Film, TV, and Theatre

Will Ferrell in Elf (2003)

Leave a comment

Anyone seen Elf again recently? I have, and although I came late to the party, some years after its 2003 release, it’s a Christmas staple in our house. It’s just a joy to watch, with great performances from Will Ferrell as Buddy the human-who-thinks-he’s-an-elf, and a strong supporting cast including James Caan and Zooey Deschanel (great comedic actress later to star in American sitcom New Girl). It’s just a charming, silly family film but a sublimely-made charming, silly family film. The director was Jon Favreau, who is known for films as diverse as romcom, musical drama, adventure and sci-fi, and including several of the Marvel Studios movies.

The first script for Elf was written way back in 1993 by American screenwriter David Berenbaum, with Jim Carrey in mind to play Buddy. However, as the project took years to get off the ground, Carrey went on instead to produce that other festive favourite in 2000’s How The Grinch Stole Christmas, and Will Farrell joined the project instead. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about a human baby, inadvertently brought back to the North Pole in Santa’s sack, who is brought up as an elf, and who later tracks down his biological father in New York. As an “innocent abroad”, there is none so innocent as this.

While you might assume that a lot of computer trickery was employed to make Will Ferrell look bigger than his fellow actors in the North Pole, Jon Favreau favoured camera techniques and trickery to create the illusion. He used the concept of “forced perspective”, along with the building of two sets, one smaller than the other, with one raised closer and smaller and one bigger and further away. With the two sets measured and lined up, the director could have one person on one set appear to be much larger than a person on the other set. The only CGI in the film was some snowing.

The scene with Peter Dinklage is riotously funny, and is best viewed without food or drink in your mouth. The scene is set in the boardroom of the children’s book publishing house that Buddy’s father works for, under pressure to come up with the next best-seller. Dinklage plays a paid external children’s book wunderkind come to bail out the company with his great ideas. Dinklage’s character, like Dinklage himself, has dwarfism and the juxtaposition of innocence and offence that ensues, when Buddy enters the room and thinks he is seeing an actual elf, is brilliant. For the viewing audience it is a case of seeing both sides…and it’s very, very funny, so Merry Christmas!

Will Ferrell as Buddy the Elf

 

 

 

 

Literature

HG Wells’s The War Of The Worlds (1898)

Leave a comment

HG (Herbert George) Wells (1866-1946) was a prolific writer with more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories to his name. His output was an eclectic mix, including works of social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography, and futurism (he foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something akin to the World Wide Web) – but of course what he is best remembered for is his science fiction, following the remarkable rapid-fire publication over a four-year period of instant classics The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898).

The War of the Worlds is one of the earliest stories to detail a conflict between mankind and an extra-terrestrial race. It presents itself as a factual account of a Martian invasion as witnessed by the narrator. You know the plot: apparent meteors have rained down around the narrator’s home town of Woking (through which I travelled by train recently, prompting me to make a mental note to write this very blog), but which of course turn out to be far from inorganic space rock, but instead very much not-friendly space aliens bent on destroying humanity.

The first edition was illustrated by British artist Warwick Goble: inky, black-and-white depictions that were eerie, imaginative, exciting, and thoroughly of their late Victorian time. Later, in 1906, the French editions were illustrated by the Brazilian artist Henrique Alvim Corrêa, which turned out to be something of an upgrade, adding to the evocation of Wells’ imagined creatures and their vessels, and of which Wells himself mightily approved.

The War of the Worlds has spawned half a dozen feature films and television series, a record album and musical show (Jeff Wayne, of course), but perhaps the most impactful dramatisation came in the 1938 radio programme directed by and starring Orson Welles. It was very much played for real and if you happened to miss the introductory monologue – which thousands of listeners did – you could be forgiven for thinking the drama was a live newscast of developing events. The programme famously created widespread panic with hordes of people believing that  a real-life Martian invasion was underway right then in North America (Welles had swapped out Woking for Grover’s Mill, New Jersey). It’s easy to scoff at the mass credulousness of the public, but you decide: here’s a clip of the broadcast. Might you have believed it, too?

HG Wells
Art

Jacques-Louis David’s Oath Of The Horatii (1784)

Leave a comment

A generation or two before the Impressionists, French artists didn’t have the luxury of lolling about fields painting haystacks and generally having a wheeze of a time. At a time of seismic social and political change, an artist had to box clever to stay on the right side of dangerous political forces. Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) was one such painter who managed to successfully navigate his way – and his art – from the final years of the Ancien Régime through the French Revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon.

David was considered to be the preeminent painter of the Neoclassical era, that return to the high-minded severity of the arts of ancient Greece and Rome in contrast to the frivolity of the late Baroque. David’s history painting matched the moral climate of the final years of Louis XVI and he was favoured by the Court. However, David later became an active supporter of the French Revolution and friend of Robespierre, and his Death of Marat (1793) became one of the most famous images of the era.

Imprisoned briefly after Robespierre’s fall from power, he aligned himself with yet another political regime upon his release: that of Napoleon, the First Consul of France. As well as his suitably heroic rendering of Napoleon in his Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass (1801), he also created the monumental The Coronation of Napoleon (1806). Finally, after Napoleon’s fall from power and the Bourbon revival, David exiled himself to Brussels, where he remained until his death.

However, let’s return to David’s origins with a painting considered a Neoclassical masterpiece, Oath of the Horatii (1784). It depicts a scene from a Roman legend about a seventh-century BC dispute between two warring cities, Rome and Alba Longa. Instead of the two cities sending their armies to war, they agree to choose three men from each city; the victor in that fight will be the victorious city. From Rome, three brothers from a Roman family, the Horatii, agree to fight three brothers from a family of Alba Longa, the Curiatii.

The three Horatii brothers, willing to sacrifice their lives for the good of Rome, are shown saluting their father who holds their swords out for them. There could be no more evocative a scene of patriotic duty and, although painted four years before the Revolution, it nonetheless became a symbol of loyalty to State and a defining image of the time.

Of the three Horatii brothers, only one will survive the confrontation and he will kill each Curiatii brother in turn, seizing victory for Rome. Aside from the three brothers depicted, David also represents, in the bottom right corner, a woman crying. She is Camilla, a sister of the Horatii, who happens to be also betrothed to one of the Curiatii fighters, and thus she weeps in the realisation that, whatever happens, she will lose someone she loves.

Music

Eric Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1 (1888)

2 Comments

Pretty much all of the classical composers I have written about in this blog so far (let’s see: Brahms, Mozart, Chopin, Mendelssohn, to name but a few) were prolific and complex and noted for being child prodigies for whom an upward musical trajectory was clearly in the offing. Not so this week’s enigmatic composer, Eric Satie (1866–1925). The son of a French father and a Scottish mother, Satie studied at the Paris Conservatoire, but was an undistinguished student and left without even obtaining a diploma (one tutor described his piano technique as “insignificant and worthless”; they didn’t hold back in those days), working throughout the 1880s as a pianist in café-cabaret in Montmartre, Paris. At this time, however, he would begin composing works, mostly for solo piano such as his Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes, that would propel him to an unanticipated renown.

Satie famously employed a minimalist, pared back style of music in contrast to the grand and epic compositions of a Wagner, for example.  In fact, he would influence a whole new generation of French composers away from post-Wagnerian impressionism and towards a sparer, terser style. Among those influenced by him during his lifetime were Maurice Ravel (see his Boléro, for example) and he is seen as an influence on more recent, minimalist composers such as John Cage and Arvo Pärt.

Satie was an enigma, for sure, and something of a quirky character. He gave some of his later works absurd titles, such as Veritables Preludes flasques (pour un chien) (“True Flabby Preludes (for a Dog)”, 1912), and Croquis et agaceries d’un gros bonhomme en bois (“Sketches and Exasperations of a Big Wooden Man“, 1913). He never married, and his home for most of his adult life was a single small room, first in Montmartre and later in Arcueil. He adopted various images over the years, including a period in quasi-priestly garb, another in which he always wore identically coloured velvet suits, and another, perhaps his most enduring persona, in which he wore a neat bourgeois costume, with bowler hat, wing collar, and umbrella. He was a lifelong heavy drinker, and died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 59.

If you think you don’t know Eric Satie’s music, think again, as you’re sure to recognise his Gymnopédie No. 1 that you can hear here against some footage of old Paris (I love these old videos, don’t you, during the advent of moving pictures when passers-by would stare or glance at this strange new-fangled gizmo pointing at them, and seeming to connect, albeit briefly, with we the viewer well over a century later).

Eric Satie

 

 

Music

Cat Stevens’ Tea For The Tillerman (1970)

Leave a comment

One of the advantages of having older sisters in the early seventies when I was just starting to discover music was the inheritance from them of certain classic albums. In retrospect, I admire their generosity, because it’s not everyone who relinquishes large parts of their music collection to younger siblings (I’m not sure I would have, had I had any). Nonetheless, I came to own and appreciate at a young age such seminal records as David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars, the Moody Blues’ In Search of the Lost Chord, and Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin II. Oh, and also three classic albums by the subject of today’s blog, Cat Stevens, namely Mona Bone Jakon, Tea for the Tillerman, and Teaser and the Firecat.

These three albums sprung out of what was an impressively rich period of output from Cat: in order, they had been released in April 1970, November 1970 and October 1971. Not that I knew the order of release back then – I wasn’t yet a geek – they were simply records, but records chock-full of warm, catchy folk-pop, occasionally with a Greek tinge in homage to his part-Hellenic heritage (his father was Cypriot, his mother Swedish, and Cat himself – Steven Georgiou – was born in Marylebone, London).

Songs that resonated: Katmandu from Mona Bone Jakon, a lilting, mystical acoustic song awash with flute from a 19-year-old Peter Gabriel, and a paean to all things simple and peaceful, a metaphoric Eden away from Western civilisation. Years later I would be riding a bus into the real Kathmandu in Nepal with this track playing meaningfully on my Sony Walkman.

From Teaser and the Firecat: Peace Train, and its hopeful, anti-war lyrics (Out on the edge of darkness, There rides a peace train, Oh peace train take this country, Come take me home again). Idealistic, sure, but it certainly struck a chord with me at the time, and if you can’t be idealistic as a young teenager, when can you be (the gimlet eye of experience hadn’t yet been acquired)?

And from Tea for the Tillerman, the beautifully crafted Father and Son, a poignant exchange between a father failing to understand his son’s desire to break away, and the son struggling to articulate the drive he feels to seek his own destiny. I always had travel in my soul, and dreamt of taking off into the wider world, so this spoke to me in volumes, even though I didn’t actually have to deal with any such cultural misalignments with my own dad.

After famously converting to Islam and changing his name to Yusuf Islam in 1978, and dropping out of the spotlight for many years, Cat returned to pop music in 2006 and released an album of new pop songs (for the first time in 28 years), under the name Yusuf. In September 2020, and now under the combinatorial name Yusuf/Cat Stevens, he released Tea for the Tillerman 2, a reboot of the original to celebrate its 50th anniversary.

Another great song from that album was Where Do The Children Play? and here is Cat playing a simple acoustic version of it and proving that he’s still got a voice like warm molasses. A shout out to my mate Graham for sending me this and inspiring this week’s blog!

Cat Stevens
Film, TV, and Theatre

Patrick McGoohan as The Prisoner (1967)

Leave a comment

Although I was too young at the time to watch the original 1967 airing of this British TV series, I guess it must have been re-run in the eighties or perhaps my friend Alec had it on video and shared it with me? Whatever, at some point in the eighties I discovered The Prisoner and, hooked from episode one, I became, with Alec, a big fan. Here was a TV series that was not only entertaining but actually made you think. Nothing was ever what it seemed, no-one had a real name, you never knew who the good guys were and who the bad; it had a unique, surreal vibe, and it incorporated elements of science fiction, allegory, spy fiction and psychological drama.

The show was created while Patrick McGoohan and George Markstein were working on spy drama Danger Man (fun fact: Ian Fleming worked in the development stage of Danger Man, and its protagonist, played by McGoohan, announces himself as “Drake…John Drake”). The exact details of who created which aspects of The Prisoner are disputed though majority opinion credits McGoohan as the sole creator of the series, and it’s certainly true that it was McGoohan who pitched the idea verbally to station boss Lew Grade. One can only imagine the inner workings of Grade’s mind as the concept and plot were laid down for him; however, he went with it and the project was born.

So, what was that plot? An unnamed British intelligence agent is abducted and wakes up in a mysterious coastal location known to its residents as the Village. His captors designate him as Number Six and try to find out why he abruptly resigned from his job, something he steadfastly refuses to divulge. His chief antagonist is styled Number Two (and no, we never satisfactorily learn who is Number One), the identity of whom changes with nearly every episode, allowing a roster of well-known sixties’ actors, like Leo McKern, Anton Rodgers and Peter Wyngarde, to play their part.

Most of the residents are prisoners themselves, while others are embedded as spies or guards. The Village is surrounded by mountains on three sides and the sea on the other, and any would-be escapees who make it out to sea are tracked by CCTV and recaptured by Rover, a huge mobile translucent white balloon-thing. Everyone uses numbers for identification, and most of the villagers wear a standard outfit consisting of coloured blazers, multicoloured capes, striped sweaters, and a variety of headwear such as straw boaters. They are generally very polite, though that tends to make you very suspicious of them.

Catchphrases abound, and I remember Alec and I gleefully repeating them ad infinitum: “I’m not a number, I’m a free man!”, “Be seeing you” and the gloriously libertarian “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered!”. The latter phrase I had emblazoned on a t-shirt bought from the gift shop at Portmeirion in North Wales, where The Prisoner was filmed and which I visited on pilgrimage in 1987.

Let’s enjoy the opening credits, enhanced by the excellent soundtrack from Ron Grainer.

Number Six

 

Art

Edwin Landseer’s The Monarch Of The Glen (1851)

1 Comment

Sir Edwin Landseer (1802-1873) was a London-born painter and sculptor whose artistic talents were recognised early on: at age thirteen he exhibited works at the Royal Academy as an “Honorary Exhibitor” and was elected as an Associate there at the minimum age of twenty four. He was able to paint extremely quickly and perhaps these days would have attracted a cool nickname like snooker players Hurricane Higgins and Whirlwind White (Lightning Landseer, perhaps); he was also reputed to be able to draw simultaneously with both hands. One biographer wrote:

…upon the occasion of a large party assembled one evening at the house of a gentleman in London, the conversation having turned upon the subject of feats of skill with the hand, one of the ladies present remarked that it would be impossible for anyone, however skilful, to draw two things at once.
“Oh, I can do that,” said Landseer quietly; “give me two pencils and I will show you.” The pencils were brought, and Landseer, taking one in each hand, drew simultaneously and unhesitatingly the profile of a stag’s antlered head with one hand, and with the other the perfect outline of the head of a horse.

Certainly, Landseer’s renown stemmed from his paintings of animals, particularly horses, dogs and stags, although his most famous work is undoubtedly the set of four bronze lion sculptures at the base of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. Today’s subject is probably his next most famous work, though, being, as it is, the ultimate biscuit tin image of Scotland: The Monarch of the Glen.

The Monarch of the Glen is an oil-on-canvas painting depicting a red deer stag, set against the steamy rugged hills of the Scottish Highlands. It was completed in 1851 as part of a series of three panels intended to hang in the Refreshment Rooms of the House of Lords, although that commission never came off due to some dispute or other and it was sold into private ownership. It also, however, sold widely in reproductions and became one of the most popular paintings of the 19th century. It probably helped that Queen Victoria was a big fan.

The painting was purchased in 1916 by the Pears soap company and this kicked off the Monarch’s career in advertising. It was sold on to John Dewar & Sons distillery and became their trademark before similarly being used by Glenfiddich on their whisky bottles. A derivative of the Monarch graced the shelves of Harrods and Fortnum & Mason via the cans of Baxter’s Royal Game Soup, and of course, as implied, it adorned many a tin of shortbread biscuits. In 2017, the painting was finally sold by its last owner Diageo to the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, where it can now be viewed by the public in all its majesty.

The stag has twelve points on his antlers, which in deer terminology makes him a “royal stag” not a “monarch stag”, for which sixteen points are needed, but let’s not quibble; he’s a magnificent beast.

The Monarch of the Glen
Poetry

Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier (1915)

Leave a comment

I recently stayed for a few days in the charming village of Redmarley d’Abitot in Gloucestershire and when researching the local area was pleasantly surprised to find that the nearby village of Dymock was significant in poetry circles for being the home of the eponymous Dymock Poets (as well as being the home of the Dymock Red cider apple and also Stinking Bishop cheese!). A visit ensued and in its church of St Mary’s I found a display about the Dymock Poets and learnt a bit more.

They were a literary group of poets who lived in or around Dymock, or visited often, and were active in the period from 1911 to the First World War. Centred around Lascelles Abercrombie’s house The Gallows, in nearby Ryton (that I subsequently visited and had a nice chat with the current owner who told me she gets plenty of American and Chinese literary tourists), the group comprised Abercrombie, Robert Frost (whose poem The Road Not Taken I wrote about here), Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson and John Drinkwater.

The group published their own quarterly, titled New Numbers, and it was in this that we first saw Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier published: a poem which was to gain worldwide fame for its simple and affecting ‘noble fallen soldier’ motif, and be recited in a thousand-fold war memorials. Whilst a lot of war poetry such as Wilfrid Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est (also blogged about, here) had a discernibly realistic view of war, Brooke’s The Soldier was diametrically opposite: a romanticised and  sentimental view, speaking in unabashed tones of pride, courage, and sacrifice. It was written near the start of the First World War, perhaps before Brookes had time to sample the brutal realities of battle.

Indeed, he never would: sailing with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on its way to the Gallipoli landings in 1915, he developed streptococcal sepsis from an infected mosquito bite and, whilst moored off the Greek island of Skyros, died of septicaemia on 23rd April . As the expeditionary force had orders to depart immediately, Brooke was buried in an simple olive grove on Skyros. It makes the opening lines of his poem all the more poignant.

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Rupert Brooke
Film, TV, and Theatre

Key and Peele’s Substitute Teacher sketches (2012)

1 Comment

I came across the comedy duo Key & Peele just prior to Jordan Peele’s directorial career blowing up with the release of his films Get Out (2017), Us (2019) and, just last month, Nope. I have seen the first two of those movies, and they are intriguing, slick psychological horror films, but it’s his comedy with partner Keegan-Michael Key that interests us here. The two first worked together on American sketch comedy series Mad TV but broke out with their own series on Comedy Central.

Key and Peele are black Americans and their sketches often focus on ethnic stereotypes and social awkwardness in race relations but they are very funny with it, and no more so than in their two Substitute Teacher sketches. In these, Key plays Mr Garvey, an angry and intimidating substitute teacher and veteran of inner-city schooling, who has come to teach a class of white, mild-mannered suburban students.

Since Mr Garvey is presumably used to teaching kids with first names having every spelling and pronunciation under the sun, he struggles with the regular spellings and pronunciations of these white kids’ names: when taking the class roll he pronounces Jacqueline as “Jay-kwellin”, Blake as “Balarkay”, Denise as “Dee-nice” and Aaron as “A-A-Ron”. Any attempted correction is seen as an affront and there’s no way he’s going to take it, so he forces them to acknowledge themselves by his incorrect pronunciations and threatens to send them to Principal O’Shaughnessy’s office (whose name he pronounces “O-Shag-hennessy”).

The concept of Substitute Teacher is very clever and Key absolutely nails his character. With excellent contributions from the supporting cast of students whose names are so amusingly mangled, it’s very, very funny. “You done messed up, A-A-Ron!”

Substitute Teacher, Mr Garvey
Literature

Plato’s Allegory Of The Cave (c.375 BC)

Leave a comment

Anyone who has studied philosophy to any reasonable degree will be familiar with the “Father” of philosophy, Plato (c.428-348 BC). Along with this teacher, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato underpins the canon of ancient Greek philosophy and, descending from that, the entire history of Western and Middle Eastern philosophy to this day. Alfred North Whitehead summed up Plato’s enduring influence by characterising the whole of subsequent philosophy as “a series of footnotes to Plato”.

Plato innovated the so-called dialectic method of reasoning by way of dialogues between two or more characters (one of them often being his old teacher Socrates himself) in order to tease out the truth about something. Plato’s Socrates turns many an interlocutor on his head with his acute reasoning, and he’s also a dab hand with allegories: his most famous being found in Plato’s Republic and known as the Allegory of the Cave.

In this allegory Socrates describes a group of prisoners who live their lives chained to the wall of a cave, and facing a blank wall. The prisoners see only shadows projected on the wall by objects passing in front of a fire behind them. The shadows are the prisoners’ reality, but are not accurate representations of the real world; they are merely fragments of reality. Socrates explains that a philosopher is one who seeks to understand and perceive the higher levels of reality and is like the prisoner who is freed from the cave and who comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not the direct source of the images seen.

There is a thread running between this ancient allegory right up to modern times as science grapples with the fundamental makeup of reality and the possibility of higher dimensions but we needn’t tax ourselves with such deep matters right now. Instead, enjoy this excellent clay animation short which summarises the allegory nicely and is the work of writer and director Michael Ramsay, claymation artist John Grigsby and voice actor Kristopher Hutson.

Plato’s Cave

Commentaries on excellence in art, music, film, and literature