French movie, Israeli movie

Some spoilers here...

Having a bit of a run on movies worth mentioning at the moment. In the last few days we've seen the Israeli film, The Lemon Tree and the French movie, The Big Picture (L'homme qui voulait vivre sa vie, which translates roughly as 'the man who wanted to live his life').

The French movie was well made, but left you with a rather flat feeling: it comes to a sudden halt at a point which could be said to be showing something of an epiphany in the main character's life, but it's very understated. Paul (Romain Duris) is a youngish man with a wife and two children, and a good job in a legal firm which it's likely he can take sole charge of soon: the co-owner (Catherine Deneuve) has learnt that she hasn't long to live. Somehow Paul manages to throw all this away, partly because of misunderstandings, partly because of not being able to talk sensibly to his wife, and partly because she's having an affair and he accidentally kills her lover. But no one else finds out about this. He makes it look as though the lover has gone away. And then he fakes his own death.

There are lots of plot-holes, as my friend calls them, lots of improbabilities. Paul is supposed to be a somewhat impetuous character, but he somehow meticulously plans not only how to get rid of the lover's body, but how to make himself vanish. Other unexplained matters irritate, such as how he manages to live without work by using only cash for several months after the events described above. The piece is slow in its first half-hour, and then after the lover's death it picks up, but there are still too many shots of Duris brooding. After a while you just wish he'd get on with things...

The Lemon Tree moves along quietly, but it has an intense performance at its centre: Hiam Abbass (an Israeli actress) plays a Palestinian widow, Salma, whose sole income is from a lemon tree orchard that is situated inconveniently on the border, right next to a house just taken over by the Israeli Defence Minister, his wife, and entourage. The security people advise cutting down the trees so that there's a clear view across the land; Salma, of course, is appalled at their arrogance, and fights for her rights.

The Defence Minister is a jerk, of course, but his wife sees through the situation a little more clearly, and after a lot of internal debate manages to do the right thing. Unfortunately it's rather too late, and the film has a bittersweet ending.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this movie is that it's been made by Israelis, and yet the Israelis are the baddies/villains/whatever. Only the Defence Minister is really bad news, in the sense that he's juggling every ball possible at the same time; most of them come crashing down before the movie ends. His wife becomes increasingly sympathetic to the widow's situation as the movie goes on, but between her hands being tied, and her lack of will to do something to change things, she fails the widow, effectively. There are some unpleasant people on the Palestinian side, of course, most notably the 'elders' who, instead of aiding the widow, want to push her down even further. There are a lot of Biblical parallels in the movie: those who are supposedly acting righteously but not caring for the widows, for instance, and Ahab taking over his neighbour's vineyard. Salma, however, is a tough woman, and she doesn't let things knock her down completely, though there are plenty of knocks along the way.

Odd phrases, J S Bach, Moby Dick and Miss Pettigrew

Just a little catchup on the HitTail side of things....the following four phrases are the ones most used to get to my site this last week or so.  And what an odd collection they are!

brownlee finland
mother armwrestling
esther muir plastered
steve jobs graduation quotes

Gerry Brownlee is the man in question in the first phrase: he's a politician here in New Zealand, and recently made a bit of a gaffe in regard to some comments given in Parliament about the country of Finland. Supposedly the Finns got very up in arms about the comments.  Quite honestly, it seems unlikely.  Do most of them even know where New Zealand is?

Mothers and armwrestling seem to be a bit of an odd combination, although there are some You Tube videos showing mothers armwrestling with their teenage sons.    Last time armwrestling turned up on HitTail in relation to my site it was to do with a man armwrestling his wife.   Not sure how the mother got in on it. 

Esther Muir was an actress who had a role in the Marx Brothers film, A Day at the Races.  Like most women who wind up in Groucho's arms in these movies, she suffers considerable embarrassment at the hands of his brothers.  

I don't need to explain the last phrase.  Do I?

Yesterday I came across a site called Grooveshark.  It's a place where you can stream endless amounts of music, or buy it, if you wish.  Since it's Easter Weekend, I had a thought that I'd make an effort to hear Bach's St Matthew Passion.  I know a little of it, but not the whole wide mountain range of it.  Anyway, it's all available on Grooveshark, in several versions.  Curiously, the tracks from these versions are mixed up to glory, so playing them in the order they appear means you're hearing a random version of the Passion. This isn't an entirely bad thing, and some tracks get repeated straight away with a different choir and orchestra, or turn up further down the list.  I've just left the whole caboodle running for the last couple of days, when I've been here, and gradually Bach's music is making more of an impression on my brain than it has before.  

On another front, I'm starting to struggle with Moby Dick, the novel by Herman Melville.  I was enjoying it at first, when he was still writing an actual story, but he gets bogged down in side-paths, which, though they may be interesting in themselves, just feel like they're holding up the real meat of the book.  Ishmael ceases to be a character in the story, almost, and becomes just a narrator of events in which he often has no part.  It's taken a long time for Captain Ahab to appear, and when he does you rather wish he hadn't.  Keeping him mysteriously below decks on a permanent basis might have worked better.  He insists on speaking in a pseudo-Shakespearean mode, as though he wasn't living in the same century as the other characters.  Not only that, Melville starts giving 'stage directions', and these have a Shakespearean feel to them too, which makes the whole thing stop being a story and begin to be almost a piece of postmodern literature (and I'm not saying that in a complementary way). 

I'll persevere a little longer, in the hope that something actually happens. 

Last night we watched a film called Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.  It was superbly designed: the colour coordination between costumes and scenery in particular was just wonderful.  It was pretty well acted too, given that most of it was a load of old twaddle.  I'm not really sure what it was meant to be about: surely not the idea that a young person can have a change of heart and settle down to a straightforward marriage after having had three affairs on the go at once and being in general a total twat. The change of heart wasn't convincing, because it was supposed to take place during one set of 24 hours, and be initiated by a woman who didn't appear to have all that much nous to begin with. Nevertheless Amy Adams did her utter energetic best as the ditzy girl; Frances McDormand did her best to turn from being a lifeless frump to someone who could let her warmth hang out and make other people feel all cosy; Ciarán Hinds played a bloke who designed women's lingerie but decided to go back to designing men's sox (don't ask me why) - somehow he fell in love with the McDormand character without anything much having clicked between them.  The inimitable Shirley Henderson (known for her role as Moaning Myrtle in the Harry Potter series, though she's had some marvellous parts in other films) played Ciarán's ex-fiancée, and was positively statuesque in spite of her limited height. She stole the show with her stylish playing, I felt, but her character was underdeveloped, and in the end had nowhere to go and dropped out of the movie. 

The sort of movie where you always hoped things would actually get up and go. Nope, they didn't.