Books, Movies and Random Thoughts

A potentially good action film, let down by a distasteful ending.

I have never had any interest in reading Lee Childs. However, from the trailer, Jack Reacher looked like it would be a slick, well made, action film.

And for the most part it was. The performances were generally good, the script had a good combination of humour and action, the unfolding of Jack’s character worked well, and I didn’t actually figure out who the villain was.

However, I was left rather uncomfortable by Jack’s almost execution-style killings towards the end. It felt unnecessary and rather distasteful.

Favourite line/scene

Helen: Would you please put your shirt on.

Bechdal test

I think a fail. There were two female characters – Helen and Sandy – but I don’t offhand recall a scene in which they were both present, let alone spoke to each other.

Stars

2

Less would have been more.

I was about 11 years old when I read The Hobbit. Didn’t (quite) finish it, and never went back to it. Although I did read Lord of the Rings about 6 years later. (Actually, it took me three attempts to get to the end of that – I kept getting stuck in the middle of The Two Towers.)

So I went into The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey with very little foreknowledge of the plot. Except that I knew there were 13 Dwarves, and given the problem I normally have in keeping characters sorted out, I wasn’t really sure how well that would work for me.

As it turned out, they did a good enough job of making the Dwarves distinctive that I was able to pretty much keep them separate. I never did learn most of their names – I got Thorin, but the rest tended to be the fat one, the one with the funny hat, the pretty one with the bow, the big white beard, etc.

I thought Martin Freeman did a great job as Bilbo – he really does portray the ‘everyman’ type, and the reluctant-hero, well.

And I liked Richard Armitage’s Thorin. But it did seem to me (and I thought this even before seeing the film) that he didn’t really look like a Dwarf. I don’t think it’s just a matter of height – I think a fantasy-style Dwarf needs a certain physique. Not necessarily fat, but broad. Where as Thorin basically had the proportions of a tall man, shrunk down (though actually, mostly not, unless he was in the same shot as Gandalf). It was like they felt they couldn’t present him as a heroic figure if he looked like Gimli – he had to look like Aragorn. And so they then threw in a couple of younger, also slim, dwarves just so he didn’t stick out too much. Not that I’m complaining about Richard Armitage’s performance (or looks). And maybe there would have been more of a challenge in empathising with the character if he looked like Gimli. But it felt like a bit of a cop-out on the part of the filmmakers.

I saw the film in 3D, since that was the only option on the opening night in Cambridge. But the cinema wasn’t huge, and it also wasn’t set up for 48fps. So it was just regular 3D, and to be honest, I didn’t feel that it really added all that much to the experience – 2D would have been just as good. (Update: After getting back to Australia, I saw it again at the Macquarie Centre, in a bigger cinema, with 48fps. And that probably was a richer experience. Although there was no particular moment where I felt I was seeing something different, overall I had a much stronger sense of looking through a window into something real. Although since I had the same sense in Hugo - which wasn’t 48fps- maybe it was just the bigger cinema.)

I would certainly say I enjoyed the film. But I would equally certainly say that it was far too long. Aside from the opening with Frodo (a rather self-indulgent, and IMHO not really necessary, tie-in with Lord of the Rings) I don’t think there were any scenes that could have been removed in their entirety: even the singing, which I wasn’t a huge fan of, probably had its place. But some of them could probably have been cut back a fair bit. In particular, the capture-by and escape-from the goblins could certainly have been shorter.

Favourite line/scene

Would have to be the riddle scene with Gollum. It was the one scene that I actually remembered from the book – even before I read Lord of the Rings and learned that it was important – and it was very well handled in the film.

Bechdal test

Fail. I think Galadriel is the only female character with a speaking part.

Stars

3 ½ (If it had been shorter, I would have given it a 4.)

Above-average Bond film, plot holes notwithstanding.

I enjoyed Casino Royale and was disappointed by Quantum of Solace so the big question was whether Skyfall would halt the downward trend. It did. It was definitely better than Quantum.

Daniel Craig gave another fine performance as Bond. I think there is more emotional depth to his Bond than many of the previous ones (though this is as much to do with the scriptwriters as with the performance). And in Skyfall the scriptwriters have let him more-or-less break the curse of the first two films, in which every woman who was willing to sleep with him died before the end of the film. (Though there does seem to be some debate about whether he and Eve slept together – I had assumed it was a given, but it is true that one didn’t actually see it happen, and other people don’t agree with me.)

Speaking of women, there were officially two ‘Bond girls’ in this film (plus a nameless bimbo early on), but the true female lead is M. Judi Dench gets the chance to give a full, nuanced performance, and (being Judi Dench) does a great job of it.

I enjoyed Ben Whishaw’s Q – I think there is potential for a good ongoing dynamic between him and Bond. Different from Desmond Llewelyn’s, but still engaging. (I was never a fan of John Cleese as ‘R’.) Although the script does make him do at least one monumentally stupid thing for someone supposedly intelligent. Perhaps it is meant to be hubris.

The other actors were also good – Javier Bardem was particularly creepy, and I liked how the M-as-father-figure subtext from the books was reworked and explored.

I found some aspects of the plot quite predictable – in particular, the two big ‘reveals’ of the final scene, I had seen coming from much earlier in the film. Although, from the audience reaction, this was not universal. (And, in any case, the scene was still fun even with foreknowledge.)

However, there was one aspect of the plot I wasn’t convinced by. Spoiler follows I could accept that Silva’s being captured was all part of the Big Plan, and I was willing to not-ask how he overpowered the guards. But I reached a point where I could no longer accept just how many people he had in key places, and the superbly synchronised timing of it all. And especially that he knew Bond would catch up with him at just the point he had set up for the train. End spoiler.

Taken overall, however, I enjoyed the film.

Favourite line/scene

Bond is in the Tube tunnel, with Q giving him directions over the radio.

Q: There should be a service door on your left.

James Bond: Got it. It won’t open.

Q: Of course it will, put your back into it.

James Bond: Why don’t you come down here and put your back into it! No, it’s stuck. Oh good. Train’s coming.

Q: That’s vexing.

(My other favourite line was M looking at the Aston Martin and saying ‘Well, that’s inconspicuous!’)

Bechdal test

Technically a pass, although not a very meaningful one.

There are four named female characters: M, Eve, Sévérine and Clair Dowar (I didn’t actually remember her name from the film, but it was in IMDB). M and Eve speak to each other over the radio, not just about Bond; and then later M and Clair have a conversation – or rather, a confrontation – about M’s performance, which, although it does involve her handling of (male) agents, is not exactly ‘about a man’.

Stars

3 ½

It’s been quite a while since I saw a foreign-language film. Actually, we haven’t seen many films at all in the past year or so.

I very much enjoyed The Women on the 6th Floor. All the performances were good, and I loved the friendship between the women, the gradual changes in Jean-Louis, and the quirky humour.

However, I was quite disappointed by the ending. (Spoilers follow.) For one thing, I was a bit confused as to exactly what the legal status of María’s son was. I thought she said she had given him up for adoption, and when she was told he was at school, I assumed this meant it was a school chosen by his adoptive parents. And that by going there, she would get to see him, and maybe even build up some kind of relationship with him and his parents. But if that was the case, I don’t see how she could have legally regained custody of him at the end – and I also don’t see how you could drag him away from the only parents he had known. So maybe you were meant to assume that he hadn’t been adopted, and that the school was some kind of orphanage or something.

More importantly, though, I really thought that Jean-Louis would end up seeing that he was just infatuated with Maria, that he still loved his wife, and that he could change his own life if he wanted to – say, by giving up his job and moving to the country. There seemed to be hints all the way through that this would be the case. Although she was initially presented as shallow and selfish, I felt that Suzanne ended up being quite a sympathetic character – or at least, one with the potential to be sympathetic. And her statement that she was just a country-girl strongly suggested that she wasn’t necessarily going to cling on, tooth and nail, to her existence in society.

So I was very surprised when he casually mentioned at the end that they were divorced, and that she was now with an artist – that seemed to come completely from left-field. I started to wonder if they had changed their minds about the ending – or even if they had done test screenings and changed it due to audience feedback. (Though if that’s the case, I think the test audiences were Wrong.) Because I found the ending unsatisfying, and I just couldn’t believe in it.

The accepted wisdom is that the film The Golden Compass is much weaker than the original book, Northern Lights. Certainly, everything is much more obvious and unsubtle, and some nuances are missing. Having said this, however, I felt that they did a pretty good job of compressing the actual plot of the book (except for the ending – more on this later). I didn’t think that the removal of all references to the Church, to God and to sin actually detracted in this instance, though how they plan to sustain this for the later books has me baffled. Aside from the ending, I thought the single biggest problem was the scene with the intercised Billy Costa: the equivalent scene in the book (with the not-appearing-in-the-film Tony Markarios) was intensely powerful and heartbreaking, and it was somewhat emasculated in the film – particularly since Billy Costa still seemed to be alive at the end. Actually, I was a bit worried about seeing this on screen, as I thought it would be too harrowing, but by making it less disturbing, they also reduced the impact of how evil the intercision process is.

I thought all the performances were good. Actually, given the way the plot was trimmed, it was basically just Lyra and everyone else. Possibly Ian McKellen’s Iorek sounded a bit too cultured, but Sam Elliot was great as Lee Scoresby, as was Daniel Craig as Lord Asriel, Eva Green as Serafina Pekkala (for the tiny amount of screen time she got) and the rest. I had imagined that Nicole Kidman would be perfect as Mrs Coulter, but when she first spoke I got a bit of a shock – her voice sounded a bit high and “little girlish”, rather than mature and sophisticated. But she looked exactly right, and either her voice changed or I just got used to it as the film progressed.

But Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra was brilliant. I have never really been able to warm to Lyra. A bit like Jane Austen’s Emma, I have never been able to make sense of the fact that other characters in the book love her, when all I can really see as her faults. But Dakota Blue Richards finally made me see it (as Alicia Silversone did as the Emma equivalent in Clueless, but Gwyneth Paltrow completely failed to do in the big screen Emma). All of Lyra’s faults were still there – she was a liar, she was shamelessly manipulative – and yet through all that, she completely shone through as a pure and even lovable character.

The “look” of the film was great – particularly some of the early scenes with the group of children and their daemons running around, and some of Pantalaimon’s transitions from one form to another. The big battle scenes were also good: clearly riding on the coat-tails of Lord of the Rings, but then there are only so many ways you can show a battle.

So the only real problem with the film – and it’s a biggie – was the ending. I’m really not comfortable with the idea of cutting off the last few chapters, and writing a new, upbeat ending to the book.

Michael, who hasn’t read the book, found the final scene rather saccharine, and felt that it undercut what had gone before. So in at least one case, the changed ending didn’t work for someone who didn’t know any better.

But for me, knowing what was to come, the ending was neither upbeat nor even saccharine – I found it unbelievably heartbreaking. Because they think everything is alright, and it so completely isn’t. Finishing the film on Lyra’s totally optimistic – and totally wrong – understanding of what is happening just feels wrong. In fact, she is even more wrong than she was at the equivalent point in the book, since I think we are meant to assume that she will also be able to get Ratter back for Tony Costa.

So if the changed ending doesn’t necessarily work for people who haven’t read the book – and those who have will obviously know what comes next – it would surely have been better to climax with the tragedy, and then finish – as the book does – with Lyra, sadder but wiser, moving forward and making her own choices. This is not exactly a happy ending, but neither is it despairing: Lyra is no longer anybody’s puppet, and she may well achieve what she sets out to do.

Books

I read 167 books in 2007, of which 106 were re-reads and 61 were new (though of the 61, there were two I didn’t finish – Lolita and Crime and Punishment). Dividing up by category, 104 were adult fiction, 32 children’s fiction, 20 young adult fiction and 11 non-fiction. By genre, I read 55 crime/thriller and 53 SF/fantasy – though SF/fantasy is spread across all age categories, and crime/thriller was only adult books. My most read author was Agatha Christie, of whom I am slowly doing a chronological re-read – this probably also skewed the genre numbers, since slightly over half the crime/thrillers I read were Christies. There was a big drop to my second-most-read author (Donna Andrews – also crime/thriller, and also a complete re-read – with 10 books) and there were 47 authors of whom I only read one book.

Probably my favourite “discovery” for the year was Sonia Soanes – I absolutely loved her verse-novel Stop Pretending: What happened when my big sister went crazy. Though I found her other books much less gripping – Stop Pretending was a very emotional book, whereas the others were a bit more lightweight. The other young adult book I was very impressed by was Alex Flinn’s Fade to Black, and I will probably be chasing up more of her work. In the adult fiction line, I have been enjoying Amanda Grange’s diary-of-Austen-hero books, and (at the other end of the “literature” scale) I am glad to have read The Odyssey, though at times it was a bit of a struggle.

None of the other new authors I tried really grabbed me, and of the new-books-by-favourite-authors probably the one I was most pleased to get was Susan Geason’s new(ish) Syd Fish story, Hook, Line and Sinker. This isn’t actually published, but it’s available for download from her website. The new Dick Francis was very readable, but not out of this world, and I was a bit underwhelmed by the new Lois McMaster Bujold fantasy – I don’t find this particular fantasy world all that interesting, and in any case I prefer her SF books.

Films

I saw 10 films at the cinema, and another 8 or so on various planes. There were no real stand-outs, though my favourites were probably Breach (which I unaccountably failed to blog), Hot Fuzz and Music and Lyrics, with honourable mentions to Pan’s Labyrinth and No Country for Old Men – these two were probably the “best” films I saw, but Pan’s Labyrinth was rather depressing – and very violent – and No Country for Old Men didn’t quite work for me. Amazing Grace and Sunshine are also worth mentioning.

The worst film I saw was probably Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, though there was competition from 300.

Plays

I only saw 6 plays, all by the Sydney Theatre Company. The two best were Riflemind and The Art of War, and I probably got least enjoyment from The Season at the Sarsparilla and Tales from the Vienna Woods – though neither of these came even close to the awfulness of 2006′s The Lost Echo . But I’m definitely going to make an attempt to get to the theatre more often in 2008.

Somehow, No Country for Old Men didn’t quite work for me. It was very well written, and the performances were excellent. I liked the twists on standard action-film cliches, I liked the theme of random chance, I really liked some of the dialogue and the cinematography. And I thought the last few scenes, in particular, were very well done. I even found most of the characters interesting, but in the end, I just wasn’t emotionally engaged with any of them.

I’m certainly glad to have seen it, but I don’t feel any urge to see it again. I have some slight curiosity about the book, but probably not enough to actually hunt it up.

I’m not a huge Neil Gaiman fan (except for Good Omens) but when I found a copy of Stardust going cheap, I thought I might as well read it before seeing the film. In some ways, it reminded me a bit of Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, in that both books are written in a very self-consciously twee style (particularly at the beginning), and yet their purpose is really to subvert the conventions of fairy tales. While I quite enjoyed Stardust, I don’t feel that my life would be any less if I had never read it. It is probably more subversive than Howl, but I think Howl is a bit more fun.

The film of Stardust, on the other hand, is not really subversive at all. It was all very nice and pretty, and there were some fun performances (Robert De Niro, playing a part that basically didn’t appear in the book, was having just way too much fun) – but ultimately it was fairly lightweight and forgettable. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it, and I have even recommended it to people, but if it was trying to be this generation’s The Princess Bride (and I think it is), well, it just doesn’t come close.

Being completely honest, I probably preferred the film to the book – in that I’m slightly more inclined to see it a second time than I am to re-read the book. However, I think the book had more substance to it: it was deliberately playing with the genre, whereas the film was just trying to be a crowd-pleaser.

Music and Lyrics
This was pretty much a by-the-numbers romantic comedy, but I enjoyed it quite a lot. The scriptwriter knew how to write exactly the kind of dialogue that Hugh Grant delivers particularly well. It probably also helps if you have a bit of a soft spot for 80s music.

Waitress
I think maybe I was watching this one a bit too late at night, but it didn’t really work for me. It wasn’t happy enough to be a romantic comedy, nor really clever enough to be quirky and interesting. I guess “bittersweet” is possibly the best description – and quite likely what they were trying for – but for some reason it didn’t quite make it. I think I just couldn’t care enough about the characters to really see the point of it all.

Shrek the Third
Not unfunny, but rather underwhelming and fairly forgettable. Not a patch on the first one, and probably a step down from the second as well.

The Last Mimzy
Very much a Disneyfied version of the short story “Mimzy were the Borogoves”. Some of the same central ideas, but thematically quite different as it was turned into a kids’ adventure (the original short story was NOT aimed at children). Mildly pleasant, but not particularly inspired.

Ocean’s Thirteen
The mixture as before. And for me, even Ocean’s Eleven had too many characters.

Spider-Man 3
It had some okay moments, but there were too many different plot threads happening, so none of them was explored as well as they might have been.

Amazing Grace
I really enjoyed this. I know pretty much nothing about William Wilberforce, but I found the story well presented and quite comprehensible. I thought they did a good job of covering the timeframe, but still maintaining the character focus (in other films covering a long period of time, it often seems like they are so busy fitting in all the events they don’t give you a chance to connect with the characters). I was even able to keep all the secondary characters sorted out (though I was probably helped in this by the fact that I recognised almost all the actors from other British costume dramas).

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
The whole film seemed to consist of everyone setting and resetting double- and triple-crosses to serve their own agendas. Which is fine as far as it goes, but isn’t really enough of a story to carry the whole film. Not that there weren’t some fun moments, but the franchise has completely lost the freshness of the first film.

I first read Becoming Jane Austen after Penny Gay recommended it during a talk to the Jane Austen Society of Australia. I found it an engaging biography, particularly in the picture it painted of how Jane the young scribbler evolved into Austen the professional author. (One of the points Penny had made was that Spence looks at how Austen began referring to her writing as her “work”). I also enjoyed thinking about the idea that Elizabeth and Darcy could have been inspired by Tom Lefroy and Jane herself – but with Tom’s traits going into Elizabeth, and Jane’s into Darcy. On reflection, I decided I wasn’t totally convinced, but it was still a fascinating line of thought.

I also found his suggestion that Jane and Tom may have met again in London interesting – the evidence he presented was certainly suggestive, if not absolutely convincing.

However, I was emphatically not convinced by the suggestion that every one of Austen’s novels references a Tom Jones character, and this is a link to Tom Lefroy. After all, Tom Jones has a large cast of characters, and there is such a thing as coincidence. I was left with a sneaking suspicion that if one tried, one could also find links to character names from – to randomly select another long 18th century novel – Tristram Shandy. And towards the end of the book, I started to be bothered by the fact that Spence presented assupmtions and suppositions, but using language that implied they were proven fact.

In spite of this, though, I enjoyed the book enough to put in a Christmas present request for it, and I re-read it with pleasure.

The film of Becoming Jane, though …

Well, I suppose it was pleasant enough, and the actors did a nice job, but it really didn’t have anything much to do with the book. At times I felt that Spence was stretching in his assumptions, but at least he did start from – and remain basically consistent with – known facts. The film just made stuff up. It took a few character types from Jane Austen’s novels, trimmed off most of the things that makes them good and interesting, and presented a fairly bland and conventional romance (except without a happy ending). And the storyline, which had started off with a vague connection to (one chapter of) Spence’s book, suddenly took a radical divergence into complete fiction. I tend to think they should have either stuck vaguely with the known facts – or reasonable extrapolations from them – or else done a film in the style of Shakespeare in Love, which is clearly unrealistic. Or – if they really found Jane Austen’s life so boring that it had to be spiced up with an elopement – maybe they should have considered not making the film at all?

But I am glad I got Spence’s book in hardcover, before the film came out – otherwise I would have had to face the dilemma of deciding whether I wanted to own it enough to put up with the film-inspired cover of the paperback.