25 May 2015

LIVE: Doctor Who Symphonic Spectacular


Review and Photos by Tom Newsom

The official concert based on one of the UK’s biggest TV shows has finally come to, er, the UK. After a couple of tours of Australasia, it’s now moved further afield - starting in London and then travelling to Cardiff, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle and Glasgow, cleverly timed for the May Bank Holiday and half term. And it’s a sell-out hit.

I was lucky enough to attend the show at Wembley on Sunday the 24th - which of course was packed with people. I’d watched the various proms from the past ten years before on the telly, but this was my first time hearing an orchestra play them live - in this case, the same BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales that they use on the show (‘the house band’ as host Peter Davison calls them).

Did it go down a storm? Of course it did. A live playing gives the music so much extra energy and emotion, even in a massive arena. And I realised just how much emotion was contained in the music all over again: once it’s stripped from the words if not the visuals, the themes of the episodes and characters are majestic. It’s almost like seeing what’s in the writers’ heads before act structures and appreciation indexes, that raw Doctor Who feeling in all of us.

The set-list seemed very well chosen and skewed quite heavily towards the newest series - performed in these shows for the first time live, and released on CD a week earlier. I hadn’t heard the CD before the show, which meant that I was listening to a lot of the music for the first time away from the episodes. But what a series to go out on - lots of visual episodes, and music from nearly all of them were played. Plus this is the first concert since Peter Capaldi joined - and incredibly, he happened to be in the audience, watching himself and listening to the orchestra play his theme!

When you compare the new music to some of the older, more simpler themes (although the set-list doesn’t stretch back too many years), it’s like Murray Gold is writing the music now with this big, BIG broad sound in mind from the start. Because it’s the big orchestral numbers that are the stars here, especially the opening, which immediately gets the pulse racing.

If anything, it’s designed to be fun - lively talk between the pieces from the excellent host, nothing in the show that’s especially off-putting for children or first-timers (although monsters like the Foretold walking around can give you a fright!), and a whole lot of variety encapsulating light and dark, older and newer, traditional and a bit funky. And there’s slightly smaller but no less powerful pieces like those sung by soloist Elin Manahan Thomas. (Who knew that Missy’s theme had such beautiful words?)

And because of all this, it means it feels like it’s over far, far too quickly!

The Symphonic Spectacular, then, is aptly named. If you’re visiting in future, expect a big, incredible hit of Doctor Who music that will make you feel like a child again. It’s a pretty awesome event.


17 May 2015

FILM: Mad Max: Fury Road


review by Rob Manns

30 years after “Mad” Max Rockatansky battled his way beyond Thunderdome, he’s back with a new face and variable accent. Mad Max : Fury Road is a triumphant return to the big screen for the most iconic of Australian cinematic heroes.

Acclaimed director George Miller, now hitting his 70s, shows that age certainly hasn’t wearied him or dulled his talent. Fury Road is every bit as exciting, brutal and bleak as the original trilogy he brought us between 1979 and 1985. This time though, it’s also incredibly beautiful to look at. Ridley Scott once said that his aim was that you could pause his movies at almost any point and see a gorgeous, artistic photograph. Miller has achieved this goal with the help of fellow Queenslander, cinematographer John Seale. The gold of the desert sands and vivid blue of the skies create a unique canvas for the chaos to play out on. It is as beautiful as it is barren. I’m confident the Academy will agree come Oscar time.

Staying with Miller for a moment, the action scenes in this movie really need to be seen - on a big screen! - to be believed. Featuring the bare minimum of CGI enhancement, the spectacular stunts, human and vehicular alike, play out like a mesmerising ballet of chaos and destruction. Unlike most action directors these days, Miller lets you see everything that is going on. No epileptic editing and shaky cam here. This is how you do it right!

It’s not just the stunts though, it’s also the wild and weird characters the series is famous for.

Standouts here are the freaky War Boys and their monstrous leader, Immortan Joe - played by Hugh Keays-Byrne who also played lead villain The Toecutter in the original Mad Max. They are repulsive but you can’t look away. Like the landscape they inhabit, they are beautiful and terrible at the same time. Everybody’s favourite is the blinded guy who lays down some major heavy metal riffs on a flamethrowing guitar while tethered by a bungee rope to the top of a truck that also sports an enormous stack of speakers and a team of drummers. If that sentence doesn’t bring a smile to your face, you are dead inside. Dead!

And then there’s our leads. Tom Hardy is more than a worthy replacement for Mel Gibson. Bringing the same brooding intensity and toughness as well as the vulnerability. My only criticism is his seeming inability to settle on a single voice. His accent shifts around, a shame as he actually does a decent Strayan accent in the opening monologue, and Bane even creeps in here and there. The film, however, belongs to Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa, and her group of women she liberated from Immortan Joe. Furiosa deserves to become as revered as Ellen Ripley as a strong female role model. She kicks ass! All the main women in this film do, including the Many Mothers we meet late in the film. The most wonderful side effect of these characters  is watching MRAs having a big, manly sook about it.

How dare they put strong, competent female characters in a film about an icon of manliness, they say. But then, the whinger who started all of it also referred to the very Australian Mad Max series as a tentpole of American culture, so take from that what you will.

That’s all well and good, you say, but, what about the story? Story? You want all that and a story too? Have you ever seen one of these films? The plot is wafer thin but, where that is normally a weakness, it’s just another of this film's strengths. It really doesn’t need anything beyond a framing device for all the madness. Honestly, it gives you enough to allow the characters a motivation to get from point A to point B and that’s all you need or could want. Fury Road is best described as a 2 hour chase sequence punctuated by occasional moments of stillness to allow you to exhale.

Before I conclude this review, it would be remiss of me not to give a shout out to the incredible soundtrack by Junkie XL. It is just as important and impactful as the landscape and the amazing vehicles and punctuates the visuals perfectly with a mix of electronica, heavy rock and sweeping orchestral moments. Sure, there’s no Tina Turner power ballad but we can’t be greedy now.

So go see this movie on a big screen. See it now! All the gushing reviews you’ve read, this one included, are right. This is an unforgettable cinema experience. It’s the reason we have cinema in the first place and it’s brought to you by a true master of the art form. It’ll never replace Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior in my affections but it is probably the superior film, all things considered.





thanks very much to Rob Manns

13 May 2015

TV: The C Word


I've been putting off watching The C Word.

Luckily I've had lots of things to distract me but I still know that subconsciously I was putting it off.

Depending on how well you know me, you may or may not appreciate the impact a drama about a young woman dying of terminal breast cancer might have on me.

I'm going to keep this relatively brief as watching this was hard enough, let alone writing this. 

Essentially, I thought it was beautiful. It conveyed perfectly the rollercoaster that this kind of situation puts you in, for all parties involved. Sheridan Smith was predictably amazing, and Paul Nicholls never put a foot wrong as the lovely Pete, who reminded me of quite a few people.

This was excellently scripted and directed too. Stephan Pehrsson has been a director of photography whose work I've been following in admiration for a few years and delivers once again here. Nicole Taylor and Tim Kirkby show us a pair of beautiful people and these 90 minutes really broke my heart.

If I do have one criticism, it would be of the slightly overdone 'handheld' camerawork, wobbling about all over the place distractingly in quite a few scenes.

But yeah. I cried a lot at this. It was extremely bloody good. Sheridan Smith is just flawless. Watch it.