Books, Movies and Random Thoughts

I’m not a huge Neil Gaiman fan (except for Good Omens) but when I found a copy of Stardust going cheap, I thought I might as well read it before seeing the film. In some ways, it reminded me a bit of Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, in that both books are written in a very self-consciously twee style (particularly at the beginning), and yet their purpose is really to subvert the conventions of fairy tales. While I quite enjoyed Stardust, I don’t feel that my life would be any less if I had never read it. It is probably more subversive than Howl, but I think Howl is a bit more fun.

The film of Stardust, on the other hand, is not really subversive at all. It was all very nice and pretty, and there were some fun performances (Robert De Niro, playing a part that basically didn’t appear in the book, was having just way too much fun) – but ultimately it was fairly lightweight and forgettable. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it, and I have even recommended it to people, but if it was trying to be this generation’s The Princess Bride (and I think it is), well, it just doesn’t come close.

Being completely honest, I probably preferred the film to the book – in that I’m slightly more inclined to see it a second time than I am to re-read the book. However, I think the book had more substance to it: it was deliberately playing with the genre, whereas the film was just trying to be a crowd-pleaser.

Music and Lyrics
This was pretty much a by-the-numbers romantic comedy, but I enjoyed it quite a lot. The scriptwriter knew how to write exactly the kind of dialogue that Hugh Grant delivers particularly well. It probably also helps if you have a bit of a soft spot for 80s music.

Waitress
I think maybe I was watching this one a bit too late at night, but it didn’t really work for me. It wasn’t happy enough to be a romantic comedy, nor really clever enough to be quirky and interesting. I guess “bittersweet” is possibly the best description – and quite likely what they were trying for – but for some reason it didn’t quite make it. I think I just couldn’t care enough about the characters to really see the point of it all.

Shrek the Third
Not unfunny, but rather underwhelming and fairly forgettable. Not a patch on the first one, and probably a step down from the second as well.

The Last Mimzy
Very much a Disneyfied version of the short story “Mimzy were the Borogoves”. Some of the same central ideas, but thematically quite different as it was turned into a kids’ adventure (the original short story was NOT aimed at children). Mildly pleasant, but not particularly inspired.

Ocean’s Thirteen
The mixture as before. And for me, even Ocean’s Eleven had too many characters.

Spider-Man 3
It had some okay moments, but there were too many different plot threads happening, so none of them was explored as well as they might have been.

Amazing Grace
I really enjoyed this. I know pretty much nothing about William Wilberforce, but I found the story well presented and quite comprehensible. I thought they did a good job of covering the timeframe, but still maintaining the character focus (in other films covering a long period of time, it often seems like they are so busy fitting in all the events they don’t give you a chance to connect with the characters). I was even able to keep all the secondary characters sorted out (though I was probably helped in this by the fact that I recognised almost all the actors from other British costume dramas).

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
The whole film seemed to consist of everyone setting and resetting double- and triple-crosses to serve their own agendas. Which is fine as far as it goes, but isn’t really enough of a story to carry the whole film. Not that there weren’t some fun moments, but the franchise has completely lost the freshness of the first film.

I first read Becoming Jane Austen after Penny Gay recommended it during a talk to the Jane Austen Society of Australia. I found it an engaging biography, particularly in the picture it painted of how Jane the young scribbler evolved into Austen the professional author. (One of the points Penny had made was that Spence looks at how Austen began referring to her writing as her “work”). I also enjoyed thinking about the idea that Elizabeth and Darcy could have been inspired by Tom Lefroy and Jane herself – but with Tom’s traits going into Elizabeth, and Jane’s into Darcy. On reflection, I decided I wasn’t totally convinced, but it was still a fascinating line of thought.

I also found his suggestion that Jane and Tom may have met again in London interesting – the evidence he presented was certainly suggestive, if not absolutely convincing.

However, I was emphatically not convinced by the suggestion that every one of Austen’s novels references a Tom Jones character, and this is a link to Tom Lefroy. After all, Tom Jones has a large cast of characters, and there is such a thing as coincidence. I was left with a sneaking suspicion that if one tried, one could also find links to character names from – to randomly select another long 18th century novel – Tristram Shandy. And towards the end of the book, I started to be bothered by the fact that Spence presented assupmtions and suppositions, but using language that implied they were proven fact.

In spite of this, though, I enjoyed the book enough to put in a Christmas present request for it, and I re-read it with pleasure.

The film of Becoming Jane, though …

Well, I suppose it was pleasant enough, and the actors did a nice job, but it really didn’t have anything much to do with the book. At times I felt that Spence was stretching in his assumptions, but at least he did start from – and remain basically consistent with – known facts. The film just made stuff up. It took a few character types from Jane Austen’s novels, trimmed off most of the things that makes them good and interesting, and presented a fairly bland and conventional romance (except without a happy ending). And the storyline, which had started off with a vague connection to (one chapter of) Spence’s book, suddenly took a radical divergence into complete fiction. I tend to think they should have either stuck vaguely with the known facts – or reasonable extrapolations from them – or else done a film in the style of Shakespeare in Love, which is clearly unrealistic. Or – if they really found Jane Austen’s life so boring that it had to be spiced up with an elopement – maybe they should have considered not making the film at all?

But I am glad I got Spence’s book in hardcover, before the film came out – otherwise I would have had to face the dilemma of deciding whether I wanted to own it enough to put up with the film-inspired cover of the paperback.

For those who haven’t read it, Philip Pullman’s fantasy series His Dark Materials involves an alternate world, in which everyone has a “daemon” – an external, physical soul. The daemon takes the form of an animal – children’s daemon’s can change form at will, but they settle into a single form as the child grows up.

The official website for the upcoming film has a “meet your daemon” section, where you answer 20 personality questions, and you are told the name and form of your daemon. Mine is an ocelot called Lutheus. As an added feature of the site, for 12 days other people can provide feedback, which may make the daemon change before settling into a final form. If you want to provide feedback on my daemon, click the picture. (NB The 5 questions you get asked in the feedback form are not the same as any of the original questions – they are just based on the summary of characteristics the first questionnaire identified.)

30 April – Update
Lutheus has transformed twice – first into a raven, and now a lynx.

And the only excuse it the usual one – way too busy.

Sunshine at Hoyts, Broadway

I really enjoyed this film. It was as much about the psychological stresses as it was about the physical challenges: about making difficult decisions while under enormous pressures, and then dealing with the consequences.

The only thing I didn’t much like about it was that SPOILER FOLLOWS I would have preferred it if everything that went wrong had been the result of bad luck or bad judgement. Having deliberate sabotage turned the plot a bit too much into a straightforward get-the-bad-guy-save-the-world story. But although this was a detraction, it certainly didn’t spoil the film.

300 at Hoyts, Broadway

Lots of violence. Lots of shouting. Lots of muscles. Lots of visual effects (some of which were very striking). A bit more plot than I had expected. A lot more bling than I had expected. Not a lot of historical accuracy.

This was not a good film, but neither was it the video game that the trailer had made it look like.

Though perhaps the most interesting aspect of the experience was the fact that one of the pre-film ads was for female hygiene products. Looking around the audience, this film did not seem to have attracted the right demographic for that ad: I won’t say I was the only representative, but I was part of a very small minority.

The Season at the Sarsparilla (Patrick White ): Sydney Theatre Company at the Drama Theatre (Sydney Opera House)

I didn’t really enjoy this all that much, though that was more the circumstances than the production. We were in the third front row, which, at the Drama Theatre, means your eyes are about level with the actors’ feet – when you can see them around the tall person in front of you. And the woman next to me was wearing far too much scented powder. And most of the people sitting around us felt compelled to point out the bleeding obvious parts of the plot to their friends (normally about five minutes after the relevant point had become bleeding obvious).

So it was really hard to get into the play. One thing that did strike me, however, was the fact that when it was written it was contemporary, but this production very much emphasised the fact that it was “looking back” at how things used to be. I’m not sure whether it was trying to prompt nostalgia or a comfortable sense of modern superiority – or a combination of the two – but whichever it was, this was something that would clearly have been totally absent from original productions.

Hot Fuzz at Hoyts, Broadway

Heaps of fun. You really can’t go past a film that has a massive gun battle in the streets of Wells.

The Good German at Hoyts, Broadway

I wish I’d liked this film more than I did. It was visually great, George Clooney and Cate Blanchett looked absolutely perfect, it had lots of atmosphere, but overall it just didn’t quite work.

Troupers (Michael Cove): Sydney Theatre Company at the Wharf Theatre

I wasn’t really sure what to expect with this play, but in the end I really enjoyed it. At the centre were really strong performances by Barry Otto, Blazey Best and Natasha Wanganeen, but it was also a quite moving picture of post-WWI Australia. Powerful and poignant, but also funny – a good night at the theatre.

The Good Shepherd at Hoyts, Broadway

This was an okay film, but I found it rather dull. As with any film that follows one character over a large number of years, it was more a series of snapshots of the life, rather than an overall development of relationships. So the political background story was okay, but I didn’t think it really worked as a character piece.

Pan’s Labyrinth at Hoyts, Broadway

This film was a real celebration of the grotesque, with some amazing visual imagery. It was rather more violent than I had expected – not just shoot-em-up violence (though there was quite a lot of that), but also the kind of slow, deliberate, measured violence that is much more confronting. In fact, there was one scene that I absolutely couldn’t watch: I looked over the top of my glasses, so it was all blurred and I couldn’t see it properly. But none of the violence was gratuitous – the point seemed to be to set the fantasy monsters against the human ones.

I liked the fact that you were never 100% told whether the fantasy stuff was real, or just the girl’s imagination. There was some evidence for either side of the argument. I believe the evidence for it being real outweighed that for it being imagination (and from something I’ve read, I gather the director thinks the same) but I like that it is something every individual audience member can decide for themselves.

Films

I saw 22 films this year. The high points were probably Casino Royale, Flags of our Fathers and Superman Returns. The biggest disappointment was X-Men: The Last Stand, because it was so much weaker than the first two X-Men films. However, the actual Worst Film would be a competition between Lord of War (which I saw on a plane, so didn’t actually waste any money on), Tristan + Isolde and Mission: Impossible III.

Plays

I saw 12 plays in 2006 (though I only actually blogged 9 of them). Ten were from the Sydney Theatre Company subscriptions (although one of these – The History Boys – was actually a National Theatre of Great Britain production). Of the other two, one was the Russian production of Twelfth Night, which was here for the Sydney Festival, and the other was You Never Can Tell, which I saw in London. My favourites were probably Twelfth Night and Woman in Mind, and the worst was unquestionably The Lost Echo.

Books

I’ve been very slack about blogging books this year. However, in August I set up – and have been maintaining – a What I’m Reading book log. So I know that from August to the end of the year, I read 81 books – though two of them I gave up on, and another two I haven’t yet finished. 47 of them were first-time reads, and 34 were re-reads. Alternatively, I could sort them by target audience (48 adult, 9 young adult, 24 children) or by genre (25 fantasy/science fiction, 15 crime/thriller, 7 non-fiction, and the rest a variety).

It was quite a good year for new-books-by-favourite-authors. George R. R. Martin’s A Feast for Crows (book 4 in A Song of Ice and Fire) was a bit of a let down, but I don’t think it would have been possible to maintain the intensity of the third book in the series, and I still have high hopes for the rest of the story. Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Sharing Knife: Beguilement was enjoyable, but only half a story (the other half comes out this year), and I still prefer her Vorkosigan books. Jaclyn Moriarty’s The Betrayal of Bindy Mackenzie was interesting, but unlikely to become my favourite of her books. On the other hand, On the Jellicoe Road could end up being my favourite Melina Marchetta. The other exciting event was Under Orders – the first new Dick Francis in six years. It wasn’t his best work, but it was a long way from the structural mess of his last couple.

I think my favourite new author for the year would be Donna Andrews. Her chick-lit/detective story crossovers are a lot of fun, if not exactly great literature. I read them from the library, and I’ll hold off on buying them until I know for sure I want to re-read them, but I’m certainly hanging out for the latest (No Nest for the Wicket) to come out in paperback and turn up in the library. Other new (to me) authors included Naomi Novik (Anne McCaffrey meets Patrick O’Brien), Anthony Horowitz (James Bond for teenagers – and with some clearly conscious Fleming homages, which I’m sure people who’ve only seen the films don’t get) and Stella Rimington (spy stories by a former head of MI5). They were all enjoyable enough to read more than one of their books, but I didn’t get overly excited by any of them.

Babel was a powerful film. It was full of damaged, displaced people, and with a strong sense of imminent tragedies (not all of which ultimately came to pass).

The way the stories were intercut with each other, and not quite running on the same timeline, made it a bit challenging to watch – but in a good way, not a frustrating way. It was more a case of staying alert for the clues as to how everything fit together (which wasn’t actually that difficult) than of being so focussed on working it all out that you lost touch with the story. And, unlike with 21 Grams, I really did care about the characters.

I thought The Holiday was a pleasant, if somewhat unremarkable, romantic comedy.

Actually, I really enjoyed the Iris-Miles-Arthur storyline. It had a lot of heart to it – and a lot of humour – though I guess it was maybe a little bit lacking in bite. But I thought that Kate Winslet, Jack Black and Eli Wallach gave fine performances, and you could really see and believe in the relationships they had with each other (if not so much in the Iris-Jasper and Miles-Maggie unrequited passions). And I loved the way Arthur had Iris watching old movies with strong female leads. And the Writers’ Guild ceremony. It was a complete “feelgood” story.

I was less impressed with the Amanda-Graham story. At best, I found it only mildly amusing, and I didn’t much like either of the characters, so I didn’t really care whether or not they got together.

I wonder if the DVD release will have a “make your own cut” feature, so I can just watch the story I liked? Unfortunately, I doubt it …

I was pretty much unmoved by Happy Feet. Yes, the animation was great, and the singing was kind of cute, and the environmental message was important (if done a bit heavy-handedly). But at the end of the day, I didn’t care that much about Mumble. I think the main problem was that he didn’t really interact with anyone much. The scenes with his parents, and even with Gloria, were pretty minimalist. And Ramón and co were comic relief caricatures – they were quite funny, but they didn’t really have enough depth to be the main ongoing relationship for Mumble. (Actually, they reminded me a bit of the Wikked Tribe in Tad Williams’ Otherland books. Zany and manic and fun, but in no way resembling rounded characters, and therefore not providing anything much for the three dimensional characters to work with.) But because you didn’t see much of Mumble dealing with other “real” characters, he, himself, didn’t fully develop either. Maybe it would have worked better if Gloria had had a bigger role – after all, in Otherland the Orlando Gardiner story would have been nothing much if it had just been him and the Wikked Tribe. It was his relationships with his parents and Fredericks that made you understand him as a character, and care what happened to him.

Casino Royale was definitely the best Bond film since GoldenEye – GoldenEye is probably still my favourite, but it’s hard to do a direct comparison of the two, as they are completely different types of film. Daniel Craig made a great Bond, Judi Dench just gets better and better as M, and I liked Eva Green as Vesper and Mads Mikkelsen as Le Chiffre. Overall I though it had the right balance between action, characterisation and snappy dialogue. I found the opening credits song a bit bland, but not unpleasant, and I liked the visuals that went with it. I also liked the way there were just hints of the Bond theme music throughout the film – generally when standard Bond things are being established (eg the dinner jacket) – but that it didn’t play in full until the very end. There were a number of scenes I really, really enjoyed: in particular, the parkour-inspired chase sequence in Madagascar, which was brilliant, and the exchange between Bond and Vesper on the train, which was very reminiscent of Bogart-Bacall scenes. The opening, black-and-white scene was also very strong, but had a bit less impact because I was already familiar with it from the trailer. And the poker scenes worked well – as a poker ignoramus, I still found that there was enough context provided that I wasn’t actually confused by what was going on. In principle, I would have preferred them to stick with baccarat, as in the book, but I guess it made commercial sense to change to a game more people are familiar with.

If I have an active complaint with it, it is that, at 144 minutes, it was really too long. I thought the action sequences in the airport and in Venice could definitely have been cut back a bit. Possibly some of the romance scenes near the end could also have been trimmed, though that might have affected the balance a bit much.

In preparation for the film, I re-read the book a little while ago. I had also read it a couple of years back, for a uni course, but before that it had been years since I’d read it, or any other of the Bond books. Possibly because of the films, it’s very easy to be dismissive of Fleming as a writer, but on re-reading Casino Royale I do find that there is a richness to it that I had forgotten. It’s extremely visceral. Bond had a sensuous enjoyment of food that never appears in the films. Also, one of the scenes that I did have a strong recollection of before this re-read was the explosion (which didn’t make it to the film) because you really get the impact it has on Bond’s senses – the smell, the raining flesh, all the things you don’t get when you see an explosion in a movie.

A number of people have said that Daniel Craig is much more like Ian Fleming’s Bond than his predecessors were. I don’t actually think this is true – or, at any rate, it’s not true of the Casino Royale Bond. Daniel Craig was something of a blue-collar thug, with a very thin veneer of sophistication. I thought this worked very well for the film, but it was no closer to the Bond of the book than any of the other interpretations. I know Pierce Brosnan, and maybe also Timothy Dalton (whose Bond might have come close to Fleming’s, if he’d ever been given a decent film) were interested in doing a Casino Royale. With the script as it was written, I don’t think either of them would have done as good a job as Daniel Craig. However, with certain shifts in tone to suit their different styles, I think either one could have put in a good performance that would have been at least as true to the book – in different ways – as this one was. Actually, probably any of the Bond actors could have. The plot of the book is so slight that it could have been adjusted in any number of directions, while still remaining true to the emotional centre of the original work. Nevertheless, I thought Craig was brilliant, and I just hope he isn’t let down by future scriptwriters/directors (as Brosnan was after GoldenEye, and Dalton was for both his films).

One of the things I read in the lead-up (which made me think it could be really good) was that they had promised to keep the torture scene and the last line of the book. As it turned out, I found the torture scene in the film far less confronting than it was in the book. This is probably a good thing, but it did leave me feeling a bit dissatisfied.

I also felt that they’d copped out somewhat over the ending. Warning: spoilers follow. The book finishes with the line “The bitch is dead now”, and I find it a very powerful, if bleak, ending. As promised, they did have this line in the film, and I thought he delivered it with the right level of bitterness, but it was immediately softened by what M says, which brings back some of the emotion, and then by the triumphant closing scene. The ending they gave it is very cinematic, and I can certainly see that they wanted the audience to go out on a positive note, rather than feeling depressed. It wasn’t even inconsistent with the book (where, after reading Vesper’s suicide note, Bond decides that “Here was a target for him, right at hand”). And the last image of him standing there with the gun, and finally uttering the immortal line “The name’s Bond, James Bond” which launches the theme music and the closing credits, was great. I certainly can’t say I didn’t like it – I thought it was wonderful. But … I do kind of regret losing the downbeat ending from the book.