Knocked Up / Superbad

Having recently been introduced to these two films, amongst the major successes in a bumper year of off-beat American comedy in 2007, it was heartening to see that American teen/ 20-something comedy is finally growing up.

Just when we thought the Ferrell/Wilson/Stiller gang was hitting its zenith, along comes the Apatow/Rogen/Goldberg crew to steal their thunder. Of the two films, Knocked Up is undoubtedly superior. It has heart where Superbad just has head (in all senses of the word), and manages to create a far more sympathetic collection of protagonists.

The fat/curly-haired anti-heroes (Seth Rogan - pictured - and Jonah Hill) of both films represent something of a new wave of American comedic leading man - although they undoubtedly have Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly to thanks for setting the precedent. What these chubby charmers achieve is an overhaul of the traditional casting of American 'dude' comedy. The down-to-earth, witty 'not-quite-nerds' are a new breed of comedy character, owing much to the Marx brothers in that the whole premise of their comedy is founded on interplay. Witty lines happily sit beside the ever-familiar nob-gags, and well-roundedness applies to their emotional make-up as much as it does to their waist-lines.

These are the products of a post-pop America. A generation of young men grown weary with high-school stereotypes yet helpless to resist them. But the use of the phrase 'young men' is significant here - for the women hardly get a look in. There is still a sexist core in both of these films that leaves one questioning when it is that these all-male production teams will wake up and smell the oestrogen. The nerds and jocks have been allowed to mature, but the cheerleaders remain shaking their pom-poms at the side. A depressing reflection of a country still riddled with ultra-conservative values and under-currents of religiosity.

Review of 'The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable' by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It is perfectly apt, pretty much essential, that this book should be a black swan: an unexpected bestseller, topping the New York Times non-fiction lists. Otherwise Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s theory wouldn’t carry nearly the weight that it does. A quirky and engaging writer, Taleb’s central thesis is that we are frequently taken for suckers by the unexpected. Until the discovery of Australia, everyone in Europe believed swans could only be white. We should be careful of all the certainties we hold and be ready to be sceptical about our beliefs. Not in a Cartesian manner following the Descartes fashion (Taleb, for reasons not entirely clear, rejects this throw out all of your beliefs and start again line of thought). Rather we should be very wary of trusting established models for forecasting in economics, society, cultural and natural trends. Will the sun rise tomorrow? – probably, but Taleb takes great pleasure in chronicling the fallacies of the ‘bildungsphilisters’ – the intellectual economic forecasters who believe the world will conform to their platonic models only to discover time after time that, well, shit happens.

Taleb’s message is an apt one for the modern interconnected world. The future (which of course can’t be predicted) will probably be dominated by a few more J.K. Rowlings and Bill Gates who inhabit what Taleb calls extremistan, and a greater number of dissatisfied and disenfranchised unfortunates (mediocristan). As a Humanist, Taleb says, he hates this disparity, and it hardly tallies with those in mediocristan who cling to the protestant work ethic view of life, that the harder you work the proportionally greater the rewards. But he offers succour to the second rate towards the end of the book with the tale of Yevgenia Krasnova, a novelist whose first novel is an unexpected success and her second book is an equally unexpected flop. There is charm in secure mediocrity, and wild success is not always all it is cracked up to be. Take comfort in the fact that you are a black swan – the biggest black swan of all, by virtue of your birth against gigantic odds.

Once the central message is grasped, you don’t really need to plough through all of the book , which is overlong at some 300 pages, unless you want to take in all the quirky asides and stories about the author’s intellectual friends and colleagues and detailed economic theories deconstructing the Gaussian Bell Curve. A vast array of obscure economists and philosophers are referenced which comes across as intellectually show-offy, and Taleb’s style is a clunking dog’s dinner, peppered with faux yiddishisms such as ‘nobel schnobel’ and prefixing any thinker he admires with the Germanic ‘über’. Still, it is partially inthis linguistic naivety, uprooted from his Lebanese homeland (or Levantine as he anachronistically calls his roots), and finding a place in the world as an eccentric commodoties trader in New York, that he is an eccentric and admirable writer. Someone who sees a crowd, and deliberately heads off in the other direction.

By Fred Bosanquet

Review of 'Straw Dogs' and 'Black Mass' by John Gray

Human progress is a myth, freedom is a fantasy, the individual self is a chimera, our lives are lived from start to finish as illusions, justice and morality are social constructs relied on solely for convenience, human beings are entirely ignorant of motivation and can no more control the future of the race than the most base amoeba can.

This is the pessimistic world view of John Gray, one of the few genuine practising philosophers alive today who still devotes his life’s work to making sense of the human condition. We are no better than beasts, he concludes, because – frankly – we are beasts. The earth has existed long before humans arrived, and humans will disappear millions of years before the sun finally bursts apart and swallows up the solar system. Humans are merely one of millions of species who have inhabited the earth only as long as the span of our striations of DNA lasts.

If you think your own life might be small and purposeless in the scheme of things, reading John Gray may only exacerbate such feelings until your sense of your self shrinks into a miserable chewing gum sized ball. An epigram for his whole collection of writing might be the scribble Darwin wrote in his notebook in 1838: ‘He who understands baboon will do more for metaphysics than Locke’. Gray, to put it bluntly, is a man at odds with the whole corpus of Western Enlightenment philosophy, from Rousseau, Descartes and beyond.

In Straw Dogs, his 2002 polemic, he devotes a brisk 200 pages to a sweeping destruction job of a whole gamut of Post-Enlightenment theories. For example, atheism: ‘Secularism is like chastity, a condition defined by what it denies’, Post-Modernism: ‘just the latest fad in anthropocentrism’ – humans arrogantly thinking they can define the terms of reality, environmentalism: ‘A high-tech Green utopia, in which a few humans live happily in balance with the rest of life’.

Environmentalism, Gray argues may be scientifically feasible, but is humanly unimaginable. In the 17th Century, the population of the world was half a billion people, the same number as the increase in people in the last decade alone. This, points out Gray, is palpably unsustainable. If the Twentieth Century was dire for its spate of genocidal warfare, this one could be even worse, as increasing population growth combined with scarcity of resources will ignite flashpoints all over the planet as the game is up for the rich nations and their hitherto unquestioned dominance over the world’s reserves.

Straw Dogs is a wide ranging polemic, but in Black Mass, the successor book, the target is more specific: the policies of neo-conservative Western governments who believe that the world can be remade in their image. Politics, given the animal natures of human beings, is inherently impossible and therefore corrupting. The desire of Bush, Blair, and the team of neo-cons who laid out the Iraq plans is the modern incarnation of a religious will, which, Gray argues, has always been present in societies. The Enlightenment, 250 years ago, merely gave this yearning a secular edge.

Stalinism, National Socialism, Neo-Conservatism, free market liberalism: all are ideologies that betray a religious, utopian impulse. The plans to introduce democracy in Iraq was as misguided and unrealisable as the Marxist claims that capitalism would be overthrown and a post-state brotherhood of humanity would be realised. Gray concludes the book by saying the only way to proceed in political affairs, as with all human affairs, is with clear eyed realism in the manner of his few philosophical and political heroes: David Hume, Edmund Burke, Isaiah Berlin.

Those who maintain faith in progress will reject Gray’s analysis on the grounds that some reforming, progressive ideals have been instilled in society: slavery was abolished, in the face of those who said it was unrealisable. Why should the citizens of the Middle East not have a chance to be freed from tyranny and live in democratic peace like their more fortunate coevals in Western Europe? However this is precisely Gray’s point – there is not enough resources in the world for everyone to eat at the ‘rational’ liberal democratic table. That is the privilege of the wealthy nations, who fiercely safeguard their resources (successfully, up to now at least). Liberalism is cast as a sort of Range Rover, I-Phone type of political theory – something only the rich can afford.

Gray’s arguments are trenchant, and easy to follow if hard to swallow. His style is that of the apercu – brisk, swift, impressionistic. Such a loose limbed writing style is easily open to objection. But he incorporates large bibliographies in the back of his books for those interested in investigating his arguments further. De-coupling human beings from their human-centric world view is a difficult operation. The tradition in which Gray writes: Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Schopenhauer, is a lonely and uncomfortable one, and it is unsurprising that his bulletins on the current state of man are met with hot opposition.

By Fred Bosanquet

Review of 'Queuing for Beginners' by Joe Moran

Surely the British have always been obsessed by the weather, consumed clutcher inducing fry ups for breakfast, and have stood in line since time immemorial.

Not so, says Joe Moran, who in this intricate little book, outlines the provenance of these and many other everyday lifestyle traits. Queuing for beginners is a social history book that looks at society through a close lens microscope. Eschewing the big political and economic themes normally associated with social change, he shows just what crazy folk we really are as he traces the typical day of an average British adult – a person who arises in the morning, eats a bowl of cereal for breakfast, squeezes into a packed train and commutes to the office, sits at a desk with a computer, attends meetings, fires off more emails than are strictly necessary, has a pint or two in the pub after work, heats up a supermarket ready-meal for dinner, watches a bit of TV (especially the weather forecast) then retires to bed under a duvet (a now commonplace bed furnishing that only dates from 1964 when Terence Conran opened the first Habitat store in South Kensington) and tries to get as much sleep as possible in this era of constant bustle and distraction.

Such a narrative might seem like the most boring book since the two volume Paddy Ashdown diaries, but it is actually a compelling look of the myriad little things that appear in our days. Drawing on a vast range of archival research (Moran is a lecturer in everyday life at Liverpool John Moores University), the author finds that there is a fascinating story behind just about everything we take for granted. The first pedestrian crossings, marked by Belisha Beacons (named after the minister of transport, Leslie Hore-Belisha in 1934) caused a scandal when they were first introduced. Militant protestors fired shots at them with air rifles as they believed the introduction of pedestrian crossings had effectively conceded the rest of the highway to the motor car. The modern form of queue – a single line in which people are called to the next free cashier by an electronic display –only became widespread in the 1990s. Before that, individual queue lines were the norm, leading to the commonplace frustration of joining the shortest queue only to find it was the slowest moving since an elderly man at the front was engaged in a long and protracted argument with the cashier.

An entire chapter is devoted to a single item of furniture – the sofa. Historically, it was a low status item, mocked as a shapeless, lumpen article. In the twentieth century, design traits from Scandinavia slimmed and reduced the size of the sofa and its modern manifestation - especially the minimalist IKEA sofa, often bought on hire purchase - is a far cry from the traditional sofa which was traditionally a lifetime wedding present for a married couple.

In so much as the book is didactical, the lesson Joe Moran seems to want to impart, is to make us take a closer look at our everyday surroundings. If we occasionally pause in our hectic lives to take note of exactly how the packaged sandwich has come to dominate our lunchtime eating habits, or why we have so many more TV channels than we used to, we can begin to realise that our lives are not endlessly recycled Groundhog Day style routines, but part of a constantly evolving historical time. In twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years time, many aspects of our everyday lives will be quite different, and the Prêt a Manger sandwich and the IKEA sofa may be objects of as much nostalgia as the Bakelite telephone or the 1940s railway carriage.

Meet The Spartans - The Worst Film Ever Made?

I'm going to cut to the chase. Meet The Spartans is 78 minutes of complete and total, unmitigated shit. Quite how the writers (dreaded spoof-movie 'gurus' Friedberg and Seltzer) manage to achieve such levels of buttock-twinging awfulness is a mystery. If you want to experience the film without forking out the price of a cinema ticket, simply ask a friend to say "isn't 300 really gay" and "boobs" over and over again. Trust me, you'll save yourself much time, effort and cash. In fact, what am I saying? If you really want to replicate the experience of watching this film, ask your friend to hit your nut-sack with a tennis racket for 2 hours continuously - the only difference is that this experience would be slightly funnier.

I'm all in favour of spoofs and love a good boob-joke as much as the next man, but here there is nothing to induce even the faintest of wry smiles. Compared to the likes of Hotshots, Airplane! or Shaun of the Dead, classic spoofs all of them, this looks like a student film shot by a group of drunks who've all had humour labotomies. Sean Maguire (clearly cast due to his impressive back-catalogue of Grange Hill, Eastenders and Holby City) gives the worst comedic performance I've ever witnessed on celluloid, whilst Carmen Electra looks and acts every inch the desperate, leather-faced old slag that she is. Pop-culture references are shoe-horned in at every opportunity, and none of them hit the mark (or even come close for that matter).

If you do for some reason decide to inflict this film upon yourself, you'll leave the cinema in a state of quiet shock (I was glued to my seat by sheer exasperation until the final credit had rolled). And, oddly enough, you might well come to the conclusion that this film actually says more about the state of American culture than any Oscar-winner ever will.

Anthony Minghella - A Huge Loss To The World Of Entertainment

The news of Anthony Minghella's death came as a huge shock yesterday. He was a magnificent film director, whose hit-rate was almost unrivalled by his British contemporaries. Amongst these contemporaries, perhaps only Richard Curtis and Ridley Scott can lay claim to having as big an influence on the industry as Minghella did.

Considering his credits as a writer/director only stretch to 5 films, he had a remarkable career which spanned mediums, genres and collaborators. His breakthrough film Truly, Madly, Deeply displayed a rare understanding of the human psyche (particularly the female psyche), and his follow-up The English Patient needs no introduction. I studied this great adaptation at University, and considering the complexity of the source material it's a testament to his genius that Minghella was able to construct such a lucid narrative. Apparently his methodology involved reading the book several times through, putting it on a shelf and retreating into isolation to work up the screenplay from memory. This approach, to me, was ground-breaking, and proved that in order for an adaptation to be successful it must have a sense of detachment from it's source.

I never met Minghella but I did attend a seminar given by his brother Dominic quite recently. Dominic, like his brother, was warm, intelligent, funny and generous, and I hope we will see more of his work in the future. But either way, the hole left by his more famous sibling is huge, and his death is a loss to us all.

Review: 'Nothing to be Frightened Of' by Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes has long been a novelist preoccupied with death. Every one of his previous books has, I think, contained at least one section featuring ruminations on the inevitable dénouement to life, but never before has he devoted a whole book to the subject.

Nothing to be Frightened of is a book that will appeal mainly to long term Barnes fans. It is a return to the smorgasbord style – part essay, part epistolary debate, part philosophical disquisition, part literary homage that hallmarked his great 1984 novel Flaubert’s Parrot, and was reprised in his 1989 meditation on history, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters. This book is hard to summarize, but the blurb writer has an impressive stab in one sentence: ‘among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on mortality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and a homage to the French writer Jules Renard.’ That just about does it. It is something of a departure from Barnes’s previous novels and essays, a comedown from the lofty heights of intellectual detachment, as he gives the reader an insight into episodes from his own life, particularly his relations with his family, people he has written of very little in the past.

Not that we should read this as his autobiography mind. A scrupulous guarder of his privacy, Barnes is unlikely to rip the lid off and spill everything in a messy reveal all in one go. Rather, he reaches into the pot to reach out carefully chosen morsels, starting with an account of his maternal grandparents who were an arch conservative and communist respectively. He recalls how his grandfather used to let the young Julian and his brother watch while he wrang chicken’s necks in the garage. Here, the Barnes brothers’ memories diverge over the exact nature of the execution (was there a guillotine mechanism? Was there a bucket to catch the heads?), and a tense dualism between them is set for much of the book.

Barnes, the younger of the brothers, gives us the impression that he is an intuitive, novelist thinker who is interested in things such as whether human life has a narrative, what happens after our death (he contemplates a huge array of options), how to get value out of a life in an age where Darwin and Dawkins have pretty much done for the idea of God – his chosen path, is a devout appreciation, the religion of art as Flaubert called it, even to the extent where he downplays his blood relations and instead considers his genetic lineage as a line of great artists including Renard (a death haunted artist who features prominently in the book), Flaubert, and Stravinsky.

Perhaps this worship of art is a result of his tricky family relations. His older brother, Jonathan, is a remote, fiercely rational Aristotelian philosopher. He features at points throughout the book, hoisted in at carefully chosen moments to illustrate a cold, philosophical angle on life. In an early exchange Barnes recounts a discussion in the car on the way home from their mother’s funeral that turned into a stern grammatical debate on the music that should have been played at the service, and whether this construed an inadmissible ‘hypothetical want of the dead’. Some readers may find this medical gloved dissection of the event appealing in its precision, many more may find the reaction of the Barnes brothers, with their mother’s corpse not yet cold, rather sub zero on the emotional scale.

Barnes's pere and mere were a difficult couple too. His father was a quiet, reserved French teacher, frequently overruled by his domineering wife who was frequently damning of her sons’ literary talents ‘one son writes books I can read but can’t understand, the other writes books I can understand but can’t read’. Parts of the book focus on their respective declines and deaths, Barnes painfully watching as his father suffers a series of strokes, his mother reacting with stern admonishing towards his aphasia.

The deaths of his parents are the way into this book, the gate at the entrance, but most of the short sections feature great artists and their reactions to the inevitable. Philip Larkin, author of the great death angst poem Aubade, we learn would have died gibbering with fear in a Hull hospital were he not heavily sedated. Flaubert maintained stoical impassivity in the face of the void. Renard himself aimed to die a stylish, French death and eventually succumbed to standard emphysema. Barnes himself fears death constantly, waking up in the night pounding his pillow screaming NO, NO, NO at the injustice of it all. He says he expects his departure to be preceded by extreme pain, coupled with extreme frustration at the euphemistic, imprecise language used by those about him. A grammarian to the end.

Coupled with fear of death is fear of God, or rather, wistful unhappiness at the absence of God. ‘I don’t believe in God, but I miss him,’ is the first sentence of the book. His brother finds this soppy, but Barnes can’t give up so easily. As with his 1986 novel Staring at the Sun he asks a number of questions concerning God - on Pascal’s wager: ‘What if it turns out that God exists but disapprovesof gambling’. He ponders the hypothetical fury of the resurrected atheist and posits a would you rather question (one of many in the book – would you rather be an atheist philosopher who finds a wonderful surprise after your death, or be right after all.

The scale of the philosophising in this book stretches from the solipsistic to the very large. In the worst passages of the book, Barnes engages in self indulgent games, wondering what the last ever reader of his books will be like, or how it would work if he were to die in the middle of writing the book, or a sentence, or a wo (not one of the high points of his normally erudite style). But he can also stretch his mind to contemplate the bigger picture. Towards the end he considers Martin Rees’s warning to us that humans are nothing in the scheme of things. By the sun’s demise, in 6bn years time, any creatures left will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.

Yes, as John Maynard Keynes said, in the long run, we’re all dead. So enjoy this witty and contemplative death volume while you can, and try not to worry about it too much.

By Fred Bosanquet