what's the point

a lily, unfestered

It's midnight and today's a new day, early, and I'm contemplating again my embonpoint. I weighed myself earlier, not at the right time, which as we all know is morning, naked or close to, post ablutions and pre breakfasting, and it was about 81.2, about ten kilos, or maybe even twelve, more than I'd like to be, but I realize I can't do it alone, because I haven't, and right now I'm writing this instead of going on a rolling midnight ramble or hopping on the exercise bike; maybe later. Yet I'm reaching a stage of really wanting to get myself under management which at least is a good sign. A certain feebleness of spirit led me to spend money on dinner out, with S and the boy, always with the very good excuse that within two or three weeks he'll be out of my care, so it's time to celebrate and be generous. Before this dinner [I ate chicken breast stuffed with camembert and other goodies, with chips and salad, great for the weight] I spent more time on my arse watching an eighties Clint Eastwood movie, The Pink Cadillac, all as part of the boy's quest to see every bit of Jim Carry footage ever captured on what passes for celluloid these days. And guess what, after dinner, at a nearby pub, we all retired to the home of S for yet another arse-flattening film, the considerably more uplifting Big Fish, a Tim Burton epic about fantasy and family and tensions between. I always feel awkward though with films about family, having let my own down so badly, having estranged myself so completely from them. 

Not going to do a film review here though. Felt a stab of romantic devotion to just one, so easy when she comes so perfectly packaged as the young Snow-White Sandra [Alison Lohman], as if this image of youth and beauty represented love and not simply a perfect specimen within which to spurt seed and start out on a new eugenics, a specimen doomed to withering but perfect at spurting time. But I must return to my embonpoint, the point after all. I'm struggling with my pedo steps, preferring fantasy myself to the hard stepping cycling work of reality. Did get a rare dose of reality the other night though in the form of a truly beautiful young woman, friendly as all get out to all and sundry, and lusted after no doubt by all and sundry in the bar where she works, a bar I visit regularly only because of her, because she is so soothing on the eye and a fillip for fantasy, and last night she tried to engage me in friendly chit-chat as she has before, and I've always been awkward and monosyllabic, trying so hard to seem self-contained and un-needy, but this time when she asked how I'd been I tossed off a remark about the difficulties of foster-caring, and she enthusiastically revealed that she had been in foster care as a teen and had been very difficult herself. Followed a brief enthusiastic exchange about the tough teen years, the selfishness and stubbornness, and it was of course a breakthrough of sorts, though i was unable to make anything more of it, yet what a subject to have in common, quite exciting really. Ah to be simply in the company of beautiful women always, watching them and pleasing them with conversation or whatever else I might have to offer, which admittedly isn't much in this competitive world.

But again getting back to my embonpoint...

Americana

the smoking bogey

American movies. No no, no such thing. Individual sensibilities. And yet and yet. Movies watched over three days, half bullied or fully bullied by the foster kid, also an easy way to assuage guilt, for not going bowling gokarting arcade gaming paintballing macdonaldsing laser skirmishing. Movies made in America. Movies featuring Americans at least. Four over three days, Kill Bill One, Kill Bill Two, Very Bad Things and Thank You For Smoking. All full of death and flippancy but at least no blood in the last. 

They bleed into each other in my mind. Kill Bill's silly manga. Know nothing about though. David Carradine's Kung Fu face looking more like his old man. Trailers and Mexico and the Japanese mafia, what they call them, Yakuza. Jacussi. Steamy stuff. Long Uma Thurman's face, changeable as Cath's in its way. Two long films, too long, superheroes, fight scenes, uninteresting superinflated characters, but I liked the trailer guy. Long tradition of multiple heaps of dead baddies, especially in cartoons. The buried alive scene, always a consciousness raiser, killed by the silly fist trick. How would you feel? Might've made the effort to surface, when a young bud. Now no longer. Relax, don't panic, slowly use up the oxygen, slip away. But really who gives a, with the unbeatable sword, the old master, the squished eye, the cardboard baddies, the unreal realism. Getting jaded perhaps. Still, always prefer good old fashioned character development. Always been weak on plot myself. Those dance fights, heads popping like corks, fountains of blood jizz, startling at first then diminished returns, slipping down in the chair, consciousness fading.

And before or ofter that, who cares, Very Bad Things, men behaving badly, Jews and Gentiles, all boorish noisy, unlike my charming mens cooking group. Obnoxious then jawdroppingly horrible, but my boy insists its a black comedy, stay with it, don't give up, improves after the first couple of deaths. Black comedy, a new concept for a teenager, he had to explain and explain. Accept the early deaths of innocents, a balloon boobed pro, a black security hotelman, as foreground to more self-destructive shenanigans led by whatisname, well-known actor, the prime nasty. Whatisname featured in that movie whatsitsname, Heathers perhaps, with weird Winona, my old flame. The Very Bad Things chopped up the bodies, disposed of them in kosher fashion and proceeded inevitably to fall apart at the seams, so with whatisnames help they dwindled in number until Cameron Diaz disposed of whatisname because she wanted everything to go right for her wedding. It was a satire. I laughed twice. 

Thank You for Smoking was a satire too about an advertising exec or maybe a lawyer, anyway an apologist for Big Tobacco, Nick Naylor, I only recall that name because the foster boy mentioned it after, and the theme was, is it really a good thing to pursue a job because you're good at it without really reflecting on wider implications? Peter Singer would not approve. Nick's young son adores his wiliness and wants to be just like him which puts us into a very very slightly tense and worried state, and that's what the film's about, why are we laughing, but we do, which is probably healthy. He has regular pub confabs with a very sexy woman representing Big Booze and a fat fuzzball representing Big Guns and they compare notes on who is responsible for most deaths. An unlikely theme for a movie, almost makes it admirable. Asked to recall what happened in the end, I couldn't. Not as unfathomable as the last batman movie, indeed not unfathomable at all, but not too memorable either, apart from that sexy alcohol woman.  Oh that reminds me of Katie Holmes, a journalist who fucked Nick for a story, for the mortgage because everyone has a mortgage, they say but I don't. Anyway again I gave the movie ticks for audacity, and for Nick being more or less unrepentent in the end, but of course Big Tobacco finally lost Big Time but not as much as Yul Brynner or Humphrey Bogart. 

my watch

I watch films, sedulously, alone, frame by frame, thinking of the care and the choices, and the beauty and equipoise of the actors, and listening to the director or whoever with the voice-over, reliving these moments twenty years or so later, sounding all world-weary yet now and then infused with enthusiasm, as all the problems of location and set and lighting are revivified, together with old friendships and brilliant performances and trying moments, and I’m left with a sense of pleasure and strange loss, loss for what I never had and might never have even hoped for had I not watched the stupid damn thing, and all its emotional weights and tempests and glories, and locations locations, yet it’s all locked away behind the barrier of the screen, and what do I care if this is really Rome I’m seeing, or Tangiers, I can’t smell a thing and I’ll never see what’s behind that pillar of styrofoam or authentic rock of ages, I’m seeing an image that stops and starts and never faces me but obliquely, made of pixels or whatever, and my house still needs cleaning.

Primary Colors and political morality

I do get a bit behind in my film reviews, or my film viewing - sixty-two years behind in the case of Dragonwyck, but only ten years in the case of Mike Nichols's Primary Colors, but with this latter, the subject at least is not out of date, and we find it in every political campaign. In the recent federal election campaign, Rudd's one-time visit to a strip club, and a tenuous link with WA inc's notorious [I'm not entirely sure why] Brian Burke, were just two attempts to bring the scandalous and salacious into the political fray.

Primary Colors takes aim at the most magnetic of recent politicians, Bill Clinton [magnetic especially in attracting scandal], by creating a fiction with obvious parallels. Presidential hopeful Jack Stanton [John Travolta] and his savvy wife Susan [Emma Thompson] have a way of sucking people into the stream of their ambition and enthusiasm, and the film is largely seen from the perspective of one such sucked-in character, Henry Burton [Adrian Lester], who becomes Stanton's campaign manager. It's an extremely well-written film, and the performances of Thompson and Travolta, and Kathy Bates as a torrential and formidable campaign force who joins up with the Stantons after years of questionable absence, are a joy to watch.

I'm not going to review the film, though, as such. I'm more interested in the dilemmas raised. I should start with my general view, which will of course soon be qualified, that having sex more often, and with more people, is a Good and Healthy thing.

First qualification, or problem, is that most people don't agree with this statement, or at least with the 'more people' bit. Fidelity and loyalty are viewed as a positive, and Robert Manne amongst others has emphasized this. My own view is that having sex with a variety of people isn't necessarily proof of disloyalty, and that there is a confusion between sex and love, though admittedly the road of promiscuity is a hard road to hoe for a genuinely loving and loyal person, given human jealousies and possessiveness. And to travel that road under the spotlight of a political life is essentially impossible, unfortunately.

While a lot more could be said about the above confusion [about the meaning of sex in the context of human relations], I'll leave much of that to my online fiction which tries to explore many of these issues. Another matter dealt with in Primary Colors is that of sex and power. The high-flying Presidential candidate who takes advantage of a friend's bedazzled daughter, the Governor who has no trouble and no compunction about seducing his secretary, etc. As the film shows, these issues cut more than one way - the secretary may have no compunction about exaggerating a dalliance into a full-blown affair, for the purpose of extorting money or favours. Jack Stanton tries to 'clear his name' via DNA tests and such, but some might feel that this misses the point, which is that Stanton shouldn't use his personal charisma or political status to exploit the vulnerable and naive. On the other hand, there seems to have been enough people willing to turn a blind eye, or even to have been quietly approving of his behaviour, for him to have gotten away with it [sorry, I'm switching my thinking here from Stanton to Clinton, though Stanton too was successful in the Presidential race].

One possible explanation for this is that people are aware [however consciously] of the harm principle, and that the question of the harm caused by a few, or even more than a few, dalliances in the context of a marriage the openness of which is itself an open question, is at the very least difficult to determine. One of the problems for me, I confess, is that the Stantons/Clintons would never admit to their marriage being an open one, if that's what it is, for fear of losing the support of vast numbers of more conservative voters. This is one of the points of the film, of course - how pragmatic are we allowed to be, in order to get elected? If Clinton's 'closed' - and close - marriage is a sham [but note that the pair are still very much together], what about, say, his religion? After all, we all know that, more than in any other country, the USA's leadership aspirants have no option but to be practicing Christians. So is Clinton really a god-fearer? How much is sincere, and how much pretence?

These issues are perennial for all campaigners in all democratic elections, and they come with the territory of representative democracy. You could even say it's the poison at the heart of this system. Is this candidate/incumbent saying what she's saying in order to get into/stay in power, or does she really feel and believe it? Did Howard throw money and resources at the tax payer because he felt they deserved it, or to get re-elected? Were his actions re Aboriginal communities and the abuse of Aboriginal children a matter of sincere conviction or political expediency? Some of these question are much more easy to answer than others.

The Clinton warts-and-all Presidency was something of a victory for flawed, ambitious humanity, though I see the flaws rather differently from most. In the film, someone commits suicide because she has ideals that the Stantons don't live up to - but nobody can be expected to live up to the ideals of others, or even to be aware of them. As it happens, the Stantons are by turns exploitative and compassionate, as we all are. I suppose the best way to judge them is also the most painstaking - to analyse who gets hurt and who benefits, how many and by how much.
It's essentially a never-ending process.

Dragonwyck

Walter Huston, Anne Revere, Gene Tierney and Vincent Price in Dragonwyck, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz. Huston and Price compare suits.

Lately I've been watching films galore. Partly it's been a bonding of sorts with my sixteen-year-old foster child - he's been cajoling me into watching things I'm not particularly interested in. The 'Saw' series of movies, for example, which I'm much more than not particularly interested in. These are dreadful, intellectually dishonest pieces of barbarity, but perhaps useful for teens to watch, to sort out their own understanding of morality in extreme circs. I found them boring, laughable, but also offensive and insulting. Other films I've watched with him, just in the past few days, include Fido, The Butterfly Effect, Pulp Fiction and Stranger than fiction.

I might review at least some of these, but for now I'm going to review a film which I saw as a child, and which I've wanted to see as an adult for I wouldn't like to say how many years. All I remember about it really was that it riveted me, and profoundly scared me, though watching it now, I've no idea why. Over the years I seem to have got it mixed up in my mind with Hitchcock's Rebecca, for I expected a frightening mansion, a dour, skull-faced housekeeper, silhouettes in flames and other gothic histrionics. What I got instead was a solid, absorbing piece, with a subtly sinister character at its centre, played by Vincent Price [before he lost his subtlety].

Based on a novel by Anya Seton, author of popular historicals in the first half of the 20th, Dragonwyck has something of an Austen-like quality [think Northanger Abbey], with its central heroine, Miranda [Gene Tierney] starting out enamoured of the idea of rich rellies and the manor born. Instead she's mired in a puritanically religious farming family [Walter Huston's a real card as her father]. But guess what, her dream comes true, via a mysteriously unlikely letter from a distant, filthily rich rellie, who's not really a rellie at all [think Tess of the D'Urbervilles], and who wants the company of a beautiful innocent like Miranda to assist him in dealing with his daughter and sundry other matters, such as his wife. Eventually she coaxes Dad into letting her go.

Miranda is naturally very much taken with the tall suave and immaculately dressed Nicholas Van Rhyn [Price], as well as his mansion, Dragonwyck, but is aghast at the narcissism, gluttony and valetudinarianism of his wife. Their daughter Katrine is kept at arm's length, and all in all it's a far cry from the homely closeness of Connecticut farm life.

The focus switches for a while to Van Rhyn himself. He's having trouble with his tenant farmers [the film is set in the 1840s], who are rebellious about having to pay tribute and never being able to own the land they farm. Van Rhyn is an inflexible autocrat who insists on his divine rights [even though he has atheist tendencies and mock's Miranda's simple religiosity]. Obviously he's headed for a fall.

He's also increasingly keen to get rid of his odious wife [and increasingly keen on the melodious Miranda], and manages to do so, via some cake spiked with oleander, a plant which he obligingly brings into his wife's bedroom to cheer her up. He has a young doctor staying in the house, who's stunned at the sudden decline of Madam Van Rhyn after he'd diagnosed nothing but a head cold.
The doctor, who sides with Van Rhyn's tenant farmers, presents to Miranda an alternative to the dodgy aristocrat, but she still hasn't cottoned on, and she marries Van Ryn.

Relations begin to founder, of course. Van Rhyn spends more and more time in his tower room [taking unspecified drugs], no doubt plagued by guilt, affected by rumours about his first wife's death, and unable to cope effectively with the rebelliousness of his tenants. Miranda's also hurt by his cynicism re her down-home religion, and by his contempt for the crippled servant she hires [Jessica Tandy in one of her first screen roles]. 'Deformed bodies depress me,' he says. Miranda's offended response is even more depressing - 'You talk as if it's her fault she's a cripple when it's simply God's will.' The typically American connection between atheistic tendencies and amorality is made clearly enough.

Miranda emerges as another element in Van Ryn's life that he can't control, and when the good doctor discovers that he's trying to do away with her as he did his first wife, things unravel pretty quickly. He's finally shot while resisting arrest, asserting his rights as lord of the manor to the end.

Dragonwyck isn't exactly a great film, there's a little too much of the Mills and Boon about it, and the themes of old world v new world, elitism and aristocracy v liberty and democracy, are touched on only lightly. There are other flaws relating to the translating of a novel into film. The doctor at one point tells Miranda he finds he has nothing to say to her, though they got on so well when they first met. This seems a condensation of the novel which doesn't quite make sense on its own. Also the young Katrine, the ostensible reason Miranda first came to Dragonwyck, simply disappears in the second half. Still it's an absorbing piece, the gothic elements of which are more effective for their restraint. The production values, the costuming and so forth, are immaculate, and the whole thing looks great. The print was superb. It was fun reaquainting myself with something I'd never forgotten, and yet had forgotten completely.

There's a useful essay on Mankiewicz's films here.

pleasure units, updated

Kiss-Me-Kates for all occasions: buy 5, get one free

Watched a film with friends the other night - The Island, an overblown crashandburn sci-fi with an at least potentially interesting but predictably handled storyline about cloning. In 2019 no less, an organisation is producing clones of filthy rich people who want to greatly lengthen their lifespans. The clones are used as spare parts, and kept in the dark about their fate, being told, when needed, that they're going to 'the island', which they're led to believe is the ultimate tourist destination. We all agreed that Blade Runner did this sort of thing much better years ago, though the themes were rather different. Anyway, all this got me to thinking about those sexy pleasure units of the earlier film, and it struck me that, if I was filthy rich, I might be more inclined to invest in one of those than a spare parts factory. I mean, instead of prolonging the agony, why not opt for a bit of ecstacy while we've got the wherewithal to enjoy it? All you'd need, presumably, is some reliable DNA samples from your fave sex symbols. Got a thing about Johnny Depp? Does Jude Law make you just want to sink to your knees? Are you a secret Bruce Willis tragic [you know who I'm talking about]? Yes, you too can decorate your boudoir with your favourite toyboy, implanted to offer a lifetime of devotion to your worthy self. Sure it'll cost you an arm and a leg, rather than the other way round, but who's counting? Certainly not Brucey baby and his mates, and they're the ones who really count, right?
I wouldn't mind investing in a Kate Beckinsale or two myself. Might have enough for a down-payment if I can make it to the end of the century

Behind Narnia, part two

nothing like ye olde swashing and buckling

Shortly after the chat with the professor, the kids are outside playing cricket. They break a fancy window, and eventually all cram into the magical wardrobe to escape the consequences.

So, all four children enter wintry Narnia, and Lucy leads them to the home of Tumnus, but it has been broken into and trashed. Conveniently, a message has been left by the captain of the secret police, Maugrim, to say that Tumnus has been captured and charged with high treason against Jadis Queen of Narnia, for comforting enemies and fraternizing with humans. Lucy realizes he has gotten into trouble because of her, and Edmund, always on the outer, is clearly aware that he provided the info that led to Tumnus's arrest, which is why he's reluctant to do anything to help him.

Leaving the faun's house [by means of bird-signs], the four kids encounter a chatty beaver, who knows Lucy by name and seems to have been waiting for them. He invites them back to his house [and his wife], beyond the hearing of the trees. Inside they're told that Aslan is on the move. Of course this means nothing to them, so the beavers tell them about the prophecy – more Christian-style eschatological stuff. The story goes that Aslan will return when two sons of Adam and two daughters of Eve come to Narnia. Then there will be a great war between the forces of good under Aslan and the forces of evil under Jadis, which of course the good will win, and peace will be restored. The kids - particularly the older pair - already in refuge from a war, are none too keen to instigate another one, and make to leave, but find that Edmund has already scarpered. The beaver, clearly suspicious of Edmund, asks whether he has ever been to Narnia before. Maybe there's another part of the prophecy that hasn't been shared.

So what about this business of the prophecy and its relation to the Christian message? One article I read [I won't link to it, it isn't worth it], though extremely irritating in its blind acceptance of so-called biblical truth, points out intriguingly that Lewis has given more play to 'pagan' mythology than to Christianity in Narnia. For this reason, there are problems with a simplistic identification of Aslan with Jesus, but even so, the Christianity-infected western mind will inevitably leap to this identification. In any case, the unit-for-unit linking of Narnia prophecy with biblical prophecy is less important than the fact that they inhabit the same metaphysical-speculative realm, the realm of religion, in which there are divisions into good and evil, darkness and light, eternal summer and eternal winter, as well as various supernatural powers and occurrences.

Edmund has run off to the queen's ice palace, drawn no doubt by supernatural power. There he finds various creatures turned to stone, and is led by the nasty wolf Maugrim of secret police notoriety, to the throne of Jadis. She's angry that Ed hasn't led his siblings thither, so has him chained up with Tumnus. She questions him about his family – already the secret police dogs have torn down the beavers' home – but of course he doesn't know where they are. Suspecting Tumnus of interference in Ed's story, she has him turned to stone, and then sets out, with Ed, to find the three other kids, who're on their way to Aslan's kingdom near the stone table.

The kids and their beaver guides find themselves being chased by a sleigh, which they fear belongs to Jadis, but it turns out to be Santa's. It's a strange moment – Santa is jolly enough, but there's no red outfit, he looks much more like a medieval nobleman, and he means business. Out of his sack he produces tools, not toys, for the kids' forthcoming battle with the forces of evil. They continue on their journey, and after a skirmish with the dogs of Jadis, arrive safely at Aslan's camp. The lion asks after the fourth child, and is told that he has betrayed them. This old-fashioned word, heavy with Christian connotations, comes as something of a shock – Edmund after all is simply trying to survive in a strange land – but in the context of the second world war, where loose lips sink ships, it's perhaps understandable.

More religious stuff comes when Aslan has a private conversation with Peter, the prophesised king. He says: 'There is a deep magic more powerful than any of those that rule over Narnia. It defines right from wrong, and governs all our destinies – yours and mine.''

It's one of those solemn moments that occur from time to time in the film – moments of high-minded nonsense that hopefully will pass barely observed by young viewers. The idea that good and evil reside in powers beyond human action or control [indeed that good and evil are palpable entities] is a pre-scientific superstition, which might readily appeal to a child's pre-scientific mind. This doesn't mean that we should prevent them from entertaining such ideas – they may well be part of a child's development – but they should be seen as part of a rich play of ideas, often contradictory, and some finally recognised as more fruitful than others.

I might add here that a few critics have made the point that the four kids of the Narnia film aren't a patch on the kids of Hogworts. Perhaps this is because Lewis's Narnia books, written in the fifties, are much flavoured by that conservative period, when children were more often seen and not heard. 'King Peter' and his siblings, even down to little Lucy, seem like they're undergoing an apprenticeship in adulthood, one that they take all too seriously. We never fully enter into their imaginative world, the magic is imposed on them rather than derived from them. They seem at times more like representative samples of children rather than the fully realised individuals of the Harry Potter series.

The rest of the film – Edmund is rescued by Aslan's forces and serves as the more or less penitent and supportive brother thereafter, Aslan does a deal with Jadis in which he apparently agrees to be sacrificed in place of Edmund, but conveniently comes back to life, and Peter leads Aslan's forces in a daunting battle with Jadis, with Aslan arriving with reinforcements in the nick of time – is swashbuckling entertainment, with the Christian elements thankfully downplayed or distorted. Even Aslan's Christ-like remark, ''It is finished'', coming as it does after he's apparently bitten Jadis's face off, hardly conjurs up notions of Christian resignation before the Almighty. It seems that, in this film version at least, Lewis's paganism does win out over his Christian sentiment, which is a healthy thing. Not that I'm an advocate of paganism of course, but it's at least an improvement on Christian dogma.

So, all in all, the film won me over. Magic prevails over doctrine, animals, albeit overly humanised, play a nobler part than generally allowed by Christian tradition, kids are encouraged to think themselves kings and queens [as if they need encouragement], the horribly slain come alive again, stone isn't always as hard as it looks, the goodies beat the baddies, and the kids all return safe and sound to the real world, having lost nothing and gained a whole new world of marvels and imaginary friends. As long as the high-flown religious nonsense is kept in check, I don't see why the Narnia chronicles can't continue to delight film-viewing youngsters in future.

behind Narnia, part one

frosty the snowwoman

I recently watched the recent film Narnia. I saw it with two other adults, and that inimitable four-year-old, Courtney, who'd seen the film countless times, in the modern way of kiddie [and teen] DVD viewers, and who insisted on giving a running commentary [a rather more amusing one than what's often offered as a DVD extra], though there were certain 'scary-hairy' bits, such as the sacrifice of the lion, which she couldn't bear to watch.

Considering my focus on religion and particularly Christianity in recent times, this might be described as a must-see for me, but I wasn't hugely looking forward to it. The fact was, I didn't want to look at it in a critical, kill-joy way, but at the same time I was reluctant to swallow any didactic message – though I strongly suspected that, if there was any underlying Christian propaganda, the film version of C S Lewis's book, which I've never read, would dilute it considerably.

I also would've liked something impossible – to see the film through the eyes of a child. I've occasionally mentioned a text I read at the age of ten or eleven, a prose version of Spenser's Tales from the faerie queene. It set my imagination alight, and I fell in love with the fair Britomartis, a maiden who donned armour and fought various wicked foes and fiends on her way to rescuing her father from the Black Knight's tower [if I remember aright].

Though I can't remember being struck by any Christian message in Spenser, it's surely true that the simple goodies v baddies format would've appealed to me, as it would to any child of my age, or younger. By the time I came to read Lord of the Rings however [and I never finished it], the goodies v baddies approach would've struck me as quite shallow. After all, by that time I'd read all the major fictions of Kafka and Dostoyevski, as well as substantial portions of the philosophy of Nietszche and Schopenhauer, and I didn't see too many of their preoccupations reflected in the concerns of Bilbo Baggins or any of the inhabitants of Middle-Earth. In fact though, what ultimately put me off finishing Lord of the Rings was the role of women. They all seemed to me uniformly pathetic. It was a macho, marshal world, and positively medieval, not a world I hankered after at all.

I know that Tolkien and C S Lewis were of the same circle, that they were both committed Christians, but that they were at odds about how they were to portray what they saw as Christian values in their works, with Lewis favouring a more didactic approach. I've had Lewis pressed upon me by at least one Christian as an interesting writer/thinker. I've also read at least one critic who dismissed him as misogynistic, bigoted and generally nasty. The Screwtape Letters, I believe, set out his ideas fairly clearly. I've not read any of his writings, beyond a few quotes here and there, so can't comment on how well or poorly the film captures the Christian values he wanted to promote, but by the time I've finished this slow review, I might have familiarised myself with at least the general trend of his ideas.

It's a goodies and baddies film, and a magical one, so its appeal for children is obvious.

Like the film Bedknobs and Broomsticks, which was set at the time of the London blitz in the forties, The lion the witch and the wardrobe starts with the evacuation of kids to protect them from the ravages of war and the largely incomprehensible dangers it presents. The transfer from familiar surroundings to the unfamiliar world of 'the provinces' – is used as a springboard to a kind of radical, but very understandable, escapist fantasy, in which the children are much more empowered. There are some clear elements of Christian symbolism, with much talk of prophecy and the return of a powerful lord or king, Aslan, to restore the blighted – but still quite attractive - world of Narnia to its former glory. Other important themes include the concept of betrayal and the importance of family. There's a resurrection story, as well as a goodies and baddies theme, with much emphasis on good old-fashioned valour and honour. As with The Lord of the Rings, human psychology, in any sophisticated sense, is almost entirely absent, and character development isn't much of an issue. In this respect, it reflects very much a child's perspective. The world of Narnia, like that of Middle-Earth, is positively medieval [Tolkien described his invented world as pre-Christian, though extolling Christian values], and has a weird nostalgic element, being, as any serious historian would admit, grossly unrepresentative of the reality of earlier times.

Of course it's fantasy, but the question is whether it's a fantasy worth having or a retreat into childhood certainties, certainties that never were real, but which seem to represent a preliminary or interim understanding of the world.

Lucy, the youngest of four evacuated siblings, stumbles upon the snow-laden Narnia when she hides in an imposing wardrobe during a game of hide-and-seek in the country house of a professor, where they've come to stay. Like Doctor Who's Tardis, this wardrobe is much more than the sum of its parts. It serves as the entrance to a world of snow-laden trees and odd creatures, one of whom she soon encounters. His name is Tumnus, and he's a faun. Association: friendly, gentle, timid – and that's how he comes across. The first overt religious note is struck here – he wonders aloud if Lucy isn't one of 'Eve's daughters'. Unfortunately the little one doesn't have the presence of mind to retort – 'no I'm actually more closely related to my friends the chimpanzees than to Eve', so we, or rather the kids, have to keep swallowing this 'sons of Adam, daughters of Eve' swill throughout the film.

Why is this stuff actually in the film? The film-makers would no doubt say it was put in or kept in to acknowledge the Christian spirit of author Lewis, without ramming it too much down the kids' throat. A mild dose of Christian mythology, perfectly harmless.

Unfortunately not. I don't know if Lewis really believed we were all descended from Adam and Eve, but I'm sure we've all met people who fervently believe this to be true – and allow this 'truth' to deeply affect their perspective on the world. This is a living issue in our culture and not just harmless mythology [for example I've known someone, a reasonably liberal Catholic, use the Adam and Eve story to argue for the unnaturalness and ungodliness of homosexuality]. Any lively, intelligent child will wonder soon enough what this 'sons of Adam, daughters of Eve' stuff means, more or less inviting adults to tell them the glorious story of our origins. That's no doubt what Lewis intended. There's an insidiousness here that's world away from Harry Potter.

Lucy accepts Tumnus's invitation to take tea and cakes and sardines at his home. We notice that he's behaving a little suspiciously, and we soon discover why. Under pressure from a witch who has styled herself the Queen of Narnia, he plans to kidnap Lucy, because she's a human. He tearfully tells her this after a strange incident in which his home fire waxes more and more frenetic and finally roars like a lion, a sign and portent which causes Lucy to faint. After his revelation, the remorseful Tumnus helps Lucy to escape back to the wardrobe and the real world. There she tells the story to her siblings, who of course don't believe her.

Shortly thereafter, Lucy returns to the magic wardrobe. The second youngest, Edmund, spies her and follows her into Narnia, where he's picked up by the aforesaid witch-queen, played with great presence by Tilda Swinton, who does as well as she can with the one-dimensionality of the role [basically she's Satan, and you can't get much more one-dimensional than that].

Edmund, very much the mopey outsider, is 'befriended' by the frosty witch-queen, though not before her attendant, Ginarrbrik, threatens to send him to 'the hereafter', our second religious reference. Edmund lets slip that Tumnus has met and released Lucy, and that he has two other siblings. The witch feeds him with magic delights, and flatters him, hoping to lure all four children into her clutches.

After she leaves him, Edmund catches up with Lucy, from whom he learns that Tumnus is living in fear of the white witch. They return to the real world, where Edmund refuses to corroborate Lucy's story of her second visit to Narnia. Lucy runs off, inadvertently into the arms of 'the professor', the owner of the country estate these well-off kids have been sent to. The professor mixes benevolence with authority, providing Lucy with hot chocolate, and the two older siblings with a stern lecture about acting like a proper family.

The professor takes Lucy's side, believing, or acting as if he believes, her story. He waves away the older sister's remark that it's illogical to find another world in a wardrobe, questioning the strange things kids are taught in schools these days.

This is a key remark, and thereafter the term 'logical' is used with clunky irony several times in the film [contrasted with imagination, as if these are two opposite concepts]. In order to fully understand this, we have to realize that for Lewis, logic was somehow inextricably linked with science which he, rightly I think, saw as posing a threat to religion, but also a threat to morality, because he saw science as mechanistic and reductionist. Inevitably, he saw scientists as logic-obsessed unimaginative drones, killjoys of the human spirit. A sympathetic intro to Lewis's thoughts on science and its promulgation through the education system can be found here. I'm far from being so sympathetic, as I've always found science to be much more of a stimulus to the imagination than a dampener of it, and a thousand illustrations can be offered, reflections on the nature of time, of space, the universe, the origins of the human, the origins of consciousness, the endless ways different species interconnect, vie with each other, feed off and on each other, and so on and on. The metaphysical thinking that Lewis fears will be or has been struck down by modern science is not something that will be missed by the scientifically minded, because scientific thinking offers something far richer and more exciting, and more grounded, and more effective. Astrology, after all, has been believed in for many thousands of years, to no effect whatsoever – apart from the effect on those individual minds that succumb to it. Religion generally can be described in much the same way.

Donnie Darko and what I like in movies

reality, dream and film: a real mix-up

I've seen Donnie Darko three times now, and I enjoyed it, perhaps a little less each time – though maybe only on the Beckettian principle that every pleasant experience loses something with repetition (while provoking the desire for repetition). It never occurred to me though – with this or with other films – to speculate much on what the film was about. Maybe I'm just dumb when it comes to these things. I just hook into the emotions, the ambience, and from time to time I step outside and look in at it from the [very raw] point of view of filmic technique. I very quickly warmed to the richness and layeredness of DD, its interconnected takes on family life, school life, the internal life, fear, sanity, socialization, bullshit, dreams and reality, power, success, pseudo-science and the imagination. I found some parts more successful than others, but the lightness of touch with which the viewer is moved through a series of more or less heavy incidents appealed very much to my aesthetic sensibilities.
If pressed on what the film was about, I would've resisted. If pressed further, I would've said it was about a boy's struggles over the purpose of life, as manifested by the boy's finding himself in a state of limbo between life and death [maybe in a dream, maybe not], through an elaborately constructed yet barely noticeable division of time, forking out from an accident involving a fragment of a plane falling on the Darko home. The main theme for me, in any case, would have been Donnie Darko's internal and social worlds and their interaction.
So it intrigued me when, on listening to some of the DVD features on the film recently, I heard the director [I think] say that it was essentially about divine intervention.
Resolute secularist that I am, nothing of this sort had ever occurred to me. That's a positive, that it doesn’t have to occur to a viewer, who can choose [if indeed it's a matter of choice] to see it as a playful, albeit sometimes dark, what-if scenario, of the type that Borges loved to create and explore, but invested with a lot of contemporary Americana. Style-wise, it seems to me the influence of David Lynch is pretty obvious, but I'm no film expert, and there are no doubt many other influences I haven't picked up.
Altogether, quite a satisfying hodge-podge. The pseudo-science would be a worry maybe if it weren't for the obvious rejoinder; that it's all to be understood from Donny's dark perspective, teen-sensitive reality writ large. Then what do we make of Donny's ''actual'' death at the end? I prefer to make very little of it – it's just a story.

the old confessional dilemma

Divided responsibilities - Monty broods in I Confess


Been engaging in some heavy reading of late - in science, in psychology and philosophy of religion, in moral psychology and philosophy. Also faced with and trying to avoid heavy issues re Lebanon, Hezbullah and terrorism. So, for a break, some reviews.

Have recently - actually not so recently - seen a couple of Hitchcock films, of varying quality.

I Confess came out in 1953 and took full advantage of Montgomery Clift's capacity to convey the quiet intensity of a priest bearing the burden of a murderer's confession. However the plot has a few gigantic holes, and the improbabilities drop the whole thing down to B level, IMHO.

Clift is Father Michael Logan, who finds that a man named Keller (O E Hasse) - whom he knows well - has stolen into his church late one night. Logan enters the church and confronts Keller, who wishes to make a confession. He's murdered a local identity by the name of Villette, apparently inadvertently, while robbing him. Hitchcock cleverly shifts the scene of Keller's confession midway through, from the confessional box to his own home (or perhaps rooms in the priest's house, for he's a refugee whom Father Logan seems to have taken in, as both he and his wife appear to work around the house), where he unburdens himself before his distraught and anxious wife Alma (Dolly Haas).

In the scenes that follow, Keller reveals himself as a real slimebucket, and I felt uncomfortable about the demonisation of this vaguely mid-European refugee. What's more, it's a bit hard to sort his manipulative nature with his confession. However, as it happens, a revealed connection between Villette and Logan offers Keller an opportunity to pin the blame on the priest. Too convenient to be quite convincing, I find - but you can choose to let go of the wobbly plot and wallow in the black and white camera work, the abounding shadows and crosses, the twitches in the corners of Clift's mouth, the awkword love scenes with the equally fascinating Anne Baxter (but now I'm confusing characters with the actors who play them). Clift is particularly watchable, in an understated, unAmerican way. Witness the look on his face when forced to meet and greet Keller, knowing what he knows.

The film's ending was particularly absurd, for mine. After some courtroom drama, Logan is found not guilty of the murder of Villette, with the jurors taking pains to explain that there wasn't sufficient evidence to convict. The judge begs to differ with the verdict; nevertheless, Logan walks free. The hostile crowds outside underline that this is an O J Simpson-style decision - Logan's life will never be the same. It's all too much for Frau Keller - she breaks away from her husband and rushes to Logan and the detectives surrounding him. Clearly she's about to divulge the secrets of her confessional, but before she can do so, her husband shoots her - in full view of this huge crowd. Somehow, though, he escapes undetected, until he’s tracked down – to a theatre. Logan approaches him, revealing his courage to all (apparently it was under question) and is only saved from certain death by a well-aimed shot from a pursuing policeman, which strikes Keller in the shoulder. Ridiculously, Keller leans on his wounded arm against the stage and goes on expatiating upon his crimes and misdemeanors, in a scene as hammy as anything in the unintentionally hilarious Howard Hughes vehicle, The Outlaw (released in the same year). I must say something about that worthy film soon.

A film [I Confess, I mean] worth watching from the perspective of mood, performance and photographic texture, but spoiled by a defective narrative and a few too many melodramatic gestures.

I can stand the rain

not all bad

For esentially financial reasons I'm rarely able to see films as they come out, but I've been catching up on the occasional oldie with Sarah et al.

Singin' in the rain is one such. For years it wasn't on my must-see-that-sometime list, probably because I was too serious a sausage to sit down to a musical, but I've officially mellowed and the grapevine has kept buzzing.

I must say, on the other night's viewing, it would be easy to slip into all those ecstatic clichés - it was captivating, a sheer delight, a visual feast, one of the greatest musicals ever made. At least of those I've seen, though I prefer Cabaret. The key to its success I think is its lightness of touch throughout, its self-parody, its Hollywood-mockery (combined with Hollywood's highest production values), and above all the driving energy of its ideas and their execution. Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge owes it much, though Luhrman hasn't yet learnt the lesson that, for the wow factor, no amount of editing can make up for real dancing genius and improvisatory ingenuity.

Singin' was made quickly in 1952, immediately after Kelly's An American in Paris,with no great expectation behind it, especially as it wasn't based on a stage work but was cobbled together, storyline-wise, over a few late nights, as a way of providing coherence to a string of old songs from the twenties and thirties. They hit upon the idea of setting the film at the time of transition to talkies, and they've milked the confusion, anxiety and opportunism of the period hilariously. The film was successful enough at the beginning, though largely ignored by the critics, but its mixture of exuberance and cynicism has won it a deservedly higher place than many loftier attempts at this fraught genre. I'm actually looking forward to seeing it again already.

Always like to seek out views fundamentally opposed to mine, and here's an amusing one. But read the reader's comment on it, which is even longer than the review.

Anyway, I thought the number with Cyd Charisse was great. I did have qualms early about the 'great voice for silent movies' stuff, but of course then they worked on showing up Lina Lamont as a nasty piece of work so we didn't have to feel guilty. Thanks, boys.

outcast from life's feast again

A moment of profound lust in hick town Amritsar

After a stultifying day poring over housing co-op accounts (though I secretly enjoy the play of numbers) I sat down with friends to watch my first ever Bollywood movie, Bride and Prejudice. I hope Jane Austen would’ve liked it – it was actually surprisingly faithful to the spirit of the original, and though it was light-on and I much preferred the weight of the recent British production, I still felt the stab of recognition of the moral dilemmas – particularly in the Wickham-Lydia episode – that first exercised me as a sixteen-year-old reading one of his first adult novels, a sixteen-year-old keen to run away like Lydia, keen to have a love, or just a girl, to run away with. In spite of the delirious color and costumes, and the cast of thousands, and a few pretty faces, this treatment wasn’t really my cup of Darjeeling. There were a few references to reading, and Indian lasses with books in hand, but this was half-hearted at best, and Bride’s Darcy was straight out of Mills and Boon. I suppose the idea was to be relaxed and entertained, and maybe I just wasn’t in the mood. There were a few cracks at Americans, and Americanised Indians, but they were altogether feeble, and belied by the old-style Hollywood treatment of the plot. Sarah picked up on the similarity of Bollywood films to the Hollywood of the thirties, when depression-ravaged movie-goers lapped up the fast-talking antics of the class they presumably aspired to. The Elizabeth character (Lalita in this version) had way more substance than Darcy, on whom she was wasted, and some of the minor characters were fun in a meet-the-Fokkers sort of way, but that was about it for jaded moi.

Lilya 4 ever – more environmental determinism?

Like Anh Hung Tran’s 1995 film Cyclo, seen recently, Lilya 4 ever, a 2002 film directed by Sweden’s Lukas Moodysson is an uncompromising study of environmental entrapment. Environment here must be understood not only as the physical environment, bleak as this is in both cases, but an emotional environment of poverty, neglect and positive cruelty. Lilya (Oksana Akinshina) is an attractive sixteen-year-old in a severely depressed unnamed region of the USSR (the actual location was Estonia). At the beginning of the film she’s upbeat; telling her friends she’s going to escape to ‘the States’. She starts packing, but she’s in for the shock of her life. Her mother is about to betray and abandon her with her new love. It seems unbelievable, but it happens – though we don’t get much background about the betrayal.

Things get worse. Left alone in the none-too attractive ‘family’ flat, she’s soon visited by a none-too friendly aunt, who shoos her out to a more modest accommodation, a filthy decrepit bed-sit, presumably nearby. Lilya is still fantasizing about flight, but in the meantime she goes out on the town with her girlfriend Natasha (Elina Benenson), who has the idea of making money in good ole fashioned way. Lilya can’t go through with it but Natasha can, but when the money’s discovered, she puts the blame on her friend, who’s soon labeled a whore by the local likely lads.

Meanwhile, a younger street-kid, Volodya (Artyom Bogucharsky) starts hanging around, at first in the hope of sexual favours. Soon, though, a real bond develops between them, as he’s the only person in Lilya’s life who makes no demands – at least of the sort that need to be taken seriously.

So, estranged from her deceitful girlfriend, discouraged at school, hounded by the local lads (who end up raping her), Lilya has little alternative but to try prostitution in earnest. While she’s trawling for customers she encounters a tall handsome young character, who calls himself Andrei, played by Pavel Ponomaryov, who appears to take pity on her, but in fact his real purpose is to sell her into sex slavery in Sweden. She falls for it hook line and sinker, abandoning the hapless Volodya (who commits suicide), and driving off with Andrei, into the promised land and a new job having something to do with vegetables. Andrei contrives to have her bundled onto a plane alone, and she’s met in Sweden by a middle-aged pimp who locks her in an apartment, only taking her out when she is to be taken to a customer. She makes a few attempts to get away, and after a final escape she leaps from a road bridge. We’re not sure if she’s going to survive.

On the bare bones of it, not a film to inspire confidence in human nature, and I wonder along with other critics about Moodysson’s claim that there’s a Christian redemptive theme running through it. However, it does capture well – in fact this is what lifts the film above the horror of its subject matter – how children, and indeed all of us, deal with extreme suffering. Trapped in Sweden, utterly friendless, completely isolated, sold to man after man, Lilya dreams of Volodya comforting her, his furry angel wings representing a kind of pure goodness and innocence. They play together on the roof of the abandoned building that they’d actually played on back in the USSR, and Volodya still has the basketball Lilya bought him from her first earnings as a prostitute (in fact the ball was soon punctured by Volodya’s violent father). Dreams of this kind come more frequently to Lilya as her life becomes increasingly grim. I don’t think there’s anything particularly Christian about them, but they do ring true. We naturally feel the harsh irony of Lilya creating an idyll of such pitiful material, but it’s the idea of the idyll that matters, a crystallisation of positive, warm feelings and memories, an intensification and exaggeration that enables her to transcend the abject reality of the present. It may well be that Moodysson was trying to suggest something more, especially as, in the final scene, when Lilya has jumped off the bridge and is being resuscitated by a medical team, we see a last dream sequence in which Lilya too has sprouted wings, but again I prefer to see this as an association of hope and happiness, an attempt at emotional escape and rescue.

A simple film about a real issue, (and the title refers to a decisive moment of self-belief in adversity which is in itself redemptive) Lilya 4 ever works painfully well, highlighting all too clearly the lack of choices available to so many people, especially children, in our most ravaged environments.

Herbert Marshall and Lulu?

thoroughly modern Lulu - a favourite pic

After watching The Razor’s Edge, a somewhat overlong, occasionally stodgily directed 1946 film of Somerset Maugham’s long novel (I only know it was long because the DVD also featured a brief filming of Maugham handing over the brick of a book – though they called it a manuscript, which confuses me), I wondered about the actor who played the role of the novelist in the film. Herbert Marshall. The name struck a chord with me. Hadn’t Louise Brooks had an affair with an actor called Herbert Marshall in the twenties or thirties? Hadn’t she followed him across America, in pursuit of kicks, with film folk chasing her and dragging her back to Hollywood to serve out some film contract? It seemed unlikely. Herbert Marshall was perfectly cast as Maugham in The Razor’s Edge. Middle-aged, jowly and ponderous, he had all the sex appeal of a blunt razor - yet still he had the savoir faire to command a kiss on the lips from the lovely Gene Tierney.

Louise Brooks, though, in spite of her four hundred-odd sexual partners (her vague and probably unreliable reckoning) is another affair altogether.

The very British Herbert Marshall, who apparently did a great job in the Ernst Lubitsch film Trouble in Paradise (1932), actually had only one leg. He lost the other during the first world war. The first world war and the way it changed the life of the character Lawrence Darrell, played by Tyrone Power, was a major theme of The Razor’s Edge.

As far as I know, Herbert Marshall and Lulu never made a movie together. Maybe it was E G Marshall. No, of course it wasn't E G Marshall.

a summery summary

I can honestly say I’ve been very busy lately, that there are plenty of excuses for not posting. I must also note that I’ve seen a great many films so far this summer that I’ve either not reviewed or partially reviewed and never posted on. A couple at the cinema but most either on DVD or TV. They include, from memory: Pride and Prejudice, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Human Nature, Donnie Darko, Lost in Translation, Sylvia, The Life and Death of Peter Sellars, All About My Mother, Manhattan, Supersize Me, Wonderland, Jesus of Montreal and Twenty-four Hour Party People, and no doubt there are some excellent films I’ve not mentioned. It’s a matter of input way exceeding outflow at the moment. Having a weakness for the triumphs and tragedies of romance, I was particularly drawn to Manhattan, Lost in Translation and Pride & Pred. For a brilliant satire on the myths and delusions around evolution and the nature/nurture conundrum, Human Nature is not to be missed. In terms of spillover complexity and the sheer messiness and ineffability of life, I’d recommend Donnie Darko and All About My Mother. If you want the horrors of junky (or base-headed) life confirmed, watch Wonderland. If you want to be mesmerised by an actor completely on top of his craft, see The Life and Death of Peter Sellars. And so on.

Bulworth breaks through

Halle Berry, the woman I love, in Bulworth

Last night a film on one of the commercials managed to grab my attention. Warren Beatty played the eponymous hero, Senator Jay Billington Bulworth, in a satire directed by himself. Bulworth is a veteran Democrat, but a conservative one, or seemingly so to judge from the television speeches and ads – it’s election time – we observe at the outset, in which welfare cuts and the elimination of affirmative action programs are touted.

However, it turns out that Bulworth is profoundly depressed, presumably at least partly because the views he espouses to get re-elected aren’t really his own. He contacts a hit-man and puts a contract out on his own life.

So, released from earthly cares he ‘cuts loose’, speaking his mind while wolfing down the free lunches at various speaking engagements organised by his increasingly anxious minders. Much of this is quite funny, and there are some telling observations (echoed by Paul Krugman in his The Great Unravelling, which I’ve recently read), such as that the real reason ‘privatisation’ is so profitable compared to public ownership, for example in health insurance, is that private companies decide to keep 24c in the dollar of premiums paid, compared to 3c in the dollar for government health schemes. Don’t know if it’s true but it sounds convincing. And more of the same is served up, on corporate media ownership and the lameness of the press, on campaign funding, on the real importance of the black vote and such-like.

From his first speech in a black church, a group of young black women hook up with him, and somehow osmotically transform him, by the end of the film, into a white black dude, complete with classy yank wide boy clobber, an obsessive interest in mother-fucking and those endearing hand gestures that drive women as insane as they do me.

Released just as the 2000 presidential campaign was hotting up, it’s a film with even greater relevance after five years of GOP hegemony. And where it’s self-indulgent, it’s forgiveable to a mid-life-crisis-ridden-wannabe-libertine male like me. I mean, I’ve never seen Halle Berry in a film before, but she was totally rivetting here (but it must be said that she conforms to a certain pattern of successful black actresses who look and sound more white than the blacks around her – she was apparently raised by her single white mother), and her machine-gun speech on the reason for a lack of contemporary black leadership was as delicious as her dirty dancing. A worthy late-night distraction.

Focus: a film

Willy Lomax meets that fellow out of The Crucible.

Funny nowadays to think of anti-semitism in the USA. Probably why that theme was chosen.

Shows how a pair of spectacles can make all the difference.

Vaguely reminiscent of Dogville, but more optimistic.

A few too many epiphanal moments.

Better than The Shipping News.

For a while there I thought it was going too be about homosexuality. That too was probably deliberate.

Were the principal characters’ inconsistencies consistent with our lived lives?

William H Macey, an impressive performance of its kind, but I’m irritated with the Yank thing of sticking a letter between first and last name.

The romantic scenes were naturally awkward, especially the initial ones, but in reality they probably would’ve been more so. The focus there was a little distant. After all, the principal focus was on courage and sometimes lack thereof.

The bad guys were too one-dimensional. They sometimes tried to provide extra dimension through facial expression but the storyline didn’t back them up.

The whole of the film was reduced to this – should we speak out or shouldn’t we? Should we fight or shouldn’t we? This narrowing was its strength, and its weakness.

The final scene struck me as painfully overplayed.