Captain Phillips and City of Ghosts

Two movies - Captain Phillips and City of Ghosts - take us to foreign climes where unconventional things happen. In the first movie we know exactly what's going to happen because it's hinted at so strongly from the beginning that we'd have to be stupid not to read the signals. In the second movie, which begins in New York but soon after heads to Cambodia, we have almost no idea what's happening, what's happened, and what will happen. Eventually we get the picture, but it takes quite some time, and if it wasn't so well crafted and full of such eccentric characters, we might not hang around to find out. 

Captain Phillips is earnest, and super realistic. City of Ghosts takes place in a world where apparently only peculiar people live - with the exception of the main character (played by Matt Dillon, who also directed and co-wrote the film). Even his love interest is a strange woman who seems to have no life beyond the moment. 

Captain Phillips was intensely exciting, although much too long: we know from the beginning that Phillips, the captain of a container ship heading through pirate waters will be boarded by a most ambitious but tiny group of Somali pirates; there are only four of them and they argue with and scream at each other - and everyone else - a good deal. And we know that once he's taken prisoner by them - he's allowed to escape with some money onto a lifeboat - that he'll eventually get rescued. This is a film based on a true story, and Phillips survived. 

Yet somehow in the midst of all the tension the films' often quite dull; the crew of the container ship are played in a way that allows none of them to be individuals, and Tom Hanks is left to carry most of the movie on his own. Of course he can do this, but he has no one to play against before the Somalis arrive, and once they do it's all shouting and screaming and scrambling to get out of the way of bullets. It's perhaps indicative of the script that the opening scene, in which Hanks and his wife head to the airport for the umpteenth time so he can fly to the place where he'll board his ship, consists of a dialogue that is not only intentionally banal but oddly uninteresting. Hanks and Catherine Keener (who plays his wife) seem to be wondering what the heck they've got themselves into, script-wise.

City of Ghosts holds our attention as it wends its way through a very murky and surprisingly long opening stretch by providing us with a bunch of quality actors (including those playing very small parts) who bring individuality not just by having quirky roles to play but by being individuals themselves. (Of course the actors in Captain Phillips are different people; but they're not given anything to get their teeth into.) The cast of this film are such a varied bunch that you begin to wonder if Cambodia doesn't attract strange Europeans. They're like the actors who used to play in the old noir movies: such a movie might not be up to much itself but once you add in the likes of Peter Lorre and co, even in small roles, you have interest and intensity on the screen: those actors never failed to bring life to their parts, however well or badly written they were. 

The roles here aren't badly written at all: the actors might not always say much but we know that there's plenty of subtext, and we wait expectantly to find out what the heck they're on about. Matt Dillon plays a man with some considerable angst; it's an angst he can hide from the FBI, but once he gets to Cambodia, he starts to unravel in some degree. Nevertheless, unravelling isn't where he intends going, and he spends more of the movie ravelling up again than unravelling.

Stellan Skarsgård is a world-weary character, one of the henchmen of the elusive Marvin (played by James Caan with an awful confidence and suave evil), and he remains ambiguous from whoa to go. Whose side is he really on, and is he going to get his comeuppance or not? Should he get it, even? We sympathise with him; he's trapped in his own corrupt behaviour and can't find a moral way out again.

Gérard Depardieu is a fat, barkeeper-cum-hotelier who lies through his teeth with almost every sentence he utters, who keeps control of the crazies who come into his bar, and who carries a bambino of mixed parentage around with him much of the time. Depardieu is obviously enjoying himself in the role, though he's not as consistently at home in it as the other members of the cast are in theirs. 

At first it seems as though Dillon is merely filling up his screen with oddballs to make things quirky. But the oddballs are in part caused by the strange country that Cambodia is, and Dillon is intent on making us realise that Cambodia isn't the place for unwary tourists to go. One of the apparently drug-addicted archaeologists (I think that's what the group were) soon succumbs to the evil that's just under the surface because of his naivety and because of his assumption that Europeans/Americans can behave as they like. 

When the plot finally kicks in, about halfway through the movie, things both tighten up and also become a bit more conventional. But Dillon has a way of putting scenes together that eschews the usual. There's an element of Fellini in the way he peoples the film with the curious and misshapen, and perhaps another director would have concentrated on different kinds of theatrics. Nevertheless, the risks he takes in filming the story this way pays off. 

Dillon takes another risk, that of casting a real-life taxi-driver, Sereyvuth Kem, as the man who takes him everywhere in one of those pedicart taxis. Kem provides a wonderful gentleness and wisdom, a cleanliness and honesty in the midst of the city's widespread corruption. You can believe that this man would very likely do the good things he does in the movie. He's virtually the heart of the film.

 

Not The Disenchanted Wizard

Back in November I got myself involved in the NaNoWriMo competition which requires you to write a 50,000 novel in a month. I wrote about doing this at the time, when I was still only some 38345 words ahead. I finished the 50,000 words, but some of them were the scruffiest words you can imagine...which is not surprising if you're trying to write a novel almost from scratch in a month.

I know some people can write quickly and confidently. Some claim that their first draft is the only draft, and usually only needs tidying up. (Stephen King claims this is the way he works: comes back to it after a couple of months and removes all the excess adjectives and adverbs.) Some have a gift for storytelling that just seems to pour out of them, and though those works may have some flaws, they carry the reader along all the same.

My certificate, though the
book's title has now changed

There were some good things in my story, some interesting and fantastical events, and I knew where I wanted to finish up...roughly. But when I'd finished the 50,000 words (which included a lot of notes about what I was writing, which is how I write anyway) I had a big hole between the first two-thirds and the last couple of chapters. In fact, though I tried to write those last chapters, they were awful, because I wasn't sure how the characters had actually got to that point.

So over the last month or so I've been working at the story again, first by going through it and making lots of notes (yup, that's how I work), and then trying to work out some of the problems, and then trying to figure out a structure and then discovering, over and over, that if I did such and such then I'd have to answer the question as to why such and such...if you get my drift.

A few days ago I tried working backwards from those last chapters to try and figure out how things got to that point. Copious notes ensued. Copious notes, and oodles of questions. I'm getting sick of my inner editor asking, But why...? like a nauseating two-year-old that someone's left on your doorstep and you have to look after for the afternoon. (Having been through the two-year-old questioning stage at least five times, it's not a period of life that I find quite so endearing as I once did...)

Anyway, today I feel as though I'm making progress. I'm now in the position of being able to go back to the beginning to sort out the structure again, this time with a lot of the reasons for things happening already in place, instead of being guessed at. Of course there are still questions (Be quiet you nauseating child!) but we're managing to work things out.

As I said in my last post this is a prequel to Grimhilda! the first book in this series of children's stories, and explains, amongst other things, how the Maps came to be the Maps, and who they are (something I thought I knew back in November - I was proved wrong and had to give the original couple their dismissal notices).

The big climax was to have taken place in a different country altogether to the rest of the story. I finally realised late last night that this was just adding to my burdens, and ditched the whole idea, along with copious notes and things copied off the Net. Much more straightforward for the storytelling to keep the thing in one city; it's the third city to appear in these books. The first two were unnamed, but this one has a name, though whether it'll actually appear in the book is another question.

Anyway, at this point I don't have a deadline for finishing the story, but I think once I start writing the next draft, I'll get an idea of how from publishing it'll be. As long as characters don't keep wanting to change their motivations and backstories and refusing to do what they're told.

Dog City

The little block of houses we live in has become Dog City.

There are only three houses in our block - until a couple of weeks ago, the only dogs were our Pomeranian cross and the old poodle in the house behind us, a dog that's not in the best of health and has problems with her eyesight as well.   Occasionally she'll have a bark at us through the fence, but it's mostly because she's not quite sure who's there, I think.  (Her only other quirk is to come out late at night, usually after we're in bed, and snort her way back and forth along the fence line, hunting for burglars, no doubt, or any other beings who have decided to encroach on her territory.)

Our dog, at a year old, doing
his somewhat bewildered look. 

The people on our right side used to have an elderly dog that never made a sound and wouldn't have said boo to a goose - if any such ever appeared around here.  It had to be put down quite some time ago.  This last week, the people there have got themselves two puppies, gorgeous ones (whose model I'm not sure of). One of them is pretty quiet, but the other feller likes to maintain that it's his territory and woe betide any dog who comes near - or even any neighbour who does.

Which will sometimes set our dog off.

On the other side of us we had had a woman living on her own for at least a decade.  She was dogless.  Recently, having retired, she sold the house and is currently spending some of her children's inheritance by going to exotic places like Russia.   The people who moved in, a lovely, friendly couple, have a dog.  A little dog, like ours, one, that like ours, thinks the entire block belongs to him, and no other dog should dare to sniff the wind (or do any other sort of sniffing) within cooee of him.  (It may be a her, I'm not sure.)

Suddenly it's:
dogs to the right of me,
a dog to the left of me,
one dog behind me,
volleying and thundering,
metaphorically....

Norwich

The memory I have of Norwich from when I was here in the early seventies, is of an accessible town, not that large, near a river, and full of interesting old buildings and dozens of churches.

I don’t know what happened to that Norwich, but it certainly isn’t the place we visit spasmodically while we’re staying in Norfolk. This one is large – much larger than my own home town – has many modern buildings (some of them tucked around ancient stone walls) and has the typical shopping malls that you expect in a large city.

Today we went to see the Cathedral, but we came out into a street called Tombland. No prizes for telling us how that name came into being. Tombland is a bit more like I remember Norwich, but only a bit.

Where have all the churches gone? There seemed to be one of every corner in the past, rather like corner dairies. And where’s Julian of Norwich’s ‘cell’ gone? I guess it’s around somewhere, but it’s certainly not obvious.

Someone’s gone and changed the place.

Babe: Pig in the City

I watched Babe: Pig in the City on DVD the other day. It was the first time I’d seen it since it was on at the movies, some nine years ago, and I’d forgotten a lot of the detail. It’s possible it’s a better movie than Babe itself, and that’s saying something. Magda Szubanski, who was riotous enough in the first movie, here leaps completely into a theatre of the absurd and verges on being a cartoon rather than a human being. Yet somehow it works, because there’s a real person under it all.
With Mrs Hoggett taking over the movie, it loses the warmth that pervaded Babe, (and loses James Cromwell for most of the proceedings) but what it loses in warmth it gains in creating a world in which chimps dressed in human clothes and talking with Brooklyn accents are nothing at all to be wondered at, since the humans in this world are even more strange.
Mickey Rooney makes a brief appearance as Fugly Floom (Fugly Floom, what sort of a name is that?) a character who’s just as peculiar in his real life as he is as the Magician. And the woman, played by Mary Stein, who owns the place where all the animals hide, is a tall person who dresses oddly, and seems to think there’s nothing weird about being almost the only human in an animal hotel. Even her neighbour across the canal, who listens all night long to opera with her husband, is a manic creature given to odd hairstyles.
The crowd who inhabit the streets nearby are an extraordinary, extreme mix of Los Angeles types, many of them on skates. And there are suddenly more people in this world with porcine faces than we’d normally see in everyday life.
The animals are drawn equally largely, from the manic dog with wheels where his hind legs should be, to the pitbull who has something of a change of heart, to Thelonius the orang-utan, who insists on dressing up when he goes out.
It’s the detail in the film that’s superb. The production design by Roger Ford is constantly a delight, as are the jokes that pervade the movie, whether it’s Mrs Hoggett being dowsed in paste and turning up later creaking and squeaking, or the absurd swinging from the mezzanine at the big party at the end.
This is a classic comedy, on a par with….The Princess Bride.