Loving Vincent

We went to see Loving Vincent last night. If we hadn't gone, there would have been only one person watching it.

The theatre should have been full: this is a wonderful movie about Vincent van Gogh. It's not the greatest movie of all time - the script is a little undercooked. It's probably not even the greatest animated movie of all time, but it has a certain unique quality that sets it apart.

If you don't already know, the movie was shot with live actors in front of a green screen. There are a number of well-known faces in the cast, such as Douglas Booth, Jerome Flynn, Saoirse Ronan, Helen McCrory and Chris O'Dowd. Intriguingly they all speak with British accents rather than French or European ones, so that we hear Irish and Cockney amongst others. This takes a little getting used to, but it works.

Once the live action was shot, paintings by van Gogh were 'composited' into the background and the film was edited as normal. Then each frame was projected onto a blank canvas, and one of some 125  hundred artists painted - in oils - over the projection, using the techniques Van Gogh himself would have used.

The result is a movie rich in colour, with real depth and texture. None of the artists had worked on an animated movie before, so they brought a different sense of colour and animation to the screen.

Initially, the eye is almost overwhelmed with the movement - clouds never stay still, trees continually reform their leaves, even people's hair moves from frame to frame. It's a little disorientating. And it's wonderful seeing so many of Van Gogh's paintings coming to life during the course of the movie.

The story is more straightforward, almost a detective story. Armand Roulin, the son of the postmaster who was a friend of van Gogh (both of them appear in well-known van Gogh portraits), has been charged with delivering a one-year-old letter that Vincent had sent to his brother, Theo. It had gone astray. During the course of trying to get the letter to its rightful home, Armand discovers that things were not entirely as they seemed in relation to Vincent's death. Being impetuous, he often jumps to conclusions, and he's led astray by the variances in the stories people tell him about Vincent's last hours.

The audience is also led astray: one minute feeling that new revelations about Vincent's death have come to light, the next finding that another character contradicts what we've heard. It leaves the viewer with a kind of emotional confusion, and an increasing sadness at the shortness of Vincent's life, and the reasons behind his death.

I found the movie very moving for reasons I couldn't put my finger on. The reason for that doesn't matter. Both my wife and I were overwhelmed with the sheer beauty of it.

Bekas

Bekas is a Kurdish word that's variously translated as orphans, complete loneliness, parentless. It's all of those things. It's also the title of a slightly odd but quite engaging movie about two brothers who, after seeing part of the film Superman in their home village, decide to go to America and meet Superman. Perhaps even ask him to come back to their home country and kill Saddam Hussein (who at the time of the movie's story, was causing havoc in Kurdistan).

The orphaned brothers are not very old. Ten-year-old Dana (Sarwar Fazil) has a bit of a romance going on with a girl who is somewhat ambivalent towards him (it's never going to work, but he doesn't know that), and is the ideas man. The younger one, Zana (Zamand Taha), is six or seven, strident, energetic, optimistic, seldom put down for more than a moment - a considerable feat in Kurdistan, where any adult male (in fact, any older male, including your brother) is likely to beat you at the drop of a hat, often with the least provocation. It's not a place for wimps.

The boys shine shoes for a living, and naturally struggle to make ends meet. In their attempts to walk or ride to America (which in their minds is only a few inches across the map and therefore can't be far away) they run into various troubles, are separated, joined up again and nearly killed. It's a grim life made bearable only by keeping your own spirits up. No one else will do it for you.

The film has some humour, but in general there's little understatement of the stark poverty the boys live in. They wear the same clothes day in and out, don't appear to eat very often, and even have to berate customers to get them to pay the proper price for their shoeshining. A few older people help them at times, but for the most part they're on their own. And at journey's end, things don't seem to have made a lot of progress, though at least they're out of Saddam's clutches, for the time being.

The cast is mostly amateur, which means that people turn up here who would never appear on screen otherwise, their faces marked in many cases with the sheer difficulties of life. The two boys are good-looking, and convey all the emotion needed in their roles. Taha has a voice that would kill a goat a twenty paces - some viewers have felt he has only one vocal mode: full-bore shouting. He may be excused in this because of the sheer need his character has to be heard when so many ears around him are deaf to his cries.

The film was written and directed by Karzan Kader, and is based on his own story of escape from Kurdistan. He had previously made a short film version of it; this full-length one has no feeling of being expanded for the sake of it.

The audience will never notice

There's a lovely baritone solo in the delightful movie, Calamity Jane, and its stage version: Higher than a Hawk. The music is by Sammy Fain, and the words by Paul Francis Webster, both men much respected in their line. Howard Keel sang the song with all his usual charm and conviction in the movie version. And it was just as well he brought conviction to the song because it has a strange metaphorical error in it, one that, when you notice it, won't let itself be unnoticed.

The song starts: My love is higher than a hawk, my love is deeper than a well. All good so far, in a loose metaphorical sense. But you get the picture without problem. And the chorus goes on quite happily for a few more lines before there's a little verse that, on returning to the end of the chorus again, ends with the same words I've quoted above.

The only problem is that when they return they follow these lines: I said that I would never fall; I laughed at others when they fell, and here I'm fallin' - higher than a hawk, and deeper than a well. 

If you're not listening, it rounds out the song very nicely before it goes off onto another verse. But the problem is, how do you fall higher than something? And why is the hawk fallin' - or falling, as the case may be?

It's a kind of 'it doesn't really matter' situation. Plainly Cain, Webster and Keel, and the rest of the Calamity Jane participants didn't get bothered by it. They probably said, the audience will never notice, because audiences don't. And I agree: there is story after story about movies where the audience doesn't notice things that are wrong, and didn't get put right, or where something's gone wrong on a particular night in the theatre and the audience has gone home just as happy as the audience to whom the same thing didn't happen. If you're still with me. I could tell a few of my own, things I've been involved in. But I won't, because I've probably already told you before.

At the end of the day, the baritone will go on stage and sing about a love that's fallin' higher than a hawk, and the movie will carry on showing Howard Keel singin' the song without blinkin' an eyelid, and 99.9% of people won't notice.

The Sunset Limited

Some spoilers in the post. 

Two men in a room. A long conversation between the two, lasting nearly 90 minutes of screen time. One is a black man (Samuel L Jackson), a poor railway worker, with a major criminal conviction behind him. The other is a white man, a Professor, (Tommy Lee Jones) worn out and world-weary, who's just attempted to commit suicide on the tracks in front of the Sunset Limited train. Somehow, and most unexpectedly, the black man has saved him and brought him back to his two-room apartment.  The door is locked with four or five different locks; outside the sounds of a major railway station go on intermittently: someone playing a trumpet badly, a sudden fight, shouting, trains stopping and starting. Our focus, however, is on the discussion these two men are having: life and death, belief and unbelief, God or not God.

This movie is based solidly on Cormac McCarthy's play - which isn't officially a play, but a 'novel in dramatic form (the playscript has minimal stage directions - the focus is on the dialogue). However, it's been presented frequently on stage, and works very well there, in spite of almost no 'action' (a coffee is made, some soup is cooked). The version I've just seen is the HBO version, directed by Tommy Lee Jones.

Both the stars revel in their parts, though Jackson's is much more the flamboyant one. Jones plays his very close to the bone: already looking like death warmed up in most of his movies, here he virtually has a mask of a face, with two dreadfully tired eyes peering out. I sometimes felt you could have done with more passion from Jones, but he saves it till the end, when he produces a tirade that shows he isn't going to change his position, no matter what. If anything he's more entrenched than ever. The much more 'fussy' Austin Pendleton played the same part on the stage - he may have been better cast, in fact, than Jones, since the latter doesn't come across as an academic in most of his films, but rather a man educated on the streets. I didn't quite feel that Jones had that self-preening that the part requires to be there in some measure. Nevertheless, he plays it in his own way, reinterpreting it so that what he does with it is effective. 

Jackson has never looked more at home on the screen. He's played some very oddball roles over the years (one of the Jedi in the second Star Wars trilogy, and that strange breakable character in Unbreakable) but here he's suited to the part completely. For much of the film his character seems to have the upper hand - the Christian apologist-cum-evangelist he might be seen as - but towards the end he realises that nothing he says will stop the other man attempting suicide again. He's knocked down, but not knocked out; he's done his level best, and that's all he could have done. God doesn't force his way into a person's life; if that person (White) doesn't want him, he'll let him be. And White doesn't want God
, come what may. Much of White's problem is a self-loathing, but he also gradually reveals that he loathes everyone else too (though he manages to tolerate Black long enough to stay and have a meal with him), and this hatred of his 'brother' (as Black calls other people) is perhaps his downfall.

But the film can be read in more than one way. As a Christian I can hear the old apologetic arguments skilfully framed by White. For some of the movie, Black's counter-arguments seem weak, and lacking in conviction. It's only at the end that he shows passion for his own belief. But an agnostic or atheist coming to the movie may well see it from the other side, and find White's Christian arguments the weaker ones. McCarthy leaves it open for both to chew over their viewpoints. McCarthy is quoted as not being a fan of writers who do not 'deal with issues of life and death,' and there's no doubt what this film is about.

Plass, Darryl, and Midrash

Some time ago I read a book that was basically a compilation from Adrian Plass's New Daylight daily readings material, plus some other writing that fitted into the book's theme.  It's called Blind Spots in the Bible, though truth be told it's not really to do with blind spots we have towards certain texts but with passages that are quite difficult to get to grips with.  Plass doesn't always get to grips with them either, and he admits this. Some passages just don't compute, as it were.

Still, there are some good moments in the book, one in particular being the skit on the death and revival of Eutychus, the young man who fell out of the third-storey window while Paul was preaching at length.  Plass's always seems to me to be at his best when he's telling stories.  His non-fiction work, like this one, doesn't bring out his gifts as well as his story-writing does, in particular the early Sacred Diary series, which can be laugh-out-loud funny and quite moving.  When he's telling stories here, the stories stick in your mind.

There's not too much of the self-deprecating Plass here,which is a good thing, but there's an excess of the use of the word silly, which is a weak word even in Plass's hands.  It smacks of something old-fashioned, and could do with be excised from his vocabulary, or at least having something of a moratorium on it.

As for silly, we watched Northfork around the same time I finished the book. I mentioned this back in Oct last year, but didn't say much more about it. Here's a movie that has the production qualities  that go with a masterpiece, and yet they're wasted on a story with a pseudo-seriousness and silly puns.   A bunch of fine actors (including Nick Nolte and Daryl Hannah) do their utmost to make the thing work, but the two elements of the film never cohere - the six men trying to move the last people out of the valley before it's flooded and the curious dreaming of the boy who's dying.   The dream stuff makes no sense on any level: it's neither surreal enough to be really dreamlike nor clear enough to make sense within the film as a whole.   Nor is it amusing, though it seems to think it is.

The photography is superb, however, and the music suits the mood of the film wonderfully.   But at the end you just ask what the heck was that all about and you're left with no answer.

Incidentally, talking of Daryl Hannah, it strikes me that Daryl is a name that gets spelt in a variety of ways and you're never sure if the person being referred to is male or female (unless you already know them, of course).  I have a friend who's a bloke called Daryl, and another female friend called Darrel, and I think there are infinite other variations in the spelling.   Someone on the Net has given this list of spellings - Darryl
Darryll
Darrell
Darrol
Darroll
Darril
Darrill
Darel
It's not surprising there's confusion. Supposedly the name is derived from the French name: D'Arielle, which equally supposedly means beloved.  But in other circles you find Arielle meaning either Lion of God, or Lioness, depending on the gender of the person.   Supposedly it derives from the Hebrew.  If I'm using the word supposedly here a good deal it's because I'm feeling somewhat cynical about the various explanations I've been finding in relation to this name.  Quite honestly, the various weak spellings of the name, in English, give little indication of there being any kind of lion involved, let alone one belonging to God. 

Reverting to Plass's attempts to explain some of the texts in the Bible: I've been reading Chaim Potok's large novel In the Beginning.  It's very gloomy, but the writing is excellent, and makes it surprisingly readable.  The characters are wonderful - although the main one, David, is a bit of a pain sometimes.  Still, that's partly the result of who he is.  But the point I wanted to make is that he spends a good deal of time studying the Torah, and the Midrash - that is, the Bible and the commentaries made by different Jewish writers over centuries.  In a section I was reading today he was puzzling over a disagreement between two of the ancient commentators, who were fussing about something that wasn't even written in the Biblical text, but was only implied.  It relates to Noah and his sons, and the odd story about Noah being found naked after getting drunk, and his curse on Ham. It's an odd story anyway, but searching between the cracks, as these commentators did, makes it even odder. At least as Potok presents it in the book...

Little Red Riding Who?

It occurs to me that Little Red Riding Hood is an odd name to give anyone. In fact, it's not a name at all, it's a description, and worse, it's not a description of a person, but an article of clothing.  In which case, why, when we say Little Red Riding Hood, do we immediately think of some anonymous little girl rather than something to wear? How did she get to be called that?  Did her parents go in for the modern fad of oddball children's names?

Yet, in spite of being called after an article of clothing, there's a famous fairy-tale about her in which a wolf wants to eat the child, puts off eating her until he's eaten her grandmother as an appetiser, and then, just when everything seems to be going his way, is chopped open by some woodcutter - in front of the child's eyes.  Extraordinary.  Exceptionally Freudian.

How did a story with such an odd name come to be so popular?

We'd be unlikely to read - let alone buy - a children's book entitled Horseback Riding Pants.  Even though a book entitled Horseback Riding Pants might be about a little boy, the youngest of three brothers, who goes off to seek his fortune when his aged father marries a wicked stepmother. Even though Horseback's bigger brother might be called Long Riding Crop, and his oldest brother, Safe Riding Helmet.  But the name of the book is a real turn-off.  (The older brothers' names don't help much either.)  Horseback Riding Pants isn't likely to go whizzing off the shelf, or get downloaded by the hundred-fold from Kindle.

So why on earth is Little Red Riding Hood still popular after all these years?  There's even been a movie made about the story recently - admittedly a story which has taken the bare bones of the fairy-tale and turned it into something in the horror genre, with a werewolf, and a priest who can exorcise the man trapped inside the wolf's garb.  Try selling a movie entitled Horseback Riding Pants. I don't think it's going to happen somehow.

Hunger Games - the book

I noted in my last post that I watched the movie The Hunger Games on New Year's Eve.  As a result I decided to read the book, in part to satisfy some of the questions I had about the movie.  The result is that I now see that the movie often provides a shorthand version of much of the background material, and while this would be sufficient to those who've read the book, it isn't always enough for a person coming new to the story.  So it pays to read the book, which is very readable - apart from a few factors.  No doubt it would pay to read the other two stories in the trilogy before the movies of those appear (the second is in production) as well.

My main concern with the book is the same as with the movie: there's little sense amongst the teenagers who spend their time killing each other off in the bulk of the story that there's something wrong with all this. Yes, they do talk about it briefly at times, but when push comes to shove, they don't seem to have many real qualms about the killing - and that includes the heroine with the weird name - Katniss - as well as her male counterpart, the equally oddly named, Peeta.  Katniss has some qualms about killing, but it's mostly to do with those she likes. The rest are basically the enemy. Suzanne Collins, the author, gets over this to an extent by painting these enemy kids as youngsters who've grown up expecting to have an opportunity to be involved in these gladiatorial games: they've made a career out of it, as it were.  In fact, this is what they're known as collectively.  Other people, however, like Katniss and Peeta - and Rue, the twelve-year-old rather incongruously caught up in this crazy business - are the goodies, and whatever their flaws, they're always painted as the goodies. Of course Katniss has to have an antagonist, and the craziest of the 'tributes' (as the youngsters are called) is seen as bad to the bone from early on.  In fact, the real antagonists of the story, I suspect, don't really come into their own until the second or third stories; this is collectively the Capitol, one of those usefully anonymous entities who appear regularly in fantasy/sci fi.  In the book version, the Capitol barely has a personality.  In fact, the Capitol in the movie has much more of a face (as do the game controllers) than in the book, courtesy of Donald Sutherland in one of his more sinister personifications.  But even though he appears briefly several times in the movie, we still don't know the whys and wherefores of his part in the whole proceedings.  This is okay: we have two more stories in which to find out about him/them.

What's not so okay, and what seems to me to be a flaw in the book (which translates over into the movie) is the way in which Peeta is constantly being rescued by the heroine.  Now, you could say that female characters by the million have spent their allotted time in books being rescued by heroes, and you'd be right.  But Peeta, who's lacking in virtually any skills that would actually get him through the nightmare of the Games, and who constantly puts his foot in it, and who is more trouble than he's worth in terms of forcing Katniss to have to deal with him as well as the big nasty, is supposed to be the romantic lead in this story.  He has to be strong enough as a character to give Gale, the boy Katniss thinks she might be in love with (but who doesn't have any involvement in the Games) a run for his money.  But he isn't that strong a character. He's a romantic, and unless he pulls his socks up in the other two stories, he's going to find himself where he probably belongs - as number two in the romantic stakes.  I suppose it's possible that Collins sees a romantic character as being more trustworthy in the long run than a hunk.

The interesting thing is that in the movie the role of Gale, the boy back home, is played by a hunk. When you come to the story as I did, without any prior knowledge of what part he plays in it all, you wonder how he doesn't wind up as the other candidate for the Games.  The role of Peeta in the movie is played by Josh Hutcherson, who isn't a hunk, and who doesn't have the screen presence of a romantic lead, and yet he gets all the screen time.  It could be said to be a nice reversal (in more ways than one), subverting our expectations.  Whether this works will only be shown when the next two films get made.  Perhaps when I read the other two stories in the trilogy - if I do - the logic behind this will come clear.

My Cousin Rachel

On our return trip from Christchurch a couple of days ago, we listened to Mel Gibson reading My Cousin Rachel, the novel by Daphne du Maurier.  I think we've begun listening to this before, but perhaps hadn't completed it, as only the early parts of the story seemed familiar.

In some ways it's less complex than Rebecca, but it shares that same ambivalence, that sense that we're never quite sure who's fooling who, and whether the people who seem to be wrongdoers actually are.  In Rebecca, we eventually learn that she really was a nasty piece of work, and that Maxim de Winter isn't as difficult a man as the narrator first thinks.  In My Cousin Rachel, we again have a first person narrator, Philip Ashley, a young man who's naive, impetuous, and unable to listen to the advice of his betters.  The consequences are disastrous, but was he entirely wrong in his assumptions, or did he just misread the behaviour of Rachel, and misread the letters that his older cousin and father-figure, Ambrose, had sent him when he was ill.

One minute we think, Yes, he's got it all wrong.  The next we think, No, we've got it all wrong.  Du Maurier leaves the story wide open.  I'm sure there are readers who are convinced they know what the truth of the matter was, and perhaps it's possible to go back and work it out sentence by sentence, but this is such a shifting sands of a tale that on the first reading (or hearing, in our case), it's almost impossible to gauge whether you've got the picture right or not.

There's a 1952 movie version of the story, with Richard Burton and Olivia de Havilland, directed by Nunnally Johnson.  Apparently there's a slight but significant change at the end of the story.  I haven't seen the movie, but by all accounts it's otherwise faithful to the book.

The audio book version (which may or may not have been abridged; it certainly doesn't say it is) has music by Don Heckman.  He's not a composer I know, and while he's listed on Google as a writer about music there's not much about his compositions.   The music on the audio book is perfect for the story, very simple, often using only a couple of instruments at a time, and being brief variations on a very simple theme.

The Debt

Note: some spoilers here...

Some while back I walked in on a movie that was showing on TV late one night.  Helen Mirren was fighting for her life with some elderly man who managed to stab her a couple of times.  Last night I watched the rest of the movie, which is a taut thriller based around three Israelis kidnapping a German doctor. They believe he was a Nazi who committed various 'research' atrocities on Jews in one of the concentration camps.  These three also appear, played by different actors, in sequences that occur thirty years later: this is where Helen Mirren is involved.

The film, The Debt, is primarily concerned with the decision the three younger people have to make when their prisoner escapes, and how they live with that decision for the next thirty years - until the doctor is apparently found again.  Jessica Chastain and Helen Mirren play the main female character in the story, with Sam Worthington and Ciarán Hinds pairing off as the Israeli whose conscience plagues him, and New Zealander Marton Csokas and Tom Wilkinson sharing the role of the other man who is able to put the past behind him very easily, even when things go wrong. 

So while it's a thriller, in that there are some excellent suspense sequences, it's also a story about relationships, people caught up in close quarters and struggling with the consequences of a botched kidnap.  The doctor is played by Jesper Christensen; he's brilliant in his role of a man still capable of winding up the Jewish psyche and coming out on top.  

The end of the film, which in some ways undercuts the values of the rest of the movie, is a bit of a female Jason Bourne sequence: not quite believable and all relying on split second timing.  Helen Mirren is, as always, superb in her role, but she's asked to make credible the stealing of documents from a newspaper office, the tracking down of the evil doctor, and a subsequent fight to the death with him.  This is Hollywood stuff that's not quite comfortable with what's gone before.  

Nevertheless, as a thriller this is well done.  Hinds doesn't get enough screen time - his character is killed off in the first few minutes, seen again quite a bit later on and then lost again.  Sam Worthington is the quieter of the two young men, a man with a mission who struggles to see beyond the borders of his intents.  Czokas is the wild man and fills the part easily, and strongly.  Chastain, with her tight angular features, has the major role, and does very well. 

Moby Dickens

Reading back to when I was last writing about Moby Dick I found there were three previous references to it on this blog. I decided I'd give Moby Dick one last go, as it's being broadcast, chapter by chapter, on a site called Moby Dick Big Read. Various readers, including New Zealand's Witi Ihimaera, are reading a chapter at a time, so there's quite a variety of accents and dialects coming through.  Today's chapter, number 15, is read by a laconic-sounding bloke called Peter Burgess, who doesn't distinguish in any way the different characters in the story (in this particular chapter only Ishmael the narrator, and the lady who runs the inn where chowder is the only thing on the menu). Tilda Swinton reads the opening chapter, so we have that famous opening line, Call me Ishmael, read by a female voice. Her accent, of course, is clean, clear Brit.  

Anyway, by this means Moby Dick might still get 'read' through before the end of this year, which will be something of an achievement. My aim to read some Dickens this year became a bit of a fizzer, for a patch, because Little Dorrit turned out to be a little boring, which surprised me. I think it's that the long-winded love relationship between Dorrit and Clennam is rather tedious. And Dorrit's self-centred father, while a brilliant portrait in its own way, presents a character who we can barely sympathise with. Anyway, I got about half way through before giving up.  

I decided I couldn't let the rest of the year go by without giving Dickens some more reading room, so I embarked upon one of his shorter novels, A Tale of Two Cities. My best memory of this book, when I read it as a youngish man, was that I couldn't put it down over the last hundred or more pages. And certainly it has suspense that I don't think any other Dickens has. Even my re-reading of it over the last month brought back that feeling of what's going to happen next? I knew that at the end Carton gave up his life for Darnay; it wasn't that aspect that was suspenseful, but the escape of the family, along with Mr Lorry, Miss Pross and Jerry Cruncher. This section has an unusually breathless feel about it, all the better for being taken at a cracking pace. (Why didn't Hitchcock film this story instead of one or two of the other historical films he made?)

Tale of Two Cities is probably unusual in two other ways, when compared to most of Dickens' books.  Firstly, there's the lack of comic characters, and secondly there's the reasonably well-constructed plot.  Miss Pross and Jerry Cruncher verge on being comic creations (though Cruncher's tiresome tirades at his praying wife aren't in the least bit amusing), but neither of them can compete with the pantheon of real comics who appear elsewhere in the Dickens' canon. This story is strikingly serious. Yes, I know, most of Dickens' later works are more serious in tone - Two Cities comes between Little Dorrit and Great Expectations - but there are still comic characters in them; here, such characters don't even get a look in.

A still from the 1935 film version of Dickens' book.  

The characters in this book are still Dickensian, but they're Dickensian with some element missing. If they'd appeared in a different book, they would perhaps have had more room to expand. Here they seem to be so subject to the exigencies of the plot, that they have to get on and be their basic selves without any humorous element. The main female character, Lucie, is of course the same as most of Dickens' young female characters: totally bland and almost lifeless.  Dickens can tell us as much as he likes about how faithful and true and loving and perfect in every way she is, but we never actually believe it because she's never alive. The man who becomes her husband, isn't much better: he has a short scene early in the piece when he confronts his wicked uncle, but beyond that he does little of note. Sydney Carton, the erstwhile hero, lazes around most of the book being a man without any ambition in life, and suddenly finds himself late in the book doing something honourable. Though why he decides to come to Paris isn't ever quite explained. Lucie's father is somewhat improbable: he's spent twenty years in prison and has lost his mind (and loses it occasionally after being freed) but he then manages to go back to his old life as a doctor in the midst of the French Revolution, safe as houses from being touched by the revolutionaries and clear as a bell in his mind. 

The two strongest characters are Monsieur and Madame Defarge. Defarge is a man of few words, but his bulk and strength is palpable throughout the book; Madame Defarge says even less, but is terrifying. She's the one who wears the pantaloons, the one who runs the pub, the one who secretly signals to the innumerable revolutionaries (who all go by the name of Jacques) when there's a spy in their midst, and the one who comes close to bringing ruin on Darnay and his family. Dickens achieves the impossible in Madame Defarge's final scene, in which she struggles against Miss Pross who's guarding the door that may be hiding Lucie and her child. He has both of them speaking their native tongue (except of course that we read Madame Defarge's words in a slightly unusual English), neither of them understanding the other's words, but both aware of the other's intent. The achievement is that this scene is both comic and horrific at the same time; Dickens plays with the language barrier and with what each speaks while at the same time keeping us on tenterhooks as to how Miss Pross will prevent Madame from discovering that Lucie and Co have already escaped. It's one of the best scenes in the book.  

If the plot has any failing, it's that it's spread over rather a long period. It begins a number of years before the French revolution and gradually works its way towards that awful event in a series of leaps of time. However, this is a minor matter, really, given how everything in the book is racing towards those last wonderful hundred or so pages.   

Two Cities has a great deal in common with Barnaby Rudge, which is the other Dickens book that I did actually finish this year. Both are focused around a period in history that wasn't contemporary with Dickens' own day, and both are exceedingly violent. I'm not sure which is worse in this regard - perhaps Barnaby. The difference with Two Cities, I think, is that the violence is in the fibre of the book from early on, and when it explodes with its full force, it's all the more sickening for it. There's no doubt that Dickens could describe violent scenes with considerable skill; some of his strongest writing occurs in both these books in the scenes of mob rule. By contrast, both books offer too many pages of purple prose: in Barnaby these occur whenever Barnaby himself appears; in Two Cities they occur whenever Lucie appears. It's a Dickens failing; you just have to start skimming when these appear.

So what next for Mr Dickens?  Can I get through something else before the end of 2012?  It would be good to try one of the books I haven't actually read...

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.

Cards, Grimhilda!, Children of Men

Once upon a time I used to send out Christmas cards...quite a lot of them.   I haven't done this for years.  Instead I write a Christmas 'update' which brings the recipients up to date on what's been happening in the Crowl household - and email it.   It's always a bit of a challenge at the end of the year, but at least keeping a journal throughout the twelve months prior to that helps to remind me of what's happened.

In the last few years I've even added in photos of the various family members - which has only served to make the letter longer for those willing to endure reading it right through.   This is actually a bit of a step forward for me, since we never sent those custom photo holiday cards in the past that some people are wont (or were wont to do).  So we've actually gone from sending boring Christmas cards with barely an individual note on each one, to a major letter and photos.

Anyway, apropos of that in no way at all, Grimhilda! enters her final week of rehearsals tomorrow.   Sunday's rehearsal, in fact, will be the last time I actually play for the rehearsals.  After that, it'll be the orchestra.  I might not only be out of a job, but bereft!  Time will tell.

Last night I caught up with the version of Children of Men that I recorded some weeks back.  I'd once seen - on its own and out of context - the extraordinary long take that occurs towards the end of the movie, when Clive Owen stumbles and crashes and trips and climbs and eventually rescues the woman with the baby in the midst of a full-scale battle going on around him.  The set-up for this must have taken days, with an exhausted cast trying to deal with all the bombs going off and bullets flying and people dropping dead.  (Owen, in one of his best roles, looks exhausted through most of the movie.)  It's intriguing that directors seem to like doing long takes when it comes to battle scenes.  There's a famous one in the Russian version of War and Peace that travels across line after line of soldiers in various formations, but the most famous recent one (at least that I've seen) occurs in Atonement.  James McAvoy walks through hundreds of extras (as soldiers) doing all manner of things to while away their time before their rescued from wherever it is they are, and there are horses racing past, and things going on in the distance and in the foreground and stuff happening everywhere.  It's brilliant.  I'm not sure what it adds to the movie, but it's wonderful.

The long take in Children of Men has more point perhaps because it heightens the danger that Owen is in; we're with him all the way as he ducks and dives, briefly encounters the nasty character (Owen claimed earlier that he has bad breath) who seems to delight in shooting anyone and everyone, whatever side they're on, and finally finds the mother with the new-born baby.  But following that scene is the counterpoint: not another long take (although the camera still moves with the actors a great deal) but a marvellous quiet section in contrast to all the noise that's been going on: under Owen's protecting arm, the mother takes her crying baby out through the dozens of foreign refugees caught up in the battle and the soldiers who are struggling to keep the uprising at bay, and every one of them is reaching out to the child, quietly wanting to touch it, praising God for the miracle (the baby is the first in eighteen years in the known world).  The soldiers, whose faces all have that grittiness that comes with being battle-weary, are suddenly charmed into humanity by this tiny creature: men reflecting their potential fatherhood.  The women are like a thousand aunts all wanting to croon and chuckle over the infant.

I don't know whether I missed the point of some of the scenes in this film, but I never quite figured out how the clearance of foreigners from British soil connected with the loss of fertility amongst women worldwide. The two intersected a great deal, but in hindsight don't seem to have a connection.   Still it's a brilliant piece of filmmaking: wonderful performances, extraordinary sense of place (rubbish everywhere and detritus and a general air of things breaking down), a huge suspense in terms of how it's all going to work out, some extreme but believable action scenes, brilliant photography.   Stephanie Zacharek calls it the 'bleakest movie you'll ever want to see twice' and that's exactly right: it is bleak, but it's so superbly done from beginning to end that seeing it twice is virtually a must, if only to catch up on all the hundreds of details that aren't shoved into our faces but are there if we're quick enough to see them.

And apart from the wonderful moment when the child is paraded through the battling crowd, there's the delightful way in which the animals react in this movie, in particular to Owen: it's as if they trust him, see him as the one honest character amongst the rest.  Noisy farm dogs nestle towards him; a kitten climbs up his trouser leg.