Skyfall, The Master and Silver Linings Playbook

After the disaster that was "Quantum of Solace", 007 was back on form with "Skyfall". Although when the movie opens with yet another car chase, my heart sank with the  memory of that which opened "Quantum". Mercifully, we were out of the cars quite quickly, but if we have to have a chase, please think of something more original. However, the film did have probably the best dialogue for any Bond film for a long, long time. Lots of great one liners that had been missing for so long. But overall, despite undoubted fun for a couple of hours, I found the whole thing a bit predictable. Although I guess that is what we like about Bond. I was disappointed by the final sequence, where was the big set and hundreds of extras? There were some great performances, I especially liked Ben Wishaw as Q, Albert Finney as Kincade and Ralph Fiennes as Mallory.

It was a dark and wet early evening that I drove to High Wycombe to see "The Master", the latest movie from Paul Thomas Anderson. It turned out to be a baffling but disturbing film, typical of this writer/director. It is basically a character study more than a story. There are two Oscar worthy performances from the two leads, Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman. At time it seemed very theatrical, as the camera gets up close and personal with their faces, and they are together for most of the time. The movie is beautifully filmed, but the feeling of alienation is not helped by the discordant music, some off key scraping from Johnny Greenwood. And the screenplay is perhaps intentionally wobbly. There is another great performance, this time from Amy Adams, but can terrific acting compensate for an unremittingly cold  story? At 144 minutes, it did not seem that long, and was never boring. So lots of contradictions, not an enjoyable film, but one that brings the highest quality theatre to your home town.

What happens when you combine an director like David O. Russell and Harvey Weinstein? An outstanding story of two (make that lots) of damaged people and a lot to say about mental illness and those people that have to put up with it,  with a crowd pleasing feel throughout. This is one of the three best movies I have seen this year, it really is a fantastic film. The screenplay that Russell has written, based on the novel by Mathew Quick, is absolutely brilliant and should win an Oscar. In the hands of the two leads, Bradley Cooper in his best role to date and Jennifer Lawrence who is just mesmeric, the dialogue sparkles. There are some outstanding supporting roles. Robert De Niro, Jacki Weaver and Chris Tucker are superb. We are in the realms of offbeat, wacky romcom, but it all fits together so well. The comedy is in fact very subtle, not laugh out loud but warm and quirky. OK, the unoriginal ending is nothing like the rest of the movie, but as Cooper shouts at his parents at four o'clock in the morning, why did Hemingway in "Farewell to Arms" have to spoil everything with a miserable conclusion.

Phantom of the Opera at Milton Keynes

This was Alison's birthday present. And, luckily enough, she chose me for the other ticket. We last went to see Phantom in London in August 1993, so over nineteen years ago. The new touring production  had been on for a month at Milton Keynes, and was basically sold out for every performance. And you can see why. The sets are extraordinary and need a long run to justify their construction. We had absolutely amazing seats in row K, and were showered with bits from the exploding chandelier, that was directly above us, at the end of the first half.

All the performances were terrific. Olivia Brereton, in her professional debut, after recently graduating from the Guildhall School of Acting,  was especially good as Christine, a roll she shares with the more experienced Katie Hall. My guess is that we have seen the start of a stellar career.

The singing was first class, the orchestra fantastic, and the amplified soundmixing spot on. It was just worth every penny, and as good as anything in London. For me, an even better experience than Les Miserables that we saw last year, even though not as good music or story.

My Favourite Instrumentals

When I compiled my list of 131 Songs, I consciously left out any that were just instrumental. So I thought that I would rectify that and list my favourite instrumental tracks of all time. Here they are:

Classical Gas by Mason Williams

Originally released in 1968, Classical Gas was written and performed by virtuoso guitarist Mason Williams. It gained  three Grammy awards in 1969. Check out the live version from 1988 on YouTube.

Foggy Mountain Breakdown by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs

The Foggy Mountain Boys was a bluegrass band formed by guitarist Lester Flatt and banjo player Earl Scruggs who wrote this track that was first released in 1949. It was used as background music in the movie Bonnie and Clyde. A late Grammy award came in 2001 when it was performed by a group that included Steve Martin. I can see a huge influence here on Alison Krauss and Union Station.

Take 5 by The Dave Brubeck Quartet

I used to have this single when it came out in 1959, at a time I listened to Jazz more than anything else. It was written by Dave Brubeck's saxophonist Paul Desmond in the very unusual quintuple or 5/4 time. It has been covered numerous times, but the original cannot be beaten.

Rockin in Rhythm by Duke Ellington

Another jazz classic from my ancient collection. First recorded in 1931, the big band of Duke Ellington never sounded better. Not sure if it was played at the concert I attended at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1967. And what a concert. Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington.

Last Date by Floyd Cramer

This has to be my number one favourite, if only because every time I hear it, I get
a lump in my throat. Don't ask me why. It has the distinctive "slip note"  that Cramer developed as part of the Nashville sound of the time. Last Date was released in 1960 and sold over a million copies. Not bad for an instrumental.

Shadow Dancer, Anna Karenina and Argo

At last. Three grown up, intelligent movies with hardly, if any, trace of CGI between them. The stories are enough. The first two were showing on Senior Screen, the single Wednesday morning shows, as these had not previously been shown in Aylesbury.

Shadow Dancer is about turning a female member of the IRA into a mole. The tension mounts as she faces the suspicion of her own family. A spine chilling story set in a wonderfully shot 1980/90s gloomy Belfast. The success of the movie is down to a large part by the acting of leads Andrea Riseborough, superb as Colette McVeigh, and Clive Owen as Mac, her British intelligence handler. Their uneasy relationship is set against the twists and turns of a fragmented terrorist group. Here the performances are excellent, as is Gillian Anderson as Mac's unscrupulous boss. I'm never keen on the author of the original novel adapting it for the screenplay, but Tom Bradby just gets away with it because of the superb cast. Director James Marsh (Man on Wire) does OK, keeping the pace and tension just right. I just don't know what the crinklies would have made of it.

Much more up their street was Anna Karenina. An interesting and modern language take on Tolstoy's classic, adapted by Tom Stoppard and a sumptuous  production directed by Joe Wright. So British through and through. I have to say that I expected more. More intrigue, more story. more landscape. Instead we have what I thought was a highly unsuccessful attempt to move the action backwards and forwards from being set in a grand theatre to normal live action. This cinematic device was, I guess, an attempt to distinguish this movie from a number of other previous films. But it did not work. There were times when the director seemed to get fed up with it and we were out of the theatre for a long period. But then we were back and it just seemed like a different movie spliced in. The two main characters of this romantic drama are played by Kiera Knightly as Anna and Aaron Johnson as her lover Vronsky. They are both the worst bits about the film. There is no chemistry and they both seem totally pathetic. In contrast. Mathew MacFadyen is fabulous as Anna's brother, as is Jude Law as her husband. And the subsidiary love story between Domhnall Gleeson's Levin and Alicia Vikander's Kitty is much more successful, as are the cameos from Ruth Wilson, Kelly McDonald and Olivia Williams. Could have been great, but wasn't.

Ben Affleck has done it again. I loved his first two movies as director, Gone Baby Gone and The Town, and now, for the first time away from his home of Boston, he has made a thrilling hostage rescue movie based on real life events, that have been heavily dramatised for better effect. We are in Tehran in 1979 and six people from the American Embassy have avoided being taken hostage with the sixty others, only to find themselves in more danger hiding out in the Canadian Ambassador's residence. What follows next is a dangerous mission to rescue them. Tony Mendez (Affleck) has an audacious plan to use a fake movie for their extraction. He enlists the help of a make up genius, John Goodman, and a producer, Alan Arkin. (Which of these will win best supporting actor, who knows? They are that good in what are reasonably small roles.). Affleck, with his director's hat on, really ups the tension almost to the point of gratuitous manipulation that is almost laughable at the end. But who cares.

Family History Websites

I now have two websites for each of father and mother's family history. When I reinstalled my FTP (the fantastic FileZilla) and uploaded my mother's data to Ancestry's freepages, it seemed to work even better than when I uploaded my father's last year. And this time I found I could easily make amendments. So I took the opportunity to reupload father's data which now has all 600 odd individuals separately instead of just in families.

Freepages is really only for data from my Family Historian programme (there is a device here for saving the data in a format especially for a website) so I have also placed all my family history documents onto separate Google Sites. The four websites are:

The Family History of Peter Richard Boyd Roberts:

http://freepages.family.rootsweb.com/~davidbbroberts
http://sites.google.com/site/dbbrobertsfamilyhistory


The Family History of Dorothy Roberts ne Askew
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~davidbbroberts
http://sites.google.com/site/askewfamilyhistory

This, however, is not the end. There are still some outstanding searches that I need to complete. There is the mystery of the Hoyland properties on Busheywood Road in Sheffield. One of these was where Dad was born, and one (or the same) where we lived when John and I were infants. I want to write on this blog about my great grandfather George Robert (Bob) Leather who played football for Rotherham (go to YouTube for "Rotherham Town v Thornhill" where Bob was now the trainer for Rotherham). But I am waiting for a reply from a Gillian Leather who has already done some research, some of which prompts more questions than answers.

Next year I intend to visit Rotherham or the villages of Toynton St Peter and Toynton All Saints in deepest Lincolnshire which is where the Askews, Ascoughs and Ayscoughs came from. There is always something more to do.

the distance between us, Fahrenheit 451 and A perfectly good man

the distance between us is the fourth novel by Maggie O'Farrell that I have read. It is nearly up there with the brilliant "The Hand That First held Mine", "The Disappearing Act of Esme Lennox" and "After You'd Gone", but not quite. It just got a little too romantic two thirds through, but apart from that, it is a typically wonderful story from this terrific author. For a long time there are two very separate stories. The fact that they alternate every page or so is at first quite disconcerting. But the writing, as usual, is so fluid and warm, that we soon are entranced by what happens to Jake and Stella. I just love O'Farrell's turn of phrase, and the back stories are cleverly interwoven with the present day.

Fahrenheit 451 was a big disappointment. The story was fine, and Bradbury's vision of the future was powerful and disturbing. But I found the writing to be awkward and his descriptions sometimes poor. "The bombers crossed the sky and crossed the sky over the house, gasping, murmuring, whistling like an immense, invisible fan, circling in emptiness". Just not my taste at all.

I had forgotten that Patrick Gale is such a great storyteller. My review of his earlier bestselling novel "Notes from an Exhibition" was not entirely complimentary, so either I got that wrong or his latest book, A perfectly good man, is so much better. Both are set in the same area of Cornwall, but this is not so much a sequel as a companion piece. Like his earlier book, the narrative shifts around in time and person. The central character is Barnaby Johnson, the vicar of Pendeen and Morva, but we also follow various other connecting characters in a way that is always satisfying. This mainly a gentle but never boring story of people with secrets that sometimes burst through with awful consequences. The writing is full of soul, wit and well constructed. I enjoyed it immensely.

Alison and Anne go to Strictly

On Saturday, Alison and her sister Anne went to see the live production of Strictly Come Dancing at the BBC Television Centre at White City. You can apply for tickets to be in the audience, although you are not guaranteed entry even though you have a ticket. So you have to queue. The BBC seem to give priority to production staff, and possibly anyone who works at the BBC can get tickets and they get all the best seats. So they never know how many places will be left for the public. There are forums on the Internet (some with quite horrific stories about disappointments) that suggest you have to arrive much earlier than the 2.30pm suggested, so Alison and Anne were there at 10.45am. There were already 120 people ahead of them!

Fortunately, their places were confirmed before 1pm, so they were able to have break at the Westfield shopping centre in nearby Shepherd's Bush. When they were eventually led in, they were disappointed not to be on the ground floor. But in the end, their seats in the first row of the balcony were absolutely superb. In the photograph above (courtesy of Hello magazine) they are in the dark in the very top left hand corner. They both said the experience was one of the best of their lives. Fantastic views of the dancers, a brilliant warm up by Brucie, wonderful sets and lighting, and hearing the music live. But I still cannot say I would have like to have gone.

Maggie and Archie

I have only just realised that this blog contains nothing about our cats So here they are.

Maggie, our tortoiseshell, has been with us for fifteen years. She was at least three years old when we chose her at the animal shelter. Or rather she chose us. Alison said she would never be able to choose, but would let the inmates decide. Maggie crawled up her leg ("take me") so that was that. She has always been "two hour Maggs" as she entered Wood Green animal shelter on Christmas Eve and we found her the first day they opened after the holiday. She is now an elderly cat, seems to be pretty deaf, but is as loving as the day she arrived.

Archie is our new (21 months) ginger tom. He is still settling in. He replaced Marty (who came with Maggie,) who died nearly two years ago. Archie (previously called Charlie) came from a retired couple in the village. He came from their son's family, now in the far north, who could not keep him. He has had a bit of a troubled past, but is now a delightful and entertaining addition to the family.

Homeland Season 2 Episode 4 "New Car Smell"

Carrie does it again, breaking protocol, as only someone with her state of mind can do. Meeting Brody in his hotel bar was not it. That was what she was supposed to do, as it was all being recorded. But when Brody leaves to go back to his room, Carrie has one of those moments. Convinced that Brody has seen through the set up, and will be immediately out to warn his terrorist friends, she disregards orders to leave ( was that Saul trying to help Brody?) and follows Brody to his room.

I guess Brody thinks she wants to rekindle their earlier liason, but in response to Brady suggesting they be friends, Carrie blurts out everything she has been holding back: "Do I want to be friends with a demented ex-soldier who hates America? Who decided strapping on a bomb was the answer to what ailed him? Despite his daughter, his son, people who loved him in real life not in the mindf**k world of Abu Nazir. Who in the end didn't have the stones to go through with it but had no problem sending me to the nuthouse? I don't think I need a friend like that."

The acting between Clare Danes and Damian Lewis makes this one of the best bits of television I have seen for sometime. Would Brody have tried to kill Carrie? We will never know as the guys from the CIA burst in and arrest Brody.  A confused and desperate Brody states, "I liked you Carrie," to which she shockingly responds, "I loved you". All the hurt at the way Brody and the CIA have treated her comes to the fore, as an emotionally wrecked Carrie watches him being dragged away. The camera concentrates on her face and then pans backwards in a memorable conclusion. Fantastic.

Tring Book Club - Stuart a life backwards and Moon Tiger

Someone at book club suggested we might try a biography for a change, and we settled on the life story of Stuart Shorter by Alexander Masters. This is his first book, and at the very end, there is an excellent article by Josh Lacey about how the author got to know an ex-homeless, ex?-druggie, chaotic man called Stuart. It was only through a growing friendship that Masters was able to tell the whole life story after years of interviews with family and friends, and many conversations with his subject.

Stuart Shorter is a complex character. An explanation for his descent into crime, drugs and mental instability only comes later as we travel back in time to his youth and childhood. For me, the book stirred many emotions, anger, sympathy and everything in between. If I saw him on the street, I would probably cross the road to avoid him. Although he would probably not blame me for doing so. On the one hand he is a vile, unscrupulous layabout who has hardly ever had a job and relies on the state to maintain his drug habit. But the causes of his chaotic lifestyle are too heavy for us to be judgemental, and Stuart clearly has some intelligence, humour and goodness that is not always apparent.

The years of research and putting together the novel way of telling the story backwards has certainly paid off in what is a moving account of one of life's losers. Or is he? Alexander Masters lets us make up our own minds.

None of us had ever read a book by Penelope Lively, although she is a very prolific and gifted writer. Moon Tiger won the Booker Prize in 1987, and I am not surprised. Claudia is an ill old woman, in hospital, and is writing "a history of the world ..... and in the process my own". She is visited by family and friends, and she looks back on her life with them. But they have their own point of view, and the author cleverly uses the third person, sometimes from more than one person's perspective to complement Claudia's first person (and amazingly third person) memories.

Lively's writing is therefore technically very interesting, but more than that it is high class and is so modern, it could have been written today. She has a wonderful way with words:

History is of course crammed with people like Mother, who are just sitting it out. It is the front liners who are the exception.

..... of  course, intelligence is always a disadvantage. Parental hearts should sink at the first signs of it.

There are times when I thought things got a little tedious. The visit to Plymouth Plantation and some exploration in Egypt come to mind. But apart from that, this is a terrific story, and the final third is brilliant. I shall be reading another of her novels soon.