Inflight Magazine of Brussels Airlines

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Destination Guides

In session

A round-up of the top films, music releases and books heading your way this month

Text Matt Bochenski
Image Rex Features

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans

Director Patrick Tatopoulos
Starring Michael Sheen, Bill Nighy, Rhona Mitra

If you saw Neil Marshall’s violent fantasy Doomsday, then you’ll have realised that, that film was basically actress Rhona Mitra’s audition tape for Underworld: Rise of the Lycans.

This is the third film in the vampires vs. werewolves trilogy, and though the previous two starred proper Hollywood player Kate Beckinsale, she’s finally decided to jump ship, leaving the door open to the former model who made her name as the original Lara Croft.

Sadly, the Underworld films have never quite lived up to their brilliantly simple premise – that werewolves and vampires have been fighting a 1000-year war – relying mostly on the skin tight costume of the aforementioned Kate. But if anything, things have taken a turn for the worse as we go back to discover the origins of the war, and demonic anti-heroes Lucian and Viktor. What that actually means is that the writers ran out of new ideas, but knew there was still a buck to be squeezed from the franchise.

Lion’s Den

Director Pablo Trapero
Starring Martina Gusman, Elli Medeiros, Rodrigo Santoro

The ‘prison movie’ has developed into its own sub-genre, but Pablo Trapero’s Lion’s Den is something different. You’ve never seen a prison movie quite this honest, quite this powerful. Much like the institution around which it revolves, Lion’s Den is a film from which it’s impossible to escape.

We follow the story of Julia, who awakes one day (in the film’s horrifying opening shot) covered in blood but unsure how it actually got there. Heavily pregnant, she’s arrested on suspicion of murder and thrown into the hellish world of an all-female Argentine prison.

As the years unfold, Julia fights for acquittal, finds love and attempts to forge a new identity for herself. It’s a performance of stunning power from Martina Gusman, who disappears into this character as though doing her own lifetime stretch. Prison life is evoked in all its grim inhumanity, but so too is its touching and even tender unseen side, as women raise their children together and create some sense of twisted community.

U2

No Line on the Horizon

Or, ‘There’s No End In Sight’ for the indefatigable Irish rockers, the only band to combine million selling albums with saving millions of lives.

Now that the other three (for the record: The Edge, Larry Mullen and Adam Clayton) have roped Bono back into doing his day job, they’re here with their twelfth studio album, and they’re back doing what they do best.

Taking its cues more from the envelope pushing era of Achtung Baby than 2004’s How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, NLOTH sees U2 going after a harder, more eclectic musical model. Lead single ‘Get On Your Boots’ sets the tone – a sonic milkshake of electro, grunge, rock and hip-hop that packs more ideas into three minutes than most bands manage in an entire album. Elsewhere, a more melodic tone takes hold, especially on tracks like ‘White As Snow’, and the epic ‘I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight’. This is U2 back on top.

Röyksopp

Junior

There’s not a lot of great music that’s come out of the Norwegian town of Tromso. Or, in fact, Norway itself. Torbjørn Brundtland and Svein Berge met at school, experimenting with electronic music just as the underground Detroit scene started to get some serious global attention. They founded Röyksopp in 1998, and instantly made a name for themselves for their dreamlike, but irresistibly catchy compositions.

Now, with Junior, the duo again stake a claim as the twenty-first century equivalent of classic composers, weaving unique, depthless sounds that are at once utterly modern and yet somehow timeless.

A measure of their caché can be seen in the quality of collaborators they’ve attracted, with the likes of Robyn and Swedish indie star Lykke Li both guesting.

The music is, as ever, edgy and surreal but also poppy and playfully mainstream. The catchily titled ‘Röyksopp Forever’ might be dripping in irony, but it’s also a very good summary about how their fans feel about this band – one that’s out on the fringes of modern music creating exciting waves for the rest of us to surf.

Book club

This month’s must -reads

The Vagrants
Yiyun Li

Chinese author Yiyun Li shot to fame in 2006 when her first book of short stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won a fistful of major awards.

Yiyun was expelled from the Communist Party as a youth for questioning the doctrine she was being force fed; eventually fleeing to America where, without speaking more than a few words of the language, she enrolled on a writer’s course to find her voice. To this day, she’s never written a word in her native tongue because, she says, she simply doesn’t know how to express emotion in Chinese.

Much is expected, then, of The Vagrants, and it doesn’t disappoint. Based on real life events, it follows the story of Gu Shan, a 28-year-old who is executed after losing her faith in Communism, and the aftershocks that her death provokes. Once again, Yiyun writes in quiet, lyrical prose that effortlessly places a hand on your heart and remorselessly starts to squeeze.

Maximum Ride: The Final
Warning James Patterson

Max, Fang, Iggy, Nudge, Gazzy and Angel are The Flock, six extraordinary kids who escaped from a top secret government laboratory. Like a cross between Bible myth and Marvel’s X-Men, The Flock all have huge white wings as well as unusual strength and powers of healing.

Now that we’re onto the fifth novel, the initial sense of anything-goes giddiness has been toned down, but this remains one of the best series for young adults who think Harry Potter is child’s play.

Max and the gang are now working alongside the government to try and figure out why millions of fish are dying off the coast of Hawaii. But, as ever, there’s more to this adventure than meets the eye, with a shady criminal mastermind tracking their every move.

With its themes of family and friendship this is perfect for young readers looking to graduate to more challenging stories.