La Pizzeria Ristorante - Northern Quarter

Last Thursday, I attended an event like no other I'd ever been to.

My prior knowledge was limited. What I did know was the following. It was a restaurant opening. It was a pop-up. It was in the Northern Quarter, on High Street, in the space above The Market Restaurant, most recently occupied by the Kahlua Coffee House. There would be free drinks and free pizza.

Great, I thought. Who doesn't like free drinks and free pizza?

Once I ascended the steps to the pleasant leafy interior, I was offered a glass of prosecco and informed that the pizzas would be coming round shortly. The guests and I were also told, with a wry smile by our hosts, that there was a twist. We raised a polite eyebrow, trying to dredge up the requisite amount of curiosity, wondering what it could possibly be.

Turns out I didn't have to wait long. I accidentally happened upon a menu and a press release which had been carelessly left on the bar, spilling its secrets to all sundry. Oops. I now knew the grand surprise.

I was surprised, alright.

Armed with this new, terrible knowledge, I made my way back over to my friend and partner in pizza crime, but I couldn't bring myself to divulge the secret.

"So what do you think?" I asked, my face impassive.

She took a bite, tearing into a too-even square topped with pepperoni and salami.

"Yeah. It's ok. Kind of tastes like a supermarket pizza? Dunno, something about the base. It's very uniform."

I nearly spat out my prosecco. "Oh right!" I said, as my stifled snort swiftly turned into a choking cough.

I hadn't even said anything but the Great Mystery was already disintegrating. I looked around. I could see it in everyone's eyes. They were thinking the same thing.

And then, several more greasy pizza boards later, it was formally announced. La Ristorante Pizzeria is brought to you by ... Dr Oetker!

I chewed on another slice, agog. Spinace, I think. It wasn't half bad, to be honest. It pleased my palate with its garlickiness. But now that this unholy truth was out, it only seemed to gain more WTF momentum.

Here we were, Manchester's media elite (well... ish :P), bundled into a room, being fed squares of oven pizza.

What.

If this is the new model for the Northern Quarter pop-up, then I dread to think what will pop up next. Perhaps the next logical iteration is a cocktail bar called, ooh I dunno, "The Bar", decked out in red and white, where the "cocktails" consist of some fizzy brown liquid poured into a martini glass and served with a swizzle stick, at a fiver a pop. But guess what! There's a twist. It's actually just Coke, served in a fancy glass! Isn't that just swell? Go buy some Coke! At the supermarket! Where it's much cheaper!

Um.

La Ristorante's predecessor, Kahlua Coffee House, succeeded because it trod the delicate tightrope between old-fashioned, out-there brand peddling and doing something a little different. Its cocktails were both good value and high quality (best espresso martinis I've had in a while), with many concoctions on the menu unique, and the food similar.

Meanwhile the cocktail masterclasses, led by local booze experts/legends The Liquorists, and weekly movie nights (showcasing a good mixture of indie, arthouse and comedy with films like The Big Lebowski, Frida and Nacho Libre) not only lent an air of credibility to the bar as an events space, but also seemed to gel well with the laidback yet discerning NQ vibe. In short, it fit in, and it added value.

I don't know how the NQ crowd are going to react to this latest pop-up but I imagine the majority of responses will range from hilarity, to apathy, right through to ill-concealed disdain. I have this image of Largarita-fuelled punters flinging burrito javelins through the window across the road over at Luck Lust Liquor and Burn.

But what am I saying, that's madness and, quite frankly, a waste of a perfectly good burrito - which, incidentally, usually consists of under a tenner's worth of massive, dirty, oozing deliciousness I would struggle to replicate at home.

And that's exactly what I'm finding so hard to get my head round here. They want to raise brand awareness, that's fine, I get that. But why would anyone pay, to go out to a restaurant, to have cheap frozen oven pizza served to them, when they know that (a) that's what it is and (b) there's a Tesco's down the road selling the exact same ones 3 for £6? Unless it's 2am and the "restaurant" is actually a van outside a club. It just. It just MAKES NO SENSE.

The irony is, I honestly quite liked Dr Oetker pizzas before this event. But now, I'm so incensed by the nonsensical and ludicrous nature of this half-baked PR pizza disaster that I'm in half a mind to visit my nearest Asda and tear down the frozen pizza aisle shouting "NO! Just no!" at the top of my voice, all the while pelting the nearest unsuspecting customer in the face with boxes of Ristorante.

Perhaps I'm being too unkind. The venue is still lovely, and no malice is meant towards the lovely staff who served us, who proved apt at keeping our disbelief at bay with each successive glass of free prosecco and wine until a jolly haze made everything seem at once whimsical and amusing.

But sorry, Dr Oetker. Wine or no wine, my conclusion remains the same: No. Just no.

Cannibals at The Royal Exchange

Manchester playwright Rory Mullarkey’s first full-length play Cannibals defies definition.

I went into the theatre knowing very little about the production. All I had to go on was the title, which suggests taboo-smashing content of the, almost certainly, disturbing variety; the poster – enigmatic, stark but possibly a bit pretentious in that sort of minimalist arty way; and the tagline – “Death, Love and Consumerism in the 21^st Century.”

One hour and 50 minutes later, after a tense, interval-less, sensory, emotional and intellectual assault, I left the Royal Exchange feeling a little dazed and shell-shocked, not quite sure where I was or how I felt about what I had just seen.

So, how to describe Cannibals? Well, the tagline is actually a good starting point. Yes, people love and yes, people die. In the very first scene, for example, a man tells his wife the many reasons why he loves her, only to be shot dead minutes later. 

But of the three themes laid out in the tagline, consumerism is the most integral.

In the developed Western world, consumerism refers almost exclusively to the buying of things – our endless need to populate our homes and lives with Stuff. It’s why we have supermarkets: those great bastions of modern society that seem to stock twenty different types of everything, from shampoo, to cigarettes, to tinned beans, to loo roll. In short, choice is king... but I often find myself wondering just how luxurious or unique tissue paper needs to be to fulfil its primary bum-wiping function.

Consumerism in the remote post-Soviet region in which the play opens, however, is a much simpler and more visceral affair. The consumers in this society are peasants, and their main want and need in life is simply having enough to eat, to survive the long and cold winter. It’s a place where desperation turns people against one other – a brutal, bleak, dog-eat-dog, human-eat-dog/horse/badger/even human world.

Mullarkey’s play roots us in the latter, ostensibly alien world of peasant farmers and war and economic hardship, of remote villages and old crones and holy fools and one-eyed icon painters.

Our way in to this world, our human conduit, is Lizaveta, a young woman whose husband is murdered, victim to a nameless war.

Lizaveta, played with great energy and passion by Ony Lihiara, must run for her life. She finds temporary refuge with a cantankerous, gun-wielding old woman (the brilliantly deadpan Tricia Kelly) who puts her to work in the fields. Here, she befriends Josef, a simple but good-hearted fool (Ricky Champ) and a painter, Vitalik (Simon Armstrong).

But soon, war and opportunism intrude once again on Lizaveta’s life, and through forces beyond her control, she finds herself transported across Europe to a strange, grotesque, bewildering place – Manchester, our world, which, through Lizaveta’s eyes, no longer looks as comfortingly familiar.

I’m not sure if it’s possible for me to say you will enjoy this show, in the same way you may not enjoy watching a dissection. It’s original and compelling, certainly, but also provocative, brutal, bleak and disturbing.

“Appreciate” is perhaps a better word, but whether you appreciate Cannibals will probably depend on what you feel theatre is meant to do.

If you think theatre’s prime purpose is only to entertain, to provide two hours of respite from the daily grind, to envelop the audience in a gentle web of feel-good escapism – then this production is not for you.

But if you believe theatre has the power to explore and interrogate difficult ideas and concepts, to take you on a discomfiting but powerful emotional journey, to make you reconsider your beliefs and your worldview, or to shake you out of a complacency you may not have even realised you had, then Cannibals is definitely worth seeing.

You may not necessarily enjoy it, but if you find that you see things a little differently when you leave the theatre than you did when you first arrived – as I did – then Mullarkey should feel proud to have done his job.

Cannibals continues at the Royal Exchange Theatre, St Ann’s Square, Manchester until Saturday 27 April 2013

http://www.royalexchange.co.uk/

Get £10 tickets through Manchester Confidential here.

Gender and equality: Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph messes with the program

Last month, I went to see Disney’s latest animated feature Wreck-It Ralph. I was, on the whole, impressed and entertained. In a review which I wrote for STYLEetc I described it as “a wildly inventive, innovative thrill-ride – a love letter to retro-gaming that sees Disney return to the top of its own game”.

But when the final credits rolled, I reflected that it was more than this. For me, one of the most compelling and praiseworthy aspects of the film was its positive and progressive portrayal of gender.

Gender inequality in cinema is well documented, both behind the camera and in front of it. Still, too often in the narratives which flood our screens, the masculine is considered universal and general, the feminine specific and other. Harmful stereotypes survive and flourish, and there is a significant gap between the number, variety and depth of roles available to men and those available to women.

It is an issue which is even more apparent in the narratives which are aimed at children. Concerned by the media her own daughter was consuming, actress Geena Davis decided to tackle the issue head on, founding the “Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media” and her own programming arm “See Jane”.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, she explained the kind of issues that her research revealed:

“What we found was that in G-rated movies, for every one female character, there were three male characters. If it was a group scene, it would change to five to one, male to female.

Of the female characters that existed, the majority are highly stereotyped and/or hypersexualized. To me, the most disturbing thing was that the female characters in G-rated movies wear the same amount of sexually revealing clothing as the female characters in R-rated movies.

And then we looked at aspirations and occupations and things like that. Pretty much the only aspiration for female characters was finding romance, whereas there are practically no male characters whose ultimate goal is finding romance. The No. 1 occupation was royalty. Nice gig, if you can get it. And we found that the majority of female characters in animated movies have a body type that can't exist in real life. So, the question you can think of from all this is: What message are we sending to kids?”

Interesting and, quite frankly, a little depressing. So it’s really refreshing to see a film – and a Disney film at that – make some pretty decent inroads into redressing the balance of gender bias and gender stereotyping.

Let’s look at how it does this in a little more detail.

[WARNING: spoilers contained within.]

The main narrative

The film’s title suggests that the main character is a man called Ralph. But really, the film is about two characters whose shared battle is against their programming.

Wreck-It Ralph, as his moniker suggests, is programmed to destroy things – to be the bad guy. But even when the game’s over and everyone clocks off for the day, his notoriety clings to him like a bad smell.

Unfortunately for Ralph, his reputation precedes him. Blinds go down as he walks past, gazes are averted. No-one ever invites him inside for cocktails and cake. His only friends are the fellow baddies he sees at his weekly “Bad-Anon” Bad Guys Anonymous meetings.

As Zangief tells him: “Ralph, you are Bad Guy… but this does not mean you are... bad guy?”

After 30 years of punching through walls and terrorising the town, he finally decides he’s had enough.

Elsewhere, in the candy-coated racing-game “Sugar Rush”, Vanellope von Schweetz is a young girl who is victim to faulty programming – she’s a bit of a misfit, a “glitch”, and because of her occasional tendency to malfunction, she is shunned by the other girls (who are uniformly pink and bitchy) and not allowed to take part in the race (note neat “race is life” metaphor).

Both characters operate on the fringes of their respective societies. They are not well-liked. They are different. Their otherness isolates them and they are both forced to live alone; cast-offs, surrounded by garbage.

Ralph just wants a chance to win a medal – be the hero. Vanellope just wants a chance to race – be the winner. Both characters want recognition and acceptance from their peers.

Ultimately, both Ralph and Vanellope express a universally relatable and understandable motivation that crosses both gender and generational boundaries.

I gotta say, I thought that was pretty awesome.

But wait, that’s not all…

The relationship between the two main characters

Ralph and Vanellope do not get off to the best start – their first meeting (the “meet cute” minus the romance) is combative, antagonistic – but when they realise their similarities, and that, actually, they might be able to help each other (and in so doing, help themselves) they eventually become friends.

Admittedly this, in itself, is not hugely surprising. One might say that if there’s one type of programming Ralph and Vanellope cannot battle against it’s the narrative programming of the movie-makers – their eventual friendship-through-hardship and consequent personal growth is as inevitable as the happy ending.

But the great thing is that their friendship, like their motivations, also crosses gender and generational boundaries.

I don’t think the significance of this should be underestimated or underplayed. For one, Disney is most renowned for its traditional fairy tale romances of princes and princesses of the boy-meets-girl, boy-or-girl-encounters-obstacle, boy-marries-girl variety.

There have been notable variations on this theme with the more recent Enchanted, The Princess and the Frog and Tangled, but on the whole, romantic heterosexual love ending in marriage is the most common narrative thread: pretty conventional and, ultimately, not very interesting. (I wonder if this is part of the reason why The Lion King is my favourite Disney film.)

Now, Disney’s cooler, more critically-acclaimed subsidiary Pixar has plenty of examples of solid friendships or other non-romantic love relationships taking centre stage in its films, but these are mostly male-centric: e.g. the central relationship in Toy Story is arguably between Buzz and Woody and/or Woody and Andy; Finding Nemo is about a father and son; Ratatouille crosses species but the central relationship is between Remy (male rat) and Linguini (young man), running alongside Remy’s conflicted relationship with his brother and father and Linguini’s romantic relationship with Colette.

Up is more unconventional in that the central friendship is cross-generational but it’s still between a young boy and an old man. Most recently, Brave sought to redress the balance by making the central relationship between mother and daughter, but not one of the films mentioned above had a platonic male-female friendship at the front and centre of the film.

I also remember thinking in the cinema that if Wreck-It Ralph were a live-action film, then Vanellope would almost certainly be the “manic pixie dream girl” character whose primary purpose, other than being a bit kooky and lovable, is to help the hero realise his own destiny and complete his journey – win the medal (metaphorical or otherwise), grow as a person, then return home a changed man with renewed optimism and purpose in life.

But guess what? She’s not. What I found wonderfully refreshing is that, when Ralph tumbles into “Sugar Rush” and meets Vanellope, she isn’t immediately doomed to the fate of being sidekick. The fact is, she has her own agenda, her own hopes and desires, her own backstory and her own plotline. Because “Sugar Rush” is her game. That’s why she fights Ralph for his medal – because she needs it just as much as he does.

And so, once their lives become entangled, they continue the film as equals, helping each other to achieve their own respective goals, and learning the vital lesson that working together is better than fighting one another and going it alone. In so doing, they grow to love one another – as friends. No romance (though that would be icky and wrong given the age gap). It’s also played with just the right amount of sentiment – sweet and believable, but not cloying.   

I am all for more of this kind of representation in films which are primarily targeted to children. Too often, these same children are marketed to in other areas in an aggressively binary way: blue vs. pink; guns vs. dolls; fighting vs. talking. [For more on this, the two-part Feminist Frequency video on LEGO & Gender makes for fascinating and infuriating viewing.]

The fact is, toy companies benefit from emphasising and exaggerating gender differences because their margins profit a lot more from being able to market toys specifically to boys and girls separately than marketing to them together. It’s classic divide and conquer. And as an aside, can you think of a toy that simultaneously advertises to boys and girls whose promotional material features boys and girls playing together?

Stop the harmful gender enclaves, I say. More platonic boy-girl friendships on screen, please.

Our link to the human world outside the game

Another area in which the film succeeds in its positive, progressive portrayal of gender is in our link to the human world.

The action of the film takes place mainly within the arcade, inside the individual game machines – this is the “game world” which the main characters inhabit.

Occasionally, however, we cross over into the “real world”, where Out of Order signs are absently slapped onto screens – these signify little more than a minor inconvenience in our world, but constitute a looming, terrifying death-knell in the game world.

Our link between the two worlds is a child – a regular arcade-goer who switches between the three main games that feature in the film.

But, to steal a Shakespearean phrase, here’s the rub. This child just happens to be a girl. Yep. A glasses-wearing girl who is just as happy playing action-heavy, bombastic, sci-fi First Person Shooter “Hero’s Duty” as she is old-school “Fix-It Felix”.

At one point she wants to play “Sugar Rush” (a girl-populated, saccharine, manga-inspired candy land) but is edged out by a pair of surly teenage boys (HA!) who have monopolised the game with their stack of quarters.

This is, quite simply, awesome. The filmmakers could have easily made the gamer a boy, but they didn’t. They chose to make her a girl. And a girl who not only likes playing games, but games that span a range of different styles and genres.

Given the already complex relationship between women and video games, this is an excellent and savvy creative choice which, though small, feels very significant. I very much doubt it was accidental.

The ending

The final gender-related masterstroke comes in the film’s closing scenes.

Needless to say, both the main characters have a happy ending. Ralph returns to his game a hero. He may still be the “Bad Guy” during office house, but the inhabitants of Nice Land have a newfound appreciation and respect for him, and he is no longer on the outside looking in. Vanellope, meanwhile, is restored to her rightful place as Princess of Sugar Rush. So far, so conventional, right?

Well, not quite.

The first interesting thing to note is the nature of Vanellope’s usurpation. The film’s baddie, the dastardly King Candy, had basically infiltrated a female-only society/gamescape, usurped its ruler, wiped everyone’s memories and set himself up as King. You could say he imposed an insidious patriarchy on the land of Sugar Rush, only to be ousted at the end. You may think I’m reading too much into it, but it’s still worth mulling over.

Secondly, Vanellope may be revealed to be a princess but she is very quick to reject the trappings of her role. For one thing, she’s hardly joyful at the pink meringue monstrosity she’s suddenly forced to wear. It’s just not very her. So she takes it off. (Gasp.)

Then, once she’s back in her familiar green hoodie, skirt, stripey tights and black boots, she says: “Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of a constitutional democracy.” Turns out she prefers the title President to Princess – and why shouldn’t she? I know I do.

Sly, Disney. You had to have your Princess in there somewhere but it’s nice to see you put a little (political!) twist on it.

*

I could go on. The film’s secondary storyline with the romance between the more conventionally attractive, leather-clad, ass-kicking Sergeant Calhoun (voiced with gleeful, gruff badassery by Jane Lynch) and all-round nice guy Fix-it Felix (Jack McBrayer) bucks convention in its own ways, but I’ve tried to outline above the major ways in which Wreck-It Ralph “messes with the program” of its narrative ancestry and the more traditional gender roles which have preceded it.

If this marks Disney striking out in a new direction then I am genuinely excited for what other feminist-friendly stories they have up their sleeves – stories where the female characters have just as much prominence, importance and agency as the male characters and where they are not limited to romantic interest, eye-candy or sidekick. I join Vanellope in ditching the foo-foo pink dress of conformity. Bring on the revolution.

*

On a final note, I only hope that the new live-action feature Oz the Great and Powerful can rise above and beyond its gag-reflex inducing trailer. As far as I can tell, it tells the story of a vain, shallow, feckless man thrust into the midst of a bunch of spirited, intelligent, yet ultimately helpless women who just need a Really Great Man to save them. Ugh. It’s basically Chicken Run with witches.

Seriously, just watch this trailer and count how many times a female character says something along the lines of “You’re the chosen one” and “We’ve waited for you to come save us” and tell me you don’t want to reach for the nearest bucket:

http://www.youtube.com/user/WaltDisneyStudiosUK?v=DylgNj4YQVc