Two quiet movies

Last night I watched a film we'd recorded a few days earlier: Snow Cake. I actually watched it nearly twice through, as my wife had been doing something else and didn't come in until it was getting close to the end - at which point I said she needed to see it from the beginning, so I watched it again.

I can't tell you about the movie without giving some spoilers, so don't read this if you want to catch up with it.

This Canadian movie concerns a man (played by Alan Rickman) who's recently out of prison (for killing another man). He rather unwillingly picks up a lively young female hitchhiker; a few minutes of screen time later, she is killed outright when a truck crashes into the car. Rickman decides to take the rather oddball gift the daughter had bought for her mother to the mother (played by Sigourney Weaver) and discovers that the mother has some form of autism - a 'very vocal' form, as the mother's neighbour points out. And so things play out, as we gradually learn why Rickman was in prison and more.

It's a story with more than one grieving person in it, but it isn't a miserable story. There's a great deal of humour all round, and Weaver's character, while not played for laughs as such, produces a number of the funnier lines in the film. It's also about the healing needed after losing someone, and how this can take more than a matter of moments.

Rickman does his usual fairly laidback characterization even while baring his soul to different people, but when needed, can produce the goods: watch him in the aftermath of the crash.

Weaver has been criticised by some reviewers for being all performance without a real connection to the character she's playing. But this is a character at a disconnect with herself: she has no social graces: if she's fed up with you she'll tell you to stop talking until she says it's okay to start again, or, if you've come to her house for a wake, she'll ask loudly why you're still there when she wants you to go, or will dump the freshly made sandwiches in the rubbish bin to encourage you to leave. She also enjoys eating snow, jumping on a trampoline, and playing with children's baubles. She's as sharp as a tack...except she isn't quite.

Carrie Ann Moss (of the Matrix series, and the strange film, Memento) plays the neighbour, a woman who doesn't mind having 'gentlemen callers' and who is part of the healing process Rickman needs to go through.

It's a relatively quiet little film, and relies on excellent actors to put its gentle story across.

We watched Taking the Wae Wae Express the other day too. NZ reviewers have generally raved about this movie, the forerunner to the recently exhibited, Hook, Line and Sinker, but we found it lacking in energy and rather shapeless. Both movies have been made using the Mike Leigh approach of improvisation-gradually-forming-itself-into-a-script. The more recent movie worked, using this process - but also had the benefit of some very good NZ actors. Wae Wae uses a mostly inexperienced cast, and for me the lack of a script with crafted lines left them floundering. The young actors were good, but there was a kind of limitedness to their roles: a stronger script in general would have helped them to achieve something more effective. Even Rangimoana Taylor (who has the lead role in Hook, Line and Sinker) suffers from an undeveloped role. There is a curious Malaysian taxidriver in the story, a man given to uttering 'wisdom' to young people, and also a female Scandinavian tourist who turns up out of nowhere and makes herself at home with the other characters - without much evidence as to why she should do so, I thought. Incidentally, this story also evolves out of a car crash....

We were sorry not to like the movie much: it was made by Andrea Bosshard, who used to be one of my piano pupils (her family were neighbours) many years ago..! However, on the basis of Hook, Line and Sinker, I'm sure she's got better stuff still to come.

Learning from a disaster

Matthew Taylor from RSA writing in relation to the Japanese disaster (and also the Scottish economy, but that doesn't get mentioned in the following extract)...

It was...fascinating this morning...to hear James Naughtie on the Today Programme describing the issues which some Japanese people hope their country will now face up to in the wake of their unfolding tragedy:
first, how could the Government and the people have a deeper and more honest conversation about the choices facing a country which already had a debt twice the size of GDP even before the crisis.
Second, how could Japan rediscover the entrepreneurial flair which led to it being the world’s economic powerhouse in the seventies and eighties.
Third, how could Japan develop a new and stronger civil society to fill the gaps between big Government, big corporations and individuals?

The idea that Japan could turn this crisis into a national conversation about a new idea of citizenship and society is inspiring. It is also fascinating how recognisable these issues are to us in the UK.

Democracy needs the Humanities

‘Radical changes are occurring in what democratic societies teach the young, and these changes have not been well thought through..…The humanities and the arts are being cut away…in virtually every nation of the world. Seen by policy makers as useless frills, at a time when nations must cut away all useless things in order to stay competitive in the global market, they are rapidly losing their place in curricular, and also in the minds and hearts of parents and children. Indeed, what we might call the humanistic aspects of science and social science – the imaginative, creative aspect, and the aspects of rigorous critical thought – are also losing ground as nations prefer to pursue short term profits by the cultivation of the useful and highly applied skills suited to profit making.’

From Martha C. Nussbaum's book,Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities

Enthusiastically endorsed on Matthew Taylor's blog.

Three positions

Matthew Taylor from RSA (not the Returned Services Association, which is what we in New Zealand usually associate this acronym with) wrote in a blog post:

...while the rich and their banks were unwilling to allow middle and poorer workers to be paid more (over the last three decades wages for all but the rich have stagnated in the US), they were more than happy to encourage the poor to borrow money. Of the 1.5 trillion dollars that flowed up in wealth, a trillion then flowed down in borrowing, much of it, from the point of view of the borrower, very ill-advised. This was the cause of the bubble and the bust.

He also says:

I see a new political space opening up which combines three positions which have not traditionally cohered:

- Opposition to extreme, unmerited and destructive levels of inequality: ‘fairness does matter;’

- Scepticism about the central state as a direct agent of social change and a preference for models which are driven bottom up by citizen initiative and community action; ‘a big society not a big state;’

- Recognition of the importance to human functioning both of values such as respect, virtue, thrift, moderation and of the norms and institutions which embody these values: ‘enlightened social conservatism’.

Wow....now if only these could come together we might see greed put in its place, and humanity given a chance to prove it can care for more than Number One.

RSA stands for the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

When the medium fails...

Paul Fromont on Prodigal Kiwi(s) pointed me to Barry Taylor on Nevermind the Bricolage who pointed me to Brian Eno who wrote (somewhere):
 
"whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It's the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

Note to the artist: when the medium fails conspicuously, and especially if it fails in new ways, the listener believes something is happening beyond its limits."

The Kobo video review

I've been away from blogging for a few days while I was up in the North Island (variously in Auckland and Matamata), so there hasn't been much happening here. However, just came across Martin Taylor's video review of the Kobo, the e-book reader just put out by Whitcoulls (perhaps Whitcoulls' most innovative action in a long time!)

Here's the video. As you'll see, the Kobo is a basic unit, but it does the job and is effective in its task. Hmmm....do I actually need one?

Couple of quotes

"We don't create something sacred. We find it right where we are by the way we deal with experiences."

Abbot Robert Joshin Althouse, a Buddhist priest and founder of the Oak Park Zen Community

"We have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world."

Jill Bolte Taylor in her recovery memoir, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey

Thanks to Cathleen Falsani's column, where I found these quotes.

Dear old Uncle Harold

For the last few weeks I’ve been working my way back through the Beethoven sonatas again. I haven’t played them much for a couple of years or more. I think I got a bit sick of them, or felt I just wasn’t playing them well. Anyway, I’ve been thoroughly enjoying going back through them one by one, working on some passages to get them right: including passages in one that was probably the first Beethoven sonata I ever learned – except it doesn’t look as though I ever learned these particular tricky bits properly. Must have fudged them. How I managed to get away with that with my teacher I can’t imagine.
I mentioned a while ago, when I was playing through the Mozart sonatas again, that I was getting irritated by Franklin Taylor, who edited the edition I have.
The editor of the Beethoven volumes, Harold Craxton, isn’t much better. He doesn’t tend to add dynamics, unless there’s a very valid reason to do so. On that side, I give him credit. The layout of the music is excellent. It’s his introductory comments that are over the top. They have a real pompous uncle feel about them, the sort of pompous uncle who’s never done anything wrong and looks down with disdain on those who do. Especially people still learning their craft.
For Sonata number 7, for instance, we find this: In some early editions a very silly person inserted a crescendo leading to a fortissimo end. If people still exist who do not see the point of a pianissimo arpeggio without pedal and with an exact final crotchet, why consider their interests?
Or, after discussing some particular point, he writes: The Slough of Despond and the Serbonian Bog will be drained before all such possibilities are exhausted.
Will they indeed?
Or, in relation to the Pathetique: Remember it is very unimportant whether you take six months or six years in screwing this Allegro up until you can break speed-records, but that it is very important for your own harmonious development that you should not play it badly at any stage of your practice.
Or, in relation to the 3rd Sonata: Some students ask for an edition in which such passages [cadenzas] are written out in full-sized notes, chopped into ordinary bars by machinery. Their trouble is that they do not want to learn music, but simply to be taught a set of parlour tricks.
Dear me, Uncle Harold. How can my poor playing ever meet with your approval?

Franklin Taylor by two

My comments on Franklin Taylor in a couple of recent posts have brought a different Franklin Taylor to my attention. This one, instead of being a long deceased music editor and occasional composer, is an artist. His abstract paintings can be seen here.
I can’t find anything about him as a person, and wherever you go on the Net, the art work that’s available seems to be just the same few prints: Ascending I and Ascending II, or In the Mix I and II. They’re always available as posters.
No doubt someone knows who he is, but so far I haven’t been able to find out anything.

More hitting the top spots

‘How to crowl in a right way’ – this search request from a country that spells ‘did you mean’ as ‘Tarkoititko’. Interestingly enough, when you put ‘tarkoititko’ in Google, along with Mike Crowl, it asks: did you mean Tarkoitetaan? Whatever language it is, it’s subtle! More to the point, the original request brought up this blog at the top. Must be a week for it!
Google is brilliant at finding what you want, but it’s also brilliant at finding things that are so far from what you want that you wonder how it got there. Still, that’s the way search engines function, pretty much.
Somebody else was looking for my old friend, Arnold Bachop, the tenor. Just doing that brought up this blog twice, in first and second place, and then another post of mine on my older website.
Someone else wants to know about the waterfall scene in Clint Eastwood’s Play Misty For Me. I certainly don’t mention it anywhere in the post I wrote on that film, even though we came third in the Google stakes on that one. In fact, I don’t remember a waterfall scene in the movie at all.
Veno’s Lighting Cough Bottles was the next search query, and we came in number two on that, for once actually having all the words in the search query actually turn up in the same post! To my surprise the same thing happens with the query: Diana Crowl music. Google thought the best thing on offer was my post on Gerald Finzi, in which all three of those words appear, but which probably has nothing to do with what the searcher wanted.
We drop down the list in regard to a query about Generation C, but we’re still in the top ten. Somehow we go to the top of the list again with ‘I hate to sit up straight’ – a query that boggles the mind as to why you’d want to say such a thing to Google in the first place. (Actually in this instance they said it to AOL search. AOL search – who are they? Perhaps AOL had been telling one of its customers to sit up straight? It’s the sort of restrictive thing they’re into, I think.)
To my amazement I’m in the top ten for ‘dating for everyone’, something that I’d hardly have thought to have written about, but apparently did, as I also did about religious jeans. How do I get into these sidetracks?
Back to number four for Franklin Taylor, that irritant to my Mozart playing. He was the editor of the edition of Mozart sonatas I’m currently playing from, and does some unbelievably silly things in terms of adding expression marks. Still, he was working in a period when the editors seemed to think they knew best about everything, including how Mozart would have added expression marks if he’d had the time. I remember reading Albert Schweitzer’s book on J S Bach. He was just as bad, complaining that Bach hadn’t done this, had done that and shouldn’t have, and so on. Schweitzer might have been a fairly clever chappie, but at 25 or so, he was hardly a match for the genius of J S B. Guess that’s the arrogance of youth.
Another composer turns up in the HitTail lists (that’s what I’m checking at the moment, in case you hadn’t figured it out). It’s our old friend Gareth Farr. The searcher apparently thought his name was double-barrelled: Gareth-Farr. Unfortunately that would leave Gareth without a first name, and what would his friends call him then?
And nearly last on our list tonight is yet another composer, this time, John Adams, he of the minimalist music. He whom I haven’t quite given room enough to grow accustomed to yet. And may still do so!
Finally, we get back to another request for crawling spelt as crowling. This time it’s ‘crowls in the water’. Well, we had Crowls in the water this morning, because both my wife and I had a bath. Does that count?

Franklin Taylor

I have an edition of Mozart’s sonatas edited by Franklin Taylor – edited in 1906, in fact, though my copy isn’t that old.
It’s curious that Mr Taylor tells us that Mozart seldom wrote anything more than f (forte) or p (piano) in terms of expression marks, and yet he then litters the music with Franklin Taylor interpretations, most of which are odd, to say the least. Fps, (fortepianos) which are quite inconsistent with the music; louds and softs where we don’t need them. It’s as if he felt he had to contribute something to the edition, or thought the pages looked bare without expression marks everywhere.
I appreciate his laying out of the trills and appoggiaturas, because those aren’t always easy to work out on the spot, but we could have done without his attempts to interpret the way the music should be played. Mozart, it seems to me, like Bach, is perfectly interpretable on the basis of just playing the music – at least once you’ve had a few years’ worth of playing behind you.