personal political

chipmunks

I took Olle to see Alvin and the Chipmunks yesterday. He liked it quite a lot; I could put up with it reasonably easily - but that's not the interesting thing about it. The interesting thing is that we had an Alvin and the Chipmunks record when I was a child which was one of the first records I ever listened to and which I played over and over again. I'm talking 1962 or 1963, when I was six or seven.

funny flicks

A very long time, someone posted a list of funny movies and invited people to bold the ones they had seen. (Actually, I'm now so old that I'm not sure if I've seen the ones I've bolded or just been in a room when they were on television or just seen previews of them - but I've tried to be strict with myself and only bold the ones I'm almost certain I have in fact watched.)

ET

I've been through the emotional wringer. Today I took Olle and a friend to see ET.

contrasting films

It's school holidays so we've been doing some holidayish things. On Friday I took Olle to see what was billed as "classic cartoons" at the Chauvel. It turned out to include a few short films, including the Red Balloon, which I was excited to see as we'd read the book last year year before last. I enjoyed that, but I enjoyed another, stylistically very similar, film even more. It was called The Golden Fish and was another black and white 'live action' film made in France in the late 50s. I can't find much about it on the Web except that it was, surprisingly, produced by Jacques Cousteau.

It's very similar to the Red Balloon in that it 'stars' a little boy and there is no dialogue. This time the boy is, I'd guess, Vietnamese, though the film is clearly set in France (lots of men in berets.) The boy, who is a latchkey kid, goes off to get a bottle replenished (with milk?) and stops at a fun fair along the way. There he watches as a Jewish man (long beard, hat) tries to win a competition for a prize goldfish. The man doesn't win but gives the boy some money to enter. The boy, of course, does win the fish. He takes it home and puts it in a fishbowl next to his caged bird (perhaps a canary). The second part of the film involves some fish and bird balletics and then a drama with a hunting cat [the IMDB website has a reader saying this was an orange tabby - it isn't, it's a black cat. Don't believe everything you read on the Internet].

I found the evidently deliberate diversity in this film fascinating. France 1959, a Vietnamese boy, a Jewish man. There's also a visual depiction of factory workers (including the boy's mother in tradtional costume) clocking in and clocking off. The pace is slow, the child lives an independent life, just like in the Red Balloon.

So so different from Happy Feet, which we saw yesterday. Don't get me wrong, we both enjoyed it (though Olle spent some time down on the floor during the killer whale sequence and other scary bits). Mostly I liked the central character, Mumble. Films like this, though, often leave me feeling a bit disengaged. They're too obvious for me, signalling all their moves and everything they want us, the audience, to feel.

Another, non-filmic, holiday event which I'd recommend to any parents in Sydney is the story-telling event at the Art Gallery of NSW, which is at 1.30pm on weekdays for an hour. 'Storytelling' doesn't capture the true theatricality and fun of it. And it's free.

comedies

Via Jody, I came across this quiz which I guess I should call a meme as it's now hit the blogs: which five comedies would you take with you to a desert island? Not in order of preference and off the top of my head:

• the collected Seinfeld
• the collected Dick Van Dyke Shows (which we've borrowed from a friend and have been enjoying watching en famille)
• Bringing Up Baby
• The Party
• Four Weddings and a Funeral

I guess to make it a meme I should send it on to others - consider yourself invited!

brokeback, good luck

I saw Brokeback Mountain this week. It seems to be a film that requires assessment. Mine is that Heath Ledger wasn't right in that part, but I thought Jake Gyllenhaal made the movie, even though at first I thought he was just too good-looking.  That was part of the problem with Ledger - not that I think he's ultra-handsome, but he's attractive enough and Gyllenhaal is charismatic enough that the two of them together  screamed 'Hollywood actors'. Ennis del Mar should have been lanky and malnourished-looking, I reckon (I read the story a few years ago).

I did find it very moving and very true to repressed-gay-life. Odd that it was written by a woman. (Or maybe not so odd.)

I also saw Good Night, and Good Luck. (I don't cope well with the comma in that title but it's American so I have to accept it.) It made me curious about Joe McCarthy. I know an average amount about the McCarthyist period but I don't know much about McCarthy himself. I'm guessing he was from a Catholic background. I know that Roy Cohn was homosexual. As far as I know McCarthy wasn't, but I wonder what personal demons fulled his evident hysteria. I'm sure there must be books about him...

Anyway, a small movie in its focus, but one which keeps popping into my mind, days later.

Apart from the politics of the media, Clooney's film has an interesting political subtext about smoking. Nearly everyone in Ed Murrow's program team is seen smoking, Murrow chain smokes and ostentatiously smokes on air and what I guess was an original (or remake of an original) Kent cigarette ad, tailor-made for Murrow's 'discerning' audience, is shown. Ed Murrow later died of lung cancer.

munich

I haven't seen Spielberg's new film and doubt that I will, especially after reading this critique of it.

How odd it is that Eric Bana, whose television comedy show bombed after just eight episodes, is now a Hollywood action star. And Heath Ledger, who from all accounts deserves to win an Oscar for Brokeback Mountain, got his start (in a gay role) in a Western Australia teen soap (Sweat) which flopped.

cinema by moonlight

We went to see Zoolander at the Moonlight Cinema in Centennial Park last night. It was amusing though I have my doubts about its relationship to homosexuality - I suspect it trades on homophobia and the two leading characters, male models, both conveniently turn out to be straight in the end.

Olle managed to stay awake for the whole film, to my slight consternation - I'd assumed he'd fall asleep. I'm sure he didn't really follow the plot but there were enough discrete watchable scenes to keep him watching.

We were there with two teenage boys (and their mother) - I saw one other small child. That was the thing which struck me most forcibly - just about the entire crowd was made up of twentysomethings in couples and groups. Not only were we almost the only people with children but we were among a handful of over-40s. 

Even though as a lesbian mother I'm used to feeling the odd one out in a group of parents and even though as an over-40 (lesbian mother) I'm used to feeling not part of the twenty and thirtysomething heterosexual crowd at work, I was hit by a wave of culture shock. "You mean, all of you go out every night to have fun together and don't have to make arrangements for anybody else to be looked after and don't have to suprervise the safety and behaviour of others or make sure you have enough food with you to feed three boys as well as yourselves etc." It was startling.

My friend, meanwhile, was having some culture shock of her own. She's an Australian who's lived in Enlgand for 25 years - her last visit was three years ago. Her shock was along the lines of: "You mean, it's night time and we're out without a cardigan and the grass is brown and there are fruitbats flying over and people speak in strange nasal voices and we're eating baba ganouj and everything smells different and we're at the bottom of the earth..." She says she keeps feeling like she has gone "through the wardrobe" (Narnia reference.)

Walking back through the park, the moon, though not full, was casting a very strong light. It's so rare that I'm in a situation to even notice moonlight, yet this was making us cast strong shadows and lighting up the ghost gums. Beautiful.

fighting for freedom

Apparently Bruce Willis is going to make a film to tell the "real' story of the American prescence in Iraq.

Willis says: "The Iraqi people want to live in a world where they can move from their homes to the market and not have to fear being killed. I mean, doesn't everybody want that?"

Certainly. And I'd guess that the vast majority of Iraqis had that prior to the invasion in 2003.

Yet another Bruce Willis film I won't be going to see.

vera drake

We watched Vera Drake on DVD the other day. I liked it a lot, if 'like' is the right word.

I was curious about the method Vera used to induce an abortion. She used a Higginson syringe containing grated 'soap' in boiled water. It looked as though she was administering a vaginal douche, but she would ask each woman to tell her when she felt full - full in the uterus, presumably. I don't completely understand how pumping a fluid into the vagina could make it go up into the uterus (otherwise pregnant woman wouldn't be able to go swimming etc.) Maybe the tubing was able to be inserted into the cervix? I haven't been able to find any information on that - even this review on a science website is not crystal clear on that subject. (Am I being obtuse? Help me out if you know more.)

The film made me think about the stigma attached to the term 'backyard abortion'. Of course, stigma should attach to a procedure which could kill and injure women. But what of the backyward abortionists themselves? I haven't read much about them and am curious to find out more - were there many woman like Vera or were they more like her greedy friend, who set up each abortion?