Hand-held Cameras

I suppose filming with hand-held cameras can be interesting - especially for documentary films where it might not be conducive to set up a camera on its tripod or whatever it is on these days; or when the film-maker wants a close-up that would be particularly difficult using normal techniques. But usually, hand-held cameras moving around the place can make one dizzy.
In the film "End of Watch" it's hand-held camera for the whole film. The reason, I think, is that the director wanted to give the audience the feeling that they were close if not actually in on the action. It did the reverse. It made me so conscious of the camera that I just couldn't get interested in the story. Not that there was much a story to tell. Two LAPD coppers on their beat. Two close friends who jabbered a lot to show us hop close they were to each other. Two decent fellows who did they're jobs well, caught crooks, weren't corrupt, had pleasant wife/girl friend. Normal guys, regular guys who did their duty, got to arrest some real nasty bits of work until they upset a cartel whose boss ordered some of his gang to kill them. Which is when the real action began. Up until then it had been a sort of documentary type of film - "lives of the policemen in the LAPD" sort of thing.
But what a tedious journey it was with all that hand-held camera stuff to put up with.
Sometimes the technique is used effectively so that you don't realise the camera is hand held - it's done so smoothly. "24" for instance. But usually you are so aware that you are watching a film that it all seems contrived and false.
The director should take a good long look at a film by the Japanese director Ozu who hardly moves his camera at all.

Cooking

Cooking they say is the new rock and roll. That means, I suppose, that TV food programmes are "with it". Well I'm not "with it", nor a rock and roll fan; nor a food programme watcher. Any more. Once they seemed attractive: seeing all those colourful food ingredients the magicians of the kitchen displayed; and once they seemed so knowledgeable about food recipes. Now, to coin a phrase, I'm fed up with them. Jamie Oliver gives me a pain in the neck with his recipes that, he maintains, can be served up in 15 minutes. Can't be done. Pull the other one Jamie. I once thought Nigel Whatsisname was in a category above the others but to try to produce one of his "suppers" inside two hours would be impossible. As for the woman, the bird, the dark haired beauty - I find her painfully unwatchable now: it's not cooking, it's showing off her contours.
What's wrong with Supermarket jars of sauces? They are surely made by experts who can produce a better sauce that I could with limited ingredients (Nigel Whatsisname's pantry is full from floor to ceiling with herbs and spices). And what's wrong with pastry from the shop when I know that trying to make it would not only take me, and probably most people, hours to produce? And what's wrong with pies from Gregg's? Their sausage rolls are great.
No, cookery programmes and cookery books are a new fad. Not only that but they take up so much valuable time when, for example, one could be reading "War and Peace" or listening to Beethoven's 9th symphony or writing a play or short story.
I suppose "the new rock and roll" sums it up rather well: it's low-rate stuff posing as quality.
I have just read that The Times is, this weekend, going to present to the public the 40 best cookbooks for Christmas. Forty!!!! That means that there are probably another one hundred and forty also published.
Mmm! May publish one myself: "How to cook without cooking" maybe i.e. lists of food available from supermarkets e.g. Sainsbury's tin of Beef Mince and Onions (excellent, topped with mashed potatoe, easier than cottage pie from scratch).

Sex 'n Violence

A winning combination, sex and violence, used in dramas over the centuries: Romeo and Juliet, Cecil B. de-Mille films (with a dash, or rather a big splash, of religion thrown in), Psycho, Killing Them Softly. The last mentioned I saw last week and even I, inured over the years to the effects on my constitution of violence in films, even I found some of the scenes in this film painful to watch. OK, you can always tell yourself that the scenes aren't actually taking place, as you can when two people are in bed supposedly "having it away" on screen, but just the same when presented so realistically as it was here in "Killing Them Softly" it rather brought out the Mary Whitehouse in me: should they really be descending to such low levels in order to entertain or to make money - though when I was at the cinema watching he film there were only four other people there which says something about the attraction of the "sex n' violence" formula. Actually there was very little sex in the film, well, not visible activity, only a hooker being paid after the event.
Strangely coincidental I have been reading Somserset Maugham's book called "Ten Novels and their Authors" which, by the way is excellent in all respects but especially so for budding writers who would like to know something about novel writing and short story writing, the differences in the genres chiefly. In one passage of Maugham's introduction to the book, he draws attention to the prevalence of sex in modern literature and he writes thus: "Owing to the invention of  contraceptives, the high value that was once placed on chastity no longer obtains. Novelists have not been slow to notice the difference in the relation of the sexes and so, whenever they feel something must be done to sustain the reader's flagging interest, they cause their characters to indulge in copulation. I am not sure they are well-advised. Of sexual intercourse Lord Chesterfield said that the pleasure was momentary, the position ridiculous and the expense damnable; if he had lived to read modern fiction he might have added that there is a monotony about the act that renders reiterated narration of it excessively tedious."

Ed Milliband

I saw a film yesterday called "Killing Them Softly", a film about petty criminals and contract killers. As a sort of running background to the main action you were made aware of, on TVs in bars in which the killers sat to talk, pictures of Barack Obama and various other politicians of the period just before he became president, spouting stuff about how they were going to change America etc. (One of the themes of the film had to do with America being the same old place it always was, corrupt and occupied with big business - just like the underworld where the main protagonists of the film were located.) One of the themes of Obama's speech had to with "one nation". I thought to myself: "haven't I heard this theme before recently?" Of course, it was at the core of Ed Milliband's speech at the Labour Party conference. Just had Disraeli's speech of the late 1800's been a call for the country to become "one nation", so too was Ed Milliband's.
I thought: "some chance, mate". One nation with the Queen and company living in Buckingham Palace? One nation with bankers and their ilk trousering vast sums of cash to spend on skying trips and yachts? One nation with Eton and Oxford versus your local greasy-spoon comp?
But let them dream, these politicians. They've always have been hopeless dreamers. Clegg had a dream a few weeks ago at the Lib Dem do and no doubt, Cameron will have a dream next week.
But Milliband's speech, while idealistic and well delivered, didn't do much for me as it seemed to have done for the vast majority of the Press ("once we had the rack, now we have The Press" said Oscar Wilde). I'll tell you why. Because I can't get it out of my craw that Ed Milliband stood for leader of the Labour Party against his elder brother. Not because they had quarreled about some aspect of socialist policies that made them in fundamental disagreement but because he desired the position. Against his own brother! We are back with Esau and Jacob here. Or Abel and Cain maybe. Too strong perhaps but nonetheless I didn't like it and still don't like it.

Jimmy Savile

What I find amazing about this Jimmy Savile scandal, apart from the allegations of his abuse of children that no one in the BBC seemed to have any knowledge of (I don't think!), is that the BBC ever took him on the staff in the first place. I have always found him obnoxious. As far as I'm concerned, whenever his stupid face with that stupid hair and that stupid cigar appeared on the TV I rushed to shut it off. I just could not stand the sound of his voice. Really I could not stand anything about him. Yet, if I, as I sometimes did, voiced my objections to his TV appearances, I was always faced with the remark "Hah, but he does such good work; take Stoke Mandeville hospital for example". I wonder now if that generosity on his part had something to do with his celebrity status; maybe it was something he could boast about, something that made him safe from censure. It seems now that I'm right, it did make him safe because I have heard that he used the fact on a few occasions when reporters approached him about the rumours of his behaviour: "you print anything about those rumours and I'll withdraw all my money from Stoke Manderville".
Now Esther Rantzen says she is ashamed of having had him as a friend and feels that she and others like her colluded with him in his horrible acts. What on earth did she find so attractive in him to have him as a friend in the first place? It seems that Savile had tremendous power over his colleagues some of whom now admit this to be true.
Let us go back in time to the BBC run by Lord Reith shall we? It's beyond belief that Reith would have even contemplated employing a person of such low life, such a clown, such an oaf, such a talentless smoothy, such a monstrous caricature of a human being.
But there! Once upon a time the BBC had high taste; now it hasn't. Why? Because it wishes to compete with ITV etc to see, we must conclude, which of them can produce the tawdriest rubbish for a nation brought up on pop, rock, rap and crap.

Kipling

Many years ago, in a discussion on radio, I heard a group of intellectuals discussing what they thought was the greatest short story ever written. Some years before a similar discussion had taken place (if memory serves me well, this was on "The Brains Trust") and the general consensus of opinion was that Edgar Alan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" was the tops; now it was Rudyard Kipling's "The Man who would be King". I don't think there could be so great a gap of style, plot, theme or setting than between these two stories than any other two: the first is set in America, the second in India; the first is a sort of horror story, the second a bit of history; the first has two characters who know each other but one of whom hates the other, the second has two English rogues out to deceive a tribe of Afghans into believing they are of royal blood; the first is a study of  hatred (though no reason is given for it), the second is knockabout humour with tragic consequences.
I never have been able to get past the first few pages of the Kipling story until this week when I put "The Stories of Kipling" on Google and started reading it again. I find it's very good; so good, in fact, that I find myself hesitating in rushing the pleasure of reading it - like good wine you want to take it slowly, savouring every tiny drop.
Apparently John Huston wanted to make a film of this story and for twenty years tried to put it together; eventually, when he was ready production-wise to do so, he approached Paul Newman having in mind Newman and Robert Redford for the part of the two rogues, after their success in "Butch Cassidy and the Sun-Dance Kid". Paul Newman tossed the script back to Huston and said "you want Sean Connery and Michael Caine for the parts". So Huston made the film with those two but it wasn't a great success. I can't say I liked what little I saw of it but that was during the period that the short story itself hadn't appealed to me. I shall now try it again.
This week I was approached by a young man who was working on the guttering of a neighbour's roof. He asked me if I'd like the same for my roof. It certainly needed doing but I had just had two new windows for over a thousand pounds fitted and felt I didn't want more expense. But the young man was insistent and dropped his price by two hundred pounds from £600 odd to £400 odd. I still said no. The next day he saw me again, said he had some material left over from the other job and I could have the job done for £270. He was a brilliant salesman. As Raymond Chandler put it about a rogue in one of his novels "he looked at me with the innocent eyes of used car salesman". This guy did too. It was like being in the power of the ancient mariner. No, not the ancient mariner but one of the rogues in "The Man who would be King". The young fellow could hardly write my name or address - I had to spell every word out for him and he wrote each letter carefully and with difficulty. But he had a certain roguish charm that they don't teach in schools. He also diddled me out of a tenner. I had to smile.

Criminals

Bernard Shaw said that "all men mean well". I don't believe it. Take the TV play from Sicily called "Inspector Montalban": the first installment featured some very shady dealings in which young boys were shipped from North Africa, Morocco, Tunisia etc. to Sicily in order that they, according to an investigating reporter, were to be sold off to various people to beg on the streets and to be "owned" by paedophiles. Now, this is a piece of fiction and might not actually represent reality, but I hardly think that the author of the books on which the TV series is based would make this up for sheer entertainment. No, it must be true that this sort of thing happens. And it's pretty obvious that the men involved in this nefarious activity do not "mean well"; they do it for money with little or no thought of morality or humanity involved. Just as the slave trade ran for centuries with so called "respectable" people greedily helping themselves to the profits. They didn't "mean well".
Another play on TV recently in the series "Silent Witness" involved young Asian men in the north of England grooming young white girls and drugging them in order to sell them for profit to older men who paid for sex with them. This, of course, went on in reality. One could hardly believe it, that there were such men that had no regard for the feelings of the young girls. They didn't "mean well".
Shaw believed poverty to be a crime and that it led to other crimes. Maybe some crimes could be explained or excused by people's poverty as in, for example, Les Miserables where the man is deemed to be a criminal because he stole - was it loaf of bread? - to feed his starving family; but not the two kinds mentioned above that the two TV plays bravely and brilliantly highlighted.
I say "bravely" because, in the case of the Asian youths, there is a reluctance to draw attention to what is thought to be by some the "cultural differences" between "us and them". And it being the BBC that produced the "Silent Witness" episode mentioned above, I have to admit that I was rather surprised that they produced it since there is, to my mind, a reluctance in the BBC to bring certain matters relating to cultural differences to the fore lest someone's feelings are hurt.