CHASTE LARS AND HIS SILICONE GIRL

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL directed by Craig Gillespie (USA/Canada, 2007)

Cover of Lars and the Real Girl

What an odd and creepy movie this is.

it is billed as a comedy-drama, yet this quirky look at mental illness has no gags and practically no dramatic tension.

In the lead role as Lars Lindstorm, Ryan Gosling remains straight-faced throughout and believable as a painfully shy individual whose isolation is heightened by the fact that he cannot bear to be touched.

The consensus is that he needs the love of a good woman to bring him out of his shell. One equally gawky woman who works in the same office has a crush on him but goes out of his way to avoid her.

Another work colleague, who spends a good part of the day looking for porn sites, inadvertently finds an alternative solution, He tells Lars about a Real Doll site and, although he feigns disinterest, we soon see Lars taking delivery of a wooden crate with his very own life-size silicone doll.

WAITING FOR THE KING

A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING by Dave Eggers (First published by McSweeney’s, 2012)

Dave Eggers is a person and a writer I admire a lot but I have to say that this is a strange, disjointed and largely disappointing novel.

Set in the present day, it follows the (mis)fortunes of an ageing salesman, Alan Gray, who is in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia heading up a small team of IT consultants. He, and his three younger assistants, work for Reliant “the largest IT supplier in the world”.

They are there to demonstrate, and hopefully sell, some state of the art “telepresence technology” – a virtual hologram mirage that gives the illusion that someone is physically present at a meeting when they are actually elsewhere.

The prestige client is the King of the King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) a place described as “a city-to-be in a desert by the sea”.

The location is exotic and Alan is intrigued to be in some small way part of the ambitious plan to build a city in the desert – “he wanted to believe that a city rising from dust could happen”.

But waiting for the King proves to be like waiting for Godot, which presumably explains why Eggers’ chose a quote from Samuel Beckett as the novel’s epigraph – “It’s not every day that we are needed”.

BLACK MIRROR: BE BACK SOON

Martha (Hayley Atwell) and Ash (Domhnall Gleeson) bathed in the glow of new technology.

Between season one and two the Channel 4′s  Black Mirror, the series creator Charlie Brooker has become a father. This major event on life’s timeline typically has a softening effect on even the most hard-hearted of cynics.

As a screenwriter, broadcaster and columnist, Brooker’s stock in trade is as a satirist with finely tuned bullshit detector. The manner in which the modern world is in thrall to the supposedly liberating qualities of new technology is one of his recurring topics and is the theme behind Black Mirror, the title being a reference to the myriad screens humankind is glued to and how this techno-dependency affects our behaviour and personal relationships.

Episode 1 of season 2 (Be Back Soon) does not show a uniformly utopian view of the near future but it does demonstrate how Brooker’s writing has matured to the point that it doesn’t set out merely to shock but rather wants us to question to what extent we allow technology to intrude upon our perception of ‘reality’.

WHEN TRACEY MET MICK

I never have been what you might call a ladies man.

For years I cursed the guys my age who seemed to get laid regularly despite being as thick as two short planks.

Why didn’t women appreciate strong silent types like me who were deep not macho? 

This short piece was written in a slough of despond yet offers a glimmer of hope that my fortunes were about to change.

TRACEY’S BACARDI

It started with a chat up line I’d memorised from a ‘how to pull’ tabloid article.
‘”Can I buy you several drinks?”
The girl at the bar looked bored and gave me a vacant stare that could be interpreted as ‘yeah’, ‘nah’ or ‘fuck off’.
“Maybe” she conceded.
“Please yerself” I said.
Act casual. Plenty more fish.
“Ok then, just one though”
“What’ll it be?”
“Bacardi and coke”

IT TAKES TWO TO TANGO

LAST TANGO IN PARIS directed by Bernardo Bertolucci (France/Italy, 1972).

Paul finds religion as he shows Jeanne another use for household butter.

Pauline Kael is a critic I admire  but I have to agree to differ with her hyperbolic assessment of Bertolucci’s notorious movie as a masterpiece on a par with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

This is a film that I would defend but don’t particularly like. Its power to shock means that is as controversial now as when it was made.