tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10593529034346906632011-04-21T11:20:54.872-07:00UCL's Arts MagazineWriting Paperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13101438086575483495noreply@blogger.comBlogger91100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1059352903434690663.post-19465175314123424692008-12-14T02:35:00.000-08:002008-12-21T15:45:54.567-08:00

Ari Folman asks his friend why, twenty years down the line, he is now having this surreal dream from the war in Lebanon. Why can’t he remember the occasion this vision so powerfully depicts? His friend tells him about a famous psychological test, in which people are shown ten photographs from their youth, and asked if they recall the events shown in the photos. Nine of the photographs are genuine

Jack Palmernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1059352903434690663.post-86492287684576382392008-11-17T18:14:00.000-08:002008-12-21T15:48:32.557-08:00

As the writer’s strike continues to paralyse the Hollywood film industry, a film like Juno makes all too clear the foundational importance of a good screenplay. A director’s vision and a talented cast will of course determine a film’s final success, but it is the story, the dialogue, the textual foundation of a project that really matters. Diablo Cody’s Bafta-winning debut, is refreshingly quirky

Jack Palmernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1059352903434690663.post-88537548090324713592008-11-13T05:23:00.000-08:002008-12-21T15:50:22.242-08:00

Revived 45 years after these two one-acters were written for television, Jamie Lloyd directs two of Harold Pinter’s early plays, fittingly coupled together to explore the themes of unconventional sexual practices, fantasy, love triangles and the ensuing struggles for dominance within relationships.The central twist of The Lover’s marital comedy of manners is that the husband is also his wife’s

Jack Palmernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1059352903434690663.post-16485081750435467322008-11-13T05:19:00.000-08:002008-12-21T15:51:57.602-08:00

On the surface Speed-the-Plow depicts a film producer’s struggle with the perennial conundrum of art or money. But in this recent production directed by Matthew Warchus this question becomes secondary to an exposition of a male relationship, and how this is configured when one is consumed with self-doubt and a desire to be ‘liked’.Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum are excellent as the two film

Jack Palmernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1059352903434690663.post-923291033815315682008-11-13T05:18:00.002-08:002008-12-21T15:55:06.731-08:00

Amis’s sixth, and much publicised, collection of essays The Second Plane is concerned with the ramifications of the September Eleventh attacks on politics and literature.The volume is chronological, beginning with an article published in The Guardian a week after 9/11 which gives Amis’s first reaction to the tragedy. Half a decade after the event this first essay provides an emotive reawakening

Jack Palmernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1059352903434690663.post-36653682511054949602008-11-13T05:15:00.000-08:002008-12-21T15:58:15.686-08:00

Regardless of which connotation Paul Haggis aims for with In the Valley of Elah, his slingshot misses its target.Paul Haggis’ latest offering, In the Valley of Elah, follows a string of ambitious narratives attempting to talk the American psyche out of it’s post-9/11 neurosis. The multi-cultural awareness vehicle Crash won Haggis a best motion picture at the 2006 Oscars; the historical

Jack Palmernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1059352903434690663.post-10650928850586167942008-11-13T05:12:00.000-08:002008-12-21T15:59:14.691-08:00

Michael Attenborough’s production of The Homecoming places emphasis on the disjointedness of the family of Pinter’s script.The ochre-set with chairs placed in a crescent shape each have a gap between them symbolic of the family’s separateness. The acting, as well, demonstrates the disjunction between the inhabitants. Max, played by Kenneth Cranham, adeptly portrays himself as the patriarch of the

Jack Palmernoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1059352903434690663.post-76734812229182043732008-11-13T05:08:00.000-08:002008-12-21T15:55:58.504-08:00

As A. David Moody admits, it is not easy to write about Ezra Pound. He left a huge output of prose, poetry and, especially, letters, in which he is given to extensive self-fashioning. The pictures he paints of himself are at loggerheads with each other, and with the descriptions of him by others, which themselves are often self-contradictory. William Carlos Williams, a close friend,

Jack Palmernoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1059352903434690663.post-6489483443829122892008-11-13T04:59:00.001-08:002008-12-21T16:07:26.555-08:00

Last November, as a friend and I wandered through an exhibition of unseen Guy works, the image of Veronica Corningstone in a Lucozade coloured skirt-suit bubbled into the brain. For that small percentage of college-age readers who are unacquainted with the quagmire of farce that is Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Ms Corningstone is the feisty lady reporter who falls for, yet usurps, the

Jack Palmernoreply@blogger.com0