Hobbit trailer-dump

There's just so much Hobbity goodness out there.  The more I see of it the more I think they've probably got it about right.  The Hobbit was never a massive epic like LotR, but a light-hearted, grumpy, homely little tale.  They seem to have expanded it to dovetail better with the overall narrative of how The Hobbit fits int the bigger history of Middle Earth, but hey, I'm fine with that.

Anyway, here's the current amount of stuff that's getting me excited:

Bilbo Baggins, the original Hobbit hero, paving the way for the Fellowship of the Ring years later, putting bad ideas about 'adventuring' into the heads of impressionable young hobbits everywhere...  and I do rather like his patchwork dressing gown.  Quite enjoyed the comment about incineration in the contract as well :)

Also, someone found this, which is rather epic.  Elvish as it was originally imagined, spoken by the man who knew it first and best.

June Update: Arts, Parks and High Hills

As usual I've been bombing it round like a mad thing, mainly trying to get my drawing deadlines done before I move house this Friday.  I like to be occupied which is good as this June there are boxes to be packed and cleaning to be done, and life going on in the meantime.  Things to do, people to see, opportunities not to be missed.  I just want to take a post to stop and get my ducks in a row.

End of Year Show

So, another academic year is over, and I may be a two-year graduate but in a town like Loughborough and with so many student friends thanks to church it's hard not to notice.  I almost feel sorry for next year's students - they've missed out on some great people.

The main milestone here is of course for the students, but one of the ways the town gets involved is through the annual Art and Design show, where each graduating class must orchestrate a display of their best work.  They're great for the upcoming students, the leavers and their friends and family, and potential employers and stakeholders in the university to get an overview of the kind of work the course produces.  My particular interest is for Visual Communication (Illustration, my old course, and Graphic Design), Printed and Woven Textiles, and Fine Art so my friend and I did the rounds.  All art students are encouraged to leave business cards so if I see something I particularly like and there are some lying around I'll scoop one up.

Zoe Marshall - www.zoemarshall.co.uk    Emily Creative - www.emilycreative.tumblr.com    Anya Raczka - www.anyaraczka.com    Sarah Lynn - www.sarahelizabethlynn.tumblr.com    Josephine Munsey    Sophie Hargrave - www.hargrave.blogspot.com    Heather Lee Durrant    Tamara Webster - www.tamarawebster.co.uk    Anniestration - www.annabrown.moonfruit.com    Abigail M. Cooper    Jessica Griffith - http://www.jessicagriffith.co.uk/

Movie roundup - June 2012

The Woman in Black, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Snow White and the Huntsman.  Warning: Here be Spoilers

Bank Holiday Funday

God bless the British and their pig-headed insistance on clinging to holidays they aren't really entitled to!  It's been a funny spring really; a very warm March, a very cold and rainy April, but with May (fingers crossed) the weather appears to be sorting itself out.  Hopefully just in time for my birthday, which is in a few weeks.

This Bank Holiday weekend has been a very full one for me; despite being ill for the best part of the week and not up to planning much for myself, several little adventures have just fallen into my lap so I've been riding piggy-back on those until I'm back to firing on all cylinders.  So in no particular order...

Jubilee Wood

Gouache, 15 mins

The bluebells are out!  I've been keeping an eye open and this week I saw a few so I decided to chance the wet weather and go check out my old walks.  Just as I got here the skies cleared for an hour or so, and returned just as I was ready to leave.

3D or 3Don't?

There's an interesting article in The Guardian today about the rather dissapointing sales of 3D cinema tickets in 2011.  Initially the 2009 reboot of 3D films that avoided the old red-and-blue glasses of the 1950s proved very popular, with James Cameron's Avatar being made specifically as a flagship for the technique, and no one can say that it wasn't a very pretty film (even if the plot wasn't as groundbreaking as the effects.  The jury's still out on whether it was a blue version of Pocahontas, Fern Gully or Dances With Wolves). 

For a while 3D films did well, but now their popularity seem to be declining rapidly, with more people opting for the standard 2D versions.  The author of the report on this believes that now the inital period of experimentation is over it's mainly due to the recession.  When a 3D ticket costs half-again as much as a 2D ticket it's just too big a spend, espcially if the cinema trip is a family outing.  Additionally those with contacts or glasses may find the 3D specs hard to wear, and a friend of mine who is partially blind in one eye can't see 3D at all - she has to wear the glasses just to stop seeing the picture in double!  However the theory that it's all down to the recession has a problem as it assumes that once the economy picks up the 3D ratings will return fully to their old figures.  I don't think that will be the case, in fact I think there's something else going on altogether.

I've been reading... and watching... a whole bunch of stuff.

I've been a bit of a culture vulture this week, indulging in a serious film, a not-so-serious film, a book I will probably never read again, and a comic of epic proportions that I still haven't finished.

• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
• Julie and Julia
• Foucault's Pendulum (by Umberto Eco)
• Habibi (in progress)

Movie news

This makes me exceedingly happy!

They are filming The Hobbit!  I mean, we've all known for some time that they were filming the Hobbit, but now there is objective proof and it's looking awesome!  This was one of the first 'proper' books I loved as a kid, I read it around age 12, and I really want to see how they bring it to the screen, especially after the great job they did with Lord of the Rings.  The Hobbit always felt more like a fairy tale to me, in comparison to the epic pseudo-historical fiction of LotR, so I'll be interested to see if they manage to do that, making the film that should have come first, come second (and in two parts), and how they dovetail the two together.

Martin Freeman is playing Bilbo, which is very encouraging.  I wasn't very aware of him until the miniseries of Sherlock aired on the BBC last year, with Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role.  I really enjoyed it and was a bit miffed to hear we'd have delays before the second season, but when it turned out that this was because both of them were working on The Hobbit it more than made up for it!  Freeman, as I said, is playing the aforementioned hobbit, and Cumberbatch is going to be the voice of Smaug the Dragon!!!

Edit:  THERE'S A TRAILER!! THEY RELEASED A TRAILER!!  OH OH OH!!!

I have so many things to say!:

1) Young dwarves! (and Northern dwarves)  So far the only dwarf we've seen is Gimli, but now we get all thirteen dwarves!  They're all so different looking too, which is good. Easier to tell them apart in the dark :)

2) Young Bilbo! (and doesn't Freemen just look the part)  I'm loving watching him try and ride that pony.  Hahaha...

3) 13 dwarves attack 3 trolls, now there's a fight I'd like to see, bearing in mind that we do see the trolls again in LotR, or what's left of them (I may call that a Dovetail Alert, where they have to make the two fit)

4) Cameos!  In this trailer alone there's Cate Blanchett, Ian Holm, Elijah Wood, Andy Serkis, and did I miss anyone?  I'll have to check.  On a really big screen.  Multiple times.

Ok, I'm officially a teensy bit excited... !!!

Looking forward

I love the way the light shifts gold in September.  It's not the deep heat of midsummer, and the wind and the rain have started to set in, but the chill of October hasn't quite arrived yet.  Last Saturday morning I woke up to this (click to enlarge):

Of course there are other things coming up I'm looking forward to, such as this offering from Disney/Pixar, due out next year

If you're seeing echoes of Dreamworks' 'How To Train Your Dragon' well I am too, but mainly I'm just pleased to have a kick-ass girl in the lead role.  Admittedly she's still a princess but two out three is pretty original as far as the Disney Franchise is concerned.  The last time they did that well was with 'Mulan'.  And Merida is a red-head too!  So often those of the ginger persuasion are relegated to the best-friend or comic-relief roles (think Ron Weasley, who fulfils both).  Apparently this is Pixar's first lead female too, which would be admirable if not for the fact that Studio Ghibli has had dozens of them since the mid-eighties.  Don't believe me?  Let's recap:

Studio Ghibli
Laputa: Castle in the Sky - Sheeta (joint lead)
My Neighbour Totoro - Satsuki and Mei
Kiki's Delivery Service - Kiki, with side-characters Osono and Ursula also making the grade
Only Yesterday - Taeko
Whisper of the Heart - Shizuku
Princess Mononoke - San/Mononoke (NOT your average female love interest by any standards!)
Spirited Away - Chihiro/Sen
The Cat Returns - Haru
Howl's Moving Castle - Sophie (who is 80 years old for most of the movie)
Ponyo - Ponyo (joint lead)
Arrietty/The Borrower Arrietty - Arrietty

Now, a few of these are technically princesses (Mononoke and Ponyo) but one is a metaphorical title rather than a social status, and the other has given up her princess-hood by the end of the film (plus, she is a goldfish, which I'm pretty sure exempts her from this) but the majority of them don't think too much about getting a guy and being lady-like and girly.  Either they're off questing or they have far better things to think about (Shizuku is working at being a writer, Kiki is setting up a business, Taeko is re-evaluating her life, Mononoke is... trying to assassinate someone) and what few men there are sort of fall into their lives as a bi-product of this.  Half the time they are either rejected or overlooked to boot.  None of these films ends in a wedding.  All in all this really appeals to me since there are surely more important measures of a girl than whether or not there's a fella about.  And damn it, I want to go questing too!  That sounds like so much more fun than sitting about waiting for my true love to drop from the ceiling.

Now let's evaluate the competition.

Pixar
errr...  I think Brave is it.  Don't say Tangled because that wasn't Pixar, that was Disney Animation.  I would add Disney to this list to help bump the numbers but every female lead I can think of is a princess or becomes one by the end of the film even if she is kick-ass.  Except for Lilo and Mulan (and even she wins her man)

Anyhow, somehow The Borrower Arrietty had managed to fly under my radar so I only saw it last week.



As usual it is exquisite work, full of the intricate hand-drawn animation that Ghibli is famous for, and the quiet spaces and gentle silences that are often passed over in Western cartoons in favour of action scenes, background music and montages.  Speaking of music, I'm thoroughly in love with the soundtrack too.  It was written and performed by French singer and celtic harpist Cecile Corbel, and adds an ancient fairy-like dimension to the incidental music in the film in particular, as well as the main theme song.  You can watch it in Japanese or English, and the jury's out on which is better.  I think you keep something nice in hearing the original language, but for those who find it hard to read on screen or pick up spoken intonation better in their own native tongue I have no objections.  The actors for the Ghibli translations are usually well chosen.

This article from the Guardian sums it all up pretty well, including a pretty interesting quote from Hayao Miyazaki himself about why exactly Ghibli enjoys it's female heroines so much.

I've been reading... The Eagle of the Ninth

I'm subtitling this 'This Curse of the Bromance'.  Contains spoilers

 I fell onto Rosemary Sutcliffe's The Eagle of the Ninth after watching and very much enjoying the recently released movie adaption The Eagle.  Sutcliffe wrote a short series of book during the 1950s which are all based around the invasion, occupation, and hurried departure of the Roman Empire from Britain.  The Eagle of the Ninth is the first in the series and follows a young Centurion, Marcus Flavius Aquila, through his first command on the dangerous frontier of Hadrian's Wall and subsequent dismissal from the army following an injury.  Marcus has spent his entire life working towards a military career in order to regain the lost honour of his family following his father's shameful defeat in battle, and is forced to consider a new life as a crippled civilian.  Hearing that the bronze Eagle standard used by his father's former legion has been spotted in the hands of the northern barbarian tribesman, he resolves to try and steal it back with only his British-born slave Esca for help.  Either version of the story makes for a good Swords-'n'-Sandals adventure with a more personal touch, and although it won't win any Oscars I found it very enjoyable.  I'd highly recommend either the book or the film, but that's not really what I want to talk about.

The main point of this blog comes from when I sat down to watch the movie with my housemate.  I'll need to give you an idea of the two main characters first and the book and the film are set out slightly differently, mainly because of their different audiences and times of writing, so bear with me and I'll be fast:

Book version:
Book Marcus is quite different from Film Marcus. He's more enlightened (almost too enlightened to be realistic in some ways) about the nature of a slave. He saves Esca mainly out of sympathy and frees him before the quest even starts, so the story here really is mainly about the search for the Eagle. There is never any question that Marcus and Esca are on the same side, and even towards the British tribes who currently hold the Eagle Marcus has no real enmity, saying that if the tribesmen are able to keep the Eagle from him they are welcome to it. His aim in finding it is not to regain his honour so much as to prevent it becoming a trigger for further bloodshed. Still, the companionship between the two is central - in contrast to the film in which no women appear, in the book you meet a grand total of one woman, which was very much the way of the times. Men and women had different functions in society and operated in very different worlds, rarely seeing much of each other until a marriage was decided upon, and even then the union was often financially or socially driven. Esca needs less explaining as he is roughly the same in both the book and film: prickly, reserved and determined to cling to the sense of honour that is all he has left to him after being snatched away from his former life. I think this idea of being honour-bound is very interesting and something we've lost in our culture, but that's a pondering for another day.

Film version:
In the film Marcus subscribes very much to the view of Roman law and sees his slave as nothing more than a piece of property.  While he and Esca are able to work together well enough, the course of the movie revolves around the testy relationship between the two of them.  Esca, honour-bound into Marcus' service after the Roman saves his life on a self-pitying whim, rails inwardly against the master who represents the nation that killed his family, invaded his home and forced him into slavery.  In the meantime Marcus drags them both relentlessly through the Scottish Highlands in the hope of bringing the pride and glory of Rome back to his family, and cannot comprehend how anyone could despise the empire he has dedicated his life to.  At the start neither of them understands the other at all but by the end of the journey each has come to recognise that neither of their nations is purely good or evil, and their forced reliance on each other turns into a strong and trusting friendship that is tested when Marcus finally frees Esca from his enslavement and Esca in turn helps him defend the Eagle rather than running to safety himself and leaving his former master behind.

The Main Point:
The point of all this back-story is that I jokingly described the film to my friend as a "bromance" (that is, a slang term for a very close but non-sexual relationship between two men, such as between brothers - hence the "bro" in bromance.  If you're not sure what that looks like, think of the friendship between Frodo and Sam from Lord of the Rings, JD and Turk from Scrubs, or Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson.  For some reason there doesn't seem to be a female equivalent).  It's true that The Eagle is a bromance, if only by necessity due to the lack of women, but mainly because of the depth of the friendship that evolves between Esca and Marcus.  But for some reason my friend has taken this to mean that the two main characters are gay, and cackles with laughter every time she finds a line in the movie or passage in the book that she feels backs this up.

If that's how she wants to see it then that's down to her (although if she did turn out to be right surely it ought to be worthy of a neutral shrug rather than hysterical giggling), but I think it does a great disservice to men in general to immediately assume that two male characters are sexually or romantically attracted to each other simply because they care about each other.  The author would be extremely unlikely to write two gay main characters into a book for teenagers and get it published (one of her adult books does allude to a relationship between two male characters, but it is very underplayed).  Additionally both the twenty-something-year-old actors and the director of the recent film have said that the characters weren't written or played gay, so where is this idea coming from that they are romantically involved?  Why is it that the behaviours they read as a bond between brothers are being read by others as signs of a sexual attraction? 

Much of it may be just the way our social conduct has changed over time.  Since 'coming out of the closet' has become more common and accepted over that last few decades there seems to be a pressure on both men and women to define their sexuality in a way that wasn't there before, and so any behaviour that could be interpreted ambiguously has been cut down, such as in this case showing signs of strong affection for another man, even if that affection is platonic.  So of course, any time we see those rare signs of affection they are jumped on, and mountains made out of molehills.  The excellent Charity Bishop has noticed a similar trend in female duos, with fans clamouring for relationships within the space of a few episodes.

It may be partly the fault of us women too.  We go on and on about how men are so much more insensitive than us and can't express their emotions that I'm afraid we're all actually starting to believe it -even to expect it.  Being masculine apparently now also implies being callous, crude and emotionally shallow, and so if any man does decide to be vulnerable with his friend it is seen as being far too forward or feminine compared to what is socially acceptable.  The trouble is, I don't think that's the truth at all.  I firmly believe that all of us, men and women, are capable of much more
humanity than that in the way we act towards each other, and that it's not the potential for sex but our belief in the value of other human beings that drives us.

The ability to be emotionally open or close with another person doesn't make you a wuss or determine your sexuality, it shows courage, trust and strength of character on both sides!  To assume that any man who genuinely cares about his friend must want to be involved with him romantically is demeaning to the great and noble hearts of the men around us, and if we don't want them to lose that ability to care then we'd better stop laughing at them for it.

So guys, it comes down to this.  I believe that you are capable of great kindness, selfless genorosity, and emotional depth.  And it appears there may be scant few of us left that think so.  Don't let us down.

Anti-Lent?

 That's right, it's update time again! Busy times, busy times. I have a job now, which I am enjoying very much, but amidst re-balancing my life I have had some time for a few other adventures:

Luxuries for Life

It's a little rough around the edges, since it was made for a friends weblog in rather a hurry.  But hey, now you know what I look like!

I'd also like to direct you to PostSecret Blog this week.  For those that don't know, PostSecret started as a way to anonymously get your burning secrets off your chest -whether trivial or serious, deeply personal or universal, by writing and decorating a postcard with your secret on it and posting it to a guy called Frank, who turns them into books and also updates this blog with the weekly arrivals. 

Some are heart-warming, some are heart-breaking.  There are happy secrets, sad ones, angry ones, funny ones and downright weird ones.  I love the idea of humans connecting with each other over the sharing of their most hidden thoughts -the things you've always wanted to say out loud but didn't know how to or didn't feel you could.

So, to mark a pretty significant date for me I decideed that I would mark it by sending in my own PostSecret.  Due to the time it takes to post anything to America it's only just appeared this week.  Yes, my secret is live on the internet, for one week only!  I hope it will encourage someone else with the knowledge that really we are all just as pecualiar as each other... but I'm not telling you which one is mine  :) 

Wearing the Clever Trousers

I seem to be interested in prodigies of late. Geniuses, savants, people of unusual intelligence. I always like to see characters with a brain being appreciated and explored since a lot of attention is usually given to the more athletic and therefore more physically attractive characters.  My current favourites are Spencer Reid of Criminal Minds and the boys from The Big Bang Theory but I seem to have picked up a pattern in the films I've been watching lately, and discovering more in them than just admirable intellects.

My favourites seem to deal with the dichotomy of genius, which is that a mental ability in one area can be accompanied by a deficiency in another. Sometimes it's a simple lack in social skills from too long spent outcast from the popular kids, or a mental illness that counterweights their genius, and sometimes is what makes it possible at all (e.g. Reid shows mild signs of Asperger syndrome, and Rain Man's Raymond is autistic)

So here's this week's playlist:
(Titles link to trailers)

Good Will Hunting
When I read the summary I assumed it would be the classic case of 'Lonely Nobody discovers he has Supernatural Abilities. He is now a Hero!' Almost like a superhero, Spiderman maybe. But instead it focussed on something I hadn't considered before- unfulfilled potential.

Will, the protagonist, is incredibly gifted. He can work out problems overnight that took his professors years to solve, he understands mathematics the way Mozart understood music, and can recall hundreds of facts at a moments notice, yet he spends his time working as a janitor in MIT and getting into pointless fights.

When one professor discovers Will's talents he decides that such a great mind cannot be wasted and bails Will out of jail with great ambitions for him, including formal lessons and therapy. However as Will slowly begins to speak with Sean, the only therapist to survive his vicious repartee, we see that it isn't that he is unaware of his own intelligence -on the contrary, he is so aware of it that he deliberately and antagonistically runs mental rings around anyone he meets just because he can- but that he has been so emotionally damaged by his life so far that he refuses to attempt anything he really wants, for fear of losing it.

There's a lot in this movie; the desire for success versus the perceived shame of failure, what happens when the need for recognition takes over, the assumptions we make about other people's lives, how fear can paralyse and isolate us, the effect cruelty and rejection has on people, the cost of abandoning troubled youths to the judicial system, the merits of intelligence versus empathy, and why we need to know ourselves and examine our actions carefully. It's a very moving film in places, funny too, and surprisingly profound in the aftermath. I highly recommend it.


Proof
Catherine Bryggman struggles to make sense of her life following the death of her father Robert, a great mathematician. When a proof is found in her father's study that may resolve an important theory in the mathematical world, and which Catherine claims to have written, she has to come to terms with the fact that as well as inheriting her father's brilliant mind, she may also be carrying the mental illness that haunted him until his death.

The cast is small which makes it very intimate to watch -the play it is based on only has four parts and they mostly keep to that- and the relationships very tangible. I like the quiet of it, the long pauses, the silences it leaves, and the math joke (I'm a sucker for a nerdy pun). While Proof deals with the same topic as A Beautiful Mind, that of fearing your own mind, I think I prefer Proof for keeping it small-scale and personal rather than going for the career-spanning grandiose air that A Beautiful Mind has, although each is justified in it's filming style for the story it tells, it's just a matter of taste.



A Beautiful Mind
John Forbes Nash Jr. is one of those guys whose ideas and discoveries are behind a lot of the processes we take for granted today. His work as a mathematician focussed on using maths to describe and analyse human behaviour and strategies, and the patterns and effects caused by variations in the environment (please excuse my Laymen's, all those with better understanding of it). He also suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. Many people get schizophrenia confused with multiple personality disorder (I did until I looked it up), where the sufferer switched between personalities, but schizophrenia is more like switching between versions of reality. The sufferer experiences things that simply are not there, hallucinations and delusions, while often appearing perfectly normal in all other ways.

For most of his career Nash struggled against the advance of the illness, and the film (based on the book of the same title) shows him trying to reconcile with the fact that his most treasured possession, his mind, is also the source of his greatest suffering.  It's a window, albeit a decorated and slightly Hollywood-ised one, into the fascinating life of one remarkable man, and just how resilient humans can be.


Rain Man
This is supposed to be one of those films that 'Everyone Has To See', so I gave it a go. For the impossible few that haven't heard of it the story revolves around Charlie Babbit, a young man very bitter towards his estranged and recently deceased father, who discovers that he has an older brother, Raymond, who is autistic and living in a care home. Their father bequeathed three million dollars to Raymond in his will, only leaving Charlie his old car, so in an effort to claim 'his share' Charlie hits the road with Raymond, hoping to use him as leverage. However the more time he spends with his brother, the more his attitude changes towards both Raymond and himself.

Rain Man doesn't really fit my genre since it's more about Charlie learning how to be loyal, compassionate and generally less of a selfish ass than he was before than it is about his brother's genius, Raymond is just the catalyst that begins that transformation and it is his disabilities that are the real focus.

In that sense Raymond's mind isn't really explored much, but the portrayal of autism has been highly praised and that's important because this is the other way of approaching the topic. The other movies (Proof and A Beautiful Mind in particular) show highly intellectual people holding the fort of cleverness against the onslaught of mental illness or emotional trauma and for the most part succeeding. Rain Man approaches it from the other end of the spectrum. Raymond has never fought as John and Catherine fought, because from the moment he was born he was already lost to autism, but rather than portray him as someone to whom mental illness represents a long fall into darkness Raymond is shown as a complete person, and not a lesser one for being autistic. He is eccentric and bound by the need for routine, but he is complete. Moreso than Charlie in many ways, and as he learns to recognise Raymond as a valuable human being he has a connection with, Charlie is humanised in turn.