Mozart and Hawkes

On the surface there's not much similarity between the work of Mozart and that of the film director Howard Hawkes except that they were both great in their own fields; but look a little closer and you'll find some things that make you think "Ah yes, they do resemble each other a lot".
They both created works that are very popular still: a lot of Mozart's music doesn't seem to fade with age; neither do some of Hawkes's films. Neither are artists in the romantic sense: people who practice their arts without caring what the general public thought of it. They were both in a sense "jobbing" artists, Mozart getting commissions where he could find them and working within the system of patronage essential for him to be able to earn a living for him and his family and Hawkes working within the Hollywood system of film moguls (like princes) controlling the way the films were produced, what was produced and what sort they were.
I don't think either was political. Hawkes had a disdain for progressive ideas and Mozart probably didn't have time to worry himself with what was going on in the wider world - "Mozart spent almost his entire life locked in the old feudal order, at the beck and call of princes, bishops, emperors and aristocratic patrons who treated him with disdain, amused or otherwise" (Richard Morrison in The Times this week).
Again, "Mozart learned voraciously from others" but adapted what he learned to his own style of composition. Hawkes had no definable style and used the studio style to the best advantage.
Mozart composed operas, religious music, concertos, symphonies etc. Hawkes did Westerns, Musicals. gangster films ("Scarface") etc. They both turned their hands to whatever was available and then did their own thing with it - a lot of the sparkling dialogue in Hawkes's films was written by him.
Jean-Luc Godard said of Howard Hawkes: "He is the greatest of all American artists". Many have said of Mozart something similar, the greatest composer of all time. Both resisted intellectual pretension, Hawkes claiming his approach was pure instinct: "Just one question: do you like it or don't you?" Mozart had not time to swim in pretensious waters, he was too busy, like Fred Asdtaire said, "making a buck".

Lucerne

We drove into Lucerne many years ago in my Peugeot car that had seen better days. I stopped at a garage where there were men in blue overalls, the mechanics, and men in white overalls, the managers. I asked them if they would fix my car and a man in white said "bring it here at 7.30 in the morning please," perfect English but spoken like a man who had been trained by the SS. We did so and we picked it up in the afternoon; it was not only running like dream now but it had been cleaned, the engine too.
The place had a German feel to it. Everything worked: the doorknobs worked, the doors didn't squeak etc.
At that time, June or July I think, the Lucerne Music Festival was on with Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Phil. if memory serves me right. I went to the box office and asked for two tickets for "tonight's concert". I was met by a young woman's face which had gone sort of blank. She seemed speechless. She just shook her head. In retrospect I believe I might have got a ticket if I had booked a couple of years before.
We left Lucerne, a lovely town, and crossed the Alps into the southern part of Switzerland, the Italian part. There, we went to a cafe to have a drink and maybe something to eat. It was not the sort of cafe we had seen in the German part of Switzerland. It was rather dingy and fly-blown. Then an argument began, I don't know about what; it started quite sociably, the two men smiling but suddenly it got violent and almost came to blows. Then it was over and everything returned to normal.
It is not racialist to say that there are vast differences between Italians and Germans; they differ in temperament, way of life, behaviour, manner etc. Fred Zinnemann, on Desert Island Discs said that if there is a bumping of cars, an English man will wish to exchange insurance policy addresses; a Frenchman will want to fight but an Italian will try to kill you.
But when Professor Hoggart was once asked where he'd like to live other than England he immediately said "O Italy. My young family loved every minute of it there." Then he added: "In Italy no one pays taxes."

Liking and Making

Some of the best sports' commentators are people who have themselves played games to a high standard. This does not necessarilly mean that they know more about looking intelligently at games than the spectator; indeed, it might mean that they know less because, while they have been in the mill of the game, or often in the maul of the game, they can hardly say that they have seen it from a perspective that is objective. In some cases they have seen it from a certain fixed angle: take a front row forward who is engaged in the hard graft of mauling and shoving and, often, brawling rather than watching the finer points from the touchline. Also, having been a player does not nesessarilly mean that you will be able to write better than the watchful spectator, one trained in journalism perhaps or one with a flair for the apt, maybe also, the well formed poetic phrase.
I once attended a conference on film study. Present were people from film study courses in colleges and writers of articles on film in certain magazines like "Sight and Sound". The aim of the conference was to project the idea that film should be studied in schools at GCSE level and above. Someone thought that it might be useful if part of the course was devoted to the making of films as well as their study. This idea was instantly denounced as decidely unhelpful: this was meant to be a study of film as an art form not the teaching of a craft. When I supported the man who had suggested the idea I too was denounced as a sort of charlatan. Wasn't I aware that English Literature was studied and that there was no part in that study for creative writing? I didn't know that because at that time I was a teacher of science.
So I thought they must be right and we two outcasts quite wrong.
Liking literature has nothing to do with making it. Liking painting has nothing to do with making it.
But doesn't the act of making something involve the artist in a critically creative task in which his/her mental processers are active in analytical decisions as well as mechanical ones like laying on the brushstrokes.
A man from the Ministry of Education (I think) came to the conference to listen and then to give his view (which became a decision). I have scarcely heard such a superb demolition of the arguments put forward to him by this group of ardent film lovers. He fairly squashed them into nothingness. It was beautiful performance, almost a work of art in itself.
What his argument amounted was really quite simple: could you expect the general public to let their children attend a school which spent a good deal of time watching films with John Wayne in them?
Though I knew a man who was a university lecturer who, at a morning's staff meeting, heard the film study lecturer give his reason for wearing a black tie that day: in respect for the memory of John Wayne who had died the day before.

Public Speaking

Not an easy thing to do; you're either good at it or not. Yet there are clubs you can join where you can larn how to do it. So I have been told. You wouldn't see me there for love nor money. Can't say I have any desire to speak in public anyway; I have done it occasionally for family affairs but then you don't have to do it expecting to be good at it; you do it so that freinds and family know that you care - about whatever the get-together is for.
I met a pathologist at one of our weekend writing courses. The first time he came he said he wanted to learn to write like Bernard Levin. The next time he came he said he didn't want to write articles any more; he wanted now to learn how to be a public speaker. There was no way we could advise him on that so we just listened to his efforts and said what we thought about his technique. When he came the third time he had been attending, he said, a public-speaking course. I couldn't see any improvement. In fact, to be honest - I didn't tell him this - I sensed a decline in his ability. He had, I think, been forced to follow a set of rules which, of course, led him along a path towards sameness; he now lacked a certain individuality; it wasn't him being natural but him being ordinary.
Toby Young, writing in The Spectator last week, tells of his experiences as a public speaker. At weddings and at certain functions that had to do with setting up one's own school (which he is now doing). He said that when he tried to make his speeches funny, they were always disastrous. He'd tell a joke which would go down like a lead balloon. Then he'd try a dirty joke with F's in it. Equally disastrous. Or worse - silence.
I knew a bloke who was quite a good actor, amateur variety. He was a very big bore, off stage. In short, when he was being himself he was boring; when he was playing someone else he was that person and was entertaining. He had also joined a public-speaking course. Disastrous. He was a bigger bore than he was naturally.
Public speaking is an art not a craft: you can learn a craft but an art is something that comes out of your own personality and experience. Don't ask what that something is please because I don't know.

Riots

Someone writing in The Times felt sorry for those students who were peacefully demonstrating against inflated fees for colleges in that they might have suffered at the hands, or rather the truncheons, of the police, because finding themselves in a surging crowd at the front of the rioters they were the most vulnerable to attack. I too feel sorry for them; I myself have found myself thrust forward in a sudden surge to find myself in the front line, as it were. This wasn't a riot but a demonstration of affection bordering on fanatiicism. Strolling in London near the Cafe Royal (?) I was aware of a lot of people also strolling aimlessly around. But they had a purpose in being there. I didn't. I was just strolling "between pubs" so to speak. Suddenly a limo arrived at the entrance to the night club and out stepped Marlene Dietrich. Having not the least interest in seeing her I nontheless was presented with a grandstand view of her; up against a police cordon with arms linked to prevent her admirers getting close to her, there I was a couple of inches away from her as she strode by ignoring all those admirers/fanatics shouting "Marlene, Marlene" in strained. agonised tones. They couldn't get close enough to her to ogle and, maybe, touch her too. I could have touched her if it wasn't for the fact that my arms were by my sides and my body was thrust against a couple of big coppers in front of me and against a crowd of fans behind me pushing hard to get to her.
One of the "rioters" in the college fees affair in London, a harmless fellow it seems who had been, like myself, pushed to the front, had been hit over the head by a truncheon; he had a large bloody gash in his skull. We see people in riots on TV and we see truncheons being used and think of them as rods of wood. They may be wood but they are the hardest of woods. As a schoolboy I had a neighbour whose father was a policeman; one day his son, my friend, showed me his father's truncheon. I held it and could not believe how solid and hard it was. I felt that you could kill someone with it. I've never forgotten the feel of it. Nor, I suppose, will that seemingly innocent student whose head was battered when he found himaself in the front of a rioting mob.

The Apprentice

Lord Sugar showed us his true nature last night in "The Apprentice": an East London stall-holder with a bullying manner and a penchant for blaming other people for his mistakes. I suppose many people watching the programme over the last few months were hoping that someone would give Stuart "The Brand" Maggs his well deserved "come-uppance". Well, last night they'd have been pleased because he got it in spades. First from the rottweiller-like interviewers who grilled him like coppers in B pictures of fifty years ago; the only thing missing was the table lamp shining in his face. Then from Lord Love-a-Duck Sugar who went at him full fruit-seller throttle. Baggs was, to put it succinctly and crudely, equivalent to a bucket of shit. It was a disgusting performance.
It was also unfair to the young man. The week before, Sugar had fired a very sweet young woman, Liz, instead of Baggs. Now, it was evident he was regretting having done so. But instead of admitting to it being his own fault, he went at Baggs blaming him for the dismissal. That was not only unfair but it was ungentlemanly and crass to say the least.
Lord Sugar, everyone had begun to think, was gradually evolving a more relaxed and engaging personality: he actually smiled a few times in the past few weeks, but now under that veneer of almost-charm came, like the Alien from John Hurt's abdomen, a creature that seemed to tell us a truth about the "noble" personage: that he had got where he'd got by a bullying ruthlessness and penchant for blaming others for his mistakes.
Chris, one of the two finalists in The Apprentice created a new cliched metaphore last week when he referred to a spat (almost a fist fight with F's flying around the place) between he and The Brand; he said "it was nothing really, just Handbags at Dawn, that was all". He should win. Why? He's creative, that's why. But he won't: he's got a degree and once studied A level Theology - and passed - while not believing a word of it. Sugar doesn't like people like that. And he's a bit posh too.

Hammond

When I was a kid the name of Wally Hammond sent a thrill through me. Of course, I hadn't seen him on television because that had not then been invented, nor had I seen him in person because I did not then have an interest in Glamorgan cricket; my interest was only in hearing about him from radio commentaries. He had a reputation for displays of brilliance at times when his team were in the depths of depair. "He came in," I remember my ciousin saying, "when his team was on its knees and the first thing he did was knock a six." My father thought he was the best cricketer in the world - Bradman was too dull in comparision.
Now, reading an article in today's Daily Telegraph, my admiration for the man, who had only lived on radio and in my imagination, waned drastically. He doesn't seem a nice guy at all. In fact, the opposite. A snob who never travelled with the team he captained in Australia - Denis Compton said he never saw him until the game took place; a womaniser of the worst kind who absolutely neglected his alcoholic and depressed wife. I recall dimly that he returned from Australia in 1946-47 under a cloud due, it was rumoured, "to woman trouble". Then there was his rivalry with Bradman whom he had encountered in the 1928-29 series in Australia; then Bradman was a youngster batting at number 7 and scoring as few runs. But later when Bradman came into his own, Hammond could not live with the envy he felt for him. So his batting went down, his reputation went down and then he was taken ill in The West Indies with a "bug" which was probably siphillis.
Why do we put people on pedestals when all they are are sportsmen kicking balls around or throwing balls around. Well, cricket has always been different; it's somehow always been on a higher plane of sportsmanship. There's always been something elegant and gentlemanly about it. Hasn't there?
Well, sort of. But there was bodyline bowling. And now there's 20/20. It's not now in the tradition of that portrayed in Terence Rattigan's film "The Last Test" any more.
I used to have an oldish neighbour, a short, fat man who suffered terribly with asthma; he and I used to watch Glamorgan cricketers, playing on their old field in the centre of Cardiff, from the roof of the flats in Westgate Street. In his hardly-able-to-breathe voice he said "I once saw Wally Hammond play here. He came out and, first ball, he knocked a six into the bowling green." The bowling green was some distance away. I watched a lot of cricket at the Arms Park ground and never saw anyone hit a ball into the blowing green.

Gossip

Toby Young, in this week's Spectator, refers to the gossip that took place in diplomatic circles as brought to the public notice by Wikileaks; it may make diplomats in future be a bit more careful what they say. It seems that gossip is what they are most interested in. Young goes on to say how, when he reached a certain hieght in the American world of publishing, he expected influential people he got to know, around a dinner table at some function or other, to talk about important issues of the day: instead, they gossipped. And it was always about people on a higher rung of the ladder professionally or artistically or those on the same level - never about people on a lower level. According to Toby Young, people who gossip only gossip about people like themselves or those above them. He added that when one of the company left the room to go to the lavatory, they instantly started gossipping about him.
I had a similar experience with a group of writers. I was once a member of The Writers' Guild of GB (waste of my time and money); they decided to hold a meeting of Welsh members in Cardiff. Some well-known writers came down from London to help out (or show off). I can't recall what we talked about but I do recall a well known writer arriving late and saying, in a very important-sounding way that he was late because he had been to the BBC in Cardiff to talk about a script he had there. He wrote scripts for the series about London police forces (can't remember the title). After a while one fellow got up, excused himself, saying he had be somewhere etc. and he left. Instantly, everyone began talking about him. Or, rather, asking about him: "Who is he? Anybody know what he does?" No one knew anything about him. They all appeared quite put out by that. Which is when I decided I was going to stay to the end, boring as it all was, because none of them there knew who I was. I waited until the very end before rushing to the toilet for a much wanted pee.

Frozen Food

I recall asking a seller of frozen poultry if frozen was as good when defrosted and cooked as fresh. Guess what the answer was. Of course it was: all frozen foods are frozen when fresh so they keep their freshness; in fact they may be fresher than so-called fresh food because fresh food is not always as fresh as the label says.
Well, I have to say I was always a little suspicious of this and the chief reason was that a friend of mine had a cat - she was one of his eight or so cats - who was 15 years old and quite finicky with the food she ate; he told me she would not eat cooked frozen chicken, only fresh, and of course, Tony being Tony, this is what he always bought her.
Now, lions and tigers at zoos apparently know if an earthquake is imminent, so animals, you see, may not be able to reason like some of us but they instiuctively can tell us something about..... er.... earthquakes. So, ergo, they may be able to tell us something about food too, especiially the frozen kind.
The TV gardening bloke who was always pontificating in gentlemanly fashion about, well, everything, maintained that frozen peas are as good as fresh ones. He may know something about your friendly compost heap but let me tell you he knows - knew because he died (someone I knew was so fond of him she said "it was like losing a brother") - he knew nothing about peas. We used to grow peas and I used to boil them and eat them, on their own, with pepper and butter and they were delicious. I wouldn't do that with frozen peas.
Now I come to my acid test as regards frozen foods. I bought a hole hake, fresh at the fish market in Cardiff; it was too big for one meal so I froze half of it. The fresh cooked fish was ten times better than the frozen - and that was frozen fresh, just after buying it. The delicious, characteristic "hake taste" had gone; now it was just fish, any old fish, fishfinger fish.
So it'll be fresh turkey this year, not the usual frozen one we have had for the past few Christmases. Fresh turkey from Sainsbury or M&S or Waitrose and to hell with the price. A small one. A baby one.

Old Films

There is one thing I can say that's good about black and white films of the thirtees: I can understand every word said. That doesn't go for many modern films - anything with Sean Penn in are almost unwatchable because of his mumbling. To a certain extent I have to blame my own ears since, ageing, I am suffering with being "hard of earing" and have hearing aids which I use in the cinema and sometimes for programmes on TV, though, with a newly purchased "Box", sub-titles are now available.
Mostly it's women I find difficult hearing: the actresses on CSI are the worst; sub-titles are absolutely necessary for them.
Earlier in the week I went to see a very old film at Chapter Arts Centre: "The Old Dark House", a sort of horror film typical of the early 30's but with dashes of humour here and there throughout. While I found the film an experience worth having, a sort of novelty experience, I can't say I there was anything that jolted me in a scary way; indeed, it was at times quite laughable. Not that the laughs were at the film's style but they were, rather, part of the script. I read that this film is a cult classic which means it has never been popular with the mass of cinema-goers but with those who take "film" seriously - people who go to film societies for instance.
So while I enjoyed the film and laughed here and there I can't say that I thought it much good. It sort of clattered along in the way those films of that period did: not much subtlety there, straight-forward story telling, lots of little "frights".
I learn that it was based on a novel by J.B.Preistley. I never would have guessed. Though perhaps it was one of his stories that had to with time returning - but there was nothing of that stuff in this interpretation.
It was directed by James Whale who has, I believe, a greater reputation than he deserves. His "Frankenstein" made him popular and it is worth seeing but still over-rated I believe. He seemed to attract quaklity actors: in this film were Melvyn Douglas, Raymond Massey, Boris Karloff and a very young and rotund Charles Laughton playing a "self-made-man from 'op North".
Halliwell says of it: "A stylist's and connoisseur's treat" and gives it 4 stars.
One big thing going for it as far as I was concerned was taht I heard every word. Why is that? Made in 1932 and the sound track is perfect. "Mystic River" made in 2003 and I need sub-titles - especially for Sean Penn.

Innocent

When I think back to the list of "greatest films" The Spectator magazine compiled I realise how daft the list was. I have just seen "The Night of the Hunter" again and think it, yes, a rather good thriller with some fine performances in it, but "Best film of all time"? It was directed by Charles Laughton who had never directed a film before that and didn't direct one after it (probably because it was a flop at the box office). How is it that a novice like him could direct the greatest film ever made? John Ford directed hundreds of films, some silent, before he directed the magnificent "The Searchers".
It's pretty obvious that the compilers of the list weren't film fans but the sort of people who go snootily to art houses and film societies not to the cinema as we all know it.
I have started to read "Innocent" by Scott Turow and am compoletely absorbed by it. What a fast moving thriller! It is a sequel to "Presumed Innocent" Scott's first novel back some twenty years ago which was also completely absorbing.
Which brings me to the film of "Presumed Innocent". Surely this is the best courtroom film ever made and, in my opinion, one of the best films ever made. Was it on The Spectator's list? Don't recall it being there. It was certainly a better film than "The Night of the Hunter". It was, of course, not the work of a one-off director but one who had already established himself as a skilled creative artist ("Klute" comes to mind) - Alan Pakula.
I thought "I must see that film again before I finish the sequel "Innocent" in which the same character, Rusty Spavich, is indicted for the crime of killing his wife; so I thought to go to Blockbusters, just down the road - get for about £4; then I thought "the town library with its large collection of films from all over the world". But that would be days if not weeks before etting it (tranferred to my local library) and I want it now or in a few days' time. So I then thought "Amazon". I got it for £1.30. It will arive Monday or Tuesday. Can't wait to see Greta Scacchi lead Harrison Ford into the office for.... you know what.
Well, I can't believe it: David Thomson doesn't even include "Presumed Innocent" in his famous book of the world's best films "Have You Seen".

Cops

There's an interview in The Daily Telegraph with a Stuart Diamond, a "how to get what you want" guru. You have to know what to say to people that you want something from. For example: one afternoon in New York, Diamond was pulled over for speeding; he didn't, like most people, stare bitterly at the steering wheel; instead he said: "Thank you so much, officer, for stopping me and doing your job. You probably just saved my life." The outcome? No ticket.
Brings to mind what I usually say to passengers, my wife for example, if I see a copper staring at my car or am travelling along with a police car on my tail: "If I'm stopped I shall say to him: 'Haven'y you got anything better to do with your time -like catching crooks?" I hear a "humph" from the next seat.
Also brings to mind a friend of mine who drove a Volkswagen "bug" (the best car he ever had, he said). He always drove fast. One day he was sailing along at about 50mph (or more, more likely) when he was stopped by a police car. "Do you know that this is a 40 mph limit?" the copper asked him. "My friend said: "Sorry officer, I was just slowing down." "From a 30mph limit sir?" What did my friend do? He laughed. He couldn't help himself. It was a genuine laugh not a mocking one and the policeman could see the humour in it. "Go on," he said and waved him on without charging him.
So humour also helps sometimes. But I was once told by a policeman that you might get away without a ticket from an ordinary cop by being nice to him or acting in a gentlemanly way but you won't get away with it from a traffic warden. It seems they don't have a sense of humour at all.

Tax

There's an article in this week's Spectator arguing that while most people would like to see bankers bashed because of their profligate ways with money, some of it ours, the facts are that because of the high rate of tax on the richest people, some of whom are bankers, there is a tendency for them to move to other countries and thus take their tax elsewhere, other than into the government's coffers. This may be true. The argument put by Fraser Nelson is well put. And he feels the government is making a big mistake in pandering to popular demand for .... what? Well, for revenge I suppose. "Why should they do so well after they ruined the country's finances while I'm here working my things off.... etc etc".
Michael Caine argues something else, diametrically opposed to that feeling. He says "We've got 3.5 million layabouts on benefits, and I'm 76 years old getting up at 6 a.m. to go to work to keep them."
I can see his point. I'd see it better if he wasn't an actor. But it's a valid point just the same. And it would with some justification be still valid if pit-worker Jim Bloggs (Joe Bloggs's brother) were to say it. More valid.
But where I was left cold with stupefaction was this comment from Tracey Emin: "I'm simply not willing to pay 50% tax...." She added that she might emigrate.
Is that a threat or a promise?
Does this outburst mean that she is in a top tax bracket? Does it mean that there are rich people out there paying for her stuff? It doesn't bear thinking about.

Torture

A long time ago there was a play on television by an MP, well known thwen as a writer of novels. Cannot remember his name. The play for TV concerned an MP who was against all forms of torture. The usual reasons were laid out so that one could nod sagely and agree. But the man's daughter was kidnapped and he found himself in a position where, to extract information about his daughter's whereabouts and safety from someone the police (in a foreign country where torture was a sort of way of life) had arrested, he could resort to using their trorture intruments which involved passing electric currents through the man's body. Did he? Would he still expound his views on the moral reasons of not resorting to torture? Or would he himself use the weapons he was invited to use?
He used the weapons of torture and extracted the necaessary information. His daughter was saved but his moral being was compromised.
Torture is used all over the world, even now in these enlightened days - or are they? I recall a film, The Algiers Story it may have been called, which was about the French occupation of Algiers. It was a great film but a thoroughly nasty one in many respects: there were atrocities perpetrated on both sides - suicide bombings by the Algerians, shootings at close range by them, and there was torture used by the French (one of the actors in the film who played a Colonel in the French army was the actual Colonel who had done the torturing - evidently he thought it necessary).
Janet Daley has written a superb article in The Daily Telegraph today about the use/non-use of torture. David Cameron stated, she says, that torture was wrong and that "we ought to be very clear about that"; then he added: "And I think we ought to be clear that the information we receive from torture is likely to be unrelaible."
Why the second statenment she wanted to know. "What point is there in discussing what Mr Cameron calls the 'effectiveness thing' at all?"
She goes on to discuss in depth the moral imperative questions that John Stuart Mills wrote about; but her point is already, simply, made: even if torture were to prove effective, should it be used?
It's easy to answer no to that. But you come to the MP and his daughter in the TV play where you yourself are involved emotionally. Or to a question of the man who knows where the nuclear weapon is but won't tell.: should you squeeze the information out of him or let the bomb go off? And there's President Bush and waterboarding. Should he be tried in a court of law for allowing it to go on? He maintains that heaps of important information was discovered that saved many lives. We'll never know.

Brain Washing

I can just about comprehend someone who has been brain-washed by some obscure cult following their teachings: it's quite common. Wasn't there a cult that sensible people joined in which they were told that they were going to a certain comet if they took this poison and died? And didn't they take it and die? Yes they did. When I heard that I went outside to look at the comet - Bob or some such thing it was called - and wondered how anyone in their right mind could have.... but there you are, the world is full of "culters". And, of course, the world is a-plenty with cult runners, charlatans often who take your money and sleep with your wives or your children. So I shouldn't be surprised that a young woman reads a website, gets taken in by the so-called arguments to go out there and do something drastic like knife an MP, should I? Well yes, actually I am surprised. But there, as some American politician said, "stuff happens".
But what I do not understand is the police reaction to what happened next. The young woman was tried and given a life sentence which she seemed perfectly happy to receive (that did make me wonder what planet she's on) but nothing was done to her followers inside the courtroom and afterwards outside (though I have to admit that they were kicked out of the court) who shouted abuse and threatened to kill the MP and cheer on the girl, who's life is ruined, and make the usual fuss these people do when something doesn't go the way they want it to.
Were they arrested? No they were not. Were they told to bugger off? No they were not. Will they be there next time when somebody else tries to knife an MP? Yes they will.
If I went out onto the street with a banner saying "Kill the Mayor" I'd be arrested instantly.
There seems to be one law for the non-cult followers and another for the brain-washed.

Mark Ruffallo

Went to see "The Kids are Alright" and liked it but not as much as reviewers did. There has not been a bad review for it. Yet most of them called it a comedy and, in some cases, a hilarious one; I chuckled a few times but thought it bordered at times on tragedy. One reviewer who thought it wonderful in most respects wondered, at the end of his review, what the point of it was.
I wonder if he has ever asked this question at the end of most Hollywood blockbusters. You don't, do you? You just sit there and let it affect you in some ways - enjoy the explosions, admire the guile (or pigheadedness) of Bruce Willis, hate it etc. - but you don't ask the point of it. No, what the critic meant I think was: here's a serious film about marriage, gays bringing up children, a gay woman being attracted to a man, children's lives being affected and so on - but so what?
I can see his point. It didn't try to give advice or produce a solution to any of the problems, it just accepted that they were there.
Actually there is a point to the film I believe: it is a film directed by a lesbian in a long term relationship with another woman and she, like many homosexuals, wants such people to be treated with the same respect as other "normal" affairs. She wants society to go some way further in acceptance of homosexuality by treating gay and lesbian affairs as perfectly normal. That's the point of it I believe.
Why pick two heterosexual woman then to play the two lesbians? Good as they were, all the time I kept thinking "they are pretending to be lesbians". When the oscars come round both actresses will, no doubt, be nominated (Annette Benning will win) and like most winners they will be picked because they are playing a person with some deficiency - blind maybe, or one-footed or a savage beast like Brando in Streetcar etc. So, instead of making the "deficiency" here, viz. homosexuality, more acceptable the outcome will be the reverse.
The great performance in the film comes from Mark Ruffallo as the donor father of the two kids. Like he did in "You can Count on Me" he makes the rogue of a guy genial. In that excellent film he played a character that you could count on as much as you could count on Osama bin Laden to join the NSPCC. Here was another remarkable perfornmance. It's this should get an oscar (it won't even be nominated) not the two women stars.
But now, it turns out, Ruffallo has been offered the part of The Hunk in a new film. What's more he's looking forward to it very much.
End of wonderful career?

Monica Dickens

Why haven't I ever read Monica Dickens? Probably because I tend not to read women writers - except Jane Austen and a few detective novelists.... O yes, and one or two by Joanna Trolloppe. Now I am tempted to, just having read a review of one of her books in The Spectator: "The Winds of Heaven". It's about a woman with three grown-up children whose "ghastly" husband dies leaving her with nothing but depts, no house, a few clothes. She loses all feeling of dignity. She is "like a child who has got lost on a church outing". Her daughters devise a plan: she will live with each in turn for a while in the summer and, in the winter, she can live on the Isle of Wight at a friend's hotel - at a cut price.
So, as one of offspring puts it, she is "passed around from one to another like a mangy cheese". Nicely put! Or "a surplus piece of furniture". Very nice! She is simply not wanted.
Then, in the great tradition of female romance best represented these days by our old freinds Mills and Boon, a man comes on the scene. But not one of your clean-cut, handsome, chisel-featured men of fortune who will love you like an ape as well as care for you like a father; no, her Lohengrin is a "grossly overweight, diabetic department-store beds salesman who moonlights as a writer of sixpenny thrillers" (Hah! thought there's be a sliver of culture in there somewhere trying to get out).
But, says the reviewer, there's more than " a splendidly happy ending: the novel ontains everything a publisher could ask for", there's also "the universal figure, a sorrowful outsider.... at odds with an unfeeling world".
Reminds me of Ozu's "Tokyo Story" and E. Eynon Evans's play with the same theme.
Can't wait to read it.
Wasn't she a grandaughter of Charles Dickens or something?

Jokes

We were in Torquay and, at the hotel we stayed at, it seemed that everyone was going to see Jim Davidson at the theatre. So we went too. The show was filthy, racialist, nasty..... in short, it was very funny. Don't think I'd like to see another of his shows; one was quite enough and since things have become more and more politically correct (from fear in some cases) one can't help being affected by the trend. So now Jim Davidson is out. But who else is there out there who's worth seeing?
One thing I was struck by in Davidson's show was that the racialist stuff was funny up to a point; the point being when he stopped making jokes about the Irish and West Indians and started making jokes about the Welsh to which tribe I belong. Strange: you laugh at Irish jokes but not ones which are pointed in your direction. The smile began to wither on my face, my tongue began to get dry and I began to be a trifle annoyed.
So I shouldn't perhaps draw any attention to a couple of Irish jokes in The Wiki Man's column in The Spectator last week. But I will.
He wrote: "In the less politically correct age which was my childhood, a series of stocking-filler paperbacks sold in their millions. The first was called 'The Official Irish Joke Book - Book Three (Book Two to Follow)' The only joke I remember concerned the Irish Nobel Prize for Medicine 'awarded to a man who had discovered a cure for which there was no known disease' "

Milhaud

This week's composer on Radio 3 is Darius Mihaud. The only piece of his music I am familiar with is his Scaramouche Suite. Everybody knows it or some of it anyway. From that I (illogically) deduce that he is a wonderful composer. And I have to say that the works so far played on the Composer of the Week programme are good, easy on the ear, splendidly orchestrated, lively, happy. I wonder if he is capable of doing anything profound. In a way I hope not.
They had a recording of him speaking. He was saying that he visited America in the sixties to attend a festival devoted to his music; he gave a talk to students there in the course of which he said that he was and always had been a happy man. The next day a girl student approached him and said that she had been unable to sleep the night after he said how happy his life had been and still was because her idea of a classical composer was that they suffered for their music and his remarks disappointed her.
Years ago I heard him speaking on radio about the composer Satie. Milhaud knew him well and liked him though he was extremely eccentric - but loveably so. He said that Satie collected umbrellas and scarves. He didn't know why. He didn't suggest that they were stolen, just "collected". When Satie died, Milhaud and his wife went to Satie's home and there they found the place full to the rafters of umbrellas and scarves.
I know only one piece of music written by Satie and knew, until today, only one piece by Milhaud. Composer of the Week does a great job of playing the works of composers not played often in concerts. Darius Milhaud composed over 400 works. I don't know how many compositions Satie composed but surely it must have been more than one.
I don't know how many umbrellas he collected either. Or scarves.

Literature

Can't recall who it was, but he was a famous translator of Ibsen, said that he had spent the greatest part of his life being bored by the great works of literature. I felt like that this week when I had the misfortune to see a play and a film both of which had received glowing reviews. They were the play by Moliere called "The Misanthrope" at Bristol Old Vic and the film "Winter's Bone" at Chapter Arts Centre Cardiff. I have not seen a bad review of either and I went to them looking forward to having a good time. What a let down!
The film was directed by a woman and it was the same old stuff: hatred of brutish men. You can't help feeling that these women directors have it in for not just brutish men but all men. There was one guy in the film that showed a little sympathy for his neice who was searching for her crooked father but even he was brutish and mean most of the time he spent on the screen. All the other men were your standard stereotypes as depicted by most women film directors: callous rotters, villainous tyrants, borish brutes. While I had to admire the film in many ways - the girl playing the daughter doing the searching was superb - I found it an altogether miserable experience.
The Moliere play was, to me, an equally miserable experience - if not more so. And this was supposed to be a comedy. I didn't laugh once. I didn't even smile once. Yet the audience seemed to enjoy it. It was quite dreadful.
What I could not understand was why Andrew Litton of Bristol's Tobacco Factory theatre company decided to direct it. After all he does great Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory and he did a wonderful "Uncle Vanya" at the Bristol Old Vic a couple of years ago.
O yes, the play was presented in a translation by Tony Harrison in..... wait for it..... rhyming couplets. OK they may have been clever rhyming couplets but two hours or so of rhyming couplets is too much for me thank you very much.
I wonder if Moliere is any good. This play was trivial beyond reason. I recall seeing another of his plays some years ago - I didn't like that either.
I recall Parky on one of his chat shows which had Lloyd-Webber and Tim Rice with him telling them what Bernard Levin had thought of "Evita". He said that Levin had written in his review that he had "never had such a miserable evening in or out of a theatre" in his life. Well, Bernard, I now know how you felt.

halal

Writing in last week's Spectator magazine, Rod Liddle makes the decision that he will no longer buy meat from supermarkets because it may be halal; he doesn't like the way cattle are killed to produce it and supermarkets don't indicate whether their meat is halal or not. This week two letters were published in the magazine, one from someone who deplores "the widespraed and unnecessary use of halal slaughter", the other maintaining that the method is less cruel since it is quick and death is instant. Personally I don't care if the meat I eat is halal or not - it's the taste is what I'm interested in. But I just don't approve of the way halal slaughter is conducted: it's primitive and beastly.
It's also against the law. We have a law in this country that states that all cattle must first be stunned before slaughter. So why is one section of the population allowed to break the law? Answer: because that section does it for religious reasons and we must respect their religion.
I can understand the government not wanting riots on their hands because of what a small section of the population, not allowed to follow their ancient and barbaric ritualistic practices, might do in protest; I can understand this because governments have to govern and so must compromise their beliefs with pragmatic exercises in control i.e. law and order. What a pickle governments get themselves into: they make a law and then apply it only to one section of the population. Maybe that's what governing is all about.
Well, I don't like it one little bit. But what I find even worse is the attitude of the RSPCA. You know what that stands for, of course: the royal society for the prevention of cruelty to animals.... I shall write it again: the royal society for the PREVENTION OF CRUELTY to animals. Yet they don't say that supermarkets are wrong to sell halal meat; they merely say that supermarkets should label their meat to inform the public which is halal and which is not. Rod Liddle isn't going to buy supermarket meat any more; well I'm not going to support the RSPCA any more because it is evident that they do NOT protect animals from cruelty.

Gene Autry

We boys who lived in Blackwood where there were three cinemas did not like Gene Autry. We liked and admired some of the other B picture cowboys like Hopalong Cassidy and Buck Jones but could not take the rather feminine charms of Autry who, with his other unmanly traits, sang cowboy songs. Later, there was another famous singing cowboy named Roy Rogers who we accepted, don't know why. I think it was that Autry was rather girlish in voice and manner. Maybe it had something to do with his being a singing cowboy, though Roy Rogers sang too if memory serves me right. Yet he was very successful as a B picture cowboy and also as a singer. He was the only celebrity to have his name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame 5 times: for films, radio, records, television and live theatre.
Then again, he was not just successful as a film star and singer, he also made heaps of money outside the film industry as an acute business man.
Some of his songs were famous and some still are:"Back in the Saddle Again"; "Frosty the Snowman" and the biggest success of them all, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer".
In an obituary in The Times in 1998 (he died at the age of 91) was written: "Autry's screen persona was conveyed by a spoof: 'Them bandits have beaten my mother, ravished my girl, burned down my house, killed my cattle and blinded my best friend. I'm goin' to get 'em if it's the last thing I do. But first, folks, I'm going to sing you a little song.' "

Downton Abbey

I seem to be the only person on this planet who finds "Downton Abbey" dreadful. Why? After all, it seems to have everything going for it: beautiful scenery, well-drawn characters - in short, all those things that make dramas like this popular, just like those others with women who wear bonnets. I can't help thinking of Barbara Cartland and her novels - not that I've ever read any but I know of them - the Lord in the manor and the poor little scrubber of a girl in the valley below and how the devil of a cad seduces her against her will..... etc.
I can't help bringing Cartland to mind because it's all the same sort of thing isn't it? ("No" I can hear being yelled at me). Of course, it must be said, Julian Fellowes is in a different class, writing-wise, than Cartland. She wrote pot-boilers for middle-aged women who dreamt of being swept off their feet by a Lord or, Rudolf Valentino in mind, a sheik; he writes classy stuff.
But it is all the same trash, really. There's Lord Grantham lording it over everyone with a wife whom he doesn't love much; then there's his mother played by Maggie Smith doing a near Lady Bracknell imitation; then there are the ones "below stairs" and the relationships they have with each other and with the "upstairs" lot. It all makes me cringe. Was it ever like this? Yes it was. Would we like it to be like this again. No we wouldn't.... hold on, I can hear a million voices shouting "yes we would".
Keep it up Julian, you're carving a solid reputation for presenting the Edwardian scene in a way that the sentimental English public sigh about and wish it were here again in all its glory.
It's tripe.

Italian Films

I got a copy of "Bicycle Thieves" recently, free by buying a newspaper, can't remember which. Haven't watched it yet but I am looking forward to a viewing. It's considered to be one of the Italian greats and quite rightly so; others which are also considered greats are not nearly as good - well not nearly as entertaining. Rossellini's films are very famous because they told of the social situation of Italy after the war in a way that made Hollywood film seem false. Then there the films of Pasolini and Fellini, much admired by film society people but I wonder if they are as watchable now as when I was young and eager to be as arty as the next film society wallah.
Whatever, they made me think of some of those Italian films I used to see in The Globe cinema in Cardiff many moons ago: not the classics of Fellini and Rossellini but films which were shown in Italy to ordinary folks. I can't recall any of their titles but used to enjoy them tremendously and probably will never see them again. I don't think I would be able to order them on one of the many clubs which send you films for a months viewing for a few quid. They've gone for good; many people would say "good riddance" but not me: I'd love to see the one about the poor family taking a day out at the seaside: the mother, fat as a pig ready for slaughter, fussing about, packing stuff into a banger of a car for the day's outing; the father, elegant in a rough-hewn kind of way, all dressed up in a suit, the grandparents looking a little apprehensive, dressed in "sunday-best" attire - and keeping it all on when they get to the beach - the daughter, a dish of a girl whose curves were like Cyd Charisse's in "Band Wagon" - "she had more curves than a scenic railway".... I can't recall if there was a son or any other members of the family but they all somehow crammed themselves into the smallish car and went off to the beach. I don't think there was much of a story, it was just a day out, but what a film!
Then there were gangster films.... but the French made better ones I think. Won't see any of those again either. Never mind, some of the classics are watchable. Some. Not all. "Bicycle Thieves" is - I hope. Soon find out.

Coke

Chapter Arts Centre has been transformed from what it was some years ago, a dingy, untidy sort of place much loved by artists and their ilk - layabouts, a lot of them - into a glossy, light, palace-like restaurant with surrounding rooms: cinemas, theatres, art galleries. I was prepared to believe that the artists and layabouts would have left and gone elsewhere since artists (and layabouts) prefer the down-to-earth sorts of places they believe bring them closer to reality.
But no, it's frequented by the same old, same old. Most have either long hair or no hair at all; most wear jeans and open-necked shirts; some wear hats - indoors! They all eat veggie food (it seems to me) or vegan food - the vegan soup I had was pretty awful: I think it had a lot of spinache in it, a green I have never liked but which, it seems, even in quality restaurants has become popular, probably because there is the idea prevalent amoung the chattering classes that it's good for you. Everybody is lean and healthy looking. Many brings kids with them and the kids run about as if it's a playground. But the beer and wine is good and the food isn't bad if you like pasta and veggie stuff and spinache.
The other day I was there to see a film, got there early and sat at a table with a glass of wine waiting for start of the film. In came a man who was not an artist or layabout; he looked a bit like a business man come there for a spot of lunch, no jacket on but trousers obviously part of a pin-striped suit. And he was fat. He was almost as wide as he was tall. Yet he didn't look unhealthy; he looked the sort of fellow who might, a few years ago, have taken his place comfortably (or maybe uncomfortably) in the front row of a rugby team.
He ordered something at the bar and sat at a table near me. He took out his laptop and proceeded to work on it. Then up came a lithe waiter with the man's order: a plate of beefburger with large bap and chips piled high. Turning from his computer he concentrated all his attention on his meal. He cut his bap down the middle and stuffed half of this into his mouth, followed by a drink of coke; then into the body of chips his fork went managing to spike four or five of them before levering them into his mouth. Soon the meal was gone and he returned to working on his laptop before leaving.
I got up to go to see the film and had a glance at the bottle of coke he had consumed.
Diet coke!
But to be fair to him, that's probably the only sort of coke they sell there at Chapter.

Jokes

I met a comedian a long time ago. We were both staying at a camping site in South Wales, me with my family of wife and young kids on holiday, him on the way to another gig in the valleys. He was not at all funny as I expected him to be when he told me what he did for a living; he was a good conversationalist, telling me about the various places where he did his stuff. He said "I have an advert in Stage Magazine - seen me? My catchword is 'Cease'." He never told me what that meant. He told me that there was a club in Cardiff which had a low cealing and thus, he said, can't think why, you couldn't get a laugh; then there was another place in The Rhondda where you could get heaps of laughs. "High ceiling?" I asked, but he didn't catch on to my little "joke", or didn't want to.
But there, perhaps I didn't tell it right. Because you see "it's the way you tell 'em" ain't it?
Certainly some of my favourite comedians of "the old school" i.e. of a long time ago, didn't tell many jokes but relied for laughs on the creation of an amusing character. Robb Wilton did his "The day war broke out, my wife said to me...." act. I don't think there a single joke in the act. Max Miller told jokes, of course - dirty jokes often (not as dirty as they are now though). Then there was a very well spoken man who told stories about himself and the various pickles he got himself into.
The best joke at Edinburgh this year was, so they say, this one: "I've just come back from a 'Once-In-A-Life-time' holiday; I tell you what - never again."
This brings to mind a joke by Bob Monkhouse: "When I told everyone I wanted to be a comedian, they all laughed. Well, they're not laughing now."
Here is a joke from last week's Spectator, from "The Wiki Man", Rory Sutherland: "A toursit is exploring the coast of a minor Greek island when he arrives at a charming fishing village, a model of contented prosperity. Freshly painted boats bob at their moorings... On the hillside there is a handsome church. Enchanted, our traveller asks several passers-by to recommend a good bar for a drink. Each time he is told that the best place is the "Taverna of Dimitri the Sheep-Shagger". He visits and in the course of a few drinks befriends the patron Dimitri who is a charming, educated and accomplished man. A few drinks later he feels emboldened to raise the topic of the host's name. Dimitri leads him outside and places an avuncular hand on the traveller's shoulder. 'You see those boats?' he sighs. "I built them all myself with my bare hands. But do they call me Dimitri the Boat-Builder? No. The church and the orphanage on the hillside. That's my work too. But do they call me Dimitri the church builder? Never! I even built the harbour wall. And do they call me Dimitri the harbour-maker? They do not. You shag one damn sheep....."

British Films

One day in the library in Cardiff some years back, I came across a friend of mine who held a rather large book in his hands. He had a great, cynical sort of grin on his face. "Look at this," he said in a way that could have meant ''Have you ever seen anything like this?'. He showed me the title: "Masterpieces of the British Cinema". I had to laugh. Neither of us believed there was such a thing never mind more than one. We had, I suppose, been brought up on American films: Bogart, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Edward G. Robinson films. Gangster films, westerns, musicals. We considered British films to be inferior and I think we were right. Though in retrospect I think we, or I anyway, weren't used to the kind of film the British studios were producing.
Simon Heffer is giving a series of talks this week on Radio 3 (at 11 pm every night, a time when most of us are in bed - well done BBC!) on, maybe not actual masterpieces of the British cinema but quality films that were made during the war and which were reflecting on our island's way of life before the war and wondering what it would be like afterwards. Films that were essentially revolutionary in content and intent (most studios were, he said, full of socialists).
The first film he highlighted was "Went the day Well". He didn't say so but I have the feeling the idea came from Graham Greene, maybe a short story? A troup of soldiers arrives at an archetypal English country town and wishes to have help from the villagers in a project that they have in mind. However, they are not English at all though they seem to be: they are Germans there to disrupt communications - or some such thing. They are brutal and start to take over the village, killing some, threatening to kill schoolchildren - in short carry out what we believed were typically German atrocities.
I saw this film some years ago and thought it a real thriller. I have to say that I was amazed to find that here was a British film that, while keeping that special quality of Englishness - the local yokels were there, the vicar was there (the first to be shot), the grand lady was there - all the stereotypes were there, it painted a picture of a Britain in which all pulled together, one society working together, class barriers pulled down and so on.
OK, it never happened but to a degree it did: the Atlee government brought in reforms the like of which the country had never seen, a National Health Service came into being, children from all kinds of homes were educated to a higher level than ever before, people went to universities from quite ordinary backgounds and so on.
The next film he talked about was "A Canterbury Tale" which I did not like when I saw it years ago. He called it a masterpiece - maybe there was one after all then! It flopped at the box office. After Heffer's talk I'd like to see it again; seems there was more in it that met the eye.

Writers

There's an article in yesterday's Telegraph about a wine-tasting school in this country; best in the world Jonathan Ray maintained. I don't know if the wine-taster I once knew went there but he was a genuine taster who worked at Harvey's where they make sherry (or just bottle it, probably). I once went with the staff of the college I worked at on a coach trip to Bristol and Harvey's. What a day! We tasted - and swallowed - more sherry that day than I have since in a year..... I tell a lie: I'm quite fond of a glass of sherry, especially Brsitol Cream, and so have put away quite a few bottles over the years.
He, the wine-taster, told me he was a chemist. But that's all he told me about his work during the week - we met a few times at weekend writing classes where, of course, no one talked much about what they did for a living; they wanted to talk "writing" - possibly wishing they might get out of full time employment and follow the romance of writing for a living. Some hope for most! Though one woman did have a book turned down by Mills and Boon but wouldn't do what they advised her to and get it published; too much pride. I told her to swallow her pride and get on the 10 000 pound bonanza band wagon called Mills-and-Boon Money-Making Machine.
I did happen to find out what some of the writers on the course did for a living. There was one who was a designer at Royal Doulton, another was a translater - she spoke 6 languages - another a librarian who loved Gilbert and Sullivan and had written and published (himself) a book on a famous D'Oily Carte impresario, another a nurse in a mental hospital who wrote only poetry. Then there was a successful novelist, Roger Ormerod, who shouldn't have been there since successful people don't usually go to writing classes - they take them. Then there was a youngish woman who wrote erotic novels which had been published and now wanted to turn to thriller writing. Good writer. A most unerotic looking woman. Don't know if she ever made it but I think she might have since she went at her work with great intensity and seriousness as if the content didn't affect her emotionally at all.
One woman who was a regular didn't work at all; she loved bats and told one of the blokes on the course that he had no aura. Didn't worry him because he knew he didn't and didn't want one anyway, thank you very much. What can you do with an aura except wear it?

Westerns

Ray Winstone in yesterday's Times is interviewed about his obsession with Westerns. He loved them as a kid and he still loves them; he didn't actually say so but I had the feeling he would like to be in one ( he did make an Australian film that was close to being a Western). When he was a kid he played "cowboys and indians" and said that modern children were missing out sending their time with heads bowed over small game machines by not playing games like that - health n' safety rears its ugly head again!
He mentions a few films he liked: "The Searchers" and "High Noon" being particular favourites; he also gave tremendous praise to John Wayne believing him to be a very fine actor indeed. He specially mentioned a scene in "Red River" when Wayne says to his son "I'm going to kill you" wiith real vehemence.
He didn't mention any of the Anthony Mann westerns, the ones that mostly starred James Stewart, like "Winchester 73" or one I particularly like by Mann, "Man of the West" which has an ageing Gary Cooper and an ageing but brilliant Lee J. Cobb (was he ever anything but brilliant?). Nor did he mention "Shane" which is one of the greats, surely.
There are a few I like that aren't considered great or, for that matter, very good. I'm thinking of the one in which John Wayne uses children to take his cattle across country - always given 2 stars in the Radio Times. Then there's "Stagecoach".
I was brought up on Westerns: The Lone Ranger, Buck Jones, Hopalong Cassidy etc. Not much good but good fun and always with the showdown at the ebd where, in all great Westerns, the man in white meets the man in black in the street and it's good against evil.
When John Ford was interviewed, which he didn't like, he said dismissively: "I just make Westerns".
What greater achievement can there be?

Cheers

Kingsley Amis was very good at picking up phrases people use casually and then using them to mock them. In "Jake's Thing" he has the main character meeting a series of lesser beings and finding that they would say "Cheers" to practically every request he made or to wish him goodbye or to greet him. He'd buy something and the seller, usually young, younger than him anyway, instead of saying "Thank you" would say "Cheers".
It was fairly obvious Amis didn't like this at all which is not surprising since he was a novelist of great literary talent and a wordsmith whose knowledge of the correct use of the English language mattered to him.
I can't say "Cheers" said to me makes me angry though it does slightly irritate me sometimes, especially if it is said in the place of "Thankyou" or "Good to see you" or "Goodbye".
"Have a good day" annoys me a little too, especially when it's late afternoon. "Take care" strikes me as meaningless - he doesn't raelly care what you do.
"I tell you what" also seems needless - except that the best joke in The Edinburgh Festival this year needed the expression I think: "I've just been on a Once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I tell you what - never again." Doesn't work so well without it.
Today a waiter, when I asked for a glass of water said "No problem". "No prob" is another variation of it, only even less likeable.
"Mate" is nuisance of a greeting, especially from a young person to an older one (I have never heard it said the other way round). And "There you go" seems to me meaningless: you are handed a glass of ale and "there you go" the barmaid says when you're not going anywhere except to your seat nearby.
"Squire" is as horrible as "mate", and "Young man" when you are obviously old is insulting.
"I have to go now."
"Well take care, mate."
"Goodbye then."
"Cheers, Squire and have a good day."
"No prob."

Women Directors

Of films, that is, not of companies. Recently I have seen two films directed by women. They were both efficiently directed though the second was a trifle flashy in technique. This was called "Beautiful Kate" and was an Australian film based on a novel, adapted for the screen by the director, none other than the once georgeous (she may still be for all I know) Rachel Ward.
I had formed the impression from at least two other films directed by women that they tended to go for stories which made men seem inferior, brutish, unfeeling..... In short I gained the impression that these women directors didn't like men much - or at all possibly. There were "American Psycho" directed by Mary Harron and "Leaving" by Catherine Corsini. The first was an exceedingly nasty portrayal of a well-off New York showoff who may have been a murderer. I enjoyed the film a lot, especially those parts when the guys got together to compare banking cards they had - American Express etc. Who had the best collection? They were silly, nasty, murderous, hated women though took them to bed of course. "Leaving" was not so direct an assault on masculine behaviour; it was a subtle depiction of the mid-life crisis of a woman who takes up with a younger man and leaves her family. The director said she was tired of seeing men leaving women for younger women and thought she'd make a film in which a woman leaves.
So while both films were enjoyable and often exciting I had the impression, again, that these two directors just didn't like men. Now, I thought, going to see "Beautiful Kate", surely it won't be one of those sorts of films because Rachel Ward, surely, liked men, likes men, and would not want to depict them so one-dimensionally as the other two. And I was right. It wasn't about women leaving men, it was about a man coming home to his family where his father is dying and "finding himself"'I suppose. The concentration was on the two men rather than on the women or the girl, the beautiful Kate.
One of my problems is that I'm now hard of hearing and the Australian accents in this film were not good for me (nor for my hearing aids). So I lost a lot of the depth of charactisation and often the storyline at times. I find, now, that foreign films are better for me because they have subtitles.
But why is it that when I see old films of the 40's, 50's and 60's I can inderstand every word yet films made today I find difficult to hear? I watched "Advise and Consent" the other day and heard every word, yet with American series, like CSI, I just don't know what they are saying, especially the women in them.

Chapter

Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff has had a face lift; more than that, it is absolutely different from the place it once was - same from the outside (an old school building) but transformed inside to a swish, plush, glossy set of rooms one of which is a large restaurant/cafe, another an art gallery, another a theatre and two others which are cinemas. I never much liked Chapter in the past and I'm surprised that it is now so modern and welcoming; it used to be a place where artists and wierdos collected, where the rooms were uncomfortable - purposely so I felt - and where works of art and theatre vied with common sense for attention. In short, it was a poseur's paradise.
The art gallery is still full of a lot of junk (Tracey Emin would be at home there) and the theatrical events are, by their advertisements, avante garde to an excessive degree, too excessive to me. So I go there for the films.
In the cinemas in the city are films which are popular with kids and young people, especially during the holidays: Shrek, Toy Story 3, Avatar and so on; here in Chapter are films you may have read about in reviews when they reached London but don't reach the main distributors. Recently I have seen: "The Last Station" with a fine performance as Tolstoy from Christopher Plummer and another from Helen Mirren as his wife; "I am Love" with another fine performance from Tilda Swinton; "Greenberg" - dreadful; "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", a superb thriller from Sweden; and "Leaving" with a performance from Kristin Scott Thomas the like of which I have not seen many times - if any - before: it is subtle and scarilly OTT at the same time.
Seats are comfy, film quality good, dining before the film good though a bit trendy in its mainly Vegan food. Seats in the restaurant are comfy too, not like the old days when they were hard metal affairs whose flat place for one's bottom was a triangle - not with the point of the triangle at the front but at the back. I never tried one; they looked like the sort of thing the Stasi might have used for interrogation purposes.
I must try their Welsh burger and chips next time - vegetable burger!

Joad

I just got hold of a book writen by C.E.M.Joad: "Guide to Philosphy" written in the fifties. It's a "philosophy made simple" type of work, for the intelligent layman not for other philosophers. Which is probably one of the reasons Joad was, in some academic circles, not much respected. Another reason for the disrespect, no doubt, had to do with his popularity; for he was at that time just after WW2 a member of BBC radio's "Brains Trust", one of four "brains" who sat around discussing topics of the day, philosophical matters .... anything really that had an intellectual content. Joad became famous for his opening remarks on a topic with the words "it depends on what you mean by...." It became a sort of catch-phrase and was known so universally that even comics in variety programmes and music halls would use it. Everybody knew it and everybody knew and loved Professor Joad.
When I was in an extra mural class doing philosophy some years back one of the class said to me: "Do you know what philosophy is? It's a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there."
On the first page of "Guide to Philosophy" Joad quotes the very same "definition" but he calls it a jibe.
I always liked Joad, to listen to and to read (he had a column in a newspaper if memory serves me right); I enjoyed his "Desert Island Discs" programme when he chose only classical music up to Beethoven and said that young people should be forced to listen to such music until they liked it. Good fighting stuff. Good old non-politically correct stuff. Daft but amusing and with a thought that "well, there may be something in what he says".
Poor Joad was caught travelling on a train without a ticket and was prosecuted. He never seemed to recover from the shock. The BBC sacked him, he sank into despair and illness and soon after he died.

Bullfighting 2

Thanks "100falcons" for your comment on my Bullfighting blog. Very interesting since you have come at the topic from a different perspective.
John Julius Norwich wrote a letter to The Times argueing the case for bullfighting: he said that if he were to have the choice of being a fighting bull and one brought up to be slaughtered he'd prefer to be the former. Because they have a wonderful life, they are treated well, live the sort of life that their nature desires and in that 5 year or so life have only ten minutes of maltreatment and that at the very end after they have done what they do best - fight; the others are sometimes intensely farmed and die dreadful deaths after being transported in trucks..... and so on.
Good case.

Gunga Din

"You may talk o' gin and beer
When you're quartered safe out 'ere,
An' you're sent to penny fights an' Aldershot it;
But when it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An' you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it."

That's him, that's Kipling alright: colourful and rough, earthy and tough..... God! you start rhyming like him after you've read his poem "Gunga Din". And you can see why people have so taken against him for his "British Empire love" when you read stuff about the water carrier, Gunga Din: "You limpin' lump o' brick-dust Gunga Din"; "It was Din! Din! Din! / You 'eathen, where the mischief 'ave you been? / You put some juldee in it / Or I'll marrow you this minute / If you don't fill up my helmet, Gunga Din": "An' for all 'is dirty 'ide / 'E was white, clear white inside".
Etc.
But under this storm of abuse and bad-naming there's a warmth of feeling for the abused, slave-like Indian who carried water for the company of men. At the end I can't stop tears forming at my eyes: "Yes, Din! Din! Din! / You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din! / Though I've belted you and flayed you, / By the livin' Gawd that made you, / You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din".
They made a film called "Gunga Din" back in the thirties but it wasn't so much a film based on the famous poem but one based mostly on the story by Kipling of Three Sergeants - played by Cary Grant, Victor McClaglen and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. It was an all-action film, the sort you might call "good fun". They were showing it in New York recently and Anthony Lane of The New Yorker talked about the director, George Stenens's "crisp direction". Maybe he was crisp then but he became rather mannered later I thought.
The actor who is most memorable to me was Sam Jaffe who played Gunga Din. In the poem Din saves the narrator from death but is shot himself; in the film he climbs slowly, since he's wounded, to the top of a golden temple so that he can blow a trumpet and save the troupe who are about to be ambushed. Sam Jaffe could play any part except romantic roles. He was a sort of hand-me-down actor who could be called on to play a mathematics professor or a well-dressed gentleman crook who ogled lovely young girls ("The Asphalt Jungle") or a man of about 200 years old in Shangri La or an Indian in a "uniform 'e wore / Was nothin' much before, / An' rather less than 'arf o' the be'ind, / For a piece o' twisty rag / An' a goatskin water-bag / Was all the field equipment 'e could find."

Holidays

Mellissa Kite writes in The Spectator this week of her hair-raising Easy Jet flight to Nice: having to queue for hours, the crushes as holiday-makers forced their way ahead to the plane.... etc. you don't have to tell me, I know all about it and it's horrible.
Last week in The Spectator a former editor of a newspaper described how he was arrested at the place where they run the detector over you for wondering vocally if they were looking for a bomb in his shoes. I won't describe everything that happened to him and his wife but again the whole experience was horrible. Apparently if you say the word "bomb" within an airport these days they'll come down on you like a ton of bricks. Not "I have a bomb in my suitcase" but merely "Are you looking for a bomb old boy? Ha, ha, ha."
I suppose it's understandable when you realise how edgy the airport staff have become as a result of our home-made jihadists' attempts to blow as many innocent people as they can to "kingdom come" - not paradise because that's already full of 'em and, anyway, you infidels are not allowed in.
My flying holidays are over. If I do go abroad in the future it will be by Eurostar, the only civilised way to travel. First class of course where you get comfy seats, newspapers to read and a glass of champagne as apperatif to the five course meal - with free wine or beer! You don't notice the journey, smooth and quiet; by the time you've put away the champagne and wine you're out the other side of the tunnel without being aware of having been in it.
Best way to go to Paris that I know - driving is too fraught with dangers and too tiring, coach trips are worse than self-driving I find.
I was sent a small brochure advertising three coach trips one of which was to the Costa Brava: they offered £40 off the £399 cost; also free drink from 11am to 11pm. For all of ten seconds I was tempted. I like the Costa Brava, I like to drink and the £40 off was an atractive offer..... Ten seconds, that's all. Ride right across England to Dover, get sea-sick crossing the pond (yes, I usually am), then the long drive across France to Spain, then the long drive to the Costa Brava.... I'd need more than a couple of their free drinks if I were to do that.
Anyway, I don't have a passport these days so that settles it. Ill get one when I can afford another 1st class Eurostar trip to the continent.

Bullfighting

"At the first bullfight I ever went to I expected to be horrified and perhaps sickened by what I had been told would happen to the horses..... The killing of the horses in the ring was considered indefensible. I suppose from a modern moral point of view, that is, a Christian point of view, the whole bullfight is indefensible; there is certainly much cruelty, there is always danger, either sought or unlooked for, and there is always death."
Thus Ernest Hemingway opens his book "Death in the Afternoon", a book about how magnificent the "art" of bullfighting is.
In yesterday's Times Roger Lewis wrote an artcile with the title "I'm with Hemingway on the glory of bullfights", and a very fine piece it is too in its defence of what, to some of us who tend to sentimentalise the lives of animals, would consider indefensible. The ritual taunting of a wonderful angressive beast, the humiliation of it by weakening it to the point where it can no longer offer any defence; then the killing of it in, seemingly, such a barbarous way that surely no person with any feeling for animals would find acceptable.
Roger Lewis argues otherwise: that we sentimentalise animals; we wish to see them set free; we do not understand the history of the practice so cannot feel the ritualistic spiritual joy of the spectacle.
He goes further to argue that political correctness has taken over the Western world to such an extent that everything now "has to be cerebral, kept inside the head or on the computer screen like the violence in children's computer games. Politically correct persons want to obliterate or muzzle any evidence of the link between modern man and our urges to be bacchanalian. The bullfight is a massive threat to this."
I saw two bullfights years ago in Barcelona. The first had a famous matador (I think it may have been Antonio Ordonez); the second had no one of note. In the first the bull met an instant death when the sword was driven into his body; in the second the bull did not intsantly die and the man was booed. I don't know why I went the second time because the first horrified me so much. It was all so savage and bloody. Yet Lewis and Hemingway make good cases for its continuation not as a sport but as a ceremony, a sort of religious ceremony that elates rather than, as in my case, horrifies.
The best part of the spectacle is when the bull comes out into the ring: he's looking for someone to kill and, I have to say, I had a secret hope that he would be successful.
Now it's banned in Catalonia and I'm not sure that I approve: my instinct tells me one thing, Hemingway and Lewis another.

Persona

I watched half an hour of Ingmar Bergman's film "Persona" but couldn't take any more. Two women, one of whom does not say a word, the other who can't stop, meet in a hospital - one is a patient, the other a nurse. And they talk. Or, rather, the one talks. About her experiences with a lover who may become her husband. May because she has had an experience of another kind of love (or lust) on a beach with a couple of boys. Yes, boys. Not as in film notes about the film "young men"; no, she specifically says "boys". I thought this bordered on the unmentionable subject of peodophilia or, if not that quite, pornography.
Of course, they're partial to a bit of porn in art houses and film societies ( I once saw Hedy Lamarr naked in "Extase", needless to say in a film society). But you're not supposed to enjoy it, you're supposed to ponder it in the context of the story..... or something.
The thing is "Persona" is a rotten film. Yet it got five stars in The Radio Times and rave reviews in Rotten Tomatoes and David Thompson rates it highly, so does Pauline Kael if memory serves me right. So it must be me. I hated it from beginning to .... to half an hour into it.
Now I enjoyed Clint Eastward's "Mystic River" whioch I also saw recently (for the second time) and thought it a much better film: good story, terrifying in places, good dialogue, good acting.
If I were to say that in the film society I once joined I would have been shouted down - "moron", "Phillistine". You couldn't mention Eastwood in the same breath as Bergman; it would have been like comparing Old Mother Riley with Laurence Olivier.
Yesterday I went to see another film whose title begins with the same letter as "Persona". I am referring to "Predators". I enjoyed it. Mindless I suppose but you need something mindless after an Ingmar Bergman film. Something where characters move about and shoot things and swear and.... well, don't just talk, talk, talk.

Videos and Wine

Someone writing in The Telegraph recently said he thought the most frightening words in the world were "do you want to see my holiday videos?" O yes, very frightening; I've been frightened many times with that question and, like the writer, can never find an excuse for not doing so that would sound genuine.
This has brought to mind a short film called "Home Movies" by Robert Benchley. He used to make short films all of which were immensely funny. One of his can be seen on Youtube: it's of Benchley playing a detective and he explains (he loved giving stupid lectures) how to become a detective. At one stage in the exercise he gets a phsychiatrist to explain to him what the facial features of a criminal look like while an artist nearby draws on a sheet of paper these features. When finished Benchley looks seriously at it only to discover the drawing of the man facing him is none other than himself.
In "Home Movies" he has himself playing a husband who has made his own movies - they didn't have videos in those days (30's - 50's) - and enthusiastically gets a few people together to watch them in the lounge of his home. One couple, in the dark, start necking instantly; a neighbour goes straight off to sleep. The film consists of views from a train - walls mainly; groups at a party - someone drunk...... can't recall the details but it's, of course, the early example of holiday videos.
Pity Robert Benchley "shorts" are not shown anywhere any more: they're still a lot of fun. I used to see them occasionally in a film club, between Bunuel and Eisenstein sort of thing.
Yes, "Would you like to see my holiday videos?" is indeed frightening but not, I think, as frightening as "Would you like to taste my home-made wine?" Not by any stretch. You can always go home and scream after videos; after home-made wine you go home to be ill.

Efrem Zimbalist Jr

I often wondered who Efrim Zimbalist Sr was. Well, not often. Occasionally. Actually never until now when I saw "By Love Possessed" on TCM. It's not a very good film but it has a good story in there trying to get out. Or, rather, the bare bones of James Gould Cozzens' novel are evident all right, the trouble is that that is pretty well all there is - the bare bones.
Someone in Variety magazine wrote about the film: "James Gould Cozzens' thoughtful novel has been turned into a soap opera."
The novel is excellent. Cozzens had written an even better novel a few years before - "Guard of Honour" which won the Pullitzer Prise; "By Love Possessed" was nominated for it but didn't win.
In both books Cozzens looks at a group of people who, seemingly, are the epitomy of respectability but who, on closer examination, have deep-lying moral faults. The characters are drawn with exemplary care and all are treated with a sort of respect so that their actions, when not conforming to society's values, are sympathetically treated.
Cozzens was deeply conservative and his writing is quite unlike that of many of his contemporaries ( for whom he held a deep contempt - "if I were to read a sentence of John Steinbeck's I'd be sick" he said, or words to that effect). It is classy and, you feel, purportedly so.
I thought the film wasn't as bad as most critics say. It is a trifle corny; it is soap opera stuff though with more depth; it is glossy and sexless though love and sex is an important theme; it is a typical Hollywood treatment of a best selling novel. But there's something about I like. I like it's focus on the characters' flaws; I like the actors' determination to get to the core of the characters (John Sturgis directed). And yes, I even liked Efrem Zimbalist Jr up against stalwarts like Jason Robards Jr (I wonder who Jason Robards Sr was!), Thomas Mitchell and Lana Turner. He looked the part of the town lawyer who is perfect in everything he does until he has at the last to make a decision that is criminal. He acted it well. He held the whole thing together. In short he surprised me. I had always thought him pretty wooden ("Wait Until Dark", "77 Sunset Strip").
O yes, Efrem Zimbalist Sr. Well he was a world famous violinist.

Cards

A card or a wag or eccentric, what I would call "a character" - that's the sort of sportsman a writer in the Times says he likes to see. He's not much interested in golf as a game to watch but he would watch if John Daly was playing. Before the games Daly would down the pints and the whisky chasers and smoke heaps of fags..... Like the darts player, Jocky Wilson, who'd down the pints then the vodka (a whole bottle of it with a trace of coca cola to hide its lack of colour) and play a game.....
When I played rugby many moons ago for second and third rate teams there was always the bloke who turned up, fag in hand, looking as if he had just got out of bed after a heavy night's drinking: eyes half closed, belches coming from his pot belly, and an F on his lips ready for a four letter word if required. We used to have to wash our own kit and pay to play - no idea why. There were no showers. Just a field. Maybe sometimes you'd have to put the posts up before you could start the game. Iron posts on one occasion. Sometimes a referee would attend. Why they came I don't know because inevitably they'd be insulted throughout the game. No one ever got sent off - they wouldn't have dared with often a fast flowing river nearby!
There were many "cards" in the games I played in: one, the full-back, hadn't told his wife he played so he had to get someone to wash his kit. Probably his mother! Another was so unfit he couldn't get to the place where the scrum was being set and just stood and watched. I saw him at the end of a game breathing heavily but managing to smoke a fag at the same time.
Tony Ward was a card I believe. I was in a pub near the Cardiff Arms Park after an Irish/Wales international when in comes Tony Ward all dressed up in an evening suit with bow tie to match. He had come to meet up with his Irish pals who were there at the far end of the room. He had a few drinks with them and a laugh (Ireland had won). I mentioned this to a friend of mine who was well up on the ettiquette of after match behaviour who said "He shouldn't have been there. Very bad form. They won't like it, the Irish powers-that-be."
He was dropped for the next game. I never knew if the incident had anything to do with it. Fancy doing that to Ireland's great outside half. Except that they chose Ollie Campbell instead!

Parry

Ignoramus as I am, I've always believed until recently that the Parry who composed "Jerusalem" was one and the same man who had composed the hymn "Aberystwyth"; that Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry was the same guy as Joseph Parry.
Simon Heffer, writing in last Sunday's Telegraph, believes that Hubert Parry is a composer who has been much neglected not least by The Proms but that this year they have made amends to a degree by the inclusion of not just his "Jerusalem" - which they wouldn't dare leave out of every "last night" - but of other works of his like his Sinfonietta.
I clicked on "Spotify" and put his name in the slot and up came a whole page of his works (with "Jerusalem" at the top of course); I discovered that he is indeed as Heffer maintains a wonderful composer of, my words now, light, English music - not as light as Percy Grainger but lighter that Vaughan Williams (who was once a student of his and a great admirer too).
Joseph Parry, described on a website as Wales's greatest composer, did not, of course, write "Jerusalem" but he did compose two other popular works that have been sung in Wales, if not elsewhere, for over a century: the hymn "Aberystwyth" and the song "Myfanwy".
He is not on the Spotify list so I was unable to sample any of his other works in order to discover if he does qualify as "Wales's greatest composer" (not much competition really).
He led an interesting life from working in an iron mine in Merthyr Tydfil at the age of nine to emigrating with his family to the USA where he worked again in a mine; from learning music to becoming a composer; from relative obscurity to become Professor of music at Aberystwyth University.
A few matters of some interest about these composers: Jack Jones's famous novel "Off to Philadelphia in the Morning" was a "life" of Joseph Parry; neither of the composers is mentioned in my three inch wide copy of Hutchinson's Encyclopedia.
According to Heffer, George Bernard Shaw was "afraid to meet him in case he was spellbound by Parry's personality". I find that hard to believe. I feel Shaw's reluctance may have had something to do with his work as a music critic; when he reviewed Elgar's "Enigma Variations" he wrote "English music has arrived at last". The "Enigma" came two years after Parry's Symphonic Variations about which Heffer writes "it is the finest work written by an Englishman in the 19th Century".
Mmmm!

Soccer

I don't dislike soccer as much as Simon Heffer who "loathes" it. I have the feeling that what he means is that he loathes everything around soccer: the wags, the lifestyles of footballers, the maniacal followers who brawl as much as support teams etc. I loathe all that too. But I can't say I dislike the game itself though I have not watched much of the World Cup (and glad it's coming to an end not least because of the noise of those dreadful, unmusical horns). What I have watched, however, I've found pretty tedious stuff. One of the football journalists, Matthew Norman, wrote that it was the worst world cup tournament he had ever experienced - and he'd seen quite a few.
Sports have been invented to play and watching other people play them can be entertaining but usually only if they have reached a certain high standard; the odd thing about this world cup is that the players are at the height of their playing careers but do not entertain very much. Maybe one of the problems is that they are all so good they cancel each other out: they depend more on defence than attack.
I was surprised to discover how much soccer is played in America and how much it was watched there on TV. Probably because their team did so well was the reason that 20 million people watched the last game their team played; yet it's a popular game there especially with youngsters.
I played it as a pupil at a grammer school many moons ago. We were not allowed to play rugby until the age of about fourteen; before that we played soccer. In most private schools rugby was the game played, never soccer. A.J.Ayer, the philosopher and soccer fan, reasoned that this was because they could get thirty boys on the field instead of twenty two.
Good reasoning Prof!

The Horse Soldiers

David Thomson in his "Biographical Dictionary of Film" does a hatchet job on John Ford and only mentions "The Horse Soldiers" in passing. He accuses him of lying about America's history and of sentimentalising characters especially old drunks. It's a blistering attack that you have to say has a lot of truth in it. But he mentions the lines of troopers marching or riding horses against the sky line in a disparaging way.
This is how "The Horse Soldiers" begins: a long line of soldiers on horseback riding along a long ridge against, yes, rippling clouds in an orange sky...... Wonderful. It may be a lie in that soldiers don't do that sort of thing but I like to think that they sometimes do. And then, of course, to add to the "colour" of the scene you get the song. Of course soldiers don't sing so well as this if they sing in unison at all, but it's a great pleasure to see this and hear this hoping that they might have. Ford used heaps of songs in his films, most of them favourites with the public and always lovely to hear. Here he has a sort of marching love song: "I left my love a letter in the hollar of a tree/ I told her I was off to join the US cavalry".
There is much brutality in this film and it's not untrue to say, with David Thomson, that Ford seems to relish it. But the main character played by John Wayne, though he enjoys a fight, is basically a kind soul who is wholly devastated by the senseless killing and destruction. There's a wonderful scene in which he is so upset with the way his soldiers and the enemy have died that he gets almost leglessly drunk, kicks a fellow colonel out of the bar for glorifying in it all, yanks a yippeeing soldier off a horse that has come into the bar and throws him out. Then.... you know it's coming - there a pyramid of glasses standing at the end of the counter and what does he do to them? The same thing Fred Astaire did at the end of his song, "One for my Baby and one more for the road" in an early film: he smashes them to smithereens.
Probably it's all lies. Probably there never were pyramids of glasses on the counters. But don't you wish there were?
How on earth does the film reviewer in The Radio Times give "The Horse Soldiers" only three stars? The opening scene, before the titles is worth 4. The rest is worth all of 5.

Betrayed

I thought the film "Betrayed" was rather good: tense and almost moving at times. I knew it was directed by Costa-Gavras from a script by Joe Eszterhas so I knew what to expect to a certain degree: a story that involves a person in a moral dilemma with a decision to make that will be the right one morally; that there will be a moment when the person will be prompted to make the decision by a fact found out late in the story. Joe Eszterhas stuff. And I knew that Costa-Gavras would have the ability to interpret the story successfully (as he had done some time before in his famous film "Z"). So I was not disappointed.
Not so one of the gurus of film criticism, David Thomson, who thought the film "idiotic". Thomson has not much good to say about either the director or the script-writer. I have seen three films directed by Costa-Gavros and was impressed by them if not thrilled: "Z", "The Confession" and "Missing". "Betrayed" was more entertaining I think because the director didn't force a political message into the plot. That there was one there was obvious - man involved in Ku Klux Klan activities is investigated by a woman cop who falls in love with him - i.e. let's look into the prejudices of The Deep South so that the world will know THE TRUTH. Sort of thing. As if we didn't already know it. It's been tackled enough (one film I recall had a Ku Klux Klan grand master - or whatever - played by Ronald Reagan; good film too). This is one of David Thomson's points: that it is "unbelieveable". I admit that you have to stretch your beliefs a bit but it's worth in this case suspending them altogether and take the film as a thriller, which it is; a good one too.
Both the director and the script writer went on to do worse films. Eszterhas did the script for "Basic Instinct"...... say no more except that he got $3 million for it. As Thomson says: "nothing in that film is as shocking as the $3 million fee".

Gooseberries

It didn't surprise me to read today that gooseberries are not the most popular fruit in this country. I like them. I grow them. And they are now ready for picking. But, as it's said in the article, picking them is not a vrey popular occupation with professional fruit pickers. You know why: the spikes on their branches are razor sharp. I started picking them today from the only bush that has given me a good crop but had to stop because with me, around my feet, were wasps. There's probably a wasp nest near. I didn't want to be vioctim of a wasp attack. I remember a neighbour and friend of mine, a boy slightly younger than me, who got attacked by a horde of wasps; he was stung all over his face. Naturally, when I, with some other friends, heard the news we wanted to ask him to come out to play hoping he'd answer the door and show us his wounds. He did. You couldn't see his eyes: his face had swollen to the size of a football; and he was in agony he told us. He didn't come out to play.
Back to the picking of gooseberrries: you have to suffer the many spikey inoculations to get at the fruit. In the article it said that these spikes are there to protect the fruit from birds. Now I don't suppose they mean that the gooseberry plant had worked it out logically that if they grew spikes etc etc. They meant, of course, they had evolved that way. Tell me this then: why didn't the red currant produce similar spikes to protect its fruit from birds? The only protection the poor red currant can get is from man-made mesh or man-made gun.
I have decided that the only way I can pick the gooseberries and avoid the wasps is to tog myself in clothing like a burqer, eyes only visible, wear gloves and use a secateur to cut off the fruit-laden branches and de-fruit them in the house away from the wasps.
What are wasps for? In E.M.Forster's novel "A Passage to India" he has a few religious men discussing heaven and they all agreed that every living creature would go there. Except the wasp.

Bad Film Club

"Birdemic" is a film that is so bad it's good. That's what a lot of filmgoers are saying. Some have got together to form a Bad Film Club and "Birdemic" is favourite there. It was made for about $10000 and shown first not at the Sundance Film Festival run by Robert Redford but "in a basement bar" near the festival. That may say something about its quality; after all "The Blair Witch" thing was a great success at the official festival.
Bad Film Clubs are springing up all over the place apparently. I know there's one in Chapter Arts Centre Cardiff though I have not yet been to see any of the films they have shown there. I think one of the first they showed was "Snakes on a Plane" which, to my mind, is not a film to laugh at. OK it's rather a silly film - the title pretty well describes it all: Samuel L Jackson has the job of escorting a man who has witnessed a crime across country in a plane but the person who doesn't want the man to testify against him has filled the hold of the plane with deadly snakes and they are let loose. I enjoyed the film. It is very well made with technical effects that are astonishing. And it has one of those over-the-top performances from Jackson that you can't help enjoying. So I didn't go to see it at The Bad Film Club because I didn't want to sit there listening to people laughing at it.
Now "Birdemic: Shock and Terror" is a different thing altogether. It's technical effects are practically non existant; the acting is wooden; the script is weak to the point of absurdity. And so on. Someone said about it and the others like it they are showing at The Bad Film Clubs all over the Western world: "First you're laughing at what's on the screen, then you're laughing with and finally you're cheering for".
The film's director isn't put out by this mockwery of his effort; after all the film has become so popular he's now cashing in on it. Apparently he's going to make sequel - "Birdemic 2" with a bit more money than he invested in "Birdemic 1".
There are a couple of good laughs in "Snakes on a Plane" one being the pilot's response to his being informed that the snakes are getting everywhere. "If they get in the elctrics," he says, "we'll be down faster than a Thai hooker."