Old and new

I can't remember if I've ever seen The Seven Samurai before; if I have it didn't leave any visual impressions.  However, it's been on my 'would-be-good-to-see' list of movies for decades, and the other night I discovered by chance that it was available free online at something called liketelevision.com.  The quality of the video wasn't ideal - in some sections it almost became like watching a bunch of pixels without being able to discern what they were showing, but in general the film's impact remained.  This is sometimes a problem with these films that are free online: the quality can be very poor, though usually only in sections rather than as a whole.

Anyway, I watched all 200 plus minutes of the movie, with a couple of tea breaks.  It hasn't lost any of its power to engage the viewer, and the performances haven't dated in any way.   Toshirô Mifune plays Kikuchyiyo, the last one of the samurai to join the group, and he plays him as the ultimate wild man, sometimes verging on the crazy, completely careless of his life.  He's both a child and a man, the source of much amusement to the more serious samurai, but also a man of bravery.   


We first meet Kanbei, played by Takashi Shimura, who is quickly acknowledged as the leader of the samurai, when he's cutting off his hair (including the distinctive samurai knot at the back) in order to disguise himself as a priest, so that he can unman a thief who has taken a child as hostage.  His wonderful priest-like serenity, even throughout the battle between the farmers and the bandits that takes up much of the second half of the movie, is a total contrast to Mifune's character.  Isao Kimura is the young 'disciple' who is accepted as one of the samurai, and even though he was 31 when he played the role, he comes across easily as a naive youth in his late teenage years.  


The cast is full of wonderfully-played characters, every one of them distinctive (at least once you get to grips with who's who).   The story, which is basically a matter of a battle to the death between the farmers trying to protect their village (aided in due course by the samurai), and the bandits who come every year and carry off food (and women, apparently), is simple enough, but the scriptwriters weave a number of other elements into the tale so that complications arise from the personalities of the characters as well as the plot.  


Not surprisingly, it's a violent film, and there are a number of deaths on both sides.  It shows the awfulness of battle, particularly when you're not experienced, and shows how easy it is to move from cowardice to heroism, from fear to fighting mode.  The last section of the battle, which takes place in pouring rain, has the actors and horses struggling in ever-increasing mud, with swords and spears and arrows flying everywhere - as well as the gun that causes ultimate havoc.

For a more detailed review, check out Roger Ebert's one here.

Onto the new: How to Train Your Dragon is a fairly straightforward rendering of the ancient plot in which a (Viking) father doesn't understand his son (or read daughter, in the case of the even more recent, Brave), and the son has qualities that are at odds with the community.   Of course the father will continue to misunderstand his son until the latter proves his worth.  In fact there are a lot of similarities between this movie and Brave, not least the Scottish accents (Vikings with Scottish accents?).  In both cases the father is very capable in his own compartment; he just doesn't realise there are other compartments.

Hiccup, the hero of this film, is that sort of age that you can't quite pin down: according to Roger Ebert he's ten, but if that's the case he's a very competent ten-year-old (when he's doing what he does well).  However, the dialogue he's given is rather too smart for a ten-year-old, and sometimes so undercuts the warmth of the character that he doesn't become particularly endearing.   His female counterpart is feisty, as you'd expect in the 21st century, although she does have a brief moment when she succumbs to the boy's charms (her usual response to him is to thump him on the arm).

The story is about a Viking village, which at first appears to have a tiny population; our view is significantly altered towards the end when it's plain that it's a much bigger place, with a lot more people, than the filmmakers first implied.  Dragons continually carry off the sheep (they're the equivalent of the bandits in Seven Samurai, perhaps), and the Vikings, including Hiccup, continually devise ways to kill them, because that's what Vikings do.  However, Hiccup inadvertently captures one, tries to kill it and can't.  This leads to a delightful friendship, and the big showdown when it's discovered that the dragons themselves aren't actually the problem.

There are some good comedy moments, and the main characters are fairly sharply drawn - the lesser characters quickly lapse into 'flat' characters - although the overweight boy who seems to have no brains is the one who's actually read the manual on dragons, unlike the others in his group.  The film would be better on the big screen: as a DVD it seemed too busy at times.   Perhaps a second viewing would improve that, as it often does.   (Is it me, or do animated movies tend to include far too much detail?)

Emperor's New Clothes?

[Lots of spoilers here] Sometimes a movie is so annoying you wonder whether it's the movie that's the problem or your understanding of it.  Such is the case with The American, a European movie starring George Clooney (he also co-produced it, along with three women and one other man).   Roger Ebert thought it was great, Sam Adams at Salon.com is more pro than against, as is Michael Atkinson in Sight & Sound - though whether the following sentence actually makes sense I'm not sure:  it’s mature, fastidiously logical (and therefore skimpy) with exposition, and patient, and arguably this is what audiences have responded to.  


Okay, well this member of the 'audience' didn't respond to it.  Nor did my wife.   And both of us found the almost total lack of exposition and information irritating rather than 'fastidiously logical.'  In fact, logical is about the last thing this movie is.  Okay, in terms of the main character it's logical that his personality, from which the emotions have almost entirely left home, will eventually cause the hell he lives in (as the local priest notes) to consume him.  Unfortunately for Clooney's character, it consumes him just as he's possibly finding a kind of salvation, a way out to life again, and that's so typically European art house in its approach that it's utterly predictable. 


Clooney plays an assassin who also happens to be a top-notch assembler of made-to-order guns.  There's a lot of fiddling around with the making of a particular gun, which has been ordered by an unlikely female assassin who's working for somebody anonymous.  After a violent and surprising opening scene, the movie moves at a snail's pace.  Clooney, at the behest of his boss, goes and lives in a small Italian village (very picturesque, it must be admitted) where he refuses to be contactable, and only rings the boss when he wants.  He claims to know nothing of machinery, but it's so patent a lie that the parish priest, who keeps turning up whenever needed for the script, tells him so to his face.  He meets up with the female assassin in a ridiculously obvious way in an outdoor and very public cafe, gets his specific orders, presumably orders the basics of the gun somehow (he's obviously not into the Internet, which in this film might not exist), and finds the odds and ends to adapt it so that the gunshot sound is suppressed if not silenced.  In order to do the latter he visits a local mechanic (who happens to be the priest's son, though that has almost nothing to do with the story) and, for some reason when left alone in the mechanic's tumbledown workshop, goes round surreptitiously collecting a pile of odds and ends.  When the mechanic catches him at this, he offers to pay for them and the mechanic says he doesn't need to.  Okay....  This scene is done as though there was a Hitchcock element to it.  There isn't. 


Back home he makes up the suppresser out of all these bits, though why he's chosen to live in a place where there's so little access to the parts is a bit of a puzzle.  He takes the gun through its paces with the other assassin in a remote place by a river, and everyone's happy.  Except that the Swedes are still trying to kill him, as they were at the beginning.  Who knows why.   Very slowly, he falls in love with a local prostitute, who, in typical European movie-style, spends most of her on-screen time with the majority of her clothes off for no good reason except that she looks as good with them off as on.  He picnics with her in the same spot he showed off the gun, and it seems possible he might kill her too, but somehow he pulls himself back from the brink.  He's constantly suspicious of people sitting in cars outside cafes.  


Finally, he delivers the completed gun to the female assassin in an isolated cafe, where everything is made to seem more mysterious than it really is, and we gather that for some reason she's going to kill him.  She misses her chance, he drives off into the village again where they're holding some Marian feast-day.  She kills his landlady, (why wasn't she watching the procession?), hides on the roof, targets him and the girl as they're conveniently talking - and standing - in the crowd, and just as she's about to shoot, is shot herself - by the boss.  Huh?  All that time and energy getting a gun sorted out to kill Clooney and she gets killed by the one giving all the orders?  What has she done?  


Clooney prowls the streets (he does this a lot in this movie), which are suddenly surprisingly empty given that a procession was taking place a few moments before, and of course is followed by the boss.  There's a little shoot-out, the boss is killed and Clooney is wounded.  He drives back to the river place where he'd told the girl to meet him (she gets there on foot apparently, even though it's miles away, because there's no other car in sight), Clooney drives in dying, and dies.   


The thing is inexpressibly silly, as were so many movies of the period when telling the audience almost nothing was considered an arty approach.  Clooney is excellent, as always, and obviously felt there was something in the script to make it worth his while.  But the problem is, there isn't anything in the script.  Apart from the minimalist redemption of the main character, all the other Hitchcockian tricks are smoke and whatever-the-expression-is.  People die and are left behind without a single police presence throughout.  The news of the first three deaths is headlined in a newspaper days after the event (and by headlined I mean it takes up the entire page), though why three deaths in Scandinavia would be especially important to the Italians I'm not sure.  In another random headline, 'two more prostitutes are killed' - what prostitutes?  Certainly none in this story, and the only reason for this bit of nonsense is to make us think Clooney is going to kill the girl he's fallen for.  And again, the headline and story take up the whole front page. 


I could go on, but I won't, even though the movie continues to annoy me.   It obviously hasn't done Clooney's career any harm, and in fact it's actually done quite well in America where you'd hardly think it would get noticed.  But Clooney's made some much better low-key movies than this, and I think mentioning the Emperor's new clothes might be appropriate at this point....

Lark Rise to Candleford

I bought my wife the DVD of the first series of Lark Rise to Candleford, which I’d seen a very small piece of at a friend's house one night. He was enthusing over it, and since it hasn’t appeared on free-to-view television (like so much these days) I thought my wife might enjoy it.

We’ve been watching it on and off over the time since Christmas. It’s full of ‘characters,’ some better formed than others, and most of the core cast are good, especially Julia Sawalha – good to see her playing a more mature woman after all those years as a perpetually young woman in Absolutely Fabulous. Some of the other core cast lack depth – whether that’s the script or the direction or what, I’m not sure. Being a kind of ‘soap’, no one is expected to develop much, nor are they given room to. However, there are some good features about it, and there have been some good guests. Dawn French, whom I thought was in the entire series, was carted off to the Workhouse after about the third or fourth episode, unfortunately – although she did perform her part in an over-the-top way that didn’t entirely fit in with the rest of the characters.

Apparently the stories are only loosely based on the books - perhaps the ideas for the plots were there, but I think they've been pulled into neatly packaged episodes.

Oddly, the writers have also chosen to play fast and loose with something that was the focus of the first episode, as one reviewer notes: “the poor people of Lark Rise having to pay a fee for postal deliveries because they are just outside the eight-mile limit from the post office. Yet, the characters of Lark Rise turn up in neighbouring Candleford throughout the series as if they were just around the corner.” This is a bit disconcerting, and sometimes annoying. You begin to wonder if everyone (including children) in these two locales has an exceptional ability to walk an eight-mile stretch (and often back again) without any difficulty. A few people travel by cart, a couple ride horses, but the rest supposedly walk.

Furthermore the 'poor' people of Lark Rise look pretty tidy most of the time, and the men manage to spend their evenings comfortably in the pub, whose owner doesn't seem to be too pressed for income. It might be interesting to read the original book(s) and compare them and the series. I suspect

The Village

Finally caught up with M Night Shyamalan’s The Village last night, on TV.
I always enjoy Shyamalan’s movies, but I’d steered away from this one because I’d heard it hadn’t quite achieved what it seemed to be setting out to do. It turns out still to be a very effective thriller, in its own unusual way, but doesn’t bear thinking about too much afterwards.
The tension would have been stronger if our viewing hadn’t been interrupted by frequent ads, and by my suspecting that things weren’t quite as the villagers tried to make out. I didn’t know the ending but had an inkling that things weren’t quite what they seemed.
It’s an odd story, however, more strange than any of the director/writer’s other outings, more strange because in the end its inner logic is based on shifting sands. The viewer is left with far too many questions at the end: why did the elders decide to continue to lie after Ivy came back from her trip to the ‘towns’. What would Ivy feel about that – she’d met someone who was kind there, not fearful as she’d expected. How was it Adrian Brophy’s character followed her successfully into the fearsome woods and yet managed to be overcome by her. (In fact, he seems immune to pretty much everything else, including the woods themselves.) How does Ivy manage that extraordinary trip through the woods on her own? Philosophising about her ability to ‘see’ when she’s blind because the other villagers may be blind in their thinking, doesn’t really cut it. Unfortunately this aspect of the story isn’t helped by the actress Bryce Dallas Howard. Too often she plainly has no trouble finding her way around. And then there are times when she’s stumbling around the village as though she’d never been there before. (For example, she runs freely in a race with Brophy, but later on walks, arm outstretched and cane tapping the ground, while finding her way to her lover’s house, a trip which ought to be just as familiar.)
Why would the elders sustain the lie that there were evil creatures in the woods to their children and grandchildren? How did they expect this all to be carried through to the next generation? And why is everybody dressed in 19th century garb? Where did all the materials to build their houses come from? And are we expected to believe that no one knows they’re living in a nature reserve?
Okay, okay. We can pull it apart as much as we like (only Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense seems unbreakable in this respect). In the end, what’s it like to watch without quibbling about the details?
The acting is uniformly convincing, and William Hurt and Joaquin Phoenix are excellent, as always. The direction is top-notch, with timing and editing superb (Shyamalan’s movies always shine in this regard) . The design is good with the drab costumes making a distinct contrast to the bold yellows and reds of the two opposing ‘sides’.
In the end it’s the script that doesn’t quite cut it. But the direction manages to make us suspend disbelief long enough to overlook the flaws.

Writing about Crowle

I’ve just been writing about Crowle, Worcestershire, on my travel blog, and in the process found a link to wartime experiences in Crowle, written by one Raymond Holt.
I’ve taken the liberty of quoting the opening paragraph:
I was born in Crowle, Worcestershire in 1933. I was six years old when World War 2 began. My Father was the village undertaker, coffin maker, carpenter and local Special Constable. My Grandfather had been the coffin maker and undertaker before my Father took over. We all lived within a hundred yards of each other in Crowle village.

Not for the faint-hearted

A few posts back I had a little debate with my inner critic about whether writing about racing and buying shares should really find a place in this blog, being as it’s supposed to be focused on the arts. The Arts.
However, one of the curious key phrases for this blog that keeps turning up again and again is athlete’s feet/fingers. In a small post written back at the end of last year, I made a joke about athlete’s fingers. Since then this phrase has turned up on HitTail as one of the strongest key words/phrases connected to my blog. It’s very odd.
In fact in this latest search, we come up as result number three, straight after two results for Pakistani women and athlete’s foot.
So how can I connect up athlete’s foot, or athlete’s fingers, to the art scene? An interesting question.
One site introduces an article on athlete’s foot in this way:
The great renaissance artist, Leonardo da Vinci called the foot "a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art".
On the Village Voice main page this piece of work was at one time seen:
Best place to see your feet in a different light - PASSERBY
Forget your plantar warts, your athlete's foot, your bunions and calluses. The most homeless-foot-lookin' feet look fly jitterbuggin' out over the Saturday Night Fever floor at PASSERBY. The candy-colored squares flash in time to the tunes and make you want to gyrate and get thy finger pointing. -Jamie Lowe
Yes, well. I’m not at all sure what homeless-foot-lookin' feet are when they’re at home (or on the dance floor), and why you need to get your finger pointing is beyond me.
As for movies, well again, it took quite a bit of Google searching to come up with anything, and in the end I probably wished I hadn’t. Someone who enjoys horror movies to the extent of finding them a laugh, wrote about a sequence from Creepshow 2. And left pictures of some of the more unpleasant bits on the blog. As the writer says, there’s always a jock in these pictures, and this one makes the mistake of letting whatever the nasty blob in the water is get him. I quote: The blob grabs him from under the raft and turns his foot into a pulsating hideously bloody mess. That's one hell of a case of athlete's foot.
Oh, dear. The lengths I have to go to, to justify this being a blog about the arts.