Scandinavian noir

The trouble with technicolor films from Sweden is that they are all back and white. It started with Wallender, but I am currently working my way though a series of foreign thrillers with English subtitles. As someone reared on Morse, Frost and Taggert, I find these continental thrillers much more brutal and callous, but also more convincing. The evil is more evil and the good guys, flawed, but more believable.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the first of the Millennium trilogy and I recommend it to those who won't be offended by scenes of rape and murder. Sadly these things take place in our society; they are painful to watch, but lest we should be soft about the perpetrators, it is as well to remember why we have the death penalty and why prison means punishment.

The French series, Spiral, is equally gritty and takes the evil into high places. From what we have recently heard about France corruption reaches into the very heart of government.

There is a Danish series entitled the Killing, which I have yet to watch, but I have it on my list.

Convalescing

How have I been spending my time while convalescing? I have been watching films, sleeping and reading.

I am still ploughing (plowing?) through the book on Bayesian statistics, but that has been a little heavy. I have also decided to attack 'A Game of Thrones' the first novel in George R. R. Martin's best-selling A Song of Ice and Fire series of fantasy novels. I believe it is being serialized on TV, but that is on one of the few TV channels I don't have. Still I have always preferred the book to the movie.

I did watch a spy thriller on BBC TV last night called 'Page 8'. For a thriller it was rather gentle but the cast was stellar. Perhaps it could have done with a real film director. David Hare's strong views about rendition failed to allow the equally valid view that fighting bad guys with one hand tied behind our back leads to the triumph of evil.

I finally got around to watching the movie "The time traveller's wife". I read the book some time ago and preferred it to the film. Brad Pitt owned the rights and his mate Eric Bana starred as the beefcake. It was less complicated than the book.

I have also watched The Apostle starring Robert Duvall and one to stand alongside Tender Mercies which I saw a long while ago.

Miss Pettigrew lives for a day is also a heartwarming RomCom starring Frances McDormand and Amy Adams and set in a London just before the second World War where night clubs and West End musicals are all that a young girl thinks about until she meets a couple of survivors from the first world war, who takes life a little more seriously.

Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont stars Joan Plowright as an elderly widow signed in as a long-term resident at a private hotel in London for the genteel poor. She expects her grandson to call but he never does. Instead after a fall she is adopted as a grandmother by a nice young busker on the London underground. As the friendship blossoms she finds she has more in common with him than with her own family.

Apart from the films, I have watched to football. Already after 3 games Manchester United are top of the league and Manchester City second. Both had big victories over London clubs at the weekend with United's drubbing or their closes competitors over the past 20 years, Arsenal, sensational. They won 8-2. I should h8-2 be an Arsenal supporter at present!

Letters to Juliet and My Cousin Rachel

We have watched a couple of OK films this week. Letters to Juliet is set in Verona where Romeo and Juliet is set by Shakespeare. The story is that the wall where the statue of Juliet is situated gets plastered by letters from girls who have been hurt in their relationships. A coterie of "Agony Aunts" answers their letters. An Ameican girl on holiday finds a letter that is 50 years old and seeks to trace the younf English girl who had decided to return home rather than met her Italian lover. That girl is now the 65 year old Vanessa Redgrave who comes with her grandson to seek her old beau. After a long hunt they eventually find Franco Nero (remember them together in Camelot?). Altogether a nice film with predictable plot twists and a gentle theme. No sex, violence or bad language.

The other was an old monochrome Daphne Du Maurier movie, My Cousin Rachel starring Olivier De Havilland and Richard Burton. I hadn't seen it previously but it was a timely reminder of what a great actor Richard Burton was, and how handsome a guy before the loose living got to him.

Burn before watching

I watched the recent Coen Brothers film, Burn after Reading last night. I cannot recomend it. In fact I barely managed to last the distance. The language was foul and it was not funny. It had nothing important to say and a lot of fine actors were wasted.

Shutter Island

We watched Scorcese's Shutter Island last night. It was, I suppose, what is known as a psychological thriller. I have got into the irritating habit of saying aloud what I think will be the next words by a given character, as if I were the writer. This film allowed you to do this, which, I guess, means that the plot line was fairly obvious. I often spend some time digesting a movie after I go to bed. Not this time though. Some of the images were a bit gross and it was not a frightener except for those who don't like rats. Somehow so many dream sequences took the terror away.

Watching and reading

I watched Heaven Knows Mr Allison the other night. It is a two-hander between Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr as a marine and a nun trapped on a Pacific Island during the war against Japan. It has a happy ending with Mr Mitchum only scratched and Miss Kerr with her honor intact. It was a typical piece of period hokum that was enjoyable enough though both the leads played sterotypical characters and nothing very surprising happened. It might have been fairly shocking at the time with a mixed sex cave for sleeping in. Today the most shocking thing about it would be the anti-Japanese racism since the Nips were portrayed as semi-comical ineffectual individuals that one could hardly imagine conquering most of the Pacific.

We also watched the latest instalment of Nanny McPhee, which was fun. How we would all wish for a nanny like that to solve our problems! Emma Thompson, who wrote it, is a Left-wing socialist atheist. She obviously has a strong religious empathy, nevertheless. Christians would recognize the Holy Spirit as McPhee's paradigm.

I have also read the latest Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight. This is supposedly for younger readers, though the level of humor, complexity and adult themes is as great as in the other Discworld novels. It concerns the teenage witch, Tiffany Aching. Among the topics it covers are cutting the toenails of an old woman who has not had her shoes off in a year, a miscarriage in a 13-year old brought on by a severe beating from her father, attempted suicide, time travel, young love dissipated, joke shops that sell plastic doggie-poo, the responsibilities of leadership, death and bereavement, hiding one's abilities in order to fit in, weddings and funerals, bullying and standing up to bullies, the hidden truths in folk-myths, and prejudice and how it spreads in a community. Such serious subjects (apart from the joke shop) are handled with fun and humor and a delicious use of English. There are now 38 books in the Discworld series; I feel like reading them all again.

Healthcheck

Today I had my Hickman line replaced on the other side. I had had Augmentin for 5 days since the other one came out. Augmentin is not pleasant causing colic and diarrhea, but having had the line removed and the abdominal symptoms subsided I am feeling a lot better with much more energy. I think the next chemotherapy will be next Monday.

I have managed to complete a 1000 piece jigsaw with my wife - one piece missing! and I have started a book by Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, Virtue Reborn.

In the meantime I have read a John LeCarre from a few years back. Our Game is about two spies who were retired when the Soviet Union fell, but they can't leave well alone and get involved with a rebel movement in the Caucasus. LeCarre seems to be supporting the Blairite interventionist line (Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Sierra Leone) but it seems to me that it is impossible to tell which of the combatants has right on their side. As usual the story is about betrayal and involves betraying a friend, a lover, and a country.

We seem to be watching a lot of Sherlock Holmes recently. I watched the recent movie starring Robert Downey Jr and an old one Without a Clue with Michael Caine and Ben Kingsley. Then we started on the old Basil Rathbone series which has been digitally remastered. I still think that the Jeremy Brett TV series was the best.

Where Mad Men came from

Pursuing my hobby of watching old movies, last night I watched The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, starring Gregory Peck. Vintage ~ 1956 and based on a book by Sloane Wilson. It was one of those Darryl Zanuck productions from the vintage years of Hollywood. It was well written, clearly spoken and with high production values in Technicolor.

Above all it was about integrity. An ordinary office worker in a safe job earning $7000 a year (those were the days) is persuaded by his financial circumstances to go for a riskier job making $10,000. He constantly has to face challenges to his integrity. By being honest he benefits even when the easy way would be to obfuscate and 'game' the situation. In this he is supported and even cajoled into honesty by his wife played by Jennifer Jones. (Minor parts are played by Fredric March, Lee J Cobb and Keenan Wynne). Then he is confronted by the fact that he has a son in Italy - the product of an illicit affair during the war. Now, there is a test for his integrity. Should he tell his wife? And if he does, how would she, who was so keen on honesty, react?

They don't make films like that any more.