Another dollop of the cream of British acting stirred into the Potterathon

So, hands up who recognised the lovely and talented Ciarán Hinds, aka Captain Wentworth in the most excellent movie version of Persuasion in the mid-1990s,

as Albus Dumbledore's brother Aberforth

in the eighth and final Harry Potter movie. (And what an excellent movie it is.)

I keep telling people 1953 was a good year.

Not the Social Network

I've not seen The Social Network yet, though I do intend to, maybe this weekend. But I've read a great deal about it and the more I read the more puzzled I get.

Because here are all these movie critics, mostly starry-eyed fans of Aaron Sorkin, banging on about Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg's moral turpitude in allegedly double-crossing his best mate, and allegedly cheating the Winklevoss twins, and being a vilely sexist little arse, and so on and so endlessly on. (And no doubt some of this is more or less true. I've just Googled Zuckerberg to confirm my sense of his age and was a bit horrified to discover that he is my astrological twin. Him, David Byrne, Cate Blanchett and me. Go figure.)

But what I have not yet seen one film critic do, not one so far, is question -- or even mention -- the ethics of making a film 'about' a 26 year old man that makes him look as much as possible like a dishonest, unpleasant little schmuck, but that Sorkin defends by saying it's not a documentary, it's a 'story'.

I don't know much about Sorkin, but I know enough to know that he knows perfectly well that most people are actually not all that sophisticated about these things, and that 95% of the people who see that movie will come out of thinking that they now know the whole truth about the real Mark Zuckerberg.

Imagine if an idolised and influential screenwriter nearly twice your age who'd decided he didn't like you, thought you were a moral midget, and held your invention in contempt (as Sorkin has made it clear he does, despite the fact, of which he seems proud, that he's more than happy to despise Facebook while knowing almost nothing about the uses of it) made a movie about a character with your name who invents your invention and is sued by the same people you've been sued by, and in the process makes you look as bad as possible -- and then says loftily, no, no, it's not a documentary, it's a story about great themes, so I'm allowed to make stuff up and leave stuff out and gaily mix up fact and fiction as much as I want.

Imagine if somebody did that to you. At all, much less when you were still only 26 and had to carry it for the rest of your life. What would you call that, if not unethical?

Harry Potter and the Magic Realism

In today's Crikey newsletter, Peter Craven reports on the new Harry Potter movie:

... it’s so episodic that it actually has the material for a huge mini-series where the snogging and quidditch alternate with the armies marching by night, the deatheaters speeding like a vision of hell through Britain’s low sky.

A huge mini-series where snogging and quidditch alternate with the armies marching by night, eh? Fantasy schmantasy, sounds like real life to me.

A note on Australian cinema

Neil Cross's novel Burial (which is neither Australian nor cinema, but bear with me) made me feel sick for the same reasons some of the Barbara Vine ones do and it was not a good thing to be reading in the same 24 hours as watching Wolf Creek, about which I kept thinking the allusions to Picnic at Hanging Rock were very well and subtly done, not least the riveting presence of John Jarratt in two movies over 30 years apart. That thought was a kind of distancing/defence mechanism, I think. Thank God I watched it on commercial TV with ads to break it up or my heart would have given out.

1,000th post: LOTR and the Macbeth Retort

Tonight the third and last Lord of the Rings movie, The Return of the King, was on the teeve. I didn't mean to watch it but I just happened to switch on the telly as I was passing and there was David Wenham as the noble Lord Faramir, skewering Orcs left and right, and I was gone for all money. (I recently saw Australia and am now planning a David Wenham Tribute Post.)

If you count this blog as a continuation of Pavlov's Cat, which is all it is really, then this is my 1,000th post: 871 at Pavlov's Cat and 129 here at Still Life With Cat. And I dedicate it to Shakespeare, Tolkien and Peter Jackson.

Because my favourite moment in this movie is the one where the warrior maiden Eowyn, in full battle gear and therefore not recognisable as a woman, faces down the Lord of the Nazgul on the plain before the gates of Minas Tirith. After she's cut off the head of his disgusting pterosaur airborne battle steed thingy and they're face to face on the field of battle, with her in full armour but still lithely dodging his nasty giant mace, he warns her: 'No man can kill me.'

Whereupon Eowyn lifts her visor to reveal the angelic face of Miranda Otto, shakes her blonde locks free, replies fiercely and triumphantly 'I am no man!' and stabs him straight through the face, upon which he crumples up, collapses like a piece of mouldy fruit, and dissolves into air. It's not quite what happens in the book, but the man/woman exchange is pretty much the same.

For those who may not remember the end of Macbeth the Scottish play, the Weird Sisters have shown Macbeth an apparition saying '... none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth.' By the end, desperate and drunk and silly on hubris because of the witches' prophecies, Macbeth faces Macduff, who's mad with grief and rage over the slaughter of his wife and children and hell-bent on revenge, and says 'I bear a charméd life, which must not yield / To one of woman born.' Whereupon Macduff replies, in one of the most chilling lines in all of Shakespeare and that is saying a great deal, 'Despair thy charm: / And let the angel whom thou still hast served [he means Lucifer, I think] / Tell thee Macduff was from his mother's womb / Untimely ripp'd.' And swordfights him off the stage, returning shortly with his severed head.

The scene in the movie (and, I'm sure, the book), warning the would-be invincible to beware of language and not to take prophecies literally, is a nice bit of homage. And I was very happy to see it again.

Word Nerd Corner (now with bonus nostalgia and film critique)

And today we have two:

1) "Fraudster"

Where did this bit of nonsense excess come from? It looks like tongue-in-cheek vaudeville Yiddish, or possibly Lolkitteh, whose construction is based partly on the addification of superfluitude. Whatever happened to the perfectly good, indeed lovely, word "fraud"? By this logic I could write you a list of some of my favourite blogs: The Viewster from Elsewhere, Hoydenster About Town, Pea Soupster, Baristaster, Humanities Researcherster ...

2) Socialite

In yet another cautionary tale about over-trustful reliance on the spell-checker, this week's TV guide, courtesy of News Ltd via the Adelaide Advertiser, contains a plot précis of tonight's ABC movie A Room With a View: 'Much to the disapproval of her chaperone, a young woman is drawn to the son of a socialite while visiting Florence in search of adventure.'

Now I wrote an Honours thesis on Forster back in the mists of time and to this day remember whole chunks of A Room With a View by heart ('Most excellent Honeychurches, but you know what I mean') and this does not sound to me like Forster's plot. For a start, the heroine is already engaged to the son of a socialite (a strange way to put it, I thought) and her arrival in Florence precipitates the new romantic direction away from him, not towards. And secondly, her chaperone, far from disapproving, is in fact excited and inspired by her new romantic adventure.

[UPDATE: well, I've watched it now and I take some of this back. What I was remembering was the chaperone Charlotte's own repressions and projections; chaperone is indeed outwardly over-horrified about Lucy's attraction to George but later proves to have been excited and stimulated by the romance, and a friend to it in the end. That was what I was remembering, not helped by conflating the character of the chaperone with her friend the novelist Miss Lavish, who finds it all terribly romantic and colourful. My bad. NB although I could sort of see what Davies was doing turning so many of the subtexts into super-texts (one of which in particular Forster would have been relieved to see end its long sojourn in the closet, so props to Davies for that) and obliterating others altogether, I thought this new version pedestrian, heavy-handed and literal-minded, though some of the casting was good, the music was nice, and Florence was Florence even though the cinematographer tried very hard to make it look ordinary with a palette of bleached Dickensian greys.]

I thought I'd solved the first mystery after two minutes' thought when I recalled that the new love interest is the son of a socialist (something Forster barely mentions in passing), and either some twelve-year-old sub had never seen the word 'socialist' but was intimately acquainted with the life and works of Paris Hilton, or (slightly more likely) they simply hadn't bothered to check. After all, it's not so long ago that I used the word 'interiority' in a book review and was subsequently horrified to see it rendered in both the online and the dead-tree edition of the paper in question as 'inferiority', which still made a kind of sense but, as you might expect, grotesquely changed the meaning of the sentence. (Both 'socialite' and 'inferiority' in these instances are variations on the theme of the eggcorn.) However, I remained bewildered by the chaperone part.

The TV guide gives the date of this production as 2007 so it is clearly not, I thought, alas, I thought, the substantial, sumptuous and multiply-Oscar-nominated Merchant Ivory adaptation of 1985 with Daniel Day-Lewis, Helena Bonham Carter, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Rupert Graves and Denholm Elliot.

No, a quick Google revealed that it is this adaptation by the ubiquitous Andrew Davies, who for reasons best known to himself has decided to change the ending in a way that would have Forster turning (or, more probably, knowing Forster, smiling gently) in his grave. And for all I know, not only has he made the chaperone disapproving but he's turned the love interest's father from a socialist into a socialite. Heck, why not.

Just as well I Googled it, or I would be spending an hour and a half tonight intermittently tearing my hair out and screaming at the TV. But Forster, as I say, is beyond caring. And as though to underline the point about spell-checking, up there in that last paragraph I originally typed 'smiling gently in his grace'.

Knowing Forster, that too.

They don't make 'em like that any more

'It's never a tragedy when an old man dies. Forgive him for his shortcomings, and thank him for all his love and care.'

-- A Prairie Home Companion

Pesto improbable, says Bond

James Bond (who was, one surmises, brought up on wartime English food) discovers pesto sauce:

Signor Kristatos picked up the menu. [Note Italian honorific with Greek surname. These wog chappies all look the same. -- Ed.] He said 'I do not beat about bushes, Mr Bond. How much?'

'Fifty thousand pounds for one hundred per cent results.'

Kristatos said indifferently: 'Yes. These are important funds. I shall have melon with prosciutto ham and a chocolate ice-cream. I do not eat greatly at night. These people have their own Chianti. I commend it.'

The waiter came and there was a brisk rattle of Italian. Bond ordered Tagliatelli Verdi with a Genoese sauce which Kristatos had said was improbably concocted of basil, garlic and fir cones.

-- Ian Fleming, 'Risico', c.1960

This story appears in Quantum of Solace: The Complete James Bond Short Stories, just published as a tie-in with the new Bond movie of the same name. The title story also appears in this collection and while it bears the marks of a heavy debt to W. Somerset Maugham, it has absolutely one hundred per cent nothing to do with the synopsis of the movie. Go figure.

The phrase itself as Fleming uses it, however, is the kind of thing you tend to remember when you're thinking about how reading literature has given you many useful tools for living your life.

'... I think it's the same with all relationships between a man and a woman. They can survive anything so long as some kind of basic humanity exists between the two people. When all kindness has gone, when one person obviously and sincerely doesn't care if the other is alive or dead, then it's just no good. ... I've seen flagrant infidelities patched up, I've seen crimes and even murder forgiven by the other party ... But never the death of common humanity in one of the partners. ... I have called it the Law of the Quantum of Solace.'

Bond said: 'That's a splendid name for it ... Quantum of Solace -- the amount of comfort. Yes, I suppose you could say that all love and friendship is based in the end on that ... [When the] Quantum of Solace stands at zero, you've got to get away to save yourself.'