I was Looking At the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky

I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky, John Adams (music) June Jordan (libretto), dirs. Kerry Michael and Matthew Xia, Theatre Royal Stratford East, 2^nd -17^th July.

In 1995, with two mighty contemporary operas to his name, John Adams completed his first ever musical theatre piece for the Broadway stage, apparently inspired by his life-long love of West Side Story.  The result was the concisely titled I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky, and has almost nothing in common with West Side Story. It did, however, receive a solid revival at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East earlier this month.

So. There are seven Californians, all in their mid-twenties and all in emotional turmoil. Rick loves Tiffany, Tiffany loves Mike and Mike is confused about his sexuality.  Consuelo loves Dewain, but he’s back in court for another trivial misdemeanour. And David just can’t seem to get Leila to give him a chance.  Then comes an earthquake that shakes them out of their status quo, and forces them to reconsider their lives.

Film review - Alice in Wonderland

Alice in Wonderland 3D, dir. Tim Burton, Walt Disney Pictures, cert. PG, on general release.

Alice in Wonderland feels like a film made by one of its own characters: amiably quirky, visually splendid and unusual, but characterised by naivety and some very eccentric choices. Oddest and most ill-advised of all of director Tim Burton’s decisions has to be his attempt to position the film as neither an adaptation nor continuation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, but as an uneasy halfway house, a sequel that doesn’t know that it’s a sequel. The adventures from Carroll’s books are dismissed in the opening scenes of the film as nightmares experienced by the young Alice. Then sixteen years later, running away from her engagement party, she finds herself once again in Wonderland. We’re then treated to a mix of scenes straight from the original (the whole drink me/eat me episode is lifted more or less directly from the page) and a new plot based around Carroll’s nonsense poem Jaberwocky. It makes for a bit of a mess, and the resulting structure is lacking in any tension whatsoever; we have ninety minutes of being asked ‘Can Alice rise to the challenge’ and ‘Were those dreams real?’ before we discover – who’d have thought it? - that yes, Alice can rise to the challenge and those dreams were real after all.

Coupled with this narrative tedium is the unfortunate truth that this Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is simply not an interesting character. Actually, simply is the operative word, since in an effort to preserve the naive curiosity of Carroll’s books, Burton has created a 19-year-old character who acts with the intelligence of a slow 10-year-old. When her mother complains of having only white flowers, Alice’s suggestion that she paint them red is meant to be a charming reference to the Queen of Hearts doing just this in the source material, but instead it just hints at a troubling history of mental retardation. Consequently, it’s hard to really care about her predictable journey of self-discovery.

TV review - I Believe In...

I Believe In... BBC Three, three episodes featuring Joe Swash, Danny Dyer and Jodie Kidd, series producer Jacqui Wilson, available on BBC iplayer.

"Is believing in something that most people find ridiculous really that stupid?" asks Danny Dyer, at the start of an hour of breathtaking inanity. After watching this short series of three celebrity poppycockumentaries, you can’t help but answer this question with a definitive and resounding ‘Yes’, before going on to question why the BBC actively sought the three most irritating and ineloquent personalities to front them.

So: Joe Swash believes in ghosts, Danny Dyer believes in UFOs and Jodie Kidd believes in miracles; they are given an hour each, not to discuss why they believe, to engage with the evidence for and against their beliefs or to look into the history of the subject, but instead to travel around meeting a somewhat random selection of other believers, remaining gormless throughout.

Let’s ignore the fact that their beliefs are transparently moronic and that the token skeptics are underused and selectively quoted; this is to be expected. What is unforgiveable is how weakly structured these investigations are. Each programme starts with the fool of the week saying something along the lines of “I know there are a load of cynics, and I’m not a hardcore believer, but I just have a gut feeling that there’s something bigger out there.” Then, after a tedious hour, they look into the lens and say, “At the end of the day, I know there are a load of cynics, and I’m not a hardcore believer, but I just have a gut feeling that there’s something bigger out there.” Swash, Dyer and Kidd learn precisely nothing, haven’t the intellectual curiosity to ask any searching questions, and they never encounter anything convincing or even quirkily interesting. Ghost-believer Joe Swash, for example, tries to spend a night alone in an Edinburgh cave, and runs out not because he sees a ghost, but because he thinks he might be about to meet a ghost. Thrilling TV.

Jodie Kidd: I Believe in Miraclesis probably the worst of the bunch, partly because it doesn’t even discuss miracles for the most part. Instead it turns out be about various con artists (faith healers, crystal therapists, shamans) who offer remedies aimed at promoting a vaguely defined new age sense of wellness. It should have been called Jodie Kidd: I Believe People Who Are in Some Way Ill Sometimes Get Better After a Reasonable Period of Time Has Elapsed. There’s one woman who claims to have experienced a sudden remission from terminal cancer, but the other purported miracles are staggeringly unimpressive.

The very end of the show, for example, includes an autistic boy whose parents think that some time spent riding horses might have a positive effect on his condition. And sure enough, the boy enjoys it, it helps him relax, and opens him up to a new experience; it’s unquestionably therapeutic. But it really doesn’t qualify as a miracle. A miracle is someone walking on water, or coming back from the dead or being respected after doing Celebrity Big Brother. Or Jodie Kidd speaking for thirty seconds without you wanting to punch her in the face.

She really doesn’t come across well in her programme. There’s a hilarious episode in which a Nepalese shaman predicts (by performing an elaborate ritual based on breaking open uncooked eggs and interpreting the contents) that she is about to get ill. Kidd then falls ill with Salmonella – you know, that one famously caused by handling or eating infected raw eggs. Blissfully unaware, she genuinely believes the shaman’s foresight to be miraculous. It’s that level of stupid we’re dealing with here. And it might just be my imagination, but there are times I swear you can hear the production team snigger from behind the camera.

VERDICT: Awful. I firmly believe that the I Believe In... series is part of a nefarious government scheme to so anesthetise us with bad TV that we’ll be too depressed to go out of the house and vote come the next election. The cynics will say there’s no scientific evidence for that claim, but I know it’s true.

BAFTA Nominations – Gentle analysis and very tentative predictions.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, James Cameron’s live action remake of Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest, aka lame CGI-fest Avatar, is top dog this year with a total of 8 BAFTA nominations. It undoubtedly deserves to win the Special Visual Effects award for mould-breaking work in that field, but it’s also fairly likely to clean up in all of the other technical categories – a shame, since its main competitor there, Neil Blomkamp’s intelligent and thrilling sci-fi drama District 9, is a much better film. And isn’t a remake of Fern Gully. Nevertheless, Avatar will probably walk away with Best Film and Best Director amongst its mountain of gold.

The most prevalent British film in the nominations list is An Education, which, though it hasn’t been a particularly visible force at the box office, is a compelling, funny and touching coming-of-age drama starring brilliant newcomer Carey Mulligan. And unlike many compelling, funny and touching coming-of-age dramas, it isn't a saccharine-powered schmaltz machine. Like Avatar, it’s managed to pick up 8 nominations, though one of these is the faintly patronising ‘Outstanding British Film’, and another is Best Make-up, which – whilst it’s very important to recognise the important work done by these skilled artisans etc. etc. – is never going to get the general public particularly fired up. Mulligan, I think, might have a fair chance of taking away the Leading Actress prize, although the likelihood is that Meryl Streep (Julie and Julia) will repeat her Golden Globe success. An Education has also provided Alfred Molina with a Supporting Actor nod, and this will be a category worth watching: he’s up against not only the terrific Christian McKay (Me and Orson Welles) but also the sublime Christolph Waltz, the smiling Nazi villain from Inglourious Basterds. Each of these chaps would be a worthy recipient of the gong, but my money’s on Christoph Waltz.

The Original Screenplay category is interesting. Alongside Up¸ Inglorious Basterds and A Serious Man – all of which are screenplays constructed with tremendous skill and originality, whether you love or loathe the final movies (and I love all three) – can be found Jon Lucas and Scott Moore’s The Hangover, which has to be the least original piece of writing to make it to the big screen last year. It’s unclear why anyone would want to nominate The Hangover for anything, but what little humour appeared in the finished product lay in performances; its clumsy structure, lame jokes and supermodel-thin characterisation deserve no plaudits. That’s right, British Academy, I called it like it is – wanna fight about it?

I haven’t seen Up in the Air, so I can only guess as to whether it’s strong enough to be a serious contender for Best Film, but I don’t think it will cause Avatar fans any concern. It could lead George Clooney to victory as Best Leading Actor, but I’m not in a position to speculate. I can only base my opinion on the trailer, which is awful. Or at least half of it is: in the first half it seems to be a smart, slick comedy, accompanied by a great soundtrack and George Clooney at his most likeably cool; the second half seems to be a humourless, schmaltzy TV movie. Watch it for yourself – the change happens at about 01:33.

I haven’t seen any films in the foreign language category, so umm... let’s move on.

It’s nice to see my two favourite films of 2009, In The Loop and Moon, get a couple of nominations each, though it’s frustrating they were buried in the subset of ‘British’ categories – you know, the remedial awards for those backwards little filmmakers without American money who’ve also – bless them – managed to come up with little films all by themselves... Both films can hold their own against Hollywood flicks, and inventing special categories so that Brits get take away something seems a touch odd.

Which brings me to a short coda on a not entirely unrelated topic: last night at the National Television Awards, Stephen Fry in America was crowned ‘Best Star Travel Documentary’. Now, Stephen Fry deserves many more awards than he could possibly have time to accept in his lifetime, but look at that title: Best Star Travel Documentary. This type of absurd specificity is only surely necessary if there’s also a gong for ‘Second-best Stationary Documentary Presented by a Minor Celebrity who Doesn’t Quite Qualify as a Star Yet’. But there isn’t. There isn’t even an award for plain old vanilla ‘Best Documentary’, a prize which, incidentally, Stephen Fry in America was also good enough to have won. Other peculiarities included the category of ‘Most Popular Talent Show’, and Ant and Dec’s winning of the highly distinct awards ‘Most Popular Entertainment Programme’ and ‘Most Popular Presenter of an Entertainment Programme’. The ‘Ant and Dec Award for Being Ant and Dec’ presumably went to Paul O’Grady. At least the BAFTAs haven’t yet become quite this silly.

Film review - Nine

Nine, dir. Rob Marshall, The Weinstein Company, cert. 12A on general release.

Cinema and musical theatre can be uncomfortable bedfellows. Indeed, in the last decade we've endured such catastrophic train wrecks (I'm talking about you, The Producers, Phantom of the Opera, Rent), that one sometimes wonders if it's really worth trying. Beautiful, soaring poetry becomes cheesy twaddle when transferred to the screen, subtle theatre performers become hideous overactors in close-up, and a perfectly paced theatrical script can make for a tedious screenplay. And that's before you get to the seriously screwed-up stuff, like the sound of Pierce Brosnan singing.

Thankfully, Rob Marshall – director of 2003's solid cinematic rendering of Kander and Ebb musical Chicago – has a good feeling for the language of film, and once again proves himself a safe pair of hands with Nine, a worthy if not earth-shattering addition to the canon of film-musicals. Hardcore fans of the stage musical might be perturbed (well, actually they'll probably be apoplectic, the default setting for hardcore fans) to find that about half of Maury Yeston's original score has been excised, and the story jumbled about somewhat. It makes for better pacing, though, and just goes to show that a bit of careful butchery can be a lot more effective than slavish adherence to the original.


It's the mid-1960s, and Daniel Day-Lewis plays Guido Contini, a charismatic yet complex Italian film director who is suffering creative block just days away from beginning shooting on a new film. At the same time, he's having the sort of woman trouble you'd expect of someone so charismatic, complex and Italian. While he desperately tries both to write his script and to keep his wife (the excellent and lovely Marion Cotillard) from discovering his mistress (the marginally less excellent but even lovelier Penelope Cruz), he begins to conjure up visions. These fantasies of his dead mother, of himself as a young boy and of all the significant women in his life (each whom he idolises in a fairly creepy way), take the form of elaborate musical numbers. Here, Rob Marshall repeats his signature trick from Chicago, cutting between simultaneously unfolding parallel realities, one spoken and one musical, so that the drama never grinds to a halt to fit in a song.

It comes as no surprise that, throughout all this, Day-Lewis' performance is engaging and real, and he is able to make charming a somewhat unlikeable character. He brings genuine passion and energy to his singing, and if his voice isn't the most beautiful in the world, it's all the more compelling because of it. Indeed, acting trumps singing throughout the cast, and that's no bad thing.

The score itself is pleasant if unremarkable; only the cheerful anthem Be Italian (performed admirably by Fergie, with a surprisingly good full-chorus tambourine break) is really hummable. And the lyrics, whilst occasionally witty, are a little too on the nose for my liking.

Nine is an unusual musical, lacking the humour and vigour of Chicago, but at the same time not offering the psychological introspection of, say, Sweeny Todd either. I suspect it may have trouble finding an audience as a result. Where Mamma Mia recently had roaring success with menopausal women, who took their teenage daughters along for two hours of frothy escapist girl-power, Nine perhaps provides an opportunity for middle-aged dads to show their sons the lies, hypocrisy and barely concealed misogyny that make up a mid-life crisis: 'Look, son, this'll happen to you forty years, mark my... Oh my, isn't Penelope Cruz hot?'

VERDICT: Not exactly a toe-tapping triumph, but entertaining nevertheless.