The need for exercise...or not

This may be a revised version of one of my Column 8 pieces, though it seems mostly to be as originally written. 

Practice makes perfect. If you don't use it, you'll lose it. So they say.

Some time ago a member of our family purchased a set of exercise DVDs with the aim of building up her/his muscles. I'm not allowed to be more specific about which family member it was, but the DVDs gave a real boost in the physical department.

She/he disciplined him/herself, getting up at the crack of dawn every morning to chug through those demanding exercises - while the demonstrator chauntered through a flow of esteem-building speeches.

Various other members of the family gave the exercises a go - with varying degrees of success. Still, I don't think any set of DVDs has ever had more use in our house. Certainly the original purchaser got value for money.

While everyone else tackled the exercises, I didn't. I was still walking to work every morning: a sufficient, demanding-enough exercise, and pleasant. A good way to allow the early-morning-family-arousing-stresses to flit off like startled sparrows. I use to run most of the way, but my legs had begun to find pounding down the hills jarred the hips and knees.

Still, the walk was enough to keep me fit, I said.

If so, why did I find my knees creaked more when I knelt - and it was more difficult hoisting myself up again? (If I could rouse the body to such a level of enthusiasm as to want to get up again.)

Why did the floor seem further away when I bent to pick up bits of paper or safety pins? And why did it take three attempts to grasp them?

Why did I have to sit a little further back from the steering wheel than before, and find the pedals further away? Why did the plate on the meal table seem not quite where it used to be? (‘There's many a slip twixt cup and lip’ was finally starting to make sense.)

Why did I feel like a formerly deft and agile adolescent struggling with clumsy-making growth spurts?

Lack of exercise.

My family has been nagging - sorry, encouraging - me, for some time, to do some exercise. (There's particular concern that they can't see the telly if I'm standing just to one side of it.) So the other night I began the exercises, in company with a couple of other family members who'd done them before, and wanted to get back into them again.

I enjoyed the exercises which required me to lie on the floor, because at least I didn't have to keep my body vertical at the same time, but I wasn't too fussed about the exercises that seemed akin to some of the spine-dislocating, hip-unhinging and bone-crackling one of my children does in modern dancing.

I know these exercises will do me good.  (I used to have a best friend who was always telling me things he suggested would do me good.)  I know that if I play difficult music on the piano, and work at it, even if I can't play it up to speed, I'll have fingers that move when I want them to, instead of fingers that ice-skate across the keys because they can't be bothered to dig their nails in.

I know if I'd kept at that memory course that now sits gathering dust on the shelf, I'd be remembering all the names of the people I want to remember - including the name of my grandson which had gone completely from my mind when I woke last Saturday.

And I know if I write a blog post a day, (inspired or not), I'll produce new ones with half the sweat and strain they usually require.

I think.

But I don't like doing these exercises. They make me feel a hundred and fifty, they make me feel as though I'm no longer capable of any physical effort - and I am! I really am!! - they make me feel that if I have to hear that trainer's voice one more time burbling visualisation babble I'll smash his fancy face in.

Apparently Henry Ford didn't say history is bunk, he claimed exercise was. "If you're healthy," he said, "you don't need it. If you're sick, you shouldn't take it."

How (ouch! oooof!) true.

Some information comes to light on the composer Donald Ford

Back in 2012 I wrote a post in which I wondered about Donald Ford, the composer of the delightful song, To Daffodils. I couldn't find any more on Google about this man except that he'd written He is Tender with the Beasts, Nod, and Romance, to words by Wilfred Gibson, Walter de la Mare and Robert Stevenson respectively. There was also a list of ten pieces for children on the Presto Classical site. 

Since then I've had some acquaintance with the song, Nod, which I can't say is my all-time favourite: it has an intentionally dreamy accompaniment which isn't much fun for the pianist to play. So be it. 

Anyway, a curious thing happened in relation to that original blog post, which I'll kind of have to work backwards in telling you about. The other day, while reading the paper, I discovered that on the Facebook site, under the Direct Messages area, there's an 'Other' section. I think FB mostly uses this to throw spam items in, but occasionally a post from a real person gets stuck in there unwittingly. 

Because I'd never known about this section, I'd never checked it, and seemingly FB doesn't notify you about it - though that may be because I haven't clicked something somewhere in their system. Anyway, after reading about the Other section I had a look, and found a message from someone that had been written two years ago! They'd probably thought I was very rude for not responding. 

It said: Mike, Read your bit about the Donald Ford "mystery" - he's no mystery, he's my uncle. And you are right, he wrote a host of songs, some sung [and recorded] by Dame Janet Baker and John McCormack. I have copies of most of them, and have recorded them myself. If you need info I have it...His son was my cousin Barry Ford, old child actor, London theatrical agent and casting director for ITV before retirement. 

This note came from Angela Byerley Haw, and I've since got in touch with her and found out some more about the talented Ford family. She's sent me some more information on Donald Ford and other members of the family. The following paragraphs are an edited version of what she sent to me. 

Donald Ford was born in 1891 at Forest Gate London, and died in 1966 in London. He published a little book about accompanying voices, and did some choral direction. He worked for Chappell and Co in London, and they had a huge fire in the 20s or 30s which destroyed some of his work. 'Family talk indicated Chappells was not good to him.' [The only fire I can find that Chappell's had was in the sixties, but there may have been an earlier one too.]

Donald's brother Aubrey was a violinist and died young, and his older brother Leslie was a well known painter mostly of 'Thames river scenes, views of barges etc, and had a rather dark character.' You can see Leslie Ford briefly in this old Pathe movie from 1956. He's the one with the cigarette butt on his lip. 

One of Don's Ford nephews was also a painter of greater achievement, and at one time painted commissions for Harrods. He was Marcus Ford. Don's only child, Barry Ford, was Angela's first cousin through his mother, Angela's Aunt Elsie Byerley Ford. 'Barry died in 2004, after many years in the theatre business, and as a casting director. 'The whole family as well as the Byerleys were a jolly bunch, all very talented in the arts and musical performance.' 

In another note, Angela wrote that Ford was quite a prolific composer, and wrote a great deal of music for children - mostly choral works - as well as educational music for those learning to play the piano. She also recorded some of his music for her cousin, Barry. 'I remember [Donald] accompanying me on the piano, for "A Song of Homecoming", an appropriate choice, in 1963, on my first trip back to England after nine years in the USA, and he was at the airport to meet me.' (Angela still lives in the USA, and is about to make her 'last trip' back to the UK.)

Don married Angela's aunt Elsie Byerley, a woman who shared his musical passion, as did the entire Byerley family, who were old friends and neighbours of the Fords in Forest Gate. Donald also wrote some casual pieces of note much value in order to make some money, under the name of Harner Williams, a combination of the names of his mother's side of his family.

It's been great to find out more about this talented man, and his equally talented family, and perhaps more will come to light in due course. 

Tosh times two

I've mentioned before that we've been getting quite a few DVDs from the Public Library, and that often we turn up a gem that's not previously been known. Not always.

I was in a bit of a hurry the other day , so I grabbed two films that seemed to hold some hope of being worth watching. Piffle. Both of them were twaddle. The first was a 1989 TV movie called The Shell Seekers, which was based on the very popular book of the same name. Angela Lansbury starred as an older woman who'd just had a minor heart attack and wanted to get back on with life while two of her three adult children seemed to think it was about time she sold off her prized possessions and gave the dosh to them. Lansbury, who was hardly old at the time the film was made (63 or 64), was at least twice given the line, "I'm sixty-three years old...etc" as though this was something of importance. So what, was the audience reaction. The film was otherwise notable for some weakish acting, particularly from the girl playing the teenage having her first love affair; she wasn't helped by the young man playing her opposite - he was required to be as dull as ditchwater by the script, it seemed. The character motivations were suspect throughout - poor Patricia Hodge, now playing the manic mother in Miranda, was the middle child of the family, the one supposedly loved more than the others. She was written as a sympathetic character throughout, until the final scene in which she suddenly seemed to have a change of heart and became almost as grasping as her brother and sister.  More than enough said.

The second film was such a piece of nonsense that it's not surprising it took five scriptwriters to try and cobble it into some sort of shape. Cowboys and Aliens concerns a man (Daniel Craig) in the Wild West who wakes up with a solid metal cuff around his wrist that does strange things when he's least expecting it. He's lost his memory, for the most part, so he can't explain where the thing came from. Arriving in the nearest town he and the townsfolk, including Harrison Ford as the local bully rancher, are attacked from the skies by some weird flying things which lasso various characters and haul them off behind their planes. Surprisingly this doesn't kill any of them, though it does leave them a little stunned. The remaining townsfolk go after the aliens who are eventually found holed up in a massive rocket-like ship in the middle of the desert. They're pulling ground out of the ground, literally.

The humans include Craig and Ford, but also a strange woman who seems to know more than she lets on (she turns out to be some sort of alien too, though rather more friendly than nasty, animal-like ones). There's the obligatory 'Doc' who can't shoot a gun, but learns to; the boy who has to become a 'man'; the preacher, who plainly never went near any decent seminary, if what he spouts as Christianity is anything to go by; the half-breed who hero-worships Ford from afar, as it were, and turns out be more of a son than Ford's real boy (his opening stunt is to shoot the windows out of the saloon). Then there are a band of rustlers/hold-up men, and a band of Indians. Somehow they all come together for the big piece at the end, by which time we're laughing our heads off at the absurdity of it all.

Craig plays 007 with a Wild West accent, and a terrible hat, and burning eyes. Ford chaunters around the place barking at everyone, getting particularly annoying when he won't wait for the half-breed to translate from Indian into English, and consequently having to have stuff repeated to him. Olivia Wilde plays the helpful alien, and a bunch of other well-known faces have appearances of various lengths. Total Tosh.

Slipping, sliding away

One of the things I dislike about getting old is losing elasticity. There's nothing much you can do about it; even spending all day at the gym won't stop muscles from becoming less springy and vital (I haven't actually tried this, but I suspect it's the case). Things just wear out, and you kinda have to get over it, I guess.

I remember seeing the fourth in the Indiana Jones series of movies - which was made much later than the others, at the time Harrison Ford was around 65 or 66 - and noting that when he was required to leap upwards from one crate to another, he plainly found it difficult. Why they didn't use a double I don't know, since he was seen from the back at that point, as I recall. But I sympathised with him not a little.

Recovering your balance is part of this issue. A while ago my wife and I (and the dog) went for a walk and found ourselves, somewhat by accident, walking alongside the railway track at Caversham. The path, such as it was, was fairly rough, overgrown and brambly. We decided, on hearing the train coming along the track, that it might be wise to move up the bank and away from the tracks. I headed up first, full of my usual youthful confidence, grabbed at a bush to haul myself up, missed my hold, tumbled backwards down the slope, with my head towards the tracks. It wasn't that I was in any danger of being run over, but it was embarrassing being seen sliding headfirst down an easily-climbed slope by a trainful of passengers. My wife was more concerned than I was; I hadn't actually done any damage to anything except my dignity.  It didn't help that I was trying to hold the dog's lead at the same time, and wasn't sure where he'd got to in the melee. 

What was painful to discover, however, was the fact that I just didn't have the means to avert the fall. In the past, once I'd lost my grip on the bush, I would have saved myself from falling by swivelling my body around, or doing some other adjusting manoeuvre [manoeuvre isn't a word I can ever spell easily]. That just didn't happen.

Yesterday, while I was out weeding the garden, I banged my head on one of the struts that support one of the two heat pump machines we've got outside. Why these struts have to stick out and catch unwary elderly people I don't know - it's not the first time I've been caught. Fortunately I had my hat on and that saved any really serious damage. I think.

The problem was that instead of reacting by stepping backwards without any problem - except that of saying Ouch or something equivalent - I toppled backwards, couldn't recover my balance, and fell into a gooseberry bush. Yup, a gooseberry bush, which obliged me by prickling me wherever it could. In the past I wouldn't have come into contact with the bush, and I wouldn't have yet again lost my sense of dignity (not that anyone else was around). But for some reason known only to my legs, they just gave up the fight and dropped me in a heap. Very unfriendly of them, though perhaps the fact that I've been running and walking on them for nearly 70 years has something to do with it.

One could offer the advice: don't grow old. However, like it or not, I have, and plainly I'm going to have to work out ways to avoid sliding, falling, banging my head or otherwise damaging myself. May take a bit of effort.

Who was Donald Ford?

I'm due to play for a young singer tomorrow at the Dunedin Singing Competitions.  We've got half a dozen songs up our sleeves, so it's going to be a reasonably busy day.

One of the songs is a lovely piece called To Daffodils.  The words are by Robert Herrick and the music is by Donald Ford.  Herrick, of course, is a reasonably well-known poet from the 17th century, a vicar by calling and the writer of some 2,500 poems.   His career as a clergyman was interrupted for fourteen years during the English Civil War, and used the interim to write and publish some of his poetry.  His clergy status was restored in 1662, but it seems that much of the focus of his life resided in his poetic work, even though in his time he was not widely acknowledged.  He died an old man of 83.

There's a good deal known about Herrick.  Donald Ford, however, is a mystery.  A friend had thought that he'd written another song,  A Soft Day, which has a similar warmth and feeling, but it turns out this is by Charles Stanford.   Ford is credited with writing He is Tender with the Beasts, Nod, and Romance, to words by Wilfred Gibson, Walter de la Mare and Robert Stevenson respectively.   There's also a list of ten pieces that appear to be for children on this site which may or may not be by him, though it's probable it's the same composer.

Other than that he seems invisible.  I'd be really interested to find out more about him, but even Google seems flummoxed by this request.

For the sake of the Green Card

Watched a movie called Crossing Over on DVD last night, and kept thinking about my son, who's living in the US these days all the time - on a Green Card.   The film is a drama about immigration in the States, about deportations and illegal immigrants and people who aren't legal themselves but have children born in the country who are automatically citizens and so on.  Harrison Ford is in it as an immigration policeman, Cliff Curtis (an Arab this time) is his partner, and there are a host of other bodies, including Ray Liotta (looking curiously seedy throughout), Ashley Judd and Jim Sturgess in smaller roles.  It's one of those films where several stories are begun and then gradually begin to intersect; not always without coincidence.

There's an underlying sense of violence in it, though the occasion on which this really shows up is when an Asian youth caught up with a gang doing a liquor store robbery nearly kills a female customer - his mate has already shot the store owner, and none of the gang apart from the boy survive the incident.  And there are some unnecessary (to my mind) sex scenes: not just the usual we-have-to-show-you-the-characters-at-it but conversations held with the characters in the nude, and a later scene in which two lovers are shot while in flagrante delicto  (which I've just learned means in blazing offence, something I'd never known before).  To my mind forcing actors to converse with each other while they're naked does nothing for their ability to put the scene across successfully.  There was a terrible scene in an otherwise very good TV play quite a few years ago in which the woman was astride the man, in bed, and they had a conversation about politics throughout the we-have-to-show-you-the-characters-at-it scene.  For me, it's just an embarrassment to watch scenes shot in this way, and the fast forward on the remote is very handy.  We-have-to-show-you-the-characters-at-it scene are like those ones that take place in men's toilets, in front of the urinals; that idea, perhaps novel when it was first done, seems to me to have been well and truly overdone, and was probably never very effective in the first place.  (In my experience, men don't tend to linger around urinals having conversations, but maybe New Zealanders are different.)

Anyway, apart from all this, there are some very emotional moments in this movie: a family split apart, another made new; a young man wounded by his girlfriend's casual attitude to prostituting herself in order to get a Green Card, and the scene in which Cliff Curtis faces up to what his brother has done - for the sake of 'family.'   There's also one funny scene in which Jim Sturgess, trying to convince an immigration person that he's Jewish enough to work at a Jewish school (he isn't), is rescued by an elderly Rabbi, in a moment of grace.

In fact there's a good deal of grace exhibited throughout the movie: Harrison Ford is a man who does his job but hates what it does to the people, and he attempts to reunite a Mexican woman and her child when they've become separated by the system.  It's way beyond the call of duty, but he has that kind of integrity as a person.  (It's what Ford does well, of course.)  Grace is given in enormous measure by Cliff Curtis to the Asian boy, a grace that he not only doesn't deserve, but almost throws away.  Quite a picture of the sort of redemption each of us receives from God, if we're willing to take Him up on it.

Made in Dagenham

We watched Made in Dagenham last night (thankfully, they didn't go all clever and call it Maid in Dagenham, which must have been a temptation, I'm sure.)   Even though it's based on a real-life event, a strike by the women workers at Ford's car factory in Dagenham, the story arc is as traditional as a thousand other movies that involve someone who doesn't think they've got much going for them deciding to stand up for their rights (Mr Deeds Goes to Washington, to name just one famous example).   So you know that once Sally Hawkins (playing Rita O'Grady - the real O'Grady appears in the film clips during the credits) gets her mettle up, it'll be click/click/click and all the nasty blokes holding the women back will go toppling like ninepins.  You know that there'll be a scene where her husband finally breaks down from being tolerant and gets mad, and then has to be told he has no reason to get mad, and that he's not a saint, and that a few scenes later he'll be apologising for being a twat and will be backing her to the hilt.  You know that one of the women will try to use the situation for her own ends, and will be brought back into the fold.  And you know that it'll all end happily ever after (this isn't Italian neo-realist moviemaking, after all).

If I sound cynical, it's only because there is a degree of predictability in the movie, and there were times when you wish the filmmakers had given the thing a bit more edge.   Seeing the real-life participants in those final clips, you wonder what they thought of what had been done to their story, which is treated fairly light-heartedly throughout (even given the situation, and a suicide late in the piece).   Having to strip down to your underwear in the factory because it was so hot in the summertime, or putting up umbrellas in the winter because of the leaking roof has a certain humour, but the reality would have been much less pleasant.  And that horrible moment (it happens two or three times) when there's a loud switching-on noise, and all the sewing machines suddenly come to life and expect the women to get on, like it or not, is something that's just accepted.  The feeling of being chained to those sewing-machines is never explored.  Perhaps there's a different movie - a neo-realist one - waiting to be made.  In the meantime, we have The Full Monty version (which also had a suicide, as I recall, but still managed to remain a comedy) and on its own merits this is an enjoyable movie.  After all, every one of us likes to see the underdog biting the heels of the bullies and overlords (including, here, Richard Schiff as Ford's American pit bull terrier - sans his usual beard, and with a wig covering his normal baldness).  The fact that those nasty overlords can be really vicious is only hinted at.  The winners here - we know it all along - are the 187 women who went on strike.  (The only time they don't win - at least initially - is in relation to a bullying school teacher played by Andrew Lincoln; he has one scene and leaves the otherwise garrulous Sally Hawkins speechless.)

Hawkins isn't my favourite actress.  There's no doubt she has bundles of talent, and uses her oddly-shaped face to considerable advantage.   However, when I twigged where I'd seen her before, as Poppy in Mike Leigh's Happy-go-Lucky, and remembered how we nearly went mad watching the manic performance she gave there, it was hard to see her objectively in this movie.  Some of Poppy's endless twitches, giggles and wriggles appear in this role too, though they're toned down considerably.  This is a problem when an actor appears in a role that you dislike; it can be hard to see them clearly in any other part.  Danny de Vito is a case in point, for me; I don't know what film it was that I first saw him in, but it put me off him almost completely - plus the fact that he does tend to play obnoxious little men.  And yet when he appeared briefly in an interview recently (he'd been voicing the Spanish version of The Lorax), he came across as a genuine, humble man, one who's been married happily to his wife of many years.  A complete opposite to the (often venal) characters he usually plays.   When I think about what I've just said, my comments are further undercut by the part Bob Hoskins plays in Made in Dagenham: he's another actor who's played some roles that have set my teeth on edge; here he's just wonderful.  Redeems himself!  LOL.

There's a wonderful moment towards the end of the movie, when Miranda Richardson, playing the inimitable Barbara Castle (no mean promoter of women's rights herself) comments to Hawkins about the dress she's wearing, which the latter admits she has to return from on loan when she gets back.   Richardson mentions the 'label' - it's been commented on a couple of times before in the movie - and Hawkins says about Richardson's dress: Isn't that a C&A? C&A is the equivalent of Marks and Spencer's: good, solid workaday clothing, but hardly fashionable.  Richardson says it is: she gets all her clothes from there.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to DC shoes.  The only connection here is that they're an item of clothing.  I wondered when I first saw the name whether they were shoes that you wore if you were travelling to Washington DC, or were the kind of thing politicians would favour when trotting through the Capitol Building.  In fact the DC stands for Droors Clothing, a label that's no longer in existence, I'm told.

As you can see from the picture, you'd have to be a fairly unconventional US politician to wear these around the Senate, though they might be comfortable enough.

Off-screen, on-screen

Out this morning to watch part of my grandson's soccer game (he scored a goal, obligingly, while I was watching) and to walk the dog from Chingford Park to the Gardens shopping centre and back.   We'd been out with my son and his family last night - they shouted us a meal (paid for it, in case you're not familiar with the term 'shouted') - and he was saying that it seemed all we do was sit in front of computers and screens and hand-held devices and we never seemed to get out into the real world.  So I did some real world stuff this morning and walked the dog for nearly an hour, and watched 14 boys and a couple of girls play soccer.  The real world proved itself fit and well and able to provide a chill factor of I-don't-know-what, but it was pretty cold if you were standing still...which I wasn't because I was walking the dog, at least initially.  

Curiously enough there's a review of a book in the ODT this morning saying the same sort of thing as my son. The book is called iDisorder: understanding our obsession with technology and overcoming its hold on us.  Personally, if the book's anything like its subtitle, I suspect it's slightly overstating its case.  Yes, we do spend a lot of time in front of screens - for some of us that's our job (or has been) - but the real humans in our lives seem perfectly capable of getting our attention when they want to, and we theirs.  The real world is fit and well, I think.  I've had lunch with two guys this week, and coffee with a third, along with the meal we had out last night at which there were eight of us (and two iPads, and three iPhones).  I also spent two plus hours at the Dental School this week with real patients and real dentists (and was reading a non-Kindle book as well).  Last Monday I played at a concert for people in the Stroke Club.  We're going to see the Nuggets play tonight, and heading off to church tomorrow (where we'll assist with a very interactive church lunch) and then in the late afternoon I'm going to sing at Sunny Side Up's practice.   And if you'd asked me I would have thought I spend quite a bit of time in front of screens.  Perhaps I'm not so technology-obsessed as it seems. 

Seems like I have plenty of real life pedestrian bridges to the outside world.

Anyway, that wasn't really what I was going to talk about.  I was going to mention a couple more movies that I've watched this week - yup, both on screens (!)  The first of these was a fairly recent sci-fi style movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal (pronounced jill-en-hall, according to imdb.com).  It's called Source Code, and involves some real flimflam science (told us at considerable speed so that we don't have time to think too hard) about the brain having eight minutes of leftover information that can be accessed after a person has died.  Considering that the brain can't even retain more than seven numbers in its short term memory, on average, retaining eight minutes of not especially important stuff seems unlikely.  But the filmmakers manage to get away with this by having poor old Jake repeatedly going through the same sequence of events over and over in order to find out where a bomb has been planted on a train.  There's more to it than that, but I won't spoil it for you.  This is a movie worth watching, because it has some nice surprises.  And no bad language (it occurred to me after I'd been watching The Social Network the other day, that no one swore in it, or if they did it was fairly mild.  Which just goes to show that scriptwriters don't have to include endless foul language just because people in real life use it.)

Jake's supporting cast includes the delightful Michelle Monaghan, the versatile Vera Farmiga, and Jeffrey Wright, who manages to overcome the fact that the scriptwriters keep on avoiding having him telling the truth about what's going on, and who is saddled with a walking stick and glasses that seem to serve no functional purpose except to show he's a (slightly mad) scientist.  

The other movie was The Searchers, the old John Wayne/John Ford combo that had a depth and sensitivity in it that wasn't always a feature of Wayne movies.  He plays himself, as always, succinct in speech, mostly unemotional when others are losing their cool, obstinate and determined.  But he's in a story that's mostly strongly written, and is surrounded by a superb cast of Ford regulars and sundry others who do a great job.  I saw The Searchers years ago, but so strong is the long opening sequence that most of it remained in my mind.  In this section, Ethan (Wayne) returns home to his brother (and his brother's family) after years of being away in the American Civil War.  He's enthusiastically greeted by all the family: his sister-in-law, his two young nieces (one a teenager, the other around ten), his teenage nephew, and Martin Pawley, a part-Indian youth who's been adopted by the family (he's played very well by Jeffrey Hunter - who would one day play Jesus Christ in King of Kings).  This group of people are beautifully drawn and we become fond of them in the short time we get to know them.  There's a brief interruption as Ward Bond and his Texas Rangers come for a coffee.  Bond is loud and shatters the quiet of the family with enthusiastic ease, and each of his Rangers is a character in his own right. We become more familiar with them as the film goes on. They've come to report that Lars Jorgenson's cattle has been rustled by a group of Comanche, and Bond co-opts Ethan and Pawley into his Texas Rangers posse to get the cattle back. They leave, but by evening there's something ominous in the air.  A murdering bunch of Comanche come to the isolated farm and wipe out all but the two daughters, whom they capture.  The leader of these Indians is actually played by a German-born actor, known by this time as Henry Brandon, but born as Heinrich von Kleinbach.  (He played an Indian in another Ford movie as well.)

The rest of the film relates, for the most part, to the long search that Ethan and Pawley undertake in order to bring back the two girls.  At first they're accompanied by the older girl's boyfriend (played by Harry Carey Jr - he turned up as an 'old timer' in the last of the Back to the Future movies); he's the son of Lars Jorgenson.  When finding out that his beloved has been killed by the Indians he races madly into the Indian camp and is killed.  There's an interlude in which the two men come to the Jorgenson farm some time later and we learn that Pawley has been the long-time boyfriend of the Jorgenson daughter (played by Vera Miles, with great energy and gusto).  She almost persuades him to stay and become a farmer in partnership with Jorgenson, but the call of the search draws him away again.  By the time he returns she's just about to marry another fellow played by Ken Curtis with an over-the-top 'gosh gee' manner.  The wedding that doesn't happen is one of the less tense and more hilarious scenes in the movie.  

Eventually they find the Comanche again, and eventually (after five years!) they rescue the girl, who's now a teenager.  There's some debate about whether she'll survive the actual rescue, given Ethan's rather ambiguous attitude to her, but she does.  (She's played by a young Natalie Wood, and in the only moment of real inauthenticity in the movie, she appears with lipstick and plucked eyebrows and mascara, in spite of having been part of the Indian tribe for several years.)

It's a long movie, with plenty of time for detail, particularly from the excellent cast.  (There's even a late addition to the characters, a young Cavalry lieutenant, played delightfully by one of Wayne's own sons, Patrick Wayne.)  The scenery is magnificent, much of it in Monument Valley, the place that frequently appeared in Ford movies.  The photography is superb and the colour is as up to date as a modern movie.  And it's full of humour, with Ethan's 'That'll be the day' being the laconic answer to several angry outbursts from other characters.  

The five-year search might seem a bit over the top as an idea, but somehow it's made to work.  Wayne's attitude of stuff-everything-else is a great part of that workability.  And there's no doubt, in the light of this movie, that he was one of the great Hollywood stars.  

Goodies and baddies

We watched Air Force One again last night; I’d forgotten how jingoistic it is.

Near the beginning Harrison Ford (playing the President of the USA) gives a speech (in Russia) saying how he won’t stand for little terrorists taking over as presidents of little countries and the US will step in and stop them! And it goes on in like fashion throughout.

We’ve already seen the US SAS-equivalent flying in and capturing one of these little terrorists while shooting everyone else in sight (of course these people don't count; they're just unnamed guards 1 through to 20, and no one cares that they might be real human beings). One never gets to sympathise in any way with the baddies: Gary Oldman is the main baddie and he has some very nasty scenes, which only make us hate him more and more.

Of course it’s very excitingly done, and is full of tension (Wolfgang Petersen at his best). Harrison Ford does his usual steely-eyed stuff at the crucial moments (see picture), and it’s a wonder the baddies don’t turn into butter and melt away. And not only is he the President he’s also a Father and a Husband. Oldman tries to get in a word edgeways about being a 'father' too (with three little kiddies), but you know he doesn’t have a capital F on his version of 'father.'

A couple of quotes from reviews about this movie:

The two hours of this movie felt like such an eternity that I was certain my clothes were going to be out of style by the time it was over. [Charles Taylor in Salon.com]

The movie also resurrects that ancient and dependable standby, the Choosing of the Wires. In countless other movies, the bomb squad hesitates between ``Red . . . or black? Red . . . or black''). This is a big-budget movie and presents us with five wires. It's an emergency, and the president needs to decide which two he should connect. See if you can guess the right two colors. The choices are green, yellow, red, white and blue. [Roger Ebert]

Morning Glory

Over the last week and a bit I've been away on holiday, so blogging has gone off the radar completely. Which isn't a bad thing, and I haven't actually missed it particularly. However, it's nice to get back to doing some writing, even though taking a break from that too has been fine.

Anyway, while we were in Wellington over the weekend, we went to the movies - mainly to rest our weary feet, I think. The choices weren't great, or else the times weren't convenient, so we wound up seeing Morning Glory with Rachel McAdams, Harrison Ford and Diane Keaton.

Keaton, who's a superb actress in the right roles, seems these days to play dopey characters with issues. However, given the material she has in this script, she does it perfectly, and is often very funny. Ford plays Mr Grump of the Year - or the Third Worst Person on the Planet, as one of the other characters describes him (the underused Patrick Wilson, who's supposed to be the hunk in the story, but gets no room to develop his character in any great way). Ford doesn't have to do much except be grumpy, and he does this very well. He's probably relieved that he never has to walk at more than a snail's pace - at 68 it's definitely time for him to hang up the action hero hat. (There was a noticeable moment early on in his last Indiana Jones movie, where he was required to jump up from one tall box to another. As a fellow-sexagenarian I could feel his - and see- pain.)

Rachel McAdams, who's not an actress I've really come across before, (though she was in the Sherlock Holmes movie that came out a year or so ago, but I think there she was struggling to be seen amongst all the hamming-up done by the two male leads) here plays an 'energiser Bunny' as Roger Ebert puts it. Quite honestly, she drove me a bit batty: she was supposed to have great talent, but was such a ditz that you had to wonder how the talent could shine through. Anyway, she's the lead, and she has a ball with her kookie character. I'd hate to come within a hundred miles of the person she plays, but that's okay, I'm not likely to, since this person gets up at 1.30 am every day to go and produce a breakfast 'news' program. Whether what they do is 'news' is what the movie is partly about, and is the source of Ford's character's issues. The former NZ Breakfast Show presenter Paul Henry was widely regarded a plonker after what he said about the Indian politician and the Governor General, but it's likely that most of the characters in Morning Glory would approve him entirely. He'd certainly fit in with their mentality.

There are few serious moments in the movie, when one character actually faces up to another with the truth, but the truth usually gets whizzed out the window a few seconds later.

I think we were probably too tired to enjoy this for what it is, but at least in the dark of the theatre we could take our shoes off without anyone noticing, and rest our weary feet.

Blade Runner re-viewed

I watched Blade Runner again last night - seems to be a season of catching up on older movies. It was listed as the 'Final Cut' and certainly, even though it's quite a few years since I first saw the film, there were scenes that didn't seem familiar at all. Whether that was just memory or alteration I'm not sure.

The story, when you think about it, can be summed up very easily. Four baddies on the loose. Kill them. The Harrison Ford character, Deckard, changes very little from the beginning to the end - if anything, he's even less enamoured of the job than he was at the beginning (we're not given any indication as to why he should have to go ahead with his particular job, since he's 'retired'). He has a sort of relationship with a girl, who is a 'replicant' - or human-like robot of the most sophisticated kind - and it kind of goes somewhere, but really has to struggle to hold its own with the violent episodes that are required to dispose of the four nasty replicants who are on the loose and shouldn't be.

The hunting down of the four replicants is pretty haphazard when you think about it. Deckard somehow finds a bit of reptile skin which he knows is synthetic, and this somehow leads him to the first of the replicants, a woman (Joanna Cassidy) doing some kind of sleazy act with the synthetic, but very lifelike snake. (Fortunately we don't get to see the act.) She cottons onto his cheesy performance as some kind of pervert inspector, and lands him a couple of solid blows to the neck (I think). But Deckard is a Dick Francis type of hero: you can mutilate him to within an inch of his life and he'll be back on his feet in minutes. He chases her and shoots her. Hmm, not much detective work there. The second replicant then finds him, and again practically kills him, and is shot in turn by the 'good' replicant girlfriend. Seems she can do anything if she's programmed for it, even things she didn't know she could do, like playing the piano.

The last two nasties, played by Daryl Hannah and Rutger Hauer (whose English varies between clear and incomprehensible) are the strangest of the lot. Hannah's character is plain oddball, and, if I got it right, a kind of killing machine. Hauer has a bit of a poet's heart, but isn't averse to doing the nastiest murder in the film. Hannah meets a frenetic, screaming end - and boy are we glad to see the end of her. She's just creepy.

Hauer is perhaps creepier, sometimes seeming to have popped over from the set of some horror movie, like the Friday the 13th series, but winds up, in the version I saw last night, dying quietly in the rain because his time has run out. (The replicants only get four years of 'life' - a rather short period of time, considering how superbly constructed they are.)

The film is full of oddball characters: William Sanderson as J F Sebastian, a genetic something-or-other who makes human-like toys; and Joe Turkel as the father/creator of the replicants, to name just a couple. Sanderson plays the most endearing character in the movie, but comes to a probably nasty, but thankfully unseen, end.

The thing that makes the movie most striking, perhaps, is the film noir approach: most of it takes place in a kind of perpetual night, with searchlights flicking across the screen for no apparent reason, and lots of neon lighting, and a kind of endless drizzle, (and sometimes it's pelting down). Chinese seems to be the prime language (though not for any of the main characters) and apart from advertising (Budweiser and Coca Cola in full view) most of the signage is in Chinese, and most of the food being served on the usual best fat burner from the street stalls is Chinese - and most of the lesser characters are Asian. It's a crowded noisy world, obviously unpleasant to live in, but taken for granted by the characters.

It's set in 2019, which isn't that far away now (the film was made in 1982), and while we have the usual flying cars and video phones and a few other clever futuristic things, the Internet is noticeably missing - to viewers in 2009. Barely thought of at that time, of course, and perhaps almost inconceivable.

There's one odd scene with a unicorn in the middle of the movie: perhaps Deckard is having a dream of some sort, but its pastoral tone comes out of nowhere, and vanishes almost as quickly. What was that about? And why does Darryl Hannay spray black stuff across her eyes (not a particularly healthy thing to do, I'd think) at one point? There are quite a few unanswered questions here...

Plainly the various versions of the film have had to be reassessed by reviewers: Roger Ebert has four reviews on imdb.com, the Guardian two, and BBCi films three. One or other of them might give me a clue as to the various shape-shifting this film has had.

PS. Here's what the Guardian has to say about the various versions of this movie:
You've probably seen Blade Runner: in 1982, on the release of the International Cut, or, if you happened to be in North America, the Domestic Cut. Then there was the Director's Cut, which actually had very little to do with the director. The one he did approve is called the Final Cut, which is the newest version - although it's not as new as the Workprint, which is the earliest one of all.
Confused? Warner Brothers feels your pain. As well as a new two-disc DVD of the Final Cut, they have issued a five-disc box set that includes every incarnation of Ridley Scott's film known to man, plus a multitude of extras. But why did we end up with so many versions? And is it worth shelling out for what sceptics may suspect is, essentially, the same film five times over?
This review is worth checking out if you want to have some idea which version is worth watching - I don't think it's really the one I saw last night.

Indiana Jones returns!

We went to the movies today to see the latest Indiana Jones escapade: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I had to look the rest of the title up as that part of the film made no impact on me at all!
The reviews I’d read were a bit mixed, but Roger Ebert seemed as pleased as punch about the movie just because it was so much fun that I thought it would be worth catching it at the cinema rather than waiting for the DVD to come out. If nothing else, the sound in cinemas is far more effective than what comes out of our TV – although when we’re watching West Wing (we’ve just gone through the entire sixth season), the phones ringing in the background often seem to be pitched somewhere away from the TV and occasionally make us want to go and answer them.
Anyway, the film is a hoot. It doesn’t take itself in the least bit seriously, plays off against Harrison Ford’s age on more than one occasion, fills itself with in-jokes, references itself back to the other movies - and offers the most extreme villains (and, as usual, disposes of them in particularly nasty ways – they just never learn, do they?).
The car chases and fights on car chases are so absurdly over-the-top you’d have to be a misery guts to carp at them (one or two reviewers have managed to play misery guts), and the spectacular destruction of practically everything in sight has a certain kind of odd satisfaction. It’s a bit like going to the refuse dump (or tip, as we used to call it; it’s now something absurd like the transit station), and throwing piles of glass off the back of your vehicle, or large pieces of borer-ridden furniture, or great heavy chunks of metal, all of which you can smash with completely-permitted freedom.
The Indy story is pretty regular: it starts off with lots of nasty Russians taking over the atomic bomb site in Nevada (Indy manages to set the bomb off, though how he does it is anyone’s guess), shifts to Indy once again in his proper employment as Professor in some elitist college (which narrowly avoids getting thoroughly wrecked), and then sets him off on a madcap trail around half the world, creating havoc everywhere with his newly-found companion, Mutt Williams, a much younger bloke with a surprising ability in sword-play and a penchant for doing his hair rather too often.
There are a couple of real plot surprises (the film doesn’t really have time for much plot with all its other antics), and a curious ensemble of characters, Shia LeBeouf as Mutt, John Hurt as a cracked archaeologist, Karen Allen (dug up, as it were, from the first movie in the series) as Indy’s old flame, and Ray Winstone as a goody/baddie/goody/baddie who doesn’t quite know which side he’s on from one scene to the next. Cate Blanchett has enormous fun as the villain (she’s more interesting than similar bad females in the Bond series, which is saying something). She has a sidekick with a constitution like an ox, and a seemingly endless supply of minor villains, none of whom survive – as far as we can tell.
And since we spend some of the time in South America, we have nasty South American natives – slightly more pleasant than the islanders in Jackson’s King Kong – as well as FBI agents and KGB agents and probably various others whom I’ve forgotten about already.
Being only two years younger than Harrison Ford, I find it hard to imagine how he coped with the rigours of filming this piece; sure there are doubles and stunt men in droves, but there are a couple of scenes where it’s obviously him, and you think: that must have puffed him out, or left him very sore.

Three in a row

I spent the night flight from Heathrow to Incheon (Seoul) watching movies, because I couldn’t get to sleep.
First up was the latest in the Oceans saga: yet another complicated piece in which George Clooney and Brad Pitt barely do anything except look pretty. There’s no woman in their team this time; instead the baddie has a chief executive who’s a woman (Ellen Barkin). She gets her comeuppance, of course, as does the baddie. It didn’t help that the engine noise from the plane was a constant background to the soundtrack of the movie, which is one where everybody mumbles a lot. I have no idea what most of the dialogue was about, and it probably didn’t matter. The heist was a typical convoluted affair full of improbabilities. And of course the eleven beat the baddie at his game without blinking an eyelid.
Bruce Willis barely blinks in Live Free or Die Hard either - he doesn’t have time. The body count is high, the stunts (particularly with cars and helicopters and an Air Force bomber) are over the top but magnificent, and the story of course follows the usual pattern. However, there’s a lot of humour (not too much of it directed at recently deceased baddies); a nasty character who manages to fall from a helicopter and survive; various computer hackers who talk in computerese and frequently leave Willis wishing he’d gone to computing school somewhere along the line; an extremely vicious young woman baddie (Maggie Q) who almost beats Willis by using karate against him; and a sidekick played by Justin Long. The sidekick is a computer whiz kid who finishes up being babysat by Willis for most of the film and who finally comes into his own in the last stages. Between babysitting he manages to provide a lot of the humour, a lot of (impossible) computer wizardry, and prove to be a likeable companion. As always all the computer whizzes type like there’s no tomorrow, and the insurance bill for what’s left in the wake of Willis’ doings rises into the billions. The Grapes of Wrath, as you’d expect, is as gloomy as it was when it was made in the late thirties. Henry Fonda gives a performance of considerable surliness, and a few tender moments with his ‘Ma,’ (played with great humanity by Jane Darwell.) John Ford directed it, and it’s wonderfully photographed in black and white. What makes the film still appealing are the performances: Fonda and Darwell are great, but the minor characters have a charm and even eccentricity that’s suitable to the story, and warm-hearted as well.
The distress felt by Oklahoma farmers who are pushed off their land after several years of drought is strongly conveyed, and the difficulty of getting work in California is equally well done. I suspect Steinbeck’s story has been altered somewhat for the movie version - the ‘Reds’ are seen as villains, and for once the Government is a benevolent provider (but only towards the end).