January 2016 book and film review

BOOKS

FINNEGANS WAKE by  James Joyce
A morally questionable Dublin innkeeper falls asleep dead drunk and in the course of one very strange night dreams a dream of all humanity. Or does he?
What did I feel about reading Joyce's epic journey into the human condition? I would say it was the most confusannoymystificahilariousbook I've ever read. Andthensome.
Problems with The Wake  begin straight away. Note that "Finnegans" contains no apostrophe, even if some commentators might persist in putting one in. Leaving it out opens up other possibilities, like "Finn Again Wakes" or "Finnegans (plural) Wake". Once into the text the problems, or delights, begin on page 1. We can try to see it as a narrative, and many books written since have tried to tease out some sort of "plot", though others say this is missing the point of the book, whatever that is, entirely.
Let us, by way of illustration, look at the opening of chapter I.V (page 104):

In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!

Your first thought has to be, say wha? Yet if you read it out loud there is a kind of dancing rhythm to the words. We may also notice that "unhemmed as it is uneven" is perhaps an echo of that part of the Lord's Prayer which states "...On Earth as it is in Heaven..." And the more perceptive among us might also notice a reference to a sura from the Koran which goes: "...In the name of Allah, the all Merciful, the Compassionate..."
And if we consult Duncan McHugh's Annotations to Finnegans Wake, which, page for page, offers a limited insight into the seemingly impenetrable text, he reminds us there is a reference in here to "Anna Livia Plurabelle", wife of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker,  the hero/antihero of the book, and who represents in a way, not only womankind as a whole but also the spirit of all rivers everywhere. "Haloed be her eve" might refer to Halloween, whereas "unhemmed" may refer to the Danish word hemme, which means to check, or hamper. Joyce called on no less than 47 languages in creating the text, and drew from the cultural stock of civilisations from every continent and every era. No wonder it took him 17 years to write...

So it may not be as confusing as you thought. Or is it? What does it all mean? Nobody claims to understand the book completely, not even such luminaries as Samuel Beckett or Anthony Burgess, two of England's cleverest men, who have spent years studying it. Yet the undeniable truth is The Wake is fun to read, with its invented words (100 to every page) and wickedly funny puns which are salted throughout the text. Stop worrying about what it all means, I found myself saying: just dive in and let the words flow through you, plunging into a strange, fast flowing river of wondrouswords.
I'm glad I did.

THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Being ten long short stories from the casebook of  history's greatest detective. With its silvery clarity and logical train of thought these tales provided a suitable antidote to the Byzantine complexities of The Wake, and I salted them into my reading of that book, partly as a way of maintaining my sanity. I bought on Kindle the complete works of Dr Watson, for the princely sum of £1, and will dip into them from time to time, leaving out only the 2 or 3 books I have already read. Watching Sherlock Holmes is a perennially popular occupation, as interpreters from Robert Downey Jr to Benedict Cumberbatch can testify, though how popular the books are now I'm not sure, though the price the entire oeuvre commands suggests perhaps not much. I have a Chinese friend who read them all as a way of improving her English, and she continues to read and re-read them to her infinite pleasure. At home, however, I wonder if they are not now seen as all a bit passe.
Pity.

FILMS

JOHN WICK (2014) D- Chad Stahelski and David Leitch (uncredited). A former hitman refuses to sell his 1969 Ford Mustang to a Russian mobster, who in a fit of pique beats him up and shoots his puppy. Bad move. John Wick isn't just a hitman, he's the killingest sonofabitch in the whole valley, capable, as we learn early on, of killing three men in a bar using only a pencil. And when he goes after the mobsters he's armed with a lot more than that. There may be films with a larger body-count, but there can't be any where one man is responsible for so much bloodletting.

We've come across super-killers before; Denzel Washington in The Equalizer, Viggo Mortensen in A History of violence, but nothing comes close to the now somewhat grizzled Keanu Reeves in this movie. But here the problem is engagement. We could identify with "Joey" in A History of Violence, and "McCall" in The Equalizer, but here the killings are piled on so thick and fast we hardly have time to catch our breath. There is also a question of tone. Is it ironic, is it trying to look like Sin City, are they trying to play it for laughs? And why did it need two directors, one of whom is uncredited? Maybe that's the problem...

DEADLIER THAN THE MALE (1967) D- Ralph Thomas. Two beautiful, bikini clad women (Elke Sommer and Sylva Koscina) emerge from the sea and chat with a man on the shore, then impale him with a couple of harpoons. They then wander off, discussing makeup and hair. Turns out they're part of an evil empire of assassination and high crime, led by an evil billionaire (Nigel Green). But they have not reckoned on Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond (Richard Johnson) being brought in to take them on.
In the late 60s, trading on the unprecedented success of the Bond movies, there came a slew of pastiches, parodies and general rip-offs. There were the four "Matt Helm" movies starring Dean Martin, The Liquidator, Our Man Flint and In Like Flint and many, many others, from around the world. But this British offering, notable for its level of violence, worse still perpetrated by women, was too much for the BBFC, who awarded it an "X" certificate. And my youthful looks at the time made it  impossible for me to see it when it came out. Annoying!

In every Bond film there is an elaborate set piece at the end to provide an awe-inspiring climax, and this film has its own: a chess game between hero and villain played on a giant board with giant motorized pieces. A cursory glance, however, reveals that the pieces could not perform a knight's move, which kind of makes the whole thing a bit stoopid. No matter, the whole is satisfying, not only for the sultriness of its two leads but for its unashamed tonguincheekness.

PEGGY GUGGENHEIM: ART ADDICT (2015) D- Lisa Imordino Vreeland. Towards the end of her life in the late 1970s, Peggy Guggenheim, art collector extraordinaire, finally submitted herself to an in depth interview about her long and fascinating life.
"Most of the people I knew are dead now, so it probably doesn't matter if I tell everything."
And so she did. Born into the billionaire family in 1898, though party only to a tiny fraction of their vast fortune (the poor thing only had $450,000 in 1919, barely enough to keep body and soul together), she found herself intrigued by the avant garde artists of the day and began collecting their paintings. Many of these works would end up being worth hundreds or even thousands of times what she paid for them, but it was never the money that interested Peggy, but the art, and particularly the men who created it..

Not being possessed of natural physical beauty, she nonetheless had a kind of earthy sexiness which was clearly attractive. It is said she slept with most of the painters she bought art from, and married several of them, notably the surrealist Max Ernst, who it has to be said did not treat her very well. Meanwhile her art collection grew and she developed a rep as one of the savviest collectors around. Then in 1949 she bought a small palace in Venice in which to live and house her collection, later opening it to the public. I have visited it and it is one of the best museum experiences in the world. One can sense her ghost wandering the pathways in its magnificent gardens, or walking through the exhibition rooms, perhaps straightening a picture here and there and recalling the tristes she enjoyed with the artist. The film conjures all this magic with great skill and subtlety, but its core lies in the interview mentioned above, with all its honesty and no-nonsense candour.
A fine piece of work.

CINDERELLA (2015) D- Kenneth Branagh. Beautiful, downtrodden girl snags the best looking, not to say richest guy in town then loses track of him. All comes right in the end of course, thanks to a bit of timely magic.
Being the latest in a series of adaptations of Charles Perrault's fairy story, this time having an awful lot of  the Disney corporation money thrown at it and deploying some of the biggest names around: Lily James as Cinders, Cate Blanchett as the evil step mother and HBC as fairy godmother. With a talented guy like Branagh in charge, this project could not fail. It didn't. Made in Britain- isn't almost everything these days? the film has made over half a billion dollars after an outlay of less than $100 million, so people around the world clearly loved it. I'm not saying I didn't, I just felt it was a bit too obvious that it is in part based on the 1950 Disney animation version, so not exactly stepping outside the box there.  But Disney didn't want Branagh to step outside the box, and he's good at taking notes.

BLACK BOOK (2007) D- Paul Verhoeven. At the height of WW2 in occupied Holland, a Wehrmacht officer is making a very tidy living duping Jews into participating in an escape plan, then murdering them and stealing all their valuables, while pocketing all the loot for himself. A group of resistance fighters are determined to off him, and in order to do so one of them, gorgeous Carice van Houten (you'll know her as Melisandre the Red Witch in Game of Thrones) decides to work for the Nazis  to get close to her quarry. A dangerous game in more ways than one. First, she'll be beheaded if the Nazis  break her cover, and second, even if successful she risks being killed by the Dutch as a collaborator once the war is over.

Paul Verhoeven went to Hollywood in the 1980s and soon carved out a reputation as someone who could put a big budget, high action movie together on time and make a lot of money for the producers. In doing so he made some of the key movies of that era: Robocop, Total Recall and of course the much reviled but highly successful Basic Instinct. For this movie he returned to his native Netherlands and produced a film which became the most popular film ever in that country. And it is good, thrilling, very sexy (Carice has to seduce a German officer at one point and deploys skills which would corrupt St Francis of Assisi) and, like all his movies, superbly paced.

MAMMA MIA! (2008) D- Phyllidia Lloyd. A lady of a certain age runs a bar on a Greek island, where she is joined by her daughter who is about to be married. Thing is, she'd like her Dad to give her away, but her Dad could be one of three possible candidates. So unknown to her Mum, she invites all three of them to the celebrations, in the hope that the truth of her parentage will somehow emerge. Hilarious chaos ensues, all set to the music of a quite successful Swedish combo.

Let me say straight away this is not my sort of movie, though I would appear to be in the minority. Mamma Mia! went down a storm on the stage before it ever got to the screen, where its success was more or less a shoe-in. Big stars were brought in (Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan etc etc) and a high professional standard throughout made it look good on the screen despite its lighter-than-air substance. It also illustrated the modern trend for having stars sing even if they quite patently can't (I refer to Pierce, who must have been very puzzled when he got through the auditions), a phenomenon which found its truest expression in Les Mis which makes a virtue out of being a musical peopled largely by actors who can't hold a tune. This is in stark contrast to a previous era when nearly all the major players in West Side Story had their singing voices overdubbed. Even Rita Moreno, a professional singer, had to fight hard to avoid having her voice dubbed. That was done in secret, with the actual singers never being credited. The questionable ethics of that sort of practice have passed into history, and rightly so. I'm not saying we should return to that, but I think I am saying that if you're going to make a musical, you should at least cast people who can sing. That's not too outrageous is it?

LORD JIM (1965) D-Richard Brooks. At the turn of the 20th century, a dashing young Englishman (Peter O'Toole) disgraces himself by abandoning a burning ship and leaving the passengers to their fates. He spends the rest of his life trying to atone for this act, and when he is offered the chance of helping a group of rebels in the Far East bring down their tyrannical rulers he jumps at the chance, even though the chances of his own survival are slim...

That is essentially your movie in a nutshell and with a highly competent director at the helm, treating one of Joseph Conrad's most interesting novels, and everybody's favourite Irishman in the lead, you'd have thought this was a classic in the making. Strange then, that it wasn't. O'Toole seems self conscious in his role, although he later said he was wounded by criticism of his contribution and regarded it as one of his best roles. The direction comes over as wooden, and time seems to drag terribly- it's at least half an hour too long. It was chosen as the Royal Command Performance film for 1965, so the poor Queen had to sit through the whole thing, showing how demanding the role of royalty can be sometimes...