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.