Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

~ Posted by Rebecca Willis, May 4th 2012

Watching “The Bridge”, the latest offering of Scandinavian noir to reach our TV screens, makes me feel hopeful—despite the increasingly dark deeds of the criminal mastermind who's keeping the police of Copenhagen and Malmö on their toes. That's because of our heroine, Saga Noren. She has the white-blonde good looks of a Swedish ice queen and an unusual brain under all that hair. Saga can’t read social signals, can't relate emotionally to other people, and takes everything literally, at face value. In short, she is somewhere on the autistic spectrum. "I don't think she knows she has Aspergers", the actress Sofia Helin, who plays her so convincingly, told Time Out. "The writer Hans [Rosenfeldt] was very precise about this. She just thinks she's odd". Label or not, she makes Sara Lund in "The Killing" just look mildly workaholic.   read more »

~ Posted by Robert Butler, April 2nd 2012

Amazingly, the 90-minute "Arena" about Jonathan Miller, screened on BBC2, is the first-ever documentary about one of Britain's most prolific figures in the arts. He has directed more than 60 operas, and that's not even what he's best known for: that would probably be his TV series on the human body, during which he dissected one. "Arena" showed how his early interest in biology took off thanks to an exceptional teacher at St Paul's. This passion was combined with a gift for mimicry, which we saw in his own documentary about London Zoo in the winter, when Miller—like a man possessed—imitated the fairly dangerous animals standing immediately behind him.

In Britain, of course, people aren't meant to be too clever and Miller was famously "too clever by three-quarters". His career in medicine was sidelined by the success of "Beyond the Fringe" at the Edinburgh Festival, and a West End run in London was followed by one on Broadway. It was here that Miller met public intellectuals unembarrassed to be clever: the editors of the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker (he wrote for both), Robert Lowell, Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag.

When Miller returned to London he edited and presented the BBC arts series "Monitor" and his programme about Sontag was considered so pretentious that although the original interview has disappeared, "Arena" viewers were treated to a parody of it, performed by John Bird and Eleanor Bron, that does still exist. In New York he also met American comedians, like Mort Sahl and Woody Allen, and two of Miller's biggest successes in opera—out of the 60 he's done— have been inspired by classic American comedies.  read more »

~ Posted by Samantha Weinberg, March 16th 2012

Next Thursday evening there will be a void in the prime-time viewing of 6m people in Britain. Last night, the latest series of amateur "MasterChef" came to its annual mouth-watering conclusion on BBC2, when Shelina Permalloo (seriously) cooked up a Mauritian-flavoured feast that had judges John Torode and Gregg Wallace raising eyebrows and smacking lips in what has become a familiar and much-imitated fashion.

It is not the food that has us all hooked. The fine dining that "MasterChef" espouses is a bit prim, a bit fussy and, to be honest, sometimes insufficiently substantial to sate many people's appetites. It’s not the format either: a reality-TV knockout competition is hardly fresh, and although "MasterChef" is a slick operation, it’s not going to win prizes for cinematography or originality.

Which leaves…the judges. John and Gregg—chef and former barrow boy—can be loud, unsubtle and sometimes downright rude. But there is something endearing about the way John inevitably loads his fork with far too much food, and then has to cock his head to one side and jam the fork through the side of his mouth, or Gregg pulls his spoon out very slowly as he widens his eyes.  read more »

~ Posted by Robert Butler, December 9th 2011

The movie version of "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" opens in the United States today, 22 years after the TV version of John le Carré's novel was first broadcast on the BBC and PBS. The movie runs 127 mins, the TV series runs 290 mins, but for some critics, the sprint through the story seems to pass more slowly than the leisurely jog. In this week's New Yorker, the film critic Anthony Lane says the TV series was,

bovine of pace, often ugly to behold, and content to meander along byways that petered out into open country or led inexorably to dead ends, yet I was tensed and transfixed by every minute... 

The movie version, he writes, feels "purposeful, unbaffled, artfully composed." Many movie-goers might perk up at the prospect of seeing George Smiley solve the puzzle of who is the Soviet mole in the "Circus" with 163 minutes to spare. But Lane writes,

something in the drama has been dulled, and I was almost bored. 

The proliferation of media, enabled by the internet and the new consumer devices that access it, has also driven the decentralisation of media. As recently as 15 years ago, if you wanted to catch up on the news, you could look at a handful of publications or a few nightly programmes. And if you wanted to listen to music, you could turn on MTV or fiddle with your radio. People in major cities had more options, because a large population can support specialty shops, but in vast swathes of the world you had to work to get outside the mainstream. Today, as we all know, access to information has exploded. One consequence, according to Touré, a cultural critic writing in Salon, is that the ability of pop culture to unify us—he refers to the massive interest in Michael Jackson's "Thriller", or Nirvana's "Nevermind"—has been eroded, probably forever:    

Back when MTV played videos, it functioned like a televised boombox. It was the central way for many people to experience music they loved and learn about new artists. Thus MTV directed and funneled the conversation. Now there’s no central authority. Fuse, where I work, plays videos and concerts and introduces people to new artists. But people also watch videos online, where there’s an endless library of everything ever made but no curation, killing its unifying potential.

Steven Hyden, also writing in Salon, counters that whatever the advantages and disadvantages of a centralised pop-culture authority, the monoculture never actually existed:  read more »

In the 1991 film "L.A. Story", a local weatherman offers to show a visiting journalist around town—“You know, a kind of cultural tour of LA," he tells her. "That's the first 15 minutes," she replies. "Then what?" 

Indeed. Los Angeles is a place where it is possible to find 17 tanning parlours and six frozen-yogurt shops thriving within a three-mile radius—and zero book stores. It is a city where Michael Bay, a film-maker lately known for directing the Transformers franchise, and the Kardashian sisters are held up as glowing examples of something, but no one really knows quite what (perhaps LA-ness?). Its profitable and occasionally inventive film and television industries provide a weird raison d’etre for a city Norman Mailer characterised as "a constellation of plastic".  

No event crystallises the city's totem virtues of talent, showmanship, extravagance and self-regard like a big awards ceremony, of which there are several annually. As television gets better and better, the Emmy Awards have seen a corresponding rise in clout and glitz. This year's event, which took place on September 18th at the Staples Centre, was a fascinating combination of high-school prom, rock concert, insider coffee klatsch and media maelstrom. It has come a long way since the first Emmy was bestowed in 1949 on a 20-year old ventriloquist named Shirley Dinsdale for her children's show "Judy Splinters". Your correspondent, who arrived as the date of a "Saturday Night Live" writer, managed to snag a seat in the centre of the ceremony's main section, right in the middle of the action.  read more »

Mohammed Saeed Harib is the creator of  “Freej”, the first 3D animation show to come from the Middle East. Since premiering in 2006, the show has gained the region-wide, cross-generational popularity of an Arab "Simpsons". This month sees the start of series four, timed to coincide with Ramadan.  read more »

"Top Gear", an inexplicably popular television programme in which three paunchy Englishmen drive slender foreign sportscars, recently began a new series in Britain. The BBC, which makes "Top Gear", is short on money. How do you think they decided to generate some publicity on the cheap?

One of the oldest ruses in marketing is to create a controversy that generates more exposure through newspaper column-inches than you could hope to buy through conventional advertising. Having your album cover banned, for instance, is the surest way to get people to Google it.

In this spirit, the writers of "Top Gear" scripted a two-minute section of this week’s programme in which the braying presenters made a series of rude comments about Mexico. Richard Hammond, one of the show's presenters, observed that Mexican sports cars were like Mexicans themselves: "lazy, feckless, flatulent, overweight, leaning against a fence asleep looking at a cactus with a blanket with a hole in the middle on as a coat." In case the ploy wasn’t obvious enough, they ended by saying that they wouldn’t get any complaints, “because at the Mexican embassy, the ambassador’s going to be sitting there [asleep] with a remote control... They won’t complain, it’s fine.”  read more »

Can you do fingertip push-ups? Jack Lalanne was doing them until his final days. The “godfather of American fitness”, as he came to be known, died aged 96 of respiratory failure due to pneumonia on January 23rd. A wave of fond and lively obituaries followed, as has a torrent of personal dedications to the man and his work. This vintage clip captures Lalanne’s charm and exuberance, and is how many will remember him:

At age 15 Lalanne had an epiphany and decided to transform himself from a fat, spotty kid into a health and fitness fanatic. Armed with the mantra “Long live living long”, he dedicated his life to helping Americans eat well, move more and lead healthier lives. He was a pioneer of modern fitness—in the 1930s he opened one of the nation's first gyms, in Oakland, California, in an era when weight-training was thought to cause hernias or create masculine-looking women.

As his gym empire expanded he devised the first leg-extension and weight-adjustment machines, now commonplace in today’s gyms (although he never patented them). In 1951 he began a successful fitness television series, “The Jack Lalanne Show”, which ran daily for a half-hour for three decades. He also put his name to a range of juicers to promote healthy eating.  read more »

On a sweltering Wednesday night it was business as usual outside the Brooklyn Museum. There were smokers, BMX bikers, a lone juggler and someone passed out on the grass. Few seemed to care about the klatch of smartly dressed people nibbling plantain chips inside the museum's glassed-in lobby. But amid this throng, gathered for the grand finale of Bravo's reality-TV show "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist", it was hard to consider anyone else. We had come to learn who would end up with the big prize: a solo show at the museum, plus $100,000.

The show, an elimination contest in the vein of "Project Runway" or "Top Chef", pitted 14 aspiring artists against each other in a series of challenges judged by Jerry Saltz, a critic for New York magazine, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and Bill Powers, both gallerists, and China Chow, the presenter. A rotating cast of guest judges included big art names such as Ryan McGinness and Andres Serrano. Sarah Jessica Parker is the executive producer. In an earlier post, we pondered how such a contest could work for such a subjective field—how, indeed, does one judge a work of art? This party, where contestants rubbed elbows with judges and buddies, seemed like a good place for More Intelligent Life to at least learn how the artists felt about it all.  read more »