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The winners of the internet(City A.M. (UK) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) THEATRE TEH INTERNET IS SERIOUS BUSINESS The Royal Court | By Alex Dymoke hhhii IT'S HARD to know what the greying grandees of London theatre criticism would have made of Teh Internet is Serious Business, a play that revels in an online world of memes and trolls, cheeseburgerdemanding cats, socially awkward penguins and condescending Willy Wonkas. But what appears as incomprehensible nonsense to most, makes perfect sense to a select few. Topiary and Tflow are the online aliases of two real-life hacktivists, Jake Davis and Mustafa Al-Bassam, both of whom were arrested in 2011 following a series of high-profile attacks on corporations and governments. Teh Internet is Serious Business tells their journey from lonely under-stimulated teens to CIA most-wanted lists. The first half is a live reenactment of a forum discussion between elite hackers (including Tflow and Topiary) on 4chan, that dark corner of the internet where infantile stupidity parties till the wee hours with nerdy superintelligence. In 4chan, the only rule is a puritanically enforced anarchy. Users are devoted to an amoral mickey-taking that takes no prisoners - one moment they're trolling a dead girl's Facebook memorial page, the next they're mocking the Westboro Baptist Church for being bigots. All in pursuit of lulz (like LOLs, as in "laugh out loud"). When the hackers realise it's more fun targeting corporations and despotic regimes, their mischief acquires a political edge. Lulzsec and Anonymous are formed and soon enough, the law comes a-knocking. Many of today's writers seem to see a kind of impenetrable chaos when they look at the internet. As a result, they don''t even try to understand it, and instead content themselves with merely reflecting its energy. Writer Tim Price fills the script with surreal jokes, incarnate memes, set pieces, songs and digressional anecdotes. There''s a ball pit (a playground that can swallow you whole; a nice metaphor for the internet, I'll give him that) and the stage is dotted with trap doors out of which people in animal costumes are liable to pop. This is certainly one side of the web, but for the people at the heart of Lulzsec and Anonymous, the net isn't chaotic or silly. It's a structured, navigable world in which they - lonely and isolated people - can be protagonists. The emotional lives of the hackers are dealt with crudely by Price, who, in order to indicate the "real life" scenes (i.e. ones not set in the chat room) places a flashing "offline" sign above the stage. Topiary's mum talks to him about dead stepfathers and school crisis meetings in scenes that function as signposts for the characters' emotional dysfunction. But while the online and offline worlds are shown side by side, there isn't enough exploration of how they intersect. Why do these boys thrive in this environment? What is it about the dark web that makes it such an attractive refuge for this particular kind of person? Price also fails to adequately distinguish hacktivists from activists. The hackers interact like any offline protest group, the main players furiously squaring up to each other in moments of heightened tension. But hackers are different, and hacking poses its own distinct moral issues, issues which Price doesn't address, such as the lack of accountability that accompanies anonymity. Still, it is very funny, in that smartalec throwaway internet way. It may not get to the heart of the matter but at least there are plenty of lulz. FILM IDA Cert 12a | By Melissa York hhhii Ida is a young apprentice nun in 1960s Poland, a chill landscape in every sense of the word, depicted with a stark stillness in black and white by native director Pawel Pawlikowski. His Ida, played by striking newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska, is about to take her vows and goes in search of the parents she never knew. The film opens with her knocking on the door of her aunt Wanda who is her polar opposite; a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, promiscuous woman who has no patience with religion. She quickly tells Ida that she is, in fact, a Jewish nun, put in the care of the convent during the Nazi occupation. The unlikely pair go on a road trip to discover what happened to their family and, needless to say, they don't find anything that restores Wanda's faith in humanity. For Ida, the morbid trip and its aftermath serves as a rite of passage from innocence to experience. She unearths the darkness of humanity with the best of it, enjoying music and falling in love even as she watches her aunt unravel in despair. At times the film can feel a bit too obvious in its symbolism - did Ida need to be a nun to be innocent? The titular character is also frustratingly introverted. Ida is a silent companion on this journey, and the viewer is left alone with their own unsettling thoughts at the end of it. ART ANSELM KIEFER Royal Academy | By Alex Dymoke hhhhh A distant, solitary figure stands before the sea, arm raised in a Nazi salute. The title of the painting: Heroic Symbol. Ironic? Well, yes and no. For though Anselm Kiefer was no Nazi, there is genuine heroism in depicting this image, in recalling the past from the chasm of silence into which Germany fell in the years after the Second World War. Born in 1945, Kiefer was obsessed by Germany's recent and ancient history. His paintings and sculptures of lead, ash, straw and clay served as a muscular articulation of German post-war anxiety as well as a practical answer to Theodor Adorno's assertion that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz. It wasn't only the Nazism's evil that Kiefer faced up to, but the humiliation of its defeat. German romanticism and folkore abounds with tales of heroism and victory against the odds. Parsifal defeats the knight Ifer. Germanic tribes halt the advance of the Roman general Varus. But look at these German officers in "Operation Sea Lion", deludedly plotting an invasion with bath-toys, the rest of the world about to envelop them. The past Kiefer dares to remember contains emasculation as well as murder. Paintings such as "Ashflower" and "To an Unknown Painter" depict more recent monuments of German power, the architecture of Albert Speer. The sober columns and vaulted ceilings look haunted until you realise the ghosts are the buildings themselves, colossal apparitions of stone, refusing to be forgotten. Kiefer's paintings also have a noble architecture, rendered in materials that decay, crumble, morph over time. Perhaps his greatest muse is lead: entranced by its malleable, alchemical qualities, he used it to make sculptures of books, jamming them into massive snow-covered landscapes ("Ash Leaves") making them protrude like greenish, raggedy tombstones. Tied to this ashen past, Keifer finds redemption by looking skyward. In The Orders of the Night he paints himself prostrate on the ground looking to the heavens while sunflowers painted in black droop and tower over him, linking his body to the sun and earth, past and future. These serious, deeply moral artworks reach for a truth ignored by most contemporary artists. They're proof, as if it were needed, of Kiefer's status as a true German hero for modern times. FILM THE EQUALIZER Cert 15 | By Bob Trafford hhiii It must be hard work running an international crime syndicate when so many members of the public have a background in killing people. Lately, it seems every man and his dog is in possession of a very particular set of skills, acquired over a long career, that make him a nightmare for prospective megavillains. In Antoine Fuqua''s Equalizer, it's Denzel Washington with a history of butt-kicking. Leaving behind the New York of the original Edward Woodward series, Fuqua relocates the action to Boston. There, widower Robert McCall (Washington) works at the Home Mart by day, and takes a corner seat at a nearby diner each night to read classic literature. It's here that he meets Teri (Chloe Grace Moretz), the skittish and vulnerable prostitute whose treatment at the hands of her merciless pimp, Slavi (David Meunier), draws McCall back into a life he thought he''d left behind - namely, that of being a startlingly efficient professional killer for "the Agency". The remainder of the story unfolds predictably, as a succession of increasingly malign but obligingly cavalier ne'er-do-wells - sneering, badly-tattooed Russians and a smattering of bent cops - are disposed of with remarkable ease while McCall and the Russian mafia "fixer" (Marton Csokas) sent to hunt him close inexorably on one another. The action is thrilling enough, and Washington is convincingly steely whether snuffing out lives with knife, pistol, hardback book, microwave or corkscrew. But as McCall walks away from fight after fight without so much as a scratch (only the penultimate baddie manages to land a punch) one begins to recognise the time-honoured formula: inept villains fall foul of lethal and righteous Special Forces retiree, and subsequently fail at every turn to make their superior numbers count. Attempts at raising the tone fall flat. In one particularly toe-curling moment, McCall provides the inquisitive Teri with a synopsis of The Old Man and the Sea (it''s a story about a man who has to go back to a part of his life he thought was over). You don't watch a film like The Equalizer for its literary allusions, but still. Better stick to the day to the day job, Robert. (c) 2014 City A.M. |