Books, Movies and Random Thoughts

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 …

In their different ways, I found both Reunion and A Kind of Alaska somewhat unsatisfying.

Of the two, I think I enjoyed Reunion more. Both performances (Justine Clarke and Robert Menzies) were strong, and it was a wonderful use of awkward words and uncomfortable silences. Unlike some of the other plays we’ve seen, in this one, the director (Andrew Upton) clearly made a deliberate decision not to use American accents, or even nationality-neutral ones. This play was very definitely done in Australian. I don’t know if the text was changed at all (though I suspect not, as there were one or two slightly jarring US references), or if the character of Bernie was in any way subverted by this change, but overall I thought it worked very well with Bernie as a blue-collar, rather inarticulate Aussie Bloke. But although the production was good, it was still ultimately unsatisfying becuase it wasn’t really a story. It was just a snippet – a brief window into a moment of these two people’s lives – but with no real plot development or climax. Obviously that was the intention, and it was not uninteresting, but somehow it just wasn’t quite … enough.

A Kind of Alaska, on the other hand, did build up to a climax. But – and I don’t know if this was the performances or the play itself – at no time did I care as much about any of the characters as I did about Caroline and Bernie in Reunion. Possibly it also suffered from the fact that the last play we saw was Woman in Mind. Because Deborah in Alaska was in a not dissimilar situation from Susan in Woman in Mind – for different reasons, they were both in a world that wasn’t making sense to them. But with Susan, you saw everything from her perspective – you were literally inside her head with her – whereas Deborah was at more of a distance, and it was harder to engage with her, or with either of the other two characters. It’s probably not a fair comparison to make, as the two playwrights were aiming for totally different effects, but it’s one that I couldn’t help making, and which probably had a detrimental effect on my reaction to A Kind of Alaska.

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.

I was expecting Flags of our Fathers to be a very strong film, and I wasn’t disappointed. The cinematography was amazing, and the muted colours gave the war scenes in particular a very powerful effect. I can’t really say whether this film or Saving Private Ryan had “better” combat scenes, but taken as an overall piece of cinema – visuals, story, acting – Flags of our Fathers was unquestionably superior.

It seems very presumptuous to have any criticism of a film about real people, who went through experiences I can’t fully imagine or comprehend, but I did have two minor concerns with it, at least while I was actually at the cinema. The first was that while I was watching it, I felt that the three main characters seemed to fall almost too neatly into roles that were in some ways almost cliched – the glory hound, the one who couldn’t take the pressure, and the one who handled it best, even though he was profoundly affected by the experience. At the time, this made me start to question the level of truth to the story. And yet, judging by the Wikipedia entry – and also by the book, which I am partway through reading – this really is what they were like. Maybe the film gave Doc Bradley a couple of extra central moments – I am thinking of the way he sort of became the spokesperson for objecting to the mix-up between Hank Hanson and Harlon Block – but in general, it does seem like it actually was a true representation.

The other thing is that I didn’t feel that the film told me anything new about the nature of heroism. I think what it had to say was important, and certainly bears repeating and thinking about anew, but ultimately it never gave me one of those “I never saw it that way before” moments. I’m not sure if I should even call this a criticism – certainly it in no way detracts from the power or the value of the film – but somehow the publicity had made me think I was going to get some new insights out of it all.

All in all, though, I thought it was an excellent film that I would certainly recommend. I am also finding the book (with a couple of reservations) profoundly moving. Once I finish reading the book, I may want to see the film again. And I am very much looking forward to Eastwood’s companion film, Letters from Iwo Jima.

I thought Children of Men was a strong film, but maybe not quite as powerful as I’d been hoping.

There was a really rich world built, and presented with wonderful cinematography. There were also some great set-pieces – most notably [spoiler follows] the intensely moving scene near the end, where everyone stops what they are doing as Kee walks through with the baby.

I thought all the performances were strong, and the characters were a good mix of personality. And yet, ultimately, I found I didn’t really have a deep emotional commitment to any of them. Maybe it was because I had a pretty good sense of how it was going to pan out at the end – who would live, who would die, and roughly where things would be at – so although I had a few shocks of people dying earlier than I expected, there wasn’t really a huge amount of tension. Or maybe you weren’t meant to connect with them too closely. Or maybe there was a problem with the writing, or with me.

So while I thought the film built up a fascinating picture of a bleak future, and the story was in many ways very strong, in the end I just couldn’t get completely caught up in it. Which is a pity.

Woman in Mind is the first Ayckbourn play I’ve ever seen, so I didn’t really know what to expect. We included it in our subscription because it had Noni Hazlehurst in the main role, and was directed by Gale Edwards. And the concept – woman is knocked out after being hit by a garden rake, and when she comes to she finds she has a devoted fantasy family existing alongside her less-than-thrilling real one – seemed intriguing.

Up to the interval, it was fairly lightweight – amusing, but not particularly insightful or thought provoking. But after the interval, even though the funny lines were still there, it got a lot darker and grimmer. Ultimately, the play seemed to be about loneliness and dementia and people not listening to or noticing each other. I think the turning point was where the fantasy family and the real world start to interact with each other, and the fantasy became increasingly bizarre and frightening. And the way passing comments and minor events were reflected in the fantasy world, but in a completely perverted manner, was very powerful. It was very creepy and scary by the end. And the idea that Susan couldn’t escape from inside her own head was terrifying.

I think any production of this play will stand or fall by the actor who plays Susan, as she is on stage for the whole thing and carries the full emotional weight of it. In this case, I thought Noni Hazlehurst did a magnificent job. The rest of the cast were more patchy. Their challenges were completely the reverse of Noni Hazlehurst’s: they are all relatively minor parts, so it would be difficult to find the people inside them. I think this is particularly true of the fantasy family – especially in the first act – as they are so “perfect” they don’t really have any personalities. Sophie Ross, who played Lucy (the daughter) managed to pull it off, and Mark Owen-Taylor (Tony, the brother) was okay, but John Adam (Andy, the husband) just didn’t come across as three dimensional. It was arguably the most difficult of the fantasy roles. In the Q&A afterwards, he said that one thing which made it particularly difficult was the upper-class English accent. It was very important to the role (one of the features of the fantasy family is that they are a rung or two up the social ladder from Susan’s real family), but it sounds very artificial, and this makes it all the more difficult for the character to come across as a genuinely loving and caring husband.

Another interesting point that came out in the Q&A was the question of how the comedy and the tragedy was balanced. Gale Edwards (I think) said that someone had once asked Ayckbourn when the laughter should stop, and he said “at the second last line”. She herself said that, as the director, for the first couple of weeks of rehearsals she deliberately didn’t draw the actors’ attention to the fact that certain lines should get a laugh.

And a piece of trivia from the discussion afterwards. There is a scene near the end where Susan is lying in the rain and gets absolutely drenched. They do use warm water for the rain, but it is quite a long pipe going up to the stage, and so initially the water is very cold. Noni Hazlehurst said that often it has only just reached a pleasant temperature at the time it has to stop!

Spoiler: This essentially gives away the ending (though most people probably have a better than 50% chance of guessing it anyway).

Although it had its laughs, Fat Pig was ultimately quite a depressing story. Essentially, Tom throws away what could have been the best relationship of his life, because he is too emotionally stunted to handle it. Initially, it seems that he is drawn to Helen for her personality, in spite of her size; but I think the bedroom scene is designed to show that he has come to love her body as well. So the problem is not that he can’t deal with the fact that she is overweight: it is that he can’t handle what he thinks other people will be thinking about her, and thus about him. His way of ending the relationship with Jeannie shows that his method of dealing with conflict and difficult situations is to just ignore them, and hope they go away; and he simply doesn’t realise how much pain this is causing Jeannie. It seems that he is stuck at about age 15, and you can kind of feel sorry for him – but nowhere near as sorry as for Helen, whose final scene (where she offers to lose weight, if that’s what he wants) is just heartbreaking.

I though Carter was an interesting counterpoint to Tom. He is certainly selfish, and has a great capacity for cruelty (specifically the bit where he runs off lots of pictures of Helen and scatters them around the office – though actually, this was one scene I couldn’t quite believe in. I just don’t see it happening, at least in any of the offices I’ve worked in. Maybe I’ve just been lucky!) But at the same time he seems a lot more self-aware, and thus basically more mature, than Tom. This doesn’t necessarily make him a nice person, and nor does it mean that things will necessarily work out with him and Jeannie. But I think if he does dump her, it will be a much cleaner break, and won’t mess her up as much as Tom did. Of course, if that did happen, he wouldn’t feel the same kind of guilt that Tom does – but then, it’s arguable that Tom feels bad, not because he has hurt Jeannie, but because she keeps shoving her pain in his face. If he didn’t have to see it, then he’d probably be able to convince himself that there wasn’t a problem.

I thought all the performances were good. I was initially taken aback that all the actors used American accents, but I quickly got used to it. They explained in the Q&A afterwards that this was because some of the lines really needed the American intonation, and wouldn’t have worked as well in Australian accents. I guess I can kind of see this, though I’m not quite 100% convinced it was necessary.

I found the set design a little odd, in the way that some of the props were used interchangeably between home, office and other environments. In particular, I was a bit disconcerted when the mattress was used in the office scene. But this wasn’t a major problem.

And I was really pleased that, unlike The Lost Echo and other plays we’ve seen recently, this was a n ice, straightforward, beginning-middle-end production, with no talking to the audience, no symbolic characters, and nothing particularly cutting-edge or experimental about it.

A little while ago, there was an article in The Guardian, in which Lucy Mangan gave (very funny) summaries of the children’s books that “that have meant the most to me, that have taught me vital lessons about life, love, truth and camping – books no child should be without.” As a result, Judith Ridge did the same thing in her blog, and I have also been inspired to join the fun, although it’s taken me weeks to get around to it. I’ve decided to define “books read in childhood” as books that I read for the first time while still in Primary School (i.e. before the age of 12).

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis

I’m told I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when I was six. Naturally, I don’t remember this first reading, and I’m pretty sure I was a bit older by the time I read most of the other books in the series, but I do know that I read them again and again and again during my Primary School years. Both Lucy Mangan and Judith Ridge included this in their lists, so I don’t really have much to add about the book itself, except that I was another reader who completely and utterly missed the Christian allegory. Even when I got the connections of The Magician’s Nephew and The Last Battle, it didn’t occur to me that there might also be a Christian side to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. For me, it was just a great story about a magical world with talking animals.

Enid Blyton

For about eighteen months of my life – I think aged about seven to eight and a half – pretty much the only books I would read were Enid Blytons. Lucy Mangan said “I am listing Blyton instead of a single book because the fact is, she wrote the same one eight billion times a year: it is both pointless and practically impossible to elevate one above another”. I am doing the same thing, but for almost the completely opposite reason: although I read almost all the Blyton series (except, for some reason, Mallory Towers) and vast numbers of the stand-alones, at different times, different genres were my favourites. I probably started with the Faraway Tree books (fantasy), then had a lengthy period of devotion to the Famous Five (adventure), followed by St Clares (school stories) and finally the Five Find-Outers and Dog (classic detective). The Cherry Tree Farm/Willow Farm books fitted in somewhere as well – they taught me all I know about fauna of the English countryside. I think Blyton had a great talent for capturing the essence of a genre, and although she didn’t flesh it out a great deal (or at all), her stories provide a wonderful introduction to the concept of plot, basic characterisation, and the other fundamentals of good storytelling, and offer a starting point from which to move to more subtle, nuanced children’s books.

The other thing I remember about Blyton is that, at some point after I had completely outgrown her, I saw my first ever production of Romeo and Juliet on television. It probably wasn’t a great production, but I was terrifically moved, and the only way I could unwind enough to get to sleep that night was to pull a Blyton off the shelf and reread it.

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

I’m not sure when I first read Black Beauty, but it was probably after the Blyton period. It may or may not have been my first experience of death in a book (something both Lucy Mangan and Judith talk about) but it was certainly the first instance of a book in which I skipped a certain section on every re-read. Thirty years later, I can still remember that in my edition, the chapter about Ginger started in about the middle of a right-hand page, and finished near the bottom of a left-hand page. I’m certain that at one point in my Primary School days, I unhesitatingly described Black Beauty as my favourite book.

Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild

Since my M.Litt. treatise was on the subject of Noel Streatfeild, and a substantial portion was a comparison of Ballet Shoes with Streatfeild’s first (adult) novel, The Whicharts, I feel somewhat written out on the subject. For more information on Ballet Shoes, see my Noel Streatfeild website.

Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott

Lucy Mangan and Judith each included a 19th century “classic” girls’ story in their lists – What Katy Did and Seven Little Australians respectively. For me, it was Little Women. I don’t quite know why, but I think it might be that Jo was the first real character to catch my imagination. She had some of the rebelliousness and independence of George from the Famous Five, but so much more personality and depth and capacity for growth. (As I said above, Enid Blyton had a talent for simplifying down to the fundamental essence, thus providing a stepping stone to much more sophisticated authors.) But why it was Jo rather than Katy, or Judy, or Anne (of Green Gables) or Rebecca (of Sunnybrook Farm) I really can’t say. I also liked Beth a lot, so maybe it was partly the strength of the Jo-Beth relationship that worked for me. I was never very interested in Meg, and I actively disliked Amy.

As far as I can remember, I was never one who wanted Jo to marry Laurie. I liked him, but I thought he was a bit too superficial and immature for her (though I did think he deserved better than Amy). In fact, I never had much of a problem with Jo marrying an older man, who provided her with stability. But I do wish he wasn’t actually described in the text as physically unattractive. I’d like to be able to think of him as like Gabriel Byrne in the 1994 film of Little Women, so that even if Amy’s husband is younger and richer, Jo’s is sexier. But unfortunately I can’t, as it is directly contradicted by the text. However, even though Professor Bhaer isn’t particularly sexy, I am still much happer to see Jo with him than with Laurie.

Elidor by Alan Garner

Actually, my favourite Alan Garner book is The Owl Service but I’m pretty sure I didn’t read that until I was in High School. Elidor, however, I definitely read earlier, and loved right from the start, though I’m sure I didn’t appreciate all the subtleties of it initially. At first, I just took it in the same spirit as Narnia – a bunch of children from the real world going into a magical one – though I did like the fact that a lot of the story was set in the real world, with the magical characters impinging. And I loved the humour of the scene where the Treasures make all the electrical appliances play up.

But the more times I read the book, the more I came to see the complexities, the lack of clear black and white, the tension of the relationships between the characters. And I also came to see that it is not, ultimately, a happy book. Yes, Elidor is saved, which I do think is important, in spite of the rather ambivalent presentation of Malebron (who is not at all the Aslan figure I thought the first time I read it). But part of the power of the book is that the situation is not clear-cut. On an initial reading, I think I equated Roland with Lucy Pevensie – the youngest member of the family and the only one who can truly see and understand the magic. I still believe Roland is closer to being “right” than Nicholas, or even David, but I have come to realise that he is idealistic and obsessive, and that Elidor is not necessarily the symbol of perfection that he believes.

And the ending of Elidor is more gripping than anything in Narnia (though, to be far to Lewis, he was writing for a rather younger audience). Findhorn’s death is tragic, and the fact that, both structurally and symbolically, this is Helen’s fault makes it even worse. And I find the closing lines of the book intensely powerful in the way they convey a sense of bleakness and emptiness:

[The children] threw their Treasures. They struck together, and the windows blazed outward, and for an instant, the glories of stone, sword, spear and cauldron hung in their true shapes, almost a trick of the splintering glass, the golden light.
The song faded.
They were alone with the windows of a slum.

I don’t think I paid much attention to this when I first read the book – I was caught up in the fact that four normal children had saved a magical world – but as I got older they became increasingly evocative. The children have gone through intense physical and emotional stresses, and have saved another world, but … now what? They are left with absolutely nothing. The book ends not on a note of celebration, but on one of emptiness. It is more than simply anticlimactic: it is actively stripped of emotion. And although I didn’t recognise this initially, I now believe it is among the most powerful endings I have read in a book.