between the rock and the cold, cold sea

Is an amusing spectacle of a film with an awful lot of ridiculously boring bits. Alas, the guy playing Leonidas has no acting chops at all, and set against the rounded vowels and British consonants of the gentleman playing Themistocles (who actually can act), his tendency to pronounce "earth" "oyth" and rush out his lines as if speed is all that matters... is hilariously jarring.

This is a film which is actually aware of Herodotos: it has no clue at all about how to choreograph a battle involving Greek hoplites (protip: short shorts go stabby, not slashy, and CLOSE UP YOUR LINES), but it does speechifying to a very Greek length. Xerxes is distracted from war by sexytimes with a (sadly unattended by her own entourage) youthful and pale Artemisia, and there is some subplot involving a young Spartan and his affianced bride who follows him from the Lakedaimonian plain to the Hot Gates - afoot, without change of clothes or supplies - and much manly beating of chests and disclaiming responsibility among the Persian generals. The division the film makes between "East" and "West," "tyranny" and "freedom," also echoes Herodotos a little (tho' for the author of the History, the division was less "East" and "West" and more "barbarian" and "Greek"), although its expression here to my mind has as much to do with its Cold War context as any attempt at faithful historicity.

But it bears comparison with the Frank Miller/Zach Snyder 300, because - poor dialogue, bad acting and all - it tries. And cruelly whimsical as it shows Xerxes to be, it demonises none of its characters: all of them are men, not inhuman monsters, though some of them are over-proud tyrannical men.

Not a film, from the trailer, that I'd ever thought to see. But when I read mizkit's comments on it, I knew I had to go.

I succeeded in going last night, despite a cold that's turned my faculties to snot and left my tonsils feeling as though they'd been glassed. And for a film with such a premise - paramilitaries take over the White House with the President and other hostages still trapped inside, make demands of a government in constitutional crisis - it is astonishingly good. Intelligently shot, well-acted, with dialogue that's clever and appropriate much more often than it's not, it even manages to pull off a modicum of political intrigue at the same time it's shooting SAMs from the roof of the White House.

It is really pretty damn good. The 11yo political-junkie girl saves the world! Channing Tatum's Muscles and Jamie Foxx do male-bonding things with rocket launchers. Maggie Gyllenhaal is NO ONE'S LOVE INTEREST. The White House tour guide gets a Moment of Awesome. ("Stop. Hurting. My. WHITE HOUSE!") People blow up the symbols of American political hegemony - that's always good. And there's a PSA: MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX is BAD and OWNS A LOT OF POLITICIANS.

Jamie Foxx's President Sawyer is ridiculously young-looking for a president, and full of entirely too much PEACE LOVE INTEGRITY to be in charge of the world's biggest military bully. But as an ideal of the kind of people one could wish held political power? Yeah. I like him. Can we have one, please?

And Maggie Gyllenhaal is NOT FOOLED. That's pretty amazing, too. (Hey, people who are unimaginative enough to remake Star Wars? Age up the characters a bit and cast this one as Leia Organa and Idris Elba as Han Solo. That'd get me in your cinema.)

(Today is day two of the Invasion of the Snotmonsters. We have called up the reserves but remain on the defensive. Tea and blanket supplies are running low.)

Ralph Fiennes' Coriolanus (he both directs and plays the title role) is a film adaptation of Shakespeare's play of the same name, The Tragedy of Coriolanus. The language of the play is itself only lightly adapted, but the costumes and setting have been adapted to 20th-century: Fiennes' Caius Martius Coriolanus and Gerard Butler's Aufidius the Volscian are soldiers of a Rome and a Volscia that bear a marked resemblence to modern day small warring states - shot partly in Serbia, it's hard to avoid feeling that the film's physical landscape reinforces the Balkanised sentiments of its theme.

Messengers' speeches are not infrequently delivered by television announcers - and damn, Shakespeare's messengers sound natural on the announcers' tongues - and the Roman Senate is framed almost as a modern parliament. Coriolanus' mother wears military uniform in the more formal scenes, which lends pointedness to her speeches -

"I mock at death
With as big heart as thou. Do as thou list
Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck'dst it from me,
But owe thy pride thyself"

- in particular. It is a film filled with solid performances, and an interesting take on staging Shakespeare. Definitely worth a look.

If I had to use just one word to sum up what irks me most about The Avengers film, it would be this: wasteful.

*

It's a sprawling film. But it's all glitter. No heart. A stellar cast exchanging zinging one-liners and trading snark barbs - although neither Scarlett Johansson nor Jeremy Renner seem to have the presence to hold their own alongside their co-stars - but when you take away Robert Downey Jr. cracking wise with perfect comic timing and Samuel R. Jackson glaring one-eyed at the world, what do you have left?

A lot of explosions.

Not much else.

*

Tom Hiddleston was pitch-perfect as Loki in Thor. He's still mesmerising, coolly amusing, and strangely charming even while going full-on Wicked. But in The Avengers he is a villain for the sake of villainy: his I am a GOD and you will BOW schtick is not a very interesting motivation for any character, even one who canonically has the universe's worst case of sibling envy.

His every scene seethes with energy and chill malevolence, but even Hiddleston's chops can't inflate the hollow shell that's Loki's reason to be bad.

*

Hollowness is a problem all over. Mark Ruffalo and Chris Evans bring both talent and hotness to bear on the roles of Bruce Banner and Captain America, but they have, let's be honest, very little to work with: a film that relies for its impact on its death-or-glory action should put a little more work into getting the audience to care whether its characters live or die.

Success, after all, is a given: one hardly expects The Avengers to destroy the whole earth before it even gets a sequel.

Hotness, while appreciated, on its own just isn't enough.

*

Thor and Tony Stark actually get a smidgeon of solid characterisation. They have pre-existing film franchises of their own, but they also get more face-time with Loki, who wants to best them in ways that are very personal.

*

Let's not mention how white this film is, with the exception of Samuel R. Jackson. Or how American-centric: the end of the world can happen outside the continental states, you know. Or how male: don't tell me Marvel doesn't have another female superhero they could have used in place of Hawkeye.

But that would have made four women with speaking parts, and three women who get fighty with the boys: as it is, I'm not sure Agent Hill (played with understated competence and solid presence by Cobie Smulders) is even in the same room as Johansson's Black Widow at any point, much less allowed to exchange words with her.

*

The Avengers is a film in love with its own conceits and its own hype, wedded to style - big, garish, flashy style - over substance. Take away a few of its toys - like the giant pointless ridiculous flying aircraft-carrier, WTF my suspension of disbelief, you pushed it, over - and given the script more snark and fewer pointless fighty bits, and it could have been so much better.

I am fond of fighty bits. I liked Battleship, for the sweet godless heavens' sakes; I watched Thor and the first Iron Man more than once. But there comes a point when fighty bits stop being entertaining and become ridiculously self-indulgent, and The Avengers hits that point rather early on.

*

The Avengers: it entertained me less than Battleship.

Although it does have better snark, Chris Hemsworth (sadly not shirtless), and Robert Downey Jr (also sadly not shirtless).

So today I set out on my intrepid journey across Athens to find the one cinema (in the not-quite-a-suburb of Pangrati) that was showing John Carter. This cinema lairs in a shopping centre that is tiny even compared to Irish shopping centres, slightly dingy, and, well, all told? Not very prepossessing, although four storeys tall inside.

It took me an hour and some to walk across the city, and I had time to lunch on chips and coke in a nearby KFC outlet before I bought my ticket, since I'd left myself a Getting Lost margin that I turned out not to need.

I was the only person in the cinema.


John Carter is better and more coherent than the hot mess that was Conan (2011). It beats out Transformers and POTC: On Stranger Tides as well. In terms of coherency, it probably has an edge on the last Indiana Jones film.

Don't get me wrong, it's an entertaining film. But Taylor Kitsch, who plays our titular male lead, has only limited charisma and screen presence. He's pretty, but pretty isn't nearly enough to carry a film. His essential blandness wasn't helped by the directorial choice to play things large and exaggerated: much of the framing has a comic-book feel, and such a choice needs someone with screen presence (Johnny Depp, for example, or Liam Neeson, or Idris Elba, or Matt Damon) to keep it from veering into the cartoonish.

But it has airships and explosions and TWO WOMEN. A green woman with four arms (Sola) voiced by Samantha Morton, and Lynn Collins' Dejah Thoris, Regent of the Royal Helium Academy of Science. (She's the daughter of a king, but by god, she introduces herself as a scientist first.) These two women don't talk to each other. But in their own ways, they both drive the plot much more than the titular Carter. Who is out-charisma'd in every scene by everyone around him, but particularly by Collins.

Apart from the airships and a couple of moments of Pure Awesome involving Dejah Thoris (Scientist Princess!) it didn't hit my narrative squids. But it wasn't a wasted two hours, either: it's entertaining planetary romance, and airships! It has airships! (I forgive much for airships, and scientists with swords.)

Sadly, Dejah Thoris would be more awesome if she and the green lady ran away together, rather than falling in lust with John Carter. Her lust/love actions only make sense if she's trying to get him to join her cause, because really? What does a smart, tough girl like her see in him apart from his muscles?

Some nice touches: several random spear-carriers were women, and their armour (or lack of it) was just like everyone else's. Airships! Landscape shots.

Things that didn't make me happy: the Mysterious Ebil Guys' motivations are completely inexplicable. Apart from Destruction Gives Us A Happy, which is not a very sensible motivation?

"The Debt" is a strange and compelling film starring Helen Mirren and Jessica Chastain. Beautifully shot, with a solid performance from Dame Helen as retired Mossad agent Rachel Singer, and excellent performances from Jessica Chastain (as the younger Rachel Singer) and Jesper Christensen (as Nazi war criminal Dieter Vogel), it works best in its 1960s scenes of East Berlin, with psychologically real, tense, claustrophic drama. Viewed as a whole, though the film never quite coheres: I would have liked, at least, to feel more emotional investment in Helen Mirren's older Singer.


"The Tempest" is strange, compelling, and utterly gorgeous. Julie Taymour's screen adaptation of Shakespeare's final play stars Helen Mirren as Prospera, the exiled Duchess of Milan, and Felicity Jones as her daughter Miranda. Djimon Hounsou plays Caliban, and Ben Whishaw's Ariel is playfully, occasionally creepily, spirit-like. The rest of the cast is likewise excellent.

But Helen Mirren is the star of the show. She should play arrogant manipulative superheroes more often, because she's fantastic at it.

Really. Helen Mirren. Go watch it.

Reader, I am still laughing.

Okay, Irene Adler? If that is her end, I will be most hideously disappointed. Because it was unworthy of her. And left me with a bad taste in my mouth/a desire to leave the building.

But I'm glad I stayed, because I have not been half as entertained in a long time. That was a blast. I'm ridiculously entertained by jealous Holmes and Holmes-Watson banter; Noomi Rapace was excellent, but needed more awesome and more plot (although I am content to stare at that woman's cheekbones for hours); and Robert Downey Jr.'s eyebrows are kinda mesmerising.

Many mantelpiece items were shown and later put to use. The climax was perfect, and the conclusion had me thumping my thigh and cackling.

I may be cackling for a while yet. That was good entertainment.

Books 2011: 68-75


68. Mark Lawrence, Prince of Thorns.

ARC provided by Tor.com. A proper review should be forthcoming there, eventually. For now all I will say is that despite some pretty good writing, I did not like it.

Oh, and it's the opposite of a feminist book.


69. Ben Macallan, Desdaemona.

desperance knocked this one out of the park. It is urban fantasy, but the seventeen-year-old protagonist, Jordan, has a fantastic voice. He's been on the run for years, and seventeen for years, and the amount of interesting Cool Shit (tm) in one urban fantasy novel - well, I hope Ben Macallan will have other names, is all I can say.

Also, how can you object to a novel that opens with, "I might never have found Sarah in time, if it hadn't been for the banshee"?


70. Kevin Hearne, Hexed.

Sequel to Hounded. In this, the Arizona-based 2,000 year-old druid Atticus Sullivan has a spot of trouble involving rampaging Bacchants, World War II-vintage evil witches, and a neighbour with an RPG.

The Celtic myth bits continue not to make me want to scream - they're pretty well done, actually - the pace is decent, the voice is pretty good, if a little too modern for your average relic, and its sense of humour meshes well with my own. All in all, pretty damn good.


nonfiction


71. Brook Holmes, The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece. Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2010.

An interesting, if long-winded, book on the development of the idea of the physical body, the soma, in ancient Greece. Thesis reading. Parts of it are fascinating, parts of it deathly dull.


72. Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1978.

I'm cheating by counting this, since I skim-read it for the thesis on the advice of my supervisor. (It was mostly not relevant.) Folks interested in Christian pilgrimage in Mexico, at St. Patrick's at Lough Derg, and Marian Pilgrimage would no doubt find it fascinating. Me, I am still yawning.


73. Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Landfalls: On the Edge of Islam from Zanzibar to the Alhambra. John Murray, London, 2010. This edition 2011.

The third, and sadly final, book of Mackintosh-Smith's travel adventures in the footsteps (or footprints) of the medieval Islamic traveller Ibn Battutah. Brilliant, informative, garnished with some lovely turns of phrases, and illustrated with sketches from the professional artist Martin Yeoman. It's a very enjoyable book.


74. The Quran, translated by M.A.S. Abdel Haleem. Oxford World's Classics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004. This edition 2010.

I figured, after studying the books of the other Abrahamic religions in college, that it probably behooved me to acquire a passing familiarity with the writings of Islam. Particularly since I'm starting to find the medieval Islamic world quite fascinating.

Like every most other religious book on the planet, it comprises long stretches of reasonably predictable exhortation followed by moments of interesting novelty. I wouldn't read it again for pleasure. But I don't regret having read it.


75. Euripides, Medea and Other Plays. Translated and edited by James Morwood, with an introduction by Edith Hall. Oxford World's Classics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998.

This edition includes Medea, Hippolytus, Electra, and Helen, in that order. Reading them partly for personal satisfaction and partly as research, I found myself surprised by the decision to put Medea first. By any stretch of the imagination, Medea is by far the most stirring of the plays in this volume, and the other plays suffer by being read in its shadow.

But they are interesting plays, and this translation is fluid and readable.

---

Films recently viewed:

X-Men: First Class.

I have no emotional investment in the X-men franchise, so apart from the rather horrendous treatment of the female characters, this was an entertaining film. Although I think I am now decided that anything starring Michael Fassbender would be an entertaining film: I would watch Erik Lensherr: Nazi Hunter in a heartbeat.


Season of the Witch.

Terrible film. Terrible. I thought it was going to be an interesting medieval film about blaming witches for plagues, like The Black Death, but no. Oh, no. It was utterly terribly bad.

Even the Christopher Lee cameo is not enough to give me any pleasant warm feelings.


The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo/Man som hatar kvinnor.

Interesting and entertaining, if slow in parts. And occasionally brutal.


The Mummy Returns.

Entertaining, in the way that only a film that doesn't care if it makes sense can be. I really enjoyed watching it - but then, I was expecting it to be much worse.


Agora.

Watch this film. It is beautifully shot, beautifully written, beautifully acted - it is fantastic in so many ways. And not just because it is about the life and death of the philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria.

I caught myself crying in the final scenes. It's powerful, and moving, and understated, and complicated. Watch it.

---

And that's it for now.

I've been to see the Prince of Persia film.

In many respects, questions of its casting aside (Brother #2 really should have been playing the lead. With a face like his, he's wasted as a secondary character. Just saying.), this is a terrible film. It makes very little sense, its portrayal of female characters is not quite as bad as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and the dialogue and performance, with a handful of exceptions, is lackluster.

On the other hand, it has very pretty men, horses, camels, some really nice scenery, excellent if overwrought special effects, and more implausible action scenes than you can shake a stick at, which makes it very entertaining.

Ben Kingsley as Nizam turned in the best performance of the film, which, given the material he had to work with, is quite remarkable. Jake Gyllenhal manages to chew scenery with slight conviction, and his female opposite, Gemma Arterton, is sadly hampered by a script which renders her character as a stereotype of a "feisty princess." And the stunning Toby Kebbell deserves more to work with.

But I was entertained, and will be looking for films with Mr. Kebbell in them in future.

The Dark Knight may not be a film made wholly of win - apparently Gotham city has a distinct aversion to women in starring roles - but it's at least halfway to excellent.

I went to the preview in the local cinema last night. It was hot - damn was it hot - and crowded; full, I suspect. But the audience was silent: I confess myself entirely surprised.

It has explosions, some decent-to-good performances, fisticuffs, and possibly some attempt at social commentary. But don't quote me on that: I was too much distracted by Christian Bale's muscles to pay it much attention (and I ignored it as probably being the sort of social commentary with which I tend to argue, anyway).

So, yeah. Not too bad.

Books 2008: 96

96. Ariana Franklin, The Death Maze.

I believe the US title is different. However, this is the sequel to the award-winning Mistress of the Art of Death, and as a historical murder mystery with attached intrigue and character development, not to mention excellence of historical verisimilitude, it is yet another book of the highest water.

Seriously. If you are going to read any murder mystery, or historical novel, read this one and its predecessor. They are very, very good.

---

Running: 3 intervals of 5 minutes and one interval of 3 minutes, separated by 4 minutes each, pushing.

Situps: 5 sets of 10 reps, 20 second rest period between sets.

Pushups: 3 sets of 10 reps, 30 second rest period between sets.

Writing: 2 notebook pages.