Inflight Magazine of Brussels Airlines

Welcome to the Inflight Magazine of Brussels Airlines

Destination Guides

In session

Matt Bochenski rounds up the top films, music releases and books heading your way this month

Images Rex Features, Getty Images

Coraline

Director Henry Selick
Starring Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher

It must get quite frustrating for Henry Selick. Despite the fact that he’s one of a very small group of modern American directors with a defining signature style, people keep mistaking his work for that of Tim Burton. Burton hasn’t gone out of his way to steal Selick’s thunder, but the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas has long lived in the shadow of his more famous producer. It didn’t help that Burton’s Corpse Bride looked remarkably similar to Selick’s wonderfully dark stop-motion fantasy world.

But now at last, Selick is ready to reassert his position as one of animation’s top dogs. Coraline is destined to go down as an all-time children’s classic. Adapted from the gothic graphic novel by Neil Gaiman, the film follows Coraline Jones, a young girl who has recently moved to a spooky new apartment with her (largely absentee) parents. Here she finds a door to a mysterious other world, where a new, much better version of family life awaits her. But behind the façade lurks a dark and deadly reality.

Photographed in 3D, Selick’s world springs frighteningly to life – it’s like watching a digital pop-up book burst open on screen. It’s a stunning technical achievement matched by a story guaranteed to leave kids both big and small feeling thoroughly haunted.

Looking for Eric

Director Ken Loach
Starring Steve Evets, Eric Cantona, Stephanie Bishop

British director Ken Loach is renowned as the godfather of socially aware, ‘kitchen sink’ realism. His 1966 film Cathy Come Home changed the UK’s view on homelessness and social services, and that set the tone for a career that has seen Loach turn his attention time and time again to the under-represented underclasses of European society.

So in this time of uncertainty, what has Loach done? Well, he’s only gone and made a film about Eric Cantona. Yes, that Eric Cantona. King Eric of Manchester United, the flawed footballing genius of his generation.

But far from being a strange blip or an irrelevance on Loach’s exalted career path, Looking for Eric is one of his best films for years. Gone is the sententious anger and in its place is a warm-hearted, brilliantly funny comedy about a Manchester postman piecing his life back together with the help of Eric (played by Cantona himself) as his guardian angel. Poignant and wry, it’s no fluffy Full Monty tale of a struggle against the odds, but a vital parable about how we can all get through hard times – with a little help from our friends.

Diana Krall

Quiet Nights

Canadian jazz vocalist (and Mrs Elvis Costello) Diana Krall has been around for a while – this is her 12th album – but she sounds as fresh as ever on Quiet Nights. Described by Krall as the kind of music that sounds “like you’re lying next to your lover in bed whispering this in their ear”, it stands in comparison with her best work.

Krall’s breathy, rhythmic lilt is perfectly suited to tracks such as the soul-straining ‘You’re My Thrill’ or ‘Too Marvellous for Words’. There are some bold choices here, too. A cover of ‘Walk on By’ takes a Brazilian-flavoured bossa nova route that’s common to the whole album, most noticeably on ‘The Boy from Ipanema’.

This track also showcases Krall’s fine piano-playing skills – indeed it was as a pianist rather than a singer that she won a music scholarship to America at the tender age of 17.

All the tracks are very polished and gentle, and might leave you thirsting for something a little edgier. You could try teaming Krall with Marilyn Manson and perhaps you really would have the perfect night in. It wouldn’t be very quiet, though.

Marilyn Manson

The High End of Low

Run for the hills! Marilyn Manson, destroyer of civilisations, corrupter of children and some-time singer, is back. Without any national catastrophes to pin on the self-professed “antichrist superstar” (rumours that Manson is responsible for swine flu remain unproven), the focus can now return to his music.

The question is, can the work stand the glare of the spotlight?

Manson has been in bullish mood, describing The High End of Low as “wiping the floor” with his previous work, mainly because he’s “got his fire back” after recent personal problems.

The album’s anthemic track is ‘Armageddon’ (it has a longer title we won’t go into), which sets the tone with its pounding industrial backdrop mixed with 1970s glam-rock influences. That side of Manson – the outré rather than the outrageous – is easily overlooked, but it’s what gives his work an edge over his rivals.

Despite kitschy, look-at-me song titles (‘I Want to Kill You Like They Do in the Movies’, ‘I Have to Look Up Just to See Hell’), this is a rigorous and musically intelligent album from the singer America loves to hate.

Book club

This month’s must-reads

The Angel’s Game
Carlos Ruiz Zafón

There’s a lot riding on The Angel’s Game, the sequel to Zafón’s 2001 hit The Shadow of the Wind. That multi-million seller followed Daniel, who was initiated into the Cemetery of Forgotten Books after the Spanish Civil War, a secret organisation dedicated to preserving literary greats. His life was put in danger when it turned out the book he was sworn to defend was being hunted by a man who called himself after the name of the devil in that book.

That mix of drama, history, mysticism and romance is again found in The Angel’s Game, a prequel set in the 1920s and 30s. Zafón hits readers with a brilliant conceit: after a past transgression, a writer, David Martin, is allowed to live only if he can write a book that will change people’s lives.

Once more, Zafón immerses himself in the unique power of literature to move and inform, while maintaining a pace and intensity that would embarrass the most seasoned thriller writer.

Dead Tomorrow
Peter James

If you’ve ever read a Peter James novel and wondered how he builds scenes with an almost cinematic sense of time and space, you won’t be surprised to learn that he actually got his start as a producer and script writer, working on projects with Al Pacino, among others.

Ironically, the switch from script to novel has done his movie career no end of good, with three of his books so far having been made into films. It wouldn’t be a shock to see Dead Tomorrow go the same way.

It’s a dark story told in a very English fashion, as the mother of a critically ill boy becomes involved in the illegal trade of organs. Ranged against and around her are human traffickers, disappeared teenagers and a newly married cop who can’t quite shake the tragic fate of his first wife.

It builds into a satisfyingly meaty story, over which James exerts complete control. He’s staking his claim as one of the world’s smartest writers of detective fiction.