Inflight Magazine of Brussels Airlines

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

Date Night

Director Shawn Levy
Starring Steve Carell, Tina Fey, Mark Wahlberg

This must have been an easy pitch to the Hollywood bean-counters: take the director of smash hits such as Night at the Museum and The Pink Panther, the amiable star of Get Smart and The Office, and America’s hottest female comedian, then mix them all together into a scattershot rom-com. All you’ll have to do is sit back and wait for the cash to roll in. Which it will, because despite the general rule of thumb that says the more money you spend on a comedy, the less funny it will be, this glossy, big-budget, high-concept ride exudes such charm and charisma that it’s hard not to succumb.

This is in no small part down to the comic pairing of Steve Carell and Tina Fey. Carell may permanently give the impression that he’s never more than one dud away from movie jail, but when partnered up with the acerbic and effervescent Fey (creator and star of the sitcom 30 Rock), the sparks really fly. They play a couple who have grown bored with the steady routine of their lives. Mixing it up on a ‘date night’ in the city, the pair are mistaken for a couple of thieves who’ve stolen something important from a mob boss. Cue high jinks, rekindled romance and the realisation that a ‘normal’ life ain’t so bad after all.

Q&A

Claire Denis, director, White Material

With her latest film, White Material, French director Claire Denis explores an African country rife with civil war and racial conflict, and follows a white French family as they attempt to save their coffee plantation.

How did you come up with the story?

The idea comes from many sources. One was Isabelle Huppert asking if I would be interested in adapting a novel by Doris Lessing called the The Grass is Singing – but I wanted to create a more contemporary character and story.

Tell us something about the heroine?

Maria doesn’t see herself as different, or a colonial; she’s just a farmer growing coffee. She believes no one will harm her because she feels she belongs. She doesn’t see the danger.

Do you have a particular style for your films?

I’m very unaware of any style. When I approach a film, I try to express how it might feel to be there – the emotions and sensations – as well as telling the story; it’s very simple and natural.

Slash

Slash

You might think you’ve never heard of British-American musician Saul Hudson, but if you saw him in a top hat and metal T-shirt, holding a Les Paul and with a cigarette dangling from his lips, you’d know him instantly as Slash, legendary lead guitarist of Guns N’ Roses. Since the band split in the late 1990s, Slash has essayed a variety of side projects, super groups and vanity missteps. But with this self-titled solo album, he’s clearly more focused than ever.

The likes of Ozzy Osbourne, Fergie, Iggy Pop and Motörhead’s Lemmy share writing credits and perform the vocals while Slash does what he does best – battering his instrument into submission with a series of raucous, lighters-in-the-air rock riffs. Though many songs evoke the early-90s glory days, particularly the furious ‘By The Sword’ and monumental ‘Watch This’, there’s also evidence of an astute mixing of genres, with ‘Beautiful Dangerous’ throwing a few leftfield beats into the mix. Perhaps most admirably, though, as he pushes towards his half-century, the old hellraiser has made an album that makes him matter again.

Katie Melua

The House

Things have been tough for Katie Melua recently, relatively speaking. After making her debut in 2003 with the mega-selling Call off the Search, it seemed she could do no wrong. Her records flew off the shelves, and by 2008 The Sunday Times Rich List estimated her net worth at £18m (€20.5m). But as a new generation of feisty female popstars emerged, such as Katy Perry and Pixie Lott, Melua began to look a bit… soft. And then the global financial meltdown came along and wiped out half of that fortune.

Book club

This month’s must-reads

The Chosen One
Sam Bourne

If you’ve read Sam Bourne’s previous novels and thought you noticed a strain of contemporary social theory hiding in the margins, you’re sharp-eyed indeed. For Bourne is the pseudonym of a certain Jonathan Freedland, venerable political columnist for The Guardian, allowing Freedland to unleash his inner Dan Brown with historical pot-boilers full of puzzles, intrigue and conspiracy.

The Chosen One presents the tale of Maggie Costello, political advisor to a dynamic new president who has come to power offering change his country can believe in. But Maggie’s faith is tested when a man comes forward with two damaging allegations against her boss, only to be found dead before he can reveal the third, which, he had promised, would end the president’s career. This is a cracking page-turner that wears its obvious contemporary parallels lightly, and never chooses political point-scoring over narrative drive.

At Home: A Short History of Private Life
Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson has become one of Britain’s most popular authors, essentially by writing in a stream-of-consciousness style that you wish you were clever enough to have. Past topics have included a journey through the heartland of his mother country, America; an affectionate travelogue of his adopted home, Britain; and an ambitious account of the universe.

Now, Bryson turns his attention to something that turns out to be every bit as thought-provoking and remarkable: he brilliantly reimagines the mundane physical space in which most of us spend our lives as a starting point of history. After all, what unites figures as diverse as Aristotle, Shakespeare and Henry VIII? They all needed somewhere to lay their head. The result is a superbly idiosyncratic account of architecture, food technology, the origin of electricity and the operation of the toilet. Veering easily between the frivolous and the fascinating, Bryson is always affably eccentric and charmingly insightful.

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