Bad and goodel

Last night we watched an Israeli movie, supposedly a comedy, about a trio of geriatrics who try to rob a bank, with the aid of the grandson of one of them. Sir Patrick Stewart (as he's listed on the cover) was one of the trio; the other two were Hebrew actors. For some reason crudity was the order of the day, along with a good deal of swearing. Which always seems worse when it appears as a subtitle. (We watched the awful Gone Girl recently with subtitles, because the dialogue was so hard to hear you wondered if they'd purposely been told to mumble most of the time. That dialogue was even more full of four-letter words - the whole range - and was really off-putting.)

The Israeli movie was called Hunting Elephants and was total nonsense, offensive to women, and filled with male characters obsessed with sex. Rubbish. Sir Patrick, curiously enough, played an actor down on his luck, who, when we first saw him, was in an abysmal production of Hamlet done with Star Wars characters. It seemed an unlikely piece for a supposedly good actor to appear in; Hunting Elephants also seemed like an unlikely piece for a very good actor to appear in.

Tonight we watched a French comedy, My Best Friend (Mon Meilleur Ami), about a man who's so involved with his own life and what he wants that he suddenly realises he has absolutely no one to share anything with, no one he can call his best friend. Furthermore he's divorced, the woman he sees regularly has had enough, and his daughter doesn't even call him Dad. As the result of a bet he makes with his female business partner, he has to produce his 'best friend' in ten days. He discovers that the best friend isn't that hard to find, but he is hard to keep, especially if the main character wants to carry on living the way he has been doing.

Daniel Auteuil plays the self-centred main character gradually warming up from frozen, and Dany Boon is the taxi-driver who seems to have more friends than he knows what to do with. It's an odd couple movie, I guess, but it's played beautifully, is never over-the-top, and is full of charm. There's only one swear word in it, and the character apologises for saying it. And it's funny.

Both Auteuil and Boon are actors who seem very familiar from other movies, yet nothing that's listed on IMDB means a thing to me. Perhaps they just look like a lot of other French actors...

Imagine That

Yesterday was a bit painful, in that for the second time in my life I had a nasty chunk of gunk removed from under one of my eyelids. This stuff comes as the result of blepharitis, a chronic inflammation of the eyelids. Seemingly some tinsy-winsy little suckers get stuck in the eyelid instead of being washed out, and unless you attend to the problem, they gradually form into a pusse-filled mass that hardens into the sort of lump I had removed yesterday. The removal itself is a matter of moments; keeping the eyelid inverted for long enough to do the job is very painful, and I don't recommend it to anyone. Unless of course, you're in the situation I was in, in which case it may be necessary!
As a result of this I have a black eye, puffy and purple, and it's watery a good deal of the time. So I saw Eddie Murphy's latest movie, Imagine That, through a kind of haze, my good eye having to do most of the work. My wife had downloaded it from Itunes as a rental so she was keen to get her money's worth while it was still available; so we were watching within the smallish digital frame of our laptop, which isn't ideal for somemone with only one good eye.
The movie is fairly low-key for an Eddie Murphy comedy: it has few frantic antics (and they're toned down a good deal when they do occur), no foul language, and no dressing up as a member of the opposite sex. In other words, it's almost in the vein of an early Murphy movie.
Murphy plays a stockbroker whose seven-year old daughter has imaginary friends - possibly as the result of her parents' separation, and the seeming lack of love for her by her ambitious father. However, these imaginary friends are pretty good at playing the stock market - don't ask me how - and start giving the father good advice, which he takes up. Of course it's all so he'll become a better person, and as far as we can see at the end, he has. (Except that he's off to work for the even more ambitious Martin Sheen, which might not be so good.)
Murphy is pretty good looking for a nearly fifty-year old, and full of energy as always. He's almost classed off the screen by Yara Shahidi as his daughter, who isn't 'cute' in the usual Hollywood sense; she's just a little charmer, and seems to enjoying herself thoroughly in the role.
Thomas Haden Church has a peculiar role to play: that of a supposed Native American Indian (well some of him is) who is full of crap in terms of pseudo Native American guff that's supposed to fool all the big stockbrockering kind of people. We see through him in a moment; curiously enough his co-workers haven't managed to do so after 18 months. Church does his best with the role, which is a bit iffy in possible racist terms. It's the sort of thing that would have been thought very funny in the past; these days it probably isn't.

Seth Godin on dealing with ideas

One blogger I read every day (mainly because he sends me a copy of his posts via email - much the best way to get read!) is Seth Godin. I may have mentioned him once or twice before in this blog(!)

Today he has three posts on the go, but the one that really appealed (mainly to my artist-struggling-to-market-his-product-type-person) was the one that starts in this way.

If you've got an idea worth spreading, I hope you'll consider this random assortment of rules. Like all rules, some are made to be broken, but still...

I won't include all the rules here, but here are some of my favourites.

• Waiting for inspiration is another way of saying that you're stalling. You don't wait for inspiration, you command it to appear.
• Don't poll your friends. It's your art, not an election.
• The hard part is finishing, so enjoy the starting part.
• Figure out how long your idea will take to spread, and multiply by 4.
• Think big. Bigger than that.
• Try not to confuse confidence with delusion.
• Surround yourself with encouraging voices and incisive critics. It's okay if they're not the same people. Ignore both camps on occasion.
• Be grateful.

Catching up on writing

Over this Easter weekend I've managed to get on and do some more writing for the Triond site, where articles can be left indefinitely, and can keep on getting viewed, and making money. (Peanuts, but it is money.)

I sat down a week or so ago and tried to chart out my writing/composing priorities. Doing an article a week for Triond was one of them. I kind of caught up by writing four articles, a couple of which were rehashes of pieces I'd done before.

So for those with an interest in other things I do, here are the links:

Blowing My Own Trumpet. This is a piece about trying to promote yourself on the Net. Self-referential is the term, I think!

Friends for Life. This one looks at some of the books on my shelves and concludes that some of them make better friends than the real people I know. Hmmm. This was a piece I started some time ago and never did anything more with.

The Delightful Lives at 44 Scotland St. Another 'rehash' - in the best sense. I've taken the four book reviews I've done of the four episodes in Alexander McCall Smith's 44 Scotland St series and woven them together into a long overview. It's called recycling.

Support Your Local Circus. This was written new and fresh yesterday after I went to see Weber Brothers' Circus in Mosgiel, one of the outer suburbs of Dunedin. It's a lovely little circus, full of energy and life, with clowns that are genuinely funny, and some wonderful Asian acrobats. And three absolutely crazy motorcyclists racing around and around inside what seems a very tiny metal globe.

Photo by Atelier Teee

The older I get...

It’s Monday here in NZ, so I guess that’s a time to give the Link and Blog Challenge of MeMe Monday a go.
But can I talk about myself? Any more?

My previous fiancee (many moons ago) broke off our engagement because she claimed I ate apples too noisily. I still eat apples in the same way, as far as I can tell, and I’m still married to my wife after 33 years.
I’m talented, but not excessively so: I’m not a great writer; I’m a pretty good one. I’m not a great pianist; I’m a pretty good one. I have a great eye for art, but not the patience to learn how to create it.
The older I get the more I think: there are umpteen thousand books I’ll never read, and umpteen thousands pieces of music I’ll never hear, and umpteen thousand works of art I’ll never see. More important than any of these: there are umpteen million people I’ll never know.
And apropos of that last one: as I get older I find it harder to make friends. When I was young friendship just happened. Now it’s a real effort. You’d think it would be like riding a bike: once learned, never forgotten. But it’s not.