A musical and a mystery

In a bit of a marathon last night, we watched two DVDs...probably nothing at all to people who go and watch all six of the Star Wars movies in a row, as some did recently in Dunedin, but still not something we often do. I can remember as a teenager going to two movies in one day and thinking that if people knew about it they'd say I was being more than a little frivolous with my time.

Anyway, one of the movies was Calamity Jane, which I'd thought I hadn't seen since it first came out in the fifties. However, I suspect I have caught up with since then, as a lot of it was quite familiar. I've recently arranged four of the songs into a medley for the singing group I conduct, The Choristers. The songs are as popular as ever, and well written. In fact the music in the movie bounces along from the moment the credits start with enormous energy, and is well-integrated into the storyline.

Doris Day is the absolute star in this musical. Even Howard Keel, who has a good deal of screen time, can barely stand up to the utter feistiness, enthusiasm, and freshness Day brings to her role of a kind of Wild West tomboy. She gets all the best songs and she packs a punch from the moment she first appears. Thoroughly enjoyable even after fifty-one years. And somewhat unusual in that this is a movie musical that was turned into a stage musical, rather than the other way round.

The second movie was in another league altogether. Two or three times we looked at each and debated whether we'd continue watching. I'm glad we did, though the movie had some slow moments, and kept making you think it was going to turn into some grisly horror piece. The film was The Sound of My Voice, a movie I'd never heard of until I took a chance on it when I found it in the Library's DVD collection.

It's about a young couple who've decided to make a documentary exposing a group they're convinced is a cult. They sneak film and recording equipment in but more than once something goes wrong and they don't get the results they expect. The woman who's at the centre of the group claims to have come from the future, and of course she already has a bunch of devotees who believe every word she says. The young couple, and another young Asian-American couple, are the newest possible disciples, and we go through the rigmaroles of seeing them gradually being inculturated.

The couple don't live with the cult, but join them regularly at night for their initiations. This means at least they can get away from the saturating presence of the mysterious leader, but it also means that things start to fall apart out in the real world.

The film was written by Brit Marling, who plays the cult leader, and the director, Zat Batmanglij (can that be his real name?). The story is presented in several episodes, some introducing completely new characters who seem at first unrelated to the main story. Marling's character, Maggie, is a highly-intelligent persuader, a person who it's difficult to fool or trip up, and who manages to convince those following her that she really is who she says she is. The persuasiveness of her approach shows how easy it is for people who want to believe - and even for those who don't - to fall into the trap of allowing someone to take over their lives. The film has several intriguing twists and turns, and an ending that leaves you not as sure as you think you are about what's gone on, though it's a very satisfying ending for all that.

The cast is excellent, although none of them are particularly well-known names. Christopher Denham (who I've seen before but is one of those actors that you couldn't easily identify) plays the documentary-maker, and Nicole Vicius, who's also been in a number of movies, plays his girlfriend.

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.

Collagraph

I’d never heard the term, collagraph, until yesterday, when I came across it in the Moray Gallery. An artist called Robert West has an exhibition on at the moment, in which he uses the technique.

Seemingly, a collagraph print is a collage printmaking technique, and is a form of Intaglio printing. (That is, one of the kinds of printing where something sharp is etched into a surface.) The collagraph plate is printed in the same way as etchings, but also include the basic principle of relief printing, and can be printed either as intaglio or relief.

A collagraph is a collage board where the materials are assembled on a flat base or plate (the matrix) in order to form a relief block with different surface levels and textures.

Collagraph plates are created by sticking and gluing materials like textured paper or fabric onto the plate and then coating it with varnish or acrylic medium afterwards to protect the materials.

That’s a simple introduction to it. There’s a fairly clear explanation here.

Unfortunately, Moray Gallery (which is right next to where I work, and used to be only two doors along from me when I ran the bookshop in Princes St) doesn’t have any of West’s prints on display on the website.

I’ve included a collagraph above, which appears on the Flickr.com site. It’s by someone who calls themselves 10b travelling. But if you’d like to see more examples, just Google the word, and look at the images. There are heaps on the Net.

Clear, clear water

A generation ago people would have laughed if we’d suggested that in future we’d be buying water from the shops to drink. We used to drink ordinary everyday tap water without blinking an eyelid, and never worried about its level of contaminants. And maybe we should have carried on doing that. But the pure water industry is so ingrained now that few people would go back to the old days easily.
So we accept the position as it stands and get on with it. In my office one of the jobs I’ve inherited is to fill the water bottle every couple of days. The water has to be filtered through a water filter before it reaches the bottle, but it’s no great task, and sometimes I can read the newspaper before anyone else while I’m waiting.
It always seems to me that the filter can’t be doing much filtering, because as far as I can tell the water goes in through it and pretty much straight out again. Still, the water, especially once it’s cooled by the water watchamacallit, is certainly very drinkable.
Purewater2go.com advertises portable water filters that do this task while you’re on the go. So presumably you can grab up some water from any old place when you’re out jogging, for instance, and filter it on the spot. The only difficulty I see here is carrying a water bottle and a filter, but if it’s pure water you want, that’s what you’ll have to do.
The site says millions of people die every year from not having fresh drinking water. I rather suspect that more than 99% of those people don’t live in Western countries, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Perhaps purewater2go has a huge untapped market in Third World countries.