Week One
I don’t really have any resolutions for the new year. What I do have is a determination to lose weight. This week I have been eating much less than I would do normally and trying to insert some activity into my otherwise sedentary lifestyle. As a result I’ve lost close to three pounds. This is roundabout where I want to be. The purpose (rather than engaging in ‘fad’ diets) is to change the way I live, to take better care of myself. The aim is improved health, as much as it weight-loss.
On Friday we went to see The King’s Speech. It was our first trip to the cinema in 2011 and a good reason to start. Original but strangely comforting, funny, moving, dramatic. It had all the components of a good story and at the same time was extremely cinematic, which gives it the edge over other royalty-based films such as The Queen. Colin Firth was convincing, as you’d expect. There’s talk of him being Oscar-nominated. On the way home we talked about whether or not he deserves an award for that kind of performance. He was brilliant, as I’ve said, but was the role challenging enough? We thought of The Reader, in which Kate Winslett played an utterly disgusting character yet made us feel sorry for her, root for her, and feel upset when she took her own life at the close. No comparison between the two.
All I’ve been able to read is Harry Potter. I’ve started with The Philosopher’s Stone, reading a chapter to the bump every night. It’s nice to read aloud, although the crushing repetition of adverbs is hard to swallow, and makes me a bit angry.
I finished Stewart Lee’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate (incorrectly titled as How I Escaped a Fate Worse than Death in previous blog posts) between Christmas and New Year. It was hilarious, and also quite touching. He segued nicely between his stand-up routine and an account of a debilitating and quite embarrassing illness. At times it was a bit wanky. The endless footnotes got annoying. Overall a funny and clever man.
This week’s highlights
This week I bought a cool and slightly deadly birthday present for my friend Mike. He turns thirty on Christmas Eve. Another friend, Marcus, turns thirty in March next year. I don’t know if I have any other friends approaching thirty. There must be some, as they’re mostly around the same age. So, for all friends of mine either thirty-plus or approaching thirty, well done. Life begins at fourty, so you’re nearly there.
Abi and I went to the cinema to see Harry Potter on Wednesday but it was sold out. ‘That’s ridiculous,’ we thought. We sat in the chairs at the cinema into which you are supposed to insert fifty p and they vibrate. We did not insert fifty p. We just sat and wondered what to do, and then we returned home. We watched The Apprentice instead of Harry Potter and to be honest I was pleased with that result.
Because I thought it might be a good idea to read about a youngish couple with lofty ambitions which are stymied by the unstoppable force of a suburban life, this week I started to read Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. I know how it ends, I’ve read it before and I’ve seen the excellent film. It doesn’t end well. Still, it is a quite brilliant book, coloured with the minutiae of everyday life. The opening, which tells of the Laurel Players’ disastrous performance of The Petrified Forest, followed by April and Frank Wheeler’s near-violent argument at the side of a road, is one of the most exquisite things in modern literature, I think.
Last night, Abi made me watch a Twilight film. I say she made me but I wanted to watch it, truth be told. I like the Twilight films. There, I said it. I like them. I know they’re terrible in every way but still. I like them. I also read half a Twilight book while on holiday this summer, and God damn it I liked that too.
Our daughter has started to make herself known. Every so often Abi twinges, twitches and looks at me and says, ‘She’s moving.’ I press my hand to Abi’s stomach but feel nothing. Last night, I thought I felt her move but, on reflection, I didn’t. She isn’t strong enough to be felt outside the body yet. I can hear her thoughts though. She’s thinking, ‘Release me from this prison. Release me.’ Or words to that effect. ‘No,’ I think back to her. ‘You are not ready. Your skin is still translucent and you are too small. Wait until April.’
Let Me In
On Wednesday we ended our cinema drought by going to see Let Me In, an English-language remake of the excellent Let the Right One In, of Swedish descent. There are a number of things wrong with it.
The first wrong thing is that there really wasn’t any need to remake the original film at all. It isn’t particularly old, it’s well-made, well-acted, well-lit etc. etc. It is a good film. The only possible reason for remaking it is that people don’t like to watch films with subtitles. Whilst I can understand this, it seems an awful lot of money to spend and is difficult to justify. The new film-makers seem also to have virtually copied the original film shot-for-shot. It is set in America, although the landscape is no different to that of Sweden. The dialogue is the same. The actors all look like the actors in the original film. In fact, it isn’t really a remake, it’s a translation.
The second wrong thing is that all of the subtlety, ambiguity and subtext of the original has been lost. Mark Kermode said today that Let the Right One In is a movie about teenagers which happens to include vampires, whereas Let Me In is a movie about vamipires which happens to include teenagers. He’s exactly right. Matt Reeves (directed Cloverfield before this…) has completely missed the point.
The third wrong thing concerns the special effects. Let the Right One In didn’t have many. Certainly no CGI. Let Me In crams them in all over the place, especially making the monster’s features all classic-vamp. This gives the film a glossy, monied effect, completely detracting from the original’s bleak atmosphere, which added so much to the theme of teenage alienation. Plus, the interesting local characters have been removed. Instead, we get sketchily drawn non-people who make no comment and have no role other than to get eaten and flash a bit of tit every now and again.
So, in short, it was not a successful trip to the cinema. More successful has been Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium, which is nicely written and short, although a bit predicatable.
I’m going to go now before I drown in my own ego.
Minor update pt.8
This weekend seemed to pass quickly. I did some DIY yesterday. I think this is known as ‘nesting’.
Today I watched Deja Vu, a Denzel Washington film. In it, Denzel plays a cop who goes back in time to solve a murder. It was a lot better than I’ve made it sound. It got me thinking about Doppelgangers. Double walkers. This led to thinking about Doppler shift, which is where the frequency of a wave alters according to the position of the observer. Then I ate some toast.
I haven’t read any books this week. What’s going on? I have a lot of work to do tomorrow.
Minor update pt.6
I watched some good TV today. There was Stephen Hawking’s new programme (I forget the name) which this week was about time travel. It turns out that travel into the past is impossible, due to radioactive feedback destroying any wormhole that might be big enough for a person to walk through. Travel into the future, though, is a theoretical possibility, if we can travel fast enough. There was a decent animation of a trainline running around the entire circumference of the earth, with a train travelling at close to the speed of light (this involved it going round the earth seven times a second), and also footage of a spaceship circling a super-massive black hole. The most likely option, though, is the creation of a giant spaceship which would travel for hundreds of years in one direction away from the earth, then coming back. The passengers would only have been travelling several weeks (I think) from their perspective.
Also, there was Wonders of the Solar System, Brian Cox’s new programme. This had some startling information about Saturn’s rings, which apparently have largely been created by ice-volcanoes erupting from the surface of Saturn’s moons. Apparently, also, the beginning of our solar system was a series of rings much like Saturn’s, but around the sun. Gravitational shove from Saturn itself caused many of our planets to shoot out from the sun’s orbit, where they hit astroids and the suchlike, resulting in the crators that we see today.
I have just finished watching Isolation, and Irish horror film about genetically engineered cows. The GE-ing goes slightly wrong, creating these mad creatures which then roam around a farm biting people. It was kind of a cross between Alien and Some Other Film Set On A Farm.
Abi’s been away this weekend. I’ve been a bit miserable about that.
I have also run out of bird food. Earlier today, one of my wood pigeons sat on top of the feeder and looked at me as if to say, ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ Then it flew away.
The Soloist
In which Robert Downey Junior plays Steve Lopez, a columnist for the LA Times who discovers a muscial genius playing a two-stringed violin on the streets. The musical genius in question is Nathaniel Ayers, played by Jaime Foxx, who has been sleeping rough since he left the Juliard school of music when he began to hear voices. Lopez takes interest initially to fill a void in subject matter for his column, but soon becomes the central facet to Ayers’s rehabilitation (or so he thinks).
Downey Junior is as enigmatic as usual. There’s a caustic scene where Lopez is covered in coyote piss, which he is attempting to hang in his garden to ward off raccoons. I could actually smell the urine. The film is also spliced with Ayers’s backstory. Him as a child playing the cello while fires burn outside his house. Him playing in an orchestra as the voices in his head begin for the first time. Him breaking down in front of his sister and attempting to forcefeed her soup.
Foxx plays the mental illness of Ayers well. At first you think that maybe he’s just eccentric. Then, when the schizophrenia becomes obvious, it isn’t overplayed. Ayers himself does not consider himself to be mentally ill. Lopez tries his utmost to force him onto medication before coming to the realisation that he should just try to be his friend. There is also an interesting theme as Ayers begins to entwine himself around Lopez’s life (at one point he calls him his god). By this point, we are well aware of Ayers’s schizophrenia. As he begins to communicate with Lopez more and more, his incessant chatter mirrors the voices in his own head. In one scene, Ayers witters into Lopez’s phone as Lopez sits at a gala dinner at which he is collecting an award for his writing on Ayers. There’s a subtle exchange of identity here.
The whole thing is played sensitively and it feels authentic. Despite the possibility of corn, as Lopez realises that friendship is the best medication that Ayers could receive, the ending is not sloppy or sentimental. Ayers is not miraculously cured, and neither does he entertain thousands at Carnegie Hall. The resolution to his story is in actual fact far more subtle. As is the resolution to Lopez’s story. His story arc takes him from a self-absorbed hack to a man far more in tune with the world around him. It isn’t a steep arc, and by no means unbelievable. It is subtle and slow. Ultimately, it is true.
I hope you like prison food. And penis.
The Other Guys was quite silly. Still, I liked it. Probably Will Ferrell’s best film since Anchorman. He played a similar character, which is what he does best.
Will Ferrell’s default position seems to be to play the Dummling. This is a character from fairy-tales, who is simple-minded but with good intentions. They are usually rewarded at the end. In The Other Guys he plays an ex-pimp (he only became a pimp to help out a friend), who becomes a cop in order to control his inner darkness and stay safe. He wants a simple life, he doesn’t want to hurt anyone and he wants to bring financial criminals to justice. The Dummling is a kind-of offshoot of the Clown character, or the Dummy. His cop-character is unintentionally funny, as his colleagues mock him for his endlessly upbeat persona. At the end of the film he is rewarded with the respect of his colleages and the ongoing love of his ‘smoking hot’ wife Eva Mendes.
Ron Burgundy, Ferrell’s character in Anchorman, is similar. He just wants to read the news and enjoy his life. He is unintentionally funny by way of his simple-mindedness (as shown by his tendency to read everything on the teleprompter, even when a mistaken question mark is added to the end of a sentence - ‘I’m Ron Burgundy?’). His downfall is finalised by another representation of his simple-mindedness. He is driven to despair when his dog Baxter is kicked into a river, which leads him to lose his job to his lover Christina Applegate. He is rewarded at the end of the film as his colleagues rescue him from anonimity and he gains their respect as well as the love of Applegate.
Will Ferrell is at his best in these roles. When he chooses to play a different character he loses his charm, which is really what drives his popularity. It’s the simple-mindedness that does it. In Stranger Than Fiction, another good one, he isn’t so much simple-minded but he is certainly an innocent. He is a good person embroiled in a very strange circumstance.
I should counter-balance this with some examples of his bad work, but I can’t be bothered.
The rest of The Other Guys was pretty standard. The plot was nothing to write home about. Samuel L. Jackson and The Rock did a good job at the beginning playing the archetypal tough cops (perhaps the funniest moment in the film was when they both unintentionally killed themselves). Michael Keaton was also excellent as the nice-guy captain who holds down a second job in order to put his bi-sexual son through college (why was his son bi-sexual? Don’t know. I think it was a joke of some sort). His performance brought to mind the police captain played by Alan Arkin in So I Married An Axe Murderer (this character is genius - he is a softy who wants to be the tough, typical captain in order to please Anthony LaPlaglia’s cop, who in turn wants the police force to be how you see it in the movies, rather than the paper-pushing mundanity that it actually is. There’s more police-spoof in that set-up than in the entirity of The Other Guys, or Police Squad, or the two put together). Mark Wahlberg was also excellent.
So, the performances outstrip the rest of the film. Perhaps that’s why it’s managed to get good reviews. To be honest, I had expected it to feel more authentic, but Adam McKay doesn’t seem to have managed that since Anchorman, and perhaps he never will again.
Minor update pt.5
I just uploaded a shedload of 18.13 photos. I wondered if the evenings were getting darker, but as this old one and this new one shows, it doesn’t appear to be yet.
Currently reading The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall. Before that, I read The Scheme for Full Employment by Magnus Mills. I also received two excellent magazines from Stack. They were literary ones this month. There was The Drawbridge and another one I can’t remember the title of. They were both in the newspaper format, which I still hope to use one day to present some short stories.
Tonight I think we are going to see The Other Guys, which promises to be hilarious. I’ll let you know how it goes.
(Oh, and I think too much time has passed to write anything comprehensive about Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, so I won’t. Shame, because we also watched Kick-Ass recently and I think they’re comparable. Scott Pilgrim was better, in my opinion. I still think it is perhaps the most original mainstream film I have seen in a long while.)
Who needs an X-Box/PS3/Wii etc. when you’ve got NBA Jam on the Playstation 2. An amazing game.
TV-wise, I am currently enjoying This is England ‘86, although ‘enjoying’ is the wrong word really. Last night there was a graphic rape scene involving a teenage girl. Still, it is disturbing and dark and funny and intense and realistic. (Disclaimer: I was only three in 1986 so I can’t actually confirm that it’s realistic, but it appears to be). The jury is out as to whether or not you need a graphic rape scene involving a teenage girl on TV. I didn’t particularly want to see it, but then it fit with the story and it was hard to imagine the scene not being included in the programme. I suppose it’s about context. Whichever way you look at it, the acting was fucking incredible.
Aside from that, X-Factor is on at the moment. Need I say more?
Many birds are now enjoying the bird feeder. There are robins and tits and our friends the wood pigeons. They all seem to get on alright, although the pigeons mostly get the lion’s share.
Minor update pt.4
For a few reasons I need to try and finish Don’s second draft by the end of September, which is a challenge. I am trying very hard to ‘take writing seriously’. The aim is to write a thousand words a day, and four thousand a day at the weekend. If I manage this then I will just about cross the line if I really get my head down over the final few days. (I probably won’t manage it).
The Good Angel of Death was excellent. Kurkov went a bit mad with his last novel, The President’s Last Love, which was over-ambitious, so you could say that it’s a return to form (if you were fond of using cliches like that). I’m currently unsure what to read next.
I haven’t watched any films today. I started watching Once Upon a Time in the Midlands but then thought that Abi might like it, so I’m saving it for when we have an evening free. I have watched one episode of Jonathan Creek (guilty pleasure). It was a two-parter, so I’m now in suspense until Tuesday.
I have also played rather a lot of NBA Jam recently.
(Did I mention that I watched Donkey Punch a few weeks ago? If I didn’t then I should have done. I thought it was pretty good. Jaime Winstone was excellent, as she always is. I didn’t even think it was too disturbing, except for the bit when she carved up the guy at the end.
Have also recently watched and not mentioned Underworld [shit], Land of the Lost [better than I thought it would be] and Jurassic Park III [can’t argue with it, really, it is what it is].
At the cinema Abi and I watched Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, which probably warrants its own post if I ever get round to it. Suffice to say I loved it, but what I loved the most was just how much it polarised the audience. Several people walked out after ten minutes, and those that remained said it was the best thing they’d ever seen. Plus, you just have to love Edgar Wright. You have to. [Not sure I’m going to be able to bring myself to apply the same theory to the otherwise brilliant Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s new film Paul, as it looks terrible.]
I just thought of something else, too. I found this video of Jack Heal on the internet, who won the Chortle Student Comedy Awards 2008. Very funny indeed. “‘Affirmative,’ I said, because I’m a bit of a twat sometimes.”)
About writing a book
Have been wondering today whether or not it would be possible to write a novel the way Mike Leigh makes a film.
I’m guessing you’d need to do a lot of background work first. Read a lot, get a strong idea of the themes and setting, sketch out a few scenes. Then get some characters and think about what motivates them, how they think/talk/act. Then put the characters in those scenes and see how it pans out.
Thinking about it, it’s probably a very good way of writing a novel. I guess what I mean is not allowing yourself to think of an ending, but letting the story end itself by the actions performed by the characters. It would make it more real, I should think. If you were a twat, you would probably call it ‘organic’.
I should add that I only have a limited idea of how Mike Leigh makes films. What I do know, and this must be true of all films, is that there is at some point a shooting schedule. At the moment he is making something with a shooting schedule of three weeks, which sounds quite short.
I like the idea of applying this to novel-writing. You do all of your background research over a six month period and then write it in three weeks, head down for twelve or fourteen hours a day. You take yourself off somewhere to do this and have little contact with the outside world.
This could solve the problem for those of us who aren’t professional writers, and have to squeeze writing into otherwise busy lives. I always have time to read, so why not read lots and lots around a particular topic over six months, maybe a year, without writing a thing except notes and scenes (could even write a treatment, as is done for a screenplay, but only a very rough one and without an ending). Then take two weeks annual leave, go away and work solid. That’s about 200 hours writing time, plenty for a first draft.
The problem comes with editing and redrafting. I think that you would need to get straight down to this after the first draft, and go back to the ordinary sort of writing routine (evenings and weekends) to get it done. You would sacrifice reading time for this.
Not sure how realistic this all is. Life is a bit more haphazard in reality.
