The Brave One (Neil Jordan, 2008)

I am a sucker for cheap DVDs, and since I am now two minutes from ASDA, I was an easy target for one of their special offers the day before yesterday. I have almost completely gone off the cinema these days. I quite like being to pause for a drink, or a think, and I quite like a bit of personal space when I watch a film. My TV watching is now in sharp descent: on average, 10 mins a day last week.

I only buy DVDs in stores like ASDA (I am rather surprised to be told by Wikipedia that ASDA is a sort of acronym originating in the merger of Associated Dairies & Farm Stores Limited – 1949 - and two other firms which began with the letters AS in 1965. I don’t believe everything I read in Wikipedia, but it is thought by many to be more reliable than Britannica) if they contain reliable actors, and since Jodie Foster is certainly in that category, I nabbed The Brave One for a few quid and a night in.

The Brave One is incontrovertibly one of the least imaginative titles ever given to a film, wouldn’t you say? I have tried thinking up duller titles, but even the most anaemic sounded more interesting. As a film, it’s no great shakes, but with Foster in it, it is highly watchable. I don’t quite know what it is about Foster: probably the usual skill of the great film actor, of understatement. She often plays women who look vulnerable but have nerves of tungsten. I also admire Foster as a woman who has almost completely evaded the celebrity circuit. The plot is morally only a couple of steps above Death Wish: it’s a revenge film, in which the central character acts as a vigilante. The bad guys are therefore very, very bad – uncharacterised thugs, at the disposal of the plot, such as it is. It involves a fair amount of shooting, but the Foster character has a chance to show off her voice in that she plays a woman who roams New York at night to make city documentaries for a radio station: some nice monologues in the hard-boiled, mildly poetic style.

Jodie Foster in 'The Brave One'

 I wouldn’t want to give away the plot, other than to say that it involves the killing of her partner at an early stage, and a faintly unlikely alliance with the cop who is searching for the perpetrator of various violent crimes. On Imdb, the internet movie database, there is quite a spat about the film between someone who failed to put ’spoiler’ in a posting which read ‘Enough loopholes to drive a truck through’, and those who read the post and found that the plot was given away. But complaining about coincidence and improbabilities in a film like this is pointless. You might as well say that Hardy’s novels are a bit too dependent on chance. Of course they are. I just placed my brain in neutral, and enjoyed Foster’s very intense acting. If movies were placed on Earth for anything, it wasn’t to be believed in.

And besides, the direction and camerawork are steady, clean, and not given to the constant, infuriating jumps which beset a lot of US films. I didn’t wonder who was whom at any stage. And there was a surpising bonus in the shape of a Sarah McLachlan song over the credits, called ‘Answer’. I usually find SM a bit saccharin, but I had bought the album with the song on it for the unprincely sum of £3.50 within an hour of the DVD coming to an end.

So: £7 worth of retail therapy. Not much to complain about, all in all. Go for it.

Light bulbs and the inner Stalinist

I actually wonder if I should rename this blog ‘The Inner Stalinist’. Don’t get me wrong, I love my new house, and I love being back in the North. Every day there’s a new twist of phrase, a new jump of logic, which is quintessentially North-Eastern. It is definitely true that they – we! – talk more to each other. It took me ten years in a Devon village to feel accepted in the post office. Here, I’m already best mates with the chemist, for heaven’s sake.

I’ve never lived in a nearly-new house before, and, while it is true that, by and large, everything works, the one thing that is new to me – the series of things that are new to me – are the light-bulbs. The houses I know in Devon have only two or three types – screw-in, bayonet and that new-fangled energy-saver which is, let’s be frank, dimmer than the stub of a second-hand candle, and not so well-designed. King Alfred himself would have given it no house room.

But here, it’s all halogen. I haven’t counted, but there must be between thirty and forty of the little blighters. They last of course, for ten years. How old is the house? Er, ten years. So they are doing the final winking act on me, which means laying in a store.

I am now going to give you Exhibit A. I can’t be bothered with B, the one that says you mustn’t touch the bulb when you put it in (eh?). I’ll just open and close the case with what’s in my kitchen ceiling, several times over. Here it is:

Now let me be clear. I have nothing against the makers. You can get this gizmo from more than one supplier – on the internet. It’s hexagonal and putting it in requires balancing on a chair and fiddling with a spring. It is as bright as the proverbial button. But it is hexagonal. Where’s the sense in that? I know that bulbs need not be bulbous (is that why they are called bulbs: I guess so). But hexagonal? For goodness sake!

Bulbs are now on my list of things I would like the new government to get straight. One sort, please, like plugs. There is no need for designers to give us infinite choice on the bulb front.

Incidentally, you know, I think the Tories might yet lose the election. Why? Because people get bored easily, and I think they may be bored of the certainty of change. This does not mean I think I know who will win. I think there will be no winner.

Private Property (Nue Propriete) – Lafosse (2006)

I’ve returned to my little Huppert obsession (this seems to be the time of year when Amazon clears out its world cinema DVDs). I can see I have my work cut out keeping up with her career after starting so late on it (she is the same age as me, which is a bit of a surprise, but then I was asked yesterday, as a security question for some institution or other, how old I would be next birthday, and I have to tell you, I didn’t believe it. No wonder my beard is white).

Private Property, directed and co-written by Joachim Lafousse, must be one of her best films. Unless I have stumbled across an errant batch of her movies, Huppert is generally called upon to play women who are possessed of extraordinary stillness, either because they are depressed, psychotic, or phlegmatic. Or maybe that’s just the way she plays them all. But her enigmatic presence is always highly articulate, which is to say, the less she speaks, the more she seems to express: the mark of a very fine actor (only Eastwood and Jeff Bridges and perhaps Jodie Foster have it, of the American stars). This is also an excellent film, intimate, and also intense.

Isabelle Huppert in 'Private Property'

Huppert plays Pascale, who has brought her twin sons up after a divorce, and who has a slightly uninhibited realtionship with them – nothing major, but close enough for instance to take a shower in their presence without any batting of eyelids. It becomes clear that the boys – played by actors who are brothers, incidentally – are slightly spoiled, emotionally by Pascale, and financially by their father. Pascale has a secret lover, Jan, and wants to sell her house. The revelation of this brings out the worst in one of the brothers, but also pits the brothers against each other and their mother. The consequences of this hostility are sudden and disturbing, and the film does not attempt to give us a tidy resolution.

What I like about this film is that the narrative is apparently slight, but has a force that verges on the emotional – achieved (as it always is), by the actors under-playing their roles. And no-one under-plays like the loudly impassive Huppert. Every movement she makes is casual, believable, and also, one suspects, the effect of long consideration. If there is a problem with Private Property, it is that Huppert acts everyone else off the screen.

That the film deals with a closed circle, and uses a small cast, is also a strength. We get to know them well. the father is a bit too obviously worried that his sons will neglect him. The sons are as similar as they are different, ganging up against the world as well as fighting each other. They are both slightly unpleasant at times but also vulnerable, and, as in the mother-child relationship, oddly close (bathing  together at the age of eighteen, for isntance). None of the characters is allowed to be completely sympathetic. Huppert is quite brilliant at both attracting and repelling sympathy, at confusing the viewer by remaining almost completely emotionless in a way that suggests powerful emotion. It’s her film, in the end. You feel it wouldn’t have worked quite so well without her.

The ‘ownership’ or property of the title refers more directly in the French to the ownership of the house being passed from father to sons, and the title therefore has more resonance than in English. But everyone in this film has a slice of everyone else: that is its skill.

Why Chemical Ali should not hang

Ali Hassan Abd al-Majid al-Tikritieh is better known as ‘Chemical Ali’, and he will be hanged shortly, having been sentenced to death for a fourth time in Iraq. His crimes are amongst the most sensationally horrible: they include the responsibility for gassing about 5000 Kurdish civilians: the image of the scattered dead in the Kurdish region of Iraq is one of the most appalling I’ve ever seen. He is also responsible for countless other deaths, of erstwhile colleagues, of fellow-countrymen. His guilt is not in question, as such.

Hanginging him will be a ritual of revenge, whether it takes place behind closed doors, or is captured, as was his cousin’s hanging, by mobile camera-phones. It will bring pleasure and a sense of justice done to those relatives of his victims who have cursed him. But once you have subscribed to the drug of revenge, once you have taken pleasure in handing out its bitter pills, then the executions which follow will have a persistent resonance in the world, and the echo will eventually be used as a kind of justification to kill someone who is entirely innocent. The moment of pleasure it affords the watchers will dissipate; it will simply reinforce the idea that it is okay to kill someone.

It isn’t just that there are got-off-scot-free murderers still on the planet. Most governments have illegal blood on their hands, by proxy at best. Nor do I believe in forgiveness as an argument. Forgiveness is a luxury which human beings have not really earned. Nor will my inherent pacifism do any good in the short, medium, or even long term. New Chemical Alis are being nurtured everywhere, every day.

Who manufactured the nerve gas? Who sold the nerve gas? Who first thought of it as a weapon? Who brought about the circumstances which led Ali Hassan Abd al-Majid al-Tikritieh to have such crazy power?

I just don’t believe in execution. It is the fool’s gold of the political classes. Somewhere, someone will take heart from his execution, and seek to revenge it, in ten, twenty, thirty years. That much is inevitable.

Going from A to B by train

There are many pernicious legacies of the Thatcher era, as of course there are of the Major years (complaining and blaming) and Blair (false sentiment and jargon), but for my money, the worst of MT’s legacies can be experienced when you try to buy a train ticket from A to B. Or anywhere else, come to that.

Let us assume that you wish to travel from Exeter to Manchester to Darlington and back to Exeter (as my children do, which is a relief). Because they are going to Manchester, why not nip over and say hello to the father who has escaped their southerly clutches? As many of you will have spotted, the first problem is that they are going back on a different line from the one on which they came: so a return ticket is going to be no help. And so a game begins. Were you to go to a station, you would be given a fairly fearsome sum to pay, so you go to an online service – let us say ‘thetrainline’, although there are others – and you start trying to manufacture the mot convenient but cheapest passage.  The variation is quite considerable, and of course the online service has a finite supply of tickets, which dwindles daily. You can find a price for a stage of the route only to find it’s been snapped up when you go back.

But the new game is really mind-bending. If say you want to go from Darlington to Exeter, there may be only highly priced fares. But if nyou go from Darlington to Birmingham and then Birmingham to Exeter, you may get two very cheap tickets for two stages on the same train. In fact, the more you break the journey into stages, the more the chances are you can slash literally hundreds of pounds from your journey. But it takes hours to work out. It is one of the consequences of the splitting of the railway into competitive bits. It is lunatic. And, while you are doing it, unless you are very sound of mind, you will probably make a slip (I did – I had to waste some time on the phone to make sure I could pick up all the tickets, which will require 30-40 taps of numbers into a machine, from the same place. And even now, I think I missed a trick. I might have been able to get part of the journey as a return. Damn.

Paradoxically, the cheapest option also includes travelling part of the way first class. That is heart-wrenchingly, brain-numbingly, nostril-baitingly mad. But that’s ‘Choice’ for you. I am against Choice. One sort of car, one sort of building, one ring to bind them all, and one way of getting a ticket at a fixed price: that’s my, er, platform.

Dinner For One

I haven’t seen this sketch before, but was sent a link to it by a friend. It’s one of those mysteries: a British sketch that is venerated (as it has been for nearly forty years) in Europe, from Sweden to Slovenia, and as much part of the Christmas/ New Year season as Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman is here, but one which has never been shown on British TV. The star, Freddie Frinton, who performed the sketch so often that he bought the sketch from the writer, only really made an impression on television audiences at the end of his life (he died at the age of 59) in a sit-com called Meet The Wife (the first show to magnify Thora Hird’s reputation on the small screen, and popular enough in 1966-67 or so for John Lennon to name-check it on a song – ‘Good Morning’ – on the Sgt Pepper album).

As far as I can make out, he recorded it twice – and this version, which I can’t find for looking on YouTube, and can’t work out the instructions to show you the Daily Motion version without your clicking on the link below, is the better of the two (better camera angle, better audience, and a bit more comic business. I think it’s a Swiss recording).  Frinton was usually cast as as sort of Andy Capp figure, but (as is often remarked) he was a teetotaller. You probably have to be, to do such a great stage drunk act. This one is funnier than Chaplin’s classic One A.M. from that point of view, if necessarily less athletic.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5zld2_diner-pour-un-humour-anglais

You can see from the web-link title that this is considered ‘English humour’. All the evidence is that it’s international. Does he circumnavigate the table thirteen or fourteen times? I laugh so much I can’t keep track.

P.S. If you are interested in coincidences, this blog entry was composed on a Saturday afternoon, and timed to appear on Sunday. Exactly ten hours later, an extract from ’Dinner For One’ was shown on the trivia quiz-show QI. Two of the contestants had never heard of it. Jo Brand knew it was Freddie Frinton. I watched no television during the day except between 1645 and 1700 (Chelsea 7, Sunderland 2, all right, all right), and between 2325 and 2335, which was when the extract was shown.

Changing patterns

It is duly addictive, after eight years of working from home, to have a place of work to which to go. I don’t regret any of the last eight years, in which I have been (mostly) working from home. To accomplish this, I had to pretend that one room did not exist. I could follow the crooked route from my workspace to the kitchen and back, sedulously avoiding the front room. You get used to it. You rejoice in it. But now driving 30-40 minutes to work, most days, seems like a luxury. On the way I pass the sign to Sunderland. Tempting to divert to my childhood, but nice just to know that it is there.

The office is open plan. This doesn’t suit everyone in the world, but it suits me very well. In my past life I had an office to go to. After a while, and to the chagrin of my boss, I had a wall taken down, so that I was accessible. I think I did it on the basis that a Principal (I’m not one!) in Birmingham had dispensed with his office. Privacy at work is partly over-rated, and a bit lonely.

There are flukes and flukes. Who would have guessed that, like my father, I would have changed my career at 49, and that like my father, picked up a new permanent job in my late fifties? Is this genetic or an odd coincidence (bizarrely, I can look across the Tyne to where he re-located himself, too).

The only hard thing is not being able to summon up my lost parents and say ‘Hey! I came back!’ – fifteen minutes away is my mother’s former home. She would have been surprised. More surprising is that the family who now own her house applied for a new number – and got hers. So my mother’s house (still in my phone) can still be called by the same number as 1955. I have never actually heard of this happening to anyone. It adds to the mystery of moving on and moving back in the same breath.

What next? How lucky can I be?

Tribulations and installations

“Just trust me on this,” he said. That’s when I knew he was talking rubbish.

My computer had been acting up for about twelve weeks, switching itself off when my back was turned, that sort of thing, and I had been doing my best to pretend it was just a hiccup. I thought it might be the power cable, or something to do with the power, but deep down I knew what it might be. The mother-board. Why have they given the operational part of a computer a gender? What’s that about? Anyway: mumsy or not, it was on the blink, and heigh-ho, time for the fourth computer of my career.

Getting a new computer raises the simple question of how you are going to get the stuff – no other word for it – off the old computer. I am a reasonably salty old hand at this, and back almost everything up. But you can’t back up those wizzy free programs you find occasionally on the net, which enable you to make very surprising translations from one sort of file to another. You may be getting a new machine (which is more powerful and less expensive than the previous one, as is the way), but you are still going to have to load up those programs. And that means, in my case, that I will have a run-in with the AOL help-line. Many of the advisers they employ are charming, but they must, let’s face it, spend their time talking to people who don’t know a mouse from a memory-stick, and they can therefore get tetchy. And if I can’t understand them, and have taught and worked online for fifteen years, what hope is there for the others?

AOL sent me, when I moved, a new disc, with an instruction to instal it. Since I was still using the faulty machine (which worked perfectly when it wasn’t not working, if you see what I mean), I couldn’t see the point of this. So I rang the helpline. “No, no, no need to instal it,” they said. So I didn’t. But today, faced with a new machine, it seemed to me that I should use the thing. I knew that today would involve a run-in with AOL: I told my neighbour, in fact, as we exchanged chat over shovels of snow (his).

The first helpliner was very good. He got me c onnected to the internet, courtesy of my new disc. Just as I put the phone down on him (5p a minute), I realised I hadn’t asked the question I really wanted to ask: how do you move your emails, the old ones, yes all right the ones you are almost certainly never going to look at again, from the old machine to the new? I had got ahead of the game on this one. When the old machine started getting very rickety, I saved what I thought was the PFC (Personal Filing Cabinet) to a spare external drive, ready for transfer. I had to ring back. The second helpliner said that what I needed to do was easy. All I had to do was to find the file ‘Organize’ on the new machine, and paste in the stuff I’d saved.

But there was no file called ‘Organize’ (or ‘Organise’, in case you’re wondering). After a heated half-an-hour, in which the gist was that I must be mad, he rang off, or was possibly disconnected after excessive time with a customer. I sat back. I rang again. The third helpliner was well-schooled in charm. Could he call me Bill? Yes indeed. But he worked out that the disc I had been sent contained a vastly inferior version of AOL – a sort of AOL lite – which was not able to produce the conditions for transferring all those emails. “Only one chance,” he said. “Uninstal the AOL,” he said, “and then connect through Internet Explorer, and download the proper AOL.’” So, I said, I need to connect through the DialBB to the internet (don’t ask). “NO! NO! NO!” he said (’said’), and then accused me of switching on the machine. He was right. “I SAID NOT FOR 15 MINUTES!” he yelled. “JUST TRUST ME ON THIS!”

I had a cup of tea. I hope he did. He was asking me to connect to the internet without an internet connection, to download a new AOL system, so that I might – might – be able to rescue those emails. It made no sense.

I went back, switched on, connect via DialBB, went online without so much as a by-your-leave, and downloaded the AOL programs. And then I had a look in the depths of the C: drive (‘Don’t come in here unless you know what you’re doing!”) for anything resembling what I took to be my colossal cache of old messages. Deep breath. I pasted them in.

I wonder if I should start a call centre. I’ll call it ‘Just Trust Me’. It is a joy to beat an expert, and made the next nine hours of putting discs in and watching as they slowly loaded almost palatable.

Taxi-drivers in the North East

They’re great. I’ve managed to knacker my arm with all the unpacking (that parcel tape is too tough), but have also decided to lord it a bit while I settle into my new adoptive town (where, bizarrely, in B&Q, I worked out that I was standing on what had been my great-great-great-grandfather’s land).

Taxi-drivers offer you a better insight than most into places. They generally start out with me on Devon (‘That must be a nice place’) only to join in when I say I prefer Darlington. (People who are born in Darlington never call it ‘Darlo’; people born outside Darlington, even if they have moved into the town, do.) My favourite taxi-driver line so far was a snippet of life history, and it went like this: ‘I have four sisters ten years older than me, and they’ve all got Geordie accents. I hate it. (Big pause, even by Pinter’s standard’s.) I wanted a Geordie accent, but my parents moved to Darlington.’

Darlington is as far south as you can go without being from Yorkshire. For that reason it has just a little of the Yorkshire market town about it, which I like, but a distinctively Durham voice. Another thing I like about Darlington is that it has no university, which means it jad none of the airs and graces which most other places of comparable size possess. It is what it is.

Most remarkably (although apparently there are a couple of others) it still has a Binns – now should I put an apostrophe in there? Was the founder Mr. Binn or Mr. Binns? As a child, all the buses in Sunderland had ‘Shop at Binns’ painted onto their exterior, so that any senseless child like me would assume that the shop had the power of a bus company. Possibly the most successful advertising trick I’ve ever seen. Binns has long gone from Sunderland, where it was the place to shop (you could walk under the main shopping street, Fawcett Street, from one department to another). But whenever you asked anyone about the war, they always recalled the worst raid on Sundrland as ‘the night Binns was bombed’. The one in Darlington, like any other, is part of the ubiquitous House of Frazer, but – so I was told today – there is an architectural ban on putting up a sign other than Binns. Quite right too.

About that apostrophe. The answer is No.

A moving story

Moving house is what I imagine Purgatory to be like: a state of limbo in which one is forced only to imagine what blessings await, while suffering the torments of the damned – the damned sticky tape, the damned carboard boxes, the damned bin-bags of rubbish, the odd discovery that one has bought the same book perhaps four or five times, the wistful thought that there is no chance of my listening to all my music now, even if I tried.

I did two heroic things. One was to cut my reel-to-reel collection down by a colossal 75% on the basis that I now have its contents in at least three other formats. The really big achievement, which was like a huge weight being lifted from my shoulders, was to keep the DVD recorder running for five weeks, at the end of which, thirteen or so crates of video had been reduced to one small box of labelled discs. The two unheroic things I did were to hang on to my other 25% reel-to-reels, and also to keep a great deal of what I had spent years videotaping.

And I threw or gave away about 300 books.

And I ripped out my contributions to magazines and newspapers, and threw the actual copies away.

And I threw away almost all my music magazines.

No wonder there is so much space in the new house. It is quite eerie.

One of the removal men was a terrific man in his forties with a bright red Mohican, and a very unusual line in waggish irony (not normally a Devonian trait). He had a number of lines, but my favourite was his standard response to the same frequent request which was made of him by the others.

Other man: Could you give me a lift?

Wag: I’ve never seen you look as good as you do today.