Archives for the month of: January, 2012

Martha Marcy May Marlene (review)

January 31, 2012 //
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Martha Marcy May Marlene: so good they named her four times? Well, perhaps not quite that good, but this is still a pretty striking debut feature from director/screenwriter Sean Durkin.

It is made all the more memorable by the performance of another debutant, Elisabeth Olsen, who is, as her surname would suggest, the sister of US celebrity twins Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen [we only know this having read some blurb on the film, but a quick Google search reveals that the Olsens twins were once so popular that an online clock was created to count down the days until the former child stars turned 18, presumably so men knew the exact date from which it was safe to masturbate to pictures of them without feeling like a paedophile].

Anyway, we digress. Recent TV and online adverts for Martha Marcy May Marlene have made it look a like an increasingly frenzied slasher pic, but this is actually one of the most subtle psychological (non-supernatural) horror films you’ll ever see. Olsen plays the eponymous enigma at the film’s centre, who we first see running away with some urgency from an unremarkable-looking home somewhere in rural upstate New York.

Picked up and taken to apparent safety by an elder sister she hasn’t seen for over a year, it quickly becomes apparent that something wasn’t altogether right with the life Martha has been living for the previous 12 months. The precise nature of this life gradually becomes clearer as the narrative flips cleverly back and forth between Martha’s present, under the wing of her sister and her sister’s husband, and the past she spent with what quickly becomes identifiable as a cult.

As each flashback reveals more and more information about Martha’s time with this cult, and her behaviour towards her sister betrays an acute case of Stockholm Syndrome, a growing sense of paranoia washes off the screen and onto the audience. In the present scenes, Durkin often places his subjects in the corner of the frame, stood behind large glass windows or doors through which you constantly expect something or someone threatening to appear.  Cumulatively, the effect is far more chilling than a hundred ‘boo’ moments from standard shockers.

Is the threat of Martha’s past coming crashing into her present real or implied? To reveal much more would almost certainly spoil the film, but Olson has to be congratulated for balancing Martha’s split-personality between normal young adult and someone who is clearly a very damaged soul virtually flawlessly, as has John Hawkes for his understated but utterly menacing portrayal of the cult’s leader.

Those who need explicit resolution at the end of a film might be left spitting feathers, but for us the conclusion was perfect, leaving a psychological impact that was difficult to shake from our heads for several days after.

Martha Marcy May Marlene is out in UK cinemas on Friday (March 3)

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Categories movie

It’s Super Colbert!

January 16, 2012 //
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Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s The Definitely Not Coordinating With Steven Colbert Super Pac!

If you are reading this in the UK, the above sentence probably flew over your head higher than anything even Superman himself could manage. Don’t worry, it’s not your fault – unless you are one of the executives at digital channel FX who decided to drop The Colbert Report from its schedule.

So a quick recap: The Colbert Report (pronounced ‘Rap-por’) is the funniest satirical show on television anywhere in the world. (Caveat: probably the best – you can’t seriously expect us to have seen every satirical show on every channel in the world!). It is fronted by comedian Steven Colbert (pronounced: ‘Col-bear’) playing a character called Steven Colbert, an egotistical, right-wing, god-fearing zealot of the type usually found fronting a Fox News show.

Yet this is not just the kind of satire that wags its finger at the insanity of modern politics from a safe distance, has a chuckle and then goes home to count its money. No, this is satire that gets down and dirty (not literally) in the trenches of realpolitik. Afterall, Colbert is the man who eviscerated (not literally) George W. Bush  at a Whitehouse Correspondent’s dinner in 2006.

Last June we reported on Colbert’s successful application to the US Federal Election Commission to set up his own Super PAC (political action committee) in order to the highlight the absurdity of the US Supreme Court’s ruling that corporate funding of independent political adverts during elections cannot be limited. In other words, political donors, whoever they may be, can spend as much money as they want promoting or trashing a candidate in any given election, behind the guise of an independent PAC and able to remain anonymous until well after the election they are seeking to engineer is over.

With thousands of fans heeding a call to donate to the new Colbert Super PAC, at first it ran a couple of ads asking to voters in last August’s Iowa Straw Poll (a poll held for Republican presidential candidates to test their support before the primaries begin) to vote for “Rick Parry – with an ‘A’”, in obvious attempt to lampoon former Republican frontrunner Rick Perry. But since then Colbert Super PAC has been a little quiet.

Not any more. Last week a poll in the South Carolina Republican presidential primary showed that Colbert (who has not put himself forward as a candidate) had five per cent of the state’s vote – one per cent more than genuine candidate John Huntsman. Aside from causing Huntsman to withdraw his candidacy, it also led Colbert to ponder a genuine run at the primary.

There was just one catch however: Super PACs cannot coordinate directly with candidates, making the Colbert Super PAC somewhat of an issue. The solution: to hand Colbert Super PAC over to The Daily Show host (and Colbert Report producer) Jon Stewart and rename it (yes, we said it in the first sentence) The Definitely Not Coordinating With Steven Colbert Super PAC!

Although Colbert is still teasing us as to whether he will actually put his name forward or not, the new PAC has just released its first advert. Voiced by actor John Lithgow and entitled ‘Attack In B Minor For Strings’, it paints current frontrunning Republican robot, sorry, candidate Mitt Romney as an asset-stripping serial killer. No, we are not making this up – see the advert below.

So on this side of the Atlantic we say: come on Armando Iannucci, Stewart Lee, Chris Morris, Charlie Brooker et al, enough with the finger wagging and the chuckling – let’s get together and actually tackle our own politibots head-on too!

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Categories television

OnlyForKool Kids meets: Paralympian Richard Whitehead

January 7, 2012 //
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Having made the enforced switch from his beloved marathon to the 200 metres look easy, Paralympian Richard Whitehead is heading to London 2012 as a contender for gold. But more than any medal, he hopes the Games will encourage a new generation of athletes, disabled and able-bodied, to get involved in sport.

There is a tendency for sport stars who move into a discipline significantly different from the one in which they made their name to find the going tougher than expected. Think of basketball legend Michael Jordan’s excursion into minor league baseball during his first retirement, or British sprinter Dwayne Chamber’s forays into American football and rugby league: after failing to set their new sports alight, both men swiftly returned from whence they came.

So when double-knee amputee and world-record breaking marathon runner Richard Whitehead switched from the Olympics and Paralympic Games’ longest distance to the second shortest, he might have expected to experience similar ignominy.

But at the International Paralympic Committee World Championships in New Zealand at the start of last year he cast aside any doubts, taking the gold medal and setting a championship record in the process. Not a bad start for someone who had never run a 200 metres race before, he admits: “I knew I had a good run in me and I just put everything on the line. I showed a lot of people that I’m not just an athlete but I’m an elite athlete in whatever sport I take part in.”

As good as his word, at a Diamond League meeting at Crystal Palace in August 2011 Whitehead, who runs on prosthetic carbon fibre ‘blades’, added the T42 (the IPC’s classification for knee amputees) 200 metre world record to his world champion status. In between, he also managed to break the T42 400 metre world record at the Paralympic World Cup in Manchester.

These stellar performances secured Whitehead UK Athletics funding, enabling him to become a full-time athlete, and most importantly of all, gained him a place in the squad for this summer’s Paralympic Games in London. Despite the switch from road endurance to track sprinting bringing such high rewards, however, it is the former that retains his greatest affection.

“I love athletics as a sport, but I’ll always be a marathon runner, whether I win gold in London or not,” he says. “I probably would swap the 200m place for a marathon start, even though I’m much higher ranked in the 200m than I am in the marathon. Unfortunately I’m not with the marathon but another door opened with the 200m. I can’t really be too bitter about it as it’s opened so many doors for me, but I want to be known as a marathon and a track runner, not just as the latter.”

Whitehead’s loyalty to the marathon is no surprise. Taking up the sport in 2004, he went on to set world records for both the half and full marathon for leg amputees in 2010, and had been targeting a top five finish at last January’s IPC World Championships.

That ambition was dashed by an IPC regulation stating that leg amputees cannot compete alongside arm amputees. To compound Whitehead’s disappointment, the IPC then announced that the only two races on offer to double amputees above the knee at London 2012 would be the 100 and 200 metres, a decision he says was “a real shock to the system”.

With the determination he has displayed as a sprinter since then, on September 1 Whitehead will take to the blocks as favourite for the T42 200 metre gold medal. Describing the World Championship-winning run as “kamikaze”, he has added a sprint coach and a strength and conditioning coach to his team and undertaken a full programme of winter and warm weather training, with a timetable that includes 16 sessions in the gym and on the track every week.

Embodying the kind of Corinthian spirit all too rare in sport today, Whitehead reveals it is a desire to reach individual goals and keep pushing barriers, not medals or prestige, that keeps him motivated. It is an approach he would like to see others adopt for the Games this summer: “I struggle with the attitude of some athletes who think it’s all about them and their performance. It’s not: it’s about what they can offer and give back to society and how they can inspire a new generation of athletes.”

Whitehead himself has already given quite a lot back to society. Before becoming a full-time athlete, he was a sports development officer for Nottingham City Council, and still visits the city’s schools to talk to pupils and encourage them to exercise. “To have that kind of impact is an honour,” he says. “Sport is more than going out for a run and getting sweating, it is about participation, making new friendship groups and experiencing new life skills. There a certain groups of youngsters that don’t necessarily want to participate in sport, so you have to engage them in different ways.”

He also travels regularly to the US to work with Achilles International, a New York-based foundation that helps people with disabilities participate in mainstream athletics. Achilles supplied Whitehead with a pace runner for his world-record time (2:42:53) in the 2010 Chicago Marathon, and he now returns the favour by coaching the US military’s wounded veterans.

“Those guys have come back wounded from action and have never walked or run on prosthetics, so I help support that transition,” he explains. “Some people just need face time with me to understand the challenges in front of them and realise that by accepting them they can become a better person. That’s what sport is all about.”

It is this ethos that Whitehead hopes will be London 2012′s lasting achievement: “In this country, there are so many people who are excluded socially a lot of the time because they have a disability. People need realise that sport is bigger than bronze, silver or gold medals, it’s about the impact they can have, whether it is inspiring that next generation of athletes or changing society’s attitudes to disabled people.”

“2012 provides a massive platform to do that,” he adds. “The legacy that I see for the Olympics and the Paralympics is about the athletes spreading that message to all corners of the country, placing it in the heart of the communities who will be coming to watch or following us on television.”


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