meish dot org: life, unfolding

Saw Casino Royale on Friday night. Here are a few thoughts:

[Warning: Spoilers]

• Daniel Craig is hot. Hotter than his pre-Bond publicity would have revealed.
• …and doesn’t he have a touch of Steve McQueen about him? The director totally knew that, too.
• …but he pouts waaaaay too much. I thought he was going to bust into Blue Steel at any moment.
• The Parkour bit at the beginning was awesome. Sebastien Foucan is unbelievable – some of the things he did looked like stunts, but I’m reliably assured that they probably weren’t.
• I liked how Bond wasn’t totally invincible – like, he got beaten up and poisened and all sorts. In the Parkour scene, and in fact throughout, he was out of breath, bruised, scabbed, cut, keeping up, but definitely not *quite* making the jumps or the graceful leaps down eight flights of stairs. This is a marked contrast from more recent portrayals of Bond in which he is seemingly able to ski like a pro while whipping up a perfect light Victoria sponge and fighting off henchmen (in Portuguese). Making him a bit more flawed and human made it more enjoyable.
• Another contrast was the lack of gadgets employed: not many. Brosnan’s Bond had descended into flipping a switch on his (insert clever gadget here) to enable him to escape from any tricky situation. That plot device was getting a bit old.
• Product placement: Yeah, there was a lot. But most of it was fairly contextual. The only bit that really smarted was the dumb conversation about his watch: “Is that a Rolex?” “no, it’s an Omega – yours for only £1499 at Argos this Christmas”
• No Q. This was probably a good thing, because the whole wheeling-John-Cleese-on-to-be-John-Cleese-for-10-minutes was getting very tired.
• It was good to see a baddie who didn’t resort to lasers and shark-pools and hidden trap-doors and cosmic rays and satellites in order to try to finish Bond off. Just a chair and a rope seemd fairly effective.
• Also, worth noting that the baddie didn’t leave Bond hanging precariously over a pit of excitable mongeese, held only by a fraying rope, safe in the knowledge that a sticky end was surely only minutes away, but unable to stick around to watch because of an important appointment at the dentist or whatever. Because that never works.

Is your mother Joan Crawford?

Who’s on first? In the video shop.

Bricktastic. My favourite is the Into the Forest one, if only because I’ve had that track playing in my head for days.

Brandchannel has an excellent and comprehensive cataloguing of brands appearing in movies.

I’ll leave it to you to decide whether those placements might have been paid for or not.

More background on the subterranean cinema discovered in Paris recently.

…Big Fish and very much enjoyed it. Deliciously tall tales.

The Shipping News. Not having read the book, I was impressed by the film – though possibly more by Lasse Hallstrom’s dramatic treatment of Newfoundland as its own character in the film than by the story.

The Man Who Sued God.

I think God should sue Billy Connolly for making such a decidedly average film.

I’m a completist. I like to see things through to the end. Once I’ve committed to something, I try to see it through.

I’ve seen some bad movies. I’ve seen some real doozies – Jade, Operation Dumbo Drop, Species to name but a few – but I’ve only ever walked out of one film: Roadhouse.

It was a sticky saturday afternoon in Cochabamba, and I headed for the only air-conditioned cinema in town to take in a double bill – Congo and Roadhouse. During the week and in the evenings, the cinema played porn, though at the weekends, it was family entertainment all the way. I got into the cinema and after twenty minutes of squinting at the slightly out of focus screen, realised that I didn’t want to be there any more.

Why? Well, one, because the cinema was as sticky inside as out, though for different reasons. Two, because the film was out of focus and it gave me a pounding headache. Three, because every man in the theatre was taking it in turns to sit in the row behind me and make moist flubbling noises. Four, and perhaps least influential in my decision, the film was dire.

One December, my sister was working at a box office in Manchester, and managed to swing a pair of free tickets to see Swan Lake at the Palace. My mum and I went along for a laugh – not great fans of ballet, but never keen to turn our noses up at a spot of free kulcha.

After an hour or so of boggling at the heffalumping thuds as the dancers’ stiff toes clomped about on stage, my mum and I turned to each other at the start of the interval and snuck out. Well, we tried to sneak out, but got lost in the labyrinth of corridors and foyers which make up the Palace theatre. At one point, we nearly ended up backstage, which could have been amusing – though mum and I could have been no less noisy than the performers. I thought ballet was supposed to be graceful and silent? Ballet is, I think, one of those things best experienced remotely. We finally made it out into the chilly air, and snuck home feeling terrible. Serves us right for deserting at half time.

Tonight, we had the best seats in the house. We booked the tickets months ago, and we’ve been looking forward to seeing the Necks live for ages. Our seats were front and centre, in prime position for the show. We sat through the first set, and at the interval, snuck out.

I felt bad about leaving half way through, especially with seats so good, so prominent, but I was too wound up to listen to improvised minimalist jazz. I couldn’t switch off my brain. My thoughts were drowning out the music. I couldn’t concentrate. I was too twitchy, too angry, too distracted by other stuff, other things.

We left the concert hall to walk along the Embankment in the November drizzle. By the time we got to County Hall, my face was dripping wet, and I couldn’t tell if I was crying any more.

It’s been a long wait. It’s felt like a very very very long wait. I’m glad it’s finally over, and yet… on another level, the waiting seems to have been half the fun.

It certainly seemed that way in Leicester Square last night, as we joined the end of a long queue of moviegoers six abreast, which snaked around the square and buzzed with excitement and the combined power of 200 lightsabers. It was even more fun as the line advanced toward the Odeon, and we readied our tickets for the door, giggling and sweaty-palmed. As we found our seats and settled in, my heart did a bizarre drum’n'bass beat and an inane grin was plastered all over my face. When the lights went down, the entire audience (yes, all 1,934 of us) cheered and clapped and hollered. Yeah, that’s right, we were clapping darkness. Weird.

One hundred and thirty-three minutes later, I didn’t really know what to think. The smile was still there, though slightly more bemused. My knees ached from sitting and my eyes smarted from staring at the screen. The audience applauded, stood and left swiftly as the credits rolled against the night sky. Was that it?

I felt like a balloon that’s just been popped – a surprised and sudden void. I always knew this might be the case. I always knew there was a good probability that the film would differ from my expectations. It was always going to be odd to deal with the reality, rather than the wait. Yet strangely, I’m still finding this a hard emotion to deal with – especially when I remember that this time last week the only thing I was expecting was blessed relief. Well, I’ve got that, alright. But why the void?

Maybe it was because I was tired after seeing the movie in the early hours of the morning. Maybe it was because all the hype had blown the experience out of proportion. Maybe it was because I quite simply couldn’t take it all in at once. Whatever the reason, I felt anticlimactic and slightly disappointed.

Let’s get a few things straight, here, for the record. It was certainly, absolutely, positively fantastic to be part of the Star Wars world again, if only for 133 minutes in the middle of the night. The special effects were truly amazing. The pod race is possibly the most exhilarating thing you’ll see on screen this millennium. The lightsaber duels are everything you’d expect them to be – and more. Even familiar characters (though with different faces) seemed like old friends.

Yet there was a strange feeling of meeting these old friends on unfamiliar territory. At one point I found myself thinking “hang on, where has all this sprung from?” I found it hard enough to re-acquaint myself with Mos Eisley in the Special Edition a few years back, and then I had to come to terms with this. A whole new world, not just new planets.

I have got to remind myself as well that a whole new generation is now going to see The Phantom Menace over the coming months. They’re going to love it, I think. They’re going to enjoy getting to know all the characters, the bizarre and overly complicated plotlines, the dazzling scenery and special effects. They’re going to cheer at the right points and get as caught up in the movie as I did with Episode IV all those years ago.

What it boils down to is this: the past is a different country – they do things differently there. They certainly did things differently in 1977. Yeah, ok, so there weren’t such blinding effects and the acting was a little hokey at points. But you know what? I kind of liked the scruffiness of A New Hope. I actually liked that the Stormtroopers looked like men dressed up as Stormtroopers, and that they had terrible aim. That whole element of home-grown excitement was exactly what made the film exciting and fun.

Last night, the movie experience for me was, well, hollow. Just like being in a different country, I found that I didn’t speak the language, that I was on unfamiliar ground, that even the bits I thought I knew (from the trailers) seemed displaced and awkward. I was caught up in watching it – falling asleep wasn’t a problem, although it was way past my bedtime – but I couldn’t really figure out what I was watching. There was so much going on – dialogue, effects, accents, characters – I was overwhelmed with the content, and strangely underwhelmed with the overall package. It was, however, worth every penny to be in that cinema late last night. Even with the prospect of rising too damned early for work this morning.

I’m not slating The Phantom Menace – don’t get me wrong. It was everything I’d expected – and more, and less too. It was confusing, delighting, exciting, sad, funny and irritating – in varying amounts and at various points. Compared to the original trilogy, it was superior, inferior…. just different. Very different. Very different indeed.

But that’s understandable, isn’t it? Technology has changed, the world has changed, the audiences have changed. And so have I. I’m older, more experienced, more expectant and yes, more analytical and critical.

So as they say, every story has a beginning. Just as The Phantom Menace is the beginning of the Star Wars story, I’m going to let this be the beginning of the story of how I grew to appreciate The Phantom Menace. I can’t be a popped balloon forever, so I’m definitely going to go see it again – you just try and stop me. And maybe next time I’ll be able to just relax, stop expecting, stop worrying, stop waiting, and watch.