Christchurch trip: third post

Yesterday, we got an email from the woman who was coordinating our work in Christchurch.  She listed what we'd achieved while we were there, and it was more than any of us realised, I suspect.  We visited 356 homes (in some cases that meant only that we'd noted the house was still there, or that there was no one at home that day); we delivered firewood to five people; we took baking to quite a few more; at least one lawn was mowed; we invited people to a meal on the Saturday night; some of the team helped pack up a house in preparation for the inside being repaired (it was a house belonging to a couple of people who had a tendency to hoard!); another two took a woman to see her mother who's in a rest home and has Alzheimer's - the woman hadn't been able to do this on her own due to her own health issues; we delivered 60 'snuggle packs' to one particular street; and we made arrangements for around a dozen people to be followed up by the CCR team because of further needs.  That's quite a bit!

On the Saturday morning, in Christchurch, our team was having its usual prayer/discussion/debriefing meeting before we set out for the day.  We'd already done most of what we would contribute during the time, and we were going to be putting on a meal in the evening for some guests.  Originally, Parklands Church had been going to host a 'shindig' (as one person called it) for us, but the person organising it had a nasty fall down some steps (breaking a couple of fingers and badly injuring his knee) and so the idea was put into reverse: we would host the meal instead.  We'd been using Parklands' kitchen facilities for our own meals.

We were expecting some of the leadership team from Parklands (including the guy who'd had the fall), but our own leader had the idea that it would also be good to invite some of those we'd had particular contact with during the week, people from the area where we'd been door-knocking, and people who'd assisted us by providing showers in their homes.  The idea was met with enthusiasm by the team, though personally I was a bit concerned about the logistics - but then I'm a person who likes to have every i dotted, and every t crossed.  The others were a lot more flexible - I learnt a bit about flexibility during the week.

Anyway, various ones headed over to the St Ambrose area again (Aranui and Wainoni) and re-visited some likely guests.  It took a good deal longer to do the rounds of the houses than we expected, but we came away with the possibility of several people attending the meal.  As might be anticipated some of those didn't come in the end, but two women did, and they seemed to enjoy themselves.  One of our team provided the transport for them; they wouldn't have got there otherwise.  All in all we had at least a dozen guests, possibly fifteen.

The meal was a virtual feast.  I mentioned in another post the enthusiasm two of the team in particular brought to cooking and baking.  For this meal, several of the young people got involved as well, and we had a couple of crock-pots of sausages in a sauce, a curry, various roasted vegetables and pumpkin soup.  And there was almost as much pudding or dessert as there was mains: chocolate cheese cake (very rich; quite an indulgent sort of thing!), two choices of ice cream, and more. (The meals we had during the week are blending together in my head a bit, so I can't be as specific as I'd like.)  We even tried to turn some rice that had been left over from a previous meal into a rice pudding (the students in the group had never tried this old-fashioned dessert and weren't desperately keen to start) but something went a bit awry with this.  Perhaps it needed longer in the oven, or needed more milk, or the jam was put in too early.  Suffice to say, it wound up as a left over twice over...

On Sunday morning we completed our time in Christchurch by splitting into two groups.  Five of us went over to St Ambrose's Church and as well as attending their 10 am service, we shared with the congregation a bit of what we'd done during the week.  The other eight stayed at Parklands, and were involved in their service.  

And so home.  The long five/six hour drive back to Dunedin confirmed that I was very tired, even though up until then I was doing pretty well in terms of energy.  When you're doing something different like this, and it requires some rethinking and flexibility (see above), you seem to pull in energy that you might not normally have.  But it catches up on you, of course.  I got home, cleared out the car, had some tea (which my daughter had ready for us) and got in the bath, where I nearly fell asleep while reading.  It might have been a bit of an anticlimax to have drowned in the bath, but so far I've never even dropped a book in the bath, let alone drowned in it....

Cloudstreet

I've known of Tim Winton's book, Cloudstreet, for some years, and even have an idea I began to read it at one point, but I can't have got very far if I did as I have no memory of the story whatsoever.

Last week while in the Library I picked up a DVD of the 2011 mini-series produced from the book.  It remains very faithful to the original story, perhaps helped in part by Winton's own involvement in the script. And from what I can gather, if it hadn't remained faithful, there would have been an uproar, as this book is very highly regarded in Australia as a classic, and is one of their all-time top books.

The three episodes each have their own flavour: the first details the gradual coming together of the Pickles and Lamb families after tragedy has struck both families in different ways: father of three, Sam Pickles, has had all four fingers and part of a thumb chopped off in a work accident, and 'Fish' Lamb has been drowned - and revived in a miracle that turns out to be an enormous test of both families' faith - not just religious faith, but faith in life itself.   As Winton, as narrator, notes in the book: “Life was something you didn't argue with, because when it came down to it, whether you barracked for God or nothing at all, life was all there was. And death.”

Winton is a Christian - check this interview for more information on that - and while his characters struggle with Christianity in any traditional sense, the book and the series are infused with an understanding that there is much more to this world than many modern people are willing to believe.  

This first episode also introduces us to the House around which the remainder of the story is centred.  This House has a past - and also an aboriginal man mysteriously connected to it - though not all the characters meet him face to face.  The House (I capitalise it because it is a character in its own right) is possibly haunted because of what has happened in the past, and makes moanings and peculiar grindings and creakings throughout the story.  

The second episode is rather more sombre in tone, even though several of the younger characters have sexual relationships with other young people during the course of it.  In this episode the nine children have almost all grown up, though Fish remains a child to all intents and purposes because of the brain damage he suffered in his drowning.  His gentle big brother 'Quick' (we're told in the book, but not in the drama, that he wasn't actually quick - it was a mocking kind of nickname; Fish was the quicker, the more intelligent of the two), continues to look after his handicapped brother until he can't take it any more and escapes the family. 

The last episode winds up some of the corners of the plot, reveals some things that make a difference to how we view the characters, and ends spectacularly with a wedding and a birth on the same night. 

The series is superbly acted, in particular by the four actors playing the parents: Essie Davis as the almost perpetually drunk Dolly Pickles, Stephen Curry as the laconic Sam, always on the lookout for luck; New Zealand's Kerry Fox as Oriel Lamb, sporting a broad Australian accent, and gritting her teeth in the face of what life has thrown at her, and Geoff Morrell as her husband, Lester, the man who never quite manages to please his wife in spite of supporting her, loving her and letting her find her own way through her problems over two long decades. 

Lara Robinson and Emma Booth play the older and younger Rose Pickles, both of them bringing an intensity and inner rage to their acting.  Todd Lasance and Callan McAuliffe play the quiet, sincere Quick, who more than once finds himself in a fantastic situation because of his slightly otherworldly brother.  Hugo Johnstone-Burt and Tom Russell play Fish Lamb: both are marvellous in their depiction of someone who has been oxygen-starved and brought back into a world from which he had died.  Johnstone-Burt in particular gets to grips with showing us the frustrations of a life lived only partly as it should be, alongside the joy of being a child in a man's garb and the belief that all things are possible: a talking pig, a dog rescued from the middle of nowhere in a 'boat' that's actually only a box and which is nowhere near water, being able to hear the sounds of the house and know its pain, plucking stars from the sky.  In this story, many strange things happen, and curiously, some of the more prosaic characters actually experience them or see the consequences of them.  It isn't just Fish Lamb who's attuned to a different world.  Winton's universe is one which requires us to realise that however 'natural' or 'scientific' this world may be, it often exposes itself as something much more mysterious. 

The production values in this series are top-notch: the photography captures the beauty of the world, and the strangeness of the house, and the people inhabiting it.  The cast are uniformly excellent, with not a weak performance in sight.  The world of the late forties and fifties are visible in every costume, prop and set.  In fact, so evocative was it, that I was continually reminded of my own childhood, not just because of the settings but because of the behaviour of the people.  Time and again I was reminded of the way my uncles and aunts and cousins behaved, the stance, the postures, the gritty faces, the expressions that came out of their mouths, the sounds that came out of their mouths, the perpetual cigarettes, that freedom of life we enjoyed in that time, when children could go off on their own for hours and no one would be troubled about where they were.  

This was a treat to watch.  

Still Walking

Having watched one Japanese movie (Tokyo Story) a couple of days ago, it was interesting to watch another, Still Walking, last night.  Still Walking was released in 2008, so it's nearly fifty years younger than the other movie.  Yet it has lots of connections, and seemingly the director, Hirokazu Kore-eda has used Tokyo Story as a kind of model for his movie.

Both are about families, and a visit by one part of the family to another: in the first the parents went to visit their various children; in the later movie, the children come to the parents for the anniversary of the death of the oldest son, who died saving a boy from drowning.   So there's an absent, deceased son in both the stories too.  And a daughter who speaks her mind and doesn't mince words.

In the earlier movie, the parents are a lovely couple who've grown past disputes and bitterness.  In this movie, the father is constantly bitter - pretty much at everyone (he's the sort that would never buy anniversary gifts for wife) - and his wife, until late in the movie, seems to be a lovely woman, always feeding everyone and been the hostess.  However, after a visit from the boy who was saved from drowning (he's invited every year) she nags on about how fat he's become and how untidy and how little he's made of himself as a young adult.  And then she goes on to tell her other son that she only invites the young man to vent her anger on how much she hates him for being alive when her son is dead.

The son she tells this to is a struggling artist, reduced to doing restoration work when he can find it.  He's a great disappointment to his retired doctor father, but he's the most sympathetic character in the movie, a man not only struggling with his job but with his fairly recent marriage to a young widow.  She has a young son that he's having to get to know as well.  (Interestingly, he's far more European-looking than anyone else in the movie.)

The daughter is another one of these blunt characters who's happy to move on and leave the deceased brother behind.  In fact she and her husband are planning to move in with the parents and remodel the house to suit their needs.  This doesn't seem to be being met with much favour, and we never find out whether they actually go ahead with this.  She has a bit of a dope of a husband, although he's a lot more fun than his counterpart in Tokyo Story.


It's an interesting movie, but not as engaging as its older 'brother' because there's a lot more bitterness floating around and much less warmth and humour.  I enjoyed it, but it leaves a fair amount of gloom in its wake.

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape

We watched the film What’s Eating Gilbert Grape again while we were in Valencia, courtesy of our host’s DVD collection. I hadn’t seen it for some time – think I caught up with in on television once – and was keen to see it again, having had fond memories of its quirky approach and intriguing characters.

Furthermore I remembered that Leonardo di Caprio was very impressive in it. He still is. I don’t know that he’s ever done anything better. Di Caprio, who was only 19 at the time the movie was made, plays a mentally handicapped 18-year-old, and conveys the behaviour of such a person with such ease and assurance that the first time around I thought the actor must have been handicapped himself (not having realized it was di Caprio). Before this, he’d hardly been in movies at all; his acting life was in television in such programmes as Parenthood, Santa Barbara, Growing Pains, and even one episode of Roseanne. After Gilbert Grape he barely looked back, and was a super star within half a decade.

Johnny Depp was thirty when he made the movie, but plays someone who’s presumably in his early twenties. Before this he’d made a number of movies, but apart from one they were nothing to write home about, and he’d had appeared for some time in a tv series called 21 Jump St. The one memorable movie prior to Gilbert Grape was the strange Edward Scissorhands, his first collaboration with Tim Burton. A cartoon story performed by real life actors, it’s an extraordinary piece.

Gilbert Grape is full of scenes that stick in the memory: the husband drowning in a foot-deep paddle pool; di Caprio climbing the water tower; the mother climbing the stairs at the end or coming to rescue her ‘baby’. But a scene I’d forgotten was when the husband, an insurance salesman, tries to sell life insurance to Gilbert, who has just been with his wife, with whom he’s been having a rather one-sided affair. On the whole life insurance, for most of us, doesn’t rank highly on our priorities in life, and it’s the same with Gilbert, who actually thinks he’s seeing the man because the latter knows about the affair. It turns out altogether differently for Gilbert and the audience; like so many scenes in the film things aren’t quite what they seem and take different directions to what we expect.

Lasse Hallström as a director doesn’t usually grab me – his version of The Shipping News was a disaster from my point of view – but in this film he has everything in place. I don’t think he’s ever made another film to equal it.