A Brief Illustrated Treatise On Morality

AMORAL: lacking a moral sense

IMMORAL: a person or behaviour that consciously goes against accepted morals.

Compare And Contrast

I am put in mind of the way examination questions used to be framed - compare contrast the treatments of villainy in George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting. 

Both of these pictures were box-office successes, garnered awards, and the second, The Sting, reunited the two stars of the first with director George Roy Hill. The four year wait was worth it. Those stars, Paul Newman and Robert Redford, are, to this hetero eye, two of the best-looking men ever to have graced the screen. But beyond that quality (in fact well ahead of it) each is confident enough in his own presence not to go in search of scenes to steal - instead they play off each other beautifully.

Why do I mention villainy in my pretended exam question? Because beneath the wit and charm (and there is a lot of both) both characters in both films are unreconstituted crooks. The attractiveness of criminals is hardly a novel feature but rarely can it have been put in the hands of such reliable charm. You like Butch and Sundance; you pull for the grifters in The Sting. This ought (wearing a moralist's hat) to be a problem. that it is not, is commentary on the skill of the film-making and (getting all philosophical) on human nature. 

As I review my rabbiting on, I realise that I have not distinguished the treatments of villainy in the two films. And here's the clever answer - there is no difference when push comes to shove and moral relativism is a dangerous game to play, particularly for someone who made his living as a lawyer. So I'll shut up and merely recommend both movies - I can't split them - 76/100 each.  

Differentiating The Great From The Merely Good

Not a peep from me about Trump pardoning violent criminals. Res ipsa loquitur.

So, enough with the Latin and back to my pre-occupation with films. The marks I award to films are guided by the marking of exam scripts and essays. That is to say that anything seventy or above indicates a first, sixty an upper second, fifty a lower second, and downwards to odium. And please don't think that I have any bias against the good old honourable gentleman's 2:2 - we have rather made a speciality of these in our family. The art (and I'm sticking to this) is in setting out to get a lower second and effortlessly achieving it. This I managed from my accustomed position in the bar of The Zetland public house in South Kensington. Golden days.

This musing on the rating of movies has been prompted by the three films I consider today, in ascending order of merit. The first is Heaven Can Wait, which The Groupie and I saw when we were courting strong. It is a slick piece of film-making and the leads, Warren Beatty (who co-directed) and Julie Christie are attractive and strong. Audiences liked it, quite possibly a pleasant distraction from the cares of the age (1978). The Groupie has the best descrition of it - 'a nice Sunday afternoon film'. 67/100.  

I have written before about the merit of the films of Christopher Nolan. Today's subject is, however, from just below his top drawer. As with any Nolan picture, the visuals are stunning but Interstellar tips into sentimentality at its end and thereby does itself down. Still a first-class offering and, as science fiction goes, a massive step up from the pretentious piffle that is 2001. And, as an aside, the sentient computers in Interstellar are a comforting alternative to the predations of HAL in 2001. 72/100. First class but not quite a great film.

Which leaves the best to last. Shane is George Stevens' 1953 masterpiece western. As with many of the best of this genre (think The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), Shane ponders on its own obsolescence. The enigmatic hero wanders out of the frame at the conclusion, a man who is out of his time. The Wyoming mountains leer over much of the action. All is superbly done. Alan Ladd was never better and Jack Palance barely says a word but manages to ooze menace. Also notable and important is one of the great juvenile performances (as young Joey) from Brandon deWilde. A great film. 87/100. 

 

Am I Getting Old And Reactionary?

Of course I am. Indeed my friends will tell you that I used to be young and reactionary. No matter, I'm still going to go off on one about the state of three of my favourite sports, most particularly the way that they seem to think they can attract a 'new audience'.

These three sporting passions of mine may be on their way out, certainly in the satisfying manifestations that have enraptured me for most of my life. Let's start with cricket, the state of which I have lamented many times before. I watch the tedious Big Bash from Australia. The commentary is odious. Shouting does not make something more notable. This noise is rubbish.

Next, the sport nearest to my heart, rugby union football. The RFU thinks it advisable to pay its Chief Executive Officer over a million pounds per annum as he signs-off on a year in which the organistaion culled a load of staff and in which the grass-roots game is dying on its feet. The game struggles to make viable a top league which has only ten solvent teams. It denies itself, when fielding a team to represent our country, the services of anyone who has the audacity to ply his trade outside England. This too is rubbish.

And the game I play (very badly) these days - golf. I watched the utter drivel of the TGL indoor game that is being used to line the pockets of Woods and McIlroy. Professional golfers hitting a ball into a screen linked to a computer that traces where the ball would have gone. All the time the commentators roar at us and attempt the impossible of making golfers sound interesting. Good golf is plenty interesting, its practitioners have no need to be. This too is rubbish. 

Test match cricket. Well-coached top-level rugby. Proper golf played under pressure of terrain and climate. Mark my words, we will miss these when they have gone.       

Novella No. 1:4

There is a long path from his school to the gate on Home Lane. The path gets shorter with age. His age. Ice cream vans cram there parasitically. His first intimations of love and death live here. He cannot remember her name, much less her face, but his nine-year-old self held her hand as they negotiated the then-long path. He felt that tender fibrillation and knew he liked it.

He has twice been close to death. He once fell asleep at the wheel on the M5. He shudders that memory away. The car rolled. He walked away. The ice cream vans were the cause of the earlier, more tactable passing of the shadow. A dizzying game of tig. Flattered to be included in the game, the fat little boy evades over-keenly and runs behind the last van. Stop me and buy one. A lorry bears down on him, horn blaring. He can still see the driver's terrified face - it is that close. He is not hit. Nor is he tigged. Good at games.  

A god who looks over drunks? Could he/she/it tell even then that the fat little boy would become an unfat drunk. An early shift? Thank God.

On that long path, one of the cool boys (he was in the football team) shows him a pornographic magazine purloined from an older brother. It makes no sense, inspires no curiosity. Sex should be a practical matter, not theoretical. It is just like falling through a hedge - anyone can do it. The art is doing it well. Sex, that is.

In Defence Of The Meta-Text: Two British Examples

You have to give it to the BBC, its iPlayer streaming service is a treasure trove. I have just finished watching two Le Carre adaptations with quiet enjoyment: Smiley's People (better as television than as a novel); and A Perfect Spy (a notably good novel and a less satisfactory, though stil meritorious, television series). But that is not what I want to talk about. My main concern today is two films that can be found on iPlayer.

You won't (or at least shouldn't) need telling that the Beatles are brilliant. I use the present tense because their music remains as fresh as the proverbial daisy. I'm listening to it now. Their first venture into film, A Hard Day's Night (1964), is a stylish, bordering on brilliant, film about a band called the Beatles, played by (and credited as playing - that point is important - pay attention at the back) John, Paul, George and Ringo. The meta-text - it's about their trials and tribulations on their way to making a television show. It is consistently good-natured and Richard Lester's direction is superb. A real treat and, oh, that music. 75/100. 

An even more self-aware piece of meta-text is presented by A Cock and Bull Story. This is a film about the making of a film of a famously unfilmable metatextual novel, Sterne's Tristram Shandy. If this was done with anything other than a very deft touch, it would be in danger of disappearing up ts own fundament. It doesn't. It is very, very clever without being alienating. There is a great line (delivered by the excellent Steve Coogan) about Shandy being a postmodern novel written two hundred years before there was any modernism to be post of. Also 75/100. 

 

Nature Abhors A Vacuum

Great minds have debated this Greek nostrum, but don't worry I'm not going to suggest that I am qualified to add to the clamour. No, it just comes to mind when I try to summon up some optimism for the year that lies ahead of us and I see the moral and intellectual vacuums that so disfigure our public life.

Let's get Keir Starmer out of the way. I really don't care for this two-faced Mr Pasty but, bloody hell, he's a mile more convincing than Kemi Badenoch. Mind you what's really irking me about Starmer are not his policies (what policies?) but his predilection for having his photo taken jacketless and his sleeves rolled up. Here I am probably miles removed from the zetigeist but I like my statesmen to appear statesmanlike, not like some mealy-mouthed middle-manager.  

But let us talk of the far greater problem - the moral vacuum that emanates from America and threatens to pull us all into its nothingness. And I'm not (for today at least) concerned with that arch-shit Trump or his grifting British minion Farage. No, Elon Musk. Being the richest man in the world does not disqualify him from having opinions but the vile trash-talking he favours (much of it currently aimed, quite improperly, against Starmer) is an abuse of status. As Spiderman so often reminds us, with great power comes great responsibility. The Overgraduate does not, and never will, own a Tesla.

Twelve Films At Christmas - 12 & 13

Yes, yes, alright, I do know that thrteen is a number greater than twelve. However I have watched a couple more films as the holiday eked out its last few days and both are so good that they deserve some analysis. Ignore my heading and think 'A Baker's Dozen At Christmas'. 

Back in 2012 the delightful movie Sideways made its way into that year's Christmas dozen. It was directed by Alexander Payne and starred Paul Giamatti. That same director/actor combination is now seen to brilliant effect in The Holdovers. I strongly urge you to watch this film. It deserves to become a Christmas classic but will be superb whenever you consume it. Warm and funny without being saccharine this is one of the best films I have seen this year. 84/100. I will not say any more.

From the hinterland of teen stardom, Ron Howard has long since shaken off the dust of being Richie Cunningham in Happy Days, and has become one of Hollywood's most reliable directors. You imagine he would have thrived under the old studio system, churning out routinely engaging pictures. If you have doubts, watch Parenthood (1989) in which he draws out fine performances from his ensemble cast. Most notably he is well served (and they by him) by the juvenile actors. It is all about the trials of parenting and of being parented. It will make you smile. 79/100.