Three films

Three movies in as many nights. After not having watched movies either on TV or DVD for a few weeks, it's been quite relaxing (after finishing my second book and getting it published online) just to lie on the couch and watch something instead of working.

First there was a strange Jet Li movie on TV - Unleashed; then Silver Linings Playbook with Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence; and finally, tonight, the almost fifty-year-old A Town Like Alice, a film based on only the middle section of Nevil Shute's famous novel.

This last of the three shows its age mostly in the now-stiff-looking performance by Virginia McKenna, so British that nothing disturbs her upper lip. Peter Finch is excellent, as he always was, and has already gone past that very English style of acting that a few other members of the cast indulge in. Even given that it's virtually a road movie, A Town Like Alice, is still very watchable, and there are some excellent scenes, and a strong supporting cast. Fortunately the film focuses almost entirely on the war section of the story; the bookends about improving the lot of a group of Malayan villages, and setting up work for unemployed people in a remote Aussie town, are barely hinted at.

Unleashed is a typically violent Jet Li movie, in which he plays Bob Hoskins' 'dog.' Hoskins has rescued him as a child (after shooting his mother) and brought him up to be absolutely subservient. When the collar he wears continually is loosened, however, he defeats anyone sent against him. Morgan Freeman, doing the typical Hollywood version of what it's like to be blind, and Kerry Conden, playing a piano student who appears to do very little practice, rescue Li by accident, and set him back on his human feet again. The film is full of extraordinarily choreographed fight scenes filmed and edited brilliantly, but it also has strong characterizations from the two leads: Li gets a chance to reveal a soft side, and Hoskins revels in being the ultimate bully and sadist (and manages to survive two major car crashes and various beatings). It was Louis Leterrier's first film as director, and he does an excellent job with his English and French cast and locations. Not for the fainthearted, however.

Silver Linings Playbook (I have no idea what the title refers to, unless it's something to do with the home betting shop Robert de Niro runs) is an in-your-face drama-cum-comedy. Cooper plays a man whose wife was found with another man in compromising circumstances, and who went off his rocker - he was already prone to mental health issues. After eight months in an institution, he's ready to come home - even if no one else is quite ready to have him back. Cooper gives a wonderfully subtle performance underneath all the bombast. Lawrence is equally mentally unhealthy, not helped by having lost her policeman husband in bizarre circumstances. She never says anything you expect, which is quite refreshing, and indeed a great deal of the movie has unexpected moments and situations. Lawrence is wonderful and grabs her role by the throat and tears it apart. (Totally wasted in The Hunger Games - this girl has the goods.)

De Niro plays the manic father again (not far away from his manic father performance in Meet the Fockers), and it's debatable as to which Pat, Senior or Junior, is the more cracked. The leads have top notch support from the rest of the cast, and although it takes a while for the thing to show where it's coming from, it gradually takes hold of you. Interestingly enough, the film departs from the book in many (improved?) ways.

An Old Captivity

Back in 1940, Nevil Shute, gradually becoming a much-acclaimed writer, published a book called, An Old Captivity. It was republished in 1967, and again in 1969. I have a copy of the 1969 edition, which I picked up at some fair with the intent to sell it off to Trade Me. (The book is again in print, by the way.)
Being short of something to read one day in the couple of months before Christmas I started into it. Full of detail about seaplanes and the flying of them (at least as far as things pertained to that period), the landing of them, the navigating of them, the full-on workload of maintaining them, and the not inconsiderable fact – which no doubt led to the demise of seaplanes commercially – that virtually everything has to be done on the water: refuelling, maintenance, cleaning up, removing bits of engines and so forth. Only occasionally is the thing pulled up on land, and then you get the feeling that this isn’t quite infra dig.
There’s not a mention of the War in spite of the time it was written. It’s strung together with three major characters who remain as bland throughout the book as they mostly are at the beginning; and told in an off-hand way with no suspense and nothing in the way of plot.

It’s a romance for a man who likes seaplanes. Consequently the romance side of it is barely worked on, and is summarily dismissed at the end.

More than three-quarters of the way through the book, after lots of flying time (described in detail – and certainly Shute knew his stuff), the main character, the pilot, has a long dream (he’s unconscious for three days). In it he sees himself in a period more than a thousand years previously, when the Vikings ruled and took slaves (from Scotland, in this case) and sailed the world, and discovered America. In the dream he falls in love with the only female slave of any consequence, and the two of them are about to escape when…he wakes up. The book ends some twenty pages later (!) having introduced a fantasy element into an otherwise very down-to-earth book (if you can describe a book about flying in such a way).

I only stuck with this book because I had read quite a bit of it, always waiting for something to happen, and thought Shute might finally have a surprise up his sleeve. Nope. It’s more like he wanted to describe what it was like to fly a seaplane, in detail, and tacked a story on to it. Somewhere along the line he realised he hadn’t really given his readers much to go on, so he bunged in a dream sequence. Having done that, he polished the thing off.

It runs to nearly 300 pages, and I’ve learnt heaps about flying seaplanes, if ever I should need this information. I’ve learnt nothing about what Shute thought about love and romance, and if I was a beginning writer, I’d know nothing about building a plot, producing suspense, or rounding out characters. Shute had written six novels before An Old Captivity, none of them as well known as later efforts. He was working on military projects for the War when the book was written, which may have distracted him a little.

There’s a very good summary of his life and work on Wikipedia, as there so often is these days!