Sneaky, cheeky Friday afternoon movie (take 2)

The Road Cormac McCarthy, 2006
The Road (dir. John Hillcoat)

Ok, so this is an odd one, part book review, part cheeky flicks trip.  It began as it usually does, Marsh and I at the Arts eating cheese and mushroom toasties and drinking beer.  Quite possibly the best preparation I can imagine for a post-apocalyptic horror, or a mindless rom-com for that matter.

She won't admit it, but I probably dragged Marsh there.  I had read the novel the weekend we were in Germany, more than just reading it, I had devoured every page of it, anti-socially often spending the entire evening with my nose in it.  I hadn't intended to get so involved: this was just a substitute for the Philip Roth novel I was reading, the only reason it was temporarily ditched was due to the unfortunate presence of a swastika on the cover.  I had picked up The Road as a suck-it-and-see, with a view to a proper future read through.  After the first few pages I became involved in the story of Man and Boy on their journey to the coast.  I didn't know what they would find there if they reached it, and I suspected the journey itself (planned on a freebie oil company map) was more of a distraction from their impending deaths from starvation, rather than any real physical or spiritual journey.  What I liked and loathed in equal measure was the reluctance of McCarthy to detail the event that led to two people alone and cold on the road, scavenging husks of wheat from barns and cans from burned out supermarkets.  Quite simply, something happened and now nothing is as it was.  In the book the Man refers to cows as being extinct; in the film the Boy quibbles the phrase 'as the crow flies', as crows only exist in books.


There are two particularly distressing aspects of the story, dealt with differently in both book and film.  The most graphic is the threat of cannibalism, perhaps best illustrated in both by the farm they accidentally stumble upon where terrified, mutilated people are kept in a larder by a gang of survivors: the film will spare you from much worse.  There is constant reinforcement from the Man to the child that they are one of the 'good guys', the fact that one of the defining features of a good guy is that he doesn't eat people is a measure of how despairing the situation is.  Equally upsetting but much more subtle is the recurring motif of murder-suicide.  Charlize Theron, playing the Boy's mother, has a role that only exists in brief flashbacks within the novel.  Pregnant when the cataclysmic event takes place, she disagrees fundamentally with the Man about how, and if life can go on in this new world.  By the time we meet the characters they have only two bullets remaining in their handgun; we see them mime and rehearse a possible future murder-suicide, always with the knowledge that with everyone they encounter the need to defend themselves may leave them with an awful decision to make further down the line.  There was a constant fear as I read the book that the Man would kill the Boy to stop someone else killing him, using the same, twisted logic that hamster mothers use.

The experience of reading the book is one of breathtaking compulsion.  Despite the truly grotesque scenes throughout I was driven to read on, desperately hoping that there could be some kind of happy ending in this unwaveringly unhappy world.  A feeling joins you on the journey, one that convinces you that there can never be a truly happy ending, even if the novel ends on a high note.  This is because the book is the story of the road, and the motif of the road is always the journey through life, which inspite of the pleasing vignettes- the meal they eat in the bunker, the can of cola, the Boy's first bath- can only end with the main character defeated. 

On the technical side, the movie was very well shot on great locations mostly in Pennsylvania, but with some of the more urban scenes shot on in Katrina ravaged New Orleans.  The strength of the movie was in its realism, or perhaps its attempt to capture a real situation.  CGI was largely spurned in favour of using disused mines and, in a memorable scene, the Abandoned Pennsylvania Turnpike.  Make-up too was excellent, rendering Tinseltown lovelies as mouldering down and outs.  Mortensen, Theron and Duvall in particular shined; I found Kodi-Smit McPhee's portrayal the Boy as a little saccharin sweet for my liking.

I watched this film about a week after Up in the Air, another, but very different road movie.  The motif of the road, which represents the metaphorical journey through life, is one that interests me in the way it changes through the different stages of life.  Clooney's character in Up in the Air, Ryan Bingham, has very little in common with the Man apart from the fact that they both learn something about themselves and others on their journey.  The reason for this is that Bingham is in the middle of his journey, in what a commentator on Shakespeare (his/her name escapes me) called the tragic phase.  The critic believed that the early years of a character could be characterised by comedy, especially the joy of falling in love; the middle years are the times of jealousy, discomfort, dislocation and the tragic; finally, old age brings the prospect of resolution, reconciliation and forgiveness.  This doesn't entirely fit with Shakespeare or the road motif: for every Rosalind and Van Wilder, we have a Juliet and the entire cast of The Rules of Attraction.  You do get the feeling though that Bingham is in that transition phase where tough questions are being asked about his lifestyle; when we left him in the departures lounge at the end of the film, you thought that those questions aren't going to get any easier any time soon.  The Man copes with problems of another kind: the differences between comedy and tragedy are very subtle flavours- how do you decide whether you've had a good day or a bad day after the end of the world?  It's as unimaginable as defining good and bad by what, and who, they eat.  So does this make The Road a Romance?  Not quite, but it is about resolution, being in the wilderness, and the old giving way to the young; the preservation of hope and keeping the fire alive, which is probably the best ending we can hope for. 

The Moon Under Water? Screen 1

This post comes to you inspired by this enjoyable epistle from the Failed Spinster, which provoked a humorous and most vocal response this morning.  


Being a classy professional with an arts degree I wouldn't deign to cross the threshold of a common multiplex to watch a mindless Hollywood offering, instead my viewing experience of choice is the indie cinema: with its classic movie posters, the aroma of espresso in the air, it is ever so slightly edgy- in a we show films with subtitles kinda way.  I am a cinema snob, and never again will I endure a film punctuated by adolescent texting and snogging, throwing what passes for popcorn around the auditorium, and listening to the mindless running commentary that pours forth from the imbecile sitting next to me.

Being a cinema snob, I watch movies in foreign languages, filmed in black and white and often with titles consisting of just one word.  I do this because I'm better than you.  I lounge around in the bar before the film drinking black coffee or overpriced European beer, poring over the Guardian culture section.  I seem absorbed in an article about whatever is currently filling the turbine hall at the Tate, but not so much that I can't glance around to check that I'm being seen.

At the snack counter I umm and ahhh between the fair trade popcorn, hand harvested by a new wave of beat poets in the Midwest, or the organic ice cream: made and marketed by a co-operative formed by the very cows themselves.  But that's nothing in comparison to the choice I had to make at the ticket booth.  Indie film #1: Silent movie from the '20s in a glorious new reprint (nothing at all like watching it at home on DVD), complete with pianist from the local arts college who will interpret it in a free jazz style.  Great.  Indie film #2: A plot-free sex romp in which an attractive girl will sleep with multiple older men and perhaps one woman.  The film will be in Spanish, Italian, or if you are unlucky, German; a motif in the final scene will represent the director's grand theory about the meaning of life.  The motif is likely to be a bull alone in a field.  This is the type of film that would be wholly unacceptable for someone like me to watch if it were in English, but as it's foreign: it's not a blue movie, it's art.

As it happens I opt for indie choice #3, the animated film that's probably aimed at kids, perhaps made by Pixar, but I can stretch it enough to say that it borrows heavily from the anime genre.  If that doesn't cut the mustard with my mates, I'll just say I enjoyed its postmodern pastiche of the cartoon genre; truth is I wanted to watch it when it premiered, but I just can't *bear* the kind of people who go to the multiplex.

So I settle down with my ice cream made by happy, unionised cows and my skinny macchiato doppio (marked with a caramel foam), all ready to mock the trailers.  In pops mum and two kids from the local independent school, you can tell by their deckchair blazers.  "Now, settle down you two," she implores, "this is a postmodern pastiche of the cartoon genre, I think you're really going get a lot from it."  I observe as she struggles with her scarf, trying not to spill her grande soy latte, when one of the kids pelts his brother with an object I don't recognise in the dark.  "Rupert," she yells, "don't throw olives at your brother!"  The younger boy begins to howl: "that one had a pimento in it, that really hurt!" and launches a return salvo of Japanese rice crackers.  

Yes, independent cinemas, an altogether classier viewing experience.  

Bookspot: The Shadow of the Wind

I was warned before I even opened it that it was a no good book, probably from the wrong side of town, but I decided to give it a chance because it was a gift from Marsh, and Marsh is rarely wrong about anything, if you don't count rawlplugs.

I don't know anything about the author and my experience of the Spanish literary tradition runs to The House of Bernarda Alba and no further.  I approached and judged this novel purely on its contents: something I've not been able to do for years.  I'm glad I put aside the warning; as a secret, avid reader of crappy thrillers I know that there is nothing better than enjoying something that you think you ought not to.  So, decide for yourself whether it is an entertaining read or just mere literature: they both sit together on my shelves. 

The Shadow of the Wind is the tale of Daniel, a restless ten year-old, inducted into the 'Cemetery of Forgotten Books' (CFB) by his father, partly to distract him from the grief he feels as his deceased mother begins to fade from his memories.  The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, sounds neat, eh?  A bit Indiana Jones-y, fascinating literary treasures-y, possibly even with a minotaur, eh?  Sadly, we don't find out.  I think that the lost library was the hook at attracted Marsh to pick this out for me, and it was certainly what intrigued me enough to pick it up, but almost as soon as it is introduced, the library is packed up and relocated to the stack of secondary locations.  Shame.  But this always happens to me: I yearn for the story that hasn't been told. 

This disappointment aside: the tale gripped me.  As a card carrying member of the CFB Daniel is allow, nay duty bound, to choose a volume from its dusty shelves and guard it with his very life.  He chooses the Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax, unknown to Daniel but an author who captures the attention of his father's bibliophile friends.  Having read the novel in my preferred, voracious, stay-up-all-night style, Daniel sets off to find out more about Carax and his novels.  He finds only a charred paper-trail: Carax is presumed dead at an early age in mysterious circumstances, and his entire opus has been acquired, then torched by a mysterious inhuman(e) character named Lain Coubert, a moniker for the Devil in Carax's novel.  The plot develops as the story of Carax and Daniel's own fate become intertwined.

Now as I said: I know nothing.  I enjoyed this as a pleasant book-related yarn.  The characters entertained and occasionally engrossed me, and I felt I was guessing what would happen up to the end.  At times the prose was beautiful: the description of Barcelona in the snow was charming and the dark and rather creepy episode in the Aldaya mansion actually scared me (just a little!).  There was the occasional moment of overhype: 'in seven days I would be dead,' but I felt that this just reflected the character of Carax's novelistic style, and the regular references to melodramatic radio plays (cf. the larger than life Fermin).

I didn't mind the way the lives of the characters danced to and fro together, or the fact that they all had back stories, secret, previous, or even fantastic alter-egos.  But, the conclusion felt too neat for my liking, and a little forced; however, I couldn't suggest better: after 500+ pages and multiple twists, any ending should ought to seem too simple.  I should know, I'm waiting for Lost to finish.

Bing: it's the sound of an idea you know

The nice man from Microsoft came to see us last week.  He was on a charm offensive to promote their new decision engine bing.  He said that bing was chosen because it encapsulated the sound of an idea, sadly bing doesn't have an exclamation mark, and I would characterise my ideas as sounding as if they could be associated with an exclamation mark.  Even more sadly this isn't my only beef.

It was going to be a tough audience, information professionals with their finger on the pulse, we wanted to know what we could get from this for our users, where the educational advantages would be.  What we got was the big guns.  We got the pretty pictures.  I wish I'd taken a stopwatch to measure how long he talked about the front page of the engine and perhaps one of those clicky things so I could reckon how many times he said 'bing experience'.  You can probably tell by now that I wasn't impressed, but I couldn't take my feelings of underwhelment out on the chap from corporate, he was affable enough and confessed to leaving the 'how it works' side to the techies.  He did admit to being tied to Vista though.  However you feel about that. 

I have to admit being slightly surprised by the warmth of the reception; I really thought that this guy would have his work cut out for him.  His patter and charm kept him on the topics he wanted to discuss: I raised questions on functionality, he talked about user experience; I wanted to know the rationale behind the results on offer, he brought us back to the (admittedly) good presentation of them.  Each awkward question, and reader, I had many, asked was deflected flawlessly, sometimes with bamboozling nonsense like 'it's a trusted, untrusted source'.  Slick charm and bamboozlement is a powerful combination, it settles you into a comfortable place, smoothes the worry lines from your brow and reassures you; you don't need to worry about things like that, let us worry about that for you. 

We should worry though.  The web can make naive fools of us all, accepting and downloading information and much more without the critical scrutiny we would apply to a movie review or a newspaper article. 

So what's bing like?  Well, he thinks it takes seven solid days of bing immersion to knock the Google out of you, admittedly I didn't do the whole week- but I did do an afternoon.  I was neither greatly impressed or disgusted by the main search function, results seemed fairly comparable with what I'd expect from Google, ads were in the same place.  It was actually better than I feared, which ought not to be read as an endorsement.  Mr Corporate spoke at length about his choice demographics, their use of social networking and their comfort with online shopping: I thought that I wouldn't be able to find an academic on there for all the celebs.  I found Peter Jones of the University of  Newcastle, not an easy one.  I also found Winston Churchill on xRank, their celebrity movers and shakers list, he came in at a respectable 90th.  The presence of Cream the 60s supergroup and hairy rockers Queen in the top three, beating the likes of JLS and Lady Gaga into submission, suggests that xRank may be a little too heavily influenced by non-contextual keywords.  Who would have thought Cream would be more popular that Harvey Milk, eh?

Away from dairy and onto my last beef of the post.  A left hand side menu allows you to access bing's 'references' section, this was the nice corporate laddie's concession to his becardigan'd audience, in fact it is bing's only concession to scholarly thinking.  Sadly the references function merely pulls up a Wikipedia article.  I'm not a knowledge snob, but that's not good enough for me or my readers.  Frankly, the news that Churchill is more famous than Russel Grant, but not as hip as Lemar was far more useful.  Their purchase of Wolfram Alpha may change their quality of referencing, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

**Bonus**

Add Wolfram Alpha seaches to your standard Google search using this Mozilla app, it goes without saying that you do need to be running Firefox to do that, and a pretty new version.

Very useful for fact checking and not looking stupid, all because someone has changed the Wikipedia article to list Timbuktu as the capital of the Maldives.

Vinyl

Ok, so this came about in the car on the way home. The radio flares up to Florence and the Machine, right in the middle eight of Dog Days and I'm struck by this weird idea about Jefferson Airplane, or maybe Starship, not sure. What I am sure of is that we watched the Cohens' A Serious Man recently and I was struck by the way Somebody to Love fills the film and utterly defines its sense of the time.  That, I thought, is going to be someones Somebody to Love, one day someone is going to equate 'run fast for your father and fast for your mother' with 'when the truth is found to be lies'.  One day it will play at a siginificant moment perhaps in a film, but more probably, and more importantly on someone's internal soundtrack.  I never have incidental, mood or elevator music on my soundtrack, it's all beefy, meaty stuff.  Maybe I'll have Florence playing at a significant moment, maybe I'll run fast for my father from the half way line, round three defenders, beat the goalie and lift the World Cup for Scotland.  No, that would likely be a film. 

Anyway, this is unimportant, a mere foil, because then I started thinking about music and the part it plays, or I think ought to play in our lives, and I'm thinking especially about vinyl.  I was born not long before John Lennon died, my Pa likes the Beatles, but he's more of a Stones kinds of guy.  One of my first music memories however is listening to the Imagine album with my dad, listening to it and feeling that it was somehow important to me that I was on this Earth at the same time as John Lennon, without any good reason at all for it.  The best thing about the experience though was the playing the record itself.  My dad, who seemed so big at the time took this round thing from its sleeve, a round thing with, as I was told then, only two grooves on it- groove: that's enough, isn't it, that very word gets you right there.  Groove.  This round thing made of plastic then went on another flat, round thing.  It began to spin.  Then my Dad gently lowered the stylus- which assured me was made from a real diamond- and a few anticipatory moments of warm fuzz, crackle and hiss gave way to the opening chords of Imagine.  As a child it was truly magic in the same way that watching my Granda bake was: the combination of inedible flour, raw eggs and butter became (seemingly through alchemy) this amazing warm, fluffy cake. 

Tapes and CDs have never captured the moment of suspense that I first encountered with that record.  They are never lovingly cradled in two different types of paper sleeve, deftly handled by the edges and sent to live in their own special box, with their own special cloth.  They fall down the back of the car seat, get dusty, mangled or chewed.  That moment, the one that my father and I shared when we first played an LP together, was etched on me, it was later joined by the time I played the first U2 single ever released (£25 from Preston record market, my Mum declared me mad) and Expecting to Fly (gatefold numbered edition), or maybe these were all part of just one continuous groove.  I'm not a vinyl nerd: if I was I'd have more than two valuable records in my collection, and as it is the rarest thing I own is sadly a CD.  But when I hear Paint it Black playing in my head just before I do something deeply impressive and energetic, the hiss and crackle that precedes Charlie Watts' thumping drums is just, if not more, important. 

While you're thinking about the soundtrack to your life take a handy hint from xkcd and make sure this one never happens to you.