Samantha Morton's film The Unloved is a semi-autobiographical debut. The short excerpts from the interview with Kirsty Wark are indeed quite moving and far from it being cathartic (Kirsty Wark queries), Samantha Morton explains her experience of working through the past, her past, as being doubly difficult.
Child abuse, violence, and psychological damage are frequently best communicated through art and culture. Even in academic works such as Nicholas Stargardt's Witnesses of War the way to get at (and indeed to explain) child trauma (I use this word with caution) is through art. Morton's semi-autobiographical film therefore follows in this tradition and - according to the three reviewers - largely succeeds in its aims.
It would perhaps be too much to have an entire programme on child abuse. Newsnight thus ends the programme on a jovial high, as they delve into the nether depths of Holywood platitudes. Dan Brown's Angels & Demons (or rather Ron Howard's adaptation) appears to be yet another terrible attempts at producing anything worthwhile. Beyond the banality of ironic American urban life of one-night stands and 'stressed' coffee drinking, what does Hollywood still have to offer? This film is yet another example of meaningless tat that seems to be at the very essence of our revered Hollywood industry.
This one looks particularly dreadful. For all his foibles, Mark Kermode does spot a bad film. He may not spot a good film, but when he identifies a bad one, then it is indeed invariably terrible. He tears Angels & Demons to shreds.
Tom Hanks acts as best as he can, which doesn't bode well for the rest of this horrendous flick As Aaronovitch points out, he is completely uninteresting. The plot is too tedious to repeat. The whole film is too tedious to mention, but I do so anyway. Perhaps as a final denouement, Ewan McGregor plays someone from Northern Ireland and gets the accent all wrong (what a surprise). So in summary, it is yet another meaningless film devoid of content with two terrible actors. Next please.
6 comments:
Olching: Got annoyed with Cohen and censored. If you are going to get stuck in to the Tories and their Euro alliance with PiS and see them as Francoist fascists, then this has to invite comparisons.
So I wrote this. It didn't stay up long.I savud in full the replies.
'Cohen's trite propaganda is on par with the drivel writen by Denis McShane and other windbag former dissidents like Adam Michnik who criticise the Polish right for being theocratic Franco worshipping Fascists.
Whilst Kaczynski's populist PiS has shown the fact it has something is common with the anti-semtic pre-war Endek and the national communists of Mieczeslaw Moczar in 68, they are not so different from Michnik.
Their anti-semitism is old fashioned. It doesn't fit in with the new shiny EUtopia which is meanced by the barbarian hordes who live in zones coveted by the West for it's copious oil wealth.
Cohen, Hitchens, Michnik et al are silent about the way Bush's foreign policy has led to torture and war crimes from Afghanistan to Iraq that have ben couched in the euphemistic jargon of power used by totalitarian states.
Let's get one thing straight.
The Polish populist right use euphemisms for Jews but unlike those the liberal left in Poland like Michnik support, like Oriana Fallaci, they haven't gone as far as describing Muslims as " multiplying like rats".
So if Cohen wants to start media framing by first picking a partisan sides then scrambling the facts up to hammer home a banal a pseudo-intellectual polemic, it's necessary to let people know the other side to it.
Cohen writes about the awful nature of Central Eastern European conservatives, none of whom are conservatives in the English tradition anyway but idiot technocrats and neoliberals.
The following Letter Of Solidarity was signed by Adam Michnik defending Fallaci in 2006, one reason Tony Judt calls him a 'useful idiot' in supporting Bush.
Just to remind people, Michnik was a key leader in Solidarnosc, a beacon of Enlightenment virtue against the 'old order'.
'We believe that freedom of speech is a universal value and should not fall within political, cultural or religious interests. Oriana Fallaci has been fighting for the freedom of expression in her work as a journalist throughout her whole life. As we intend to protect the freedom of speech we want to express our solidarity with Oriana Fallaci. Being aware of contentiousness of her latest statements, we still stand against the trial which is infringing the freedom of expression'.
Which must mean, according to forthright liberal leftist like Michnik, who frames his propaganda in very similar terms to Cohen asnd is also a 68er and ex-Trotskyist poseur, that Fallaci has no political, cultural or religious interests.
Musims just "multiply like rats" and the Muslim birthrate is used as a weapon against the West. Read her The Strength of Reason for confirmation of all that, This is a text approved of by Michnik. An ideological ally of Cohen.
See how easy it is ? To make vast generalisations about the 'mindset' of those whose political opinion differ from yours and how easy it is to dehumanise them to make cheap partisan points'.
Take Two :)....
Now let's try the heavy iront approach.
An interesting article by Nick Cohen, the forthright polemicist and tribune of Euro-Alanticist freedom and liberalism whose position on the Tories scepticism towards the EU he sees as ranging them alongside right wing populists in 'the 'New Europe'.
The Tories will ally instead with the proudly ignorant parties of eastern Europe. Know-nothing chauvinism, sexual and religious prejudices, and conspiracy theories from Europe's dark heart motivate them, but they are against federalism and that is all that matters to Cameron.
History is strewn with strange alliances that seem unexpected, not least the support given by Polish left liberals like Adam Michnik whose warnings of theocracy and of the similarity between Kaczynski's PiS and the politics of Franco led him likewise condemn the theocratic fascism of Islamists.
So much so that Michnik gave his unqualified backing to George Bush's War on Terror and mysteriously remained silent on such issues as the use of CIA Prisons in Poland for beating and torturing Islamic 'terrorist suspects'. This is important for a number of reasons.
Firstly, if one is going to lambast the right wing parties such as PiS for their use of lustration laws to out 'communists' and collaborate through witch hunts and the use of judicial power one should be aware of a certain hypocrisy in doing so whilst remaining silent on the CIA prisons.
Secondly, the way Cohen writes about ' the old hatreds of Jews, gays and blacks' he sees as inherent in the Polish populist right ignores the darker side of the Polish liberal left. As Tony Judt had it when writing of Bush's 'Useful idiots'
Adam Michnik, the hero of the Polish intellectual resistance to Communism, has become an outspoken admirer of the embarrassingly Islamophobic Oriana Fallaci
Oriana Fallaci has what some would call controversial views on the role of Muslims in Europe, outlined conspiracy theories no less rabid than the Polish anti-semitic populists about Eurabia and the way Muslims saw a higher birth rate as a way of taking over Europe.
Yet New Labour were only too happy to align themselves ideologically with Polish leftists like Michnik who held these views. For example Denis MacShane who is a great supporter of Michnik from his time as part of the Workers movements within Solidarity.
Unlike certain Muslims from Europe who were actually tortured, I am yet to hear any evidence where Communists, Jews, homosexuals etc have been beaten and tortured as the consequence of their policies, no matter how unpleasant their populist politics is.
A brilliant, profound, non-propagandistic and scrupulously fact finding journalist like Cohen ought to at least take that into consideration when using the rhetoric of anti-fascism, Enlightenment values and the New Europe to condemn 'Old Europe' .
Great article Nick. Keep up the good fight.
Hollywood Babylon - Did you ever read that book Olching?
Hi folks,
Karl, sorry for the late reply...I don't bother with Cohen anymore, partly because I was asked by the Guardian/Observer not to comment on his threads (for picking him up consistently on factual errors, as you probably know anyway).
Hi Phil, I haven't read the book, but will look it up. Thanks for the recommendation. Hope all is well.
Hi Olching. Are you still posting here?
Yes, just very busy at the moment...for another 3 - 4 weeks....
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