Inflight Magazine of Brussels Airlines

In session

Images Allstar, Rex Features

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

Alice in Wonderland

Director Tim Burton
Starring Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Crispin Glover, Anne Hathaway

With over 20 adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s fantastical slice of kids’ philosophy littering the paths of cinema history, Tim Burton better have something special up his sleeve to make this one worth our while.

In fact, he has three things – three dimensions to be exact. Yes, it’s time to don those sexy 3D glasses again, and then cringe in terror as limbs, swords and grinning cats come hurtling towards us from the screen.

There’s no one better than Burton to deliver this kind of madcap popcorn escapade and he’s ably assisted by a top-notch cast of players, including Johnny Depp hamming it up as The Mad Hatter, Helena Bonham Carter as The Red Queen and Matt Lucas as both Tweedledum and Tweedledee. But it’s newcomer Mia Wasikowska who holds it all together as Alice, ensuring that all the CG bells and whistles never distract from her weird and wonderful journey into the land beyond the looking glass.

Lebanon

Director Samuel Maoz
Starring Reymond Amsalem, Ashraf Barhom, Oshri Cohen

The second Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006 continues to act as something of a catalyst for the nation’s soul searching as, following Ari Folman’s animated Waltz With Bashir (2008), another film examines the psychological trauma of Israel’s military misadventures. In Lebanon, we return again to the country in the 1980s, but this time with a very particular perspective. Using his own experiences as a gunner as a basis, director Samuel Maoz locks us in the steel guts of an Israeli tank, whose frightened crew (four young men) experiences the war from a position of literal and metaphorical blindness.

This ingenious technical conceit provides Maoz a chance to explore fresh territory in the war genre, jettisoning the bomb-blackened clichés and focusing instead on the personal side of this political conflict. With a script populated by archetypical characters rather than real people, however, the potential to say something different is fumbled, leaving little insight past the usual homily that war is hell, in which old men send young men to die.

The White Stripes

Under Great White Northern Lights

If it was the 10th anniversary of your award-winning, loose-living rock band, what would you do? Trash a hotel room in memory of the good old days, perhaps? Not Jack White. Jack and fellow White Striper Meg decided to set out on an expedition to play every Canadian province they hadn’t visited, with small, impromptu gigs in bars, boats and bowling alleys.

As with any good 21st-century creative project, the whole thing was recorded, and both the film and music material is contained in this dual project, Under Great White Northern Lights. The film is a so-so doc that never really gets under the skin of a fascinating band, albeit with some breathtaking footage of the Canadian tundra. The music, however, is a fantastic reminder – in case anyone had forgotten in the flurry of film roles and side projects – of what a truly awesome live act The White Stripes are. Being an anniversary, the track listing takes in a decade of hits, from the anthemic ‘Seven Nation Army’ to the screeching riffs of ‘Ball And Biscuit’ and the incomparable ‘300mph Torrential Outpour Blues’.

This may be the age of Kings of Leon, but they’re standing on the shoulders of Jack and Meg.

Gorillaz

Plastic Beach

Back in 1995, when Damon Albarn was just another Brit-popper riding the mid-90s roller-coaster of irony and nostalgia, he seemed an unlikely candidate to become the next decade’s most consistently confounding musical innovator. But as Blur segued into strange African influences, Albarn crystallised his personal renaissance in a daring new virtual band. Consisting of animated characters drawn by collaborator Jamie Hewlett, Gorillaz made soaring modern pop records that stepped seamlessly across genres and styles while remaining gloriously and defiantly good fun.

Albarn and Hewlett took a break from the band to write the pop opera Monkey, but now they’re back, and time clearly hasn’t diminished their appetite for exploration. Need proof? Just take ‘Stylo’, the first single from Plastic Beach, which features Mos Def and Bobby Womack in an eerie dance of dubstep, improv and hip-hop. Who’da thought it? The rest of the album doesn’t disappoint, either – it’s furiously inventive and addictively listenable, put together with the kind of swaggering confidence that only Albarn can muster.

Book club

This month’s must-reads

Brooklyn
Colm Tóibín

Irish journalist, playwright, lecturer and novelist Colm Tóibín won the grand prize at the 2009 Costa Book Awards for his latest novel. It’s a tender and searching story of grief and loneliness, which stands comparison to the work of one of his heroes, Henry James.

Eilis Lacey is a young woman in 1950s Ireland, restricted by its habits of repression and inhibition. With an unfulfilling life stretching out before her, she accepts an offer of work in New York – but she arrives to find the promises of the new world broken. Unmoored from her past and scarcely able to dream of a future, she’s soon forced to make a tragic choice when news arrives from her homeland.

Tóibín is a master at evoking the physical sense of America’s flourishing East Coast, but his interest lies more in the emotional, as he eloquently creates this portrait of a woman fighting against the proscriptions of her age.

Solar
Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan is no stranger to success – he scooped the Booker Prize for Amsterdam, and Atonement was adapted into a film – but nor is he a stranger to controversy. After getting his fingers burned with his remarks about Islamic extremism in 2008, the heavyweight author turns a satirical eye to the hot issue of climate change.

But this is no laboured polemic; rather, McEwan thrusts us into the libidinous world of Michael Beard. A balding, mid-50s physicist and Nobel Prize recipient, Beard is now a tired old sham, hoovering up on the after-dinner circuit, writing fatuous letters and wasting time on a climate change panel while keeping an eye out for fresh ways to put his fifth marriage at moral risk. That is, until a freak accident offers him a way out of the mess his life has become.

Solar finds McEwan at his most charmingly scabrous. His humour is sometimes bitter, often biting, but always underpinned by an extraordinary intelligence and linguistic gifts.

Leave a Reply