Men of the City

A busy month has meant that we've built up a backlog of recorded TV, so we've only just watched a Storyville documentary by Marc Isaacs, called Men of the City. I've always really enjoyed documentaries which sit back, observe and mostly let people speak for themselves, rather than asking questions, and Men of the City did just that. It's a real gem of a film.

Very simply, the film follows the lives of four men who work in the City of London: a hedge fund manager; a street sweeper; a man who holds a sign pointing to the nearest Subway sandwich shop; and a man who collects money on behalf of City clients. It's an incredibly beautiful, humane film. The photography is stunning (a downpour in London has never looked so beautiful), the music (by Michel Duvoisin) is lovely, but it's the portrait of the men which really holds your attention.

When you think of bankers and City money men and the recession, it's very easy to think "Bankers? Greedy, money-grabbing, selfish...blighters the lot of them." But of course, that's utterly untrue — every person is unique, and while it's easy to hate a faceless group of people, it's impossible to do so when you encounter people as individuals.

The hedge fund manager seemed to be looking at the world through a grey blanket of exhaustion, tinted with vivid washes of stress as his screens of figures changed from green to flashing red. His face showed a completely different kind of intensity as he printed out and mounted huge prints of his children (he had separated from their mother), smoothing the prints lovingly into an album. The money collector (I never did quite work out what his job involved) seemed to be a constant bundle of tension, and I feared for his poor heart. He wasn't rich, and yet his life had been one long round of worry about meeting the demands of his job and keeping a roof over his and his wife's head. The only time when I saw the stress ease from his face was when he was talking about motorbikes and the joy of just getting on the bike and going for a ride — then he looked free at last.

The Subway sign holder was an exhausted Bangladeshi man, holding the sign for minimum wage 10 hours a day on freezing streets, then working in a restaurant in the evening, and trying to look after his teenaged daughter alone in the time between. When she went into hospital and he had to visit her, he lost the sign holding job, and had to trail around restaurants, literally begging for a job. That was heart-breaking.

In many ways, the street sweeper seemed the most serene and happy, even though he wanted to get out of the city. He was an avid reader of New Age philosophies, trying to make sense of his life. But he had some startlingly poetic opinions about his job. Most people, he said, think of street sweepers as losers, but he saw it as serving his community. And if you can't make any job — even street sweeping — into a "graceful act", as he put it, then how can you act gracefully towards yourself or others? That really struck me. He's right, I think. It's not what you do, but how you do it that matters. It wasn't clear whether he actively chose his profession, or whether it was a last resort, but he seemed to me to be like a non-religious monk in some kind of gritty, open air monastery. He did his job as gracefully and mindfully as he could, and was aware and in touch with everything going on around him, in stark contrast to the others in the film, who seemed to have turned in on themselves, out of self-protection.

Most TV programmes and the newspapers deal in broad brush strokes and crude stereotypes, which is why it's so valuable to have programmes like this looking at individuals with a humane and non-judgmental eye.

A review of three things sharing a theme

I'm lagging behind a bit on reviewing some stuff I've come across recently, so I thought I might save a bit of time by doing a three part mini-review. When I was thinking about it, I realised that the film, book and album I'm about to review share a theme: death.

I expect I've lost all three of my readers now. But in these difficult times, a bit of morbid fascination cheers everyone up, right?

Falling Angels by Tracy Chevalier

The novel opens with the death of Queen Victoria, and follows two families — the Coleman and Waterhouse families — who happen to have adjacent family plots in a London cemetery. Sweeping social changes are about to replace the formality of the Victorian era (with its obsession with elaborate mourning rituals and rigid social class system), with something more informal and fluid in Edward's reign. The women's suffrage movement is slowly gaining momentum, to widespread disapproval from those who are still hanging on to the old, Victorian ways.

Each chapter relates events from the viewpoint of one of the characters: Mr. and Mrs. Coleman and their daughter Maude, or Mr. and Mrs. Waterhouse and their daughter Lavinia. Occasionally, we get a very different view from the household servants, or from the boy who digs graves in the cemetery. The story (revolving around the cemetery) is pretty gripping, and the characters are brilliantly realised. In particular, the way that you see the two girls (Maude and Lavinia) maturing throughout the novel is fascinating.

Far North directed by Asif Kapadia

If you like the landscapes of the Arctic (it was filmed in Svalbard), you'll probably like this film. The photography is absolutely stunning, which is as well, because the plot is minimal and the dialogue almost non-existent. Given the minimal plot, it's difficult to describe without giving anything away, but I'll try not to post any spoilers. The story centres on Saiva (played by the terrific Michelle Yeoh) who has been told by a Shaman that she will bring death on disaster to any who get close to her. In an attempt to avoid this fate, she exiles herself, rescuing a baby called Anja along the way. One day they come upon a dying man, Loki, and everything starts to fall apart.

The film has a kind of harsh, mythic quality, enhanced by the fact that you can't place the time or geographical location of the action easily. I don't think I'm spoiling anything if I say that it doesn't have a happy ending, and death and relentless fate are omnipresent. At the time, it felt like quite a slight film, but it has lodged itself stubbornly in my mind, and I keep thinking about and reinterpreting events in the film.

Better Times Will Come by Diana Jones

I first heard a few tracks from this album in a concert of American Roots music shown on TV, and hosted by Seasick Steve. I found her mellow, unornamented voice and the way she sang about heartbreaking things with a total lack of sentimentality utterly mesmerising. And she tells a story so well. The songs on this album aren't (quite) all about death, but they are mostly sad songs about hard lives and difficult choices.

There are many good tracks, but in my opinion, 'Henry Russell's Last Words' is the best. Henry Russell was a Scottish miner who died in a mining accident in West Virginia in 1927. He and more than 100 others were trapped in the coal mine, and — without any hope of rescue — slowly suffocated and died. As the air was running out, Henry wrote a note to his wife Mary with a piece of coal. Jones used this letter as the basis for the lyrics.

The quiet acceptance, sorrow and dignity of Henry's words shines through the simple melody. Unless you are made of stone, the repeated refrain of "Oh how I love you, Mary" will bring tears to your eyes. Every single time you listen to it...

1066

We finally got around to watching the Channel 4 historical drama 1066 a few days ago. I was never very keen on History in school and these historical dramas can be truly dreadful, but we really enjoyed it. They made the sensible decision to tell the story of the Battle of Hastings (and the lead up to it) from the perspective of the ordinary people of the village of Crowhurst. So we followed the 'weaponmen' as they were effectively conscripted to go and support King Harold, and protect the coast against the expected Norman attack.

I was obviously not paying attention in my History lessons, because I hadn't realised that the arrival of the Normans was preceeded by an attack by the Vikings (or víkingr¹) in the north. So some of Harold's men had to run 200 miles in four days to try to prevent the Viking advances. That lead to huge losses on both sides, but the Anglo-Saxons sort of won (in the restricted sense of 'win' in which they had more men alive at the end), only to hear that the Normans had landed, and they had to run 200 miles back to the south coast.

The drama was authentically bloody and realistic, capturing the fear and chaos of battle. I also liked the way that they interspersed the narration (by the superb Ian Holm) with quotations from Norse sagas and contemporary reports and writing. It also made me realise just how much Tolkien shamelessly nicked from Anglo-Saxon and Norse writing and mythology. 'Middle Earth' comes straight from the Saxons, as does 'orc' which was adapted from the Anglo-Saxon 'orc-nea' meaning demon or monster -- or in this dramatisation -- monstrous Norman foreigner.

The timing of the broadcast was a bit unfortunate, because racist nationalists always seem keen to invoke Anglo-Saxons as the 'true English' and not, for example, Celts, Romans, Normans, Vikings, Africans or any of the many and varied people who have made England and Britain what it is today. 'We' are no more Anglo-Saxon than we are any other race in most parts of the country. But the film makers did at least try hard to show that there were (of course) good and bad people on both sides, even though our sympathies were with the Anglo-Saxons. For example, there was a rather noble Norman character (Baron de Coutances) from Brittany who was forced into fighting for William by the kidnapping of his family, and tried to stop the worst atrocities perpetrated by his side. One of the Viking attack party also ended up fighting on the side of the Anglo-Saxons.

Once again, I'm rather late in mentioning this since it was broadcast in May, but it is coming out on DVD soon, and I'd recommend it to anyone who snored their way through the Battle of Hastings at school.

¹ For some reason, I see that written in blue with the 'r' in pink. Can't think why... ↑

Mike Leigh

We watched the film director Mike Leigh get interviewed by Mark Lawson a few weeks ago, and it was a fascinating insight into his working methods. I've seen quite a few Mike Leigh films, the most recent of which was Happy-Go-Lucky, and I always admire the way he gets such great performances from actors. His modus operandi is famously quirky and intensive. He starts off with a rough idea of the plot and then gathers together the cast. He works very intensively with small groups of cast members, and together they construct the characters. They spend long periods discussing in great detail tiny aspects of that character's life, their likes and dislikes, and what has got them to the present moment. At the end of this, each actor knows their character intimately, and can react to situations confidently in character as they start to improvise scenes.

One very important point that he made is that each actor is only allowed to know what their character knows, so there is a great deal of secrecy in rehearsal. This means that -- when they are improvising -- they react naturally because they genuinely don't know what will happen next. Leigh related an example during the rehearsals for the film Vera Drake, where the family were sitting around the table having a meal, and the police knocked on the door. The actor playing Vera's husband had no idea at that point that Vera was an abortionist, so when the police officer read out the charges, he was genuinely shocked. Similarly, they build up the characters chronologically, so if a piece involves a brother and sister, and the sister then marries and later has an affair with another man, the brother and sister characters will be fully constructed before the husband and lover.

After all this improvisation, during which the dialogue and script emerges from the collaboration between Leigh and the actors, the actual filming takes place. But it all remains very natural and believable, because it has been built from the characters' reactions to events. One of the fascinating things that Mike Leigh said in the interview was that he can't actually write anything without seeing it. He sees the screenwriting process as completely collaborative, and a work in progress, much like a novel which is drafted and re-drafted repeatedly as it is written.

I'm not an actor (and don't want to be), but I think that it must be really rewarding (if a bit terrifying) to act in a Mike Leigh film and play such an active part in the creation of the film.

Kristin Scott Thomas

It so happens that we seem to have watched an awful lot of films featuring Kristin Scott Thomas recently. First, there was the brilliant, funny Easy Virtue, in which she played a cold, arrogant English aristocrat who was the Mother-in-Law from Hell for the heroine. Then we saw a couple of French films, in which Kristin Scott Thomas played French or bilingual English-French characters: I've Loved You So Long and Tell No One. Admittedly, my French isn't brilliant, but she seemed utterly comfortable with the language, which I'm sure she is, having lived in France since she was a young woman.

It's odd because I've always though of her as a quintessentially English actress (think of her roles in The English Patient or Four Weddings and a Funeral), but actually, she is equally comfortable in French language films, and I've only just discovered that side of her work.

By the way, I've Loved You So Long (or Il y a Longtemps Que Je T'aime) is a fantastic film about forgiveness, and Scott Thomas gives a brilliant performance as a woman just released from prison and holding all her emotions inside.

Wall-E

Ever since I saw a trailer for Wall-E early on, and the little robot reminded me of the strange parking meter/litter collecting machine on Wallace and Gromit's Grand Day Out, I've been looking forward to seeing the film. It took a while to come around on our LOVEFiLM queue, but it was really worth the wait.

I don't think I've seen such a perfect animated film in a long time (with the possible exception of Curse of the Were-Rabbit). The film is notorious for lacking dialogue for the first 40 minutes or so of the film, and yet it manages to convey the personality, hopes and fears of both of the main characters (Wall-E and Eve), and even makes a cockroach seem like a loveable pet. Wall-E's movements, little beeps and squeaks and the care with which he tends his collection of 'treasure' and his cockroach friend tells you all you need to know about him. Eve is -- by turns -- tender and fierce and spiky.

It's also quite a sharp satire on consumerism, showing the hapless passengers on the Axiom as fat, infantilized beings, suckling on "cup cakes in a cup" and staring zombie-like at the adverts and entertainment on their personal screens. Meanwhile, back on Scrapheap Earth, Wall-E gamely tootles about building skyscrapers out of their ancestors' compacted junk. I think it's a great shame and a missed opportunity that Pixar (or more likely, Disney) didn't choose to forego a bit of income and make a point by not having any merchandise to accompany the film.

There are some great little jokes and references in the film, but they are timeless enough that Wall-E is likely to be a classic film in the years to come. I laughed out loud at Wall-E's 'fully charged' chime sound, and his dithering about whether to put the plastic spork he had found with his plastic spoon or plastic fork collection, settling for placing it mid-way between the two. I also loved his groggy, uncoordinated early morning routine of trying to get the caterpillar tracks on his wheels before going out.

The soundtrack (including some wonderful ambient sounds produced by Ben Burtt - the DVD extra on the work he did is fascinating) is superb and subtle, with some very touching moments. I have to admit to getting a little moist-eyed when Louis Armstrong sang "La Vie en Rose". Even the short feature -- Burn-E -- on the DVD packs more entertainment into under 8 minutes than most full-length films. I love Burn-E's chirpy humming of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" as he prepares to replace the damaged beacon, and his hang-dog posture when trying to get yet another beacon from the supply robot. The way the events of the main film are woven into his story, so that you see the unseen havoc unwittingly caused to Burn-E's ordered little world by Wall-E and Eve, is really brilliant. All that, and they managed to get a subtle little reference to "2001: A Space Odyssey" in as well.

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

I've been meaning to write a full review of this book for ages, after posting a brief review on blippr. I read it while I was in Brazil, and was completely gripped. It's one of those books which you don't want to finish because you're enjoying it so much. You're also desperate to discuss it obsessively with everyone you meet, but at the same time, you don't want to spoil it for them.

Henry (the time traveller) and his future wife Claire meet when Claire is six years old and Henry is in this thirties. They eventually marry in their twenties, with an age gap of only 8 years. That should give you some impression of the rather complex, non-linear time-line of the novel. In fact, because Henry doesn't meet her until later in his life, but Henry-in-the-future has been visiting Claire throughout her childhood, when they meet in his present (his past from Claire's perspective), he knows nothing about her, and she knows a lot about him. And he hasn't experienced their shared past yet. When Claire was a child the situation was reversed, because he knew her intimately, and he was an enigmatic man who appeared in her parents' field every now and again. Confused? You will be, but you gradually get used to the warped narrative, and let go of the idea that cause must precede effect.

There must have been thousands of books and films about time travel, but Niffenegger has the amazing ability to make you feel like you've never really known about time travel before. For a start, in most sci-fi books or films, the time traveller makes a deliberate choice to go to the future or the past: Henry has no choice. His ability is involuntary, and he jumps into the past or future without much warning, arriving naked and without any possessions. It's something like eplilepsy, and he is more prone to 'time attacks' when stressed or upset. He never knows where or when he will end up, or how long he will stay there before suddenly appearing back in his proper timeline. Because he arrives naked, he becomes an expert in picking pockets and locks (so that he can feed and clothe himself), and running and self-defence (to stave off the inevitable violence that a suddenly-appearing naked man occasions).

As well as visiting Claire at various stages of her/their life, he also visits himself as a younger and older man. One of the most touching scenes in the book (and there are many that will make you blub like a baby) is when he gently guides his bewildered 7 year old self around a deserted museum at night on his first time travel experience. Later, he teaches himself the skills he'll need in his future life. One of the layers of subtlety is the sense that he bypasses any of the normal mechanisms of nostalgia. When we think about our past, we remember it softened by time, conveniently forgetting things which don't reflect well on us. Henry sees himself in sharp focus, exactly as he was at the time. This -- as you can imagine -- is a rather bittersweet experience. He also re-experiences traumatic events again and again, obsessively jumping back into the moment, without being able to influence events at all. It has its lighter moments too. At one point, Henry lands back in the marital bed, forehead bleeding and chuckling, and tells Claire that her child-self has just chucked a shoe at him because he wouldn't sleep with her.

Along with everything else, it's a wonderful love story, but it's not in any way syrupy or a chick-lit novel. The characters and their relationships are so beautifully drawn that you care very deeply about them. Claire is a fascinating character. She's very independent and intelligent, and yet the fact that she knows she will marry Henry from an early age means that she is constantly in a state of suspended animation, putting her life on hold to wait for what she knows will come. She's met Henry later in his life and loved that version of him, so when he's behaving like an immature jerk, she knows that it will get better, but she still has to wait. In fact, her story is all about waiting, while Henry's is about holding on as tightly to the present as he can to prevent himself being dragged off to the future or the past.

It's a terrific novel, and I recommend it highly. I want to read it again to pick up all the subtle clues the author gave to foreshadow various events in the book. It might look like chick-lit at first glance, but there's a lot there for the kind of obsessive geek who watched Primer or Memento with a notebook open on their lap, trying to work out the timeline [raises hand slightly bashfully]...

Pan’s Labyrinth and Tideland

Several months ago I watched both Pan's Labyrinth and Tideland within a few weeks of each other. They have some notable parallels, and are both quite disturbing explorations of the imaginative worlds of children. I meant to write a piece about this, but for various reasons it ended up on the back burner for a long time until I saw an interview with Guillermo del Toro (the director of Pan's Labyrinth) in a documentary about fantasy writing and films, and it reminded me that I'd never got around to it.

I suspect that one of the reasons I dragged my heels a bit was because I found both films deeply disturbing (in different ways), and rather harrowing to watch. Don't get me wrong -- I think they're both great films, but they aren't easy viewing by any means.

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Playtime

I love Jacques Tati. Almost nothing cheers me up as quickly as watching one of his films, which is odd really, given that Tati was a very visual, physical comedian, and that isn't normally the kind of thing I enjoy. But I just have to watch a few minutes of Monsieur Hulot walking -- leaning forward, as if into a stiff headwind -- and I'm in fits of laughter.

I've seen 'Monsieur Hulot's Holiday' many times, but recently we've rented some of his other films, and watched 'Playtime' last night. It wasn't a success when first released, and eventually bankrupted Tati, because he spent a fortune building what amounted to an entire town for the set. For those reasons, I wasn't sure that I would enjoy it as much as the other films, but I thought it was wonderful.

Tati films contain very little in the way of plot, but the plot of Playtime -- such as it is -- concerns the efforts of Monsieur Hulot to meet someone in an enormous modern office block. In this film, as in most of the others, Hulot is a kind of passive entropy generator. The world starts out clean and ordered, but when Hulot comes on the scene he unwittingly sets up a chain of events which result in chaos, by doing nothing more than wandering around in a benevolent but bewildered fashion.

It's particularly clear in Playtime that this is a good thing: the clean, modern world depicted at the start of the film is sterile and alienating to humans. We see an elderly porter trying to contact the man Hulot has come to meet using a high-tech bank of switches and lights. It takes him several minutes of tentatively pressing buttons (getting incomprehensible patterns of flashing lights and beeps in return) before he actually manages to communicate with a person. The building is so vast and uniform that Hulot gets hopelessly lost within a short while of arriving. Considering it was made in the 60s, Playtime feels like a modern, satirical film about the perils of modern architecture and technology. When things start to unravel later in the film, the world feels like a much warmer and more friendly place, partly because the chaos means that people actually talk to one another.

There are some wonderfully clever visual puns in the film. A group of female American tourists are all wearing floral hats, and at the restaurant, a waiter appears to be watering their hats with champagne. The film is supposed to be set in Paris, but it is so modern and anonymous that it could be anywhere. However, occasionally when characters open the ubiquitous glass doors, they see the Eiffel Tower, or some other landmark reflected in the door. There's also a brilliant joke about a patent 'silent' door, being shown at a kind of Ideal Home Exhibition. For complicated reasons, the Director of the company believes that Hulot is the man who has been rifling through their office doors, and shouts at him for his presumption before flouncing off through his silent door, slamming it -- completely noiselessly -- behind him. I'm going to have to watch it again soon, because I'm sure that there were probably lots of jokes I missed.

The Golden Compass

Reading a review in the Guardian of The Golden Compass -- the film adaptation of the first part of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials (HDM) trilogy -- I was not sure whether to be excited or appalled. I'm a massive fan of Pullman's work, and HDM is one of my favourite books of all time. Despite ostensibly being books for children, they are as rich, subtle, disturbing, intriguing, exciting, and many-layered as any adult book you are likely to find. Even after reading them twice, there are still aspects I don't fully understand or that I wonder about, and that's exactly the way it should be.

ThoughtBadger and I had a brief conversation about this in the comments for my review of the last Harry Potter book, so I know I'm not the only one who feels a certain dread about the films. One of the things which troubled me most about the review by Peter Bradshaw was when he said, "...to this non-Pullman-reader, the claims often made on behalf of his legend about striking a blow for rationalism against religious authoritarianism don't precisely hold up." He also describes the film as "deeply conservative". If they didn't capture the fierce, rebellious exhortation for everyone to think for themselves, use their own intelligence and live this life, rather than hoping for a life hereafter, then the film will be a terrible failure. It's true that the books only gradually reveal the full import of what Dust is over the course of the trilogy, rather than at the start, but I hope that they didn't miss the point completely.

I'm worried about the characterisations, too: according to Peter Bradshaw, Lord Asriel is a "gallant hero". One of the brilliant things about HDM is that none of the characters are entirely good or evil (or even what they seem at first), but rather real people with complex emotions, personalities and motivations. From the start in the book, Asriel is a very ambiguous character, and far from being a gallant hero. He's an adventurer, and appears to be on the side of good, but he's ruthless, arrogant and seemingly out for personal glory. Mrs. Coulter is also not purely evil at all, though she is rather chilling in the first book. From the clips I've seen, Lyra (played by Dakota Blue Richards) appears to be rather a delicate, wistful child, which is a million miles away from the way I see Lyra.

At the start of the book, Lyra is a tough, independent tomboy, running over the rooftops of Oxford colleges, and starting fights with local kids. She's fierce, brave and scruffy, and has a tendency to lie to get her way or to talk up her own achievements. But she is also deeply empathetic to the feelings of those around her, and has a strong sense of natural justice. At one point in the first book, she unselfconsciously puts herself into a situation which horrifies and disgusts the adults around her, purely to provide what comfort she can for a boy in a terrible situation. Iorek Byrnison (the armoured bear) rebukes the adults hanging back where Lyra jumps in, because he shares Lyra's deep sense of honour and justice, and the importance of keeping one's word. Throughout the books, the things she has to go through make her more serious, and she loses her innocence. In short she grows up, which is one of the themes of the series -- what does it mean to be an adult? Pullman's thesis (I think) is that the mythical expulsion from the Garden of Eden was the best thing that ever happened to us¹ -- that losing our innocence and gaining knowledge about ourselves and the world around us is a precious, important thing, and not something to be mourned.

I could ramble on about HDM for ages. Just the other day, I was thinking about how skilfully and subtly he shows us what it might be like to have a part of your spirit² as a separate, external being. Daemons in HDM are not airy, ghostly things, but warm and solid animal-formed beings. They can speak, and people and their daemons have discussions and even arguments over what is the right thing to do. But a daemon isn't a kind of magical conscience like Jimminy Cricket; neither a person nor their daemon have all the answers, but they must come to understand the world together through discussion and joint experience. The remarkable thing is that Pullman describes this thing which is very far outside our experience in such a natural and vivid way that you feel rather lonely without a daemon of your own by the end.

The mainstream cinemas around here are pretty dire, so I'd probably wait until this came out on DVD anyway, but if anyone else goes to see the film (particularly anyone who loves the books), I'd be curious to know what you think of it. I might summon up the courage to watch it if it's not a total travesty.

¹ Since I don't believe in this, I think of it as a metaphor. ↑

² The closest word I can get to his idea of a daemon, but it's not quite right. ↑

A tale of two films

Nearly a year ago, we watched a film called Capote (IMDB page), which we both enjoyed a lot. Last week, we watched another very similar film about Truman Capote, called Infamous. It made for an interesting comparison. While both films are based on different books ('Capote' is based on a book by Gerald Clarke, and 'Infamous' on one by George Plimpton), they both document the same event: the research that Capote did for his book 'In Cold Blood' about the murder of a family in Kansas.

Both feature excellent leads and supporting actors (Philip Seymour Hoffman in 'Capote' and Toby Jones in 'Infamous'), but the feel and tone of both films is quite different. 'Capote' was quite dark, leaving you with the predominant feeling that Truman was a cold manipulator, consuming the story of the two killers to build his literary reputation. In contrast, in 'Infamous', Capote came across as a much warmer, more charming and witty person, damaged by his upbringing and finding something of a soulmate in Perry Smith (Daniel Craig). You got glimpses of his coldness every now and then, but those references were much more ambiguous. In 'Infamous', Perry becomes enraged after pouring his heart out to Capote, when he finds out he plans to title his book 'In Cold Blood', seeing it as a betrayal. Capote tries to persuade him that the title refers in equal measure to the coldness of the authorities, preparing the execute the men in a pre-meditated way that he feels is almost worse than the original crime. But in 'Capote', it could equally apply to Truman's own enterprise of writing about the details of the crime.

'Infamous' was released about a year after 'Capote', and I can imagine that none of the people involved with it were too pleased about the timing. However, both films work rather well together, showing subtly different aspects of an inherently ambiguous story.

Silence

I watched a couple of things yesterday (one a TV documentary and the other a film) which were both -- in their different ways -- about silence, isolation, and internal mental strength. The coincidence of watching them both in the same night wasn't planned, but they made a very interesting pair of companion pieces.

The first was a documentary called "Real Men Under Pressure" about saturation divers working on North Sea oil installations on the sea bed. The other was Into Great Silence (Die Große Stille), a film about Carthusian monks in the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps. Two more dissimilar subjects, you would think, would be hard to find, but there were a lot of parallels.

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New review of Children of Men

I know that people sometimes don't notice my reviews over in the sidebar on the right, so I'll point out that I'm currently raving about Children of Men which we saw last night. It's definitely one of the best films I've seen in a while.

Update 2007-04-23: For those of you who commented here and found that your comments disappeared, do not fear! It seems that having the same url title for this posting and the actual review, I had inadvertantly created some kind of comment worm hole, such that comments posted here ended up attached to the actual review. I've changed the url title for this entry now, so hopefully it shouldn't happen anymore. Many thanks to Brian Tanaka for solving the mystery!

Animated

I've been meaning to write about a couple of excellent and unusual animated films I've seen recently. The first was shown over Christmas, and was a BAFTA-nominated retelling of the story of Peter and the Wolf by a joint UK/Polish team. There's no dialogue, but it uses Prokofiev's score for the story, fitting the action in the visuals to the musical themes. It's hard to say what is so enchanting about it, but the characters are so engaging (Peter in particular) that you're genuinely upset when the duck gets eaten by the wolf (I know -- a spoiler -- but I'm assuming that most people already know the story). The film manages to have a dark, contemporary feeling, without losing the timelessness or charm of the original story.

The second animation -- The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello -- is much more unusual visually speaking, but also features fantastic story-telling. Jasper Morello is a navigator who has lost his professional reputation after a tiny mistake lead to the death of a man. He's been given another chance to prove himself on an airship voyage to unknown territory. The passenger -- a 'controversial scientist' -- is performing experiments to try to find a cure for the incurable plague which is killing much of the population.

The visual world that Jasper inhabits is a wildly imaginative riff on Victoriana, with gothic touches worthy of Mary Shelley, M. R. James or Conan Doyle. The world is rendered in rich, dark sepia, with etiolated, silhouetted Giacometti-like characters. This darkness makes the occasional splashes of red or orange, or changes of lighting, all the more striking. The technology is Victorian engineering gone mad: there are gears, cogs, steam engines, steel beams, rivets and wrought iron everywhere, and wonderfully excessive ornamentation on every structure. Jasper's narration sounds like a Victorian gentleman's journal, and fits well with the visual feel.

The animation is superb, but what holds your attention is the wonderful, old-fashioned story-telling. It feels like someone telling you a gothic horror story (the kind that is enjoyably creepy, rather than terrifying) around a cosy winter fire, and we were gripped by the tale. It was rightly nominated for an Oscar, and is well worth a watch if you can track it down.

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