Inflight Magazine of Brussels Airlines

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

A new movie from the studio that gave us Finding Nemo, Monsters, Inc. and The Incredibles is always one of the film events of the year, and Up doesn’t disappoint. The 10th Pixar film release sees the animation masters come of age with a movie that’s as subtle, emotional and profound as anything it has done to date.

In a tear-jerking opening montage, we see Carl Fredricksen and his sweetheart, Ellie, fall in love and get married, before tragically losing their baby and struggling to move on with their lives. When Ellie dies, Carl is left alone with only bitter memories for company.

But just when you’re wondering where the magic went, Carl literally uproots his life, taking off on the adventure of a lifetime along with a young Wilderness Explorer, Russell. Before you know it, we’ve been transported to a colourful wonderland of talking dogs and birds of paradise.

It’s worth reiterating: Pixar is no ordinary animation studio. It’s in the business of making real films that all ages can enjoy. Up is no exception – it’s an emotional and technical tour de force that will leave you walking on air.

The White Ribbon

Director Michael Haneke
Starring Ulrich Tukur, Susanne Lothar, Mercedes Jadea Diaz

If Lars von Trier is the mad provocateur of European cinema, Michael Haneke is his more cerebral, quietly devastating alter ego. The White Ribbon (or Das Weisse Band) took the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and no one could argue it wasn’t deserved.

This is a haunting story filmed with an icy beauty and clarity of expression. In a small German town in 1913, strange events are unfolding – the local doctor is injured in a fall from his horse, the landowner’s son goes missing and a disabled boy is tortured.

Creating a sense of pervading unease, Haneke guides us through the mental and metaphysical breakdown of a community. As the perpetrators of these crimes are revealed, Haneke makes a bold metaphorical leap in which the actions of a generation prefigure the horrors that would soon engulf the country.

This is a technically polished and intelligent piece of cinema, although there’s a question as to whether Haneke’s hermetically sealed movie universe really speaks to the wider world.

Emily Loizeau

Pays Sauvage
Emily Loizeau is a rare find: not only a French singer who is rather good, but also one who seems interested in the musical landscape beyond her banlieue. Taking her cue from the new breed of twentysomething suburban poets such as Kate Nash and Lily Allen, she has reinvigorated French music, winning fans on both sides of the continental divide That can be explained in part by the fact that Loizeau is the offspring of French and English parents. Mixing influences as diverse as Bach and the Beatles, via Schubert and Bob Dylan, she is perfectly placed to capture a new, international, genre-defying sound.

And that sound is as much playful as anything, full of vibrant rhythms and funky lyrics drawn from a teenage world of crushes, jealousy, family relationships and the gradual process of selfknowledge. Pays Sauvage has all that and more in spades, and looks like the album to take the singer-songwriter to the next level.

Whitney Houston

I Look to You
Who, exactly, is Whitney looking to? Her lawyer? A shrink? A team of paramedics? All of them would be valid options given the torrid times the diva has suffered. After signing a $100m six-album deal in 2001, the artist once known simply as ‘The Voice’ saw her private and professional lives begin to fall apart, with rumours of drug abuse accompanied by a career nosedive.

Now she’s back with her first studio album in six years. And she’s looking (on the cover, at least) younger than ever. But how does it sound? For much of its run-time, I Look to You evinces a slightly backwardlooking air that’s probably deliberate. The late 1980s and early 1990s represented the salad days of Whitney’s career, and a song such as ‘Million Dollar Bill’ self-consciously reaches back to the period with its MOR stylings. Elsewhere, ‘Nothin’ but Love’ introduces a more modern feel, albeit generically so, with its distorted vocals. It isn’t until ‘I Didn’t Know My Own Strength’ that you get some classic Whitney - this is a lovely, surprisingly subtle ballad that directly addresses some of the singers many problems.

All in all, this isn’t an album that’s going to cement Whitney’s comeback in the pop world, but it will probably be seen as an important first step.

Book club

This month’s must-reads

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest
Stieg Larsson
If you haven’t heard of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series, where have you been? Larsson was a crusading Swedish anti-Nazi journalist who died in 2004, leaving three finished manuscripts. The first was a smash hit, placing Larsson among the world’s best-selling authors.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest is the third and final part of the story of hacker Lisbeth Salander and journalist Mikael Blomkvist. It kicks off where the last book ended: with Salander gravely injured and awaiting trial for murder. Now the two must prepare for their greatest challenge to date - proving Salander’s innocence.

But the cracks that began to appear in the series’ second book are carried over here. Much of the prose feels unedited and Larsson’s psychoanalysis of the ‘bad’ characters is callow and naïve. That said, if you’ve come this far, you’ll be thrilled to see how it all ends.

Small Wars
Sadie Jones

Sadie Jones spent 15 years having movie spec scripts rejected before deciding on a change of course. She soon found her debut novel, The Outcast, climbing the bestseller lists.

Her second novel, Small Wars, is set in the 1950s during the little-known Cyprus Emergency - which saw British forces trying to prevent the island’s Greek and Cypriot sides uniting - and it’s a romantic, tragic and impeccably researched work.

We follow a young officer, Hal, and his wife, Clara, as they’re transferred to the Mediterranean. As the Emergency takes hold, Hal is pulled deeper into a dirty war and the changes wreaked upon him are inexorably repeated, first at home and then in the world at large.

This is a tale not just of innocence lost, but also of the semantic naïvety we apply to history when we talk of ‘major’ and ‘minor’ conflicts. It’s a deep and intelligent novel, and another major step for Jones.

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