Inflight Magazine of Brussels Airlines

In session

A round-up of the top films, music releases and books heading your way this month

In Bruges

Director Martin McDonagh
Starring Colin Farell, Brendan Gleeson

It’s not often that a film set in one of Belgium’s most historic cities makes waves on the international movie scene, but that’s exactly what’s happened to Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges. It was one of the hits of Sundance 2008, kick-starting the festival and gaining rave reviews for the lead performance of Colin Farrell.

Alongside fellow Irishman Brendan Gleeson as Ken, Farrell plays hitman Ray, forced to spend an impromptu fortnight in Bruges when their boss, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), orders them to stay put. At first they are struck by boredom, but as McDonagh’s photography increasingly invests the city with a subtle sense of heart and soul, a gradual change comes over them. They spend their time drinking, bickering and fighting, but an introspective melancholy insinuates itself beneath the surface.

Indeed, that becomes the centre of McDonagh’s film – the thin, intersecting lines between violence and sadness, life and death, tragedy and humour – that gives In Bruges a restless, earnest poetry. By the time Harry arrives for the film’s dark dénouement we are looking at a pair of changed men.

But there are to be no happy endings in Bruges; just the dispassionate journey of life as it rolls on its course, not around Ken and Ray, but over them.

You, The Living

Director Roy Andersson
Starring Jessika Lundberg, Björn Englund

Roy Andersson’s You, The Living is a uniquely Scandinavian farce that ekes out the absurdity in the wasteland we call life. And it returns the 65-year-old director to the cinematic spotlight after a career spent mostly in advertising. He talks to b.there!

How would you describe your style?
My philosophy is to create pictures that are very clean, purified and condensed. Like Matisse, the French painter, I take away everything that’s not necessary for the picture.

Why have you resisted the lure of the feature film for so long – only four in 40 years?
My first feature was a fabulous success, and my second was a fabulous flop. I was a scapegoat for that and I was out in the cold for many years in Sweden. I couldn’t work. It was a very hard period, and the only people that called me were advertising people, so I started to make commercials and was a big success.

Ingmar Bergman died last year – does Swedish cinema miss him?
I probably shouldn’t say this but in my opinion he’s a little overrated. He was also very right wing politically – almost a fascist. He was not a nice person.

Book club

Hold Tight by Harlan Coben

With a name like Harlan Coben there are only a handful of serious career options open to you: whiskyguzzling alternative country music star; grizzled fire-fighter; or dazzlingly dark crime writer.

Choosing the latter, Coben has made a name for himself as the king of brutalist, almost mythological, violence, and has the sharp, sparing dialogue to match.

Set in the curtain-twitching environs of middle-class suburbia, Hold Tight homes in on parents Tia and Mike Baye, who are concerned about their 16-year-old son Adam.

The recent suicide of Adam’s best friend cause the pair to worry about their son, but when they start to poke into his private life they discover forces that are far more sinister than they ever expected, which turn the lives of the Bayes and others upside down

What really hits you about Coben’s work is its sheer, unrelenting momentum. Hold Tight is no different – an unstoppable work of crime fiction that still manages to raise pertinent moral questions. It’s brilliant stuff.

REM

Accelerate

Accelerate? After almost three decades, 13 studio albums, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction and millions of bucks in the banks, shouldn’t it be about time REM, you know, slowed down a little? Apparently not. Here they are with their 14th studio album, one that promises to hit the kind of heights that the band have missed in recent years. The SS REM has not been the happiest of musical ships lately, but this time we’re promised “a confidence in the material, and a communication between the three of us that hasn’t been there for some time”.

What that means for you and me is less of the soapy ballads that marked 2004’s Around the Sun, and more back-to-basics rock from the pioneers of left-field stadium grunge. Living Well is the Best Revenge, Horse to Water and Staring Down the Barrel of the Middle Distance all turn the volume up to satisfyingly raucous levels.

REM might have come a long way in the last three decades, but they haven’t forgotten how to jam.

Portishead

Third

Back with a new album for the first time in 10 years are Bristol-based trip-hop outfit Portishead. Never ones to enjoy the limelight, the band’s fractious career path is like an alternative history of the 90s Brit pop scene.

Making their debut with Dummy in 1994, the same year as Oasis’ Definitely Maybe, Portishead actually beat the Mancunian favourites to the 1995 Mercury Music Prize. But where Oasis would go on to serve an era of laddish, loutish culture with the music to match, you always got the sense that Portishead were a bit too sensitive, a bit too sensible to go down that route.

And they didn’t. They shunned the limelight and the parties to concentrate on expanding their musical portfolio – a journey that’s now culminating in the release of only their third album in over a decade.

Was it worth the wait? Yes and no. Tracks like Hunter and Nylon Smile are hugely sophisticated constructions full of echoing beats and dark energy. But it’s not exactly going to usher in a new age of musical thinking.

Book club

Once Upon a Time in the North
by Philip Pullman

Without a great deal of fanfare, Philip Pullman has been slowly expanding the world of his Northern Lights trilogy to explore some of the earlier adventures only hinted at in the original books.

Once Upon a Time in the North returns us to the first meeting of pilot Lee Scoresby and polar bear Iorek Byrnison in an Arctic town at the centre of an oil war.

What Pullman is so accomplished at is writing pitch-perfect children’s stories without compromising his political convictions. Here he portrays the polar bear community as an disenfranchised, exploited labour force, while keeping up a steady stream of outlandish adventures and daring deeds.

He continues to rival the legacy of JRR Tolkien, who did much the same kind of thing in his Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales. Anybody who struggled to leave Lyra sitting on that park bench at the end of The Amber Spyglass owes it to themselves (and maybe to her) to return to this spellbinding world.

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