One old, one relatively new

Watched The Music Man yesterday for the first time since it came out in the early sixties. I have an impression in my head that I didn’t much enjoy it at the time, but I was a teenager then, so that might explain it.
After nearly fifty years it stands up very well. It’s not the greatest story, but it has a very solid great character in Professor Harold Hill, and the songs he sings in particular are very well constructed. The film is fairly stagey – maybe not surprising since Morton DaCosta directed the original Broadway version as well – but this doesn’t actually detract from it. The thing needs room to breathe and between the wide wide screen and the spacious sets, there’s plenty of room. Even the library scene, which at first looks cramped, manages to have room enough for a nifty lot of dancing.
And the dancing is always given full visibility. None of your quick cutting stuff. Here you can see the dancers dancing. There are cuts, but they fit to the beat and the steps rather than cutting across them. And do they dance: even Robert Preston and Shirley Jones do some pretty quick capering in the Shipoopi, though neither of them were dancers – nor was Buddy Hackett, but he still gets a few nifty steps in. Apparently each dance sequence was given three weeks full rehearsal (the whole period of filming was nine months), and the quality of work shows.
Meredith Willson will probably be remembered for little besides this musical, which was certainly his masterpiece. But he wrote a bunch of other more serious works, including symphonies. His skill as a composer with more breadth than your average musical composer shows: he writes gentle love songs, but also the incredibly complex Hill set pieces (Trouble in River City, to name but one); there are barbershop quartets by the handful, and a bunch of zany things like the duet over a piano lesson, the gossip song, Pick a Little, Talk a Little (which goes at a rate of knots) and the opening number sung by the salesmen on the train that fits neatly to the rhythms of the steam engine.
I think what strikes you about the movie is the sheer energy of it all. Preston is supreme in this, but no one else falls flat. Even young Ron Howard is fully present.
The cast has two wonderful comics in it: Paul Ford and Hermione Gingold. Both use their lines with such elegance and force, and make such fun of the malapropisms and misunderstandings, that they almost carry the film away whenever they appear. Ford was the ill-benighted suitor Horace Vandergelder in The Matchmaker, from which Hello, Dolly was eventually formed. His role is similar here, but that’s probably because he makes it so much his own.
Sadly, the brilliant dancer, Timmy Everett, who was only 23 when he appeared in this movie, and who doesn’t seem to have danced in anything else, died only 16 years after the film was made.

I’ve now watched The Incredibles several times since it was shown on TV a couple of weeks ago, as my young grandson has taken a liking to it, and he lives here with us. I don’t remember enjoying it particularly at the movies either, which is very odd, as it’s well-constructed, has a superlative sense of humour, and is aimed at adults as much as kids. I know my brother-in-law went to sleep during it. But then he went to sleep during the third Bourne movie as well, something that must be quite an achievement.
The vocal casting is great: Holly Hunter adds a kind of oddball lisp to her lines; Craig T Nelson – one of those actors you recognise when you see him, but whose name you never seem to know – does a wonderful Mr Incredible (aided enormously by the visual character), and Brad Bird himself plays the wonderfully crazy designer, Edna ‘E’ Mode. Samuel L Jackson turns up skinny, which is rather fun, and the sultry-voiced Mirage is played by 44-year-old Elizabeth Peña, another actress whose name means nothing to me, but who’s always visible in something or other.
The visuals are great, from the design of the ‘sets’ to the look of the characters, including the many smaller parts. The policemen all have a slightly cross-eyed look, and the guards on the island (whose relatives are the clones in Star Wars) have cheesy good-looking but somewhat uninformed countenances. Some characters are extreme caricatures, particularly the nasty little boss, (played by Wallace Shawn and here even smaller than he usually is), and the permanently-boyish baddie, Buddy Pine, played by Jason Lee.
Great fun all round.

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 movies

I mentioned the movie, Serenity, in my previous post. Some guys from our church get together about once a month to watch a DVD together, and this was the choice for last night’s event. Not my choice, but that of the young fellow in the group who’s a keen sci-fi fan.
Apart from the fact that it borrowed from every other sci-fi movie under the sun, particularly the first Star Wars, it wasn’t too bad, with a few twists in the tail, (including allowing the baddie to live!), and some semblance of a plot. (Some of which had to be explained by the sci-fi buff, as the rest of us had no idea of the background to the thing – it pays to have watched Firefly, the series it was based on.)
There were some crazy moments in it: the cannibalistic nasties and the Alliance (yup, one of those, and megalomaniac with it) had a space battle at one point, while the heroes escaped between them. All this was done in spaceships so cluttered together in space that the collision level should have been extraordinarily high. Somehow they managed to battle it out without everything in sight blowing up.
The girl, River, was far superior at taekwondo than the two girls in the Olympics: she could take on fifty men at the drop of a hat and defeat them all. Yeah, right. Even being the mean war machine she was supposed to be, the sheer improbability was just a bit much.
And then the heroes only strapped themselves into seats in their space ship when they thought they were going to crash. Prior to that they’d been walking happily about the thing in spite of the fact that it was doing frequent somersaults in space and corkscrews and you name it.
Still, the spaceship designs were cool throughout: the baddies had nasty kinds of designs, like sharks, and the goodies had something like a bird, or a large insect.
For some reason, after this, I came home and watched The Red Shoes, while my wife slept in the lazy boy chair. The acting is old school – clear enunciation and rather mannered movements (but only at times) – and the story is a bit dragged out, and the ballet people are all a bit over the top, but there are some great things in it still. The photography is superb, moving seamlessly from atmospheric studio stuff to location work, much of it in a brilliantly sunny Monte Carlo. And the colour throughout is imaginatively used: Moira Shearer’s ginger hair shines, the red shoes glisten menacingly, the arty ballet sets contrast wonderfully with the clean location colours, the warm interiors and much more. Even the men’s dark suits and tuxedos shine.
And while the ‘real’ story of two men in love with the same woman is a bit clumsily handled, it parallels nicely with the Red Shoes ballet itself, which is based round a similar idea. The ballet is superbly done, not just from a dancing point of view, where the choreography is imaginative and detailed, but from a cinematic point of view. Like the best Hollywood musical ballets, it doesn’t stint on using cinematic tricks (the usual shift from a real stage and audience to vast sets is handled with ease). Shearer leaps into the red shoes almost in one take; a newspaper gets up and dances with her and then transforms within the same shot into Robert Helpmann, and back again; a huge, rolling ocean behind the conductor (who appears randomly throughout the ballet – he’s one of the lovers) turns into the audience; and other seamless moments show the marvellous control that the directors, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and DOP Jack Cardiff have over their material.

Bleak House

With The West Wing now having been viewed in its entirety, I looked around for something to replace it, and found Bleak House, the BBC serial version, on display at the library. 15 episodes, but much shorter episodes than The West Wing ones.

I kept saying to my wife: I don’t remember that from the book, but in fact they stuck pretty closely to it. In spite of the fact that I’ve read Bleak House twice, the details obviously haven’t stuck with me as well as I’d thought.

It’s pretty well done, considering it’s produced in that BBC fashion of not stinting on costume and casting, but on lighting and scenery. Somehow the BBC, for all its expertise, still plays the niggard on certain aspects of its major productions. And there’s quite a bit of hand-held camera, which sometimes gets annoying, particularly when the camera’s prowling around one of the enormous gardens and we have to spy on the characters through leaves, plants and bushes.

There’s more story than I remembered, but for all that, some of the characters, such as Harold Skimpole, seem excess to requirements. My strongest feelings about the whole thing relates to the casting: some of it is top-notch, some of it is odd.

Anna Maxwell Martin plays Esther Summerson as a determined kind of character who dives in boots and all and seems to have few qualms about herself. Not quite how I remember Esther from the book: there she was much more backward about coming forward. Still, Martin has some very moving and affecting scenes. 7 out of 10.

The Wards in Chancery are excellently cast, and actually manage to give life to two of the duller characters in the story. Carey Mulligan and Patrick Kennedy therefore get 9 out of 10.

Miss Flight is played by Pauline Collins. She’s the right height, but the wrong shape. This Miss Flight is well-fed and fairly capable – and there are few flights of fancy about her. She seems to have her head well screwed on, whereas as Miss Flight ought to be tiny, like a little bird, barely fluttering her way through life. 5 out of 10, but mostly the producers’ fault for wrong casting.

Equally Jo, the sweeper boy, has plainly been getting his vittles from somewhere off stage. A skinny, small boy is how he’s cast by Dickens, and his illustrator, and this well-fed lad, though he does the part adequately, shouldn’t have been cast in this wizened role. Again 5 out of 10 because of the casting department.

Nathaniel Parker, of all people, plays Harold Skimpole. What is it about skinny people in this production? Parker was quite beefy in a recent TV series, but has lost some of that here. Nevertheless, he’s far too comfortably-built, and never convinces us of the truth of his idea that he’s too much of a child to understand the adult world. Regrettably, because I like Parker as an actor, 4 out of 10.

The one skinny actor who gets everything right is the oddly-named Burn Gorman as Mr Guppy. Not only is this beanpole exactly as Phiz shows him, he’s gauche and irritating, socially inept, has a face like something that’s been pushed sideways and all in all could have sprung from the pages of an early edition of the book. 10 out of 10.

Lady Dedlock is played by Gillian Anderson, who, I only realised part way through watching, is the former X-files leading lady. Some reviewers haven’t liked her much in the part, but I couldn’t fault her. 10 out of 10.

Likewise Charles Dance as Tulkinghorn is the epitome of malevolence, manipulation and heartlessness. Superbly done. I had an impression in my head that Tulkinghorn was a stouter person, but Dance overcame all other impressions within the first episode. 10 out of 10.

Timothy West does Sir Leicester Dedlock wonderfully; Tom Georgeson is a typical Dickens clerk (Clamb); Hugo Speer is Victorian to the sideburns as General George; and Alun Armstrong, while not being how I’d pictured Bucket, makes the role his own. High points all round for these people.

Being a Dickens story, there are a host of other minor characters, from the doctor, Alan Woodcourt to Caddy Jellyby, from young Turveydrop to Snagsby. The list goes on and on.

Two other larger parts are played by Philip Davis, as Smallweed, and Johnny Vegas as Krook. Davis throws himself utterly into his role (though we could perhaps have had one or two less of the shake-ups from his granddaughter) and Vegas is suitably slimy until his explosive demise. Again I would have expected ‘lesser’ men, in the sense of skinnier people. Not too many people managed to carry weight around in Dickens’ time, and the pictures of Smallweed that I seem to recall were of someone virtually at death’s door at all times – but managing to avoid it.

Casting obviously makes a huge difference to any piece, and my carping about skinniness aside, I enjoyed the production overall. And there’s a wonderful moment at the end, which in a way echoes Dickens’ usual tidying-up chapter of what happened to all his characters. Esther finally marries Alan Woodcourt, and as they begin to dance outside, the bright summery field is full of people from the story (those that haven’t died off during the course of it!). It’s reminiscent of the end of Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing, with its great dance of life.

Which reminds me that I haven’t mentioned the character I enjoyed most of all. For once, a character that I’d remembered as having a bit of weight turns up in the production as someone of ordinary size: John Jarndyce, the warm and loving man of integrity, wisdom and honesty, the man who struggles with his love for Esther (because he knows he’s too old for her), the man who's unable to help Richard Carstone avoid an untimely death from his addiction to the Jarndyce v Jarndyce case, and the man who helps many others in the course of the story. In this role, Denis Lawson never put a foot wrong. He’s been in television for ever, his first listing being way back in 1969, in Dr Finlay’s Casebook. And he appeared in the first Star Wars and two of the subsequent prequels. If I could give 11 or 12 out of 10, I’d do it.

Chaos and creativity

I was interested in this paragraph from page 53 of The Making of Star Wars, by J W Rinzler, because it very much describes not just the creative process that artists go through, but similar creative processes other people have to work in, including the place where I'm working at the moment.

Industrial Light and Magic at its birth seemed to have the two elements necessary for creativity: a certain amount of chaos and a certain amount of money. After their first three weeks o existence in June, Lucas had already shelled out $87, 921. While those same two elements, in differing quantities, wold combine to create other situations, at the beginning everyone was enthusiastic. 'I thought that at some point, things have got to change – the people who have ideas to do thing should be allowed to do them,' Edlund says. 'It was providential to me that Star Wars came along, because it was the response to that dream. We all got together, in a highly unorthodox way, in this little warehouse out in Van Nuys.'

The Making of Star Wars - J W Rinzler

Avatar

James Cameron is currently completing a new movie, Avatar, his first feature film since his blockbuster Titanic, which was filmed in 1997. Cameron began the shoot of the new movie with virtual photography (don’t ask me quite what that is), following it up with live-action work. Let’s hope the cast aren’t ‘animated’ in the same way those in Beowolf were.

Cameron wrote the screenplay for the movie as well. It’s the story of a wounded marine who’s sent to the faraway planet of Pandora against his wishes, and finds himself caught up in a battle for survival with the planet's inhabitants.

The 52-year-old Cameron has spent years researching and developing the new filming techniques needed to create the movie's $190 million hybrid of action and animation, and he claims he's been "the busiest unemployed director in Hollywood." He says, "We're going to blow you to the back wall of the theatre in a way you haven't seen for a long time. My goal is to rekindle those amazing mystical moments my generation felt when we first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey or the next generation's Star Wars. It took me 10 years to find something hard enough to be interesting." The sci-fi epic is due to be released in 2009.

Well, at the moment the most interesting factor about the movie is Sigourney Weaver, who can be guaranteed to light up any scene she’s in. Cameron was a brilliant director when he made The Terminator series, but Titanic, in spite of its enormous popularity, leaves me cold: it has some of the worst acting this side of the silent movies, and even Kate Winslet and Di Caprio barely make their scenes work. The whole thing got overloaded with technical stuff and spectacular effects, to my way of thinking. And it was so long: it could have done with a dose of lipovox to thin it down!

And I can remember my first viewing of 2001. Like millions of others, it was a revelation – or so it seemed until you tried to figure out what the heck it was all about. Seeing some of it again in recent years confirms my opinion that it should join Titanic in the Most Overrated Movies of All Time Lists. It’s even worse in terms of length than Titanic (where at least there’s something happening most of the time), the acting is non-existent because there aren’t any characters in it, and Hal is about the only interesting bit of the story.

Making Star Wars

Just reading J W Rinzler’s mammoth The Making of Star Wars, and it’s interesting to see how complex a route the writing of the original scenario took. What seems, in the movie, to be something fully-formed and conceived, is seen here to be a long, hard process of changing focus, changing plot lines, changing characters (and their names), swapping ideas around, having one or two scenes that would survive from the first draft through to the end, endlessly swapping how things worked and where they worked, dumping characters and pinching their names for someone else, morphing people like Han Solo from an alien to a human, and the two robots from a couple of bickering bureaucrats to a bickering golden robot and a chirping trash can on wheels.
It’s very encouraging for any writer who’s trying to tackle something large.

The anonymous Navy Man

A couple of blogs I didn’t find via Link and Blog come from a guy who’s a retired US Navy man. Don’t know what rank, because he doesn’t give much information away about himself. All I know is that he likes golf, and the Star Wars movies, doesn’t read a lot, but likes country music. He now works in a convenience store chain.
He turned up on myLot asking for people to do reviews of his two blogs, one of which focuses on Net tech stuff, and the other on ways to make money on the Net. Both worthy topics.
I felt he just didn’t give enough of himself away on the blogs. Maybe I’m a person who lets ‘me’ appear a lot when I’m writing; this guy is a bit reticent for my taste, but maybe that’s an okay thing. Not everyone of us has to hang it all out. (Actually, I don’t really do that. If you think the blog is personal, you should see my journals. You won’t!)
Anyway, click here for the Tecchie site, and here for the Moneymaking one. Both are worth a look.