The road goes ever on and on ...

A very holiday thing to do - though for the past few years one we've kept till the day the schools went back - is to make the trip to Glasgow to see a movie in a big cinema with huge screens and wrap-around sound and comfy seats. Yesterday we saw The Hobbit, not necessarily because I thought it would be hugely gripping - after all, I think I first read the book in 1968 - but because I couldn't ignore the fact that the sounds and visuals would be stunning.

And stunning they were. There were some amazing interiors - the dwarves' kingdom, the huge lair of the trolls - but what I loved most was the sweep of the New Zealand landscape. And of course there are some amazing actors in this film, and there was the distraction of identifying who lay behind the beards and noses of the dwarves: sometimes it was only the voice that gave the clue. Richard Armitage's name (or Lucas North, if you like) only came to us later; James Nesbitt and Ken Stott were vocally unmistakable. Martin Freeman (Dr Watson)  makes a very convincing Bilbo while Sylvester McCoy, FP of Dunoon Grammar School, is a batty addition to a trio of wizards (Iain McKellen and Christopher Lee, natch, are the others). I never clocked Barry Humphries; if you haven't seen the film yet, see if you do.

And the film itself? Well, there's too much of it. That's it, really - the book can be read from cover to cover in a matter of hours, and yet it is given the same three-film treatment that the massive Lord of the Rings had and needed. (It took me an eight-day illness to read that way back in my youth). So there were moments when I found myself thinking "get on with it", and there were, as Mr B observed, too many creatures rushing about and too many bangs and thumps: both are thrilling in small helpings but tedious when they recur every time someone stops talking. (My father used to relate how he fell asleep while a spectator of the Battle of Alamein, in his signals truck). I realise that three films make far more money than one, and when you've hauled all these actors to NZ and set everything up there's a temptation to get more out of them - apparently action scenes from the desert war movie The Desert Fox  reappeared in The Desert Rats a couple of years later - but it makes for a thinning of the narrative, a slowing down of pace that has to be compensated for. So we have racing wolves (scary teeth), racing rabbits (scary ride for Radagast) and hordes upon hordes of racing Trolls.

The opening of the film makes a neat - but over-long - reference to the first part of Lord of the Rings, and the music provides a subliminal linkage, landing me with an earworm that lasted the rest of the day. I knew I had been sucked into Middle Earth again when I saw the departing audience as trolls flooding down dark stairways, and found myself looking behind me in the street outside when an unexpected noise seemed suddenly threatening. But it's a lazy sort of enjoyment, the sort of enjoyment I sought when I re-read Lord of the Rings over the years as an antidote to stress instead of tackling a new book (I must have been incredibly stressed - I think I've read it seven times). I didn't see it in 3D, and I'm glad - wearing two pairs of specs for so long would have been incredibly tiring, and would also have brought on one of my heads...

Don't be put off, however, if you enjoyed the other trilogy. But do treat yourself to a good meal after the movie rather than before. You'll stay awake better, and you'll be pleasantly peckish.

Unless you go for the popcorn ...


I'm writing this on Tolkien's birthday, by the way.

Cathartic Iron Lady

It is a tradition - or has been since work no longer interfered - to visit Glasgow on Mr B's birthday, meet rellies, take in a movie (fun that, to go to the cinema in the late morning with about 10 other people) and enjoy a late lunch somewhere nice (tapas, this year, and very enjoyable). Yesterday we went to see The Iron Lady. There were reasons for doubting the wisdom of choosing this over, say, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - I'd read negative reactions from people I know, as well as glowing reviews from journalists I trust; I tend to favour the big action movie for the proper cinema with the super sound system and be content with more domestic action on the small screen; I loathed Thatcher and all that she stood for when she was in power. But the time was good for our day - time for coffee before and lunch afterwards so that we didn't fall asleep like the old fogies we become - and the consensus obvious, so Mr B spent a chunk of his birthday with Margaret Thatcher.

I was bowled over. It's a magnificent piece of acting on the part of Meryl Streep, for a start. Jim Broadbent was fascinating as Dennis - and the scenes of the young Margaret and Dennis fed convincingly into the couple we felt we knew at the time, and made the partnership credible. Yes, it brought back the rage and the frustration and the demonstrations I took part in; the sinking feeling after her third election victory and the sense of alienation from the British electoral process. But it brought it back in such a way that I knew it was over - history for Thatcher, history for me. What is not over is what happens to people as they grow old, and I was convinced by that too. I've read fictional accounts of dementia  and felt somehow cheered, and I know that there are wonderful moments of hilarity in the life of a friend who now suffers from dementia, but this film showed another side. Along side the chuckle-producing moments with the recurring visions of the deceased Dennis, there were the moments of despair, exhaustion, bewilderment - and the all-too-obvious physical effort of being ...  old.

I don't see me struggling into smart frocks and pearls in my eighties - don't do it now, for heaven's sake - but I was made to think about the illusions we create, the armour we put on, the show of strength that becomes pathetic as we diminish. It was this that stayed with me and had me reaching for the wine-glass over lunch, and this that makes me wonder if our reactions to the film are coloured by our stage in life.

The film has its entertaining moments, but it is not mere entertainment. For me, it was as striking as any tragedy, complete with fatal flaw and the fall from a great height. And like a good tragedy, it achieves catharsis.

Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

I've just been watching the film of John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. I haven't read the book, and I'm interested to read a review tonight which reminds me that it is "a holocaust book for children." I don't think I for one moment thought of the film as anything but adult, despite the fact that the events are seen through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy. Perhaps viewing his world through the lens of a camera meant that I was free to interpret in my own way, find my own knowledge flooding in with the images - like that of the smoke from the death camp rising foully over the trees - in such a way as to encapsulate the child's innocence and look over and around it.

I found it very powerful, this film. I'm fascinated by the apparently normal family lives of Nazis immersed in the horrors of the Final Solution, by the glimpses of a humanity suppressed - perhaps permanently - by the demands of the job of extermination. The film was full of foreboding, from the moment when the family of the Kommandant arrives at their new house in the country, a gloomy, echoing building of small windows - one of which, in the boy's bedroom, commands a distant view of what he thinks is a farm - right through to the end which I couldn't help wishing would not be so. The gradual realisation by the boy's mother as to what exactly was happening in the camp, the growing tensions within the family as the 12 year old daughter became Nazified - these, I felt, were explored in the film at an adult level, being conveyed less in words than in expressions, gestures, the glance of an eye that was quickly averted.

The tension of the last fifteen minutes of the film, and the understated conclusion, left me wrung out and sad to an extent I had not expected - more, even, than the much bigger sweep of Schindler's List. I'm glad I recorded it.

Voyage into 3D

I've come over all industrious in the last couple of days - started work on a new blog to make use of fascinating family archive material from World War 2 - but before I lose sight of it, I must record our recent outing to the movies. This is something we tend to do on average once a year - a post-Christmas treat involving the empty cinema (everyone else being back at work/school), a morning screening and a large and leisurely lunch afterwards. Because I believe that a big screen and superb sound effects merit a big movie and special features that wouldn't be the same on the telly, we didn't see the apparently excellent The King's Speech - we shall, but probably on DVD - but went to a 3D screening of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader - the third in the Narnia films.

Of the books, this was perhaps one I didn't particularly enjoy, but boy, did it make a good movie! There we sat, in our shades (modern 3D involves not red and green lenses, but things that look like pale sunglasses), captivated by the effects as Eustace the dragon swept at us out of the screen and the green fog (see picture) threatened to engulf us all. The moral transformation of said Eustace - which might well have seemed nauseating - was wonderfully acted, and Aslan (Liam Neeson) as ever sent shivers up the spine. It was a great outing - and the threatened sick-making effect of the 3D wasn't in evidence, despite the problem of getting the specs to balance comfortably over the ones already on my nose.

Magic, in fact.

Silly Steps

Well, that was silly. Yet another "creative" version of Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps. Not even the presence of the lovely Rupert Penry-Jones could save it from idiocy as fleetingly familiar moments morphed into something quite different and the woman who has been an obligatory part of the action since the Robert Donat movie assumed more roles than a shape-shifter.

I recall a fourteen-year-old Foundation pupil who had sat silent as I read the book with his class - actually, I read it to the class as they sat with the books in front of them - telling me: "Miss, that was the best book I ever read!" And yet each adaptation I've seen takes snippets of the original and stitches them together into a barely comprehensible and totally uninvolving whole. I dream of Buchan's story, complete with the Bald Archeologist and the Spectacled Roadman and the Literary Innkeeper, presented as a serial over ten weeks, each chapter having an episode to itself and ending on a cliffhanger, with the wonderfully tense drama of the London meeting followed by the incongruous confrontation in the seaside villa forming the final two episodes. No women, no love interest, no submarines. Just a rattling good yarn.

I wouldn't even allow them to take out some of the worst linguistic excesses in the opening two chapters in the interests of political correctness - think Merchant of Venice and leave it all. It'd work. But I bet it'll just have to stay in my head - and Buchan's book.

The Passion - retrospectively

Last night saw the final episode of the BBC production "The Passion". The above photo comes from Friday's episode and shows Mary at the foot of the Cross, and I've chosen it because the focus on Mary provided such a powerful means of engagement with what was happening. You can see much more about the film, and leave your own comments, here.

The drama succeeded on many levels, for my money, not the least because it managed to avoid crassness. It left questions unanswered and raised more, and provided thoughtful insights into the background pressures of the time. I'd not seen Joseph Mawle in other parts, which I felt was a good thing, but I realised that James Nesbitt was convincing me in the part of Pilate even though his face and voice were so familiar. Main impressions? The incredible dusty confusion of the Passover-crowded Jerusalem, the lack of ceremony with which some of the key moments were played out, the casual brutality of the crucifixion, the matter-of-fact attitude of the soldiers, the eyes of Mawle as he looked at the disciples and the gasping agony he brought to Jesus' death. And Mary, his mother, played by Penelope Wilton, in the agony of watching her "beautiful son" so tortured - a clever move, to spend such a long focus on her face at the foot of the cross, or as she ran gasping over the dusty hillside to confront the soldiers with her grief.

The resurrection appearances of Jesus were played by two different actors - one near the tomb, one on the road to Emmaus - who shared only a slight resemblance to Mawle. The dream-like reality was convincing, I felt, though I was glad to see the recognisable Jesus among his disciples at the end. What did this suggest? Was it saying that they became convinced by faith? or longing? or was it simply a way to convey the strangeness of the original story - that at first Jesus was not recognised by those who had known him best?

I'd like to watch it again - but not now. Too immediate, too real. But cheers for the Beeb. It's quite something to get people actually interested in the first Easter these days, and to refuse to be hidebound by convention. Definitely the best Passion film since Pasolini's "Gospel according to St Matthew" - and that's a gap of over 40 years. A lifetime, in fact.

3:10 to a malt loaf?

A couple of weeks ago I had an amusing trawl through some childhood memories over a discussion of the current film 3:10 to Yuma. 50 years ago - oh, Lord - 50 years ago I was taken by my parents to see the original movie with Glenn Ford and Van Heflin, and recalling this experience I wondered at the description of the new Russell Crowe version as a taut thriller. I had the memory that Glenn Ford spent the entire time handcuffed to a bed and that I spent the entire time wishing something would happen. At that age, like Polonius, I needed a jig or a tale of bawdry or I slept - or at least some action, and that was strangely lacking. Maybe I was too young to appreciate the tension, and I certainly felt no sympathy for the miserable-looking Van Heflin.

These recollections led the discussion on to another childhood memory: Youma bread. There was a brief moment of doubt about the spelling, but it's not the same as the filmic town and Googling the correct spelling brought up a discussion about this wee malt loaf here, if you're interested - that's where I found this picture. In its later incarnations it came wrapped in waxed paper - white, green, red, touch of yellow? - and was always very sticky and very dense. It tended to survive well in a rucksack or schoolbag, and cried out for some butter. Talking about it brought back the taste, the smell, the texture - and yet I cannot think how long it is since I ate any. It doesn't exist any more, and I doubt I'd buy it if it did, but it was one of the tastes of childhood.