Prestigious Or Not?
In a radical move, we went to the cinema the other night. I don't really know what's happened to me the last couple of years, but from having been in a regular routine of cinema-going at least once a week, this constituted only around my fourth trip this year. This must change.
Anyway, we went to see Christopher Nolan's new one, The Prestige, about a pair of Victorian stage magicians played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, and it's about to suffer from the fact that I didn't mention it that same evening. Because at the time I enjoyed significantly more of it than not, but with distance, I've become significantly less tolerant of it.
It's a film that makes much use of unreliable narrative, of (dare I say it) sleight of hand, and of out and out twists that are clearly meant to make it something slightly special. My problems with it at the time hinged on the fact that the major twist is in fact clearly indicated very early on indeed and then hammered if not to death then certainly to the point where the constant reminders get extremely irritating. At the time I thought it was Nolan's way of giving the audience some complicity in the twist that was unknown to the protagonists, but the more I think about it and read other people's comments, the more I begin to think that actually he didn't intend it to be so obvious, or at least not so obvious so early on. Which I find hard to believe (because it really is *that* obvious, and *that* overplayed), but which seems to be a generally held view. If that is the case then my problem with it is different than the one I thought it was, and actually probably worse.
There are also some fundamental problems with the structure which are less apparent on first viewing because the film's timeline is presented non-linearly, but which are really obvious once you stop being carried along by the actual presentation and think about the detail. There are some directorial touches that are so self-consciously in the Sixth Sense school that it's annoying, especially as Nolan has plenty of effective tricks of his own he could have played.
But: taken on its own in its own running time it carried me along on the strength of its performances, which are generally good, and the core story, which is as good a depiction of jealousy and obsession as I've seen in a while.
Go and see it, but for your own sake don't think about it afterwards.
Balls
Once upon a time there were two Amnesty International gigs called The Secret Policemen's Ball and The Secret Policeman's Other Ball (there were other, earlier Amnesty gigs in similar style, but these are the two I recall). They combined comedy and music and were formative influences on my comedy appreciation. The opening scene from Other involved the whole cast criticising the cheapness of many of the audience, and was followed by Rowan Atkinson's utterly brilliant European Traffic Fatality Statistics monologue. Some of the biggest names in comedy then and since took part, and I loved them.
A few weeks ago, Amnesty held a Ball for the 21st Century, which was televised while I was out of the country. When I finally caught up with it I was pretty disappointed - it didn't do much in the way of real laugh-out-loud moments for me, and it felt a bit uninspired.
But - and it's a notable but: it contained David Armand miming to Natalie Imbruglia's Torn, with a twist or two, and it made the whole event. If you didn't see it - watch it here, and watch right through - it just gets better.
EDIT - Embedding YouTube screws up my pages, so check it out on the YouTube site.
Married Life
I meant to post yesterday that we've passed our first monthaversary and so far have neither killed each other nor filed for divorce.
Which I'm considering a result 
This Airport Life
So I'm writing in an airport departure lounge again, having lapsed from posting over the last week owing to pressures of work and the fact that every time I started to think about posting the Ghost of NANOWRIMO would look at me reproachfully from the corner. But my flight is delayed for an unspecified period, and in the hope that it won't actually be a long enough delay that I could have polished off a couple of chapters this seems like a productive use of the downtime.
This has been one of those days which happen just slightly too often to be enjoyable where I had to be up significantly before the crack of dawn in order to be at the airport in time for my flight. And it was a near thing this morning - an hour to the minute after I left the flat I was at the Heathrow 1 Mile sign, and it then took over half an hour actually to get into the airport, let alone through security.
Here's an interesting thing - I checked in for both my outbound and return flights online last night, and when I picked up my boarding card around 45 minutes before the outbound departure, Heathrow still didn't have the gate displayed for it, yet the return boarding card had the gate for the flight back clearly displayed, well over eight hours before take off. And indeed, though the plane itself will be departing late, it will be departing late from the specifed gate. Why can other airports do it but Heathrow not?
And on the subject of NANOWRIMO, I should point out that I haven't officially given up on it, despite the fact that I haven't written anything towards it for a week, but I am open to the idea that it will be given up at some point. Let's face it, as previously chronicled in my travelling posts, I hardly had a chance to get off to the most creative and dynamic of starts.
Fifteen Thousand And Counting
Episodes of The Archers that is, as of this evening's episode. I'm not a full-time fan, but it's sometimes on when I'm in the car, and I'm always at least mildly entertained by the everyday story of class division among country folk. And don't ever be mistaken - it's class division that underlies the whole concept of the programme, all the way down to how characters are allowed to address each other.
Anyway, the landmark edition was entirely given over to the will she/won't she issue of Ruth's potential infidelity with Sam, complete with background scenes of her loving family (including loving but oafish husband David), and would-be paramour Sam's constant phone calls to find out where she'd reached on her journey to his hotel room love nest. Oh the agonies of poor Ruth's situation! Oh the irony of oafish David's comments about how much he loved her even as he'd driven her (possibly) into the arms of another man! Oh the pathos of daughter Pip's childlike concern about the state of her parents' marriage - closer to reality that she knew!
What was the outcome? Well I'm not going to spoil it for you - you can listen for yourself.
I Give In
I'm sick to death of the volume of comment spam I'm having to deal with, so I'm making a staged attempt to stop it. I've closed commenting on all posts older than 14 days (except the Joss Whedon one), and will see how that helps. To be honest, the time lag between making a posting and the first spam hitting it can be as little as a day, but there's also a chunk of older postings that regularly get hit. These at least will now be immune.
I'll monitor, and if it becomes necessary to bring the threshold closer I'll do so. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.
Shhhh!
I was sad to see while I was away that William Franklyn had died.
He was one of those figures that become stamped on the popular consciousness steadily and without fanfare, just for having been in so many things over such a long period of time, and it's odd to think that his extremely distinctive voice won't be heard any more.
Not much else to say really, just noting his passing.
Bashing The Bishop
(Blame Dave for the title)
Long time readers will know my attitude towards religion generally and its champions especially. I rarely miss the chance to have a go engage in a spirited discourse when confronted by one of them shouting the odds, but even I recognise that there's a time and a place.
And neither of these is an airport departure lounge before seven in the morning.
Okay, so spotting a bishop among the passengers isn't a good sign - let's face it, add a nun and you're practically guaranteed to find yourself in a disaster movie - but the man was minding his own business and not actively attempting to subborn the heathens among us, so I was happy to leave him to his coffee.
Not so the rather aggressive young man who fortunately ended up sitting in a completely different part of the cabin for the actual flight. No, he was determined that he was going to have a confrontation with the bishop, and among other things tell him that he was wearing his cross in a very confrontational and intrusive manner, that he didn't believe he was really a bishop, and that he was angry at the Catholic church's attitude to other religions. To be fair, from what I heard of the bishop's responses (he didn't have a problem with other religions as long as people recognised that they didn't count), he deserved a certain amount of grief, but he certainly didn't pick the fight, and it really was quite disturbing to see the confronting man in action. Seeing him stride onto the plane and down the aisle, then off again at the other end, there was something about him that was generally rather worrying.
Call me judgemental, but I couldn't help thinking that whatever his problems were, he couldn't lay all of them at the door of his seminary school.
Well, It Worked
Sorry - catching up from the weekend:
The Immigration IRIS scheme worked like a dream, and to make what was actually a thoroughly pleasant flight back absolutely perfect, my bag was the first off and onto the belt at Heathrow. Truly I am blessed.
Caught up with Mike on the last night of his travels, which was fun, and improved my mood from the distinctly frustrating day I'd had work-wise previously.
I Suppose It’s A Start
I got to the airport early with a view to starting my NANOWRIMO novel, and as the chart indicates, I've managed to knock out just over 2000 words. They're not good words, I should hasten to add.
The trick really is to set aside any desire to make creative use of language and just drive the narrative hell for leather. I guess this way at least you end up with a plot that, if it has any value at all, you can then rework when you have more time, taking the opportunity to make it flow beautifully, reflecting the full range of your linguistic prowess and working with nuance and subtlty. First time round you have to forget all of that and just hammer out what happened, to whom, and in what order.
Someone I know (yes, that swot I'm married to) managed to hit 5000 words on day one. Sickening.