Critic Cal

CARRION COMFORT Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be. But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?     Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear. Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod, Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer. Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.  Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918...

Ayoade et al. 's adaptation of  The Double  is set in what one might describe as a futuristic post-near-apocalypse version of the 1980s, as though something had gone terribly wrong in that decade and the world had frozen in dim dilapidation, indefinitely served by the same clunky, temperamental technology and entertained by the same particularly fuzzy sci-fi TV shows and bleak electro-pop. Along with some satisfyingly jarring images, a tense and (mostly) suitably restrained script, a sound-track which unsubtly but cleverly gives the whole the feel of an oncoming train, and some proficiently well-meaning-but-chronically-anxious fumbling on the part of Jesse Eisenberg , it does almost as good a job as the book of conjuring up a sense of claustrophobic loneliness and paranoid anticipation of disaster, as the protagonist finds his life usurped by a doppelgänger -- a man physically identical but temperamentally antipodal to himself, with all the self-assurance, social nous and...

Disney's  Frozen  is a powerful allegory about mental illness and the propensity of sufferers to shut down to the outside world ... No, wait, it's a parable about puberty and coming of age, and the temporary distance and awkwardness that it generates between family members ... Oh, or is it about the challenges of bringing up exceptionally gifted children, and the loneliness of mental superiority? ... Of course, it's really  a corrective on the damaging fairytale notions of romantic love ... It's a polemic against reductive and oppressive notions of womanhood, transforming the 2-dimensional Disney Princess into an aspirational fully-rounded smart, feisty and flawed character ... It's a celebration of sexual liberation ... A metaphor for coming out as gay ... An admonitory yarn about climate change ... A sympathetic observation on the discomforts of Raynaud's disease ... In short, it is a very human, very simple, very beautiful (IMO) story which most people c...

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...