Theme Time Radio Hour

For quite a while now I've tuned in to Radio 2 at 11.00pm every Thursday night for Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour. As I've said before, Dylan's part of my life and I grew up with his music, so it's a huge and unexpected treat to hear his voice talking to me every week.
One would never have imagined in the 60s that he'd end up as a DJ, especially one playing old stuff from the 30s, 40s and 50s, though actually it's clear that he's a musical scholar of enormous erudition. He often talks at some length, reciting poetry or excerpts from Shakespeare. His language is like his songs, and his book, Chronicles is the same, freewheeling, sometimes random, but highly literate. I gloried in it and look forward to any further volumes, if there are any, with great anticipation.
Sometimes he takes off, and there's more Dylan talking than music which is fine by me. He doesn't actually talk, but speak - there's a big difference. I could never have imagined that he would go down this road, and of course he still makes music. I haven't heard any of his recent stuff, and some of it is, by all accounts, excellent. I've always deliberately steered clear of everything post-John Wesley Harding, but I'm thinking that I might have to think again. I did hear Most of the Time by accident recently and loved it.
Anyway, he clearly loves being a DJ and he's uncovered some remarkable, obscure old stuff. I love listening to him and 11.00pm on Thursdays has become a highlight of my week.

Times and Winds

I loved this film, and after immersing myself in Turkey while reading Snow, I found it fascinating on many levels, but it's the sense of ferment, of tension between a deeply traditional society and the forces of modernisation, which co-exist and sometimes collide with each other.
It's a hard film to describe - it's basically a portrait of the lives of a group of teenagers in an isolated, rural part of Turkey.In spite of the way of life that governs them, something that's been embedded for centuries, there's television, telephones and education. The female schoolteacher doesn't wear a headscarf, unlike the mothers of the children she teaches. She's a force for modernity, as is the television which is always present in the children's often harsh and sppartan home surroundings. One of the boys she teaches has a crush on her, and it's clear she must seem like a goddess to her pupils, whose mothers and sisters labour under the yoke of tradition.
There are scenes of great beauty in this film, helped by Arvo Part's music. I know it isn't to everyone's taste, and it was pretty pervasive, and loud, but it gave the film a seriousness and grandeur which it deserved. A small masterpiece.

The Duchess

I went to see this with my daughter - we knew that no-one else in our male-orientated family would want to see it, but we both enjoy costume dramas, and we enjoyed it very much. It's funny how they've acquired such a bad reputation, but those who like them love them.
It had received some bad reviews in the usual predictable quarters - Peter Bradshaw, I mean you, though he wasn't the only one, practically every reviewer sneered at it. But my hero, Mark Kermode on FiveLive, came to the rescue. He's usually highly critical of costume films, and has savaged Keira Knightley (who played the eponymous duchess) in the past, but he approved of the film, so that in itself intrigued me.

I knew a bit about Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire as I'd read the biography by Amanda Foreman on which the film was based. It's an excellent book, and the Gainsborough portrait of her on the cover shows a character who looks as if she has a wicked sense of humour - she's not conventionally pretty, but she's intelligent-looking and feisty and it's easy to see how Foreman, as she confesses in her introduction, fell in love with her subject. It's very much a scholarly work, with footnotes and an index, but it's compulsive reading.

Georgiana's story is amazing, even by 18-century standards. Her arranged marriage at the age of 17, to the stratospherically wealthy, but emotionally cold and distant Duke of Devonshire gave her the chance to shine in society and she grabbed that opportunity with both hands, becoming a leading light in the ton as it was called. Her downfall came when she committed the crime of producing daughters, which distanced her even further from the Duke, and even though she eventually produced a son, by then she'd had a passionate affair with the man who eventually became Lord Grey (famous for introducing the famous Great Reform Act in 1832 - an event and date engraved on my memory from school history lessons).

You couldn't invent her life; and the film doesn't give us the half of it. That's its main failing, I think, as it gives us a too-happy ending. Nevertheless, it gives us a convincing picture of the period and I have to say that Knightley gives a sterling performance. I have a feeling she's going to become a Helen Mirren-like national acting treasure - her choice of roles is increasingly interesting, though she needs to stop making those hideous Pirates of the Caribbean films. I look forward to following her career.

The Orphanage

I'd meant to see this at the cinema when it was released but it didn't happen, so as soon as it came out on DVD I put it at the top of my rental list. I had to wait a while before it came, and it was pretty near the top of the DVD charts for quite a while, so it was obviously extremely popular. Anyway it finally arrived, so I had a real sense of anticipation.
Was it worth it? I watched it twice, as I was pretty sleepy the first time and knew that I may have missed the odd little chunk or two. Also I wanted to see it again to make sure that my feelings of flatness after seeing it were justified.
It's beautifully filmed, but where have I seen that look? It's the greyish-blue tinge to everything, and the creepy, country-house setting, very different from the National Trust look of many British films. We first saw it in The Others a few years ago, a ghost story set in the Channel Islands during the 1940s and it set the template. I thought it was excellent - scary children, weird, ghostly sets, and Nicole Kidman, brittle, fragile and heartbreaking, producing one of her best performances and Alejandro Amenabar proved himself an extremely accomplished director. Certainly Spanish cinema has produced some extraordinarily original films in recent years, and The Others, The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labrynth have been prime examples.
The Orphanage is in this vein but, unlike those films it didn't convince. I'm happy to completely suspend disbelief when watching films, but the film has to make you do it, and this one didn't.
It obviously succeeded with many, and the reviews were adulatory, so maybe it's just me.
The Orphanage's narrative doesn't compel. It lacked narrative drive and structure and, although it was well acted and beautifully filmed, it was all over the place. The basic story, that of the childless couple attempting to set up a home for children with severe disabilities in the country house in which the wife, herself an orphan, had been brought up. The house had been an old-fashioned orphanage and the couple had now bought it. Their adopted son begins to collect imaginary friends, who turn out to be the ghosts of his mother's playmates, who were murdered....and so it went on. I've forgotten who the murderer was.
An implausible scenario, which doesn't disqualify it by any means; after all, the same might be said for many of the greatest films. But I didn't believe a word of it and the ending was ludicrous and had a tacked-on feel. It's one of those films where I have a blind spot - it doesn't happen too often, but occasionally I find myself out of step. Oh well......