Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

Back in the mid-60s when I was still in short trousers, I won a brand new pencil in class for correctly spelling supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Oh such joy!. This week I learned (from the radio, but here’s the story) that 13-year-old Morgan Pozgar was crowned the LG National Texting Champion and won $25,000 for correctly texting supercalifragilisticexpialidocious in just 15 seconds. A sign of the times! Surely sprclfrglstcxpldcs is close enough in text and could knock about 7 seconds off the record?

Plus ça change …

Film: Half Nelson by Ryan Fleck
Rating: 8/10

Okay, okay, I take it back. Not the bit about Hollywood, but there are actually some good indie films coming out of America. (I knew that already; The Squid and the Whale being a not-too-out-of-date example) but its easy to forget. I often feel the sign of an intelligent director is a film that trusts its audience to follow subtle metaphors and to enjoy the film even if they don’t. This film bravely offers us a mini-course on dialectics (or the philosophy of change) tailored for 13-year old kids and loosely relevant to the stories of its three main characters. The ending is open enough that the viewer can conclude that these opposing forces had/had not any effect on changing each other.

Half Nelson is a gritty, uncompromising film, more reminiscent of British than American cinema, with its relatively unsentimental view of a working-class school and neighbourhood. Shot with a very shaky camera which was a bit too close-up in the small eight row cinema where I saw it, we were a bit sea-sick when the credits finally rolled. Nevertheless, it was worth the discomfort; this is an intelligent film about a teacher’s descent into drug addiction which concludes ambiguously in the real world where nothing gets resolved just because the 90 minutes are up.

Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) has already tried rehab before we meet him but he’s dropped out. He’s got a lot going for him; he’s personable, intellectual, employed, liked by his students and we never really learn what personal anguish is making him so self-destructive. He knows he’s descending into darkness but he doesn’t even fight it. In his coherent moments, he’s an idealistic teacher but not the cloying patronising kind we saw in, for instance, Dead Poet’s Society. Drey (Shareeka Epps) is a 13-year old student with her own issues: poverty, temptation, possibly a crush on her teacher; she’s street-wise, fights her own battles and makes her own decisions. The trio is completed by Frank (Anthony Mackie) in a great performance as a charismatic drug dealer who doesn’t need to play it tough to be wholly credible. The only false note in the screenplay is Dunne’s too perfect classroom composure.

This is a short out-take from ordinary lives; ‘nothing’ happens but heading home you know you’ve thought a bit more about the human condition and realise that there is nothing to be done to change it.

Sonata for a good man

Film: The Lives of Others by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Rating: 9/10
Original Music by Gabriel Yared supplying the title of this review

Germany has come into its own of late with some of the best new cinema in Europe. Europe has, of course, always been head and shoulders above America. My first thought leaving the theatre was that this film exemplifies everything that sets European cinema apart from American cinema. “How did Hollywood get it so wrong I thought”, rather idiotically, because of course Hollywood is laughing hysterically all the way to the bank. Nevertheless, give me a European film any day.

The bad guy in a European film isn’t a psychopath. He’s your average selfish individual ready to use whatever power he has to walk all over others just to get what he wants; you meet them everyday in every walk of life; and many don’t think they’re bad. The good guy in a European film isn’t a hero who takes a few blows, turning the other cheek and then eventually rising up against evil and restoring order and justice to the world. No, he’s weak and afraid like most of us and if he’s lucky he’ll muddle through without losing too much; and many don’t think they’re that good. It’s even more complicated: bad guys aren’t bad all the time and good guys sometimes betray their friends.

This fabulous story shows one bad/good guy, who terrorises others by his diligence in enforcing a regime he believes in, becoming ambivalent about a case because he doesn’t respect the motives of his commander. It shows some good/bad guys, who just want to succeed in the regime without believing in it, and one who discovers that she’s prepared to compromise her friends to defend her ambitions. So in a way it’s a story about one man relentlessly committed to his principles whatever their effect on the lives of others and others who were prepared to compromise their own principles for the benefits that can bring and how both switch sides.

Finally it’s not easy to tell bad/good from good/bad … like in the real world. And then there’s the unique circumstance of the story where the Berlin Wall comes crashing down and one of the characters gets the never-before-thought-of opportunity to actually read the official record of what happened (because here we’re in a country with a fixation on recording every last detail) and he puts two-and-two together.

Bound to disappoint American audiences (if Hollywood’s fixation on happy endings is to be trusted!) because the really bad guys walk and the good guys get a pretty raw deal, this film is simultaneously enthralling because it’s believable and a thrilling piece of European culture.

The medieval future

Book: The Pesthouse by Jim Crace
Rating: 10/10

If I could write, I’d want to write like Jim Crace. From the first moment I first discovered his The Gift of Stones he entered my list of ‘favourite authors’ alongside Graham Swift, Heinrich Böll, Iain M Banks, Juan José Saer and very few others. The kind of writer you check the shelves for every single time you enter a bookshop; then when you buy the latest book you leave it unopened a while, savouring the anticipation, fearing that once you’ve read it there’ll be no more Jim Crace to discover unless he writes another; and the day may come when he won’t. He’s already hinted that, though thankfully it now seems that two more are in the pipeline.

The Pesthouse is not his masterpiece (see Arcadia for that) but it is solid reliable Crace. Reading it I was in familiar territory. First, it reminded me of Signals of Distress though I can’t say why other than a feeling about the attitudes portrayed. Then it recalled The Gift of Stones and it is, in a sense, its mirror image, evoking a world that is regressing. Later again I felt stirrings of Quarantine with the trek across the wilderness and Being Dead with all the death and decomposition. That’s the thing about Crace; his books may be all about different things but they’re fashioned from the same tools. His sentences are short and poetic. His characters are lonely people, inhabiting slightly surreal but still recognisable worlds. There is an overarching misanthropy, tempered by great affection for individual characters.

Crace described Pesthouse as follows:

The novel provides America not with a science fiction future but with something that it has always wanted and lacked – a medieval “past”, an ancient European experience.

In some ways we’ve been there many times before in science fiction, and also in westerns. It’s the post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max inhabited by the grubby frontier people of High Plains Drifter but without any heroic ‘man-with-no-name’ to take revenge on wrong-doers. This is a western told in the European style. Cormac McCarthy came close in The Border Trilogy but ultimately Crace’s characters, timid, fearful and chaste, strike me as most believable.