A really good movie...

...is one of the highest forms of art, for me.

The Sea Inside – just saw this on DVD. Awesome movie. I cried, and I don’t usually.

Beowulf - I read something about “The new Angelina Jolie movie” yesterday. As though a movie is nothing but a celebrity limo. The fact that Neil Gaiman has been working on this project for ages now is not newsworthy enough I guess. Anyhow, the “new Angelina Jolie movie” is actually a long standing project called Beowulf, and is based on the Anglo Saxon epic poem of the same name. Hero Beowulf fights evil Grendel “descendant of Cain”, and Grendel’s mother, and dragons and things: “...Thus these warriors lived in joy, blessed, until one began to do evil deeds, a hellish enemy. The grim spirit was called Grendel, known as a rover of the borders, one who held the moors, fen and fastness...” It should be a dark and thunderous adventure and I’m looking forward to it.
They are also going to do a movie of Neil’s astonishing novel, Stardust. You should rush out now and get a copy of this book, it’s not like anything you’ve read before and yet you will recognise it all. He is doing the screenplay himself, so it will translate into celluloid beautifully I think.


Rant…

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe -

Don’t read this rant if you don’t know the books and you want to go see the movie and enjoy it for what it’s worth.

I was afraid to go and see this movie. I lived in these stories as a kid, wore them like coats, and tried often to go through my own wardrobe. They were my best friends and gave me courage.
Maybe it had something to do with the 20 minutes worth of ads I had to watch beforehand (Hey! I am paying for this ticket and this stale popcorn and this flat cola and these buzzing speakers! You should be paying ME to watch these ads!), but I was right to be afraid. While the movie looks nice enough on the surface, some of the CG animals, like the fox and the wolves, (and yes, even the lion that they’ve been bragging about so much) fall seriously short. You just can’t really believe in them. And surely there’s a better way to make animals talk? Like maybe let them think aloud or something? Busting guts and harddrive space to make them photo-real and then giving them human mouth movements and facial expressions is just silly. It’s not bending the truth, it’s breaking it clean in two. The faun/satyr/phoenix/mermaid thing works well with CG because you’re not trying to fool yourself about them being real to start with.
With Jadis, I got the feeling that they were onto something, but then they got lazy. She’s cruel and cold and selfish, sure, but not enough. The mere sight of her should stab your heart with a steely icicle, you should tremble at the very thought of her. This does not happen in the movie and her sleigh makes far too much noise. She should be snake-like. She isn’t.
Peter is smarmy. Susan is an afterthought. Aslan… what can I say. You don’t actually end up understanding what all the fuss is about, they don’t explain: What’s so special about this Narnia place anyway? Why is this lion so beloved? Why are they all so keen on fighting this battle? So what if he dies? At one point, he’s supposed to be about to roar a roar that will shake the foundations of Narnia and fundamentally alter all who hear it, it must put courage in some hearts and fear in others. Cover your ears, he says. He roars. Rrooaarr. So?
And then, they’ve censored it silly. Come now. Not one drop of blood. I had to censor it myself when I read it to my kids when they were very small, and they went on to read it for themselves a little later, in full. But telling it this sweetly to a generation of wiseass kids who are playing Doom and Quake and even Vice City (yes, they are. 10 year old kids are playing this. If you’re a parent and you don’t know this then you need to catch a wake up), and who have unrestricted access to adult material of all kinds via their cellphones… that’s just stupid. Does Disney think it’s going to undo decades of gratuity now, by telling only half of a really good story? Now that Disney owns Narnia… oh god. I have a headache.

Well anyway. Lucy and Mr Tumnus are great in the movie. But then, they are not complex characters. So this ends up being just another kids holiday movie, unexceptional. Which is nothing short of a travesty. I wonder how it will go with the rest of the Narnia stories, should they decide to go on with it? There is enough material for another ten years worth of spin-off figurines.

You guys ROCK!

Ek voel so lekker warm and fuzzy. Ek het ‘n unexpected opportunity (half an hour of actual TIME. Can this be true?) gekry om ‘n bietjie te surf. By way of Susynoid, first star on the right and straight on ‘till dawn, het ek ‘n happie van Dignet gelees, en ook Eben se Oord, en ek weet hoe absurd is dit, dat ‘n engelse meisie in Afrikaans probeer skryf, maar julle woorde klink so nice (soos die krikkel van die vuur, na die braai – when it’s just right for marshmallows and ghost stories, or bananas in tinfoil with chocolate and cape velvet), hier binne die koue sieellose internet. Langsaan julle, voel ek so bietjie one-dimensional. Ek het nie een slukkie kultuur om my eie te noem nie. Net English, and we all know how patchwork that is. Toe maar, dis orraait. As ek nie in die band kan speel nie, sal ek sommer net ‘n groupie moet wees.

:-)

xox

Thank you Dio! I have links, because I can cut and paste and I can sort of follow instructions. You have no idea what this means to me. Today, html, sort of. Tomorrow, the cosmos? Somebody stop me!

An it harm none, do as ye will

I had wanted to be cheerful and blithe, but I’m not a good actress so I’ll just be morose, and retain some integrity. Marketers gleefully quoted Charles Bradlaugh today:

"Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful... Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people, and entombs the hope of the race."

In true marketing style, the quote is out of context. Bradlaugh lived in different times and was not talking about sales. He was campaigning for Irish Home Rule, the redistribution of land, birth control, and atheists being allowed into the House of Commons, among other things. These creatures are campaigning for the sale of everything, from our children to the planet; together with many other things we had imagined were not for sale. As with so many freedoms, the ‘right’ to do such-and-such becomes nothing more than an excuse for doing it, in this insane Ripley’s version of a world. The ‘truth’ as applied to contemporary life is a dire culture of entitlement; with gratification as its sole aim, and its war cry has nothing to do with any kind of real freedom or real truth. I can think of many current instances in which the abuse of certain ‘freedoms’ has not died in a day, and is of itself busily entombing the hope of the species. If everyone lived in a little bubble of their own, and their words and actions could not affect the whole, then wholesale freedom of speech would be a fine thing. And although most of us think that we do in fact live in such a bubble, in reality not one of us can or does. We’re either oversensitive or desensitised, and both positions play straight into marketing’s hand.

In my ideal world, no one gets absolute freedom of anything until we have learned - and can apply - compassion, respect and tolerance. Impossible things to measure and truly difficult to practise, but by the time we’re eighty, maybe freedom can be ours in some small way. In the meantime, of course we should feel free to speak – if we think first. Marketing people better batten down the hatches and lay in some supplies, because if they’re to evolve from seething pond scum to thinking person with earned rights, at least three million years must pass.

Nice Dream.

Long live Bradlaugh, and a pox on those who take his name in vain.


In the spirit of the season, here’s something by Ogden Nash:


A Carol for Children (Abridged)

God rest you, merry innocents,
Let nothing you dismay,
Let nothing wound an eager heart
Upon this Christmas day.

Yours be the genial holly wreaths,
The stockings and the tree;
An aged world to you bequeaths
Its own forgotten glee.

Soon, soon enough come crueller gifts,
The anger and the tears;
Between you now there sparsely drifts
A handful yet of years.

Oh dimly, dimly glows the star
Through the electric throng;
The bidding in temple and bazaar
Drowns out the silver song.

Two ultimate laws alone we know,
The ledger and the sword –
So far away, so long ago,
We lost the infant lord.

God rest you, merry innocents,
While innocence endures.
A sweeter Christmas than we to ours
May you bequeath to yours.

Please, thank you, so sorry.

Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves) has a new book out called Talk To The Hand, which is all about people having no manners anymore.

When I was a kid you had to be polite to everyone older than you, and nice to everyone younger than you, or else. You even had to be polite to really horrible older people, because the grownups were so busy climbing social ladders that they didn’t know who the really horrible ones were. But we kids knew. And we still had to be polite to them.

Maybe manners do maketh the man, but I’m confused. I just had my pin number filched by a very polite and neatly dressed criminal at the ATM. This is ridiculous, because I’ve been around long enough to know about these things. The thing is, while I was acutely aware somewhere in my consciousness that this impeccably mannered person was hoodwinking me, I was too busy being polite to assert myself by kicking him in the nuts. Years of conditioning has overridden my base instincts and rendered me incapable of self-defence? This is not good.
The lady at the bank rudely rolled her eyeballs at me as if to say, “You idiot,” when I told her my story and begged her to change my pin. I was polite and apologised for inconveniencing her, of course.

I would so like to have tea with Lynne Truss. We could duel politely with our little silver filigreed cake forks, and argue good-naturedly about whether to keep or lose the apostrophe forever.

And I could ask her (politely) why she keeps writing all the books I was going to write.