Musings on art and modern audiences

  The Rings of Power: a tragedy of franchise Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy is one of the best loved film adaptation franchises ever, and for many good reasons. Presumably if you’re reading this, you have some idea of The Lord of the Rings (and how brilliant it is), so I won’t go into details. Presumably if you’re reading this, you also have seen Amazon’s The Rings of Power series and have some Opinions . I’d like to preface this by stating that I have a heavy bias against Amazon’s series, but I will do my best to remain diplomatic (at great personal suffering).  The problem with The Rings of Power is not necessarily its writing (although the writing is pretty bad), but I think the main issue Lord of the Rings fans take with the show is that it doesn’t feel quite like the film trilogy. Whilst that’s a valid observation, just because the TV programme has a slightly different aesthetic doesn’t automatically make it bad, per se. There’s also a twenty-ish year ...

  Mad Max: Fury Road : A Sea of Lone Survivors Futuristic, post-apocalyptic fiction has the uncanny habit of making us think about what we really value in our lives. What are the essentials we need for human survival? What happens to our morals when we’re faced with a resource crisis? How might our relationships with each other change when we’re faced with desperate circumstances? Survival brings to the surface the essential forces of life and our relationships with each other. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so they say.  I’d like to say this post has come about in advance of the release of Furiosa in 2024, now in post-production, but to be honest, it’s because I’m really late to the club and have only just seen the film. Anyway, here’s my very belated take.  In a way, the simplicity of the film’s plot is important to its philosophy. As the audience follows the parallel, and increasingly intertwined, redemption arcs of Max and Furiosa, I think we have to qu...

  Henry V : English heroes in post-Brexit Britain I dread using the B-word, but I think it’s pretty unavoidable in a post about a play which is so concerned with national identity. Brexit has changed the identity of Britain, the UK, and the British Isles in unprecedented and irreversible ways. Post-Brexit Britain is highly anxious about its own status as a nation, especially since Great Britain as a geographical space consists of multiple nations themselves. Having recently watched a production of Henry V by Shakespeare’s Globe, the prominence of nationalist discourse is at the fore.  Nations are relatively new concepts in human understanding. They are not necessarily the organic and inalienable structures that we might perceive them to be. A person might identify as “British,” but “Britishness” is itself a fraught, complex, and hybrid idea. Britain is obviously made up of England, Scotland, and Wales, which in themselves are separate nations, but it’s perfectly acceptable fo...

Tár : Villains and victims of cancel culture I’m not sure how many people are actually aware of this but Lydia Tár isn’t a real person. It seems a strange thing to need to mention, but I think it does change the way we understand Tár . As a fictional film interested in modern issues like cancel culture, having a fictional protagonist (and a pretty unlikeable one at that), seems to do the film a disservice, once we realise she isn’t real.  The scenario proposed to the audience involves a woman in a position of power who is able to manipulate and dictate the directions of her colleagues’ careers, and the victims of her dominion. If the film is a solar system, Lydia Tár is the star relative to all her peers who orbit her, drawn to her. Rather than coming from the perspective of those without power, the film only gives us Tár’s perspective on events and people, and yet we still leave the film knowing very little about her interior self. Even then, the binaries of “victim” and “perpetra...

  His Dark Materials : Children, Animals, Dæmons The imaginations of children are one of this world’s wonders. Whether you like children or not, there’s no denying that some magic attends the mind of a child, and it’s kind of beautiful. What happens, then, when those children grow up, loving the stories they love, imagining those stories with the imagination of a child, and see those stories played out on a screen? Adapting literature for film or TV is always a delicate creative challenge, but when that literature has a special place in a person’s childhood, that pressure becomes even more massive. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is unequivocally one of my favourite book series, so there is a real bias behind this post, but the feelings of nostalgia and protectiveness which I approach adaptations of Pullman’s stories with are not exclusive to me - I’m certain others feel the same way about their own special book or story or series.  Children’s imaginations seem to...