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. 

The First Grader & Room Service

My wife and I went to see The First Grader today - we were the only people in the cinema.  Admittedly it's a small cinema, seating no more than perhaps thirty.  Still, it was a shame that no one else had the pleasure of watching this great little movie.

Most people will know that it's the story of the 84-year-old Kimani N'gan'ga Maruge, who took up the Kenyan Government's offer of 'free education for all' only to discover that it wasn't really intended for older people.  Maruge has never had the opportunity to learn to read - and significantly, he has an important letter he wants to be able to read for himself - and so he goes along to school to find that he's joining the children in the primary school, much to the annoyance of the male teacher, who wants to throw him out.  The headmistress, Jane Obinchu, lets herself be persuaded that Maruge can learn, and then finds herself facing criticism from all quarters.   She's not the sort of person who gives in easily, and nor is Maruge, and between them they make a difference to the future of Kenyan education. 


We learn, in a series of violent flashbacks, that Maruge had joined the Mau Mau as a young man in order to free his country, and spent nearly a decade in various jails.  I'd forgotten about the Mau Mau, and my memory of them was that they were a villainous and murderous group who went round slaughtering white people in Kenya.  Of course that was what we heard because we were getting the white people's picture; this was in the days when colonialism was still strong.  The film gives us the chance to change our view of the Mau Mau. 


Oliver Litondo is a wonderful Maruge, and English actress, Naomie Harris (better known for her role as the very strange Tia Dalma in two of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies) is excellent as the headmistress.   This is a great movie - and empowering for old people too!


I watched another of the Marx Brothers movies yesterday: Room Service.  The first half was familiar from some earlier viewing, but I'd never seen the rest.   To be honest seeing the rest was no great joy; this is a piece of nonsense that could have starred anyone.   The Marx Brothers contribution is very straight, with none of the usual setpieces, no musical interludes, and only some of the wisecracks that Groucho is known for.   Most of it takes place in a single hotel room - it began life as a stage play - and it wastes the talents of a bunch of people: Lucille Ball and Ann Miller both appear, but any two Hollywood starlets could have done the roles; the women have very little to do that's outstanding.   Frank Albertson is the young playwright from the hicks, and treated as a piece of furniture or a prop most of the time. 


There are a couple of delightful bit players in it, neither of whom I can quite identify from the cast list.  One, a tall, thin and gaunt-faced man plays the agent with the big cheque that will rescue Groucho and his cast from being thrown out on the street.  He's a quiet centre in the midst of the chaos - for a time.  And there's the man who's from the We Never Sleep collection agency: he's always a moment behind the eight ball, but hard to get rid of nevertheless.  

Two minor movies

Over the last couple of days I’ve sat and watched a couple of DVDs I bought recently: old movies, of course, since they’re what I tend to look out for in the bargain bins. The first, which I watched with my younger son, was A Night in Casablanca, one of the Marx Brothers' last outings together. As Leonard Maltin says, it’s not classic Marx Brothers, but it still has some very funny sequences, and certainly my son (who enjoys these old movies too) and I had several laugh-out-loud patches, particularly in the wardrobe scene, where the baddies are desperately trying to pack their trunks and the Marx Bros are just as speedily unpacking them.
It almost has a story, too. In fact, for several scenes at the beginning there is no sign of the Marx Bros, and a ‘plot’ takes over. Once the brothers get into action, though, the plot goes pretty much out the window, as you’d expect. I enjoyed it, and would happily watch it again – though it’s the sort of movie you need to see with other like-minded people.
Naturally there is a Harpo playing the harp sequence, and a Chico playing the piano sequence - both of them superb, though neither of them in the least different to the same moments in all the other Marx Bros movies. And there's one of those marvellous word-play scenes, where Harpo is trying to get a message across to Chico, and mostly uses puns to do so. These are well worth watching.

The second movie again, Take Me Out to the BallGame had almost no plot – but then it was a musical, so what would you expect? Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra star, one the skinny rake, and the other the short-stop. The thing quite often takes off on its own stars, and the final song ignores any idea that there was reality in the story and sums it all up with some nice in-jokes about Fred Astaire and the like.
It survives because of its energy, which is considerable. Sinatra dances with almost as much élan as Kelly, and sings much better. Esther Williams proves she could do a lot more than swim (in fact she barely swims in it at all, thank goodness), and Betty Garrett takes up the usual role of the other woman in the quartet: for no good reason as far as the plot is concerned, but what the heck. She has energy to burn, and her song with Sinatra when she’s chasing him over the bleachers (the piece revolves around a baseball team) is full on. The songs aren’t up to much, unfortunately – there isn’t a well-known song in it, in fact –and the big dance routine is a real hotch-potch, but…it’s still watchable.