Yesterday I Have Mostly Been:

Running slowly - before breakfast and ruing my stiff knee, the latest manifestation of my old age. To add to the knee, it's bloody hilly here at Plas Piggy.

Visiting Caernarfon - the castle may be a symbol of oppression but you have to say it's a rather magnificent symbol. Nice pint in the bar of The Black Boy and a bowl of chips shared with the Groupie.

Listening to - Gil Scott-Heron, Pieces of a Man. Nice.

Reading - The Mabinogion. In English translation, sorry about that.

Film's Most Charismatic Actor?

I refer to Marlon Brando and I turn for evidence not to his famous turn in The Godfather (one of my favourite movies but one where Brando goes a tad over the top) but to two monochromatic performances in 1953 and 1954 respectively. The second of these even has learned nominations as the greatest cinematic performance of all time.

Julius Caesar was the first Shakespeare I ever studied seriously (O Level) and it has a chapter to itself in my doctoral thesis. The play is not, I have decided the 'broken-backed thing' derided by some critics. Yes Caesar gets bumped-off barely halfway through the text, but the play fair rattles along and gives us, particularly in Brutus and Antony, plenty of politico-drama to get our teeth into. The 1953 film is loyal to the text and James Mason makes a persuasively priggish Brutus. I am never quite sure about John Gielgud (this, I accept is probably my problem) but he enunciates Cassius's lines beautifully. It is, however, Brando who muscles his way to the foreferont as Antony. A highly resepctable adaptation. 70/100. 

Brando's work in On the Waterfront is on an altogether higher plane. This is a magnificent film, ornamented with a slew of notable method-acting tours-de-force - take your pick from Rod Steiger, Karl Malden or Lee J. Cobb, but you will eventually be brought back to Brando as Terry Molloy. It is a gift of a part but what Brando does with it is breath-taking. The movie lasts barely more than ninety minutes but satisfies on every level. 93/100.

Tweve Monkeys And A Panda Crossing A Bridge

I bet you were expecting a convoluted joke after that heading, but no I'm afraid it's another of my opinionated blogs on films, all of them good but not of the top notch.

I really enjoyed Kung Fu Panda (I think I watched it one Christmas although I don't seem to have reviewed it on here) but it is the sequel Kung Fu Panda 2 that is now under the OG microscope. As with almost all modern CGI, the animation is breathtaking whilst lacking the romance of the early hand-drawn cartoons - I still regard Snow White as arrrestingly brilliant and somehow satisfying, perhaps a recognition of the intense labour involved in its production. Well KFP2 lacks that appeal but it is vibrant and funny. 65/100.  

And now for something completely different. Twelve Monkeys is a Terry Gilliam film, craftily directed and gripping as its plot veers about in the protagonist's time travel. That the protagonist is played by Bruce Willis is a help - always watchable and particularly well-suited to a role that has him dripping with sweat and lurching from one beating to another. Good but not great. 68/100.

Let's take it to the bridge. The Bridge on the River Kwai to be exact. I had somehow managed to avoid sitting through the entirety of this film until last week. I had caught multiple snatches of it over the years (so much so that I think I had taken in the whole thing in a cut and paste manner). The wait was worth it. This is a compelling and beautifully realised piece of cinema. However when you come to it armed with the knowledge that it is directed by David Lean and that Lean was responsible for the truly great Lawrence of Arabia, there is a risk of mild disappointment. So I have no hesitation in calling it a very fine film but not quite a very great one. 79/100.     

21st Century Gothic

I take you all the way back to 19 January 2013 when I praised to the hilt Pan's Labyrinth as part of my advent listing of great films. I have just watched it again this afternoon and can confirm that this is cinema at its most enthralling. Guillermo del Toro has never done anything better (in itself quite a recommendation) and Sergi Lopez's performance as the evil Captain Vidal is a terrifying treat. I won't let you know the plot since that would spoil the fun but I really do urge you to track down this film. If you can find it showing in a cinema, please let me know. I first saw it at Vue in Birmingham in a near empty theatre at the time of its first release. 95/100.

The Trap Of Certainty

I know, I know, You've long since got the message that I can't stand Donad Trump. I think he's vile and, in all but unimportant matters, pig ignorant. But his advent on the political scene (and to a lesser extent the scar on British politics that is the dissembling Boris Johnson) has taught me an important lesson - life is not merely about policy. It is also about decency. You should not want to be governed by someone you wouldn't want to share a dinnner table with. Sorry Donald, sorry Boris, you're not getting invited. 

And what has got me trundling down this philosophical by-way? It was a combination of watching the Tory leadership contenders making their respective pitches to the party conference and something I read. Of the contenders I will only say this - I don't like the cut of Robert Jenrick's jib. As for that thing that I read, it is from Pope Leo XIII in 1878. In my less moderate days I might have seized on this as a clinching argument. Now I merely offer it up as a stimulating contributor to life's puzzles. The subject His Holiness considers is that of socialism/communism:

Misled by greed for the goods of this world which is the source of all evil, and the desire for which has caused many to err in the faith, they [socialists] attack the right to property sanctioned by the natural law, and while they pretend to have at heart the needs of all men and claim to satisfy all their desires, they make a criminal attempt to seize all individual possessions whether acquired by legitimate inheritance, intellectual or manual work, or by economy, and to make them common property.

Makes you think, well does me anyway.

 

Carry On Richard Curtis

I have written before about feeling vaguely exploited when enjoying Curtis's Love Actually, a film full of strong performances that can mask its mildly dodgy sexual politics. In similar vein The Groupie and I enjoyed re-watching The Boat That Rocked the other day. Bill Nighy delivers his usual scene-stealing performance as, well, Bill Nighy. The lamented Philip Seymour Hoffman is excellent. So is Rhys Ifans. I could go on. Like the  more acclaimed parts of the Curtis oeuvre (Four Weddings and a Funeral; Notting Hill) Boat is at its strongest as an ensemble piece. The critics didn't like it and took issue with its perceived misogyny. I take their point on the misogyny although the Groupie (who should be a poster girl for feminism) was not offended. What I find hard to understand is that critics failed to find it funny. It is. And what a soundtrack!

As I pondered whether I should be feeling guilty at the pleasure I took in this cinematic confection, it came to me that Curtis films are the bigger budget, more refined successors to that peculiarly British filmic form, the Carry On film. Which leaves me to make the important point that if you can't laugh at Carry On Cleo and Carry On Up the Khyber, then there's a defect in your sense of humour. Or possibly in mine - take your pick. Conceivably we could both be right.

The Boat That Rocked. 68/100.   

Tommy

I try to keep at least one non-fiction book going at any one time, alongside a couple of fictions. In this, as in so much else, I find myself inadequately mimicking the learning habits of my late father. I have just finished Richard Holmes's Tommy: the British Soldier on the Western Front 1914-1918. I have just noticed that Dad had written a Christmas message inside the cover when he and Mum gave it to me. How he would have loved Helen's wedding last weekend.

I commend Tommy to you. It is compendious, seven-hundred plus pages, but never tedious. It is impossible to read of WW1 without wondering just how you might have responded if you had been called to arms. One-hundred-and-twenty-three of the Aston Old Edwardians who went to war would never return. To this day we play our rugby on the ground bought in their memory. My generation has been spared.

Holmes quotes C.E. Montague whose war memoir was tellingly titled Disenchantment, but the power of the quoted words is not in that disaffection but rather in that agnosticism that is a necessary shield for all but the most gifted/afflicted:

But the war had to be won: that was flat. It was like putting out houses on fire, or not letting children be killed; it did not even need to be proved; that we had got to win was now the one quite certain thing left in a world of shaken certainties.