Monthly culture: February 2019
Tuesday, March 5th, 2019 06:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranth01FEB19: How to Train Your Dragon 3: The Hidden World -- Greenwich Odeon
"Just keep flying until we find the end of the world."
I found this very affecting: Toothless is an especially feline dragon, thoroughly adorable, and the bond between him and Hiccup is a delight: it made me want to (re)read novels with human/animal partnerships. Beautiful graphics (which felt like a Roger Dean painting at times), surprisingly dark -- the villain is pretty scary -- and with a worryingly conservative, isolationist ending. I cried.
02FEB19: Burne-Jones, Tate Britain
A few pictures (for example Love Among the Ruins, Portrait of Katie Lewis, The Mermaid) that I hadn't seen before, though I grew up with a lot of Burne-Jones on my bedroom walls (prints liberated from a withdrawn library book). It was marvellous to be able to examine the stitching on the Pomona tapestry, even though this was not of course the work of the great artist himself but of a team of (mostly nameless) women employed to bring his vision to life. I'd never seen the panels in the Perseus sequence, either, and they are very striking in three dimensions. Have to say, though, that it all became rather ... bland after a while. The figures in his paintings all look rather out of it, dreamy or stoned or disinterested: the colours are always amazing, but I found the backgrounds more interesting than the foregrounds.
Also, the Graham Piano is ... not good. It embodies the worst excesses of Victoriana.
14FEB19: Hamilton, Palace Theatre
Third time (this one a matinee in the Grand Circle). Still good. I'm still noticing new things, like the father/son themes and echoes throughout.
15FEB19: Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Greenwich Picturehouse
Absolutely stunning performances from Melissa McCarthy ("I'm a 51-year-old woman who likes cats better than people") and Richard E. Grant ("I've no one to tell, all my friends are dead"). McCarthy plays Lee Israel, solitary lesbian author who can't get a contract for another book, so decides to make a living forging letters from famous writers. "I'm a better Dorothy Parker than Dorothy Parker." Her friend Jack Hock (a gay drug-dealer) aids and abets her. They get caught. The life-affirming final scene shows the healing power of KITTENS. Nice to see a film with two middle-aged gay leads, especially when both are portrayed as, well, past their best.
22FEB19: The Monstrous Child (Gavin Higgins, Francesca Simon), Linbury Theatre
I confess that Higgins' music is far, far too modern for my taste -- but what a fascinating production! The libretto (written by Francesca Simon, on whose novel the opera is based) is sparse and witty. And the staging is awesome: Hel (Marta Fontanals-Simmons, who has a glorious voice and neat mannerisms as well as glorious green hair) is imprisoned half-inside an ambulatory dunghill / hairball / tumour; Asgard is very brightly lit, with cuboid chunks of real ice dripping down in the heat of the lights as counterpoint to the music; Loki (played by Tom Randle, on whom I developed an immense crush as a result of his velvet-and-leather-clad Oberon in The Fairy Queen at the ENO) sports a flat cap and a copy of The Racing Post, and is thoroughly unlike any other interpretations of Loki that you may have seen recently.
Everyone is mean to Hel, even Baldr (the kindest of them all). And she is as bitter as one might expect.
Note: I have never seen a placenta in an opera before.
"Just keep flying until we find the end of the world."
I found this very affecting: Toothless is an especially feline dragon, thoroughly adorable, and the bond between him and Hiccup is a delight: it made me want to (re)read novels with human/animal partnerships. Beautiful graphics (which felt like a Roger Dean painting at times), surprisingly dark -- the villain is pretty scary -- and with a worryingly conservative, isolationist ending. I cried.
02FEB19: Burne-Jones, Tate Britain
A few pictures (for example Love Among the Ruins, Portrait of Katie Lewis, The Mermaid) that I hadn't seen before, though I grew up with a lot of Burne-Jones on my bedroom walls (prints liberated from a withdrawn library book). It was marvellous to be able to examine the stitching on the Pomona tapestry, even though this was not of course the work of the great artist himself but of a team of (mostly nameless) women employed to bring his vision to life. I'd never seen the panels in the Perseus sequence, either, and they are very striking in three dimensions. Have to say, though, that it all became rather ... bland after a while. The figures in his paintings all look rather out of it, dreamy or stoned or disinterested: the colours are always amazing, but I found the backgrounds more interesting than the foregrounds.
Also, the Graham Piano is ... not good. It embodies the worst excesses of Victoriana.
14FEB19: Hamilton, Palace Theatre
Third time (this one a matinee in the Grand Circle). Still good. I'm still noticing new things, like the father/son themes and echoes throughout.
15FEB19: Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Greenwich Picturehouse
Absolutely stunning performances from Melissa McCarthy ("I'm a 51-year-old woman who likes cats better than people") and Richard E. Grant ("I've no one to tell, all my friends are dead"). McCarthy plays Lee Israel, solitary lesbian author who can't get a contract for another book, so decides to make a living forging letters from famous writers. "I'm a better Dorothy Parker than Dorothy Parker." Her friend Jack Hock (a gay drug-dealer) aids and abets her. They get caught. The life-affirming final scene shows the healing power of KITTENS. Nice to see a film with two middle-aged gay leads, especially when both are portrayed as, well, past their best.
22FEB19: The Monstrous Child (Gavin Higgins, Francesca Simon), Linbury Theatre
I confess that Higgins' music is far, far too modern for my taste -- but what a fascinating production! The libretto (written by Francesca Simon, on whose novel the opera is based) is sparse and witty. And the staging is awesome: Hel (Marta Fontanals-Simmons, who has a glorious voice and neat mannerisms as well as glorious green hair) is imprisoned half-inside an ambulatory dunghill / hairball / tumour; Asgard is very brightly lit, with cuboid chunks of real ice dripping down in the heat of the lights as counterpoint to the music; Loki (played by Tom Randle, on whom I developed an immense crush as a result of his velvet-and-leather-clad Oberon in The Fairy Queen at the ENO) sports a flat cap and a copy of The Racing Post, and is thoroughly unlike any other interpretations of Loki that you may have seen recently.
Everyone is mean to Hel, even Baldr (the kindest of them all). And she is as bitter as one might expect.
Note: I have never seen a placenta in an opera before.
