Ah...

My faith restored

I couldn't leave things as they were - whingeing about Borderlines' less-than-perfect performance this year. I owe that organisation far too much and all is now as it should be.

We drove through the dark on narrow rutted lanes, often through great splashy puddles left behind by the incessant rain. Few signs of habitation. We might have been in Transylvania.

Our destination was Michaelchurch Escley which is a real mouthful. Estimated population for 2018 was 209. The approach to the village hall was the Bumpy Alps in miniature but the welcome was warm and, as the projector switched on, the audience became silent and remained so for the ensuing 100 minutes. We watched Pain and Glory, an effortlessly impressionistic bio-pic of the film director's life. With any other director it would have seemed indulgent but this was Pedro Almodóvar, Spain's greatest, nay Europe's greatest, nay... (fill in your preference).

He is no stranger to us. We've seen: Tie me up! Tie me down!, Volver, Talk to her (The poignancy!), All about my mother, The skin I live in. I turned to VR as the lights went up and said something which I now forget. She said, simply, "Ah..."

All with sub-titles of course. If you have problems and assuming you can read, you must cast this defect to one side. Otherwise you will continue to miss PA's invention, his sense of fun, and the unbelievable variety of his supporting characters. Doubly missing these things since you will want to see these films a second time.

You wouldn't want to go through life with a PA-shaped hole in it. Honest.

Borderlines sags. Oh, no!

Borderlines Films Festival, now in its 18th year. We've attended most and seen about 20 movies over a fortnight each year. Wonderful memories but for the first time, after six viewings, disappointment has reigned.

Blackbird (Middle-class Eastern seaboarders, including my angel Susan Sarandon, discuss and practice euthanasia. I am not persuaded). Photograph (Wandering unresolved non-love story in Mumbai). Bait (Travails of Cornish fishermen; almost comical chain of technical errors by student film-makers). Little Women (Beautifully shot, beautifully acted but somehow hollow; "self conscious" period costumery).

So thanks for Parasite (Hated by the US president. South Korean blackest of black comedy with serious points to make. See pic.). The Personal History of David Copperfield (Capturing the essence of Dickens but without any of his egregious faults.)

Rictangular Lenses, my current novel, now back on track. 48,336 words

The Platinum Breakfast had included scrambled eggs dotted with flakes of smoked salmon. Lindsay tried a forkful but pushed the tray away; fish seemed alien at half-past-seven in the morning. She drank only coffee and ignored the toast, the croissant and the boutique-ish jar of jam said to contain Tyne Valley strawberries. Were strawberries grown this far north? Were they yet another part of the region’s laborious struggle to find enterprises that would replace the metal-shaping that had once occupied half the workforce?

Our equivalent of D-day

Hereford’s Borderline film festival is coming up. Our choices have been made: 20 movies over two weeks. In both 2018 and 2019 we managed 22 but matching the movies against the locations, dates and times is like playing three-dimensional chess and losing badly.

Also there’s Ian, our 6ft 4in grandson. Wherever possible I need to find him leg room.

Ian, VR and I each make our choices and I have the unenviable task of combining the three lists, chopping out those that are impossible. Fairly, that is. Ian makes a special plea for Pain And Glory, the latest by Spain’s great director, Pedro Almodovar - a choice we all share. But it’s only on at three places, all on the same day. One is 31 miles away from our home and another village, equally obscure. We opt for the village hall at Michaelchurch Escley. Because we’ll be arriving there latish we reconnoitre it during daylight. Gonna be difficult.

Booking starts promptly at 10 am at Hereford’s Courtyard Theatre. I arrive at 9.45 and sort of hang around, establishing my presence. “Is there someone ahead of me?” I ask. “Him,” says the booking clerk. I chat with my competitor who’s a good sport and has done Borderline many times.

However, two extra booking clerks have been added and my competitor and I start “even Stephen”. More info about leg-room is now available for the Courtyard where most of the movies appear; I get everything I want and a large sum of money is deducted from my credit card to cover the sixty tickets (see pic).

I email the result to Ian who lives in Luton. He says, “I look forward to seeing the delights of Michaelchurch Escley in the pitch dark.”

Everything about it is appealing...

Larry Lion’s showbiz career was down the toilet. He called his agent, Chas Cheetah, and said “Make ‘em love me again”. Chas sent out tasteful, deckle-edged cards:

Fun and drinks on the High Veldt.
Come to Larry’s Conversazione.
Meet the elite fleet. High moon. Dawn

Actually Chas didn’t know Conversazione from his ass, had wanted “Fatted calf.” But feared it would put off The Gazelles whom Larry had chased (unsuccessfully, obviously) in his youth. The Gazelles, a timid lot, scented blood – their blood – and refused. A Tofu Buffet at the Gnu Grand was their excuse.

No problem with the location – The Mud Waterhole – but Larry would sing. His voice was rough and his choice of song, Food, Glorious Food, didn’t help. A herd of elands, ever party poopers, drifted away, then Hank Hyena and Wally Warthog fought to the death in an argument about casting in the TV series, Game of Bones.

Larry found himself alone and starving, wondering whether to eat his faithful agent. But knew ever since their college days Chas could outrun him. Might even sneak round behind and turn him into lion tartare. Companionably they snacked on what was left of the starters, mainly Meerkat Bits, and Chas was disposed to advise.

“Age is the problem, Larry. When your mane gets shabby so do your ratings. And hair inserts just don’t cut it. But I have an idea.”

“Wha’s that?” asked Larry
.
“Animation, but with your voice. Back to your glory days. Standing on rock bluffs and roaring.”

Outraged, Larry – just for form’s sake – chased Chas and saw him disappear over the horizon. By the time the movie came out Larry had lost all his teeth and was being fed pobs in a Berlin zoo. His successor on the veldt was called Kevin.

Mainly a treat

My take on Borderlines Film Festival. VR and grandson Ian would no doubt differ.

Excellent
Magic Flute (Sweden), Smiles of a Summer Night (Sweden). Two unbeatable Ingmar Bergman classics. Flute - an exemplary transformation of opera into film.

Happy End (Germany). Director Michael Haneke, in his pomp, satirises French middle classes against present-day immigrant background in Calais.

Third Murderer (Japan). Police procedural but much more. Why are Japanese movies so absorbing?

Death of Stalin (UK). Shameful bad taste; rollicking hilarity. Simon Russell Beale magisterial as Beria.

Three Billboards, etc (US). Frances McDormand worth three Oscars. Serious but witty; wonderful script.

Milou en Mai (France). Great French director, Louis Malle, turns family squabble into magnificent pastoral comedy.

Lady Bird (US). Wagging finger for all parents. Daughter and mother from hell, but a familiar suburban hell.

Very Good
Loveless (Russia). Another, darker, despairing tutorial for parents, with matching background.

Sweet Country (Australia). Antipodean western energetically examines colonial racism. Vividly realised characters

The Gulls (Russia). Culture clash in Buddhist (!) Russia. Poignant, noirish

Man called Ove (Sweden). Feelgood but funny; about old age. Monumental central character, Rolf Lassgard.

Good
Shape of Water (US). Marine version of beauty and the beast. Predictable events.

Loving Vincent (Poland). Slender story cartoon about Van Gogh; done in his painting style

Phantom Thread (UK). Haute couture detail good; characters frequently irritating.

Average
Mountain (US). Docu-spectacle for sports nuts.

Ghost Stories (UK). Horror tale, nominally about supernatural. Not my bag, I fear

Dark River (UK). Cold Comfort Farm updated; unbearably grim; set in Yorkshire.

Awful
The Party (UK). Hysterical, claustrophobic farce strains at the leash.

The Bookshop (UK). Dull, cliché-ridden, in peculiarly English way. Sentimentality that puts you off reading.

Good?/Obscure
Free and Easy (Russia).  Unexpected laughs in unremitting dystopia.

Persona (Sweden). Experimental Ingmar Bergman. Too gnomic for me.

Wrapping up Borderline

Rest of 23 movies seen at Borderline festival.

Jackie. Well-dressed, much smoking, I couldn't mesh. Jackie K, we must remember, soon became Jackie Onassis.

Frantz. In effect a post-war film of Wilfred Owen's war poem, Strange Meeting. Character study of two nations, now uneasily peaceful.

The Olive Tree (see pic). Feelgood, best-appreciated Borderline movie (97% pro). Youth's tribute to age; rural Spain vs. urban Germany.

Julieta. I've always enjoyed director Aldomovar's special strangeness but found this too complex, slightly hysterical. VR and Ian liked it so who am I to belly-ache?

Return to Ithaca. Two or three long conversations by four middle-aged post-Franco Spaniards who all suffered. Grew on me.

A Quiet Passion. See post: The Surprise Factor

The Handmaiden. Luxuriant Oriental lesbian porn (sadism added) with awkward flashbacks. Don't take your grandchildren.

A Simple Life. Modern-day Tokyo realism at its best. Age as an ineluctable force. Characters you wanted to hug.

Personal Shopper. Séances, high fashion and young folks' misery.  I'm too old for this, always was.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Youth buddie-bonds with age in NZ escape movie. Amateurish, less charming than it thought it was.

It's Only The End Of The World. Claustrophobic (too many close-ups) acount of Canadian family's failure to communicate. Stellar performances, though.

A Taste Of Cherry. Man in a car, on a mission in arid Iraq, puts dilemma-ish proposition to three others. Couldn't take my eyes off it.

The surprise factor

We may be impressed or moved or disgusted by great works of art. More rarely are we surprised. Even if we've led wilfully sheltered lives we've usually absorbed a host of trailers before we come upon the Rembrandt self-portraits, Boswell's Life of Johnson or Citizen Kane. We are prepared and this can interfere with the way we respond. After all, no one wants to admit - at first sight - that Hamlet's a right old load of rubbish. I should add in support of my High Cultural Virginity this wasn't my initial reaction to the great Danish time-waster.

But I was surprised by Madame Bovary. Oh I knew it was a French classic, a true "modern" novel. But even now, forty or fifty years on, I remember my first act on finishing it. I turned back to the title pages searching for small print that confirmed I hadn't read what the French call Texte intégral but rather an abridgement, perhaps even by Reader's Digest. There had been no hindrances, the story moved at great pace and with fearless clarity. Classics usually demand concentration, some allowances for obsolete language; Bovary moved like a rocket.

Moby Dick also surprised me but this was less admirable, I ended up smug. I'd been warned about the density, the detours and the fog coefficient but I read it straight through as if it were an Agatha Christie. What, I wondered, was the problem? Yes, you're right: utterly insufferable! Alas, Tone Deaf is frequently just that.

Nobody in my group much cared for A Quiet Passion, a recent movie about Emily Dickinson, the poet whose external life was a nothingness. I stayed silent, saw it as a masterpiece. Surprise may be incommunicable.

A real biggie

At Borderlines we could have booked for Abel Gance's silent five-and-a-half-hour epic, Napoleon. The breaks were kindly (50 minutes for late lunch, 20 minutes with optional tea/coffee and cake, 10 minutes for minor surgery) but we worried about the eventual state of our backsides. I bought the four-DVD set instead and we watched in upholstered comfort at home. In one go from 6 pm to near-midnight.

The film first appeared in 1927 but this version had been digitally restored over decades and includes a musical background adapted mainly from Beethoven's Eroica symphony. Submitting to this ordeal might have seemed masochistic but if you care for movies in the widest sense and feel you need to know more about French history you should take a punt.

Ironically this was only half the story, no mention of Trafalgar or Waterloo, of course. But never mind, for several years Napoleon retrieved France's glory and the preceding events are told with great passion. The central character (played by Albert Dieudonné) becomes part of your family by the end.

But the over-arching drama is the way director Gance pushes movie potential to the absolute limit. If you forget the mainly static camera and the lack of spoken dialogue this becomes a very modern film. Huge crowds are handled with great conviction (The Convention: France's maniacal revolutionary government; the siege of Toulon; and - grandest of all - Napoleon addressing the exhausted French army in Italy) yet the face-to-face scenes involve real people.

At nearly six hours for £22, it's a snip. With whatever wine you care to choose. Bring in the neighbours and gain a reputation for cultural philanthropy.

UPDATE. Checked with Borderlines management and discovered that 73 hardy souls with cast-iron bums (= half the Small Studio) had booked Napoleon. Felt mildly proud of Hereford.

Worldwide films

Ordered a moderately expensive Cherry keyboard - works mechanically and clacks, just like the old Underwoods in the news-room at the Telegraph and Argus in Bradford. Said to be therapeutic.

The Borderline Film Festival continues:

Alone in Berlin. Middle-aged couple distribute anti-Nazi messages in Berlin during war. Despite predictable ending their dogged courage is uplifting. (See pic; yes, that's Emma Thompson!).

Graduation. Slippery moral slope for doctor and family struggling to live in corrupt modern Romania.

The Unknown Girl. Idealistic Belgian doctor, racked by guilt at single minor act of negligence, investigates death of young woman immigrant.

The Salesman. Won Best Foreign Film Oscar this year. Yet another masterpiece from Iran (How do they do it?): assault on woman is explained by couple appearing in production of Miller's Death Of A Salesman. Detailed and persuasive.

La-La Land. Doesn't live up to hype. Musical with feeble tunes, modest dancing by principals and vestigial show-bizz plot lapses into inanition. Jazz sub-plot looks like five minutes spent on Google.

The Headless Woman. Mis-titled, over-ambitious and opaque  story from Argentine about woman whose personality is affected by car accident. Repetitive, uncommunicative and somewhat irritating.

That time of year

Life is presently complicated. Grandson Ian is staying, Borderlines Film Festival started two days ago, eventually the three of us will see 23 titles in a fortnight. Fitting in blog responses and practice for Mozart's An Chloë (my most demanding song so far) is a real bastard.

We have seen:

Denial (Feelgood movie about Jewish US academic sued by Holocaust denier David Irving; protean performances; fascinating differences between US and UK law systems. See pic.).

Manchester By The  Sea (Manchester in Massachusetts not Lancashire; central character is guilt-ridden Boston janitor facing new responsibilities; a threnody to inarticulacy).

Hell Or High Water (Formulaic, modern-day bank-robbing in Texas but raised a notch by allusions to poverty).

Toni Erdmann (Over-long but witty/funny German tale about father's concerns for business-woman daughter  racked by getting ahead in unconvincing world of meetings and presentations).

Slack Bay (Grossly over-long French nominal parody about class differences in Northern France in Edwardian times; treated as fantasy-cum-farce but with excess knockabout; made irritating by incorporating six false endings just when viewer's resistance is weakest.


For MikeM

Pix well viewed

We - RR, VR, grandson Ian - ate marvellously at the Severn and Wye Smokery, a fish restaurant overlooking the Severn, crowded to the gills and where it is impossible to book. I had gurnard for the first time but it won't be for the last. Ian recklessly proposed we watch the DVD of Shakespeare's rarely performed Henry VIII which I was dreading. But it was made real by super acting (Timothy West, John Stride, Claire Bloom) and I subsequently performed an act of public contrition.

We are also two-thirds through the Borderlines Film Festival.

Taxi Tehran. The director, Jafar Panahi, greatly restricted by the Iran regime, drives a taxi round the city, picking up customers and dropping them off. But what customers! In the words of one, now defunct, British Sunday newspaper: All human life is there. (See pic)

Ran. Kurosawa's take on Lear, over-long but thunderous in scope and emotion. One for the bucket.

Our Little Sister. Three self-dependent young sisters, living  unfettered in their grandmother's house in the crowded suburbs of Kamakura in Japan, welcome their half-sister to their brood and encourage her to grow up. Heartfelt and memorable.

Spotlight. Journalism vs. the Catholic church in Boston, Mass. Put together dispassionately; made me proud to have passed through the trade.

Ivan's Childhood. Twelve-year-old orphan fights his way into the Soviet Army at war with the Germans. A moving study in human fatalism by famed director Tarkovsky.

The Hateful Eight. Tarantino, beautifully scripted and with a fine range of characters, does his Western-in-winter bit that's as well constructed as The Importance of Being Earnest. For 75% that is. Then all becomes blood-boltered.
 
45 Years. Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling illustrate the nature of marriage. A must! Please!

pppp, and you're done

To Birmingham last night to hear the Academy of Ancient Music, a long established thirty-strong group who play on period instruments. The music wasn't all that ancient, 'twas all Mozart and he's mid-eighteenth century. Or, if you prefer, timeless.

It should have been good; perhaps it was. The conductor was Robert Levin, an academic who is also a nifty keyboardist. He played WAM's loveliest piano concerto, the twenty-fourth. conducting from the instrument not the podium. The programme said piano but it was the much smaller, much quieter fortepiano; it had to be; a modern Steinway would have drowned out the gut-string violins, the valveless trumpets and the wooden flutes. A Ferrari among Model T Fords.

Fortepianos sound OK on CDs, We've got Melvin Tan doing Beethoven's first and second piano concertos and I love his agility. In the concert hall it's another matter. So much went for nothing. And we were in the priciest seats, dead centre, eleven rows back.

Yeah, I know all the arguments. Less resonance, faster articulation, music as the composer would have heard it. But if you can't hear it... As Basil Fawlty said, it's so basic.

THIS seemingly eviscerated accordion consists of 68 tickets (Grandson Ian's coming too) for 23 movies at the Borderline Film Festival, starting February 27. The titles: La Maison de la Radio, Ida, Whiplash, Wild Tales, Still Life, Foxcatcher, Birdman, Cycling with Molière, Enemy, Inherent Vice, Winter Sleep, Most Wanted Man, Mr Turner. Lourdes, Clouds of Cils Maria, Amour Fou, Duke of Burgundy, Black Coal - Thin Ice. Boyhood, Ex Machina, Before I go to Sleep, Phoenix.

From France to UK to China to USA to Canada to Israel to Poland to Germany to Argentina to Turkey.

We'll let you know. 

23 movies: our scorecard

FIVE STARS
After Life (Japan). Define yourself  in five seconds. Adult, profound,witty. A bucket movie. (Top pic)

The Lunchbox (India). Love born and nourished via food and letters. (Middle pic)

Nebraska (US).  Old age terrors; filial duty; unglamorous locations. (Bottom pic)

FOUR STARS
Rush (UK). Character-driven Formula One rivalry. Unexpectedly good.

The Past (Iran). Relentlessly close-up family agonies; unbearable but persuasive; Paris.

Inside Llewen Davies (US). Folk-music based Odyssey; quirky Coen brothers give it bite.

Philomena (UK). Mother/lost child saga, Irish style. Excellent Dench/Coogan chemistry

THREE STARS
Museum Hours (Austria/US). Platonic love; art masterpieces; sort of documentary; Vienna.

Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (UK). Self-serving DJ manages to be funny in police siege.

Marius/Fanny (France), Two parts of Marseille trilogy; love and sacrifice, lightly done. Daniel Auteuil directs and overwhelms (as actor).

Jeune et Jolie (France). Sex-for-sale fantasy. “Only in France”.

Blue Jasmine (US). Sexual/social parasite gets come-uppance – twice.

Patience Stone (Afghanistan, France, Germany, UK). Muslim wife/mother tested horribly by surrounding war.

Ilo Ilo (Singapore). Phillipino woman is nanny to disintegrating Chinese family

TWO STARS
August: Osage County (US). Banal Gothic family reunion; performances compensate.

Le Week-End (UK). Poorly scripted late-life crisis; Paris. Lindsay Duncan transcends the commonplace.

Gloria (Chile/Spain). Irritating fiftyish optimistic woman drops elderly mendacious businessman.

Monuments Men (US). Surprisingly dull WW2 pursuit of art stolen by Nazis. Irritatingly naïve.

ONE STAR
Her (US). Inarticulate man loves bodiless woman. Scarlett Johannsson compensates as “voice”.

Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune (France). Self-centred amoral Parisian woman sketchily punished for her ways. Director: Eric Rohmer, therefore an acquired taste.

UNJUDGED
All is Lost (US). Not VR’s cuppa.

La Belle et la Bete (France). French classic; not RR’s cuppa.

Lost for words? He's no help

I knocked Primce Igor but it wasn't part of Borderlines; the transmission from New York just occurred at the same time and at the same venue. However the first truly duff Borderlines film screened yesterday. It failed strangely.

Her, starring Joaquin Phoenix, directed by Spike Jomze (who did Being John Malkovich which I liked), falls in love with the operating system of his mobile phone/computer. If you share a universal love/hate relationship with Windows 7 you may find this preposterous. Don't worry.

The software isn't an operating system but an artificial intelligence program capable of adapting itself to the intellectual and emotional needs of the user and interfaced with the voice of Scarlett Johansson. At first the trickiness is beguiling but before halfway the story just bores. Imagine a love affair via telephone with a supreme blue-stocking from Oxbridge.

Phoenix, the dullest man in the universe, is dismayed when he discovers that Scarlett - whose audio favours he thought to be his alone - is sharing herself simultaneously with 6381 dimwits. That's what computers do, dummy!

It wasn't boredom that got me down but outrage. I didn't actually count but Phoenix's vocabulary must be limited to 700 words. "How're you doing?" he asks. When Scarlett returns the favour he replies, “I’m good.” Asked to elaborate he says, “Real good.” An exchange repeated a dozen times but it feels like a million. Asked again by the patient Scarlett he perhaps adds, “I dunno. Difficult to put it into words.” And on, and on. I started predicting and I was way ahead of him.

Never has language been so poverty-stricken, so bare, so repetitive, so dull. I came away ashamed of my mother tongue. Don’t see it (Or, rather, hear it.) Please!

Been off the radar, I fear

Tis the year of the quiet RR. Well, not quite the year, perhaps a fortnight, perhaps three weeks.

I'd been neglecting Second Hand, just adding in a hundred or a hundred-and-fifty words at a time: the equivalent of driving at 28 mph with the handbrake on. Dabbling and - worst of all - forgetting what I'd previously written. The cure was to download SH to the Kindle and read it as it brushed shoulders with the collected verses of WB Yeats, Anna Of The Five Towns and Our Man In Havana.

A bit like giving myself an enema. An intellectual invasion. The shoddiness leaped out and 58,000-plus words quickly lost a thousand words.

Seamlessly this act of cauterisation (See, I'm mixing my metaphors) eased into the beginning of our local film festival, Borderlines. I'd booked twenty-three movies over thirteen days: of which five days involved two movies and three days involved three movies. Plus travelling to remote places. We'll be seeing Philomena at Ledbury, Gloria at Ross-on-Wye and Le Week-End at (a geographical collector's item) Bosbury Parish Hall.

Already seen: Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine (tightly constructed; Cate Blanchett's Oscar well deserved), All is Lost (Robert Redford the sole actor, less than 100 words dialogue, techno-triumph), La Belle et La Bete (Cocteau's 1944 whimsy; imaginative; not my backyard), Jeune et Jolie ("Only the French could get away with this" - The Guardian), After Life (Japanese; superb; words fail me), Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (Vallait le voyage - to Leominster)

The only duffer: Borodin’s opera Prince Igor from the New York Met. Gorgeous Russian singing but inanimate story, knee-jerk “advanced” direction. We left at first intermission. Luckily Borodin had a day job as a chemist

My name is Tarzan, Mr Tarzan

Tarzan movies were the b&w jungle equivalent of James Bond on a thousandth of the budget. To keep costs down some scenes were repeated movie to movie. The Tarzans, a sort of nuclear family, occupied a ranch house halfway up a very large tree and passed their days entirely free from intellectual diversion. Mr and Mrs Tarzan appeared to be clad scantily and uncomfortably in leather. Their strangely pudgy son, Boy, had blonde curly hair, wore leopardskin trunks and had clearly been born on the wrong side of the blanket. The pet, a chimp, was ironically called Cheetah but no one commented on this.

Conflict was generated by (I’m a bit hazy on this) Nazis, much more suitably clad in safari suits. The Nazis manipulated the locals who were shockingly stereotyped and had bones through their noses. The locals played tom-toms and did very little else.

Mr Tarzan got around in two ways: swimming splashy racing crawl or by swinging and jumping from conveniently positioned lianas. Identical footage of these activities always reappeared. Before reaching for a liana Mr Tarzan ululated (Wiki: a long, wavering, high-pitched vocal sound resembling a howl with a trilling quality.)

In all the Tarzan movies I saw Mr Tarzan was required to wrestle and stab to death a rubber crocodile. This scene (always repeated) took place in a tank of muddy water which made it difficult to follow the action.

Little changed from movie to movie. Once and once only we were tantalised with details of the water system supplying the Tarzans’ kitchen. A vertical endless conveyor built up from dozens of short bamboo tubes. Sum total of the Tarzans’ imagination.

For me the series ended with Tarzan in New York. Mr Tarzan wore a suit and Cheetah went into care.

Husbandry

Education is a practice that rings in my ear like a cracked bell. Out of tune, arid theory. Sour grapes too. Money was spent fruitlessly on my "education" and my father grew angrier.

For the fifth time I watched Etre et Avoir, a 2003 French documentary about a one-room school in the Auvergne where a single teacher nourished the lives of children aged 4 to 11. It won awards and made money, leading, alas, to a sad squabble I prefer to ignore.

I cannot accept that the movie depicted education - that hollow abstraction doesn't fit. In guiding faltering infantile hands to write better numerals, gently sifting through the reasons for a falling-out in the playground, persuading Jojo to finish his painting, and comforting Julien whose father faced surgery to remove his larynx, M. Lopez seemed only to be encouraging growth. A benign insistent force impelling his charges towards more effective versions of themselves. At the end a large percentage left for the summer holidays and then for middle school in Issoire. M. Lopez himself was due to retire. Emotional kisses were exchanged and it was clear that the children, having gained something, were also losing something.

I tried to imagine the circumstances under which I would even have shaken hands with any of my educators. My imagination failed me just as my so-called education had.

WIP Second Hand (31,364 words).

TO UNDRESS behind screens, put on an ill-fitting nightdress and to be at the beck and call of nurses was to cross the boundary of authority. Others clothed in suits and differing uniforms moved around purposefully into and out of the ward, jobs to do. Francine lay on her bed, trying to read a paperback, making no contribution, unable to identify her sense of unease.

Too big a calling card?

Lincoln, directed by Steven Spielberg, proved to be an absorbing movie, admirably conveying the cramped, unhygienic way people lived and worked in the mid-nineteenth century. Not least in the House of Representatives which looked like an East End pub on Christmas Eve. And while Daniel Day-Lewis was as good as anybody you'll ever see in the cinema he was well supported by actors with lesser names.

Lincoln often manipulated people via anecdote, one of them especially telling, I thought. Some politician apologised for producing a lengthy tract. In his defence, he said, "I was too lazy to make it shorter."

I reflected on my self-imposed 300-word limit and felt briefly smug. Alas the moment was only too brief. My posts may be  kept to 300 words but my comments on others' blogs often run on and on. Is there a parallel here reflecting the laws of hospitality? Am I risking outstaying my welcome with this grandiloquence? Is it the equivalent of cutting myself a huge slice of cake at someone else's afternoon tea?

I could say my Linkspeople are good listeners. Put perhaps I'm not giving them any alternative. One of those matters I ponder at at 3 am under the wing-beat of the Angel of Death. The conclusions are  pessimistic but at least dawn is always welcome.
  
WIP Second Hand (30,694 words)
(In the customer services section) there were even gentle hints about make-up and a tidier hair-style. Plus a new level of formality from the women who’d worked alongside her at the tills - no longer Frankie she was now Miss Embery. Lorne warned her not to lose her temper with customers who came in to complain but Francine enjoyed these encounters most of all. Restraint, like revenge, was a response best practised cold.

Skyfall rises; MS shrinks

I've watched James Bond movies over the decades. Seen them evolve from plots which adhered to the books (From Russia With Love had the best baddie - Robert Shaw) into three-ring circuses where soundbites outweighed the thrills. Felt they were getting repetitive. Thought Daniel Craig was a step in the right direction. Noticed that the latest, Skyfall, got good  reviews from the critics I pay attention to.

Watched Skyfall last night. A tighter more believable plot which tracks British society as we know it, good London settings,  the enemy reduced to a handful, a villain (magnificent Javier Bardem - such a presence in No Country For Old Men) who has good reasons for his villainy, less gadgetry. Room too for introspection: on responsibility, the business of getting older, making hard decisions, bearing the consequences of "collateral damage", and fear. Plus shooting, bombs, etc. It's not Once Upon A Time In Anatolia, but better than most in its genre.

EARLIER this year I sent the completed Blest Redeemer to Joe for what newspaper journos call copy-tasting. Forty-eight hours on I begged him to destroy the file. A few weeks later I sent him a revision; then another panicky email saying "Not yet." A month or so has passed and 156,000 words have shrunk to 147,575. I may be on the verge.

Not everyone is familiar with numbers of words. Think of the 8500-word shrinkage as 38 A4 pages of double-space typing. Quite a lot. Two short stories. And now the $64,000 question: why, you ask, do I over-write in the first place?

Well, there's a rule of thumb that less is more. So prune hard, eh? Indeed. Unless, of course, what you've got is too abrupt, lacks scene-setting description, needs a bit of fun. Also, who knows in advance which words should stay

Welcome Zach; goodbye films

ZACH stays the night while his parents abandon themselves to pleasure. He arrives with Missie, the elderly Cairn terrier whom Lucy says resembles Rosemary's Baby. Missie wanders the house expressing misery plus something else I'm unable to pin down.

Of course! That's it!

VR TAKES Zach to Hereford to buy a book which his parents say is too expensive. Aren't grandparents lovable (and subversive)? At Waterstone's VR lets Zach find the book himself while she trawls the cheap deals.

A (male) customer asks how old Zach is. Six, VR says. The man says, "Six! And he's already buying books."

Later I descend from the computer into a tranquil living room: VR prone with The Guardian, Zach head down over his new acquisition. "Me and my grandson," says VR ever-so-slightly smugly.

Last two films at film festival
I wish. If you make a wish at a point where two Japanese "bullet" (ie, TGV) trains pass each other it comes true. Eventually two groups of children, separated geographically by parental divorce, fit this project into their busy, cramped, talkative, speculative, reflective lives. Two of them, already forced into adult ways, crystallise fleeting childhood; all help create an ever-changing mosaic of modern Japan. Director Hirokazu Koreeda famed for managing child actors. I'll say.

A last quartet. New York. For forty-five minutes a good absorbing movie as members of long-established string quartet, talking persuasive musician talk, rehearse LvB's "favourite" opus 131. And react to news that one of them is succumbing to Parkinson's. Then their supposed personalities are permutated in a ludicrously confined mish-mash of bonking, betrayal, parental failure and unconvincing melodrama. Super performances from stellar cast (Christopher Walken, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Mark Ivanir).