Couple of footnotes

Forgot to say that after today's rehearsal I was one of the guinea pigs for the make-up artists, who were having a training session. Unfortunately, you might say, because I'm an animal in this play, my make-up isn't going to be straightforward. I came home eventually about three o'clock (the rehearsal had finished at one) after having had my face covered in grey makeup, along with various pinks and whites and blacks. I'd washed off the worst at the theatre, but needed a good soaking to get the rest of it out of my beard.
Can't say the idea of this process is grabbing greatly - but the makeup did look effective when they finally got through with me!

Recorded Woody Allen's Melinda Melinda last night, and watched it this afternoon when I was too tired to do anything else. Talk about inconsequential. It has a bunch of four unnamed characters talking about an incident in which a woman walked uninvited into a dinner party. One writer thinks of it in tragedy terms, the other as a comedy, and we get to see both their versions on and off through the movie. But neither version goes anywhere; the connections between the two stories are random; characters leave husbands and wives with a fair amount of speed; the woman in the comedy version manages to wind up with Will Ferrall (playing Woody Allen, basically) and suddenly the movie stops. We see no resolution to any of the stories, and the ending of the tragic version is cut off as abruptly as the movie itself. Bit of a fizzer, really.

Indiana Jones returns!

We went to the movies today to see the latest Indiana Jones escapade: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I had to look the rest of the title up as that part of the film made no impact on me at all!
The reviews I’d read were a bit mixed, but Roger Ebert seemed as pleased as punch about the movie just because it was so much fun that I thought it would be worth catching it at the cinema rather than waiting for the DVD to come out. If nothing else, the sound in cinemas is far more effective than what comes out of our TV – although when we’re watching West Wing (we’ve just gone through the entire sixth season), the phones ringing in the background often seem to be pitched somewhere away from the TV and occasionally make us want to go and answer them.
Anyway, the film is a hoot. It doesn’t take itself in the least bit seriously, plays off against Harrison Ford’s age on more than one occasion, fills itself with in-jokes, references itself back to the other movies - and offers the most extreme villains (and, as usual, disposes of them in particularly nasty ways – they just never learn, do they?).
The car chases and fights on car chases are so absurdly over-the-top you’d have to be a misery guts to carp at them (one or two reviewers have managed to play misery guts), and the spectacular destruction of practically everything in sight has a certain kind of odd satisfaction. It’s a bit like going to the refuse dump (or tip, as we used to call it; it’s now something absurd like the transit station), and throwing piles of glass off the back of your vehicle, or large pieces of borer-ridden furniture, or great heavy chunks of metal, all of which you can smash with completely-permitted freedom.
The Indy story is pretty regular: it starts off with lots of nasty Russians taking over the atomic bomb site in Nevada (Indy manages to set the bomb off, though how he does it is anyone’s guess), shifts to Indy once again in his proper employment as Professor in some elitist college (which narrowly avoids getting thoroughly wrecked), and then sets him off on a madcap trail around half the world, creating havoc everywhere with his newly-found companion, Mutt Williams, a much younger bloke with a surprising ability in sword-play and a penchant for doing his hair rather too often.
There are a couple of real plot surprises (the film doesn’t really have time for much plot with all its other antics), and a curious ensemble of characters, Shia LeBeouf as Mutt, John Hurt as a cracked archaeologist, Karen Allen (dug up, as it were, from the first movie in the series) as Indy’s old flame, and Ray Winstone as a goody/baddie/goody/baddie who doesn’t quite know which side he’s on from one scene to the next. Cate Blanchett has enormous fun as the villain (she’s more interesting than similar bad females in the Bond series, which is saying something). She has a sidekick with a constitution like an ox, and a seemingly endless supply of minor villains, none of whom survive – as far as we can tell.
And since we spend some of the time in South America, we have nasty South American natives – slightly more pleasant than the islanders in Jackson’s King Kong – as well as FBI agents and KGB agents and probably various others whom I’ve forgotten about already.
Being only two years younger than Harrison Ford, I find it hard to imagine how he coped with the rigours of filming this piece; sure there are doubles and stunt men in droves, but there are a couple of scenes where it’s obviously him, and you think: that must have puffed him out, or left him very sore.

50 Greatest Comedies? Hmmm

Last night I caught the end of the program on the Greatest Comedy Films. I don’t know whether the films were chosen by some sort of poll or not, but it seems they may have been when I look on the web.
The list is okay when you work from 50 towards the top; there are some oddball films there, but that’s probably good. But as you get into the top 15, things take on a curious turn. I caught up with the list at Groundhog Day, which isn’t just a comedy, it’s a philosophical statement about life and repetition and the order of things. The Blues Brothers, which comes next, is mayhem personified. I’ve never managed to see all of it, but it looks like an odd combination of lots of car crashes (Americans seem to find this amusing for some reason - maybe they actually hate cars rather than love them) and some interesting uses of music.
Annie Hall is next on the list, with Woody Allen at his neurotic best, and then we come to This is Spinal Tap, a film I’ve barely heard of, and which, from the clips they showed, may be worth a look. It was hard to tell. But it seemed a strange choice to be so far up the list.
Now we come to the level of comedy where the crude and gross excel. On screen in the documentary we had various people proclaiming how far they’d gone and how producers had actually let them get away with it. There’s Something About Mary is famous for some very unpleasant use of semen and for Ben Stiller getting himself caught in his zip. Beyond that it’s hard to know whether it’s of any value as a comedy or not, because this is all you ever hear about it.
Blazing Saddles came next, and certainly this is a pretty crazy movie. Again, one scene has stuck in people’s minds, which seems to say a lot about what people think is funny, and that’s the scene in which a bunch of men eating beans fart a good deal. The film is a lot better than this one scene, though again it’s pretty crude.
But crude and gross and generally offensive is about all I can say in regard to the next choice, American Pie. I’d heard that it was pretty puerile, but the clips shown last night show that I’d barely guessed at the level of puerility. It may be funny in some people’s minds, but it wouldn’t make my list of comedies.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail is another kettle of fish. The Python gang can be pretty offensive in the sexual area sometimes, but seldom get to a disgusting level. This isn’t a movie I’ve seen, but the clips seemed to indicate it had a typical Python sense of the surreal, and could actually be quite funny.
The last five on the list are an extremely mixed bunch: South Park, Austin Powers, Shaun of the Dead, Airplane! and Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
To take the top one first. The Life of Brian has always been controversial because of its closeness to the Christian story, and in spite of what the Python clan claim, it mocks Christianity continually. For them to say that people like Malcolm Muggeridge and some Archbishop who appeared on television with them were too ‘serious’ about the film, and seeing things in it that weren’t there is just nonsense. No one with any knowledge of Christianity could miss the constant references, and time after time it undercuts the faith and sincerity of real believers. The language is foul as well, as though the Pythons had finally discovered the F word. It’s almost as common in here as in a Gordon Ramsay episode. This film would never make the top of a list of my favourite comedies.
Airplane! is absurd in every respect, and probably deserves to be on the list somewhere. Whether second place is its place is another matter.
Shaun of the Dead comes out of nowhere. A frequently brutal piece - in a funny way, according to the makers - about killing off zombies, it has its points (as far as I could tell from the clips) but when one of its makers and actors said that the other main actor had the filthiest mind he knew of, I wasn’t inclined to chase up a copy of the film and watch it.
Austin Powers has some wonderful madness in it. It certainly sends up the Bond movies hugely and makes nonsense of the sexual content of them. And Mike Myers is one of the few actors who can make himself spectacularly ugly and still come back for more. Again, a possibility for a list, but not in 4th place.
And South Park. Well, I have no time for this program at all, anyway, so a movie version of it isn’t going to grab me. I know plenty of people think that the offensive humour has something going for it. Not me.