With the emphasis on corny slapstick, Amiel's film is decidedly simple- minded and hopelessly uncool. But at least it doesn't have the thin pretensions to grown-upness expressed by more upmarket Britcoms like Sliding Doors and Martha - Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence.Lars von Trier is best known over here for Breaking the Waves (1996). But in his native Denmark he's more celebrated for a bizarre TV serial called The Kingdom, which, when re-edited for theatrical release, broke Danish box-office records. The second batch of episodes are now showing at the ICA in London as The Kingdom II (no cert), and - if you've got a certain turn of mind - are definitely worth travelling to see. Set in a public hospital more oriented towards voodoo and vivisection than patient care, it's what ER would have been like if HP Lovecraft and William Burroughs had been the script editors.
Sinister, hilarious and deeply perverse, Von Trier's film delivers 295 intoxicating minutes of weirdness, in which neurosurgeon Helmer (Ernst-Hugo Jaregard) spikes his coffee with zombifying poison, a repellent changeling (Udo Kier) grows to gargantuan size, and Dr Rigmor (Ghita Norby) parades her badger fixation. I was half-delighted, and half-suppressing the desire to yell "Nurse, the screens!" If only our national tastes weren't so miserably middlebrow, our film and TV industries might feel brave enough to produce monstrous masterpieces like this.Cinema details: Going Out, page 11.. HOSPITALS and churches have a lot in common Think about it. Neither properly belongs to anyone; neither has a market value; we may avoid contact with either or both for the bulk of our lives. But at the very beginning of life and again at the very end of it, they come into their own They become staging posts, virtually unavoidable. So it was not so very bizarre that Neil Bartlett's The Seven Sacraments of Nicolas Poussin, which earned rapturous acclaim last year when performed as a dramatic monologue at the Royal London Hospital, should have its second incarnation in a gigantic, mock-byzantine, C of E church.
Originally an intimate meditation prompted by Poussin's famous sequence of paintings depicting baptism, coming of age, marriage, penance and so on, Seven Sacraments, an Artangel project premiered at the Brighton Festival last week, has burgeoned into something very grand. It is now a dramatic oratorio, complete with orchestra, soloists, vast choir, and even dancers. Yet the message it conveys is not the rock-solid affirmative of Handel and co. It's the unsteady questioning of Mr Ordinary, who is none too sure whether and what he believes in these days but who, undergoing some undefined mid-life crisis, has discovered a nostalgic respect for the old forms. When this Neil Bartlett narrator-figure first appeared at Wednesday's premiere, ambling up the aisle of St Bartholomew's, muttering, I probably wasn't alone in thinking him a stray nutter who had blundered into our concert It was registering the radio-mike that made you sit up Like most of us, this man hasn't been to church in ages But he remembers all the words, well .. some of them. "Without some ceremonies it is not possible to keep any order," he quotes from the preface to the Book of Common Prayer. For 400 years, he reflects, people assembled to recite the same words on all the occasions that mark out the journey from birth to death. But what about us, now? When even the font of St Bart's has to be labelled for the benefit of clueless visitors, what words can we use ...
