His Dark Immaterials

The two hours spent watching the first installment of His Dark Materials, on screen as The Golden Compass, weren't a complete waste of time. The movie was not unpleasant: fluffy bears, snowy scenes, and a world where everyone has pets; and, like every action adventure filmed in the last few years, features Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee. The Sunday Times gave it four stars. The Economist's Intelligent Life placed Pullman in a succession with the Bible and Milton, and wrote that the author expected just a handful of people to 'get' the story, but found it a pleasant surprise when it achieved the cult status that it did.

I think I am one of those few, we unhappy few, we band of heathens, who don't get it. I have to admit to not having read the books, though not for want of trying; if it is as representative of the novels as Disney's The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe was, then perhaps I am doing Pullman a great disservice. I both agree and disagree with Pullman when he says that literature should be a 'theatre of morality'; I think that some literature is, and has great value as such; and then some literature isn't, and that's okay too. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, which he disparages, isn't; but it is firmly rooted in another tradition, that of the epic, with clearly defined forces of good and evil; and there is tremendous popular appeal in this because you don't have to think about what makes them good or bad.

What makes The Golden Compass confusing is its resemblance to Lord of the Rings (not just in casting Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee) but in the trilogy format, and the strange resemblance to a Bond film in having a secret laboratory with white curvy walls in the middle of nowhere. Now in a Bond film this would be inhabited by an arch-villain with clearly evil intentions (e.g., blowing up the world), but here the great revelation is a machine that separates kids from their pets; okay, daimons. Which doesn't really seem like enough provocation for the 'war that is coming'. Without the ramifications of allegory, The Golden Compass, as a film, fails to satisfy.

This doesn't mean I'm giving up on Pullman, though; I just might spend the winter holidays curled up with the trilogy. And there was a brief moment of nostalgia for Oxford, and the airship 'ferry' that took Lyra away to the great city is certainly an improvement on the Oxford Tube or the First Great Western service to London.

Hwet!, For I Shall Disrobe

The trailer of 'Beowulf' had already put me in a Freudian state of mind when I headed across London to the BFI Imax theatre to see it in glorious 3D. 'Give me a son,' Angelina Jolie says in a Transylvanian accent, stroking him with the tip of her braided ponytail. 'I will make you strong.' She seemed to be reading off a list of things that guys like to hear when you take them to bed, so I wasn't at all surprised when the crowd at the sold-out showing was largely male. Besides, if there's one person with breasts that seem to be in 3D even on the television, it's her.

'Beowulf' is far from being the first film to be shot and released in 3D, but it's the first complete film in the recent revival of the format, when technology has allowed it to be actually convincing and not leave you in a nauseated state. It's an excellent choice for the attempt, with a strong, driving plot and universal themes, and there's a nice circularity to the first work of the English Literature canon being used as the basis for a new level of reality in; and the epic was, after all, oral in its first inception. Hwet! And look! It's movie experiences like this that keep us going to the cinema.

The film was a romp from beginning to end, a wall-to-wall Freudian playground. Beowulf, the hero, fights Grendel completely naked, with his genitals obscured behind a jug or a screen of smoke; Grendel is, naturally covered in a translucent viscous liquid, and as he advances over the cowering girl, he drips huge gobs of pre-cum like an overenthusiastic teenager off-camera from above. Angelina Jolie as Grendel's mother struts in on sixth-century demonoid stiletto heels, and seduces him while, quite literally, stroking his sword. She takes from him both the male sword and female cup; she keeps the phallus but spits the vagina back at him when she terminates her protection.

The lack of dialogue synchronisation, quite jarring on certain occasions, was reminiscent of budget films made without timecode or pilot tone, and was a reminder of how rudimentary the technology is, and to what degree this new format of storytelling is in its infancy. The most difficult recreations for any visual effects teams are human beings in natural surroundings, so while it's easy to make convincing monsters, getting people to look right and getting the audience to have a sense of where they are in the 3D setting is always challenging. With the opening shot of Robin Wright Penn I mentally groaned to myself and thought that everyone was going to look like cardboard cutouts, but as the film progressed I realised that in general close-ups and far shots were convincing, and it was just that Robin Wright Penn simply has a very flat face.

Each age, I suppose, gets the retelling of Beowulf (the tale, as well as the hero) that it deserves, and both technologically and thematically, this was definitely a 'Beowulf' for our time.

The Summit in the Alleyway

Every city has its own pact between it and those who live there; each one, individually. Oxford, but for a few, those who stay become part of it, is haughty and peremptory: it opens its gates, its college courtyards, its libraries, to those who give to it their intellect and consent to carry its standard. The place is pompous and full of it but if you believe in the myth you won't fail to be moved, rather like enjoying the company of a likable braggart. As I rode my bicycle into town for some much-needed repairs I sailed down Broad Street (or rather, wobbled; my front wheel had come loose) past the Sheldonian in the late-afternoon sun and wondered how I could desert this place that had been so good to me; it had, quite honestly, offered me little in the way of learning, but much in the way of redemption.

London is another beast altogether. Whether or not you drink the Kool-Aid, Oxford advertises what it's all about quite openly: welcome to the seat of learning; this way up the ivory tower, mind your step and wipe your feet please. I'm sure London can pull up and boast of a Higher Purpose just as quickly; in fact, it can pull up just about anything. Former hub of empire, centre of government, hub of trade and finance; the city is multitudinous, and there are no gates. You enter through an alleyway and emerge into a row of Georgian mews and wait for a definition to present itself to you, the way information packets are handed out to freshers. What is this city about?

At first glance it appears to be centred entirely around money: making it, spending it; it whirls as it is flushed away like the crowd that disappears into the bowels of the underground at half past five. If you walk down King's Road on a Saturday afternoon it's gorgeous and lush, as beautiful as it is inaccessible, like the impeccably dressed woman who looks me up and down with that imperceptible smile on her face: I'm from another world than yours. I imagine it to be a world devoid of those wire-frame racks which lurk like an out-of-season Christmas tree in hundreds of thousands of flats across the country, festooned with knickers and dishtowels. But just as I've found that window-shopping in Chelsea is a perfectly pleasurable pursuit in itself, I think there's a third response to looking at the convertibles whizzing past and the terraced apartments in Kensington, which is neither that of feeling like the little match girl or setting one's jaw with grim determination that all this, too, shall be mine, mine! one day: the simple, quiet realisation of the fact that this is not my world. But I am looking forward to the London that will become mine, by discovery, by creation, in the way that though I will never be a member of All Souls, I do have my favourite seat at the Bodleian.

There is a pleasure in performing something perfectly, like playing a piano piece one knows by heart or executing a well-loved recipe; but there is another pleasure in discovery, in learning, in mastering what one does not know. London was, among other things, the starting-point for geographical expeditions during the age of exploration. There is a certain irony in the fact that perhaps the best way to get to know London is to approach it as would an adventurer, turning the corner into an alleyway that yields unexpected delights, and then to plant a flag, marking it as part of one's own private empire within the city.

Wadham Gardens On a Summer's Day

'Take with you a ground rug or folding chairs,' we were instructed the day before the performance of Romeo and Juliet in the gardens of Wadham College, which I have to admit (intercollegiate rivalry notwithstanding) is one of the prettiest colleges in Oxford, and its lawn were bright and green and shimmery in the afternoon sun. The performance did not take place in the hallowed space of the centre college quad, of course, but in the garden to the right of the main buildings; against the backdrop of a wall, a 70s Volkswagen van and a tent had been parked, to emphasize the idea of Shakespeare being 'on tour', and which served as the backstage for the square of wooden planks that had been laid down. The idea that the six actors simply piled into the rickety old VW camper and meandered away down the motorway to their next touring gig was somewhat mitigated by a gleaming, comfortable modern bus parked nearby.

It was a small, intimate crowd of theatregoers in a lazy summer mood, and sweet alcoholic drinks were being served; thankfully, they opted for a play everyone knew by heart, it was difficult to imagine mustering the focus to get through, say, Henry VI Part III while semi-drunk on sugary Pimms. As the play moved into the second act the audience, especially those sitting on the ground, were perceptibly more and more horizontal, and the actors glistened in the summer heat. Or perhaps Juliet was really feeling the potion.

Despite the obvious professionalism of the performance, there was something very local (not amateurish; local, more so than if it had been on the stage of a West End theatre) about the fact that Shakespeare was born just a few miles to the north and it was first performed fifty miles to the east; and the garden setting, taking away not just the dimmed, fan-shaped theatre and the proscenium, but the very structure of a theatre in the form of a building, was a wonderful reminder of how 'theatre' is about an agreement between the players and the audience: we say entertain us, and they do; they say, this is Verona, and we believe them. Oh, and the play, of course. For a summer afternoon in Oxford, this play was just the thing.

Out from above the boiler room

It's easy to romanticize (or sentimentalize) the process of moving house. I'm presently packing up the dormitory room where I've been ensconced for the last two years; I imagined myself lovingly going through the bits and pieces of two years' worth of life as a student at Oxford, doing a triage of thing to keep and things to throw away, and things to gaze at for a while before closing my eyes and dropping it into the dustbin. In the end it was about nothing so much as shoving stuff into boxes as quickly as I could, and noting how unimposing and dusty the things looked as I threw them into storage: flurry, then; and an underlying sadness at leaving a tiny space in which I had been comfortable. The bed where I had read my way to a Master's degree looked uncommonly ugly in the way that only college dormitory beds can look without their covers. Tossing out readings should have been a cathartic process but the main sensation was physical, of paper cuts and grime and sneezing out dustballs. The room, as I look around it, seems unbelievably small: a burnt-out, shrunken shell, papered over in college-issue paisley prints. No, no sentimentality here; just sadness and an eagerness to move on.

Satyagraha ha ha ha

Seeing 'Satyagraha' performed by the ENO at the London Coliseum has resparked my love for Philip Glass's work, and I have been revisiting old friends. I'll be taking a break from revision to watch Naqoyqatsi, his cinematic masterpiece which is the closest experience to being stoned that doesn't involve being stoned. Fortunately, with a DVD the wonderful thing is that you can wander off while it plays; this you cannot do while watching an opera. Fortunately the staging by the ENO was engaging even as it unfolded, to put it politely, at a stately pace. They made good use of technology as well, including flashing the lyrics (which are in Sanskrit), on monitors mounted on the balcony of the dress circle for the chorus members. Comments overheard as we were walking out ranged from 'brilliant' to 'crushingly boring', which it can be if you were waiting for something to actually happen. But if you allow the hypnotic repetitions of the music to lull you into a trance, then a single moment of Gandhi's life, that of his politicization, is transformed into lush, symbol-laden spectacle, and three acts of beautiful, crystalline music.

Catch it early

Timesinks from Amazon arrived this afternoon, bringing CDs of instrumental music (which in theory I should be able to play while studying, so as not to distract me with lyrics), and a few DVDs for the weekend. Of the music, standouts are the soundtrack from Miss Potter, with Renee Zellwegger looking rather rabbity herself on the cover, which is light, airy, and evokes wonderfully the English countryside of imagination (as opposed to the English countryside as seen from the window of a First Great Western train); Pan's Labyrinth is also a beautiful plunge into a fairytale world, the only problem being that the soundtrack was conceived as an extended lullaby, which of course meant that I promptly fell fast asleep.

The DVDs I bought were a lucky choice. I had meant to get another season of 24, but the political bias was beginning to show itself to a distasteful degree, like having a conversation with a man with an increasingly tumescent erection. I decided to take a chance on Criminal Minds, and found it refresingly intelligent. It isn't so tightly written to the point of being fatiguing, like the hour-long BBC dramas; it's predictable enough to be fodder for a Saturday night off. It falls into one of the sub-categories of crime dramas about the different investigation procedures, in this case the profilers. Mandy Patinkin, oddly convincing as a paternal/avuncular veteran of the field, heads a team who, in the episodes I've watched so far, gallop through the various criminal psychoses.

Perhaps I've been wondering since my nightmares of the other night whether I'm of a criminal disposition, but with each profile I found myself nervously examining myself for signs of criminal behaviour. Loner disposition and antisocial qualities? Check. Obsessive compulsive disorder? Yes, until my mid-teens. Interest in Criminology? Yes, I just finished the exams. Paranoid personality? Check. Does paranoia that one is of a criminal disposition count for or against likelihood of criminal behaviour? Okay, now I'm going around in circles. A sign of self-obsession...

Dream Sequence

It's only been my second night without downers, but I've spent the last two nights in the throes of a dream which I wish I could say was recurrent, but has been actually rather like a television serial. Perhaps I've been exalting the format of the television novel a little too much, but my dreaming has taken on the likeness of an art-house version of 24. Night 1. Interior. Night. I hang out with some new friends, popping a few pills and smoking up. At the end of it all, I feel a flirtatious camaraderie with one of the boys, R. As the sun comes up, they all stumble out of my house, sobering up in the cold dawn. I'm suddenly conscious of the maid standing shivering in the doorway; she informs me that my terrier, who was pregnant with four puppies, is dead. R had come upon her and for no apparent reason kicked her across the lawn. She had spent last few hours haemorrhaging to death at the vet's. I wake up and attend my Sociology of Ethnicity class.

Second night. I have a presentation to prepare, so I took out my notes, my handouts, and my readings, and soon fall asleep with pencil in hand. Interior. Night. I have found my father's .38 in a desk drawer, and am trying to remember how to use it, and the few shooting lessons we had had together before I grew up and into libertarian politics. My dog's corpse is brought home in a cardboard box, and I thank the maid who had fetched it for me. As soon as the door closed, I found the reason why I had been unable to work the gun. I unlatched the safety, braced my arm, and fired. The recoil was more manageable than it had been for a nine year old, and I managed to leave a nick in the door three feet left of the peephole I had been aiming at. Armed, literally, with this new confidence, I mustered the courage to open the box, and stroked the stone cold body. The next shot went into the wall somewhere. I wiped away the tears and kept firing until the gun was empty.

At this point I had to wake up to go to the bathroom. I knew that if I went back to sleep I would soon head out to see if I could actually find R and pull the trigger. Did I want to find that out? It wasn't even six in the morning yet, but I decided instead to check my email and see if any friends across the globe were awake and logged onto their instant messaging service. Tonight I'm cranky and antisocial, and have decided I'm going to pop a Valium. I also called my maid and was reassured by the sound of barking in the background. I told her to take her to the vet's; she's overdue for her shots anyway.

Notes on a Few Recent Films on Sex

After the phenomenal worldwide success of 'The History Boys', you might be led to thinking that the British take a somewhat relaxed moral attitude about things like middle-aged schoolteachers sexually harassing young boys. This is far from the truth. In Venus, about a decrepit actor's relationship with a young girl, and Notes On A Scandal, about a female schoolteacher's relationship with a young boy, and that of an older schoolteacher's sapphic lust for her in turn, yet more permutations of inappropriate desire are explored, sometimes more throughly than one would like to really see.

Of the two new films, Notes On A Scandal is the 'bigger' release, featuring as it does Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett; Patrick Marber (Closer) wrote the screenplay, and Philip Glass (The Hours, among other depressing hits) the music. All the ingredients are in place for a throughly gut-wrenching movie, and anyone with any sense would wait for the DVD and watch it with either a very large tub of ice-cream or a warm body into whose clothing one can sink one's tears. I am not a sensible person, so I watched it at the Phoenix Picturehouse, where I had, incidentally, recently seen The Queen. I only mention this because Notes on a Scandal features two former Queen Elizabeths, and I felt that Helen Mirren should have at least been given a bit role in this movie, if only because she has more Elizabeths under her belt than either of them. The movie was indeed bursting at the seams with emotion and high drama, and Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett turned in excellent performances: full marks. But even while Elizabeth I and Elizabeth I were thrashing it out, there was a part of me that was tapping my foot: 'And then?'

Perhaps it was because I had not quite recovered from the sparse, insidious realism of the previous night's Venus, directed by Roger Michell, of Notting Hill fame, but in a style far removed from the gloss, as well as romanticism, of that film. The lighting in Venus is harsh and unforgiving, especially when the most of the cast is carunculated and tousled. Even Jessie (aka Venus) isn't fantastically pretty; she's young and has the attractiveness of youth, but that's about it. Now when you have a situation in which there is an old (i.e., not merely elderly, or older, but old) man and a teenager (presumably of consensual age), one expects certain cliched storylines to emerge: the intellectualized desire of Nabokov's Lolita, a heartwarming tale of breathing life into a dying man's last days; a tale of sexual frustration, perhaps. Hanef Kureshi, who did the screenplay, and Michell did nothing so prosaic. Or rather, they took all these for granted (the scene in which she insouciantly swabs her twat and offers her finger to Peter O' Toole as a 'reward' is unforgettable) and went far beyond any such conventionalities, ironically by making it a film, quite simply, about a relationship. The film is as insouciant in its portrayal of this unfolding relationship as Jessie is in it, and this lack of deliberate intensity makes it hit all the harder.

I highly recommend watching these films back to back with The History Boys; perhaps they should offer them as a box setof some sort, with a warning that any thoughts of sex after watching all three in a row will, for a while at least, be accompanied by a shudder.

Pirates of the North Sea

They say that in an experiment two groups, watching the same movie on a smiliarly-sized screen, but with tinny TV speaker sound on one hand and surround sound on the other, not only experienced the movie more intensely, but actually had the impression that the screen was larger than it was. I don't watch many movies at home (I see them in the theatres), but I do watch a lot of television. I have yet to buy my dream LCD flatscreen, but it might actually be larger than the floor area of my dorm room. Hanging it on the wall with blu-tack is against the regulations.

Back home for the holidays, my television is as outdated as the magazines on the couch; and just as I cringe when I look at the fashion that was the cutting edge before I packed my bags for London, my television is a 4:3 CRT that has never heard of terms such us HD or 1080i. So I've made up for the tiny screen with a plethora of speakers, thanks to an AV receiver with a manual as complex as a statistics textbook, though marginally more interesting. My brother, under the influence of Christmas bonhomie, said he'd set it up for me, a slip of the tongue that he cursed me for remembering after a few hours crouched behind the the entertainment console with a flashlight, draped in cables, while I delivered the scripture according to Yamaha, pacing back and forth.

But it was worth it. Of all the new shows, Heroes shows the most promise; it has a JJ Abrams cliffhanger style, though it isn't as fast-paced as Alias but, unlike Lost, seems to know where it's going. I've only watched up to Episode 11 of the opening season; and my main complaint is the annoying expository voice-over ("Evolution is a complex process...") that frames each episode: you really want to shoot the guy. Another point that may soon be cleared up is the lack of a single, identifiable (in both senes of the word) character through which the viewer enters the world (Josh for the West Wing, Xander for Buffy, George for Grey's Anatomy); at the moment it's a toss up between Hiro and Peter Petrelli. Ali Larter's character seems to have been thrown in as eye-candy for the boys; her superpower appears to be that she can get mad and become violent. I can do that. Of the old shows, Bones and Boston Legal seemed to be chugging along nicely, each episode well made, but easy to snap off. The television equivalent of cocaine is Grey's Anatomy; it leaves you sleepless, your eyes dilated, sniffling into a hanky, yet hungry for more. Season Three promises to be even stronger than the first and second.

Movie studios seem to have taken the hint that people will go to the cinema to watch a movie if they aren't made to wait too long for it, so release dates are now almost simultaneous with the States. Whether they are making more positives from the release internegatives or enough theatres in America have switched to digital, I have no idea, but all I can say is, good for them. Television is another matter. My newlywed friends tell me that their cosy moments at night are spent cuddling together with a laptop, watching TheLatest.s3e5.xvid.lol.avi. Or they might start off the night with two laptops, one watching Prison Break and the other Desperate Housewives, and then watch Grey's Anatomy together. Meanwhile, the 5.1 surround system lies dormant all around them.

There are some things that take priority over shoes, clothes, and Lladro figurines: I have never regretted prioritising spending on books or music; and since I believe that screen narratives are the art form of our time, I'd put DVDs on that list. But one can't buy what isn't being sold, so if I can't get it in the form of a silver disk, then thankfullly there's the Bittorrent underground network. At the moment The Pirate Bay is trying to start its own country off the coast of the UK, and though I am sceptical of their success, I applaud it as an appropriately ridiculous symbolic gesture for the mule-headedness of the distributors.