Take that, Pat Kenny

In China, suburbs are populated with gated, self-contained communities. Buyers choose from all inclusive lifestyle estates with Anglicized (and intentionally bourgeois) names like “Latte Town, Glory Vogue, Yuppie International Garden, Wonderful Digital Jungle, and–cutting to the chase–Top Aristocrat.”

From a review by Dave Atkins of The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World by Thomas J. Campanella.

There are many strange things about Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, but one thing that bothered me at the time was that despite being set in New York, the street scenes sometimes looked strangely un-New-Yorky, and not just because they were filmed on a studio set in Pinewood. Jon Ronson’s recent documentary “Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes” has a partial explanation: Kubrick had thousands of photos taken for the purpose of research, but all of them were of London streets. Ronson discovers this when he finds dozens of photos taken on Upper Street (see here, 5 minutes in), down the road from his house and from mine, and which I walked up and down the length of today. It’s a bit uncanny to see the pubs, shops and cafes you know so well turning up in the files of the world’s most famous film director. What I don’t get is why he didn’t just have somebody go take photos of New York.

It’s a pretty enjoyable documentary overall. The boxes reveal Kubrick’s quirks and obsessions to be alternately alarming and endearing: the bizarre memos instructing a minion to phone up the Met Office to ascertain the barometric pressure for 4am the previous Friday night, the cardboard boxes he had custom-made because the lids on the ready-mades were never ‘just right’, the meticulously scrutinsed newspaper advertisements for his films from around the globe, the accumulation of vast quantities of Rymans stationary (according to Jan Harlan, he would go frequently “go to Ryman’s and see if they had something new”). And if you’re one of the thousands of fans or cranks who wrote letters to Stanley Kubrick, you’ll be glad to hear that he not only kept your letter but carefully filed it and made a note of your contact details in case he needed to ask you to check on a local cinema or perform some other favour. Amusingly, the only thing he didn’t keep was the outtakes from his films, which were incinerated.

Peter Bradshaw watches Mamma Mia! The Movie so we don’t have to:

Everything has been squeaky-cleaned up. It too has a feelgood wedding motif - but there is no irony, no heartache, certainly no paralysing illness, no dramatic plausibility, and weirdly, no hint that the characters know whose songs they are singing; there is no sense of perspective on the music. In Mamma Mia! Abba is everywhere and nowhere. This is Planet Abba or Abbaworld. The characters are forever dancing and smiling and bursting into Abba songs like Stepford cyborgs when you flip the secret panel behind their heads and press the Life-Affirming Behaviour button. An Abba instrumental is even used when the bride walks up the aisle, instead of Handel. And nobody ever says: “Oh for Gawd’s sake, just for a change, can we sing something by the Carpenters?” …

Mamma Mia! ties itself in knots trying to shoehorn in every single famous number, and each time, the beginning of an Abba song triggered in me a Pavlovian stab of pleasure, cancelled after a millionth of a second by a backwash of rage that this soulless panto has done nothing to earn or even understand the good feeling.

Some songs are easier to incorporate than others. Waterloo is saved for the closing credits, perhaps because screenwriter Catherine Johnson didn’t grasp its metaphorical quality, and that she would not in fact need a vast Napoleonic army to troop across the island. But there is one very famous Abba number which is entirely omitted. That is a crying shame. I have an idea for the way in which it could yet be included, should an extra scene be needed for the DVD. There’s a six-year-old boy on the island called Fernando, and caring Meryl Streep suspects that poor little Fernando could be hearing-impaired. She sits the little lad down, takes out a set of drums and bangs them close to his ears; with tears pouring down her cheeks, she sings to him a single, heart-rending question …

He puts his finger on the problem with most of these productions - the songs of the artist in question are everywhere, but there’s no sign of the artist or any songs by anyone else. This was perhaps the crowning failure of Julie Taymor’s jaw-droppingly bad Across the Universe: it was based on the songs of the Beatles but set in a version of the 1960s from which the Beatles, who did more than anyone to define the cultural consciousness of that decade, were entirely missing - as were any of the other leading musical lights of the time, though some of them were dealt the additional insult of being crassly impersonated by one or other of the movie’s characters, with the sole black male actor forced to embody the diluted essence of everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Marvin Gaye at some point or another. If the intention of the film-makers was to permanently erase any imprinted nostalgia felt for the 60s by anyone who wasn’t sentient at the time they did a bang-up job.

Arctic Economics, courtesy of long-time economics blogger Ben Muse. It’s pretty good, too - I particularly like the post about a company called Skyhook International promoting dirigibles as the Arctic transportation mode of the future.

The BBC has a delightful story today. It is either the basis for a sit-com or a tear-jerker movie of triumph against the odds. Whatever it is, there’s wrestling involved so it’s sure to be a hit.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2008/0701/1214857997611.html