5 HOT PICS - GRIGOR DIMITROV

Grass court tennis season is upon us! And good luck to Andy Murray (featured in the first pic below!) in the Queen's Club final tomorrow, going for a record 5th title against Milos Raonic.

2014 Queen's champ and Wimbledon semi-finalist Grigor is nowhere near that sort of form at the moment, sadly. He's on a 6 match losing streak and seemingly able to be beaten by anyone holding a racquet at the minute. Still, at least he had the common sense to dump girlfriend Maria Sharapova before she was busted for using meldonium.

Enjoy.

Neil Gaiman - The Graveyard Book

Picking up The Graveyard Book after the exhilarating but exhausting Chaos Walking trilogy (see a few posts below) was both a relief and a slight disappointment. Relief as it was a nicer, more straightforward, easier read (notwithstanding the brutal murder of the protagonist's entire family in the first chapter), disappointment as whatever came next after the rollercoaster of Chaos Walking was going to feel somewhat lightweight in comparison. Only slightly disappointing, mind, as Neil Gaiman is obviously in the top class of authors of imaginative fantasy and knows what he is doing no matter the material.

Coraline is, to my mind, the superior novel by Gaiman for the younger market, a near-perfect blend of surreal fantasy and horror with a wide-ranging appeal that goes beyond its target demographic. However, it was The Graveyard Book that hoovered up all the prestigious awards in the children's/young adult sector for Gaiman, and made him the first author to even win both the Carnegie and its American equivalent, the Newbery Medal, for the same novel.

Gaiman has confirmed his major inspiration for The Graveyard Book was Kipling's The Jungle Book; only the slight twist of the abandoned orphan, Bod, being raised by ghosts differs from the basics of Kipling's plot. Through eight short, snappy stories, Bod meets a range of characters, both ghost and human, that vary from the nice to the sinister to the downright weird, gets into a number of amusing and scary scrapes in both the real and supernatural worlds, and learns a few lessons about people and places and growing up along the way.

One of Neil Gaiman's standout skills as an author is his ability to write for a wide range of audiences in a variety of genres and always maintain his own authorial voice while pitching his story and tone for his intended readership each time differently and seemingly easily - although it's a hell of a difficult trick to pull off. The Graveyard Book is no exception to this - it reads just right for 9-year-olds and up, just descriptive and wordy enough to be a challenge for this age range without bombarding them with anything overly complex or confusing. Gaiman is also a talented enough author to include incidents, jokes and sly little nods that can be enjoyed by an adult audience too; one of the chief things I enjoyed about this book was the fun Gaiman has with Bod's ability to slip in between the real and supernatural worlds - used to both clever and funny effect when Bod attends a local school and uses his skills to blend into the background, barely noticed by students and teachers alike (and haven't we all worked or gone to school with someone that seems to have faded into the ether just like this?)

The Graveyard Book's effortless style, witty invention and Neil Gaiman's well-established reputation as an excellent author all combined to make this an easy choice to sweep the awards circuit at the time. However, perhaps as a consequence of the book consisting of eight short unconnected tales rather than one wholly consistent plot, I was left wanting just a little more. The main villains of the book, introduced in the penultimate chapter, offer a dark and detailed glimpse at a fantasy world that Gaiman leaves mainly unexplored as we stay confined to Bod and his adventures in and around the graveyard. Flicking through the book again shortly before writing this review, the standout element of the project struck me as being Chris Riddell's illustrations; witty, well-observed, and perfectly suited to the material, I was left wishing there had been more commissioned to accompany the book rather than just the one at the beginning of each chapter.

The Graveyard Book is smart, well written and hits many of the right notes, but there's also unexplored depths here that Gaiman might have opened up to a fuller and more interesting extent in a longer or more intricately plotted work.

Birdman, Or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance)

I'm yet to see Spotlight, the most recent recipient of the Academy Award for Best Film, so thought I'd kick off my reviews of Oscar winning films with the previous winner before I completely forgot about it - because that is precisely what I have been dying to do ever since I danced a jig of joy and relief when the end credits rolled on this tiresome, pretentious rubbish masquerading as a comedy and satire on Hollywood.

Michael Keaton, famed as Bruce Wayne/Batman a generation ago in Tim Burton's dark, gothic, slyly comic take on the superhero, plays lead here as Riggan Thomson, an actor famed for playing dark, slyly comic superhero Birdman a generation ago. Geddit? Now he's trying to revitalise his non-existent career by writing/directing/starring in a Broadway play based on a Raymond Carver short story. Unfortunately for Riggan, he's haunted by his old Birdman alter-ego, which mocks and undermines his confidence at every turn. Riggan may also be able to perform various superhero-esque feats such as telekinesis and levitation himself. Or is that Birdman again, mocking Riggan with delusions of these feats in his own head? Does anyone know? Do we care?

Riggan is joined on the adaptation by a cast of 'colourful' sidekicks including lead actress Lesley (Naomi Watts), her egotistical, smarmy but highly rated actor boyfriend Mike (Edward Norton) and his own daughter (Emma Stone) who's just out of rehab and working as Riggan's assistant. There's not so much a coherent plot as a sequence of long-winded, dull dialogues between characters on acting, the shallowness and fickleness of the Hollywood scene, and so on, interspersed with comic scenes (Keaton fights Norton while Norton is in his underwear! Keaton gets locked out of the theatre and has to walk through Times Square in his underwear!) that are not just forced and clichéd, but about as funny as Ebola.

The film reaches its nadir when Riggan bumps into influential critic Tabitha (Lindsay Duncan), who promises to trash his play without even seeing it, due to her hatred of Hollywood celebrities. Clearly, director Alejandro G. Iñárritu seems to have used this scene to work out some anger towards what he perceives as unwarranted criticism of his prior work. Well, sorry, Mr. Iñárritu, but I sat through Birdman from start to end, and have no hesitation in trashing it because it is quite simply a bad film, and one that irritated me in all manner of different ways.

Birdman is the sort of film that critics love, and Hollywood loves to reward, because it comments on and ruminates on and even pokes fun at acting and the nature of acting and the system that chews up actors and spits them out when they are perceived to be too old or past their best or box office poison. There may well be a great satire out there that utilises these themes, or one yet to be made, but Birdman is nowhere near vicious or sharp-witted enough for its commentaries on the Hollywood scene to hit home. I sensed it had been rewarded chiefly because it played it safe when it came to satire. A truly great film would have gone to town with this material (and probably come home from Oscar empty-handed).

Keaton does his best with a thankless task. Riggan is a character that it's just hard to care much for. That's not the actor's fault, he simply isn't well-written or sympathetic enough. Half the time I rolled my eyes at his so-called problems rather than engaging with him as a real person. Edward Norton's Mike is a potentially funny caricature of a preening, ridiculous egotist, but the film simply doesn't do enough with him, while the talented Naomi Watts is stuck with a two-dimensional, flat nothing of a woman in Lesley. And while I'm no fan of Emma Stone as an actress, it would be hard for anyone to inject her character with spark and empathy - again, she just wasn't well-rounded enough; you just don't care about what happens to her. With regards the rest of the cast, I either don't remember or didn't engage with them enough to comment in detail on their performances.

A lot has been written about Birdman's gimmick of being filmed in 'one shot', but to me, this distracted from what little of the plot there was and didn't fit at all at times; like much of the rest of the film, it feels forced and unnatural, a 5-minute novelty stretched out to a full 90 odd minutes. Crucially, I also felt that it lacked the smooth sense of cinematography that a director such as Julien Temple managed to convey a generation ago on smaller budgets and lesser technology.

Lastly, Birdman fails in that most critical of areas for a comedy; it simply isn't funny. Most of the time, I didn't really know what it was trying to be. There might have been comic potential in the basic premise here, but it's lost quickly as the film descends into self-indulgent, insubstantial babble. 2015's other front runner for best film, Boyhood, may also have its detractors, but in my opinion it blows Birdman out of the water technically, thematically, and in terms of its ambition and acting. Heck, it even manages to be a bit funnier!

Birdman was almost universally praised by critics, and maybe I just didn't 'get it', but it feels about as weak, back-slapping and un-entertaining as an Oscar winner can get. Disappointing, unfunny and shallow.

5 HOT PICS - JACK WILSHERE

England clung on to their Euro 2016 dreams with a somewhat fortunate last minute winner against Wales. Arsenal's Jack didn't get off the bench for that one, but as the below pictures show, he'd easily get in the starting line up of the all-time hottest England squad members. It's just a shame that he can't seem to so much as look at a football pitch these days without getting injured.

Enjoy.

Patrick Ness - Monsters Of Men

Monsters Of Men is the concluding book in Patrick Ness' fast-paced, edgy, ambitious Chaos Walking trilogy, and concludes the series at a suitably breathless, breakneck, page-turning pace. 

Ness introduces us to the odd but utterly believable Chaos Walking world in Book One, The Knife Of Never Letting Go, by narrating the book entirely through the eyes of wide-eyed innocent Todd, born on the Chaos world but compelled never to have left his home town of Prentisstown through propaganda and fear led by the town's evil Mayor, the main - but certainly not the only - villain of the series. The Chaos world hinges on the unusual phenomenon of the 'Noise' - the thoughts of all men are broadcast out loud to everyone in a constant, blaring, screeching mess of colour and confusion.

In Book Two, The Ask And The Answer, we switch viewpoints between Todd and Viola, Todd's female counterpart from the first book and the catalyst for Todd's ventures into the world beyond Prentisstown. As the Mayor encroaches upon and then overtakes the world's default capital 'city', Haven, we witness increasingly devastating events though the eyes of Todd and Viola, who are used by The Mayor and resistance leader Mistress Coyle respectively as pawns in an ongoing battle that often reads as much as a war between two powerful egos as it does between two distinct ideologies.

Monsters Of Men sees Ness introduce a third voice into the mix, 1017, one of the native Spackle species of the planet who had waged a bitter war with the incoming human race several years previously and who harbours an all-consuming hatred and bitterness towards Todd after events from the previous book. As the Spackle begin their own attack on both sides of the human battle, Ness piles on layer upon layer of suspense, action and cliffhangers as the trilogy hurtles towards a conclusion that manages to be satisfying, hopeful and heart-breaking all at once.

What makes all three books so remarkable is the amount of themes and philosophy Ness manages to bring in without it ever eclipsing the constant forward thrust of the plot. Chaos Walking is a series written in a frenetic style and designed to be read as such, yet even as I pelted through the pages desperate to find out what happened next, I picked up on big themes such as the futility and destruction of war and its consequences, the conflicting and sometimes cruel decisions made by leaders at times of crisis, the seeming impossibility of maintaining peace alongside individual desire for power, the question of what constitutes the 'bad' side when the actions of war inflict atrocities upon the innocent regardless, and a whole heap of other things beside. Our loyalties shift and twist and change throughout; Ness pulls off the almost impossible trick of making all this work - and work towards the progression of the overall story - while always keeping our main focus and interest on the heroic centre of Todd and Viola. Todd and Viola are the moral centre of the story that all the other plot points stretch from; Ness is pulling off a frantic act of plate-spinning, juggling and surprising his readers and it is to his credit as a writer that he doesn't let any of the threads or themes slip once. 

Chaos Walking is far more than a straight forward action trilogy based around the high-concept gimmick of the Noise. Its plot and themes are as involving, deep and morally complex as any trilogy intended for an 'older' audience. It is no less than the best series of young adult books since Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, and deserves to be discovered and enjoyed by adult readers just as much as that trilogy was.

Chaos Walking is the crowning achievement of a tremendously skilled and gifted author. If Ness does ever manage to top it, there will be no question he won't just be the best young adult writer of his generation, but one of the best of all time.