: a world-class female sociopath to root for the same way we did De Niro’s wise-guys in all those Scorsese films. Robbie is slimmer and prettier than the stocky Harding — she’s a swan playing a duckling — but she digs in and gets something of her fierce survival instincts. A street fighter raised in trailer home in Portland, Oregon, by her viper of a mother LaVona (Allison Janney), Harding is pushed onto the ice aged three, while mom sits on the sidelines, sucking down whiskey and swearing like a tevedore. “You skate like a graceless bull dyke!” LaVona screams, and later, at competitive events, slips twenties to spectators to do the screaming for her, to sharpen her daughter’s edge. It’s a phenomenal turn by Janney, an exultant, extended riff on her chain-smoking pageant mom in Drop Dead Gorgeous, without vanity, redeeming virtue or apology, and horribly funny. The bluntness of La Vona’s cruelty jolts you into shocked laughter, despite yourself. Refusing to give her daughter a bathroom break, forcing her to pee herself, LaVona barks, “ skate wet!” — from my Sunday Times review
“A master-class‑–immersive, detailed, meticulous, privileged inside-dope… Tom Shone is the king of critical cool.” — Craig Raine “An up-close and personal look at one of Hollywood’s most successful directors…This erudite book is packed with extensive, expansive discussions about Nolan’s films… insights into what he was trying to accomplish with each film; and the movies, directors, books, art, architecture, and music that influenced him…. Fans of Nolan’s films will find this revealing book invaluable.” — Kirkus , starred review
"A sweet and savvy page-turner of a valentine to New York, the strange world of fiction, the pleasures of a tall, full glass and just about everything else that matters" — Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story and Absurdistan
"A cocktail with bite. I downed it in one" — Helen Fielding, author of Bridget Jones's Diary
"A deft, witty satire which casts its sharp eye over the absurdities of addiction, recovery and contemporary New York" — Marcel Theroux, author of Far North
“Laugh-out-loud funny” — Toby Young, author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
"Tom Shone's superb debut is a wise and witty examination of literary celebrity, Anglo-American mystification and the cult of recovery. Shone's prose sparkles: his humor detonates smart-bombs of truth" — Stephen Amidon, author of Human Capital
“A cutting comic debut” — The Sunday Times
“Clever, witty, acerbic, warm” — Geoff Nicholson, author of Footsucker
"A sharp, funny, and ultimately touching debut novel" — Library Journal Reviews
"One of the few novels set in Manhattan that gives you a true feel for the city” — James Wolcott, Vanity Fair
"A splash of cynicism, a dash of self-doubt, and a good measure of humour.... In the Rooms is an entertaining page-turner about humanity, with plenty of hilarity" — The Economist