The shoes do/A kind of voodoo

[altariel]

Saw the recently restored version of The Red Shoes at the NFT. Glorious, if grim. By the end you're hoping Vicky will strangle Julian with one shoe and shove the other up Lermentov's smoking jacket... Alas no. Patriarchy, tsk.

I thought Doctor Who was silly, but hadn't been expecting otherwise. My favourite bit - apart from the Cribmeister in the cafe - was Obama. Next week: the Daltonator.

Comments

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Yes, that, about The Red Shoes: alternatively, and before things reached that stage, couldn't they have taken all the simmering tension into a threesome?

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Ha, yes.

I bought Katie Roiphe's "Uncommon Arrangements" as a Xmas present for a friend and was wondering what you thought of it?

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I was so profoundly annoyed by interviews with and articles by Roiphe about that book that I struck it off any list of mine it might have been on. I posted about Roiphe in this context here. She was also irritating about abortion and generally has a rather poor track record on informed analysis about women and their position.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I suspect you'd dislike it very much: there's a lot of description of her subjects' emotions without direct reference to sources. I guess she's done it this way to prevent overloading the text with citations, but it does mean that the reader doesn't know what is evidence and what is Roiphe's own conjecture.

The opening and closing sections are a pretty self-involved discussion of what marriage means to her. She also tries to make a (weak) case that the book isn't high-class celebrity gossip. Because at the end of the day it is gossip, it's just got more words in it than Heat magazine.

I thought she did a good job of drawing connections between chapters and the various people therein, and the acid commentary of Virginia Woolf throughout is a treat. I thought it was a sympathetic treatment of Katherine Mansfield, and the chapter on Vera Brittain, George Catlin, and Winifred Holtby was fascinating. Most of the material was new to me, and hence interesting, but I doubt it would be new to you.

By good fortune, I found a copy of Victoria Glendinning's bio of Rebecca West in Oxfam just after Christmas, so I picked that up as an extra present for my friend.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

I rather liked Julian, because the scene I've always remembered is the one where they're out somewhere, having a perfect day, and he fantasises about how one day, years in the future, he'll tell people "Yes, I knew Vicky Page, and as I recall we were very much in love..." I was fascinated by the idea that one could be so much in love and yet imagine it having passed (whether he actually believed in that outcome or not); I suppose I was so used to the ideal of "happy ever after" that it was a revelation to think love could be so strong and yet transitory.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

That is a particularly lovely scene. My patience with Julian decreases as tbd film goes on.

[azalaisdep.livejournal.com]

The Cribmeister in the cafe rocked. Though really if it weren't for John Simm's uncanny ability to channel psychopathic demonic evil the entire episode would have been stuffed. (The bit at the end of the Confidential where they show you the 40-plus costume changes JS had to do in an afternoon to pull off the final few minutes of the show is hilarious.)

And while on the trail of the Currently Ubiquitous Mr Tennant... did you see Hamlet??

[happytune.livejournal.com]

I was just about to ask this! I missed it at the theatre, and wondered what you thought about it?

[azalaisdep.livejournal.com]

Looking forward to hearing A's views on the film adaptation, as she saw it at the Courtyard with me! greylin loved Illuminations' take on it, and I must admit so did I...

[happytune.livejournal.com]

Great review. I thought he was really superb in the TV version, and as has been said, fantastic that Beeb chose to programme this. I only realised at the end that I had forgotten about Tennant as the Doctor right from the first scene in which he appeared - he was totally unrecognisable.

[azalaisdep.livejournal.com]

The other, really silly, thing that struck me as soon as he appeared in the jeans-and-tshirt ensemble was "It's true! Telly really does make people look fatter!" Because, if you can believe it, he's even skinnier in the not-very-much-flesh; at Stratford (where, admittedly, he'd been charging around on stage five times a week for months) that combo was hanging off him so he looked like a coathanger. An unbelievably hot coathanger, but nonetheless.

[happytune.livejournal.com]

LOL! Yes, given that he looked slightly drawn in the mourning suit ensemble in the opening scene, he must have been positively skeletal on stage.

[azalaisdep.livejournal.com]

It was one of the things which made it totally possible to believe in him as an emo adolescent - he has the physique of a lanky 17-year-old...

[communicator.livejournal.com]

here's immortalradical's review of the TV version.

I haven't seen the TV version yet.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Haven't had a chance to watch it on telly yet, but my review of seeing it with Az is here:
http://altariel.livejournal.com/403904.html

[azalaisdep.livejournal.com]

And mine (Shameless Self Pimping) is here...

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Haven't seen Hamlet yet. We're away till New Year, so might wait till we can see it in the big telly.

[azalaisdep.livejournal.com]

It would repay Big Telly viewing, I think. And it's not like you're dying to find out how it ends ;-)

[katlinel.livejournal.com]

I thought Doctor Who was silly

Is that a bad thing?

I totally failed to recognise Dalton's voice.

I think I like your version of the ending of The Red Shoes. Tsk to patriarchy indeed.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I would have liked more of Cribbins, Donna and the Silver Cloak, and slightly less running around shouting, "No!" But I can imagine that in my head.

[katlinel.livejournal.com]

I think the version in my head consists almost entirely of Wilf and the Doctor talking in the cafe, with occasional shots of John Simms in mad mode and some of Donna slowly beginning to remember (and no pointless Barry Boyfriend) and The Silver Cloak texting the latest to Wilf, which texts he shows to the Doctor while they continue to talk about death and thought and memory.