Three lads on a quest (The Quest, 2002)

The Quest (2002) [D: D. Jason. David Jason,  Hewell Bennett, Roy Hudd] Coming of age story shown as a flashback beginning when Charlie rear-ends Dave at a stop light. He invites Dave to his retirement party, at which Ronno, the third of the “three musketeers” also shows up. This sets off a round of reminiscences of their trip up north to the Lake District on motorbikes, in search of girls. It’s Charlie, the shy, soft-spoken one, who gets a girl, or rather, she gets him, but she rejects him later when he persuades the other two to go to Blackpool where she lives. A nicely done study of horny adolescent males. The girls are of course much wiser, and know perfectly well how to handle the lads. The movie ends with the men leaving a pub and agreeing to get together again.
     Part two begins with Charlie receiving a phone call from Sondra, an old flame. He’s on a ladder fixing the roof, and falls. When Dave and Ronno visit him in the hospital, we see the flash back to the lads’ trip to the Isle of Man, this time to ride the TTC course. But Charlie really wants to find Sondra, whose mother has other plans for her daughter and has forbidden the romance. This part is much piecier than the first one, there’s no solid central narrative line, things just happen. Charlie of course discovers that Sondra isn’t really interested in him, in fact she’s a little tart, but a nice beauty pageant contestant takes an interest in him, etc. When that episode falls apart, three older women pick up the boys, but the desired rendezvous is kiboshed by the landlady of the B&B at which the women are staying. So that’s that.
     There’s a part three, which I don’t have. I recorded these two parts on VHS years ago from TVO. I’m tossing the tapes, but decided to see what was in this one. If you like mildly amusing, nostalgia-inducing movies, you’ll probably like The Quest. It’s resolutely male point of view is unusual. **½
    

A Stale Raisin

    M. C Beaton. Agatha Raisin and the Curious Curate (2003) A potboiler, written in a flat, unobtrusive style, better plotted than narrated, with cardboardy characters just colourful enough to carry the plot. Even Agatha Raisin fans will find this tale below average. The plot is about the only thing that kept me turning the pages.
The new curate, Rev. Tristan Delon, is too beautiful for words, and a narcissistic charmer who specialises in separating susceptible women from their money. He gets his comeuppance, as does his murderer, who is as nasty a piece of work as Tristan himself. Agatha’s new neighbour, a crime story writer, helps her detect, but the spark is missing, and he leaves the village at the end of the story. Enough twists to keep you guessing, perfunctory updating of various back stories and tying up of loose ends. I think the series is wearing Beaton down. Her forte is comedy and cheerful satire, but there’s not much of that on offer here. *½

Not really about trains

     Louis L’Amour. North to the Rails (1971) Tom Chantry comes West to buy cattle for his future father-in-law. His father was killed many years ago, after which his mother moved East, and raised him as an anti-gun pacifist. First thing: Tom fights a guy and wins: he’s trained as a boxer. He buys the cattle and starts north with French Williams as his trail boss. But meanie outlaws, just plain mean men, and sneaky thieves of one kind or another interfere. There’s also a cousin of Williams who wants the money; she teams up with two especially nasty types. Tom fights a Kiowa, but doesn’t kill him, and later his father’s history with the Kiowa adds to his winning hand. Anyhow, the tale ends with a gunfight, and great gobs of poetic justice.
     Not L’Amour’s best work, but a well crafted entertainment that any fan of Westerns will like. Chantry drives his herd to the railhead, which has moved further west, which will improve his profits **½

Canadian Satire: Barbed Lyres, 1990

     Barbed Lyres: Canadian Venomous Verse (1990) Foreword by Margaret Atwood. This Magazine asked readers ro write satirical verses, and this book is one of the results. The verses in it for the most part express annoyance rather than venom, but the standard of both content and form is high. An example relevant to the current US Presidential election:
     Of Brian and Ronnie and Free Trade
     How wonderful his breath must smell
     From his bid to be famous
     He sold our nation straight to hell
     And kissed old Ronnie’s anus
              (S. Piatkowski, Ottawa)
     Found in the Sault Ste Marie library’s book sale for $1. A keeper. ****

A Water Landing (Sully, 2016)

     Sully (2016) [D: Clint Eastwood. Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart et al].

     Chesley Sullenberger landed American Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson River after losing both engines to a birdstrike shortly after take-off. The movie is built around the Aviation Safety Board hearing into the “crash” (Sully insists it was a “water landing”), presented as attempting to show that a return to LaGuardia was possible, which would imply that instead of being a hero, Sully was a fool. The film convinces us he was a hero. Or rather, that he was a man. He didn’t want to die, so he did the best he could do, and it worked.
     Excellent reconstructions of the crash, nice flashbacks into Sully’s 40-year flying career (beginning with his flying lessons as a teenager), believable characterisations of men and women who just do their job. The cross-cutting between past and present, indoors and out, in the plane and on the ground, hearing rooms and streets, the hotel and Sully’s home, heighten tension: We know that all 155 people on the plane survived, that Sully was vindicated, but the movie still engages us so thoroughly that for a while we feel that things could turn out very badly indeed. Hanks respects the character he plays.
     Simulation of the event is available on on YouTube:
     Watch the movie in a theatre if possible. ***½

Century-old view of the Earth

     Joh. Georg Rothaug. Vaterländischer Geographischer Schulatlas (ca. 1913) Authorised by the Imperial-Royal Ministry for Culture and Education in December 1912. The maps show the pre-World War 1 boundaries, the aerial views were taken from balloons. Part one is a general introduction to maps and geography, part two is a series of maps beginning with Austria, part 3 is an appendix showing the “principal races” of the world. There’s also a diagram of the planetary system (no Pluto) and of the starry sky as seen from the median latitude of Austria-Hungary.
     The binding is falling apart, many of the pages are loose, and a Birnecker Gottfried has written his name in several places. A very well-used volume, no doubt serving as reference work even after the Empire collapsed.
The colour printing is outstanding, the maps are very well drawn. Comparison with modern maps shows that in 1912 railways still mattered more than roads. A fascinating look at how Austria saw itself 100 years ago. ***

Catherine Aird. Last Respects (1982)

Catherine Aird.  Last Respects (1982) A body floats in the estuary of the Calle River, but the man was dead before he was dropped in the water. Aird tells a leisurely tale of Det. Insp. Sloan’s investigation, with nicely sketched characters and settings, and four or five plot-threads converging neatly in the end. One of the blurbs accurately claims Aird’s “witty aside and funny riposte are her forté”. I enjoyed this well-crafted entertainment. The Sloan novels (there are about 20 of them) would make a nice series of one-hour TV shows. Or two-hour ones if the adapters wanted to elaborate on all the back-story hints and red herrings thoughtfully supplied by Aird. ***

Art & Artists (reference book)

Peter and Linda Murray. A Dictionary of Art and Artists (1960) Just what the title says, and a good reference if you want to know about European and US art. A mass of obscure painters mentioned, good definitions and discussions of technical art terms. Based on other reference works, and shows the limitations of 2nd hand research. Heavy on medieval and renascence art, light on anything post-1800. Should be titled “A Dictionary of European and US art to 1950". As such it could be worth keeping, but a quick test shows that online information is as good if not better. **

How to spoil a good story (Matilda)

      Matilda [D: Matthew Warchus. Book by Dennis Kelly, Music by Tim Minchin, based on the novel by Roald Dahl. With Hannah Levinson, Dan Chameroy, Paula Brancati, et al.] A good play spoiled by flashing lights and sudden noise, and extremely average music played very loudly. The acting ranged from competent to very good, the dance sets were cliched but well done, the set designs and lighting were created to maximise the wow-factor. Overall the production was less concerned with telling a good story than with astonishing the audience. I have no idea whether it succeeded with the other patrons, it did not succeed with me.
     In short, impressive, but not in a good way. Pity, since Matilda is one of Dahl’s better stories. It shows how the imagination and a couple of engaged adults can foster the resilience of a neglected child. Dahl knows that a happy ending is unlikely, but he gives us one anyhow. *½

Early Allingham: Mystery Mile (1930)

     Margery Allingham. Mystery Mile (1930) A very early Campion story, quite melodramatic, with disappearances, a Moriarty-type criminal master-mind, multiple deceptions, fisticuffs, night-time excursions, and limited characterisation. The evil guy suffers poetically just drowning while stuck in the mud. There’s a fire, too, but it’s mostly stink-bomb and smoke-screen. Love and justice triumph. What more could you want? Well, a fully realised Campion, for a start. The later Allinghams are much better than this one. The title refers to a village on a mist-shrouded peninsula, barely connected to the mainland by a narrow causeway, and surrounded by tidal flats and mud. A must for Allingham fans, recommended for students of early-20th century crime fiction, but at best a curiosity for anyone else. *½

Why does the US seem so small?

Just heard the phrase “the vastness of our land” applied to Canada. Which made me wonder, Why does the USA seem so small?

Short answer: The USA is a patchwork of different cultures. Driving though the USA feels like driving through different countries. Michigan just doesn’t feel the same as Arkansas. Texas is its own place, and then some (they are the politest drivers anywhere, by the way). But driving across Canada, at least from Ontario west, I feel that every place is Canada. One reason, I think, is that the language varies very little from east to west, while in the USA the language varies in all directions. So we don’t hear the differences that a traveller across the USA hears.

Why are the regions of the USA so different, while those of Canada are not? Short answer: settlement patterns, and political and economic history. But to expand on that would take more space (and more detailed knowledge) than I have.

Home is for Homicide (book review)

    Joan Hess, ed. Malice Domestic 9 (2000) A pleasant series of short stories illustrating the dictum that the bosom of the family is a nest of vipers. This one pays homage to Agatha Christie, with always affectionate and sometimes quite funny pastiches or allusions. There are a few touches of Ruth Rendell, too, as in The Murder at the Vicarage, whose narrator falls for the new vicar, who hasn’t married because he hasn’t met the right woman yet. This raises the hopes of several other swoony, broody females. The narrator expects that their discovery that they were all handmaidens who would never achieve their dreams would cause them to abandon the man, but instead they kill him.
     All the plots are fair, the characters just off-kilter enough that we accept them as plausible victims and murderers, and the writing competently adapted to the writer’s intentions. A good book for a plane ride. **½

How to Play Hamlet

 

Book covers of Hamlet assume specific interpretations of the play.

     Hamlet: Two introductions. Back in ye Olden Days of Gold, school and college text producers took literature seriously. They asked academics for introductions, intended to prepare scholars for the treats that awaited them, to prime them to have the conventional responses and ideas about the books. I recently read two intros to Hamlet, and both display the writer’s certainty that his interpretations are the right ones. Both include orotund exclamations about Shakespeare’s genius and Hamlet’s philosophical world-weariness and such. Sentences that I can see an industrious student quoting, and attributing in carefully constructed footnotes.
      I don’t have the name of the person who wrote the introduction to the Canadian edition of the Swan Shakespeare. (Published in the 1950s) It begins with a Life, goes on to consider the Elizabethan Stage, and Shakespeare and the Renaissance Spirit, which the writer claims is best seen in Hamlet. There is a brief discussion of Elizabethan language, a great help to the naive reader I think. The writer takes it for granted that Shakespeare is the greatest writer and Hamlet his greatest work. I suspect that the Renaissance was his field of study, for he says about Hamlet, his love of philosophy, his student’s mind, his melancholy, his trust in “capability and god-like reason”, his frequent references to classical myth, his love of music... remind one irresistibly of Leonardo [da Vinci] at the court of Ludovico of Milan... show he was a Renaissance Man. Well, maybe so, but don’t expect a high school senior or a college freshman to get anything out of this encomium, apart from labels of Renaissance traits.
     G. S. Gordon of Magdalene College edits the Clarendon (Oxford) Shakespeare (1912). His introduction focuses on the text, which exists in a bad first quarto, a reasonably good second quarto (reprinted several times), and the Folio, which omits some quarto material, and adds new lines. It is Shakespeare’s longest play, which in itself raises puzzles about how to think about the extended text. Was it ever acted at this length in Shakespeare’s day? To what extent does it represent Shakespeare’s and his acting company’s intentions? Impossible to say.
     Gordon’s take on the text is that it developed as the Company played it over many years. He approaches it as a script. It was very popular in its day, which suggests that the Folio text represents the final version(s). He points out, for example, that the variations in the Queen’s speeches in her interview with Hamlet affect how we answer questions about her possible complicity in the murder of her husband. A good point, and Gordon refers to Shakespeare’s “remodelling” of several scenes of the play.
     It’s not always clear whether he’s thinking about how Shakespeare reworked the older version of the play, or how he reworked his own version. But his focus on the craft of script-writing is welcome: most school- and college-text criticism discusses the plays as a text to be read, not as scripts to be acted. Still, he doesn’t go all the way, and still betrays a prejudice in favour of reading over acting.
     I think the focus on reading the text has for several generations been a weakness in Shakespeare criticism. The question is not, “How do we interpret the characters?” but “How should we play them?” Instead of asking whether the Queen suspected her husband was murdered,  I would ask, “How would you act the Queen if you think of her as suspecting (or not suspecting)  that Claudius killed his brother?” The answer is not obvious. If we assume that the Queen suspected Claudius killed the old King, then the interpretation of the text and hence the acting will be different than if we assume she was utterly innocent of any such suspicion.
     Was she, though? We have to consider all her appearances in the play to decide which version is more plausible, but whichever one we settle on will affect how we decide to play her. But this conception itself depends on a larger sense of what the play is about, of the world in which Hamlet must accept that he cannot reject the options that face him, but must choose. “Ripeness is all”, he says as he finally accepts his fate.
     That, too, is a major thesis of Gordon’s introduction. Thematically, Gordon’s essay is richer than the Swan introduction. Its implicit acceptance of the text as a script could have been made explicit. As it is, Gordon comes close to saying that we should read the text as if we wanted to produce the play. The puzzles of plot and character then become problems of direction and acting.
     Swan: ** Gordon: ***