Culture

I've been meaning to write for some time about the various cultural things I've been doing, but alas, the lure of playing games has been stronger. Perhaps this is why so many blogs get started and then abandoned. It's certainly true that I find it easier to write on my PDA in the middle of New Zealand than at home, not because the PDA is a good writing platform (though there are worse) but because there are fewer distractions. So to blitz things.

The Reader
Saw this one in January. It is without doubt a tremendously accomplished film. The quick summary is that it's about a German man, now in his fifties, still haunted by his first love, who turns out to have been a member of the SS. Kate Winslet, as Hanna, the former guard is splendid and entirely human. Life has overwhelmed her, forcing her do do things he knows are wrong, but she's lost, confused. It was wrong, but she doesn't know what she could of done better. Rafe Fiennes is also baffled and confused for most of the film, unable to make a proper relationship with anyone else.
It is a very accomplished film, but did I actually enjoy it? Neither central character is entirely sympathetic, by the end of the film you feel profoundly sorry for them, but wouldn't really want either of them as a friend. The whole film is somewhat painful, but so is life. It's a good film. Real. I'm glad I saw it. But not quite a film to love. All the characters are too damaged to feel love, and I can't quite love the film back as a result.
Does Winslet deserve the Oscar? Not that I've seen any of the other films nominated in her category. It is a stunning performance, and without her the whole film would have been a nothing. The bizarre thing is the number of awards Winslet has won as Best Supporting Actress, which she is not by any stretch of the imagination. I suppose that's a polite fiction to prevent her from competing with herself on Revolutionary Road.

Slumdog Millionaire
Saw this one in February. Why is it that there was absolutely nothing you'd even consider paying £7.20 to go see in November-December, and then an overload in the New Year. Surely films can compete for Oscars if they've been out for more than six weeks?
Still: Street kid goes on 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire,' every question is a reflection on his life. Is he a cheat, lucky or destined to win?
It's a gobsmacking film. Astoundingly beautiful. If it doesn't pick up all the editing & cinematography Oscars tomorrow night then there's either something very wrong or it will have been beaten by something transcendental, and I've heard nothing to suggest that. It sounds splendid as well. All in all a very effective advert for the Indian Tourist board. Apart from the bit with the slum toilet.
While again the central character spends a lot of the film baffled, Dev Patel is engaging, funny, wry. Anil Kapoor makes a splendid Chris Tarrent.
A wonderful film. Should win Best Director as well as all the technical stuff. Perhaps Best Film, perhaps not. If you've not already, go see it.

Can You Forgive Her?
Book rather than a film, but still undoubtedly culture. And rather disturbingly the first book finished this year, though to be fair it is a rather long one. First without pictures anyhow.
A few years back I kept a reading diary, recording all the books I read and what I thought of them. Even had the idea of putting them up in some form of blog, though I never got round to doing so. Might try again and stick things up here.
The second Anthony Trollope I've read, last year it was 'The Way We Live Now'. Obviously a man that liked long titles. TWWLN is splendid, and strangely appropriate for modern times, being mainly about the rise and fall of a crooked banker and the damage done to the people around him.
CYFH rather lacks that modern echo, being mainly about a young lady dithering about whether to marry her noble but boring fiancee or her charismatic if amoral cousin. Meanwhile her widowed aunt strings along two suitors, monied and boring or penniless and charming, and her best friend dithers about whether to abandon her husband in favour of the lover she put aside to marry him. It's well written, though at times you really do feel that some of them need a slap.
848 pages apparently in dead tree edition, and to be honest could have been trimmed a bit. There are five or six chapters after everyone's come to a conclusion that don't really add very much, save for a need to (almost) every character some form of resolution. The basic flaw of the book is that Alice, the first of the ditherers, spends most of book deeply unhappy with the choices she has made and yet quite unwilling to change them, and she becomes rather hard to sympathise with. Thinks: could one write a dull thesis on whether she is in fact bipolar?
Still, there's enough in there to bring me back at some point for another. But not for a few months.
But if you're looking for a Trollope, The Way We Live Now is very much better.