may book, fim and TV review

Out into the country bright and early for a long walk up the escarpement of Mynedd Llangattock. An ascent of >500 metres offers an excellent workout for myself and the wife. But even the sublime beauty of the hawthorns in full blossom cannot completely distract me from the events off the coast of Gaza broadcast this morning before we left. I appreciate that the enterprise was provocative, but if diplomacy is like a game of chess, then what the Israelis have done is the equivalent of sweeping all the pieces onto the floor and beating the opponent to death with the board.

MAY BOOK AND FILM REVIEW

BOOKS

JAMES JOYCE, by Richard Ellmann. A massive book, which some people consider one of the great biographies of the 20th century, worthy of the maestro himself. All was sacrificed to his art, including his children. His daughter Lucia developed schizophrenia, possibly as a result of the family's gypsy existence, though interestingly, Joyce never accepted the diagnosis, preferring to see her as "overly creative and sensitive". I have seen the same response in my practice more than once.
OUT OF AFRICA, by Karen Blixen. I read this when I discovered that Joyce admired it, which was saying something for him, he who rarely had a good word to say about any contemporary. And it is a wonderful book, full of unutterable beauty and unbearable ennui.
SAD GIRAFFE CAFE, by Richard Gwyn. A series of "prose poems" which when read together create a strange and frightening world of truth, half-truth and chimera, which perhaps owes something to Marquez, but these worlds are unique to Gwyn himself. Are these the drug and alcohol fueled fantasies he dreamed up while bumming around the Med in the eighties? I'll have to ask him the next time I see him.

FILMS

THE INTERNATIONAL,2009 (D- Tom Twyker). Boy, those Bourne films were influential. This one is highly derivative, though unfortunately Clive Owen is no Matt Damon.
HEAVEN'S GATE, 1980 (D- Michael Cimino). Famous as the classic case of illustrating the danger of giving a highly successful director enough rope to hang himself, this film is watchable, but only for an hour or so, certainly not the 3 1/2 hours it actually runs. Awful.
AN EDUCATION, 2009 (D- Lone Scherfig). Certainly a serviceable piece of drama, but is it really a feature film? This is the sort of thing the BBC used to do so well as a play for today.
OVERLORD, 1975 (D-Stuart Cooper). One ordinary soldier's progress towards the Normandy landings. An authentic-looking "drama-doc" ahead of its time, and in some ways better than the vastly more expensive "Pacific" currently being screened on Sky movies (vide infra)
BURNED BY THE SUN, 1994 (D- N Michaelov. A decorated war hero and close friend of Stalin, enjoys his last days of freedom before being taken away in one of the great purges. It looks idyllic, but the sense of malignity is never far away. A superior film, only possible after the fall of communism.
THUNDER ROAD, 1958 (D-Arthur Ripley). Robert Mitchum plays an illegal whisky runner fighting the feds and the gangsters from up north who want to muscle in on his lucrative trade. Of interest is is son James, who looks disturbingly like a young clone of his dad, right down to his laconic delivery and half-closed eyes. Passable.
SYNECDOCHE NEW YORK, 2009 (D-Charlie Kaufmann). A theatre director is offered a grant to make the "play of his life", but his real life begins to melt imperceptibly into the play itself- or is it the other way round? Talented, thought provoking stuff. And Philip Seymour Hoffmann is superb throughout.
OUT OF AFRICA 1985 (D-Sidney Pollak). A beautifully realized adaptation of Karen Blixen's book (see above) which deservedly won Oscars for direction, screenplay et al, though oddly not for Meryl Streep's masterful performance.

TELEVISION

THE PACIFIC, 2009 (producers- Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks) These 2 "Midas touch" Hollywood moguls try to reproduce the success of their excellent adaptation of "Band of Brothers" by transferring to the Pacific theatre of operations. But something has been lost. It is true that the battle scenes are among the most realistic and horrific ever put on the screen(some of the dehumanising effects of combat are superbly portrayed), but they have admixed too much emotional melodrama (the life of the boys at home and on R and R) which just doesn't work for me. Disappointing.