Herostratus (1967)

The main reason I came to watch 'Herostratus', other than liking the title and cover, is that it came out in the BFI Flipside series of DVD/Blu-ray dual format releases.  It's a run of obscure, interesting British films from the archives, forgotten marvels given a chance to shine again.  'The Bed-Sitting Room' (1969), which I very much enjoyed, was one such release, and on the basis of it and BFI's release of 'Winstanley' (1975), I find the line very encouraging.

Then, of course, there's the film's basic idea.  In short, a young man goes to an advertising agency to get maximum publicity for his act of suicide.  It's an unpleasantly interesting concept, grim, but ripe for satire and social commentary.  I'd say the film grapples with both of these, but fares less well as a drama or comedy.

So, we follow Max, the main character, as he approaches the advertising man Farson, a very sixties businessman who comes across like a Number 2 from the same year's psychedelic stand-out 'The Prisoner'.  Farson puts Max up in luxury and sets about publicising a sellably bland version of him to win public support.  The film then intercuts Max's reclusive days in a comfortable black void with archive footage of Ginsberg, Roosevelt, Churchill and Hitler, and juxtaposes sexy dancing with swirling offal, while making ironic comparisons between Max's herostratic desire for suicide and the conspicuous death of Jesus.

It feels like an investigation of ideas, rather than a narrative- or character-led piece.  A discussion, and quite a long one, at two-hours and forty minutes.  At times I wished the film would hurry itself along.  Perhaps I'm too impatient to really engage with this kind of art, or perhaps the film was making its point more slowly than necessary.  I'm inclined toward the latter, as the release also features director Don Levy's 'Time Is' (1964), which wants to wow its audience with the suggestion that time, as we understand it, is a human construct, a point that it makes quite effectively in the first five minutes, but persists with for another 25 - perhaps appropriate, given the content.

'Herostratus' has a chilling lack of glossiness, making it resemble Eastern and European films more than the American sort that I've come to think of as cinema's default.  The blood red and golden lighting, and the frequent cuts away to black, made me think of the then-recent Ukrainian movie 'Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors' (1964).  (I feel pretentious comparing this art-film you probably haven't heard of to another art-film you probably haven't heard of; I'm only aware of them because I'm doing this film-based blog, and have deliberately sought out some obscure items in the hope of finding treasure.  Somehow it feels like it would be more acceptable if I was doing this with novels, because everybody knows books have an inherent cultural value).

I didn't find a lot of pleasure in 'Herostratus'.  It interested me, but stretched that interest very thin, and I found myself wondering whether I have too much love for the easy comforts of commercial cinema to really get on with art films.  Or maybe I just didn't like this one.  Never mind.


P.S. Herostratus, if you're curious, was an ancient Ephesian who set fire to the Temple of Artemis (one of the Seven Wonders of the World) purely because he wanted to be famous for something.  It worked, and his name lives in infamy, as 'herostratic fame' today means fame at any cost, even fame for atrocities.  Anything to make one's name linger in the public mind.

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Early films (1905-1908)

Rescued by Rover (1905)

So far as I can tell, this is the first film with a dog in it.  Like the more famous Lassie, Rover is a collie dog with a knack for seeking out lost infants, and calling the relevant adults to their aid.  It's a strong idea for an early film, as the sight of a dog rushing down lanes and through rivers is something one couldn't represent nearly so well on stage or in print.

The film was made by Cecil Hepworth, a British director who in 1900 made the wonderfully gruesome special effects film 'Explosion of a Motorcar', and in 1903 an excitingly early film of 'Alice in Wonderland'.  The man was evidently a smart cookie, realising the potential of the cinema and delivering a blend of narrative and effects (hitherto films had often been one or the other) with a really good framing and timing.  Watch it here - it's exactly the sort of melodrama one might expect from the silent age.

Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906)

‘Humorous Phases of Funny Faces’ contests with ‘The Merry Frolics of Satan’ to be the most immediately arresting movie title of 1906.  It’s a logical progression of the tricks we saw in ‘The Enchanted Drawing’ (1900) - faces are drawn on a blackboard, but come alive and interact with one another.  While the earlier film was about the relationship between the artist and the art, this one puts the emphasis on the picture, which suits the camera better.  The animated part now fills the whole of the frame, and the artist is a cameo, rather than a star.  Quite amusing!  Chortle at it here, if you will.

If you’re curious, ‘The Merry Frolics of Satan’ is a hand-tinted Méliès film, and has a much less exciting title in its native France  It has a great skeletal horse in it, and some fine special effects.  Not much Satan, though.

Ben Hur (1907)

Long term readers may know that The 1959 'Ben-Hur' is my favourite film.  It’s been shot a few times, and this was the earliest.  The film is most notable for having been made without the permission of the rights-holders, meaning the production company were sued for copyright violation.

It’s not a very satisfactory adaptation, even by the standards of the age.  The film assumes a familiarity with the novel, serving as moving illustrations to aid the imagination, rather than a narrative in pictures.  We’re given no reason to think or care about the characters, and when a slate falls from the Hur family’s roof, injuring Valerius Gratus, the camera pays it no heed.  If you don’t know the plot, the movie has very little to offer.  There are crowds and chariots, but no spectacle, no excitement.  Nobody has yet thought of moving the camera to follow the action, and since everything is shown in long shot, there’s no real detail to look at.  I suspect most of the cast are in splendid historical costumes of some sort or another, but they’re all just distant blurs.  You can watch the film here if you wish.

So, those Bens-Hur, in order of preference:

1. Ben-Hur (1959), a true epic, full of excellent performances and strong dialogue (though some Esther’s more religiose comments in the second half come across rather weakly).  This version has the best theology of all, and its chariot race is one of the most exciting sequences in all cinema.  Plus, Charlton Heston!

2. Ben-Hur: a Tale of the Christ (1925).  Many people favour this silent classic over the 50s talkie.  It certainly has style, and some fantastic hats.  One of the best American silents, and certainly the most expensive.  Its chariot race is pretty thrilling, though technological limitations of the time mean parts of it are too obviously faked in studio.  Jesus is manifested as a disembodied arm, which I’m inclined so say lacks his characteristic humanity.

3. Ben Hur (2003).  An animated version, which at 80 minutes does most of the things its far-longer predecessor did in 212.  It’s for children, so simplifies the story quite a bit, and gives Messala a happy ending.

4. Ben Hur (2010).  A TV miniseries.  I’m not a fan of this version, with its jerky slo-mo, its disappointing Jesus and its wilfully unmemorable chariots.  It tries too hard to avoid copying the 50s film, and so ends up lacking its merits.  A good cast, though ill-used.

5. Ben Hur (1907).  As above, this is limited by its era, but far more by a lack of imagination.  Edwin Porter or Georges Méliès could have made it beautiful.

A new version will be in the cinemas in 2016, so expect me to pop up then to provide heavily biased comparisons with my favourite film.

Japanese Butterflies (1908)

When I resolved to plug some gaps in my chronology, I asked friends if they could name any extremely old films.  Two of my lodgers had once seen a movie ‘about butterfly women’ in a museum in Berlin, and a little research revealed it to be ‘Japanese Butterflies’, a Spanish film from 1908.

Like a lot of very early films we’ve looked at, it eschews plot for spectacle (though, as mentioned in the film above, sometimes we’re presented with neither), and gives us a number of special effects and striking images.  Japan!  Some men!  Dancing butterflies!  A woman!  A chrysalis!  A giant butterfly!  A slightly different giant butterfly!  That’s really all there is to it - a  of Oriental beauty and mystery, its frames coloured-in by hand.  You can watch it right here.


Tune in again for 1909-1912, though since films start expanding from shorts to features (which is to say, films an hour or more in length), these years may be spread across a few posts.  Technology is marching on!

A Zed and Two Noughts (1985)

Do excuse my wonky screen-caps - I'm photographing my TV again

We're nearing the end of the Penciltonian now, so as well as watching films from those last few years, I'm tidying up a number of loose ends.  I was keen to watch a film for every letter of the alphabet, and found that I had, quite appropriately, left Z for last.  Since I didn't have the time to watch 'Die Zweite Heimat' (1993) before the end of the year, I turned to 'A Zed and Two Noughts', a pleasingly literal choice for the letter.

Like most Peter Greenaway films, this is full of wit, conspiracies, nudity and astoundingly attractive cinematography.  So much symmetry, such colour.  Greenaway's introduction to the film points out the myriad myriads of light-sources used, from sunlight and starlight to different kinds of bulbs, flames, sparks and rainbows, and with this in mind the uses of light and colour in the film are really quite remarkable.  Some images anticipate my favourite Greenaway film, 'The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover' (1989): a woman in flamboyant, ancient reds in a pink-lit lavatory, or the fascinating or horrible treatment of food that is no longer food.

Venus de Milo (Frances Barber) and a zebra.

"The wives of two zoologists die in a car driven by a woman called Bewick who's attacked by a swan on Swan's Way".  The zoologists, identical twins, obsess over decomposition, grow more identical, and begin to liberate zoo animals for Alba Bewick, who loses a leg but grows more symmetrical.  Though the film is enjoyable and engrossing, you must never watch it it while eating your dinner: it's a beautiful picture, studded with time-lapse footage of decay - apples, prawns or zebras, passing from near life to maggots to brown mush.

The cast includes credible actor Geoffrey Palmer, arrestable comedian Jim Davidson, David Attenborough as narrator of a nature documentary, and a piquant part for Frances Barber, who I know better as Doctor Who's intensely villainous Madame Kovarian, here playing Venus de Milo, a writer of erotic animal stories.  It's a curious and exciting cast, and a film that lingers long in the memory.

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I haven't found a film that looks and sounds better.  Magnificent light, colour and framing, and a pulsing, obsessive, urgent score by Michael Nyman.  This was the first film I looked at on blu-ray, and is the only film I would recommend to you in that handsome, unnecessary format.

Empire Records (1995)

A haircutting scene!  All is not well.

So it's the middle of the nineties.  I've heard a few people opining recently that the nineties isn't enough of an era, in as much as one can't really dress nineties in the same way one can dress sixties, seventies or eighties and clearly belong in that one decade - but I'd venture that this film does indeed look identifiably nineties.  For one thing, characters have magnificent nineties hairdos of the style I envied at the time and envy still.  For another, it's set in a music store where people actually buy music on CDs, and this is counted as cool.  That era is now closed.

This is a film about some cool young people who work in the music store - and yes, as in 'Brick' (2005) I've found myself describing the cast of a film as 'young people' and realise I no longer count myself as youthful.  They're not cool cool, as their lives are troubled and complicated and their music, fashion and lifestyle choices tend to be a couple of steps toward the idiosyncratic, but I found them to be a stylish and enviable bunch.  They love their job, whether it's good for them or not, and they enjoy one another most of the time.  It's a film about what happens to people before an after the highpoint of life we know as 'being in a band', and it looks like a fine time, though I found myself at the end worrying for their continuing prospects.  They can't all wind up owning their own music store.

The store is visited by Rex Manning, that sexy, churlish Elvis Shatner of a man

It's a well-cast film, and two of its stars, Renée Zellweger and Liv Tyler, went on to prosper as an actor and an elf respectively.  I tend to do an embarrassingly poor job of recognising actresses, as they're prone to more variety in hair and makeup than their male equivalents so often appear unrecognisable, but these two are unmistakable and show the promise of their later careers.  I was surprised not to have seen any of the rest of the film's cast in other works, and particularly enjoyed Anthony LaPaglia as the store's excellently patient manager, and Rory Cochrane who managed to come across as both socially incapable and excellent company.

I feel I've come away with remarkably little to say about this film.  It's so much easier when a film is technically innovative or very terrible, but this is certainly neither.  There's only so far one can spin out 'this was good and I liked it', but this is and I did.

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We may be in the twilight of the age of the compact disc, but here's a DVD for format nostalgists

Bucket of Blood (1959)

Walter Paisley (Dick Miller), with a pancake pan

Everyone who's ever met me will know my love of pancakes, and my particular delight in pancake pans, those low-sided frying pans designed for lightness, dexterity, and all-round ease of flipping.  Imagine my delight and concern, then, when Walter Paisley, the spongy-legged hero and villain of this bizarre B-movie, does the inevitable and makes the pancake pan a weapon of murder, and a tool of art.

So there's this guy called Walter Paisley.  He serves tables at a cafe in the heart of America's beatnik scene.  All around him are artists who seem to him great.  Poets, painters, poseurs.  To us, they're incredibly pretentious - a point the film rams home slightly too hard - but to Walter they're heroes.  He yearns to be like them, to create a great work of art, and be respected; most of all, he wants everyone to say to him 'Walter, let me shake your hand.  It's been a real pleasure to have known you Walter'.  Walter has no especial talents.

Pancaked!

It's not clear whether Walter has learning difficulties, or is just overwhelmed by the arrogant confidence of his peers.  Certainly, I've spent many days of my life being Walter Paisley, staring at my clay-analogue and realising I can't make anything out of it at all.  It's practically a default state.  However, a bizarre mishap changes his fortunes, and it's an event I hope never to replicate.  His landlady's cat gets stuck in the wall-space between rooms, and Walter tries to cut it out with his pocket-knife.  He aims poorly, and stabs the creature to death, and into an advanced state of rigor mortis.  What can he do to hide the evidence from his landlady?  He covers it with clay, of course.

Naturally, his clay cat is a big hit at the club.  Suddenly he's a figure of admiration, and many artists who ignored him suddenly admire him.  Maxwell, who bears a striking resemblance to an ambulant Michael Flanders, even delivers a poem about young Paisley.  Walter must make more sculptures.  Several of the artists even offer to model for him.  Obviously, this is where things start to go wrong.

Carla (Barboura Morris), the least arrogant beatnik, offers to model, but Walter would sooner marry her than kill her.

The trailer promises that we'll be 'sick sick sick ... with laughter', which isn't quite right.  It's a fun piece, a dark comedy, but makes no attempt to be hilarious.  It's thoroughly enjoyable, and at just over an hour makes an excellent appetiser to a longer programme of B-Movies (which is how I saw it lately), but while everybody found plenty to enjoy and laugh at, none of us were rolling around in hysterics.  It's just not that sort of movie.  The most well-worn piece of trivia about 'A Bucket of Blood', though it seems worth repeating here to give you an idea of the tone, is that filming ended two days before the sets were due to be taken down, so director Roger Corman used them to made the original version of 'Little Shop of Horrors', also featuring Dick Miller, who went on to have many fabulous adventures.


P.S. There is a bucket of blood in the film, as per the title, but so briefly that you could miss it.  After pancaking a policeman, Walter hides him in the ceiling, as you do, and puts out a bucket to catch any drips.

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An enjoyable sorbet of a film, and currently available for as little as one pence, plus postage.

Ladies and Gentlemen... Mr Leonard Cohen (1965)

Though Leonard Cohen is now known as a singer-songwriter, this documentary was made two years before he'd released his first record.  Here we see Leonard Cohen the poet, the novelist, the stand-up comic.  He plays a harmonica at one point, and is briefly seen playing some chords on a guitar, but these are momentary novelties.

Appropriately, when I first saw this documentary at university in 2004, I hadn't heard any of Cohen's albums.  I'd heard a few of his songs, as the neighbour who showed me the film always had Leonard Cohen songs blaring from his open door, and his classic 'Hallelujah' was especially unescapable in those days, wherever you went.  I was very taken with the short film and with the charisma of its lead, and it only took me seven years to get around to listening to his music.  This week, having a far clearer, and rather different understanding of the man and his career to what I had in 2004, I revisited the documentary and found it excellent.

The young Cohen signs a book of his poems for a fan

Leonard Cohen knows he's somebody special.  That makes him sound arrogant, and perhaps he is, but for the most part it's just a confidence in the worth of his art, in the quality of his poetry, and in the fact that a documentary made about him at this young age will some day be a work of historical significance.  Since he's become both famous and highly influential since then, I'd say he's been vindicated in this high self-esteem.  The narrator speaks with the same confidence, as if this film was intended as much as an advert for the merit of Canadian culture as a documentary in search of the truth.

'His talent has been saluted by the international press.  Canadian critics have called him the finest poet of his generation.  He himself has said he has chosen a path that is infinitely wide and without direction.  This, he says, is a very good path for someone who moves in the funny way that he does'.   It's a pity Cohen now has such a reputation as miserable and depressing, as his sense of humour is apparent throughout the film, as it is through his records.  When he stands on stage to tell a story he remains deadpan while his audience roar with laughter.  When he's in more intimate surroundings, he can hardly contain his giggles at mild whimsies.

We get a good showing of Cohen in action.  He delivers a number of poems, none directly to camera: some are given to live audiences; one in a recording studio, where the camera observes him from within the booth, and then from the mixing desk; some, we have only the audio over shots of Cohen travelling or socialising.  In an especially 1960s sequence (for this is a very mid-60s film), we see him interviewed by men in suits, who struggle to understand his youthful idiosyncrasy, his irony, his claims to be apolitical.  Away from the interviewer, he talks more candidly about the questions he was asked and the answers he would and wouldn't give.

A highlight: Leonard Cohen takes a postmodern bath

At the end of the film Cohen is shown some of the footage and interviewed about seeing himself on the screen.  These five minutes are my favourite part, and the reason this short feature stuck in my mind for a decade.  There's a shot of him asleep in bed, and he talks about how privileged he is to see himself asleep.  He then points out that, of course, he isn't seeing himself asleep, only himself pretending to sleep, as this was faked for the cameras.

Continuing this theme, we see Leonard Cohen in the bath.  He sits, bathing himself for a while, but eventually picks up a pen and writes 'caveat emptor' on the wall.  'Let the buyer beware'.  He's asked why he wrote this, and explains that he's warning the audience: what we're seeing isn't Leonard Cohen privately bathing, it's Leonard Cohen observed by a camera, pretending to be alone.  It's a brilliant illustration, a moment of postmodernism which comes back to me quite often.  Watching documentaries of any kind, but especially reality TV of the Apprentice mould is intriguing when you remind yourself that the subjects are surrounded by cameras, and any action, any emotion they show is given in the knowledge that it may be broadcast.  With very few exceptions, we never see people going about their daily lives, and the reality we're given is all constructed for us.  Leonard Cohen knows this, and knows how to play us.  No wonder he got so famous.

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It's way expensive for 45 minutes.  Borrow my copy instead.  And listen to some Cohen music, why doncha?  There's an affordable box-set of most of his studio albums, and they make a magnificent guide through the latter third of the 20th Century

Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993)

Until a week before I saw this film (or should I say, 'these films') I had never heard of Glenn Gould.  I received many recommendations during a merry weekend, but the title and the very brief description I heard from my friend and scientific advisor Fnord meant this was one of only two films I sought after from the ten or twenty titles I solicited.

Glenn Gould was a concert pianist and this is a set of 31 short films (averaging 3 minutes apiece, plus or minus three minutes) about him and his life.  Being a few years dead, he himself does not appear, not even in photo.  What we have are dramatisations, vignettes, monologues, snatches of animation, and interviews (in English and French) with those who knew or met him.

Glenn Gould coming to a resolution

Since the movie is divided so clearly into many short segments, it has the feel of one of my favourite novels, 'Bear v Shark' (Chris Bachelder, 2002) which is made up of 100 very short chapters, typically only one or two pages in length.  Snippets and snapshots, ideas rather than full scenes.  Each of the 31 films here is given a chapter-heading.  Few if any of the dramatisations give us major events in Gould's life, preferring to show us quiet or private moments, one side of a telephone conversation or, on several occasions, Glenn Gould listening.  Almost the whole soundtrack is Glenn Gould on the piano, either supporting or competing with the contents of the scene.

I like this, as a way of telling the story of a person, more than any biopic I've seen.  In my comments on 'The Passion of Joan of Arc' (1928) I talked about how 'I'm Not There' (2007) broke Bob Dylan into seven characters to examine his different facets.  This managing something similar, but without divorcing the parts from the whole.  The scenes point in from myriad directions but in a manner less fanciful than that other film.  A lot, perhaps everything, can be shown about Glenn Gould in these 31 attempts far more quickly and economically than if these 90 minutes were given over to more straightforward structure.  For one thing, that would require more characters than one; in this form Glenn Gould is the film's only focus, and any other face or voice is likely to enter and leave his life in under six minutes, never to be spoken of again.

Glenn Gould on the telephone again

It's remarkably solitary.  Many scenes with the one character, thinking, listening, often being highly sociable and articulate but only over the telephone.  Refusing to speak about his music, which speaks for itself.  The only extended dialogue in the film, and my favourite of the chapters, is 'Gould Meets Gould', a dramatised interview in which both sides were scripted by the real Gould.  It shows Glenn, his voice as sonorous and pedantic as ever, leading a highly-strung interviewer (of the same voice) through certain fascinating ideas, theories of art, the ways he thinks and works - his insistent dislike of the ratio of one performer to a whole roomful of audience, for instance; Gould favoured a more intimate relationship with the audience-member, and so abandoned public performances in favour of studio recordings.  The interview is conducted at break-neck pace in a wired-up church, and the two parties (Glenn Gould pacing, the interviewer head in hands) are lit only from behind, their faces in so much shadow as to be invisible to the viewer.  All this dominated by his thunderous piano.

I feel I have rather a lot in common with Glenn Gould.  Perhaps anybody watching this film would come away feeling equal affinity with the man (as is so readily the case with any biography which really gets of the heart of a real person in favour of caricature or easy answers).  Nonetheless, I feel compelled by Glenn Gould's thoughts and philosophies, ways of working and talking; I feel some kinship with his troubled hair; his habitual solitude balanced against a capacity to be extremely talkative and rhetorical, away from people.

'Gould Meets McLaren'

An animated sequence of spheres

Something I always forget about biographies is that the main character dies at the end.  I once made the mistake of reading a biography of Gilbert and Sullivan, in which they both died, which was more than I was prepared to deal with.  The films hardly seemed arranged chronologically, but they did begin with Glenn Gould's beginning and ended with his death and legacy (the latter of which was some consolation, at least), and though I'd only known him for an hour and a half I was more upset than I'd expected.

This might be my favourite of the films I've watched for this project so far.  I once made a video documentary about a singer-songwriter friend of mine, Tom Hollingworth, and wish I'd had the sharpness of mind to have made it in the fashion of these 31 films.  I might actually have been able to say something interesting about him.

P.S. When I made mention of this film to my mother she gave a nostalgic cry of 'oh, Glenn Gould,' so my dearth of knowledge of the man is probably down to my ignorance rather than his obscurity.  In my defence, there was never a year when we both of us walked the Earth.

P.P.S. I know I've already covered 1993 with 'Jurassic Park', but this film was something special, and I was unwilling to ignore it.  Since it seems quite as much documentary as dramatic biopic I'm content to count it toward Achievement 6, my intent to see documentaries from ten decades.

P.P.P.S. Come back this weekend when I'll be commenting on a documentary about the life and work of another Canadian artist, 'Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Leonard Cohen' (1965)

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The DVD isn't so Region 1 as Amazon might claim, and I'd recommend it gladly.  It's pretty cheap, too.

Finding Neverland (2004)

My friend Charlotte recommended me this movie, and I was especially glad as it meant my 2004 viewing wouldn't have to be 'Downfall', and so I've been looking for the time to watch it for a fortnight now, but things have kept looming up to put it off.  Anyway, I found myself agitated for no interesting reason on Saturday, and needed some cheering up, and reasoned that any film that has a credit for Toby Jones as Mr Smee (an actor and role, however small, that always bring me joy) couldn't help but gladden me.  As it was, 'Finding Neverland' made me happy, but then made me sad again, and though I anticipated it bringing me back up to happy at the end, it confounded my expectations, leaving me both.

This is the story of how J. M. Barrie came to write Peter Pan, a writer, play and character who've had my attention of late.  I recently read a lengthy piece on why Peter Pan is a played by a woman - a chapter which I must say came to some extraordinary conclusions - so this recommendation was fortuitously timed.  J.M. Barrie was a fascinating fellow, and I like to think I share his capacity for turning up in a hat.

J.M. Barrie dressing up, and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies

(sadly not so)

This film manages to be three things: first, a story about the children who inspired Peter Pan and his fellows, secondly, it's a story about writing and staging a play - always exciting and terrifying to watch if you've written plays or acted on stage, and finally (unless I've missed one) it's a romance, though a slightly unusual one, between J.M. Barrie and the Davies family.

The heart of the story is a touch comparable to 'Miracle on 34th Street' (1947).  A single mother (Kate Winslet on this occasion) is struggling (as single mothers do in the movies) to raise a child who doesn't know how to use their imagination - at which point a charismatic champion of the imagination arrives, tries to teach the child how to enjoy their childhood, and in general aims to make all well, with mixed results.  The child at the centre is Peter, who shows great potential but needs to be encouraged greatly to delight in his imagination.  There is also his brother Michael, who grows up; for J.M., this was always something of a tragedy.  History records more Davies children than just these two, but if they were in the film they made themselves anonymous.

The romance between J.M. (is this really how people addressed him) and Sylvia, which more accurately is a great love of the whole family, is an intriguing thing.  It's denied with some frequency, and for a while it seems he's just a family friend very generous with his time.  In an effort to make J.M.'s actions a little less adulterous, the film goes out of its way to make his wife Mary as loveless, unimaginative and mercenary as possible, so we're obviously meant to boo her and cheer on J.M.'s move into the Davies family.  It turns out quite well for everyone, and Mary has an affair of her own, which pretty much legitimises J.M.'s antics, though too late, as Sylvia has a cough, which in cinema as in life means she will surely die.

Magnificently stylised special effects live in the imagination of us all

I finally got myself a kilt this week, after some years of yearning.  Having listened twice to 'Donald Where's Your Troosers' to get myself in kilt-wearing mood, I thought it a pity that none of the films put to me seemed in any way Scottish - and I particularly didn't want to watch 'Brigadoon' (1954) - so I was pleasantly surprised to discover, when watching 'Finding Neverland', that J.M. Barrie was very much Scottish (though, despite a certain flair, he never affects Highland dress).  It may have been the fact that he is played here by the American and generally magnificent Johnny Depp that made this seem unlikely, but the man has a way with voices as he has with faces.  Even more than Michael Sheen, he manages to remain obviously the same person on the inside while exuding full other characters out through his face and mouth.  Perhaps I just mean that he's a good actor, but I think he's probably something else as well.  Like Peter Pan or Michael Jackson, he seems to exist between, or without, age, race or gender.

I feel I'm trailing off rather here - there's nothing very exciting to note about the other performances, which were fine and dandy.  Freddie Highmore, playing Peter, went on to be Charlie Bucket in 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' (2005), a film that only I enjoyed; Toby Jones (Smee turned out to be a very small role here, but all enjoyable) has continued to pop up in many things I'm glad to watch; Kate Winslet I haven't seen in anything more recent - I'm not a great fan of her stylings (she was terrible in 'Dark Season' (1990), but it was her first TV so it's to be expected), but she's very likeable here, her exit proving suitably beautiful and upsetting.  Director Marc Forster went on to make differently-popular Bond-film 'Quantum of Solace' (2008), and Jan A.P. Kaczmarek's wholly agreeable score to this film won an Oscar, so there's a happy ending on that front.  For the story and the main character, the unusual effects for Neverland, and the elation of imagination, I commend the film.

P.S. The next blog will regard 'Laurel and Hardy Way Out West' (1937), and the next film I watch might be 'Na Srebrnym Globie' (1987) but I'd sooner it was 'How Stella Got Her Groove Back' (1998)

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It's a pleasing and interesting film, and I may revisit it soon to grasp it better.  Oh, but perhaps you haven't seen it?

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?