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Sci-Fi, Marukami and politics in your ear
HANS PIENAAR writes about his sci-fi fix on the small screen, JONATHAN AMID recommends good reads and LAUREEN ROSSOUW provides the ideal talk feeds for your earphones.
Hans Pienaar recommends The Expanse:
Genre: Science fiction/drama
Developed by: Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby
Platform: Prime Video — six seasons
Filmed in: Toronto, Ontario and elsewhere in Canada
Science fiction captured me in my school days, when I wanted to become a nuclear physicist or a microbiologist. That was after I wanted to become a pilot. All three of these fields come together nicely in the series on Prime Video, The Expanse.
I've been watching the six seasons on and off for months. It's a mixture of profundities and all that is a cliché from the sci-fi archives. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is there, Alien, Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky, The Martian ... and yet the concept makes you feel that something new awaits around the next cosmic corner.
In the future depicted in The Expanse, humanity mercifully is one race, though divided into Martians, Earthlings and Belters, the last the leftovers from the asteroid belt and planetary moons' mines. The action shifts from the inner chambers of the UN, which now rules the entire Earth, to the Belter gangs and the foot soldiers of Mars, all of whom have Australian accents. (And yes, the Belters speak a kind of Caribbean-Cockney-Cape Menglish). There are other sillinesses, such as the astronauts who have to duck loose wrenches floating around then drink coffee in the canteen as if they're extras in an earthly Starbucks commercial.
The dialogue is full of snappy one-liners like Raymond Chandler would use, and the humour is sardonic and self-deprecating, as it should be. While one Rambo-type soldier tries to teach a refined diplomat to walk with magnetic shoes, (“just pretend they're pumps"), his equally rough comrade asks, “What do you know about pumps?" He replies: “I had a life before I joined the army."
The series gives a good reflection of the global crises we are grappling with — scarce resources, power-hungry politicians, unscrupulous capitalists — but what I like is its settting in the same imperial expanses in which we find ourselves today but can't quite get our minds around.
Is globalisation a good thing or is it better for everyone to pursue happiness on their own little rock in space? And in the characters' struggle with a new, much stronger form of life that threatens all of humanity, it touches on the same issue around AI and robots that has everyone on tenterhooks in the 2020s: what exactly is mankind?
Six movies based on books of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami
#1 Hear the Wind Sing
#2 Tony Takitani
#3 Norwegian Wood
#4 Burning
#5 Hanalei Bay
#6 Drive My Car
Shooting is under way in London on Bridget Jones 4: Mad About the Boy. Michael Morris is the director. All we know so far is that Hugh Grant and Renée Zellweger are back in action.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 is in the works too. David Frankel is the director. The follow-up film will focus on Miranda Priestly’s (Meryl Streep) struggle to save her failing Runway magazine.
The sequel's producers are not making the same mistake as Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, which sidelined Streep and ended up as a box office disaster. Streep is very much there and central to the plot.
Reviewer and literary consultant Jonathan Amid shares the five best books he's read recently (considering he reads up to 10 books a week, you do not need to take these recommendations with a pinch of salt.)
#1 Finding Endurance by Darrel Bristow-Bovey
#2 Place by Justin Fox
#3 Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
#4 James by Percival Everett
#5 Show me the Place by Hedley Twidle
Laureen Rossouw's five best podcasts
#1 Politics with Michelle Grattan: The chief political correspondent of the academic curatorial magazine The Conversation brings you the most insightful, fascinating and surprising analyses and stories, and talks politics, politicians and experts.
#2 Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso: A weekly podcast of intimate long-form interviews with people from all walks of life.
#3 Critics at Large: New Yorker Radio staffers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry and Alexandra Schwartz discuss pop culture.
#4 The Shift with Sam Baker. Conversations and interviews about being a woman post-40.
#5 Writers & Company: Eleanor Wachtel from CBC Radio explores the lives, thoughts and works of remarkable writers from around the world.
♦ VWB ♦
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