the summer of the soul in December...

I was very excited to hear the news that The Muppet Christmas Carol would be receiving a cinematic re-release this December.  Whilst I can't honestly say that is my absolute favourite seasonal film*, it's a film that brings back some very happy memories and holds a special place in my heart.  Besides, has Michael Caine - who plays Scrooge entirely straight, with no regard to the fact that the vast majority of his co-stars are muppets - ever been better in all his long and illustrious career?



It's in the singing of a street corner choir
It's going home and getting warm by the fire
It's true, wherever you find love
It feels like Christmas

Irresistible, right?

Well, as I was talking about this with my team at work, whilst Jack was very enthusiastic and wanted to look up when screenings were on in Nottingham, the girls in the team were entirely indifferent.  In fact, most of them hadn't even seen it.  "It's a boy's film", said Alice, dismissively.

Wait, what?

As a man, perhaps it's my privilege speaking here, but I would never in a million years have The Muppet Christmas Carol down as a boy's film.  It's hardly Die Hard, is it?  We spent the next few minutes doing a sampling of all the people around our desks, and indeed..... most of the girls hadn't seen it and thought it was a boy's film, and most of the boys were fairly enthusiastic about it.

Say it ain't so!

Of course, the whole concept of there being "boy's films" and "girl's films" is nonsense, but if you allow the concept, then surely Muppet Christmas Carol would be nowhere near the top of anyone's list.  Even amongst seasonal films, it's nowhere near the top, is it?

I'd be fascinated to hear what you think.

Oh, and guess what I'm giving every single member of my team as a Christmas gift.

---
* Elf**

** or maybe Bad Santa***

*** probably Trading Places.****

**** Just don't talk to me about Love Actually.  In my view, that's a vile, cynical film where every single male character behaves as though they don't have an ounce of respect for any of the women.  Ugh.  

smaller and smaller and smaller...

"...I can arrange that!"

There's an article on the Guardian today where Carrie Fisher discusses how she felt under pressure to lose 35lbs before they started filming the new Star Wars film.  This is a difficult issue: would there be a problem if a Princess Leia, 38 years older than in the original films, was two-and-a-half stone heavier than when she was nineteen?  Probably not.  She isn't, after all, very likely to be required to appear in a metal bikini this time around.

But do the director and producers have a right to ask the actors to change their body shape if they feel it is right for the character?  It would definitely be a problem if only the female actors were asked to lose weight, but it's noticeable that Mark Hamill lost a lot of weight before filming too.  Although the role Luke Skywalker is going to play in this film is shrouded in mystery, I suppose it's safe to say that a fat Jedi Master was never really going to work...

Anyway.  Whilst reading this article, I discovered that a Guardian commentator by the name of Nashket has won the Internet for the day with this pearler of a comment:

"Spoke like somebody who does not have a clue about Star Wars.
Princess Leia, the character, is an elegant individual who takes massive pride in her appearance, after all she is royalty and had a privileged upbringing.
She is also son of Anakin Skywalker, one of the most powerful Jedi ever known based on his Midi-Chlorian level and therefore has great discipline and self-respect for the body which is passed down to her by her as a result of her Jedi roots in her character.
She would not of suddenly just abandoned all those personality traits as she got older or developed a cake addiction, when cake may not even exist in the Star wars universe.
I have not seen Star Wars in about 10 years and I remember these basic things.
When political correctness starts to cause you to change some of the greatest stories ever told, you know something is not correct"

So there.

....Although, as another commentator notes a little further down, "No cake in the Star Wars universe?! Then just what are the rebel alliance fighting for?!!"

I actually want to try and avoid spoilers for this film.  I sense that this may be difficult, especially as I won't be seeing it for a week or so after it's released.  Oh well.  I guess I'll live.

a long, long time ago....

Over the weekend, I took the time to watch the classic Star Wars trilogy again.

I’ve seen all of these films literally hundreds of times over the years, so this wasn’t so much a question of preparing myself for the release of the new film in December as much as the fact that I just thought I was due. When I watch these films, I can remember where the original boxing day adverts were in the version we taped off the telly and onto Betamax; I can remember Luke throwing his grapple on the Death Star and missing the first time; I can remember queuing in the rain outside the Elektra cinema in Newport Pagnell to watch the Empire Strikes Back for the first time; I can remember playing with my Star Wars figures and counting down the days to the release of the Return of the Jedi. I’ve owned these films many times and in several different formats, from that original Betamax copy of Star Wars taped off the telly, through various video box-sets (the one of the original cuts I left with an ex-girlfriend, which seems ridiculously generous of me, given that now it’s basically the special editions or bust), and finally onto DVD. I drew the line at buying the Blu-Rays because I figured that, by this point, I’d given George Lucas more than enough of my money. I’d love to get the original cuts again, but the crappy edits available on the Blu-Ray just wasn’t enough to entice me.

When I went to the cinema in 1997 to watch the Special Editions, I was a little surprised that Return of the Jedi was the film that I actually enjoyed the most. Like most fan-boys, I’m an ESB man, and had a healthy loathing of the damn ewoks… but when it actually came to watching the films again on the big screen, it was Jedi that grabbed me the most. Perhaps it was because it was the one of the films that I’d watched the least, but there it was. The same thing happened again this weekend: there’s something satisfying about the way it rounds off the whole journey with the death of the Emperor and the destruction of the second Death Star. Maybe I’ve mellowed, but I don’t even really mind the ewoks anymore either.

A couple of things did strike me about the films though: the first was that almost every single addition that George Lucas made in the Special Editions was a complete waste of time. Either they added nothing at all to the plot (that extra scene with Biggs before the assault on the Death Star – yes, they had the footage, but all it does is slow down the story and shows us how crap an actor Red Leader is), or they just looked hideously dated. Never mind the fact that it’s all a bit childish, all that additional CGI to beef out Mos Eisley just looks like it has been pasted onto the original film and doesn’t look real. Why squeeze Jabba in? It doesn’t make any sense and the logistical problem of having Han walking around him could just have been avoided by leaving the scene out in the first place. It’s tinkering for tinkering’s sake, and shows again that George Lucas didn’t really understand what made Star Wars so charming in the first place. We like Han Solo precisely because he is the kind of scoundrel who would shoot someone under the table. Still George Lucas was only insisting last week that he hoped that JJ Abrams didn’t “ruin” his vision and that Jar-Jar Binks remained his favourite character in the whole saga. Trolling Star Wars fans to the end….

The other thing that struck me was quite how much of the thunder of the original trilogy that the prequels take away. One of my friends has never seen any of the Star Wars films before, and so her boyfriend is preparing her for the release of “The Force Awakens” in December by watching the films in order of Episode I to Episode VI. That seems like it makes sense, but when you think about it… it really doesn’t. Think of the dramatic tension we get from finding out that Darth Vader is Luke’s father. If you watch the prequels first, that tension is completely ruined. And… of course, they’re crap films. If my friend can make it to Episode IV after watching all six hours of that crap – never having been interested enough to watch any of them before, remember – then she’s probably doing pretty well. We took part in a Star Wars quiz the other week, and the quizmaster was talking about something we should watch out for the next time we watched The Revenge of the Sith. I snorted. I’m never bloody watching that again, I thought.  It's better than the other two, but really that's not saying much.

At the end of the day, the original films are just great entertainment. Several times, my wife passed by as I was watching them, and several times she found herself sitting down to watch as she got sucked in. It was a pleasure to watch them again, having not watched them for a few years. Even if I have seen them all hundreds of times over the years. I’m a fan, but I’m not one of those people who is so excited about Episode VII that I’ve booked my tickets already. I remember getting excited about seeing Darth Maul on the first Phantom Menace trailer, and look how that turned out. I’m hopeful that it will be a decent, entertaining film… but I think I’m past the point where I’m expecting it to really rock my world….. although I will admit that when Han and Chewie turned up in the trailer, my heart did skip a beat. Those cynical, manipulative bastards.

There will be more exciting Star Wars news here very soon. To misquote Lando, I’ve just made a deal that will help us with our marathon fund for the MS Trust enormously. Watch this space for a running / Star Wars based announcement that you will all be able to get involved here in the next couple of weeks….. For reals.

a million shards of glass...

We watched “Spectre” yesterday, and I have to say that I enjoyed it. No spoilers here, btw.

Yes, it’s manifestly ridiculous and I’m certain the plot doesn’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny… but it was a lot of fun, right from the stylish opening sequence set in Mexico City during the Day of the Dead. (sidebar: I read an interesting discussion about cultural appropriation and the day of the dead here)

I was speaking to a friend yesterday who was saying how Daniel Craig was his least favourite of all of the actors to have played Bond. I couldn’t disagree more: I’m starting to think that he might well be the best, although this film feels like a natural full-stop for his time in the role.  Ian Fleming apparently approved of the casting of Sean Connery because of the way that he walked like a panther, full of controlled menace. Watching Daniel Craig as he walked along the edge of a hotel balcony in Mexico and stepped down air-conditioning units and across the gaps between buildings, the very same thought struck me too… he walks like a panther, full of grace and threat.

He’s a physically impressive specimen (at the age of 47, poor old boy), but he’s also managed to capture a tender side to 007 that we haven't seen in the past. This was apparent in his very first outing, in Casino Royale, when he comforted Vesper in the shower, and you can see it here when, at a crucial moment, he holds a woman’s hand because she is scared. The Daniel Craig era has seen a significant move away from the misogynism that was part-and-parcel of the Bond film canon. Women are not just objects in these films, and they are not just victims either.  Daniel Craig's Bond is often surrounded by powerful and empowered women, most notably (but not exclusively) Judi Dench's M. At a couple of key moments in this film, it is the woman who is making the decisions about their relationship and not Bond.  It's not really what you could exactly call a subtle film, but it has some nice touches amid all the crash, bang, wallop.

One thing I particularly enjoyed in Spectre was the referencing of older Bond tropes: some were more obvious than others (I won't mention the most obvious, but the mountain-top retreat was a nice touch, although sadly no skiing away from black-suited bad guys with guns).  The one that made me laugh out loud was a beautifully subtle reference to a Fleming short story in the "For Your Eyes Only" collection.  If you haven't read "The Hildebrand Rarity", then I highly recommend it.  In fact, I would recommend any of the Bond short stories.  "Quantum of Solace" (from the same collection) is definitely worth a read and is absolutely nothing like the film.  Nothing.  For starters, it's a story told *to* Bond and doesn't feature 007 at all.  "Octopussy" is a corker too.

I enjoyed all the books.  They're products of their time, for sure, and you find yourself wincing at some of it (negroes can't whistle?  What? But they're really very good.  If I was a film producer, I'd be looking at making a proper period Bond that faithfully follows the books. "Moonraker" would be my choice.  Again -- notice the theme? -- that book's nothing much like the film either.

So Spectre: yes. Well, I can take or leave the theme song.... but apart from that, I enjoyed it.  If you can find a cinema showing it, then you should check it out.

a frozen heart worth mining (?)

Those of you that know me, may well know that I take a perverse amount of pleasure from the list of films that everyone has seen that I haven't seen: Grease (although I have seen Grease 2 starring Maxwell Caulfield and Michelle Pfeiffer, and I just plain don't see how it can be topped), Titanic, ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Dirty Dancing, Ghost.... that kind of thing.

Frozen is also on that list.

It really isn't that much of a big deal, except that as the film has become more and more successful, it's a cultural reference point that I simply don't have.  But I'm a 41 year old man and I don't have any children: why would I watch it?  So why do people think I'm weird for not having seen it? Wouldn't it actually be weirder if I had? Kind of like those guys who know all the words to "I Will Survive", because they think it makes them more attractive to women and definitely NOT creepy?

It's creeping up on me though.

First, I saw that a "Frozen Heart" / "Let It Go" medley was on the setlist for the summer season at choir (although, all Disney princesses are sopranos, so I'm not entirely convinced their will be all that much in the voice part for a bass to get all that interested about).  Amazing though it may seem, when I saw that, I still hadn't even heard "Let It Go".... and then over Easter, I caught the last five minutes of a countdown programme on the telly listing the best ever Disney songs.  Somewhat bizarrely, this was hosted by Jamie and Louise Redknapp, and when I tuned in, they were just finishing off "Whole New World" at number 3, playing "The Bare Necessities" at number 2 and finishing - inevitably - with "Let It Go" at number one.  Leaving aside the fact that two of the top three are completely wrong, this was the very first time I had actually heard this song all the way through.  Well, it's no "King of the Swingers", is it?  I'm not even sure it's a "Chim-chimerney" either.

That was bad enough, but look what arrived in the post for me today:

Oh, my friends are such a scream.

I surrender.

Can't hold it back anymore..... (do you see what I did there?)

don't get caught alone no, no.....

I got sucked into one of those "Top 100 countdown" things on TV last night... I would have quite happily watched to the end to discover what the Greatest 1980s Movie made was, but the realisation that the programme finished a little before 1am on a school night sent me packing to bed shortly after we had reached "Beverly Hills Cop" but before we'd got to Bill & Ted.  Eddie Murphy was 22 when they made that film.  Twenty-two!  I was also slightly disappointed to discover that Bronson Pinchot - who appeared to talk about filming his scenes with Murphy - isn't actually Eastern European at all and instead has a meat-and-two-potatoes American accent and was born in New York.  Huh. (and looking at his wikipedia page, I can see that he won an award for his performance in the talking book book of "Matterhorn" by Karl Marlantes.  Now that's an excellent book which would have been weird if he'd read it in either the accent of Balki Bartokomous or Serge.... but I digress).

Watching clips from films like St Elmo's Fire, Weird Science and Desperately Seeking Susan reminded me of a conversation I had at work the other day.  We'd been talking about being the gatekeepers for some process or other, and one of my colleagues piped up:

"Ah, what I want to know is who is the keymaster!"
Another colleague looked confused.
"What do you mean?"
"It's from Ghostbusters"
"The film?"
"Yes"
"When did that film even come out?"
"About 1984"
"What? 1984? That's the year I was born. Is it worth watching?"
"......"

It's not so much the ignorance that gets me, it's the lack of curiosity.

the melting men....

I flicked the television on this evening when I sat down with my tea and saw that Raiders of the Lost Ark had just started on BBC3.  Obviously, I sat and watched it.  I've seen it hundreds of times, of course, but you can't flick past that, can you?

This film was made in 1981, and even though the special effects are positively Stone Age compared to what's possible today, I was watching the famous face-melting scene at the end and thinking that it's a far more effective special effect than any amount of million dollar CGI thrown at the latest Transformers movie.... because the film doesn't JUST hinge on the special effects, but has an actual plot and characters you care about and old fashioned things like that.

Then I remembered that half my team at work haven't seen this film.

Ever.

Imagine that.  They all know who Nicki Minaj is (and what her fragrance smells like), but they have no idea who Indiana Jones is, and in fact they probably couldn't name a single thing Harrison Ford has done in his career.

Young people, eh?

say my name....

Erm.  Who?

You might remember that I've been on a bit of a mission over the last few months to extend the cinematic horizons of some of my younger colleagues.  This has been somewhat harder than you might imagine as they don't appear to have seen anything at all, never mind any of the real classics.  Still, I like a challenge and have been lending out various DVDs and then asking for a score out of ten to force them to think - even a little bit - about what they really thought about the film.

I had a minor triumph when one colleague realised that she had given "The Shawshank Redemption"  exactly the same score as she had given "Brewster's Millions".  Both are good films, but at that moment, my colleague realised that she thought that the one film was simply better than the other, and promptly asked if she could revise her score for Shawshank to an eight.

It's been a bit quiet recently, but one of my other colleagues - 23 years old, ladies and gentlemen - finally returned the copy of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" she borrowed before Christmas (amazingly, she hadn't seen it).

"What did you think?"
"Pretty good. Loved that special effect with the melting Nazis"
"Well, it was 1981"
"I suppose so. What was the name of the guy in it?"
"The guy?"
"Yeah, the main guy"
"Er.... Harrison Ford?"
"Oh yeah. That's it"

Young people, eh?

Still, put yourself in her shoes: she hasn't seen Star Wars, Witness, Mosquito Coast, Blade Runner, Working Girl, and she's only just seen one of the Indiana Jones films.... why should I expect her to really know or to understand or care that Harrison Ford is one of the most successful movie stars who ever lived and has been in some of the biggest grossing films ever?  Not to put too fine a point on it, she was born in 1990 and his film record hasn't exactly been unimpeachable since then, has it?  You might wonder about her lack of curiosity or desire to view films from before she was born, but basically, he don't mean shit to her.

Maybe it's a reflection of my age that this seems so inconceivable.  I'm the Star Wars generation.  Ford's golden period coincides neatly with my discovery of films.

Still, what do I know?  My team have just named the whiteboard we gather around each morning "Zac Efron".  Apparently it amuses them.  How quickly they've forgotten their crush on Channing Tatum....

That is an awesome effect though, right? Still beautifully effective to this day!  Zac Efron wishes he could be in a scene as memorable.... and actually, who wouldn't want to him recreate this exact scene?

solitary brother....

I went to go and watch "Blackfish" the other night.  It's a very powerful documentary by Gabriella Cowperthwaite about orca being held in captivity (it's notable in the film that all the people from the theme parks call them "Killer Whale", and all of the scientists call them "Orca").

Here's the blurb.

"Blackfish tells the story of Tilikum, a performing killer whale that killed several people while in captivity. Along the way, director-producer Gabriela Cowperthwaite compiles shocking footage and emotional interviews to explore the creature’s extraordinary nature, the species’ cruel treatment in captivity, the lives and losses of the trainers and the pressures brought to bear by the multi-billion dollar sea-park industry.  This emotionally wrenching, tautly structured story challenges us to consider our relationship to nature and reveals how little we humans have learned from these highly intelligent and enormously sentient fellow mammals".

The film is perhaps a little one-sided (there's no contribution from Sea World, for example), and I can't help but think that a few of the interviewees are being a little disingenuous about how powerless they were to make a difference, but there's no denying that this is a very powerful film.

We saw some orca in the wild off the coast of Vancouver Island in July 2010, and they are magnificent animals.  They live in matriarchal pods and they travel up to one hundred miles a day and may range across thousands of kilometers of ocean.  They are clearly intelligent, social animals and it just seems wilfully cruel to shut them up in tiny tanks and to make them perform tricks just for our gratification.  Is it really any wonder that these animals occasionally snap and lunge out at their trainers?  There have been absolutely zero reported attacks by orca on humans in the wild, but these sorts of attacks are relatively common in captivity and people have died.

This is a photo of one of the orca we saw in Canada.  That dorsal fin is about 2m tall.  It's a very impressive animal, and watching this film having seen these creatures in the wild really drove the message home for me.  We're better than this.  More importantly, the orca deserve better from us.  It's not an easy film to watch, but I'd highly recommend it.

I've been toying with the idea of getting another tattoo, and watching this film has reminded me of one of the designs I've been thinking about since our visit to Canada in 2010 (when I got my bear paw tattoo).  Sarah won't thank me for this, as she's been toying with the idea of getting one done in this sort of design for some time, but I'm really drawn to a haida representation of an orca.  Something like this:

For the haida, the orca is an animal of tremendous spiritual significance. Within the Haida society, the killer whales were viewed as members of a race of people who operate in the underwater realm much as human society does on land. The killer whales could capture a canoe and take it underwater to transform the occupants into whales. Thus, whales seen swimming near the shore were really transformed humans trying to get in touch with their families. Haida also used the killer whale as a popular symbol of family, for the whales stay with their families and travel in large pods.  Tlingit stories tell of how the killer whale was created: a man named Natcitlaneh was abandoned on an island by his jealous brothers-in-law. He was rescued by sea otters and taken to their village in a cave where he healed their chief. In return, the sea otters granted him magical powers. Natcitlaneh carved killer whales out of different types of trees. Finally, when he carved the whale out of yellow cedar, it came to life when placed in the sea. Natcitlaneh held onto the dorsal fin of the whale and went out to sea with it. There, he saw his brothers-in-law in their canoes. Natcitlaneh’s whale avenged him by smashing the canoes and killing his wicked brothers-in-law. Natcitlaneh told the whale that it must never again hurt humans. That is why killer whales, to this day, do not eat people.

Anyway.  It's a lovely design, and I was toying with the idea of getting it across the top of my left arm, with the tail dipping down towards the t-shirt line and the head facing towards my chest.

Another idea I've been toying with - perhaps for my right shoulder - is some sort of star map of Ursa Major.  I'd like something like this, perhaps with a bit less text, although I haven't really worked out how to make it work.

One to keep thinking about anyway.  There's certainly no rush.  I might explore the orca idea a bit further though.  The bear paw on my back represents an animal that is strong but gentle, lord and protector of the forests.  An orca represents something similar for the oceans, and I really like that.  I also really like the design (which, as it happens, is similar in colour to the bear paw on my left shoulder, which is a Navajo indian design).   I'm not especially looking to coordinate, but I suppose that's a happy bonus.

I've been chewing on both ideas since my last tattoo in 2010, but there's no rush.  No need to be hasty inking something permanently into your skin, eh?

that make you Tom the curious, that makes you James the weak...

I finally watched "Searching for Sugar Man" yesterday.  It's much garlanded already, so you hardly need me to tell you that it's worth watching, so I won't.  It is an amazing story though: the idea that a musician like this could be completely obscure - completely and utterly unknown - in his own country and yet enormously successful in South Africa, where his music had become a symbol of the struggle against Apartheid some 25 years after it was originally recorded...well it's almost completely unbelievable.  Everyone thought he was dead, but it turns out that he was alive and well and living in Detroit, working as a manual labourer.   It's a very moving story.

What really struck me, as well as the incredible humility of Sixto Rodriguez himself, was the story of how his music slowly became hugely significant in South Africa.  They knew nothing about him at all.  Nothing.  All they had to go on was his picture on the cover of his records, the names on the back of the album and the lyrics themselves.  They had nothing else to go on but they wanted to know more - not least his supposed death by committing suicide onstage.  This was about 1998, and whereas nowadays all you would have to do is to reach for Google, in South Africa back then, an appeal went out through the unlikely medium of some new sleeve notes written for a South African re-release of Rodriguez's second album and the whole thing just snowballed from there.  Like I say, it seems scarcely believable.  I had a website of my own in 1995, for heaven's sake.  Google was up and running.  How could they know nothing?  This guy had a record contract with a proper record company in the USA in the 1970s, released two full albums and played innumerable gigs around Detroit.  How could people know so little about him, even in Apartheid South Africa?  In today's data flooded world, it just seems so hard to understand.  He may have sold no records at all, but surely there was a paper trail of some kind?  Well, apparently not.  

Anyway.  If you're interested in the details, watch the film.  It did make me think though: how often do you hear music that you know absolutely nothing about?  Something where you can't filter what you're hearing through what you know (or think you know) about the artist?  I suppose the closest I get is the local bands I review for Leftlion, but even then, most of them have got a Facebook profile, so you can at least read what they think of themselves and what their influences are.  I don't know much about them, but they're not an entirely blank canvas.

For these South Africans, Sixto Rodriquez was a complete unknown: all they had was his music, rumours of his death and how they thought his lyrics were speaking to them and directly to their situation in Apartheid South Africa. Word got around because people made bootleg tapes and passed them around.  That doesn't really happen any more, does it?  Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Spotify, Soundcloud, MySpace.... once word gets out, it's surely never been possible for it to spread further and faster than it does today.  I guess there are still plenty of brilliant musicians living in obscurity today, but it's surely never been easier to make your music available to the world, whether or not anyone chooses to listen to it.

I suppose it's pointless to wonder if that's a good thing or a bad thing because that's just the way things are.... all the same, the story of Sixto Rodriguez wouldn't quite be as romantic today, would it?  If you could just google the guy and come upon his twitter feed and his flickr photos, then it wouldn't really be same at all.  I think a large part of the story's appeal comes from the mystery and a strange series of events across continents that, if you read it in a novel, you would probably deem ridiculous.  But there it is.  Would it even be possible today for an album to sell 500,000 copies somewhere and for everyone to think he was dead?  Doubtful.  No record company or publicist would allow that.  Even if the artist wasn't interested in the money, someone damn well would be and he'd be contractually obliged to appear on Graham Norton and Jonathan Ross and Loose Women.  He wouldn't be allowed to slip between the cracks.

You'd imagine that Rodriguez himself would be delighted to be discovered - think of all those royalties he must be due and the merchandise he could flog.  That's the absolute best part about this though: although clearly pleased to be able to play his music to appreciative audiences, he's clearly not the least bit fussed about material things and is not at all bitter that he's led a life of hard physical labour and not of pampered musical superstardom.  Mick Jagger he most definitely is not.

It's a brilliant story.  His music is really, really good.  Properly good.... and I'm very much looking forward to the chance to see him with my own eyes at Glastonbury this year.

It's a brilliant film and an amazing story.  But you probably know that.  Everyone knows that already, right?

born stubborn....

I think I've talked about this before, but I love the Grimm fairy tales.  The original, unadulterated ones, that is.  Forget the saccharine rubbish pedalled by Disney, with their ludicrous fantasy castles and a world filled with beautiful princesses, fairy godmothers and frogs that turn into prince charmings.... life is nasty, brutish and short, and you might as well learn that in your bedside stories.

Mind you, even by the standards of the Grimms, the tale of the Willful Child is an absolute belter (even better than the unfortunate story of the foolish mouse who thought it might be a good idea to share a house with a cat...).

Here is the tale of the Wilful Child, in its entirety:

"Once upon a time there was a child who was willful and did not do what his mother wanted. For this reason God was displeased with him and caused him to become ill, and no doctor could help him, and in a short time he lay on his deathbed.
He was lowered into a grave and covered with earth, but his little arm suddenly came forth and reached up, and it didn't help when they put it back in and put fresh earth over it, for the little arm always came out again. So the mother herself had to go to the grave and beat the little arm with a switch, and as soon as she had done that, it withdrew, and the child finally came to rest beneath the earth".

Outstanding!  Short and not in the least bit sweet, eh?  I very much look forward to any potential Disney adaptation.

For some reason, I am reminded of this:



"....I'm getting better"
"No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment"

Ah.  They don't make fairy stories like this any more.  If they did, Bella wouldn't have made it past the first book.  If she did survive, she certainly wouldn't have kept her virtue intact....

so hip it hurts....

I was wearing my Ho Chi Minh t-shirt last weekend.

I searched long and hard for this when we were in Vietnam during the August of 2010.  Clearly t-shirts of Uncle Ho are as common as muck and as cheap as chips over there, but I was looking for something a little out of the ordinary... well, and something that might last me a little longer than the first wash.

In the end, I stumbled across exactly what I was looking for in a small shop called "Papaya' down by the river in Hoi An.  It wasn't the cheapest by any means, but the t-shirts seemed to be a very high quality and - best of all - they were fair trade.

Here's a snippet from their website:

"Purchasing a papaya t-shirt you can be sure to help and also be involve in the building process of an equitable system where both, the worker earns a living wage so he can provide for his family’s daily needs, and you, the consumer can be sure of having purchased a quality product that will bring satisfaction and that he has done a good deed.
Our Policy: No children labour freedom of association safe and good working conditions reasonable salaries and benefits sharing reasonable working hours equal opportunities employment security respectful treatment of employees".

The label "Made in Vietnam" is used here as a badge of quality.

I wear my Uncle Ho t-shirt with pride: he's an iconic figure and it was a fantastic trip to a beautiful country (plus it's WORTHY, too... what's not to like?).  The great man only appears on the t-shirt in silhouette, but the guy in our local picture framing shop recognised it immediately on Saturday and commented approvingly.  Well, I suppose he would: he's both exactly the right sort of age to identify such an iconic figure AND he framed the Vietnamese publicity posters that we brought back with us (including one of Uncle Ho).  Hmm.   Now I think of it, he's also just framed a North Korean propaganda poster advertising an art exhibition in Vienna that we went to).  Yeah, so I guess he had some context.  But still....

A little later on, I was enjoying a beer in the bar at the Broadway cinema when someone else approached me about the t-shirt.  Now, the Broadway is the art-house cinema in town, and it has a pretty good bar: if you can find hipsters anywhere in Nottingham, you can find them here.

"Excuse me"
"Yes?"
"Do you mind if I ask you who that is on your t-shirt?"
I summoned my most nonchalant look and replied, "It's Ho Chi Minh"
"Ah."
Pause.
"...that was a great episode of Top Gear, wasn't it?"
He then went into what I assume was a Jeremy Clarkson impersonation, making some remark about how they'd now made it further north than the Americans, but by now I'd looked away disdainfully.  To be honest, I was a little embarrassed on his behalf.

Seriously.  I bet he wasn't there to watch a subtitled film either*

(* we were there to see Dark Shadows, btw... but he doesn't need to know that)

culture of consumption....

We went to the cinema on Saturday afternoon to watch "The Hunger Games".  I thought it was pretty good, but I'm not going to bore you with an in-depth review that makes comparisons with a Japanese film that I've never seen.  You can find plenty of them for yourself.  Instead, I'm going to have a moan about the people sitting just behind us.  Sound reasonable?  Ok. Good.

There were about five or six of them, a mixture of boys and girls.  They were young; perhaps in their early twenties or a little younger, but they didn't look like mouth-breathers to me.  They were dressed okay - neither in shellsuits or filled-nappy harem pants - and looked as though they might be students.  They were carrying a couple of huge bags of popcorn when they came in to sit down, but I didn't see anything to be alarmed about.

In fact, initially I was amused by them:
"Ohmigod.  I saw his Facebook status, and within thirty seconds I had text messages from both the other two..."

I think it's fair to say that my experience of being nineteen was a little different.  I still went to the cinema with my friends, but when I wanted to talk to one of them, I used to have to use the telephone in my parents' front hall to ring the telephone in their parents' front hall to set things up.  It was that or send them a letter.  I was watching a documentary on Britain in the 1970s last night, and I thought that it looked like a different world.  Never mind 1973.... 1993 seems like a different world to these kids.

It was when the lights went down that my problems really started.  For the first thirty minutes or so - and it was nearer 45 minutes in all - I was largely oblivious to what was going on around me as the advertising and previews on the screen were blasting out at deafening volume.  ("Battleship"?  They've seriously made a film based upon the board game?  Starring Rihanna? WTF? Also, have we really reached a point where the advertising makes up 25% of the length of the entire screening?).

Once the main feature started though, the volume dropped somewhat, and as I settled into the film, I began to be aware of noises around me: specifically the noise of a bunch of kids stuffing their hands into large paper bags, rummaging around for a handful of low quality, overpriced popcorn and then the sounds...the endless sounds...of mindless chewing.  It was like listening to a herd of cows chewing contentedly on the cud.  What made it worse, so much worse, was they way they passed these bags around so that someone sitting a little further away could make even more noise as they rummaged around for their handful.  They were entirely oblivious, too of the noise they were making in quiet bits of the film, and apparently immune to the hate lasers my wife trained on them every few minutes.  I don't think it even occurred to them for a moment that they were maybe being a little inconsiderate.  Those bags of popcorn lasted for the whole film.  I saw them in the foyer afterwards and they were still dipping in a hand and chewing.  Do those bags access another dimension or something?

After an hour or so of this, one of the girls stood up and announced -- to each of the others in turn, as she passed them in the line of seats -- that she was going to the loo.  Literally one minute later, she was back, telling each of them in turn as she passed them on the way back to her seat that she couldn't find the toilet.

Then a phone rang.... and was answered.

It didn't ruin the film for me, but it did make me pause to think that these kids - university students, remember, hardly pond life - seem to have the shortest of attention spans.  They've grown up in a world of instant gratification and consumption.  I don't think they're used to sitting still and silently for more than a few minutes at a time and perhaps simply don't know how it's done.  Or why it might be necessary.  They've had mobile phones for most of their lives and can't imagine why they might sometimes need to be turned off, or why their email or Facebook doesn't need checking every few minutes.  I overheard them in the foyer talking about what they were going to see next: Battleship.  It's got Rihanna in it.

Couldn't we put these people into an arena and make them fight to the death or something, like, totally for my entertainment?  They could fight Simon Cowell or something.  I'd totally watch that.

srsly.

Good grief.  When did I get so old?

It's a good film though.  I enjoyed it.  Well worth seeing, if only for Wes Bentley's epic facial hair.

Looks pretty high maintenance to me, but something to think about perhaps?

forget reality....

After trying - and failing - to get into a screening when we were in Paris over Christmas, I finally saw Hugo the other day.  As everyone seems to agree, it's a lovely film.  Even the - thankfully fleeting - appearance of Jude Law did not manage to destroy the experience for me. 

It was a delight.

I won't trouble you with a detailed review - just go and see it for yourself would be my advice.  In a world of mammoth, empty blockbusters, it is wonderful to watch a film that has been clearly put together with so much love, care and attention.  I can usually take or leave Martin Scorcese films (although at least this one doesn't have Leonardo DiCaprio or Robert De Niro in it....), but this is masterful.

We watched the film in 3D.

Here's the thing: this is by some distance the best use of 3D in a film that I have ever seen.  But, to be honest, that's not really saying very much.  There's none of your post-production, after-thought 3D here: every single shot was clearly put together with 3D in mind.  It looks beautiful, with lots of layered, clever shots that are interesting without being too showy or taking away from the plot unfolding in front of you.

....but whilst it's clearly very accomplished, I reckon I could easily have lived without it.

Yes, so there are snowflakes falling out in front of the screen.  Very good.  But just as I can read a book and paint my own pictures of what I'm reading in my head, I am equally well able to use my imagination to add the depth to the 2D image being projected onto the screen in front of me.   Just as no amount of CGI special affects alone cannot make a crappy film good, neither can 3D effects alone, no matter how good they might be, make a dull film interesting. 

Fortunately, Hugo is not a dull film by any stretch of the imagination..... it's so good, in fact, that I'm not sure that the 3D is anything other than a gimmick.  It's impressive alright, up to a point, but what does it really add to the whole experience?

Maybe it's just me, but I also find that as my brain is processing the 3D image being projected out at me, the rest of the images behind it seem to become a little blurred and hard to process.  It's all a bit unsatisfactory.  Not to mention the bloody glasses you have to wear.

It's ironic really, as much of the film is a homage to the early pioneers of film whose work seemed to be all about creativity and imagination.  Whilst I'm sure that Georges Méliès would have been all over 3D if he'd been given the chance, so much of what he created - and indeed so much of what makes Hugo such a lovely film - is a triumph of the imagination.  For me the 3D technology takes away more from me as a viewer than it adds.  I understand that this film is probably a magnificent technical achievement by Scorcese and his crew, but in its own way, 3D is a technology that misses the point of what I want to see at the cinema every bit as much as all of those empty, bombastic CGI blockbusters.

Hugo is a beautiful story, beautifully told.  That's all I need it to be and far more than most other films manage to achieve.

The 3D?  For me it doesn't add much, if anything, to that.

silence is golden....

"ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, "Be My Baby" on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so."

Odd though it might sound, watching a screening of "The Artist" over the weekend brought the opening lines from "American Psycho" by Brett Easton Ellis to mind.

Why? Well, those words foreshadow much of what is to happen in the book that follows. Similarly, the opening scene of "The Artist" shows Jean Dujardin's silent movie star, George Valentin, at the premiere of his latest film, and we watch as his character undergoes torture on the screen. A caption pops up as our hero is having bolts of electricity shot into his head by the dastardly villains... and the first "line" of the movie is "I will not talk!"

Given that the film deals with the silent star's gradual slide towards oblivion with the arrival of talking pictures, it's clear that the symbolism is entirely intentional.

It's somehow very satisfying, in an era when CGI heavy blockbusters seem to be the norm, that cinemas are currently filling out to watch an almost entirely silent, black and white film. Never mind entirely CGI characters, one of my favourite scenes in this film involves nothing more technical than a hatstand, a coat and top hat, but the end result is touching in a way that all the special effects in the world never can be. At the screening I saw, the screen actually narrowed after the trailers instead of widening... to the old, 1.33:1 "Academy ratio" originally used to shoot silent films.. rather than the more normal cinema ratio of 1.85:1 to 2.35:1.  Sometimes less really is more.

It's broadly a story that's been told before, of course, in many different ways, but there's still something wonderfully refreshing watching it being told in this way; never mind the absence of special effects and the other Maguffins of modern cinema, there isn't any actual dialogue here either. Instead, director Michel Hazanavicius is obliged to tell his story the old-fashioned way: through music, dialogue cards and the sheer skill and screen presence of his actors. Jean Dujardin is a delight, but so too is Bérénice Bejo as Peppy Miller, and if there are any acting awards to be given out, then might I suggest that the Academy recognises the work of Uggie the dog?

The last words of "American Psycho" are "THIS IS NOT AN EXIT", something that makes the reader pause, even as they put the book down, to reassess the meaning of everything they have just read. With "The Artist" too, the last words... no spoilers here... give the viewer pause for thought and to reflect on everything they have just seen.

It's a wonderful film. Go see.

I saw a film today, oh boy....

We ended up having a conversation at work this afternoon about the films that I haven't seen.  This is old ground for me: there are certain films that I have never watched that seem to cause widespread amazement and whenever this comes up, people seem to want to spend time pushing me to find out why not.  Dirty Dancing, ET, Grease, Bambi, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Ghost, Aladdin.... there seem to be loads of them.

So why haven't I watched them?  Well, the most popular opinion amongst my colleagues today was snobbery: I simply refuse to watch them out of some highbrow view of what kind of film is worthy of my attention and what is not.  Simply not true, I'm afraid.  I've seen Grease 2 starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Maxwell Caulfield, so what kind of high ground am I ascending, exactly, by bragging that I haven't seen the original Grease?  I haven't avoided any of these films on principle, I just haven't seen them.

Apparently that's hard to believe and harder to comprehend.

Anyway.  As part of my defence this afternoon, I mentioned one of the films that I have seen.  You know what it's like: you're watching TV at stupid o'clock and you should really be getting to bed.  As you're idly flicking through the channels, a late night movie is just starting, so you sit up and watch the first five minutes.... it's a made for TV movie, so you don't imagine this will be detaining you long, and then before you know it, it's gone 3am and you've seen the whole damn thing.  I have vivid memories when I was a teenager of staying up to watch something my memory tells me was called "The Ron de Flores Story", a film about an ex-con who was discovered in jail to be an amazing baseball player and eventually becomes a professional player.  It wasn't epically crap in a "mega shark vs giant octopus" kind of a way, but for some reason it has stuck in my head as being a symbol of all those hours you've spent watching crappy films that you will never get back.

I mentioned this to my colleagues, together with the aside that I've never been able to find a trace of the film whenever I've looked for it online.  It's as if it never existed and I've just made it up, or I actually fell asleep in front of the telly and dreamed the whole thing.  It's a really vivid memory, but the only result that google brings up is me when I've mentioned the film on this blog in passing.

Perhaps it doesn't exist, said one of my colleagues.

Hmm.  Now I was starting to worry a little for my own sanity and decided to change my search strategy: instead of searching by name, I decided to search for mentions of a film about an ex-con who becomes a professional ball player or, indeed, the player himself if this was actually based on a true story.

Much to my relief, I quickly found out that the film does actually exist - One in a Million: The Ron LeFlore Story. DeFlore is real, a centre fielder, mostly for the Detroit Tigers who played in the 70s and 80s, even making the All Star selection in 1976.  He also served a sentence of 5-15 years for armed robbery before playing baseball at all, and played his first ever game whilst inside.  He was ultimately talent spotted and played his try out for the Tigers whilst on day parole from prison.  It's a remarkable story.

Brilliantly, the film starred a certain LeVar Burton, better known to most as Geordi La Forge from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

 

I'm not sure why, but this fact makes me very happy.

Look, there's a clip on YouTube and everything.

The film is rated as a 6.2 out of 10 on IMDB from 84 votes.  Not too bad.  That clip is nearly 9 minutes long and shows Ron having his trial with the Tigers.  I watched it all.  I'd happily watch that film again and waste another couple of hours of my life. 

The net result of all this excitement?  Tomorrow, one of my colleagues is bringing me in her copy of Aladdin to watch on DVD.  She was also going to bring me Beauty and the Beast, but I pointed out that as a 37 year old man, I wasn't sure I wanted to watch a film featuring a singing dinner set.

Who says the time you spend in the office is wasted?

a kind of magic....

We were idly planning a trip to the pictures this evening. As the headache that’s been brewing all day has finally arrived, I can’t say that I really feel like watching the cinematic dénouement of the Harry Potter saga. I’m not sure I have all that much energy for it full stop, to be honest. It was the same with the books: I approached “The Deathly Hallows” with more a sense of relief that it was finally going to be over than with any real enthusiasm (although I still bought the damn thing the week it was released). I started reading the books in about 2000, around about the time that “The Prisoner of Azkaban” was published. Like everyone else, I was initially charmed by their freshness and invention, but as the books bloated and Harry and co. grew up, I began to wade through each successive volume with an increasing sense of duty…. I knew we were approaching a defined end point, and was reluctant to stop reading entirely… but when I finished the last book and read that little flash forward, I got to the end with an overriding sense of relief that it was over rather than delight at the conclusion to the story I’d been following for so long.

It’s not that they’re bad books, and I wholeheartedly endorse almost anything that gets so many people reading, it’s just that for me the series peaked with “…Azkaban” and that thereafter the books became needlessly big… a little editing would have gone a long way without damaging the overall narrative thrust of the story and I reckon you could have taken 100 pages off “The Goblet of Fire” just by judiciously trimming some of the fat. As the books went on, plotting was also seemed to become increasingly hard going and, as our heroes became teenagers, we seemed to get lots of clunky dialogue dealing with emotions painted in primary colours and with little texture and nuance (am I asking too much of a children’s book? I don’t think that I am. Philip Pullman’s “Dark Materials” books are aimed at slightly older children, I think, but are far less black and white).

The films have been okay, I suppose, although I haven’t been to the cinema to see all of them and only caught the first part of “The Deathly Hallows” on the plane to New York… not exactly the optimal place to enjoy the big screen experience (although I still don’t feel the need to watch “Avatar” in any other format, thanks very much). It’s been interesting watching the cast grow up, I suppose, but – ironically given that I think the books are overly long – the films are too short, even at two hours plus, to do justice to the plots. The story in the books is often given shape by the passing of the terms at Hogwarts, and in so many of the films we seemed to jump from winter to spring to summer in the course of about ten minutes: one minute they’re walking across a snowy quadrangle at Christmas, and the next minute they’re revising for their exams… dramatic peaks are only allowed to happen in the summer term, you understand, and Voldemort plans his ill-deeds strictly according to the academic calendar…. One per year.

Still, I’m griping. JK Rowling, I learned last week, apparently earns another £1m every three days. Good luck to her, I say: she’s earned it. Lest we forget, she was a single mother living on benefits barely ten years ago. Rowling seems like a genuinely nice person who is still taken aback by how much her little stories have been taken into people’s hearts (and I should also mention that she’s a generous supporter of MS charities, which definitely makes her okay in my view…), and those books (and films) have brought people an awful lot of joy. After all, no one forced me to read all the books, and no one is forcing me to complete the set by watching the last film either.

Apart from anything else, given recent news, it might be quite nice to watch good triumph over evil for once.

Just not tonight, eh?

it's like a later Tom and Jerry, when the two of them could talk....

On Sunday evening, we watched The Social Network.  When the credits were rolling, C. turned to me and said, "Well, it's not a patch on Inception."  Both films have been nominated for eight Oscars at Sunday's Academy Awards ceremony, but although both have been shortlisted for the "Best Picture" award, and Christopher Nolan is up for "Best Original Screenplay", Inception has been ignored in the acting and directing categories, and is mainly up for the technical awards.  By contrast, as well as seeing Aaron Sorkin nominated for "Best Adapted Screenplay", The Social Network sees David Fincher nominated for "Best Director" and Jesse Eisenberg for "Best Actor".  Inception is hardly under-represented, and I'm not sure that I would say that the film has exactly been snubbed, but it does seems to be missing out in the bigger categories.

It's a film that seems to divide people: I liked it, and thought it was better and more interesting than The Social Network, but lots of people seem to get very agitated to see Inception described (as it often is) as an "intelligent film".  Here's Will Self on the subject in the Guardian the other week:

"No, Inception wasn't the last word in sci-fi meta-sophistication, but rather a stupid person's idea of what an intelligent film is like"

Ouch.  Although as I also saw someone saying today, "anyone who thinks that Inception is not an intelligent film has clearly never seen Meet The Spartans".

Anyway.  I'm not sure I care who wins at the Oscars, to be honest.  Since when has this been the benchmark of the quality of a film?  Didn't Avatar win a whole load?  Exactly.  Much though I enjoyed the film, I also see no reason to get all patriotic about the chances of The King's Speech, either.  Why should I?  Good luck to 'em, but hardly a cause to wave the flag, surely?

I won't be watching the ceremony, but I did have a chuckle this afternoon when I found this in the comments section of an article about why Inception should win the "Best Picture" Oscar (they've been running articles every day about each of the nominees).  When you read this, remember that Christopher Nolan has been nominated for "Best Original Screenplay", not "Best Adapted Screenplay":

"All you need to do [to find out exactly how original Inception is] is to read the Disney comic published 8 years before the film came out (2002) called, "Uncle Scrooge in the Dream of a Lifetime".
It's got everything.

Plucky thieves (the Beagle Boys) invade a dream to steal the combination of a vault - check.  After they're inside Scrooge's mind, the Beagle Boys have trouble differentiating dreams from reality -- again, exactly like the characters from Inception.  
Donald uses "kicks" the feeling of falling to wake people from the dream. - check
In order to escape danger, Scrooge starts jumping from dream to dream, but like Cillian Murphy's character, he can't remember the last dream once he's in the new one. Donald, however, is the invader (like DiCaprio) so he alone is able to remember the progression.
Scrooge's old sweetheart even shows up in the 24-page comic. He hasn't seen her in 50 years. She may or may not be dead. And is there because of the guilt Scrooge carries over how he treated her in life.

It's a great movie. But if it does win an Oscar, the "I owe everything to Donald Duck" should be the first line of that acceptance speech!"

There's more on this here, and (if you Google it) all over the internet.  How funny is that?  Best Original Screenplay?  Are you sure?  Next they'll be saying that Nolan's other great work, The Dark Knight, was also based on some ancient comic book too.

Oh.

I enjoyed Inception when I saw it at the cinema, but I do have to admit that I did fall asleep in front of it when I watched it on DVD.

Or did I?

Do you see what I did there?

Yeah, so maybe that's not an entirely original gag.  Feel free to nominate me for it, though.  Just be sure to credit ME with it.  Me. 

you always mistook fists for flowers....

I had a dream last night that Britain was slowly becoming a fascist state; that we were under the spell of a government that was slowly stripping us of our rights and our liberties; that nobody stood up to say anything until it was too late and people were being marched off to death camps.

It's not too hard to work out where this came from: the three things I watched on TV before I went to bed.  The first was a news item about how the coalition government was planning to sell off Britain's national forests.  Apparently, more than 150,000 hectares of forest and other land owned by the state in England is likely to be sold within three years. Such a sale might raise £250m or thereabouts, but would put the continued survival of some of our ancient woodland under real threat from developers.  The government are apparently hoping that charities and volunteers will be able to take up the slack left when the Forestry Commission stops working on land no longer owned by the state.  It's a disastrous act of vandalism by a government who will apparently spare the highest earners and big business from tax rises whilst looking to rape our country's heritage and those who can least afford it.

That news was followed by a viewing of "The Counterfeiters". As wikipedia says, "It fictionalizes Operation Bernhard, a secret plan by the Nazis during the Second World War to destabilize Great Britain by flooding its economy with forged Bank of England bank notes. The film centres on a Jewish counterfeiter, Salomon 'Sally' Sorowitsch, who is coerced into assisting the Nazi operation at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp."  Much of the drama centres around the desire of the prisoners to stay alive whilst also wanting to sabotage the Nazis as much as they dare.  As one character says to Sorowitsch, it is the failure of people like them to risk their own lives by taking a stand against the Nazis that led ultimately led Germany to the death camps.  As always, it still shocks to see the brutality and inhumanity of a concentration camp displayed on the screen, even in fiction.  How can people treat other people like that?  How can so many people be so complicit to such an atrocity?

C. told me the story today of how she once visited Buchenwald with a family of Germans, including an 85 year-old woman who had lived in Weimar during the war.  In spite of the fact that the camp was built on a hill above the town, and was dominated by the massive chimney of the furnaces that incinerated the corpses of more than 50,000 people during the war, and more than 250,000 people in all passed through the camp, this old lady wandered around the remains of the camp murmuring that "we just didn't know".  They almost certainly did know, but did nothing.  How hard is that to come to terms with?

In a way, I understand: as the Nazi's gained influence, it was probably the most natural thing in the world to shrug your shoulders and, as they rose to power, to join the party and just get on with your life.  Who was to know what they were to become or what they would be capable of?  It's easy to be wise after the event, but if you were a clerk at the railway station, is it out of the question to imagine that you might be the one sorting out the suitcases and shoes of the people passing through on their way to the camps?  It's not as though you were the one killing them, is it?

All of these things came to mind as I watched "The Counterfeiters", and the ten minutes or so of "V for Vendetta" probably helped seal these thoughts in my head before I went to bed.  Is it any wonder I dreamed dark dreams?

I'm not seriously suggesting (even if my subconscious mind definitely is) that David Cameron is in any way comparable to Hitler or that England is on the verge of slipping into the clutches of a totalitarian regime..... but I feel as though I've had a fleeting insight into how these things can start.  They don't seem like much of a threat when they're elected, but before you know where you are, you've lost things you can never get back.  It might only be removing disability benefits and the funding for higher education, the slashing back of the NHS or the sale of our national forests today, but what will it be tomorrow?

the blood that moves my body now covers the ground....

As is traditional, I spent a reasonable portion of the holiday season watching movies.  With the exceptions of "The Man Who Would be King" on Christmas Day (awesome) and "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" (which was exactly as disappointing as I remembered it being), I didn't actually watch any of these from the bumper festive TV schedules, but instead made use of the opportunity to watch some of the DVDs that I never seem to get quite get round to watching. Some of them I've seen many times before; others I was watching for the first time.  I like watching movies.

Amongst other films, I watched "In Bruges" (excellent, of course), "Trading Places" (the best Christmas film ever), "Wayne's World" (which was a landmark film in my life, but left C. entirely baffled as she watched it for the first time), "I Love You Philip Morris" (passably entertaining), "Scott Pilgrim vs the World" (alright, and certainly not terrible, but also really not all that), "Inception" (better when you don't fall asleep, but still pretty good when you do)..... and finally, last night, we got around to 2008's "Let the Right One In".

This is a Swedish film about an alienated young boy who befriends the strange and mysterious girl who moves in next door.  Through this girl, he discovers love and finds the courage to take revenge on the bullies who are making his life hell.

Oh, and the girl turns out to be a vampire.

The film was remade by Hollywood last year as "Let Me In", starring the boy out of "The Road" (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and the girl out of "Kick Ass" (Chloe Moretz).  I've not seen it, but I'm reliably informed that it's really very good indeed.  Well, if it's half as good as the original, then it's quite some film.

This film is brilliant.  I can't quite remember the last time that I watched a film quite this good.  A colleague at work was asking me today why I thought it was so good:

"Is it a horror film?"
"Not really"
"A thriller?"
"No"
"Well, what is it then?"
"Well, it's kind of a romance...."

It's achingly beautiful and unmistakably Scandinavian, with lots of Bergman-esque silences that allow the atmosphere to build in the oppressive concrete jungle of a snowy Stockholm housing project.  The performances by the two leads, Kåre Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson are exceptional.  Leandersson in particular is incredible: just 11 years-old when she was cast, her performance as Eli is a study in restraint and stillness as she conjures up the sadness and loneliness at the heart of the vampire child.  It's quite a hard film to categorise: there are some elements of bloody violence, and much of the plot centres around murder and Eli's need for blood, yet the centrepoint is the touching friendship between the two young outsiders as it grows and blossoms into something that might be love.  24 hours after watching it, I can't stop thinking about it.

I learned, when reading up on the film later, that it is based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who also wrote the screenplay.  I wanted to read it, of course.....In the old days, I would have had to wait before I had an opportunity to get to a bookshop or for it to be delivered.  Nowadays, I was able to immediately download it onto my kindle and spend the next couple of hours reading it before finally heading up to bed.  It's gripping, with many of the themes touched on by the film explored in much greater detail, and so sad that it makes my heart want to burst as I read it.

Both film and book are highly, highly recommended, and I await the February DVD release of the Hollywood remake with interest.

Twilight, True Blood and all those other Vampires novels have left me entirely cold, but Eli has stolen my heart.