Mischievous Constructions

I'm researching Victorian cinema at work, and mentioned what I was doing to a friend, who after she'd got over her surprise that the Victorians made films at all (they actually started in 1895, some six years before the eponymous queen's death) asked me what they were like. I said that for the most part they were primitive in the extreme, but rather endearing because of this.

"What, like Dude, Where's My Car?"

Indeed.

My son turned one today, and most of my wife's relatives threw a surprise party to celebrate after luring us over to Kent with promises of a low-key get-together. I'm not sure he took all of it in (and he spent much of the time upstairs asleep in any case), but the rest of us had a great time regressing back to early childhood by playing with his presents in his absence, most of which were made out of brightly coloured plastic and made sounds when you poked, prodded or hit them.

Proof positive that he's his father's (indeed, his parents') son came shortly after Christmas when he worked out that instead of going through the tedious rigmarole of pushing coloured shapes through the appropriate slots, it would be far easier just to press the button just inside the slot in question (which would normally have been triggered by the correct shape going in), thus obtaining the reward - a barrage of flashing lights and sound effects - without actually having to resort to any real mental effort. I'm not sure whether to praise him for his resourcefulness or chide him for his laziness, but I can't really offer much in the way of resonant criticism as I was irresistibly reminded of one of the most perceptive comments any of my teachers wrote on my various school reports - "Michael would get an A if there was no such thing as written work". It's clearly genetic.

But this was probably the last time we'll be able to relax over the subject of our offspring's birthday - a few months ago we went to the second birthday of the daughter of a friend of ours, and it was clear that attitudes change dramatically between one and two. We only bought him one relatively low-key present in the sure knowledge that he'd have plenty more: we certainly won't be able to get away with that sort of shameless cheapskatery next year.

Incidentally, my wife was hugely disappointed that she missed out on him sharing a birthday with Doris Day and Tony Benn by a mere three-and-a-half hours - instead, he shares it with the far less prepossessing David Blaine, Robert Downey Jr. and a particularly hated ex-boyfriend of my wife's best friend. I did a bit of digging and found out that the very wonderful Aki Kaurismäki (about whom I posted exactly two months ago) was also born on 4 April, but since just one person at the party today had ever heard of him - and that was only because she was married to me - this didn't count for much. But at least it makes me happy - plus the fact that being born on the fourth rather than the third means that he'll never have to think when filling in his date of birth on American forms. One of his great-uncles was born on March 3rd, and confirmed that this is not to be sniffed at.

Yesterday I went to the first Catholic service I'd been to since my grandfather's funeral nearly five years ago, and once again I felt distinctly like a tourist: amongst many tiny details that separated this particular wedding ceremony from the more usual Anglican ones of our experience, my wife and I were particularly struck by the way all the statues inside the church were covered with purple cloths, the effect being not unlike a row of Afghan women clad in unusually severe burkhas that didn't even admit any light onto the face.

I naturally assumed that these were all statues of paedophile priests who had had their faces covered up out of shame, whereas my wife claimed that it was more likely to be connected with Lent in the run-up to Easter. Annoyingly, she turned out to be right.

Spotted on the A27 just before Shoreham, graffitied in large block capitals onto a bridge-supporting pillar:

ANIMAL TESTING HARMS HUMANS

To which someone had added, in rather smaller text:

So experiment on hippies!

Not much blogging until tomorrow evening, I'm afraid - I've got a family wedding to go to and my son's first birthday to celebrate (not that he's noticed, even though he's had far more cards than I usually get).

In the meantime, though, here's a handy definition of the term 'Jew', as Google searches have apparently been somewhat unhelpful of late.

The British Film Institute has just launched the latest of its online galleries, this one devoted to the work of Roman Polanski and featuring literally dozens of high-quality stills from the films themselves, plus behind-the-scenes shots and posters.

A pity about the semi-literate buffoon who wrote the accompanying text (I'm pretty sure he hasn't even seen one of the films), but I suppose you can't have everything...

Following today's announcement about the new BBC Chairman, I have a horrible feeling that I'm going to have to buy the Daily Mail tomorrow, if only to see just how much outrage they can summon up over the news of the elevation of Britain's former "pornographer-in-chief". And unlike the alleged deal with Express proprietor Richard Desmond (whereby they don't mention his other sideline in exchange for him not slagging them off), I don't think they've agreed not to call him that!

The Mail reaction aside, though, I think this is very good news - he's undoubtedly more than qualified for the job (vastly more so than most of his predecessors) and I can't see him being especially supine when it comes to fighting the BBC's corner.

A few days ago I read an eloquent plea for 'originality' not to be quite as highly rated per se - at least in comparison with other more traditional values - as it rather too often is. I wish I could remember where I read it and who wrote it (it may have been a blog, or even a blog comment), as I'd link to it like a shot, as two of the films I saw most recently on the big screen provide ample support for his thesis.

Earlier today I saw School of Rock, about which I can safely say that there was nothing remotely original about it. The basic premise is essentially Dead Poets Society meets Rock'n'Roll High School, and neither of those films was exactly mould-breaking in the first place (and there's certainly nothing as startling as the latter's lab mice exploding when forced to listen to The Ramones). The indolent underdog who makes good despite sticking to his much-criticised guns? Check. The stuffily buttoned-up frumpy teacher who loosens up when exposed to a little rock'n'roll? Check. The overweight black girl whom no-one notices turns out to have the voice of Aretha Franklin? The geeky four-eyed Asian who turns out to be a keyboard wizard? The thrilling climax that is nearly called off thanks to an eleventh-hour misunderstanding? Check check check - there's barely a piece of background scenery that isn't telegraphed hours in advance, let alone a major plot development, and if I'd only gone from a plot summary instead of the near-unanimous critical ecstasy it attracted, I wouldn't have touched it with a proverbial bargepole. And yet, largely thanks to Jack Black's genuinely barnstorming performance, the film is absolutely irresistible: comfortably the most sheerly enjoyable of its ilk that I've seen since The Commitments nearly thirteen years ago.

The other film, which I was too knackered to post about when I saw it last week, was Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World - directed, coincidentally enough, by Dead Poets Society's Peter Weir. I had rather higher expectations of this, given that Weir rarely makes a less than interesting film - but, as with School of Rock, there's really very little to it that we haven't already seen: it's a rousingly old-fashioned seafaring yarn that, again, ticks all the expected boxes in terms of familiar narrative ingredients. What Weir and his team bring to it is a level of conviction that I hadn't seen before, with clearly meticulous period research supported by contemporary film technology to create a film that has more in common with the relentlessly gripping German submarine yarn Das Boot (I thought I was being hugely original in pointing out the parallels until a Google search turned up 2,750 pages containing both titles - I'll get me coat) than an old Errol Flynn swashbuckler. True, it's attracted complaints that the level of detail sometimes comes at the expense of dramatic satisfaction, and the eventual outcome is never in doubt, but I was engrossed enough to buy one of Patrick O'Brian's books afterwards.

I don't know anything like enough about Japanese popular culture in general and the Zatoichi cycle in particular, but I'm hearing rumours that Takeshi Kitano's spin on the series might well fall into the same category of films that are sensationally entertaining because of, rather than despite, their lack of originality. As with the other two, instead of undermining one's expectations, it confirms them, and the pleasure comes from having them confirmed so emphatically. Of course, it would be very dangerous to regard this as a general rule: Richard Linklater, Peter Weir and Takeshi Kitano have more than proved that they're capable of exceptional levels of originality in the past (Slacker, The Truman Show, Hana-Bi, many others), so they have an excuse for discarding it when they deem it unnecessary. Most hacks don't.

Talking of laughing out loud (see below), I spent most of my daily commute this morning listening to audio interviews with Alan Bennett in connection with a forthcoming multimedia celebration of his work, to be unveiled in May - and as he returned to his perennial theme of embarrassing himself in public, I became acutely conscious both that I was all too obviously trying to stop myself from giggling, and that my fellow commuters must have thought that I was suffering from some bizarre and possibly epileptic condition that might at any instant erupt into a full-blown seizure.

It got worse when the next recording started playing, as Thora Hird was, if anything, even funnier...

Yes, I know it's appallingly tasteless and a trivialisation of one of the world's most embittered and entrenched conflicts, but Private Eye's ongoing 'The Book of Sharon' rarely fails to make me laugh out loud several times, and this week's example is no exception:

1. And lo, there was dwelling in the land of Gaza a holy man of the Hamas-ites, whose name was Yas-sin, which is to say the man of death.

2. And Yas-sin was old and full of years, and his beard was extremely white, like unto the snow on Mount Arafat.

3. And Yas-sin was sore afflicted, so that he could not walk, but needeth many followers to carry him hither and thither on a small chariot which is called an "wheelchair".

4. And despite these afflictions, Yas-sin plotted darkly in his heart against the children of Israel, conspiring how he might smite them.

5. But Yas-sin had one problem.

6. For the children of Israel had many tanks and guns and many rockets, even unto the device that is nuclear.

The remaining 22 chapters can be found here.

No time to post anything substantive, but I've just got back from Takeshi Kitano's Zatoichi, the most shamelessly enjoyable experience I've had in a cinema in ages, and probably the only film that boasts a finale that intercuts high-speed ninja-versus-blind swordsman action with what can only be described as massed clog dancing.

It's possibly not ideal for those averse to body counts in the high double figures as a bare minimum (my wife stayed well away, though this might equally have been because it was in Japanese), though the deaths themselves are so stylised as to be oddly inoffensive despite the copious images of spurting arterial wounds.

I heard most of the blood was CGI-generated, and I can well believe it: the red splashes across the screen essentially have the same impact as the onscreen 'Pow!' and 'Wham!' in the old 1960s Batman TV shows, and I suspect that was the intention - though when it comes to Japanese popular culture one can never be entirely sure.

"I've just given our son his first taste of home-made rice pudding, and he adored it", claimed my wife.

"Because it was obviously made with a mother's love?", I asked.

"No, because I put too much sugar in it", she admitted.

All of which is highly topical, because of recent reports that children are being fed wall-to-wall junk food and are turning into tiny lardbuckets as a result, if that isn't a contradiction in terms:

The survey of 2,000 parents by Mother and Baby magazine and Cow & Gate found children's favourite foods include chocolate and crisps. Eight out of 10 parents admitted their children had worse diets than they had at that age. But few thought they were to blame.

Of course they weren't. And I bet the babies who were fed liquidised hamburgers and chips refused point blank to eat anything else.

I can't tell you how sympathetic I was when I read this news item about how people are being targeted by muggers after they're spotted wearing the unmistakable white iPod earbuds. As an early-adopting iPod user of well over two years' service, I can well imagine the trauma they must have suffered...

...but surely it can't be any worse than the trauma of actually wearing the damn things for longer than a couple of days? I bow down to no-one in my admiration of Apple's ultra-stylish industrial design (the flat-screen iMac I'm writing this on is still an object of surpassing beauty over two years on), but those earbuds were an abomination: horribly uncomfortable to wear and none too great on the sound quality front either. I got rid of mine within a week and have never looked back - and if this means I've escaped getting mugged into the bargain, I'm even happier.

I went out for a rare after-work drink with colleagues and collaborators from various locations, and because I was the only non-London resident, they were kind enough to agree to my request to go to a pub near either Victoria or London Bridge stations. We chose the latter, but one of them was dubious: "it's bound to be full of wankers".

I pointed out that the watering holes that he usually frequented in Soho or Charlotte Street were not exactly an exception to that particular rule, to which he replied "Ah, but those are media wankers. This pub will be full of City wankers. There's a huge difference."