Not Everything Is About Me

The Groupie (the wisest person I know) frequently advises me not to keep reading about Donald Trump - it only makes me angry. She has a point. America's very public psychosis feeds my own.

All of which comes back to me as I contemplate, inter alia, five films recently watched. Four of them are American movies, one British. You  might not believe it but I do actually give it some thought before I put metaphotical pen to to virtual paper with these film commentaries. And recent cogitation has brought home the fact that any trace of decency in any film that analyses the human condition merely provokes me into observing either that Donald Trump should be made to watch it, or that he wouldn't get the point.

So here are those five films. First up is Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a picture that has that ubiquitous Tennessee Williams atmosphere of strangulating heat. Has cinema ever deployed a more beautiful leading couple than Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman? They fight and tear at each other in the cage of their doomed marriage. Burl Ives plays the vile American patriarch with portly panache - I will resist the deployment of a Trump reference - oh no, I've done it already. In truth this film never fully escapes from its stage roots but it smolders nicely. 69/70. 

Burl Ives gives us another display as the vile patriarch in The Big Country. On this occasion he got an Oscar for his efforts. This film lives up to its name - it is big. The landscapes are big, the stars are big, the cinematography is big (Technirama), the fights are big. The humans almost fade to insignificance against the backdrops. It has pretensions to talk about the truth of Manifest Destiny and, given its age (made in 1958) it is probably making some heavy-handed points about the Cold War. Altogether glorious to look at. Its denouement suggests that bad men must die to allow civilisation to grow. Trump ... no too bloody obvious. 69/70. 

3.10 to Yuma (the 1957 original not the 2007 remake) is a taut Western notable for a superb performance of smooth menace by Gelnn Ford. Its ending is a surprising concession to decency in the midst of vicious singularity. [Insert Trump reference here]. 70/100. 

I will set the British film aside for now and instead turn to a very good American movie from a master of the medium that, for me, sits in the middle ranks of his oeuvre. Casino sees Martin Scorsese repeating much of the narrative technique of his (for me) masterpiece, Goodfellas. This time it is the Las Vegas casino industry of the mob-dominated 70s and 80s that comes under Scorsese's acute microscope. Joe Pesci, gives us his best Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro is compelling as the uber-clever gambler who becomes a casino boss but who finds himself undone by love and by the advance of the junk-bond ecnomy (a voodoo economy in which Trump crashed and burned but by the immoral rules of the game lived to fight on). However the star turn comes from Sharon Stone as de Niro's booze-addled nemesis. Great soundtrack as well - a recurrent element in Scorsese's films. 80/100.

I have bitter-sweet memories of a family holiday in Denmark. Sweet because I love my family and because I happened at that time to think (wrongly as things transpired) that I was at the peak of my powers as a businessman. At our coastal lodge I would rise early, go for a run, then swim in the sea before making myself some proper coffee and reading a management tome. Bitter because I returned to England and my professional life collapsed. That is s story for another day - or, perhaps better, a story never to be told. Denmark struck me as a peaceable country at ease with itself. Again I may be wrong. No matter, those memories were stirred by the modest British production, Denmark. Rafe Spall plays a down-at-heel Welshman who resolves that his best hope of a comfortable life is to earn himself a spot in Danish prison. From this unlikely conceit is spun a nicely beguiling redemption tale. 72/100. I'm pretty sure Trump wouldn't get it, but who am I to say.  

       

Tempus Fugit - And Takes Automotive Technology Along For The Ride

As you will know if you have been with me on this blog's meanderings for the past decade and a half, I own my Precious Jag - a beautiful Jaguar XK8 that spends most of its life sleeping idly in the garage. It may be a small and stupid thing but it is, for me, a piece of automotiive pornography. It is getting on for thirty years old and runs beautifully. 

Overgraduate with his Canyonero

But enough of such mild boastfulness because today I am saying goodbye to the more prosaic car that has been my main vehicle for eleven years. It is a Kia Sorento, it has done a shade under one hundred thousand miles and has been hardly any trouble. I shall miss it - the Canyonero as Daughters numbered One and Two and I dubbed it - you have to be a Simpsons devotee to get the reference.

 

Krusty with his Kia

 

And let me tell you how to measure automotive sophistication/progress. The Precious Jag has a CD player which I had to have specially fitted. Canyonero came with a CD player as standard and also has a bafflingly unreliable digital radio which I had to buy as an extra. Canyonero has been superseded by a Dacia Bigster (terrible name I know but a lot of car for the money) and that has an efficient digital radio and Android Autoplay so that I can listen to Spotify via my (also new as it happens) phone. No CD player in sight - so last century!

I like the new car  and here's a thing - it's a hybrid. Will that be defunct by the time I next change cars? 

The Myth Of Those Italian Trains

I'm afraid that it is not true to say that Mussolini got the trains running any more efficiently than before he seized power. I know this to be the position because various search engines and a touch of AI have told me so. As any fule kno, the internet never lies.

I mention this nubbin of information only because it has robbed me of a ready cliche to deploy in making my reaction to the recent editions of the television spectacular that is The Donald Saves the World. Now before you go scurrying off to check-out this programme, no it doesn't exist (although I would confess that I can't be arsed to check out this statement), it is merely my glib way of wrestling (as I have been for weeks) with the self-proclaimed saintliness of Donald J. Trump as he goes around the world stopping wars and generally dispensing balm.

My (highly unoriginal but it cannot be said often enough) point is that truly bad men can do good things. So I might have started by saying that Mussolini made the trains run on time, but we have already established that this was not actually the case. No matter, what I will say is that Hitler revived a moribund German economy and that nice bloke Stalin galvanised Russia to defeat said Hitler. Either or both may have made trains run on time.

So here's the thing, Trump's peace accord in the Middle East (actually it's that most annoying of legal things - an agreement to agree) is to be welcomed. Hamas and Likud are, how should we put this, both bat-shit-crazy and would happily have carried on their wanton acts of destruction and desecration until the sacred cows come home. So an abeyance is good. We might carp that Trump could have brought Netanyahu to heel fifteen months ago but better late than never. Will it hold? Let us pray so - though to which version of God we should pray is a matter of contention.

As I say, truly bad men can do good things. Trump has done such a thing. He remains a malignant narcissist whose driving passion is that we should all love him as much as he clearly loves himself. Fat chance.    

A Suitable Obsession For The Old

JTC was a wise and amusing man, much my elder. He was a stalwart member and Honorary Life Vice President of our rugby club and, in his more decorous moments, a member of that great seat of affluenec, Little Aston Golf Club. Many years ago I was chatting to him at the bar and mused out loud that I might play more golf. Jim counselled me against this and uttered the sage words, 'play team games for as long as you can'. In this, as in so much else, Jim was right.

I played rugby until a week short of my forty-eighth birthday, by which time I was held together by strategically applied tape and over-medicated on anti-inflammatories. I loved close to every minute of it. I had played my last game of 1st XV rugby at forty and thereafter grew old gracelessly.  

I mention this only because I spent a fun two hours this morning on the practice ground at Clwb Golff Ynys Mon. I was merely tatting around and it was only when I switched on my computer just now that I noticed the date (a boon in being elderly is that the date is a matter of only passing import) - tomorrow is the fifty-first anniversary of my first game of golf. Founder's Day 1974. I love golf in all its infuriating detail but my advice, should you choose to hear it, remains, play team games as long as you can. 

Spirit Of Monochrome

The first time I saw Alastair Sim's performance as Scrooge was in a lamentable 'colorized' version of the movie. I next saw it in a sharp, restored monochrome edition. The second viewing was all the better for restoration to its original format.

I mention this only because I am a bit of a fan of black and white film stock. Amongst the many things I tell myself I am going to get around to doing, is to buy a decent camera and use it to take atmpospheric black and white pictures. Of course I will probably never get around to this but a man can/should dream. 

All of which brings me to four excellent monchrome films I have watched recently. I may be an old romantic but I think each of them is better for being shot in monochrome. I will turn first to David Lean's 1946 adaptation of Great Expectations - this is a top grade movie, previously reviewed here and I confirm my past prejudice to give it 85/100.

Lean was at it again in 1953 with the screen rendition of Hobson's Choice. Atmospheric monochrome magic. The quietly brilliant John Mills is once again the youthful hero. As for Hobson himself (a part for which I would break my unlamented stage retirement) this role falls into the hyper-capable hands of Charles Laughton. 86/100. 

Another reliably excellent actor is Henry Fonda and he has the conscience-stricken lead in 1957's Twelve Angry Men. This is a claustrophobic masterpiece that speaks gradually louder as to the importance of the rule of law. In an age where the President of the United States clearly has no conception of the rule of law, this is a film that cries out to be re-watched. Innocent and not-gulity are not the same thing. 88/100. 

I have talked of reliable imprimaturs - Lean, Laughton, Fonda. Today's last film comes courtesy of another such, or more accurately another two such - Powell and Pressburger. The Small Back Room. Although not nearly in the class of their gloriously colourful classics, A Matter of Life and Death, and Colonel Blimp, The Small Back Room is a taut monochrome dissection of trauma and courage. 79/100.

Monochrome. all that glisters is not gold.   

The Bankruptcy Of A Genius

The genius of whom I speak is Jacques Tati and his financial catastrophe was brought about by the financial demands of his magnificent comedic confection, Playtime.

This film invites you to laugh at the noble silliness of Tati's M. Hulot as he winds in and out of the widescreen modernity of Paris. The dialogue is a glorious mishmash of English and French but the spoken word operates merely as a backing track. I will not spoil any of the recurring gags by describing them because if you get the chance to see this film, I fervently urge you to do so. In the end modernity cannot quell the very human ability to have a good time. In our scarred present, this is a bold tonic. 90/100.   

The Tolkien Franchise

If J.R.R. Tolkien is looking down on us, I wonder if he is rueful about the abundance of riches that have been showered on the hugely significant but lesser literary figure of J.K. Rowling. This (admittedly not very novel) thought occurred the other day as I watched the Japanese Anime stylings of Lord of the Rings: the War of the Rohirrim. 

I have ben immune to the Anime bug but I have to admit that this bit of cartoonery was perfectly passable fun. Nuance and violence nicely mixed, which seems to me to be a fair description of Tolkien's lore. 69/100.