Quiz and a couple of movies

Last night my wife and I went to a fundraising quiz at one of the local taverns.   Nice and warm inside, but a bit of a shock to come outside and find a skiff of snow on the ground.  There'd been snow forecast, but nine times out of ten it doesn't arrive.  Anyway, it wasn't anything much and we drove home without incident.  This morning there was a bit more snow on the ground, but still not enough to stop my intrepid wife from driving part of the way to work and then walking the rest.  


I haven't been to many quiz nights like this: it was a combination of quiz questions (the winning team got a prize, of course) and endless raffles, and another thing where you got a celebrity name (I was Pavarotti) and if you're name was called you went up and got a prize.  They had prizes galore - obviously firms are happy to donate to these sorts of things, though they must get called on constantly for support.  


Pubs are noisy places, with the televisions going up on the TV mounts on the walls, and the filling of glasses at the bar, and the general chatter (including from those who aren't participating in the quiz night), and the restaurant area making its usual sorts of noises. 


We did quite well, all up, though we didn't get placed.  We needed to do better than our top score in a section, which was only eight.  I think we got down to five points in another section.  The sports questions were the worst, but a bunch of answers beginning with S restored our confidence.  And it turned out we had a 'rabid royalist' in our group (according to her friend) so she helped with the section on the monarchy.  


On Monday night my wife and I caught up on the film, Precious.  She'd been wanting to see it for some time, and certainly it was worth seeing, if only for the performances alone. Gabourey Sidibe is a revelation in the lead role, and Mo'Nique, who's apparently tended to play comic roles in the past, is a nightmare as the abusive and self-centred mother.  Mariah Carey also eschews her star presence and appears in a few scenes as the social worker.  Great film, though it was sometimes difficult to pick up on what the younger actors were saying because of their individual 'dialects.'  


We went to see the movie version of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, the other day, too.  Delightful movie, though I think it takes some liberties with the storyline as well as casting Kristin Scott Thomas as the PR person - this was a male character in the original.  However, Thomas does a great job with it, scary as hell, and plainly awful as a person.   The book's telling of the story through diary entries, emails and other notes is lost to a great extent - although Skype replaces some of the communications, and there are emails written at various points, with the text running over the screen.  I think the movie also changes the 'love story' between the two main characters.  It's several years since I read it, but I noted on this blog at the time "the romance aspect is quietly handled, and there’s no shattering of marriages or sudden changes of direction for the characters," something that isn't quite like the movie, where the two main characters obviously go off into the sunset with each other at the end, leaving the uppity wife and the returned soldier on the sidelines.   I'll have to check the book out again sometime and see how it deals with this.  


However the movie stands on its own feet quite comfortably, and retains at least one of the most delightfully funny lines from the book.  Fred, the main character, has had a bit of an argument with his so-superior wife, who always expects everything to be on her terms.  “The rest of the evening was a bit of a frost, but when we went to bed, I think Mary must have felt a little guilty about the way she had changed her plans. Suffice to say, my new Marks & Spencer pyjamas were not required for the early part of the night. A relatively rare event in our marriage of late. Afterwards Mary said, ‘There now, darling, that should keep you going for a bit.’” (Page 30)


Ewan McGregor is great in the main role.  He fits it like a glove, and of course, rolls his accent around the lines with great enjoyment.  McGregor has sometimes seemed out of 'fit' with his film roles, such as the young Obi Wan Kenobi, or in Moulin Rouge or in a sci-fi the name of which I can't remember at present.  But here everything works, and it's a joy to see. 

The Truth Game

Went to Simon Cunliffe's play, The Truth Game, last night.   House wasn't very full, which was a bit of a surprise, since the play has had very good reviews, and it's new, and it's locally-written (Cunliffe works for the Otago Daily Times, which has sponsored the play, and also provided, no doubt, the mountains of newspapers that litter the stage and the foyer, and which the Fortune is going to have to recycle at the end of the season on Saturday).

The play has an excellent cast: Greg Johnson, Peter Hayden, Phil Vaughan, Michele Amas, Anna Henare and Kathleen Burns - more on them later - and a striking set designed by Matt Best.   At first it looked as though the giant screen that dominates the stage (and is used by Belinda as a PowerPoint) is going to clutter up things.  In fact, its screen is made up of modern-style Venetian blinds (I'm sure they have their own proper name) and these open up completely to reveal an office within the larger office that takes up the rest of the stage.  


The play is basically about the conflict that's going on in the newspaper world between old hacks like the rough-edged Frank Stone (note the name) and his even older confederate Ralph (pronounced Rafe, as he carefully explains to the newbie journalist), and the New Media people who think running a newspaper is all about making money (which of course it is, but news comes into it too - real news, as Frank insists again and again), and the up-and-coming generation who can find reports and articles and tweets and blogs at the drop of a hat.   No one wins - not in this play - and probably the competition is going to go on for a long time yet.   


Frank may be rough-edged, but he's a very good editor and organiser - when the big story comes at the end of the first act, he's onto it in a flash.  Frank is played by Greg Johnson - he was the irascible hostel manager in the movie, The Insatiable Moon.   This is a somewhat similar character: a man who's hard-nosed, but has considerable integrity.  A man who shouts at this clientele, but loves them dearly.   A man with mistakes in his past (as the sub-plot brings to light - a sub-plot that's interesting, but not quite in line with the play as a whole; still, it provides variety.  By the way, that use of a semi-colon there is much denigrated at one point in the play, along with a number of other woolly-liberal kinds of punctuation - the end-dash, for one.)


Peter Hayden plays Ralph.  Hayden has had a long and successful career both as an actor and also as one of the men at the forefront of the Natural History documentary unit here in Dunedin.   In this play, Ralph is a little fragile, past retirement age, but still living in a world where he is safe and snug doing what he's always done.   Hayden provides a quiet foil to the noise that goes around him (he writes with large earphones on), and provides some of the more amusing moments with his didactic approach to grammar.  Ralph spends his days puttering around doing the editorial (I always thought the leader was done by the Editor, says Jo, the newbie), pulling together stuff from his forty plus years of experience of writing, and also writing the wine column (a somewhat less-than-journalistic occupation in the eyes of some of the others). 


Phil Vaughan is the fussy little manager; he still has a bit of journalism in his blood, but mostly its been diluted by the need to make money, please the Head Office and so on.  The arm-wrestling he and Frank do at one point may be a bit odd, but it's significant in terms of their relationship.   Anna Henare (a Fortune Theatre regular) is the up-and-coming editor, an able journalist, still with integrity, and still soft, but heading - it seems - towards being as hard-nosed as Frank has become.   She's Frank's current lover, but journalism and truth keep getting in the road.  


Michelle Amas (who's a poet as well as an actor) is the brittle Belinda.  She opens the play with an almost-too-long seminar 'talk' to an Australian conference (Frank is there, and walks out in disgust).   The least likeable character in the play, Amas still manages to give her some warmth - though never too much.  Kathleen Burns is the youngest character in the play (meant to be a late teenager, I'd think, while Burns is around 25), and the one with all the Internet skills.   Burns has a bit of a difficult role: her character, Jo, brings humour to the play, is meant to be a little gauche but also better-read than her years would indicate, and struggles with the interplay between the other characters.    At times I felt Burns was acting the part rather than giving it to us direct; some of her moves had the air of being there to add character, rather than coming out of the character itself.   This may be intentional on the director's part (Lara McGregor, who's done a superb job overall - she's also the Fortune's new artistic director) but at times it just didn't seem quite on a par with the other actors' work.   Nevertheless, Burns is well-integrated into the cast, and my quibble is minor.  

All in all, not only has this play been well worth putting on - and I'd hope there are other companies around the country who'll pick it up - but it's perhaps the best thing I've seen at the Fortune in a long time.  Though that may not mean much as my attendance at the Fortune is pretty irregular!

Ewan McGregor

Watched Ewan McGregor in a sci-fi movie called, The Island, the other night. Exciting piece, with a reasonable deal of intrigue about it. Great photography, and a good sense of the future not being too far distant from where we are now.
I was rather amused, however, at one point, when part of the plot hinged on Scarlett Johansson identifying whether McGregor was telling the truth or not by the way his eyes looked when he smiled.
To be honest I never find that McGregor looks sincere at the best of times. His smile is on the cheesy side, and I’m never convinced by his performances. He’s okay in this one, because he’s playing a naïve character who doesn’t know much about the big wide world. But this lack of conviction undermined his performances in the Star Wars movies, and even more so in that riotously appalling movie, Moulin Rouge. It wasn’t helped by the fact that he had to sing in it.

Just to show that I'm not alone in thinking the way I do about McGregor's mug, here's Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian: McGregor does that charmless rat-like grin a fair bit - less attractive than Scarlett's unvarying inflatable pout.

Two more movies

With all the cold weather we've been doing very little except sitting in our lounge, wrapped in blankets even with the heater going, and watching a bunch of movies I got out of the library. My wife's sick with a heavy cold, so that was the excuse. I've already mentioned Will Smith's movie, but since then we've also watched Little Voice and Good Night, and Good Luck.

Little Voice is adapted from a play, and adapted pretty well, all things considered. Brenda Blethyn is really the star of the piece, even though the focus more and more is on Jane Horrocks, who plays Laura, commonly known as Little Voice. Blethyn throws her heart and soul into her part, and in spite of her courseness and vile tongue, is far more endearing than Horrocks' character.

The problem is that the character of Little Voice is too improbable for us to believe in. She takes the play from realism to fantasy and tries to combine the two - unsuccessfully, in my opinion. In the end we just become irritated with her, even though we can understand how she might have got the way she is. For someone who lives in virtual isolation and whose voice is unpleasantly childlike to have the means to sing like Garland, Marilyn Monroe and Shirley Bassey is just out of the ball park, especially as she's surrounded by a bunch of truly down to earth characters. Any musician watching the film quickly gets puzzled by the fact that when she does come out for her big one night of singing, she apparently never practices with the orchestra (which happily moves from one number to another) and you also wonder who did all the arrangements without her being giving them any indication as to how they were going to be sung.

And more, at the end there's a major fire in the house where most of the action takes place, a big enough fire to destroy the place. Yet Little Voice and her mother go back inside, up the stairs, touch stuff, have a fight - all in a building that would still be smouldering hot and impossible to breathe in.

Michael Caine also appears in the film as a seamy loser of a promoter, Jim Broadbent appears with a terrible hairstyle and Ewan McGregor makes a ham-fisted attempt at the lover. Somehow McGregor doesn't suit romantic films (or Star Wars prequels, either). He lacks the ability to look sincere in a love scene. Think he should stick to dead serious movies.

We've just watched the second movie, a film directed by George Clooney, who also appears in a secondary role. It's an intense piece, with little humour, no character development, a wisp of a subplot and not much drama between the characters themselves. The drama takes place offstage, as it were, with Joseph McCarthy's (real-life) rantings being the main thing that the other characters are in conflict with. It works, but only just. It's serious stuff, almost of the kind: and don't you forget it. I found it intellectually interesting, but emotionally dry. We knew a lot at the end about Ed Murrow's ideas, but nothing about his personality. You want to ask: where's his wife and family? Do they exist, or does nothing exist outside these TV studios? (Things are so claustrophic that that's how it feels.) We know that the George Clooney character has a family, but you wouldn't think so, by the way he acts. Wives in this movie are singularly unimportant. The only wife to appear shouldn't be there because she's married to one of the blokes (Robert Downey, Jnr in a very understated performance) and working with your husband or wife isn't allowed in this environment. (It's hard to know why this aspect of the story is there, really, as it has no dramatic point, and no real emotional effect.) Even the death of one of the newsmen by suicide is given very little room in the film - almost as little as the 'obit' Murrow tacks onto one of his broadcasts.

A rather disappointing movie, given its cast, its class, perhaps showing that even ideas have to be dressed up in drama to make them interesting.