Critic Cal

I wanted it to be  The Avengers  really .  Or that one  the other day with the sardonic raccoon and the slow-witted tree and the mixtapes. It was a bit optimistic, but -- too tired after an intense weekend cocktail of cleaning and serious reading to move or to try to think deeply -- I talked myself into  Captain America: The Winter Soldier . It was ... decent. Some nice thoughtful touches about the Information Age and the tensions between security and freedom, leadership and egalitarianism. And they have managed to make Steve Rogers a far more appealing and nuanced character than the all-American cliché I was apprehending. But ... it lacked the energy of the aforementioned Marvelous ensembles, and I did find myself a little fidgety at having surrendered my mental energies for two straight hours to moving images and noises that were only ... decent. It also re-raised, for me, another, far more significant objection. I am increasingly unimpressed by this idea that -- as long as it

Nah then, Freddy: look wh' y' gowin, deah. […] Theres menners f' yer! Te-oo banches o voylets trod into the mad. […] Ow, eez ye-ooa san, is e? Wal, fewd dan y' de-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel's flahrzn than ran awy athaht pyin. Will ye-oo py me f'them?  (Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion , Act I, George Bernard Shaw, 1912) Forget boxsets -- after-dinner read-throughs are the height of domestic entertainment. The latest production chez Whitnall was George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (named after the sculptor from Greek mythology whose most beautiful statue awakens to life).   In the play, a Professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins, accepts a bet to inculcate 'common', comically Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle with such refined speech and deportment that she is able to pass for a duchess in upper-class society. [1] As forewarned by his mother and his housekeeper, the success of this undertaking lands Eliza in somethi