Critic Cal

Having become greedy for  Tolstoy  after a few appetising short stories, but not feeling quite hungry enough to stomach all 560,000 words of  War and Peace , I settled on  Anna Karenina  as a middle course. I'm about halfway through, and there's this scene which nicely sets the, er, scene for my latest attempt at some calendar-specific reflection: Country land-owner Levin is preparing for his long longed-for marriage to Kitty. He has cheerfully parried all of his bachelor friends' jibes about the hindrances and botherments of wives, and, left alone, muses peacefully on his future happiness, until...   'But do I know her ideas, her wishes, her feelings?’ some voice suddenly whispered to him. The smile died away from his face, and he grew thoughtful. And suddenly a strange feeling came upon him. There came over him a dread and doubt—doubt of everything.   ‘What if she does not love me? What if she’s marrying me simply to be married? What if ...

The title of this post is guaranteed to make at least one person extremely nervous (should she see it) and any number of others darkly curious...but I confess outright that it is little more than shameless clickbait. I will be introducing a mother-in-law eventually, but not my one (not that I would struggle to find lots of wonderfully positive things to say, but I suspect that she would prefer to be spared even that). I was rather intrigued, the other day, to stumble on the concept of the Bechdel test  -- a set of criteria for assessing gender bias in works of fiction. To pass, a film or book must have 1) at least two women in it, 2) who talk to each other, 3) about something besides a man. The idea (and the name) come from a 1985 comic strip by American cartoonist  Alison Bechdel : a character who has made this the guiding principle for her own cinema-going laments that the last film she was able to see was Alien..."the two women in it talk to each other about ...

On the subject of unsubtle Christological allusions in contemporary culture: Sherlock . No prizes for guessing where I'm going here... At the end of Season 2, Sherlock dies -- under dramatic, self-sacrificial circumstances. John Watson sees the whole thing, and is devastated. There can be no doubt: in order to save his friends from Moriarty's malevolent scheming, Sherlock throws himself off the roof of St Bart's, where John is (almost) the first on the scene of his lifeless corpse, and even checks his (absent) pulse before the hospital staff intervene and carry the body away. The episode ends with John and Mrs. Hudson standing sorrowfully by the grave, longing (but with no cause to hope) that it might not be so. Two years elapse before the start of Season 3, and John has returned to his old life. He no longer lives at 221B Baker Street, and has lost touch with Mrs. Hudson -- not through lack of affection, he just can't stand to be reminded. He has dealt with ...

It's been a few years since I last watched The Matrix but Switch's quietly horrified "Not like this" is a long-running household meme for reasons which I have entirely forgotten. The line is from the scene where Cypher exposes himself as a traitor to the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar and, having liaised with the Agents to set up a trap, and shot Tank and Dozer on the ship, begins to pull the plugs on those who are still inside the Matrix. Trinity, on the other end of the phone line, watches helplessly as her friends drop down in front of her... "By the way, if you have something terribly important to say to Switch, I'd suggest you say it now," he taunts. All this, in exchange for the promise of a life of blissful ignorance inside the Matrix. As it does many other aspects of the Christian 'story', the film captures the gut-wrenching bleakness of betrayal pretty poignantly: one of their own ...one with whom they have lived and eaten and bravely co...

Oh! the inundation of triumphant screenshots: four-by-four arrays of cool-grey bevelled tiles, warming up to rust and cheeky crimson, dawning -- finally! -- victorious in glorious sunshine yellow. If you haven't 2048 ed yet, you're nothing  in today's world, even should you boast whole hosts of grand post-nominals. Or so it would seem from Facebook. For those who've been passed by by this particular phenomenon, 2048 is an online, single-player, sliding block puzzle game, the aim of which is to collide (and consequently additively combine) matching tiles displaying powers of two until the value 2048 (= 2^11) is reached. It's all the rage. At least, it was a week ago...at the time I start to write it is already on the wane, and by the time I finish (in a few months if my recent rate of composition's anything to go by) we'll doubtless be several new-fangled iterations down the line, our Facebook feeds populated by some hybrid whatsit -- virtual cultivation o...

There are some dicey moments in the second of  Stieg Larsson 's ' Millennium Trilogy ' crime thrillers. The one that really  got me was when his arguably- too -brilliant social-misfit-hacker protagonist Lisbeth Salander   finally  (after several weeks of intermittent, amateur endeavour) solves the riddle of Fermat's Last Theorem  -- a conjecture which famously remained unproven for 358 years after the tantalising claim by the eponymous theorist , scrawled in the white space of his copy of the ancient Greek mathematical text Arithmetica , that he knew a proof but that it was too large to fit in the margin. Salander began her advance towards the house, moving in a circle through the woods. She had gone about a hundred and fifty metres when suddenly she stopped in mid-stride.  In the margin of his copy of Arithmetica, Pierre de Fermat had jotted the words I have a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow ...

Mr. W's had me watching the oh-so-disturbingly funny ' Inside No. 9 ', a series of disconnected black comedy shorts made by the men what done ' The League of Gentlemen '. It's all mindgames and murders, domestic intruders and sinister secrets and aargh. Tends to be that I enjoy it in the moment and regret it in the middle of the nightmare-riddled night... So the other evening, I opted for the tried-and-tested ' Cabin Pressure ' remedy, and drifted off to the dulcet, charmingly hi-lariously crafted tones of Douglas, Martin, Carolyn and Arthur. Indeed, my sleep was much the sweeter for this I'm-too-old-for-a-bedtime-story-but-radio-4-does-pretty-much-the-same-job stratagem. Except, part way through I was distracted by an onset of thoughtfulness, prompted by the following interlocution between the sharp-tongued Carolyn and her cheerfully be-leagured new-found love interest, Herc: Carolyn: Oh, don't tell me you're a vegetarian.  Herc: ...