Time and Relative Digressions on Cheese (music, 2015)

Have I the right to touch these cows together?

This is really a bit of self-promotion, dear readers.  I've stepped away from films for a moment to tell you about an album by The Potential Bees, a small, surprising band of which I am a member.

'Time and Relative Digressions on Cheese' is a double-concept concept-album.  That is, a concept-album which has two concepts, each of which is worked into every track.  In this, it might be unique (though I wouldn't be terribly surprised if someone has done a double-concept concept-album in which one of the two topics is Christmas).  Anyway, every track on this new work is simultaneously about Doctor Who and cheese.  Fourteen Doctors, fourteen attitudes to cheese.  This may sound like a terrible idea, but actually I think it allowed us to come up with tracks which would never have occurred under other circumstances.

The whole album can be had (for free, if you wish) on Bandcamp, and the opening track has a music video, visible below:

It's a fairly diverse album, roaming across a number of genres and sounds to suit the different eras and temperaments of the Doctor/cheese pairings, so I hope you'll find some parts of it to enjoy.  If you like Doctor Who, or if you like cheese, or if you have an antipathy towards both of these topics, but remain willing to hear lively new songs, why not check it out?  One of my favourite concept albums - heck, one of my favourite albums, is on a topic that doesn't interest me - The Duckworth Lewis Method's self-titled album (2009), and its follow-up 'Sticky Wickets' (2013), are great cricket concept-albums, and despite cricket's dreariness, the songs delight me.  The other concept album that's long inspired me is Steven Ramsey's 'Genius of the Restoration' (2008), an amazing amateur concept-record regarding Indiana Jones.  Sadly, Ramsey seems to have disappeared from the Internet and taken much of his music with him, but some of the tracks can still be found on Youtube.

The Adventures of Food Boy (2008)

Yesterday, my bandmate Pez urged me to look out ‘The Adventures of Food Boy’ on Netflix.  I can’t remember quite why the recommendation was made, but the concept entranced me: a boy suddenly learns that his family has the magical power to produce food from their hands.  What sold me on the film was a description of a scene when, attempting to run for ‘class president’ (which is a thing, in America), young Ezra Chase (for that is his name) accidentally shoots hams out of his hands.  Hams which strike his hated rival in the face.  Hams.

I spent a few hours mulling over this concept.  The idea was intriguing: food from nothing, hams from hands.  Spontaneous food-production is a fantastic notion.  You’d never go hungry again.  Heck, you’d never need to go food-shopping again.  Assuming a £20 weekly food shop, you’d be running on a saving of a thousand pounds a year, and you’d be a position to hand similar savings to everybody around you.  Engaged by a homeless person?  Ham ‘em!  Cold, cold Winter?  There must be some flammable foods you could produce and burn.  Oatmeal, perhaps, or bread?

The prospect was incredible.  You could wring a great drama out of it.  Or would this be another ‘Bernard’s Watch’ (CITV, 1997-2005), something far more satisfying in the imagination than on the screen?  Inevitably, the reality was disappointing.  Or, it was as expected; I knew from the off, this would not be beautiful art.  A star-and-a-half rating on Netflix, and the recommendation I received yesterday was more along the lines of a damning indictment.  The luscious hams I’d imagined were not great hunks of meat, they were wafer-thin processed stuff.  Hanky-meats.

Food Boy cowers in bread.

Ezra seems to find very little joy in his magical powers.  Unpredictable mustard ejection isn’t really his bag.  He has a dream, a slightly boring dream, of getting into an Ivy League university.  Do teens really get excited about that sort of thing?  Specifically, cool movie protagonists, and the sort of kid who would choose to watch a film called ‘The Adventures of Food Boy’.  Also: there are no adventures in this film.  He goes to school; he wants a career; he plays a little golf and wants to work on Wall Street.  There’s a jape, a scrape, even an antic, but no adventures.  This is no Buckaroo Banzai, no Priscilla, neither Rocky nor Bullwinkle.

How is it as a film?  Well, it’s clearly working to a tight budget.  They’ve hired a school and got a good number of extras, but there’s precious little left for the special effects.  The conjuring catering, which ought to be a visual feast, is weakly.  You can make a lot of magic with a little imagination and a good grasp of editing, as we saw in 'Orphée' (1950), but almost every apparition in this film is done the same way, with drainpipes in the sleeves.  It’s easy to guess, and it wouldn’t wow a toddler.

The movie as it appears on Netflix is in tall-screen, and seems to have been framed with this in mind - a strange rarity in the late noughties, when even made-for-TV and straight-to-video had gone widescreen.  (I have since found a widescreen version on Youtube while gathering screen-caps, but a lot of the shots seem to have been planned for 4:3).  The film is occasionally loud (with a musical score that belongs in a cooler film) and colourful - Ezra’s friends by-and-large fail to distinguish themselves, but they each have their own colour, and dress in a range of outfits around that simple theme.

Sandwich cutaway!

The other place that colour comes to the fore is in the movie’s real highlight - the highly stylised, very low budget flashbacks to famous food-wizards like the Earl of Sandwich.  These are played out on a very small stage, perfectly fitted to the film’s aspect ratio, and with all the set details painted on flat wood or cardboard.  It’s something you rarely see outside of 20s German expressionism or The Tent Stop of ‘Playdays’ (CBBC, 1988-1995).  These strangely-acted interludes really made the film, for me.

It’s not a wonderful movie, but after the dreary opening 22 minutes (which contain no food magic, and no hints that food magic will appear) it was sufficiently engaging to keep me going for the full 90.  Despite the food theme, don’t be tempted to watch it while dining, as there are a few instances of vomiting, pseudo-vomiting, and other culinary vulgarity.


P.S. The film has a strong moral which we hear articulated several times.  I like films with morals because their existence means the world will get better and we'll all be okay.

Pancakes - a recipe (for three or so hungry people)

Pencilton snoozes under a warm pancake

Into a large mixing bowl pour a mole-hill of plain flour, about the volume of a small hat.  Sieve it, if you don't like lumps.  More flour here will mean more pancakes, and it's about the only part of the recipe you will need to scale up in order to feed more people, or the same number of hungrier people.

Using an unbroken egg, make an indentation in the top of the mole-hill of flour.  Break two medium-to-large eggs into this hole, giving the appearance of a volcano.  Add a pinch of salt, which will bring out flavours later on.  Using a wooden spoon (or a whisk if you have one), stir the eggs into the flour, and start to add the milk.

The milk should be poured in little-by-little, each time the mixture seems to be too dry.  In the end, after a good amount of stirring, whisking or beating, the mix of flour, egg and milk (and that pinch of salt) ought to be somewhere on the fine line between gloopy and soggy.  To see whether it's there yet, lift a spoonful of the mixture and pour it from your spoon.  Does it creep like treacle?  If so, it's too floury, and needs more milk.  Does it flow like water (or milk, indeed)?  If so, it's too milky - add some flour.  It should be somewhere between the two.  The more viscous, the more filling the pancakes will be, the wetter, the less likely to become a pancake.

Now, using your pancake pan (or regular frying pan, if you will), fry a large lump of butter, about the size of a big toe.  Let it coat the pan's interior, and drip the remainder of the melted butter (which should still be a sizeable amount) into the mixture you have prepared, and stir it up.  A good amount of melted butter in the mix will mean the pancakes are self-lubricating, and you won't need to pour any oil into the pan between each one.

Leave the mix to settle for an hour, or less, or not at all if you're very hungry.

Heat your pan until it is very hot.  Pancakes cannot be achieved over a low heat, and some camping stoves are incapable of reaching pancake temperature at all.  Pour (from a cup or ladle) a measure of pancake mix into the middle of the pan, and move the pan about until your batter spreads out to cover its bottom (or whatever size you wish your pancakes to be).  Heat for a short while - until the surface of the pancake looks dry but clammy, or until smoke emerges.

Now, the time is come to flip your pancake.  You should shake the pan vigorously (but carefully) to unstick the underside from the pan - or carefully slip a spatula beneath the pancake, to make sure it isn't cleaving to the pan.  Once you're sure that the half-cooked pancake is moving freely, give your pan a confident, but not excessive, jerk, forwards and upwards, tilting the far end of the pan up higher than the handle end.  Your pancake ought now to rise, rotate, and land upside-down ready to cook to readiness.  Do not be afraid - the pancake is very unlikely to travel far in any unexpected directions, so, with practice, you should be able to turn the pancake over with very little panic or use of energy.  Cook this side of the pancake for a slightly shorter time than the first, then slide the finished item out of the pan onto a plate.

Since the pancake mix does not itself contain sugar, the resultant pancake will be suitable for sweet or savoury fillings.  On the savoury front I'd recommend salami and grated cheese, with black pepper - or courgette and mushrooms if you're vegetarian, again garnished with black pepper.  Pepper is the savoury sugar, when it comes to pancakes, and will make any savoury filling seem deliberate.

I've no doubt you have your own preferences when it comes to sweet fillings, so I shan't presume to recommend any.

P.S. I'm well aware that this is not a set of comments on a film, but pancakes are important too.  Pancake Day is almost upon us (and as I often note, it's always Pancake Day in your heart, except on Tisha B'Av, the Jewish day of mourning)

The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003)

Who determined that men must wear their hair short?  Someone, somewhen must have decreed it, and done so with great power.

These are the films that made me grow my hair long.  Everybody here (and in 90 per cent of this adventure, 'everybody' is synonymous with 'all the male characters') - the wizards, the men and the dwarves, have long, magnificent, flowing hair.  The hobbits have rather less, but still a good deal more, I'd say, than the male average when the thing saw release.  How I admired the hair (and the general style and bearing, but the hair seemed both achievable and symptomatic) of Aragorn, of Elrond, of Gandalf the Grey, the most magnificent.

It's been long and short ever since.  It takes time to make it long but I ill care for it, or the pressures of 21st century Britain demand its loss.  I think I'd still be glad to grow up to be Bilbo or Radagast (but now, you see, I'm talking in the wrong film), but am wary of letting my pate come to resemble that of Grima Wormtongue or Jimmy Saville.  Ah, you cry, this is not a hairdressing blog.  Indeed not!  Shall we return to the matter at hand?

The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

Sean Bean is Boromir.  Doomed, of course.

Well, you've all seen these films, perhaps several times at ever-increasing lengths, so there's little I can tell you about the content.  The big surprise, rewatching this first part, is how real some of the locations look.  I've always accepted the grand locations augmented by CGI and cunningly composited model-shots in the later films, without consciously registering that this is how they were put together, but the places roamed through in 'The Fellowship of the Ring' feel like real places you could visit - as if anybody with a camera and a few Orcs could go and gather the same footage, without having to find a portal to a real fantasy kingdom to get the scenery they're after.  Only a handful of slightly dodgy slo-mo footage seems to date the film, the remainder seeming magnificently timeless.

The fellowship is peopled by excellent characters, well-cast.  Four hobbits, two men (one dark and handsome; the other Yorkshire and treacherous), a wizard (Gandalf, of course), an elf (Legolas manages to be stylish, effete and dully humourless all at once) and a dwarf (Gimli is somehow very Scottish and very Welsh at the same time - an excellent combination).  For some reason, this is the only one of the films where we see dwarves other than Gimli.  Presumably they're occupied somewhere else during the ensuing world-war, but they could have made a few of the battles much less precarious if they'd done as the Elves do and sent a couple of battalions to Helm's Deep or Pelennor Fields.

A friend of mine, who presents the Minute Doctor Who Podcast, suggested that Elijah Wood was poor casting for Frodo, and that this was the films' greatest hindrance.  It seemed a curious suggestion to me - perhaps because I watched the films long before reading the books, so to me he is Frodo and Frodo is him.  The vibrant relationship between him and Sean Astin's Samwise Gamgee is the heart of the films, and everything else is window-dressing - even the battles, even Gandalf, even the pretty lights and colours of the Balrog and the fireworks and the eye of Sauron.

The Two Towers (2002)

Frodo, perhaps about to kill slimy old Gollum.

So the Fellowship fell to pieces.  I expected this film to show them taking separate routes only to be reunited and carry on as before, but by the time this sequel starts, they're irreparably divided, like Earth in the time of Peleg, and we're following several stories at once.

I'll take this chance to say something about sequels, as it seems to bear some relevance to this blog and experiment.  I'm meant to be looking at a hundred films from a hundred years, but it doesn't seem quite right to take up three per cent, and three consecutive years, on The Lord of the Rings - a fine series, but one with a very consistent style.  It's better, perhaps, to count it as one big film, and tie it to just one of those years, allowing me to re-use 2001 for 'Moulin Rouge' and 2003 for 'Good Bye Lenin' (for instance).  I'll apply the same thinking to my 1971-3 trio of Shaft movies.  If I didn't go with this sort of thinking, I'd be able to have a long weekend binge of the canonical Bond movies and wipe out almost a quarter of my 100 films at the expense of variety.

Back to 'The Two Towers', then.  A sequel without new characters would be a pointless thing (please let me know if you can think of any good examples), and two fine adventurers enter here.  Firstly, the cadaverous form of Theoden, from whom Gandalf (if I may spoiler a spoiler) exorcises Saruman, and who subsequently gets his groove back, once he realises that his obviously evil servant Grima Wormtongue is evil, obviously.

I can't easily screen-cap blu-ray, so I photographed my TV.  Does it show?

Secondly, Gollum: seen in the distance in 'The Fellowship of the Rings', but a hero and a villain from here on.  Just as we've gotten used to Frodo and Sam adventuring alone, the relationship is shaken up by this CGI monstrosity.  Sam, who's been nothing but hearty good-humour and encouragement, suddenly reveals a nasty streak, despising this slimy churl, a creature who alternates saving the day and threatening murder.  It's an arresting, horrible yet sympathetic performance which owes at least a little to Peter Lorre in 'M' (1931), and it's not without reason Gollum is still so celebrated and impersonated.

There's a great deal of fighting, here as in the threequel.  I still can't tell where the real soldiers and sets end and the models and CGI begin, so I'm content to say the sequences work as impressively as intended.  Everything's beautifully designed and strikingly attractive.

Starting in this film, Aragorn has a choice of two wives - a storyline plumped up considerably to make the lack of women in these films less embarrassing.  Of course, since Aragorn is royal, and this is the real Olden Days, he could probably fix the problem with bigamy - or since he and Arwen are both very long-lived, he could marry Eowyn first, wait for her to grow old and die, and then marry Arwen.  Perhaps I'm being unduly unromantic making such practical suggestions, but I thought it worth suggesting.  As it is, Aragorn gives his full attention to his sword and his battles, perhaps waiting to see who survives before ironing out the destiny of his loins.

The Return of the King (2003)

Andy Serkis is a real person, not just the puppeteer of Gollum

'Return of the King' holds my two favourite scenes of the trilogy. First, before the film's title dares appear, we're treated to Gollum's back-story, as Smeagol and Deagol fight over the newly-found precious.  It was an unexpected delight, watching this for the first time in the cinema, to see Andy Serkis in the flesh.  An appropriate reward, I think, for his years being motion captured - his voice and movements were celebrated, but only here is his face seen.

My other favourite scene is the one with the beacons - a moment the book covers with half a sentence, but which in the film is a beautiful triumph.  Here, grizzled old Denethor is most reluctant to call for aid, but young Pippin scrambles up to light the city's waiting bonfire beacon, and once its flames have grown, we see another light spring up on the far horizon in answer.  The camera flies over distant and inhospitable mountains as beacon answers beacon, the signal going out for aid, calling stations presumably maintained for this purpose for many generations.  It's an awesome, surprisingly emotional sight.  Like the defiant singing of La Marseillaise in 'Casablanca' (1942), it gives me a thrill of hope in the midst of desperation.  For me, this is the best part of the eleven-hour adventure.

Frodo just gets dirtier and dirtier in these films, and not in a saucy way.

Watching the films in their extended form (as seems appropriate), it's easy to grow a touch fatigued during this final instalment.  The first two went up from three hours to three-and-a-half apiece.  'The Return of the King' was already three-and-a-half hours long in the cinemas, which felt about as extended as was required, and so ends up almost four-and-a-half hours in duration.  The ending sequence, which was derided (unfairly, to my mind) is under twenty minutes in length from the destruction of the ring to the start of the credits - not inappropriate when compared either to the extent of the adventure that precedes it, or to the equivalent portion of the book (more than forty-thousand words, not counting the appendices).  Twenty minutes seems about as long as one can acceptably make an audience cry with a mix of sadness, merriment and relief.  Each strand is tied up, everyone goes home, and Frodo, Gandalf, and Bilbo in his dotage resolve that they must leave Middle Earth forever.  For a happy ending, it is very sad.

Nine years later, enough time has past since this massive epic that I very warmly welcome 'The Hobbit', by way of a prequel.  But that, as they say, is another story.

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You would think that the extra capacity available in a lavish blu-ray box-set would allow the inclusion of both the extended and the sensible editions of these films, wouldn't you?  Nope.

Daisies (1966)

I came to 'Sedmikrásky' with no clues at all to its style or content, as it was passed to me without cover or introduction by my friend Opai, who DJs a radio show of excellent or terrible music (the like of which one could never hear in any other circumstances), and who, I reasoned, could recommend me films nobody else would know existed or dare to advocate.

The opening credits - the wheels of a persistent machine, intercut with grainy footage of bombs and exploding planes - suggested that this film might regard some desperate post-apocalyptic struggle for survival.  I was wholly unprepared for what ensued: an unreasonably bizarre and psychadelic Czech comedy, the sort of thing you might see spoofed but would never believe actually existed.

'This film is dedicated to those whose sole

source of indignation is a messed up trifle'

Perhaps it might be clearest if I described the first scene, tinted a grey blue.  Two young women in bikinis.  When they move, they creak INCREDIBLY LOUDLY as if crudely hinged.  One, named Maria, begins to pick her nose.  The other, also named Maria, plays the trumpet.  Since the world is so bad, they resolve to become equally bad.  Maria slaps Maria into colour, and into the world.  Are they angels?  Robots?  Women?

They dance in a full-colour apple grove before falling into an apartment, and taking a man out for lunch.  They eat at him, and this tinted in every colour you might know.  The man is in no way extraordinary, and they make sure he catches his train.  The train is made of colour.  If it wasn't played out under such whimsical music, it might have taken me longer to realise this was a comedy.  That's not to say it's bad or not funny, just that this is unlike anything I've ever seen, as if writer/director Věra Chytilová has heard the concept of 'comedy' described to her but never seen any before making the film.

Maria and Maria take a man out for lunch

The sound, the music and foley are no more predictable than the pictures.  Footsteps are loud and almost wholly un-footstep-like.  Just as limbs may creak like barn doors, so motions may make the sounds of ukulele and harpsichord.  At one point the apartment seems to be host to an off-screen typist, as a loud typewriter permeates the scene as if it were a newspaper office.  Eventually this transpires to be music, rather than sound effect, typed percussion.  At one point the telephone rings so long, unnoticed, that I thought it too may be incidental music.  Eventually Maria picks it up, only to exclaim into the receiver 'Rehabilitation centre!  Die, die, die!  He he he he he he he!'  She hangs up, the picture fills with a dozen sudden close-ups of red roses, and we again hear 'die, die die'.  This is after she had tried to recreationally gas herself, but accidentally left the window open.

Maria has cut her head off with scissors

The men in the film are tedious, anonymous, appearing at dates to be charmed then outraged, then hurry to catch their trains; or else not seen at all - heard knocking at the door and asking to be let in, or only heard over the telephone.  The Marias take a phone-call from such an un-named admirer, all the while using scissors to snip the ends off sausages, cucumbers and bananas.  It's an uncomfortable sequence, but they seem to be having great fun; I found myself feeling like a woman watching a film made for men.

I shall say now, I have remarkably little idea what is going on in this film.  I've never seen anything even slightly like this, and I'm still trying to make sense of even a minute of it.  For the first hour I simply boggled at it, worked out it was a comedy and wondered whether at any point it would burst into a particularly avant-garde episode of 'The Goodies'.  It would be easy to look at this in the standard way of investigating any startling and apparently insane sixties artworks, and assume that everybody was on every drug at all times, but the end left me wondering whether these unpredictable antics were meant to be taken more politically - but I'm glad I couldn't work out any clear meaning behind it.  To analyse this fun would be to kill it, and I look forward greatly to seeing this again and finding it no less surprising.

'How do you know you exist?'

I can't help feeling that, just trying to describe the film's contents, I've made it sound much more orderly and deliberate than it feels.  Skipping once more through the scenes, I find I've been inventing sense for it and making links that aren't there at all.  It flits like a dream: there are dozens of dead butterflies, suddenly they're being made coffee in the public toilet, they steal from a handbag, they hop upstairs, they set their apartment on fire, delighted, to strains of choral music.  If you have the chance, you should probably watch this.

P.S. The film was banned in its native Czechoslovakia, so it sounds like somebody got it, or didn't.

P.P.S. The next film I'll watch will be the oft-recommended 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari' (1920), and the next blog post will regard 'Finding Neverland' (2004).  Merry Epiphany

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I don't believe a film has ever left me quite so confused or amazed while being so enjoyable as this.

The Belly of an Architect (1987)

I first discovered the films of Peter Greenaway when I was at university, and quickly embraced and devoured 'The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover', 'The Draughtsman's Contract' and 'A Zed and Two Noughts' (1989, 2 and 5 respectively).  They were strange films, full of astonishing images, rather extraordinary scripts, Michael Nyman's pulsing, repetitive, slightly baroque music and all-round slightly too much sex and nudity (generally functional rather than salacious or enjoyable for its participants) for my prudish tastes.

It's been increasingly rare since then, to get my hands on a Greenaway film I haven't seen.  When I found no delight in 'The Pillow Book' (1996) or '8 1/2 Women' (1999) I worried all the good ones were gone.  'The Belly of an Architect', though, hails from the 1980s, the seat of Greenaway's greatest glories.

Peter Greenaway trained as a painter, and tends to fill the frame

with symmetries, geometric patterns, well-chosen colour.

'The Belly of an Architect' is the story of Stourley Kracklite, a minor architect neglecting his own work and reputation to stage an exhibition in Rome celebrating Étienne-Louis Boullée, a similarly obscure architect whose best works were never even built, and (since this is a Peter Greenaway film) Kracklite runs into a web of conspiracy, adultery and death, all framed and shot with a striking deliberateness.

(I suspect Boullée's memory and legacy were as much buoyed by this film as painter James Ensor's were by They Might Be Giants' song 'Meet James Ensor'.  In both cases an artist on the edge of obscurity was hailed and given a fresh audience by a modern artist with a cult following.)

The average human intestine is 27 feet long

As his wife's belly swells with pregnancy, so Stourley Kracklite's swells with some nameless curse.  He's right to grow paranoid, as his colleagues and his own self-neglect threaten to wrest his legacy from him, ultimately leaving him more obscure than the centuries-dead Boullée.  He turns to investigation, roams the city, sees terrible things, looks through keyholes, and discovers he is both replaced and doomed.

It's a pretty unpleasant set of characters, but Brian Dennehy's performance as Kracklite looms over them all, leaving him at the centre of the film, likewise dominating the centre of the frame.  Just as 'A Fistful of Dollars' (1964) can be seen as a film with one character and a load of Mexicans (if I may oversimplify somewhat), so this is a film full of Stourley Kracklite.  Not that the other characters aren't interesting or well played - they are merely satellites orbiting the story of his swollen gut, and when his belly's story ends, everyone else becomes irrelevant.

Kracklite, Stourley Kracklite.

I can't imagine I'll revisit this film with the same regularity as 'The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover' or 'The Falls' (1980), but I'll happily put it with 'Drowning By Numbers' (1988) and 'Tulse Luper Suitcases' (2003) as an interesting film to watch occasionally.  The fact that it has such a strong central character (as opposed to the mere agents of wit and story who feature in earlier pieces) makes it rather easier to consume.  I've some wariness of recommending any Peter Greenaway films, as I can see he really won't be to everybody's tastes, but if you like stomachs and architecture (an art-form generally neglected by cinema, when compared to the number of films about painters or musicians, say), you might find this film tickles your fancy.

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Available from the BFI in a set containing both Blu-ray and DVD.  Handy if you want to see it in high quality, but also take screen-captures for some kind of film-review blog.  The set also includes a 15-minute Peter Greenaway documentary about what a good businessman Terrance Conran is.  And why not?

Life of Pi (2012)

I've already told you about one 2012 film, so under the terms of my experiment I've really no business saying anything here about 'Life of Pi', but it's in the cinemas now and I think you should probably see it (whoever you are), so I'll make this exception.

The novel won the Booker Prize in 2002, which means it ought at least to be a story worth telling, and which can be told well.  I've enjoyed very much the only Booker-Prize-winning book I've read (and have appeared on-stage in a blues-musical about a Booker Prize loser, and once lived for a troubled year with the grandchild of the 1974 Booker winner), but haven't read 'Life of Pi', and was assured by a friend that it was a book that must never, ever be made into a movie.

Despite this, it made an enthralling and stunningly attractive film, one of the most visually delicious I've encountered, with a wealth of colour and animals and truly special effects.  Despite this, it's thoughtful, though not unexciting; ambiguous but never vague; it's stylised, but you can believe in it.  I only hesitate to describe it as 'intelligent' because I suspect I'd be taken aside and assured that the whole thing is a nonsense when compared to the book.  Well, so be it.

A real live tiger, probably.

The majority of the film follows a boy, Pi, trying to live simultaneously as a Hindu, a Christian and a Muslim while adrift on the ocean in a small lifeboat, which he shares with a ferocious tiger.

I like animals - not in person, but in theory - and this is an animal film, with entrancing zebras and flying fishes, Richard Parker the tiger, orangutans, boars and flamingos.  My favourite was a hyena, whose fluffiness, aggression and voracious appetite reminded me of an owl puppet of my acquaintance.  To look at this as a story of nice and horrible and enjoyable animals isn't at all to miss the film's point, or to ignore the questions at its heart.  If you would like to be charmed and alarmed by animals, and yet be left pondering some long while after the film has ended, I don't think you would regret watching 'Life of Pi'.

This is what night looks like on the pacific, from above.

I might well look out the book during 2013, and am left keen to see some more films from or about India (where, I have wholly failed to so far mention, the eponymous Pi Patel starts his journey).  On that front, a film of Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children' (another Booker Prize winner) has also come out this week, and I've been looking forward to it for some while - and my parents have lent me 'The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel', but that seems to be entirely about retired white people with India merely a vacation, so may be the opposite of what I'm after.  Both of these are 2012 releases, so you probably won't hear about them here again, at least for a while.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)

The Hobbit was read to me in my infancy, but I subsequently forgot any parts of it that weren't recapped by the films of Lord of the Rings.  I tried to read it around five years ago, but crashed out somewhere in chapter two, frustrated by the made-up sounding names of the dwarves, and all that singing.

I tried again this Autumn, accidentally starting on the 75th anniversary of the book's publication, and found a great deal to like.  It's a fun adventure, full of incident, set within a well thought-out world of great detail.  The problem is, the great detail doesn't turn up until very long sequel The Lord of the Rings.

I do like a splash of colour.  Far greener than its Sequel.

In the end I read The Hobbit in the knowledge that the film adaptation was to be greatly expanded, unfolding 300 pages into nearly nine hours.  Some have quavered, but I was glad of this fact.  I'm a great believer that you can't do much with a novel in two hours, and everything happens so suddenly in this book.  Gollum is in and out in a trice, given almost more backstory than story.    Characters like the Goblin King and the Master of Lake Town turn up without being granted either names or physical descriptions of any kind.  The thing was crying out for pictures and performances, for the care and attention of Peter Jackson, and an industrial tanker of helium with which to fill out the slightly insubstantial sketches that appear in some places in the book.

So, I went to see the movie in Oxford with a company of friends.  Critics had warned me to be wary, but I had resolved to enjoy the film to the full, and I was in the right context to do so.  As I hoped, this was a story told big, with, y'know, drama and emotions, as well as singing and falling over.  It was broader and deeper than the book, not that the depth wasn't there in the Tolkien, but some was hitherto hidden by being in the wrong book.  A fun adventure, but not just fun and adventurey.  From book to film, twelve rather anonymous dwarves, who had been too much alike, too irritating and altogether too many have become about six interesting and excellently enjoyable characters and about six who will presumably show their merits in the next two portions of Hobbit.  I'll get back to you about them in 2014.

I shan't say much more, as at this stage in 2012 you've probably seen more than enough review and comment on the subject, or have seen the film already and don't need to hear more.  I'll just say a word for Sylvester McCoy, an actor I've long enjoyed and championed.  It's a delight to see him on the big screen, especially when he gets to interact with, for instance, Ian McKellan, or a lovely hedgehog.  I think he may divide opinion here, as he does everywhere, but I won't object if he makes more substantial appearances in the next two films, and then his own psychedelic veterinary spin-off.

Television's Dr Who in a big beard

Final thoughts: the 48 frames per second looked great, and I welcome it for the future.  I'm glad I was wrong in my prediction that Sir Christopher Lee would die this year (and was likewise wrong about Sir Sean Connery and Sir Margaret Thatcher), and it's a fine thing to see him on display here being magnificently old.  The man loves his Tolkien, and I'm sure he'll enjoy the film.  And so will you, probably.

I've been a little excessive and updated thrice today.  Partly I'm getting through a backlog of watched-recently-but-not-blogged films (though I'll slow those down), but I thought it worth getting this one up while it was still a new film, and also making sure I'd spoken about three very different films.

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989)

I should say from the off that this is one of my favourite films, and by my favourite director, Peter Greenaway.  It's a beautiful thing with its excessively rich use of colour, its symmetry, its huge, perfectly framed sets, its poetic justice, its many depictions of grand cookery (which is like grand larceny, with cucumbers and swans) and its overwhelming Michael Nyman soundtrack.

I had forgotten - until I pondered lending it to a friend - quite how grotesque and horrible it is.  Not that its beauty hides or is undermined by its excessive violence, its obscene central character, its desperate, fraught and interrupted sex and its coupling of nudity with stinking, decaying and maggot-filled meat.  In a way it all works together to make a strange, horribly engrossing feast of sound, colour and performance.

Albert Spica (Michael Gambon) laughs at prairie-oysters

Michael Gambon's character is so watchably aggressive and churlish here that it's almost difficult to properly condemn his long campaign of his bullying, belching, eating, merry-making and stabbing, his fumbling attempts at pretentiousness, his place as the king of a court of English gangsters.  He's disgusting and despicable, yet despite all the hatred he exercises against his wife, his gang and his enemies, I feel sorrow for his character and at the same time want to see him die.  I can believe in someone so powerful and pathetic.  I condone nothing he does, save for the eating of food, but the performance and character are fantastically engaging.  How pleasingly different a role for the man now better known as Albus Dumbledore.

I must speak again about the visual feast.  In the restaurant, where most of the action plays out, everything is a regal red.  The walls, the curtains and the costumes.  Rich, sumptuous, bloody, and dominated by a painting in the same hues and character.  As soon as the action moves to the kitchen, however, the same characters' clothes become greenest green, matching the drapes, the lights and the vegetables.  Blue outside, where the dogs are continuously barking, and pure white in the women's toilets.  The first time I saw this I took it to be some trick of lighting - but no!  These places are different worlds, without compromise.

Like saying, ha ha, 'death, I'm eating you!'

In competition with the feverishly colourful visuals is Michael Nyman's finest work, his funeral march Memorial, which rightly has its own Wikipedia page (at once the cheapest and greatest accolade of any notable work).  Twelve driving minutes of minimalist Purcellian honking, bearing some of the most exciting and alarming soprano vocals I've ever been glad to hear.  It matches the film perfectly.

Incidentally, the film has the highest score of all the Greenaways in the 's/he's been in Doctor Who' game, with Michael Gambon, Roger Lloyd Pack and Alex Kingston, in that order of prominence.  Of actors unconnected to Doctor Who (is it concerning that my mind really works this way?) I must point out the rare acting performance from Ian 'Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick' Dury, and apologise for so far failing to mention Helen Mirren and Richard Bohringer as the eponymous wife and cook, who make a long conversation towards the end, about voyeurism and how to decide what to charge for items on the menu, the highlight of the film, bar the finale.

If you've the stomach for it, I'd urge you towards The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.  Sumptuous, horrible, beautiful and alarming - a combination I find bizarrely appealing.

Cucumber-chopping cutaway in a scene with near-tasteful nudity

P.S. I'd meant my comments on this blog to be quite a bit shorter than this.  Do excuse me.

P.P.S. If you happen to be my mother, do not watch this film.  It just isn't your sort of thing.

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Tempted to watch the film? You could buy it on DVD. Or, you know, you could borrow my copy, but not everybody lives very near my shelves.