Category: Writing Wordshop
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Golden lads and girls
So David Bowie is dead at 69, of cancer (I guess you could say, cigarettes don’t kill people, smoking does). I don’t know about you, but I look at the story and – even as I register, oh gosh, it’s David Bowie this time! – go 69, eh, a little close for comfort. It’s the […]
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Sixty-ish
For his sixtieth birthday my wife Roberta gave our good friend Boyd a book (I put Rob’s name there in full for the rhythm of the sentence). Appropriately enough the volume, a memoir on his sixtieth year (‘is this the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end,’ Toronto author Ian Brown evidently […]
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‘Amy’ distilled
Whatever circle of hell the jazz singer Amy Winehouse may have descended to, the documentary ‘Amy’ puts you right there with her, voyeur, watching. It’s an uncomfortable feeling. Observing the opportunists and piranhas circling – her drug-riddled boyfriend/husband, her creepy dad, the mobs of unfeeling, slavering paparazzi – as fame and addiction slowly swallow her is […]
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‘The Danish Girl’ distilled
The Danish Girl, set in Copenhagen and Paris in the 1920s and based on a true story, relates the travails of a married painter who decides he is a woman, and undergoes a sex change operation. Beautifully shot, wrenching. The universal in the particular. Director: Tom Hooper. Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander Verdict: Strong stuff. Excellent. […]
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‘Youth’ distilled
Set in a Swiss spa, ‘Youth’ focuses, if that is the word, on the philosophizing and reminiscences of two elderly creatives, one a composer, played by Michael Caine, the other a film director, played by Harvey Keitel. Director: Paolo Sorrentino Verdict: Artifice not art. Pretentious; lacks sparkle. Tap water.
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‘Mr Turner’ distilled
The past is another country, and Mike Leigh shows us this is about more than differences in costume and manners. The world that JMW Turner, in this terrific portrayal, inhabits and paints is different from ours – none of our cold scientific rationalism, or post- post-modernism here. But then – this is not history, or […]
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‘Scrooged’ distilled
A ‘Christmas’ re-run of the 1988 Bill Murray movie. The premise: the guy making a movie of Scrooge is a bit of a Scrooge himself. Supposed to be hilarious. It isn’t. Verdict: Asinine. Cost me two hours of my life. Vomit
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A call from Mr Bell
In the immortal words of Alexander Graham Bell – ‘Mr Watson – come here – I want to see you.’ Continuing his experiments in Brantford, says Wikipedia, “Bell brought home a working model of his telephone. On August 3, 1876, from the telegraph office in Mount Pleasant five miles (eight km) away from Brantford, Bell […]
The View From Here 