12 Films At Christmas - 10

The Candidate (1972) - I remember watching this film on television with my father back in the 1970's and I recall in particular his assertion that this was a good example of America's laudable skill in washing its dirty linen in public.

This film prefigures Primary Colors and to a lesser degree The West Wing. As in both of those examples our protagonist is a Democrat  - as in Primary Colors, but decidedly not in The West Wing, the putative hero transpires to have feet of clay. Good stuff - and all of it written before Watergate had even started. 7.5/10

12 Films At Christmas - 8 & 9

An interesting comparison between the latest (third?) golden era of Disney animation and its first .

Frozen is the modern offering. Slick CGI animation, good characterisation and a plot that zips along. All in all then a good film but, if I must be critical (and I must) I found it mildly unengaging and somehow too clinical in its artwork. Could be an age thing. 7/10.

The product of an earlier vintage is Pinocchio and I think, after due deliberation (and a bit more just in case) that I have to deem this film brilliant. Beautifully hand-drawn, taut ( not a wasted frame) and nicely disturbing - what does happen to all those naughty boys who are not rescued from metamorphosis into donkeys? This and other early Disney set the parameters of what should be expected from animation, parameters which have still not been expanded despite the advent of CGI. 9/10.
 

12 Films At Christmas - 5, 6 & 7

I have been keeping my dear old Dad company for the last few days whilst Mater has been in hospital. We have watched three films together and here is my review of each.

In quick succession we on one evening, courtesy of ITV, watched Mission Impossible and Tomorrow Never Dies. The first of these features the ever watchable Tom Cruise and an almost total lack of comprehensible plot. Somehow the lack of plot doesn't matter as the film races from one entertaining improbability to another. You are rarely more than a few minutes away from an explosive piece of action, all under the expert direction of Brian De Palma. The final set-piece has a helicopter chasing a train down the Channel Tunnel. Fun. 6/10.

Tomorrow Never Dies is a not dissimilar piece of work but on an even more lavish scale with James Bond tongue-in-cheekery thrown in. It's not Skyfall or even Goldfinger but it's also a long way from being the worst Bond film. Piers Brosnan is a good Bond, the chase with the remotely controlled BMW is terrific and making the arch-villain a megalomaniac media baron is a neat twist. Also 6/10.

Our third cinematic venture was a very different kettle of fish but the best of the three. The Way Ahead dates from 1944, is directed by Carol Reed, co-authored by Eric Ambler and Peter Ustinov, and features more familiar British acting faces than you can shake a stick at. It would make an interesting companion piece for the much later and infinitely less optimistic Full Metal Jacket (see Overgraduate 17 December) since the latter's structure follows that of the former - raw military recruits being taken through training and then switching to their eventual deployment in battle. 7.5/10.

Advent 24

My apologies to anyone sad enough to have been waiting with bated breath for the concluding calendar entry. Due to a bizarre confluence of funerals, illness (of others) and botched amateur house-breaking (of which I will probably write at a later date) I was remote from internet access yesterday. Still, I'm pretty sure you will have guessed the unimaginative concluding cultural influence. Without apology I give you quite simply the greatest writer of them all - the Boy Shakespeare.

So much has been said about the Bard that his work can seem impenetrable. It categorically is not. If I was conducting a crash induction course I would start at the Globe preferably with a production of Macbeth - the plays were written to be watched live and performed raucously. I would move on to recommend Frank Kermode's Shakespeare's Language, a magisterially composed rescue from critical density of Shakespeare the dramatic poet. Next we would watch Julie Taymor's Titus followed by some WWE Wrestling as an illustration of modern context. And then I would realise that I was being presumptuous and pass the inductee into the hands of the peerless scholar Jonathan Bate, courtesy of his Soul of the Age - from which I now shamelessly quote.

Both 'not of an age' and 'Soul of the Age'. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in nineteenth-century New England, Shakespeare was 'inconceivably wise', possessed of a brain so uniquely vast that no one can penetrate it. But at the same time, he was the incarnation of 'a cause, a country and an age'. It is this double quality that makes Shakespeare, in Emerson's fine phrase, the representative poet.

Happy Christmas one and all, and may your God go with you.

 

Advent 23

Mindful as I am that it is terribly bad form to quote oneself, I nevertheless must refer you to my own entry on the estimable Victorian Web - a brief biography of Walter Bagehot. Readers of this blog and those who know me will already have been bored by me on the subject of this flawed Victorian genius but for anyone interested I refer you to Bagehot Biography

Tomorrow my ultimate cultural hero - about whom I have also unapologetically bored my acquaintances rigid.

Advent 22

Today we have the quite brilliant Clive James. Because his work is so accessible it is easy to overlook the enormity of his intellect. He is poet, lyricist, critic, commentator and novelist. It was dipping into his awesome Cultural Amnesia that gave me the idea for the calendar this year. Mine is a motley collection of twenty-four thumbnail sketches from the edges of reason. James' is an imperious array of one hundred plus cultural essays. Still imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. His essays and my calendar have only one common subject and that is Margaret Thatcher.

Clive James' best work? The lyrics he wrote for Pete Atkins' compositions in the 1970's - the more recent stuff is not quite as good. My absolute favourite lines,

I've got the only cure for life/ and the cure for life is joy/ I'm the crying man that everyone calls laughing boy.

 

 

Advent 21

Rain Steam and Speed

Ruskin judged Joseph Mallord William Turner one of the 'seven supreme colourists of the world.' The

Boy Roberts from his perch in the half grown tree of big ignorance thinks him the greatest painter ever. So two pictures today - one of the man by the man and the other of a train by the man. Don't take my word for it, go to the National Gallery and see the original - it's free. That's why I pay my taxes.