OG/BFP has been silent for too long. Sorry about that, those few of you out there who might have noticed, and, I suppose, more pertinently the few of those who give a stuff.
Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been? I went down to London to visit the queen. Which is exactly, well nearly, what OG, the Groupie, and DN1 did. We queued for twelve hours to pay our respects to our late monarch. Cold logic fails to explain why I felt compelled to attend the lying in state, but (and I'm sorry if this disappoints some of you) it is something I needed to do. I had always promised myself that when Queen Elizabeth II passed, I would make my small gesture of gratitude for a job well done. Whether I will ever come to feel the same about Charles III is a question I cannot yet answer. I hope so. A good start will be the ostracising from the working family of Prince Andrew and the freezing out of Harry and his knowing duchess. I bow to no man in my gratitude for their armed service but there are stupidities that cannot be endured.
To happier themes. I, for the first time in a decade, am free from my self-imposed guilt at not getting on with my thesis. It may be a piece of crap but it is my piece of crap and it is finished and submitted. Examination/humiliation by viva voce awaits. We shall speak of this no more - not sure that's a promise I am up to keeping.
Film as art. We watched Kenneth Branagh's
Belfast last weekend. A tender and beautiful piece of cinema, particularly resonant for anyone privileged to have been welcomed into the Irish diaspora. And what a performance from the juvenile lead, Jude Hill. In racing parlance, I hope he trains on. Even if he does, one has to doubt that he will ever be in anything as good again. 91/100. That good.
Film as art. When I was young and impressionable I thought John Steinbeck a great writer. Modernist snobbery made that an unfashionable view. I hold to it. I read
The Grapes of Wrath almost at one sitting on a cross-channel ferry. Until this week I had never viewed John Ford's movie adaptation. It is (not my words but they are apt) a poem of a film. It moves away from Steinbeck's bitter/sweet/harrowing ending (still burned on my memory) in favour of a mildly more optimistic tone, but it is, like its source novel, a thing of artistic majesty. 97/100. That good.
It is a pretty good week when the third best film you see in those seven days is another Ford masterpiece,
The Searchers. I treated myself to another screening of this film last night (I am on one of my flying visits to Plas Piggy to turn on the heating). It is not as consistently brilliant as
The Grapes of Wrath but that is to compare it to a near-perfect artefact. No,
The Searchers is an important piece of americana, one that faces up to the racist difficulty at the heart of Manifest Destiny. And in John Wayne's portrayal of Ethan Edwards, we have one of the most undererated performances in cinema history. 91/100. That good.
Not quite so good but perfectly watchable was this afternoon's choice - the John Huston 1956 adaptation of Melville's unfilmable
Moby Dick. Gregory Peck seems an odd choice to play the demented Ahab but the film has its strengths. It is a tale of toxic masculinity and the obsessions it can spawn. Quite fittingly there is not a word spoken in the film by a woman. Better to read the book but nevertheless 69/100.
So that's it. The boy is back.
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