“Hulk. Smash! …Smash Hulk’s USP. What Hulk smash most? Hulk smash all hope of interesting time in cinema.”
Peter Bradshaw neatly sums up the desperation of the would-be film-goer as blockbuster season settles in for the summer.
Take your pick:
The Incredible Hulk (see above)
Iron Man, “a mixture of Robocop and Darth Vader… a franchise that is already beginning to rust”
Indiana Jones “One tries hard not to be distracted from any available pleasure by the plot—thickly woven gibberish”
Sex & The City “There are four of them—banded together, like hormonal hobbits, and all obsessed with a ring“, or
The Happening “Basically an awful clunker of whose essential clunkerishness you become aware slowly but...
I have just finished reading Then I Saw the Congo, a 1920’s travel memoir by Grace Flandrau, a novelist from Minnesota who shared an editor with F. Scott Fitzgerald. (It happens that her biography is being published this spring.)
I had misgivings about the title (see below), but found Flandrau’s writing pleasantly unburdened by the conventions of the adventure travel genre, and she disparages - even mocks - the then-fashionable pastimes of shooting large animals and ill-treating ‘the natives’.
Since the book is long out-of-print (Nayembi discovered it in an antique book shop in Lilongwe), I’ll spare you a review and transcribe some of the more memorable passages instead.
First impressions of Kinshasa:
At first glance Kinshasa gives one the rather...
In
Books,
People,
Kinshasa,
history,
Travel,
Cities,
comedy,
food,
writers,
D R Congo,
films