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

~ Posted by Simon Willis, February 1st 2012

The Economist recently published a three-page briefing about Mongolia, which sits on vast reserves of copper and gold. "Mongolia has a chance," the paper wrote, "of becoming a Qatar or a Brunei: a country that has only a small population, but almost all of it, in global terms, loaded." Money is flowing into Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia's capital, and people are following. Part of this huge cultural change is that city dwellers no longer feel the pull of the nomadic herding traditions. Twenty years ago, the paper says, it was hard to meet anyone in Ulaanbaatar "who identified with the city".

There aren't many movies that you can buy on Amazon that give you a flavour of Mongolian life, but one that does was released 20 years ago. The mismatch between the city and the country is its main theme. "Urga", released in Britain and America as "Close to Eden", won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film. Directed by the Russian filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov, it's the story of Gombo, who lives with his wife, three children and a grandmother in a yurt on the steppe.

Their traditional life of herding and horse-riding on the grasslands is observed with documentary patience and the camera lingers, nostalgically, on the domestic details—the grandmother cuts fatty slices of mutton into her mouth; a daughter plays ditties on a giant accordion; Gombo’s wife Pagma gets her children to sleep, three to a bed.  read more »

~ Posted by Simon Willis, January 26th 2012

When I left the office the other afternoon for a screening of a new documentary, the sky was grey and overcast: good weather for watching any movie, perfect for one about W.G. Sebald. His book "The Rings of Saturn" (1995 in German, 1998 in English) records a walk he took around East Anglia in 1992, during which the author meditates on everything from herring fishing to the Holocaust. Darkness is always falling in Sebald's books, or clouds casting a shadow or "veils of mist" drifting in from the sea.

Grant Gee's excellent new film, "Patience (After Sebald)", which is released in Britain tomorrow, retraces the journey. The film combines grainy and blustery footage of Covehithe, Southwold, Dunwich and Somerleyton with voice-overs from writers and artists interpreting the book's web of associations. There are also audio recordings of Sebald himself. At one point he talks about fog and mist, and how much he admires the ability of Victorian novelists "to make of one phenomenon a thread which runs through a whole text." 

That applies to Sebald's work too. Weather in "The Rings of Saturn" is more than mood. It's also a method of blurring what he sees, and a metaphor for the unbidden path the book takes. In the film, the author and academic Robert Macfarlane describes Sebald's work as "a vanishing of stabilities". It's not unlike a phrase Macfarlane used in a recent piece about mist for Intelligent Life. Mist, he wrote,  is “trickster weather…it turns familiar landscapes strange, dampens sounds, blurs vision".  read more »

~ Posted by Robert Butler, January 25th 2012  read more »

~ Posted by Maggie Fergusson, January 13th 2012

It was a damp morning last November when I went with Michael Morpurgo to the cast-and-crew screening of “War Horse” at London’s Odeon Leicester Square. I’d been invited to come, with his wife, Clare, and his eldest granddaughters, Léa and Eloise, because we’ve been working together on a book about his life. 

In “Michael Morpurgo: War Child to War Horse”, to be published in May, I’ve written seven biographical chapters to which Michael has responded with seven stories. (Michael has also visited In Flanders Fields Museum for our series Authors on Museums). “War Horse”, now 30 years old, has always had a special place in Michael’s heart. It was the first of his books to get wide media coverage, when it was shortlisted for the Whitbread Children’s Book Award, and it’s his wife’s favourite. But it got pretty mixed reviews, and it has never sold as well as either “Kensuke’s Kingdom” or “Private Peaceful” (Michael’s own favourite).   read more »

~ Posted by Nicholas Barber, December 23rd 2011

David Fincher’s new film of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” leaves a lot of questions unanswered, and not just the question of why Rooney Mara attempts a Swedish accent all the way through, while Daniel Craig gives up on his after ten minutes. Here are a few of those questions. Why do we learn so little about the tattooed heroine, considering that she’s the title character? Why do we have to witness her being raped by her legal guardian when he’s got nothing to do with the film’s central mystery? How come such a significant event as her setting fire to her own father is merely mentioned in passing? And will she ever see Craig’s character again?

If you’re one of the zillion people to have read Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy, or seen the Swedish film adaptations, then you’ll know that the answer to all these questions is, in three words: wait and see. A large proportion of the first novel is spent setting up situations that aren’t resolved until book two or book three, which means that Fincher is simply being faithful to his source material, even if he is presenting us with a fundamentally unsatisfying narrative. But is that really OK? One of the virtues of the feature-film format is that it lets us experience a complete story from beginning to end in two hours.  read more »

~ Posted by Nicholas Barber, December 20th 2011

Glance at the films being released in Britain in January and early February, or in America in November and December, and you’ll notice a glut of Oscar contenders. You know the type. They’re middle-brow, grown-up dramas, often biopics or literary adaptations, with a sheen of Hollywood gloss over a base of indie intelligence, and with one or two juicy roles played by actors who have already won their share of prizes. If you vote for the Baftas or the Academy Awards, but you can’t decide which movies to support, they’re the films which say: relax, this is what quality cinema looks like. The 2012 crop includes “The Iron Lady”, “Shame”, “Coriolanus”, “J. Edgar”, “The Descendants”, “Carnage”, “Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close”, “Martha Marcy May Marlene”, “A Dangerous Method” and “Young Adult”. In Britain, every one of those films comes out in the first six weeks of the year. In America, they’re released about a month earlier, but they’re almost as tightly packed.  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. 

~ Posted by Robert Butler, December 9th 2011

Over at Economist Debates the theme is Women & Work and the motion is: "This house believes that a woman's place is at work." At the moment 45% agree with the motion and 55% disagree. Those who agree with the motion believe that women belong in the work place "so that they can live to their full potential as productive and self-reliant individuals". Those who disagree say women "do not have an assigned place. In free societies, they choose where they wish to be". Of course it's not always an "either/or", sometimes it's an "and/and". One extreme example appears in the Daily Telegraph where Meryl Streep discusses preparing for the role of Mrs Thatcher in "The Iron Lady". Streep spent months watching videos and broadcasts and met many people who knew her. The detail that really amazed her was that Mrs Thatcher cooked supper each evening.

She wanted to make dinner for Denis every night, and even when it was take-out from Marks and Spencer’s they would sit down and have it together.

Streep employs a cook, and says she hasn't made her own supper when working since "Sophie's Choice" (1982). 

"The Iron Lady" is released in Britain on January 6th and in America on December 30th 

~ Posted by Robert Butler, December 8th 2011

Two years ago the Independent said the public's reaction to phone-hacking resembled the scene in "Casablanca" when Captain Renault shuts down Rick's Café saying he is "shocked, shocked" to discover that gambling is going on. Five months ago, a New Statesman article about phone-hacking pointed to the same moment in the movie. Last Wednesday the New York Times did too. And so did the Guardian. On Sunday the playwright David Hare made a similar point on BBC Radio 4 about the feigned level of shock.  "I think everyone's faking...Have you never read these newspapers?"

Hare co-wrote “Pravda”, a huge hit for the National Theatre in 1985, about the ruthless rise to power of a media tycoon. There was no missing the similarities between Lambert Le Roux—played by Anthony Hopkins—and Rupert Murdoch. If ever a play cried out for a sequel it is this one—with Hopkins returning to the character a quarter-century on.  

"A Love Song for Annie Hall" is a track by Hartley Goldstein, an American folk-singer. The first verse is a tender elegy for the character of Annie as depicted in the 1979 Woody Allen film, with her awkward charm and her "liberal-arts educated neurotic philanderings". However Goldstein's lovesick nostalgia soon turns into a grim indictment. "I've got a bone to pick with your agent," he sings of Diane Keaton's later career. His conclusion is brilliantly blunt: "Cos Diane you were so cool when you were young/What in God's name happened?/Are we all just destined to become/Mediocre and lame?" 

Goldstein is not afraid of hyperbole, but his plaintive ode has some truth to it. In "Then Again", Keaton's new memoir, we see her struggling with just these questions. It is not easy to live down an iconic early performance.     

Woody Allen is ever present in "Then Again". This is understandable; for nearly a decade he was the centre of either Keaton's professional life or her private one. Over an eight-year period he cast her in ''Play It Again Sam'', ''Sleeper'', ''Love and Death'', ''Annie Hall'', ''Interiors'' and ''Manhattan''. Keaton accompanied Allen during his progression from inspired slapstick to angsty Manhattan sociology. She muses at length over their relationship; their uncomfortable first steak-house date, their cutesy, insulting nicknames and, of course, the experience of starring in his greatest films. Keaton had already starred in ''The Godfather'', but the roles Allen crafted for her assured her place in cinematic history in a way that none of her subsequent work has.     read more »