Monthly culture, December 2025
Tuesday, December 30th, 2025 08:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranth04DEC25: The Holdovers (Payne, 2023) -- Netflix
A prestigious East Coast school: Paul Giamatti great as the grumpy, unpopular classics teacher (his go-to gift is Marcus Aurelius 'Meditations') who gets landed with supervising the students who have to stay over Christmas. Newcomer Dominic Sessa, as Angus Tully, had an Adam Driver vibe and was very good. A film about friendship, loyalty, privilege and Christmas, with a subplot involving racism towards Mary, who runs the kitchen (Da'Vine Joy Randolph) and has recently lost her son in Vietnam. Not wholly cheerful but nicely done, and less try-hard than many period dramas. Also, pleasingly devoid of romantic subplots.
12DEC25: Arcadi Volodos in recital -- Barbican Hall
Schubert, Schumann, and Volodos' own arrangement of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody no. 13. I first saw Volodos playing Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto no. 3 at a Prom in the Nineties, and it changed my life. I haven't seen him live for years, and this was very much a recital -- no orchestra in attendance, just one man and his piano. He played as though the music was a contest of wills between him and the instrument -- impish expression, head turned aside as though what he's hearing has nothing to do with his own hands. I especially liked the Schumann -- glorious cascades of sound with Volodos in perfect control of silence and noise. Four encores! including a fabulous malaguena.
18DEC25: Wake Up Dead Man (Johnson, 2025) -- Netflix
Still good on a smaller screen, and knowing what was coming, I was able to follow the plot more clearly. Daniel Craig really enjoys himself in this.
19DEC25: The Princess Bride (Reiner, 1987) -- Greenwich PictureHouse
I'd never seen this in the cinema before! The colours were bright and the credits rather shorter than I've been accustomed to. Cut-glass accents and distinctly unmedieval teeth, and some excellent non-CGI. In the framing narrative, I note that the boy who's being told the story has a Captain America figure on his shelf -- more than a decade before the MCU happened.
But woe! for Rob Reiner was murdered: and that was why the Picturehouse was showing the film.
29DEC25: Twelfth Night (Shakespeare) -- Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican
Freema Agyeman fabulously haughty and lascivious as Olivia, Michael Grady-Hall a brilliant and engaging Feste, Daniel Monks (who I last saw in Teenage Dick) as Orsino. There was an organist in a Fairisle sweater (the organ balanced out some of the lighter songs, which had a very modern vibe). Joplin Sibtain was clearly channelling Oliver Reed to play Sir Toby (poor Maria has to *marry* him! but she will be rich). This was a very enjoyable and well-produced staging, and left me wondering anew why nobody has written about Malvolio's revenge...
A prestigious East Coast school: Paul Giamatti great as the grumpy, unpopular classics teacher (his go-to gift is Marcus Aurelius 'Meditations') who gets landed with supervising the students who have to stay over Christmas. Newcomer Dominic Sessa, as Angus Tully, had an Adam Driver vibe and was very good. A film about friendship, loyalty, privilege and Christmas, with a subplot involving racism towards Mary, who runs the kitchen (Da'Vine Joy Randolph) and has recently lost her son in Vietnam. Not wholly cheerful but nicely done, and less try-hard than many period dramas. Also, pleasingly devoid of romantic subplots.
12DEC25: Arcadi Volodos in recital -- Barbican Hall
Schubert, Schumann, and Volodos' own arrangement of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody no. 13. I first saw Volodos playing Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto no. 3 at a Prom in the Nineties, and it changed my life. I haven't seen him live for years, and this was very much a recital -- no orchestra in attendance, just one man and his piano. He played as though the music was a contest of wills between him and the instrument -- impish expression, head turned aside as though what he's hearing has nothing to do with his own hands. I especially liked the Schumann -- glorious cascades of sound with Volodos in perfect control of silence and noise. Four encores! including a fabulous malaguena.
18DEC25: Wake Up Dead Man (Johnson, 2025) -- Netflix
Still good on a smaller screen, and knowing what was coming, I was able to follow the plot more clearly. Daniel Craig really enjoys himself in this.
19DEC25: The Princess Bride (Reiner, 1987) -- Greenwich PictureHouse
I'd never seen this in the cinema before! The colours were bright and the credits rather shorter than I've been accustomed to. Cut-glass accents and distinctly unmedieval teeth, and some excellent non-CGI. In the framing narrative, I note that the boy who's being told the story has a Captain America figure on his shelf -- more than a decade before the MCU happened.
But woe! for Rob Reiner was murdered: and that was why the Picturehouse was showing the film.
29DEC25: Twelfth Night (Shakespeare) -- Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican
Freema Agyeman fabulously haughty and lascivious as Olivia, Michael Grady-Hall a brilliant and engaging Feste, Daniel Monks (who I last saw in Teenage Dick) as Orsino. There was an organist in a Fairisle sweater (the organ balanced out some of the lighter songs, which had a very modern vibe). Joplin Sibtain was clearly channelling Oliver Reed to play Sir Toby (poor Maria has to *marry* him! but she will be rich). This was a very enjoyable and well-produced staging, and left me wondering anew why nobody has written about Malvolio's revenge...
