Recent films I have seen; or, cultural relativism at the flicks...

I've seen several films for the first time lately and looking back I feel they contrasted rather well with one another.  Two were on dvd and three were at the cinema.

They were all, in different ways, very professionally done; slick, highly commercial pieces of work; and they were object lessons in how to do commercial cinema well, and how not to.  At least for my money.

First up was Marvel's "Ant-man".  When I saw a trailer for this, a few months ago, I thought it looked pretty cheesy.  Even the special effects (which after all would of necessity be central to the storytelling) looked poor.  I only agreed to go because my friend Dip the Dipterist wanted to see it (because ants).  In the end Dip wasn't feeling very well and I went on my own; and, guess what? - I loved it.

I gather it has aspects that can be considered highly problematic if you are a fan of the comics on which it's based; in particular, there's a blatant case of fridging of a (of course) female character in order to explain a male character being a prick; and the only black characters are treated as primarily comic relief, despite the fact they are integral to the plot and come up trumps when the shit hits the fan.

But it did have some pluses to compensate for that.  We have an age-appropriate actress playing the female lead, instead of a girl of 20 pretending to be 35 because Hollywood doesn't believe anyone can bear the sight of a woman with a few tiny creases at the corners of her eyes when she smiles.  We have a non-hunk hero.  We have a step-father figure for the hero's child, who isn't a plot device and who acts with exemplary good sense throughout - and doesn't get bumped-off, humiliated or otherwise shelved at the end.  The aforementioned female lead is angry because she has bloody good reason to be, not because she's stuck in a delayed adolescent rebellion - the second film I've seen this year (after "Mad Max; Fury Road") that accepts the idea that women are entitled to be angry if they are treated shittily.  Plus, the special effects are actually fine, and I gather that the ants are pretty accurate from a biology point of view.

And it's good fun.  Where recent Marvel films have been getting pretty dark and bleak, this returns suddenly to the warmth and lightness of spirit of "Guardians of the Galaxy".  Darkness and sadness may be more realistic, but sometimes that fairytale of happy endings for the good-of-heart is an incredible relief.

The next thing I watched was a dvd my mother lent me; "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies."  I came to this with really seriously low expectations, having been terribly disappointed by the first two Hobbit films (bloated, messy, self-indulgent and poorly-scripted).  It was even worse than I feared; which is almost an achievement.  If you felt the first two were bloated, messy, etc, this one is far, far more so.

It's such a shame.  Martin Freeman is a tremendous Bilbo, and most of the rest of the cast are also good-to-excellent (with the exception of a few bits of stupid stunt casting).  It all looks great.  But the padding-out of the plot is ludicrous, there's a pointless romantic sub-plot shoe-horned in for Kili (or was it Fili? - I never could tell them apart - handsome Aidan Turner rather than the other slightly-gormless chap), and on the rare occasions when the dialogue is the original Tolkien rather than invented new stuff, it sticks out like real butter in a plate of bread-and marg, because it suddenly has the ring of Middle Earth in every word, instead of the ring of modern English in pretentious vintage clothes.  Please excuse the bad mixed metaphor there.

With the exception of those few lines of real Tolkien, about the only good thing you can say about the script is that they had just enough nerve not to bottle-out of killing Thorin, Fili and Kili.

Oh well, never mind.  Glad I hadn't forked out to see that in the cinema, though.

Forking out for films is a thing of the past for the next twelve months, anyway, since I've just joined the Cineworld Unlimited scheme.  And my next two movies were both seen on my new Unlimited card.

"Jurassic World" does exactly what it says on the tin.  Fabulous special effects, loads of smashing dinosaurs smashing stuff smashingly, and Chris Pratt on a motorbike.  Oh, and the T Rex gets to win the day and save the day (well, kind-of); the closing shot is his triumphant roar over his regained kingdom.  I suspect the science is wince-making if you know anything about genetics.  But for an enjoyable evening at the flicks, with a straightforwardly exciting plot and a few squeal-moments, this would take some beating.  Ever so much fun.

That was followed by the new Mission Impossible film, "Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation".  It's a silly title, but nobody's perfect.  This also did exactly what it should; daft plot, stupidly great stunts, terrific action sequences, lots of Simon Pegg, and the good guys win in the end.  There's a tremendous sequence filmed in the Viennastaatsoper and set to a soundtrack of long chunks of "Turandot", which I'm pretty sure came in the right order and were sung by real singers.  Even in a franchise famous for its exciting theme tune, a slab of full-on Puccini adds instant drama.

There wasn't enough Agent Brandt (but then I would say that, wouldn't I?!) and though he was pleasantly sarcastic and wry in what screen-time he did get, he didn't have much real action; someone seems to have decided to relegate the character to a desk job.  Doesn't seem fair, if you ask me.  On the other hand, we got the first really interesting heroine the MI films have given us; Rebecca Ferguson's bold and capable Ilsa Faust.  Who had agency and motivation, wasn't used as a love-interest, saved the day repeatedly and was generally utterly cool.  Ms Ferguson is also stunningly beautiful, incidentally; but with the beauty of an athlete rather than a supermodel.  Douze points for the MI series for that.

And finally, the second film I saw on dvd; "Les Miserables".  Oh dear.

Unlike the Hobbit, I was really looking forward to this.  It's taken from one of the most famous and succesful modern stage musicals.  It had rave reviews and rave word-of-mouth.  It was praised as "sheer heaven" and seemed to satisfy everyone from the most arty to the most populist of critics.  It had a great cast.  Where could it possibly go wrong?

Okay; the cast are indeed mostly great, though I remain mystified by the attraction of Eddie Redmayne.  Ann Hathaway deserved her Oscar; she's heart-rendingly good and doesn't milk a role that could have been one solid wallow of self-indulgence.  And it looks really good (with the exception of the blank Mr Redmayne); the sets and costumes are uniformly splendid.  I did get a bit tired of all the tight close-ups of singing people with their mouths open showing off their theatrically-blackened teeth, but that's a minor detail.

But for my money there's one big problem with "Les Mis"; the music is rubbish.

If someone wanted to write an opera, but didn't know how, and was too self-confident to ask for help, but also couldn't bear to just not do it, this is the kind of thing they might write.  It's sung-through, but most of the time the vocal lines cling nervously to a tiny range of safe notes; and the orchestration is almost all solid movie-score string-heavy stodge.  There are a couple of Big Numbers, with actual outright melodies.  There are a few of what one might call Small Numbers, with a bit of melody, carefully confined within that safe-note zone.  And there is tons, and tons, and tons, of recitative.  Extremely dull recitative.  They all chunter on and on, up and down on two notes, for hour after hour.  Even one of the supposed Big Numbers is actually almost all sung on just two notes.

It's some of the most boring music I've heard in years.  Pity, that.  Seeing it a few days after "MI:RN" with all that Puccini only served to emphasise how dull and flat and tumty-tum-y it was.

Well, as I said at the start of this post, they were all commercial films.  But I find it interesting that the one which was nearest to being considered Serious Cinema, which was most praised, and least mainstream in subject, which was un-pop enough to please even "serious" critics, was for my money the most disappointing.  "Les Mis" had major pretentions to be Real Art; but it was fundamentally dull, and most of the big "emotional" moments left me feeling cheaply manipulated.  "Ant-man", "Jurassic World" and "MI:RN" all of them made no great claims to be art, and no great claims to have the right to make us cry.  They set out to entertain and thrill, and they achieved it.  Two of them even managed to slip in a tiny amount of genre subversion (okay, maybe 15% subversion maximum; but that's still more than one expects).  And they were highly enjoyable when the would-be Serious Real Art was basically not.

I can't really draw any profound conclusions from this; except to say, I am not ashamed of my eclectic tastes, or of liking things that are "low" culture and not liking something that is "high" culture (or at least, in cultural snobbery terms, very much higher than Mission Impossible).  I like what I like and that's all there is to it.

Nutcracker, Firebird, Hobbit, laptop...

Here's something really cool to start with

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20918398

Excellent idea.  Now all I need is for someone to do the same thing for SF writers!!

Work is getting busier, which is no bad thing.  On the good side, Great-British-winter-wise, once or twice lately we have had some watery wintry sunshine.  On the bad side, we’ve also had snow – and not nice crisp snow that settles and makes kids happy, but the sloppy wet kind that doesn’t settle but gets everywhere, and still makes going out miserable.  

 January is probably my least-favourite month – there simply isn’t enough daylight.  At least here, with all of Kew Gardens to mooch in during my lunch break, I can smell the sweet scents of winter-flowering plants, and watch for snowdrops and the rose-pink buds of limes and maples, to remind me of spring.

What have I been up to?  Writing, quelle blague; what a surprise.  I’m relieving the work of typing up and revising “Gold Hawk” by also indulging myself with a little fanfiction on the side.  It does feel a bit like having something on the side, too; a really sinful indulgence, like a box of good posh chocs (think Booja Booja quality) or a bottle of 20-year-old Laphroaig.  Or a fling, obviously (only I get all screwed up over those, whereas with chocolate or liquor, or fanfic, I can relax and enjoy myself).  Not sure what I’ll do with it, beyond using it for relaxation purposes (ooh, now that does sound dirty!), but it’s giving me some much-needed light relief in this dark month.   

I gather that some people consider writing fanfic to be a dreadful and unforgiveable sin.  Obviously I’d be a stinking hypocrite if I pretended to agree with them!  I guess in their book I’m hell-bound and that’s all there is to it. 

From what I’ve read (not very much, I should add) some of it is drivel and some of it is porn, or at least porny.  But plenty of mainstream legitimate fiction is drivel and/or porny.  Surely anything that gets us consumers to wake up and doing something creative, instead of just sitting on our backsides all day consuming, can’t be all bad?  Whether it’s taking a camera out to photograph the texture of leaves, or taking a sketchbook when you go on holiday, or keeping a journal, or singing in a choir, or going outdoors to reconnect with nature and discover some natural history, or writing a short story about your favourite fictional characters, just for fun; it’s creative, it’s self-expression, and it’s engaging with the world and responding to it instead of simply being spoon-fed the mental equivalent of junk food.  It’s co-creating, in a small way; and that, if you’ll forgive my going all religious on you for a sec, is blessed; it’s lending a hand in the Goddess’ work.

However, to come back from these heights to my present reality; the big problem at the moment with my writing, of all kinds (serious, frivolous and even perhaps drivel) is that my laptop is sick, and getting steadily sicker.  It now gets conniptions every time I try to save what I’m writing onto disk.  Since it’s far too old for me to be able to save onto a USB stick (they may not even have existed when it was manufactured – at any rate it lacks the necessary scart/port/whatever), floppies are my only option if I want something saved in a portable format.  And I can only get my work onto ICW, or into a friend’s mailbox, if I can get it off the machine in the first place.  Lately, I can have been peacefully typing all evening, and then the laptop will suddenly turn up its toes and refuse to do anything more.  Instead, I get a frozen screen, and it refuses to switch off, either, and sits buzzing for hours until it runs its battery right down.  By this point it has generally kept me awake for several hours, which is not good.  I feel about ninety this morning, after having this happen again last night.

Around the edges of a lot of typing, I’m having a busy old time of it culturally-speaking; a good dose of high culture, and a healthy fillip of somewhat-lower-culture.   A Nutcracker, a triple bill and a Hobbit, to be precise.

I love the Royal ballet’s “Nutcracker”; it is very, very traditional, with snowflakes and glittery costumes and wicked mice and a gorgeous transformation scene.  I’ve seen it about six times, so this trip was a complete indulgence.  Mainly I went to see Akane Takada in action as the Sugar Plum Fairy.  She’s one of their up-and-comings, just starting to get some bigger roles.  It’s one of the joys of going to see a particular ballet company regularly; getting to spot young talent and see them progress rapidly (or, frustratingly, not so rapidly) up the ranks and into the larger parts.   She wasn’t a flawless Sugar Plum, but rather a lovely one nonetheless; she doesn’t over-extend, which loks right to me in this kind of pure classical stuff; she has a delicious finish, right down to her fingertips, and that trick of coming down off pointe very smoothly (which probably has a technical name) so that every balance seems to flow into the next move without the tiniest transition.  She also looks like a Japanese Googie Withers, which can’t hurt. 

The triple bill was “The Firebird”, “In the Night”, and “Raymonda Act 3”.  Two utter marvels, and a dollop of glittery idiocy and Mittel-european flouncing in character shoes.   

Mara Galeazzi’s Firebird was extraordinary.  She is a dancer who is immensely good at conveying powerful human emotions, but here she genuinely seemed to be touching the non-human – instinctive, reactive, self-preserving, utterly wild – so that the creature’s reappearance to honour her pledge with Ivan Tsarevich became not just the working-out of the plot, but a moment of real awe and power.  This is what fairy tales do, when you’re a child and the stories are new; hit you in the eyes with their archetypal potency.  It’s good to see it can still happen, and raise the hairs on the back of my neck.  It’s also a joy to see Ms Galeazzi back in action again, let alone in such blazing (almost literally!) good form.  

The Jerome Robbins was utterly wonderful, too.   Why don’t they do a Robbins triple bill?  “In the Night”, “Afternoon of a Faun” and “Dances at a Gathering” are all in the RB rep now; and wouldn’t that be a simply dreamy evening?  I suppose they fear that it wouldn’t put bums on seats.  It would get my bum there; but that’s only one bum on one seat (or technically two if I went twice, which is always a temptation with mixed bills as there’s usually more than one cast).   “In the Night”, anyway, has grace and charm and delicacy and romance and humour, and an indefinable overarching quality of mystery; it is far more than the sum of its parts, as all the best short works are.  I saw Emma Maguire and Alexander Campbell as Couple One, luxurious Zenaida Yanowsky and big Mr Kish as Couple Two, and Roberta Marquez and the great Carlos Acosta as Couple Three.   Gorgeous casting in a gorgeous, haunting ballet.

“Raymonda” does nothing profound for me, but it was great fun, and looked gorgeous, and everyone was dancing their socks off.  ‘Nuff said.

“The Hobbit; An Unexpected Journey” is a muddle.  I wish it weren’t.  I loved Peter Jackson’s three “Lord of the Rings” movies, although they aren’t perfect (the bits that grate with me, the unnecessary tweaking of the plot in particular, grate more each time I see them).  This looks just as good and for a change some of the tweaks actually work better.  If one is going to present the story of “The Hobbit” as part of the same canon, and not as a lighter, more child-orientated work (which the book certainly is), then one has got to stress the seriousness of what is going on, and set it firmly in the same continuum.  I can accept that; much of it has been lifted and shoe-horned in from the appendices of the “Lord of the Rings”, and I think from the “Silmarillion” too; and I think in the main it’s fairly well done.

 But there are also some completely extraneous additions; notably a prolonged battle in the Orc halls that looks as if it was lifted wholesale from a computer game.  And all the way through, one is aware that here, things could be taken with leisure, spreading the story over three films when it fills one pretty short book.  Compared to the taut, compact story-telling in the three LOTR films, this looks relaxed to a startling degree.  The dwarves get to do both their musical numbers, for goodness’ sakes.  I didn’t really need either.

But what works, really works.  The “Riddles in the Dark” section is like something from a different movie altogether, tight and powerful and genuinely scary.  The designs are glorious (though I’ve always felt the Peter Jackson Shire looked too untamed – it has the appearance of a landscape that was first settled and farmed perhaps two or three generations ago at most, not countless centuries.  It should look like rural Kent or Devon).   Little things like the moon-runes and the sword Sting glowing are spot-on.  Above all, the cast is excellent, and I honestly don’t think that if they had instigated a world-wide hunt for Bilbo Baggins, à la “the search for Scarlett O’Hara”, they could have found a more perfect lead than Martin Freeman.  He is simply wonderful.

Well, anyway; I’ve been writing this in my lunch breaks since the end of last week, so now I am finally going to post it, and then try to keep a bit more up-to-date.  But here’s to more cultural fun, both high and low, for the rest of this year.  And here’s to the blinking laptop behaving itself tonight.  Please?