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."

Toffs

I've been reading a review of a new book on Patrick Shaw-Stewart and it's nearly made me sick. Educated at Eton then Oxford he was a member of "The Corrupt Coterie", a group of students who regarded themselves as superior to everyone who hadn't gone to Eton, superior to those others who had, superior to everyone who was not British. They partied from Saturday to Monday in grand houses. They were all in love with Lady Diana Manners, whoever she was, and they all joined up to fight The Great War in which most of them were killed. Apart from their courage and patriotism I don't think there is anything that can be said about them that is complimentary. Shaw-Stewart, when an officer in the army, said of "the men" under his command: "I dislike them all pretty heartily because they nearly all smell".
Associated with this "band of brothers" was Duff-Cooper who had a position in governemnt in the Second World War. He was a descendant of William the Fourth on the distaff side: a mistress of the king's bore him a son whose blood came down over the years to Duff-Cooper. Incidentally, Duff-Cooper's neice was the grandmother of our own prime minister, David Cameron. So he's of royal blood! No wonder the queen was smiling when she met him ("one of our own").
When I think of this lot, toffs, especially the Corrupt Coterie I think also of the man I saw in a top-hole in a colliery I worked at while a student: he worked in a very narrow sloping tunnel, cut the coal in the seams with a pick-axe and pushed the coal down the shaft with his boots to fall into a truck placed beneath. All day. Not paid much then. Not enough to party into the early hours. Just slog and more slog. "Nearly all smell" my foot! From my experience of miner's houses in the South Wales valleys, they were all clean as pins and if there was a smell at all it was of carbolic soap.
Has anything changed?

Ergos

Rod Liddle in this week's Spectator magazine writes a piece on Monty Hall. It's a sort of card game. You place three cards face down on a table; two of the cards are jokers, one is an ace. You ask a fellow player to put his finger on the card he thinks might be the ace. He chooses a card. You pick up the other two one of which is a joker. You show him a joker and then place the other card face down next to the card he has already chosen. You now ask him if he wishes to change his mind and switch to the card you have just put down. Almost inevitably, says Rod Liddle, he doesn't change his mind. But he should because he'd have a better chance of picking the ace.
A similar "game" was played on an American gameshow in which there were three doors behind which were a car and two goats. A contestant was asked to choose a door to win the car. The compere, knowing where the two goats were, would open a door to show a goat then asking if the contestant wanted to change their original choice. Usually they didn't. When the compere announced that he should have changed so that he'd have had a better chance of winning, there was uproar from the country's mathematicians. Even the famous mathematician Paul Ergos said it was a fifty/fifty chance, no greater than that.
He was wrong. There is a bigger chance if you change your choice. Why?
The explanation is this: when you first choose you have a 1 in 3 chance of being correct; when you decide not to change you choice, you have a 1 in 2 chance which, of course, is higher.
Ergos had to have it demonstrated on a computer which played the game many thousands of times.
Ergos was a strange guy. He travelled round the place going to university maths departments, picking brains, doing calculations; when he had, so to speak, absorbed all the knowledge he wanted, he'd leave and go to another university. He once won a prize of a few thousand pounds which he gave to a beggar he passed on the street. When he died a few years back I read his obituary in The Times after which I said to my wife "There's an interesting fellow: mathematician." "Interesting? Why?" "Well," I said, "he showed....." here I can't recall the exact details of the work he did but it had to do with prime numbers - nothing to do with life outside the abstract world of mathematics. "What good is that?" she said. "What good is music?" I replied. "It's pleasant to listen to." "Maths is pleasant to do," I replied.
I'm afraid not many people believe that.

Shaw

What a big disappointment to me was the London production of "Mrs Warren's Profession" by Bernard Shaw which I saw yesterday. I have seen it a couple of times before and laughed a lot at parts of it - the part where the ageing partner in Mrs Warren's "business" proposes to her daughter I have found in the past (even on radio) to be immensely funny but here it wasn't. I admire Shaw's determination to de-bunk Victorian society by underlinging its hypocricy but this time I found many of the arguments unconvincing and tedious; he seemed to be repeating himself a lot for the sake of driving home his points. I have often had the impression that certain writers like Woody Allen, especially those who have cut their teeth on writing comedy sketches, tend, if they have a choice of going down one avenue of drama which the play's direction seems to be the one that should be followed, or down another alternative one that has a good joke in it, they will choose the second way. I have always thought Shaw incapable of this dramatic nonsense but here it seems to me he is almost guilty of much the same thing: following not so much the logic of the story but occasionally straying off to indulge in "entertaining" side-lines.
The theatre didn't help my mood. The Comedy theatre must have been built when or probably before Shaw wrote this play (1894). It's one those old, uncomfortable places which have seats tightly packed together with not much leg room; no central aisle so if, like us, you wished to go to the bar you had to prevail upon the good nature of people - most of them, like me, old and some appearing infirm as well - to stand, if they could, leaving enough room to squezze past them.
Before the show we went to a rather more modern establishment than this ancient place: a bar/restaurant/club called "Tiger, Tiger". We had a Caesar Salad for a fiver and a bottle of wine for £14. I was in the mood for a good laugh but only laughed once - no, even that wasn't a laugh, more of a chuckle.
I asked the waitress: was this the place some of our un-revered terrorists tried to bomb a few years ago. She said it was and that she there that night and would been blown to "kingdom come" if the bomb had gone off. Nice girl. One of "the slags" the bomber would have liked to kill.

Clint and Dennis

Last Monday Clint Eastwood reached the age of 80 and he is not at all in decline; on the contrary, he's still making films - two in the offing - and I think he is making better films now than he's ever made. He started late, in his thirtees, in star-acting roles having made a series of films and TV shows playing bit parts. But once he had established himself as a certain sort of actor: the man with no name, the tough hombre who stands up for what is right against "punks" and political correctness, he was made for life. "Liberal" is the last word that could be applied to the roles he played (maybe I should say rather cynically, the role he played because they were pretty well all the same character).
Dennis Hopper was another actor who pretty well played the same sort of guy in all the films he made: violent usually or if not violent, carrying the threat in his character to become violent. He too directed a few films, "Easy Rider" being the first and probably the best (I did not like it because I thought it idolised a way of life that was wholly without any moral substance). There were others but none are much good. Acting is what he excelled at. To paraphrase what someone said that in every fat man there was a thin man trying to get out, with Hopper it's a case of in every short man there's a big man trying to get out.
In David Thomson's book about film stars he maintains that Cary Grant is probably the greatest film actor. I believe that too. He could play most anything: tragedy and comedy, fool or wise man, sophistication or down-and-out. He could do song and dance too in his early days. Neither Clint Eastwood nor Dennis Hopper would have got away with "song and dance"; they wouldn't even have tried. But they both reached heights of performance denied to others who may have had more talent by being themselves or at least being a character they invented.
Not many reviewers of their lives this week mentioned Clint's best film, "Mystic River" or Hopper's wonderful appearance in "Red Rock West". And no one to my knowledge mentioned Clint's performance in "True Crime" which I thought showed a development in his acting I believed him incapable of achieving (funny too); or Hopper's late appearance in the first series of "24" which suddenly made you sit up and take notice.
Many times married, both of them (once is enough!). In Cary Grant maybe there was a feminine streak. Not in them. Wholly heterosexual was their stock in trade.