Musings on art and modern audiences

  When Harry Met Sally : romance done right Never underestimate the power of a well-written romance. It’s no big secret that When Harry Met Sally is firmly up there with The Notebook and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days as a classic autumn rom-com. I have to say it’s one of my personal favourites, so avoiding biases or romanticisations are strictly off the table today, sorry not sorry.  When Harry Met Sally has some of those terribly cliché tropes, it’s true, but it’s definitely not a trashy romance by any means. Predictably, the enemies-to-friends-to-lovers trope is doing a lot of work in this film, and it’s also very much a slow burn romance (nearly thirteen years of slow burn, but who’s counting?). It’s a film that is very much consumable for lovers of the trashy rom-com, but it’s also a genuinely complex and mature story of two people growing as individuals.  Audience satisfaction from When Harry Met Sally comes from the fact that both characters are developed in the...

  Barbie : the pink revolution The moment you’ve all been waiting for has finally arrived. Here’s my take on Greta Gerwig’s Barbie .  What can I say about Barbie that hasn’t already been said? As I’m writing this, two people at the table next to me are discussing the film, beginning with a joke about Ken’s Mojo Dojo Casa House, continuing to discuss the merits of critiquing patriarchy in the film by making it into a farcical obsession with horses.  Many people have rightly noted that this is a film for everyone, not just women. People have gone on to say that perhaps men ought to be paying more attention to this film than women. I’d like to say I wish men were paying more attention to this film. Plenty of men have seen Barbie , not so many have thought very deeply about it.  I guess the obvious way into a conversation about Barbie which might interest men involves everyone’s favourite doll, Ken. Ken gives male audiences a means to understand both the female experie...

  Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game : Unsung heroes in our everyday lives The 2022 film Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game is by no means a major blockbuster, but I’d say it’s the kind of film you stumble upon and fall in love with unexpectedly. Pinball follows the story of Roger Sharpe, a young journalist from Chicago working in New York for GQ magazine, who has a great love of pinball. When he discovers pinball’s been criminalised in New York, he’s devastated, and wants to use his skills as a writer to educate people on the game’s intricacies - it’s engineering, it’s design, and so on. Roger’s work on pinball was instrumental in its decriminalisation, which on paper seems like a bizarre but wonderful life legacy, but alongside this achievement, Pinball is also a story about Roger and his life. Roger meets and falls in love with his wife Ellen (and her son Seth), and tackles the complicated emotions around those relationships, building a family together, whilst his love for ...

  Much Ado About Nothing : Catherine Tate and David Tennant What is so appealing and entertaining about the romance between Beatrice and Benedick at the heart of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing ? It’s clear there’s a fine line between loving and hating when our lovers are so keen to hide their respective interest in each other with unbridled disdain, turning their words into walls to deflect their own feelings. But really, here are two people who couldn’t be more well-matched if they tried (and they certainly try). They match each other in wit, word for word, bite for bite. No one is clever enough for Beatrice but Benedick and no one is as unafraid of Beatrice as Benedick. A match made in heaven?  Another aspect of the play that might appeal to us is the element of genre. Being a Shakespearean comedy we can approach the play feeling comfortably confident that we’ll get a happy ending. We enjoy the next two hours of verbal sparring between Beatrice and Benedick so much bec...

  The Picture of Dorian Gray : ‘All art is quite useless’ Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel obsessed with the idea of art, and its power over us. How much power does art inherently have? How much power do we afford art? How does art have power over our lives and identities? And then in turn, what does The Picture of Dorian Gray tell us about art? These are questions I fear are too wide, too vague, and too unanswerable to tackle in one post. Oscar Wilde’s preface to his novel tells us plenty about art, but in the end leaves us as confused as ever, as if the whole point is that there is no clear lesson to be taken from art. I think I’d agree with that. If art had only one concrete lesson to teach us, we wouldn’t give it the time of day. But instead, here we are.  The preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray is utterly captivating, and utterly confusing. The apparent uselessness and insufficiencies of art are made abundantly clear in the preface, and those ideas...