Cyber-anger

The NZ Government is in the process of considering bringing in a law that will protect people who are cyber-bullied.  The aim is to show the bullies just how serious their actions are, and that they could lead to a prison sentence.

Bullies aren't good at listening of course - even when the harm they do magnifies into something like suicide on the part of the victim, they have a tendency to blame the victim rather than themselves.

The video below isn't directly about bullying, but it is about the way in which we need to remember that it's a real person at the other end of the computer, and that they expect you to act as a real person too.  Regrettably, all of us at times have acted as though there isn't anyone real out there, that it's just a machine we're addressing.  Curiously, even though we think of 'it' in terms of a machine, we direct our bullying or complaint to a 'real' person we have in our head.  Holding back on the vehemence and violent language by taking a walk round the block before you sit down to write the abuse (however justified it may seem) is one way to avoid problems for all concerned.  Anyway, the video says it better than I can...

Brave

We went to see Brave today with three of our grandchildren, one daughter and one daughter-in-law.  What a wonderful film, though not entirely for children, who might find it quite scary in places.  The five-year-old grandson assured me he was okay while at the same time telling me it was a bit scary.  And it was: the scene in which the ferocious bear appears, and especially the big battle between the male and female bear at the end, are very frightening.  If you're five.

But frightening bits apart, this is a delight.  The characters have originality about them, the story isn't as straightforward as it might first appear, and the detail in every scene insists that we come back for a second or third look at the movie.

The wonderful thing about animated movies in particular is the artwork that's involved. It's in a league of its own, but more importantly it invariably celebrates the beauty of the world.  Brave is no exception (and the short Pixar movie that accompanied it, in which three generations of starkeepers deal with the latest influx of stars, is just a wonder from beginning to end).   The Scottish wilds are wonderfully portrayed, and the animals in the film (in particular the heroine's horse, and her father's dogs) have their own personalities, but are also animated wonderfully as animals.

Brave's big plus, in terms of animated movies, is that it concerns a young girl who knows her own mind, and who's finally allowed to follow it.  While females have often been the subject of cartoons, from Snow White onwards, they've seldom been as adventurous or forthright as Merida, the heroine of this movie.  Merida has to battle with her mother at all points, but she manages to win through at the end still on the same side.  Both characters have matured by the time we're finished.

The vocal work is delightful too - the script includes a number of less commonly used words that fit well with the Scottish accents.  Kelly MacDonald plays Merida, Emma Thompson her mother, and Billy Connelly her father.  I wasn't sure that Connelly was going to work at first, even though he seems an obvious choice for the role: he's larger than life and the character he plays is larger than life both personality-wise and physically.  But Connelly has a way of reading his lines in movies that doesn't always ring true.  Fortunately for Brave this style is soon left behind, partly because he gets fewer and fewer lines to say as the movie goes on.

Julie Walters appears as the wood-carving witch, and is quite unrecognisable.  There are a number of other reasonably well-known actors in the smaller roles including an actor named Patrick Doyle. This is the same Patrick Doyle who composed the score, and his score is a delight from beginning to end; even the bagpipes come across effectively.   Doyle the actor has appeared in other movies he's composed the score for, including two of the Kenneth Branagh Shakespeare adaptations.

At the opposite end of movie-making, as it were, we watched the second in the Girl with a Dragon Tattoo trilogy; The Girl Who Played with Fire.  Like its predecessor, it's violent in the extreme, though there are thankfully no sexually abusive scenes.  (There is one what-seemed-to-me-to-be unnecessary lesbian sex scene, however.)  Unlike its predecessor, it relies on a lot of coincidence, and there's much less actual mystery to it. The heroine manages to find out things fairly easily, and Blomqvist finds her even more easily at the end, by which time she's been beaten, shot and buried alive.  She's one tough cookie.  The story is left hanging (unlike the first film) and it's presumably necessary to see the last movie to get some of the unfinished business dealt with.  The revelation about her father in this one seems a bit far-fetched, especially as the first time we saw him he was drastically on fire to the extent that you wouldn't have thought he'd have survived.  Seemingly he's as tough as his daughter.  (And let's not mention his even tougher son, who's very unpleasant.)

Dragon and Foyle

Last year I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  It's certainly a page-turner, but, as I said at the time, it's also very graphic in its sadistic detail.  This is something I puzzle over, since Larsson was supposed to be very much against abuse towards women.  Does a book in which sexual abuse is so graphically described really make abusers turn away from their behaviour?  Does it make us more aware?  I haven't read the other two books in the trilogy, which I've now discovered are linked to the first in a number of ways.   I'm still not sure that I want to.  

Nevertheless last night we watched the Swedish movie of the first book in the series.   We fast-forwarded through the abuse scenes (including the one where Lisbeth, the girl of the title, takes vengeance on the man who's abused her) because we really didn't need to see these.  Both my wife and I remembered them from the book without having them portrayed here.

But the film, of course, is a good deal more than abuse; it's an excellent thriller and detective story, and that's its major appeal, I suspect.  (Do many readers go to a book to read about sexual abuse?)  I know that the English version of the movie has been well-received and is highly-regarded, and no doubt Daniel Craig can play a world-weary journalist as well as anyone, but he'd have his work cut out to do better than Michael Nyqvist, whose battered face gives him a head start anyway.  And Noomi Rapace would be hard to beat as Lisbeth (in fact I hear that she does beat her English-language equivalent).  


So in terms of excellent contemporary filmmaking, Dragon Tattoo comes out on top.  Pity about having to fast-forward some parts, though. 


As a total contrast, we've been watching episodes of Foyle's War, a television series set during the Second World War that's been airing since the early 2002, and is due to be revived this year (the series hasn't aired every year).  These are very mild detective stories, relatively-speaking (the three murders in the last episode we saw were exceptional).  The degree of detective work varies; as is so often the case, the earlier episodes had better mysteries than the later ones, but the real pleasure of this series is watching Michael Kitchen, who, as Inspector Foyle, has a wonderful role as a humane policeman who not only aims to see justice done, but more often than not, tempers that justice with mercy, even to some who least deserve it.  


The curiously-named Honeysuckle Weeks plays his co-opted driver (Foyle can't drive a car) and Anthony Howell plays his offsider, who began the series with a prosthetic leg.  This seems to have been forgotten as time goes on!  There have never been more than four episodes per season, so there's no sense of staleness about the series, or the characters.  The earlier episodes were interesting because of a couple of now famous names that appeared in smaller roles: David Tennant (Dr Who) was one such.  

Unpleasantness

"When did we become so enamoured of unpleasantness? More importantly, when did we start automatically accepting it as truth, particularly in literature? The world is, of course, often quite unpleasant, and any brainlessly pain-free book purporting to show truth can and should be dismissed as unrealistic contrivance. But while contrived cruelty may seem more artful than contrived sentiment, it’s still contrivance."

Patrick Ness in The Guardian, writing a review of the book, More Than it Hurts You, by Darin Strauss.

I'm just about finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a book I've been keen to read since a friend let me skim through the first few pages while I was waiting to accompany him in a singing competition two or three years ago. The book is overlong - Stieg Larsson never spares on detail, even when it contributes nothing to the story in hand - but that's survivable.

What I've struggled with is the emphasis on sadistic sexual violence. I think if it wasn't for the fact that the story itself is intriguing, I'd have put it away early in the piece. Larsson is making a point, I guess, and puts statistical quotes at the beginnings of chapters about how many women are abused sexually each year - and in terms of the way women are abused throughout the world, it does no harm to remind us of how awful some women's lives are.

Nevertheless, there's a sense of enjoyment in the way the book writes about these episodes, and most of these episodes are written in such a way that they draw the reader in. This is particularly evident when one of the main characters takes revenge on a man who's abused her. However, I found myself skimming pages when Larsson continued to add more and more sickening detail to later parts of the book. I didn't feel it was necessary to have all this hammered home.

We've got the other two titles on Kindle, but if they're similar to the first, I think I won't be reading them.

Justice seen to be done? Not

A Dunedin man, at an under-10-year-old rugby match, swore at the ref, abused him, walked on the field, continued to swear and abuse the ref even after he'd been told to get off the field.

Another spectator asked him to stop swearing, and was abused himself. The spectator, who just happens to have a Maori or Pacific Island name, finally decided enough was enough and punched the abusing man in the jaw.

The abusing man called him a 'coward'! Yeah, right. The Maori/Pacific Island man punched him again.

The result: the striker gets fined $500 and the abuser walks away Scot free. And the judge's comments? I quote from the Otago Daily Times:

The judge: said [the Maori/PI]'s reaction to [the swearer's] "poor behaviour" was unjustified and wrong - particularly in front of children - and the conviction would remind him such actions were unacceptable.

Uh, it's acceptable to swear continually, abuse the ref, walk on the field, continue to swear after you've been asked to stop. Oh, right. That'll be why such 'victims' (as the judge called him) get away with such garbage.

And note this paragraph: In court yesterday, defence lawyer Sarah Saunderson-Warner said a restorative justice meeting had not been possible because of the attitude of the victim, who indicated he would only take part if [the Maori/PI] brought $5000.

Now that the exam is over

Over on one of my other blogs, Webitz.net, I've been celebrating the fact that geocities.com, the huge conglomerate of websites put together by enthusiastic amateurs like me, and then dumped from the Internet without much warning by Yahoo, has not only been rescued by reocites.com, but also ASCII and OoCities. Great job, guys!

Now that my exam is over, and the course finished, I can relax a bit and start reading books that aren't related to NZ history again. I've been reading one called Bottled and Sold - the story behind our obsession with bottled water, by Peter Gleick. It's interesting but a bit repetitious, so I may...not...finish...it...yet. On the other hand I finally started reading Half the Sky today, which I bought a month or more ago and couldn't allow myself to get into because of the study. It's an in-your-face look at the way women are treated around the world, not just in terms of forced prostitution, but slavery in general, and abuse of every kinds (and I mean abuse: beatings, eyes gouged out, having acid thrown at them and much more).

I did read some other non-study books over the last few months (impossible for me not to do so). One was a biography of Georgette Heyer, the historical romance novelist. My mother had practically every book she wrote, I think, and I've read some of them in the past myself. She was an excellent writer, a great humorist, and a somewhat indomitable human being. I also started reading the biography of jazz pianist Mike Nock called Serious Fun. It started off very interestingly but has become a bit of a list of who played with whom and who was taking drugs at the time and which album they recorded while they were together for a few months and so on. I'm supposed to review it, so I'll have to give it some more house room yet.

I haven't consciously heard a lot of Nock's music, as it happens. I know his name well, and I've no doubt heard tracks on which he's been playing in passing (usually on one of those jazz programmes on the Concert FM, or whatever it's currently called), but I've never really sat down and listened. Hmm. I got a CD out of the library the other day and was surprised at how dull it was. Nock's left hand went on and on playing the same thing, while his right hand wandered around with no apparent idea where it was going. That was the first two tracks. After that my mind had switched off and I didn't hear what came next. I gave the CD another go a day or so later, and the same thing happened.

I'll have to try a different album. It's unlikely that his reputation stands or falls on that particular CD.

And the other thing I'm doing, of course, is getting on with writing the music for the musical. The stuff I'd already written has been buzzing around in my brain every time I stopped thinking about anything else, so I need to get on and write some more (or go mad). I've been orchestrating some of the music I wrote a while back and it's been good to hear it - particularly now that I'm actually hearing what it's like rather than what my two dud speakers on the computer claimed it sounded like. A bit of adjustment on the Sibelius program itself, and the use of earphones, made a huge difference.

I've just noticed that there's some way to record music via a microphone using Sibelius. Once it's recorded and Sibelius has transcribed it, you can edit it - make it look like it should! I hope it's better than the scanning program Sibelius uses: I've given up on that because it's more work trying to edit than just transcribing the stuff straight into the computer in the first place. It doesn't seem to work any better with this latest version of Sibelius than it did with the old one. Of course, it possibly doesn't help that most music people want me to transcribe is elderly, often torn, scribbled over and various other things. But even clean copies don't seem to go too well.

It doesn't look as though I installed the microphone (audio score lite) program. Maybe I'll get onto that some time - although the way I write music doesn't really lend itself to that much. Still it may prove more of a bonus than I think!

By the way, the exam went far more smoothly than I expected, I felt pretty good about it, and hopefully the examiner will too. But three hours of typing took a fair amount of concentration (I can't even begin to imagine writing for three hours) and my bum also got tired of sitting in the same spot for so long. There were only two of us disabled people in the room - I don't know what was wrong with the young woman who was also doing an exam (probably a different one to me) - and there were two supervisors! All very friendly. Because there were so few of us we started a quarter of an hour early. Better than sitting around nervously.

Antwone Fisher

We’ve had a DVD on the shelf for some time which my wife has seen, but I’d never got around to. Antwone Fisher, written by Antwone Fisher and directed by Denzel Washington.
It’s a small scale movie with no ‘action’ except a bit of fisticuffs early in the piece, but it’s typical of the best stuff that Washington puts his hand to: warm and full of integrity. Derek Luke plays the title role with ease and performs well in his many scenes with Washington.
It’s about a young man in the Navy with an anger problem; Washington is his psychiatrist, and through the course of their conversations we hear of the abuse the young man has suffered, and the way in which he’s been abandoned by his mother. After some time he decides to go looking for his family, and even though his mother remains distant and unable to come to terms with this stranger who’s her first-born, his father’s family welcomes him with open arms. There’s a wonderful scene after he’s gone off with his uncle to meet his mother for the first time in twenty or more years. When they return to the uncle’s house, instead of there only being his aunt and the other uncle there, the whole family has gathered to welcome him, from the youngest to the oldest. The matriarch greets him personally, holding his hands in hers with great tenderness. And they’ve put together a feast for him as well. It’s a great moment, and echoes the dream that opens the movie, when the child Antwone walks into a great barn full of not only his living relatives but his ancestors.