Day: 2 February 2014
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BOOK REVIEW | How Are You Going To Get Out Of That One, Alan Ambrose, by David Moreton
Ever seen a book review in 10 words or less? No? See Below?
Like Carry On? Like farce? Love this!
There! Never let it be said I didn’t rise to a challenge. But, to flesh it out a little (oooh, errr, Missus), this rib achingly funny book from David Moreton is like a gay romp through all those bawdy British comedies I grew up on. Saucy comments via Carry On – check. Rude jokes via On The Buses – check. Double entendres via Nearest & Dearest – check.
Right up my street if you’ll forgive me! This book is a gem of a read, taking the reader on a journey as we follow our hero, Alan, through his growing pains, coming out, staying in, cottaging, trading favours for gifts, you name it – it reads like the kind of book Rupert Everett would like to write, but doesn’t.
David has a talent for writing farce, creating situations that at once make you laugh out loud (not great on a Manchester bus at night) and also inwardly cringe (hoping to god it never happens to you). He describes sex in all its seedy reality, warts an all – as it were. These scenes are all too graphic and farcical, but feel as if they are based on real situations…..cottaging, not as its shown in glossy porn clips, but in all its piss stenched reality, gritty and dirty…..but always with a glint in the eye and a smirk on the chops!
We read of Alan’s adventures as he moves from man to man, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes shoved/pushed/dumped, from continent to continent, villa to bedsit, Hollywood to Hove. And I feel better for it! We read as he gets involved in scrapes, schemes and porn…..
At over 3,000 pages, this isn’t a light read – and I thank god its on e-reader, cant imagine the weight of it as a physical book but would imagine it’d give you a pretty good workout carrying it around!!
You end up feeling like Alan is someone you want to know, want in your life, want to go get a drink with, never want to meet at a urinal, and always check your wallet is still there before he leaves…..fun, frank and farcical…..
If you are looking for that book to read whilst warming your toes during the long winter nights….do yourself a favour. Ignore those sour-puss, just-sucked-a-lemon, up-yer-bum serious novels that always populate the “high brow” review pages and get this one. It’ll tickle your funny bone, it’ll make you smile, it’ll make you think, it’s the most fun you can have with your clothes on for under a fiver!
Get your copy here
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THEATRE REVIEW | How To Be Immortal, UK Tour
★★★★ | How To Be Immortal, UK Tour
Three true tales intertwine in this intimate, bold and funny show about love, science, death and immortality.Henrietta Lacks died in West Virginia in 1951, but her cells are still alive today, dividing endlessly in laboratories, their every detail studied by scientists all over the world. It’s taken Deborah years to come to terms with her mother’s death. Now, suddenly, she’s got to deal with her immortality.
Rosa and Mick are in love. She plays the cello, he plays the squeezebox –they sound great together. The trouble is that she’s pregnant and he’s about to die.
If we didn’t have bodies would we live forever? Its 1950 and Doctor George Gey and his wife Margaret are about to make a mind-bending discovery using homemade apparatus and some calves liver puree. All they need is the right biopsy.
Love, death and DNA intertwine in three twisted true tales about what we leave behind. There’s live music on cello, squeezebox and ukulele, 1950s science, nano-puppetry, animation and a song composed from human DNA coding. This is a moving production that is not easily shaken from the mind.
For such a heavy subject matter, this is actually a very watchable and engaging play with plenty of humour. Writer, Kirsty Housley, manages to present a trio of fascinating stories with a deft touch, conveying both deep emotion and offering up a complex scientific theme, which is quite a feat. The technology worked well too with some breath taking back projections onto the versatile and clever set. The stories blend well together and the trio of talented actor/musicians give sterling performances in a variety of role.
I was lucky enough to catch the show at the Albany at Deptford, a fantastic small theatre and arts venue which people outside of South London might not be in the know about. It’s well worth a visit and easily reached by public transport.
The show is on tour until the end of March 2014 and you can catch it at various venues around the U.K.: http://www.pennydreadfultheatre.com/#!tour-dates/cxb5
Check out The Albany at Deptford here: http://www.thealbany.org.uk/whatson
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COLUMN | Super(Gay)Man
I was watching an interiors program the other night and, unsurprisingly, the majority of male participants were gay.
This led me to ponder why it is that gay people are so talented in the fields of the arts? We’re prominent in theatre, dance and design. Fashion would be stuck in the doldrums without us. The world of hairstyling would be severely depleted and there’d be a lot less fancy window displays in the big shops. Do we have a special gene? Is it a class we all take at gay school? Are we just born amazing, with an eye for colour and where to put an accented scatter cushion?
We’ve got comedy cracked with our acerbic wit. We can write, sing and paint with amazing results. We’re even infiltrating sports with our buffed physiques teetering on the edges of diving boards and our good legs managing to kick balls about whilst looking hot in shorts. Is there no limit to our talents?
If you listen to our detractors; we can topple governments, corrupt children and make whole nations quake with just a click of our delicately manicured fingers. We can have whole countries living in terror of us, leading them to pass laws to suppress us, trying to make us impotent and powerless. Religions pass judgements on us just so that they can try to hide our clearly superior talents.
Is there nothing we can’t do? Maybe we’re the master race. We’re a force to be reckoned with, strong, talented and amazing with a little bit of fabulousness and good skin to add to the mix.
..or maybe we’re just people. Maybe that’s why we terrify some people so much. We’re just a group of people who happen to be gay and are pretty much the same as people who don’t happen to be gay, with a varying range and mix of talents and characteristics.
Now that must be truly terrifying for some people.
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FILM REVIEW | A Most Violent Year, Playing it straight can work – Sometimes
Abel Morales wants to pursue the ‘American dream’ the right way. However, his pushy wife Anna thinks otherwise. She is the daughter of the Brooklyn mobster who sold his small Heating Oil business to Morales in the first place, and Anna is well aware that if they are to be successful they will first have to effectively deal with thugs who run competitive businesses by far means and foul. Mainly the latter.
It’s obvious from the start of the movie when yet another of Morales’s tankers are hijacked and the driver is badly beaten that whoever is behind these incidents means to put the Morales out of business. As Anna keeps nagging to remind him, they are effectively at war. The trouble is they are not quite sure who with.
It’s the 1980s and in a crime-ridden New York City it is tough for a business like Morales not to have to resort to play dirty tricks to survive. He has signed the biggest deal of his career to date when he agrees to buy an Oil Terminal from a group of savvy Hassidic Jews, and if fails to complete the purchase on time he stands to lose everything, including the oversized ‘macmansion’ he has just bought in the suburbs. When news of the deal goes public, then the campaign of terror against him is stepped up to try and ensure that he will not have enough funds to close the deal.
If that is not enough trouble, the Assistant D.A. is out to make a name for himself and be seen to be cleaning up the ‘dirty’ oil industry and is looking to charge Morales with multiple offences. This includes fraud and cooking the books, the latter being one of Anna’s more accomplished talents.
This taut multi-layered tale of corruption and treachery is the third feature from writer/director J.C. Chandor who made such a splash with his debut movie Margin Call in 2010 that became a sleeper hit. Chandor keeps the tension packed until the final credits roll when Morales, determined to keep to the moral ground, realises he has to be tougher than both the thugs out to ruin him but also his wife who has no problem at all resorting to whatever it takes to keep her family together and the business in tact.
With a really compelling performance from Oscar Isaac looking more like a new George Clooney matinee idol in every movie he stars in, who with his heavy Brooklyn accent is perfectly cast as Morales. He has such a commanding presence and its clear to see how he has jumped up into leading man status since his breakthrough performance in Inside Llewyn Davies. Plus Jessica Chastain forsaking her copper tresses and going bossy blond, is splendid as the matter-of-fact tough cookie Anna.
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FILM REVIEW | Dallas Buyers Club
★★★★★ | DALLAS BUYERS CLUB
The very scary fact thing about watching Dallas Buyers Club is always knowing that this is sadly a very true story.
Not that we have anything except unfettered admiration for Ron Woodroof and his wild unorthodox schemes, but it is the reminder of the sheer number of countless deaths that could have been avoided if it hadn’t been for the complicity of the U.S. Food & Drug Administration Agency with the greed of the Pharmaceutical Companies that still rankles even now.
Woodroof was a working-class Texan hedonist living in a Trailer, hanging out at Rodeos and partying very hard indeed. He was also a serial homophobe. When he collapses one day and is rushed to the ER the Doctors discover he is HIV + and with such a minute T cell count, they tell him that he has no more than 30 days to live. The year is 1985 and there is very little hope for anyone that gets full blown AIDS.
At first he is in total denial and continues his life of drugs, drink and unprotected sex with hookers until his body starts to give up. When he finally accepts the truth, he also sharpens his resolve to beat this rap. He drags himself to the library and consumes all the information that is in the public domain at the time, which is very little. It is however enough to know that there is about to be a trial of AZT a new anti-retroviral drug …. the first if its kind … and because of the rapid explosion of AIDS, the FDA have agreed to fast-track it without its usual safeguards and checks.
Woodroof pleads with the Doctors at his local hospital to be allowed some of this new wonder drug, but he is rejected on the grounds that he doesn’t qualify, so he seeks out an Orderly and bribes him to steal a supply. When this dries up, the Orderly recommends that he tries a Doctor in Mexico who may be able to help.
He checks into Dr. Vass’s rundown Clinic over the Border and it is there that he first learns the enormous potential harm that unchecked toxic drugs such as AZT cause. At the supposition that they may stop the virus expanding, they also do such harm to the body that they expose them to countless opportunistic diseases. Vass’s solution is proteins and vitamins that will actively improve the general health of a person with AIDS making them in better position to be able to deal with the virus.
When Woodroof learns that none of these are available in the USA, he starts an import business to supply them to other patients back in Dallas. He partners with Rayon a Trans person with HIV who he met in Clinic once as she can introduce him to all the people who would want to get their hands on these new drugs.
At every step of the way, he is aggressively pursued by the FDA as even though none of the drugs/proteins he sells are illegal, they have not been officially approved and the FDA, egged on by the Drug Companies who fund them, want to keep total control of every aspect. One of the ways to get around the Law is not to actually sell the drugs themselves, but sell memberships to his Club (for $400 a month) and this entitles each member to have whatever drugs they want.
As supplies get tougher to obtain, and new drugs come on the market, Woodroof widens his search worldwide to anyone and everyone who would sell to him. And the FDA would use every legal loophole and obscure law on the Statute Books to seize all his supplies and issue countless fines. Meanwhile at the local hospital it is getting very obvious that patients on the AZT trial are doing much worse than other AIDS patients, but the Authorities anxious to keep receiving the much need Payments from the Drug Companies are happy to suppress all the official reports that confirm this, and the one Doctor that dares to question her Bosses’s ethics is fired.
Woodroof unquestionably started this venture purely to keep himself alive and to make money. He succeed with his first aim and lived 6 years after his initial diagnosis of just 30 days, and as he gradually got less paranoid of the gay community, he started allowing some people to have the drugs even though they couldn’t afford the Fee. It wast as much that he was any less of a homophobe, but as his own friends totally rejected him out of sheer fear, he started to be able to relate to being an ‘outcast’ like his fellow AIDS sufferers.
This film has been a long time coming. Scriptwrters Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack based it on the hundreds of interviews they had with Woodroof, and then waited 20 years for the movie to finally get made. Several directors and stars were attached to it until it ended up in the hands of Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallee who’s claim to fame (so far) is C.R.A Z.Y. a very neat gay coming of age so far. His two principal stars lost a ton of weight for the parts Jared Leto as Rayon dropped 30 lbs and Matthew McConaughey a scary 50 lbs. They both gave powerful dazzling performances which will has got them several acting awards including Oscar Nominations for them both. It was definitely a stunning change in direction for McConaughey in particular who has established his career so far mainly in rom-coms, but for my two cents (!) it was Leto’s heart-breaking turn as the drug-addicted Rayon that totally bowled me over. It makes one appreciate that Leto has been off our screens far too long (5 years whilst he was touring with his Band)
These Clubs like Woodroof’s (there were others in other cities) played an important role alongside the wonderful ACT-UP movement to continually put the FDA on notice, and without their unceasing pressure, demands and activism so many of the drugs that would eventually help with people with AIDS would never have been made available in time.
It’s a compelling story told with such passion and authority that both disturbs and delights. Unmissable.
Available to buy / view on: Amazon | Amazon Prime | iTunes