Lightning Bolt Of Pain and "Amour"

   A couple of days ago, I was sitting on the edge of the bed, pulling on a sock. I can't tell you the countless number of times I've done this in my life, without anything untoward occurring.
   That particular morning, however, as one leg crossed over the other, I suddenly got what felt like a lightning bolt go through my lower back on the right side.

Like this...but in my back!

   I am not immune to the occasional twinge as a day progresses but this was the kind of pain that stopped me dead in my tracks. Well, not exactly "dead in my tracks" as I did manage to make it into work but after about fifteen minutes at work I knew I wasn't going to be able to finish my day and was fortunately able to make it home, after stopping to pick up some pain meds.
   That was the morning before last and yesterday I thought I was making a little progress. I had taken the day off work but had managed to gimpily pick up my new car at Honda. The rest, combined with some low-risk movement, seemed to make me feel better. We watched some T.V. last night and then headed off to bed.
   Very early this morning, in a still-more-or-less-asleep state, I shifted in bed. Well, I shifted the wrong way and yet another bolt of lightning brought me (and Doralyn) fully awake, with a yelp. Doralyn groggily asked what she could do for me and I groggily replied not too much. At that point I really didn't know what needed doing.
   At this point, I've been up for a couple of hours and I feel as though I am back to square one with the back pain and any gains I felt I made yesterday seem to have been negated. Thank goodness it is now the weekend and we have no major plans so I can just rest and take it easy.
   Last night, we rented and then watched a movie called "Amour". It is a French-language movie which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film back in the Spring. Essentially, I think we regretted the time spent watching it. It's a very slow-moving film which takes place almost exclusively in the apartment belonging to a senior couple in Paris. The movie starts with the authorities

breaking into the apartment, to find the decaying body of the woman, who has been placed lovingly on the bed, amidst cut flowers. From there, the movie goes back to describe how the woman ended up there. About five minutes of the film near the beginning takes place in a music auditorium and then on a mass transit car. The whole rest of the movie then takes place in their apartment.
   The couple were once music teachers and, after attending a performance by one of their former students, the woman has a stroke in their apartment. The rest of the movie chronicles her slow but inevitable decline and the effect this has on their relationship as well as their daughter, who only sees them occasionally. The man opts to care for his wife at home, rather than have her committed to a facility, and this only leads to family tensions.
   As I mentioned, the movie is very slow-moving and claustrophobic and sometimes hard to watch. Emmanuelle Riva, the actress who plays the wife, does an outstanding job portraying the gradual change and suffering the woman must endure. For this role, she was nominated for an Academy Award for a leading actress and it's not hard to see why. Jean-Louis Trintignant, as the husband, also does a great job of portraying the man's love, devotion and frustration at having to see his wife suffer. If you want an opportunity to sit and ponder the inevitability of the aging process, then this is the movie for you. If, on the other hand, you want to be excited and uplifted--well, you might want to check elsewhere.
   At one point as we were watching the movie and the husband finding himself very much in the caretaker role, Doralyn asked me if this was what she had to look forward to. This was fairly typical of something we might have joked about at any time but it was even more appropriate last night as I was hobbling around with my bad back and she was trying to do whatever she could to take care of me.
   Early this morning when I yelped us both into a waking state, Doralyn ran through a list of things she might be able to do to help me alleviate the pain. When I replied in the negative, she then stated that I make it very difficult for her to take care of me sometimes. My reply was that I loved her for wanting to!
  

Bond

Sean Connery-the original Bond

   This week, we have been inundated with Bond--James Bond. This as a result of all the hype over the impending release of the latest Bond film, "Skyfall". It has received nothing but rave reviews and even I am looking forward to seeing it.
   I have yet to see any of the Daniel Craig "Bond" movies. This has been more of an oversight than anything as I have been quite intrigued and will likely be checking them out soon, one way or the other.
   In the meantime, it is quite interesting to surrender to the hype and investigate it, at least a little. The Free Press here in London spent the last week publishing surveys such as who was the best Bond ever, who was the best villain, the best title song, etc.
   I have been watching James Bond movies since they first came out, back in the sixties, and I have seen all (or at least large chunks of all) of them. As importantly, I have read all the Bond books written by Ian Fleming. I read them with the same kind of passion as I'd had for the Hardy Boys books. It's almost as if they were the next step up in the puberty process and they were pretty heady stuff for a young lad such as myself!
   Because of this long association with Bond, it is interesting to watch the recent goings-on, the surveys and opinion polls. It is particularly interesting to listen to people try to rate the all-time best Bond portrayal. This is not the first time this has happened, there have been enough different actors playing James Bond that it kind of lends itself to this sort of thing.

Daniel Craig, the "new" guy

   In the past, whenever the question has been asked, the general consensus was that Sean Connery was the quintessential Bond. What I find fascinating now is that this seems to have changed. According to the surveys, now Daniel Craig has taken on the mantle of being the best Bond ever and "Skyfall" has been described as the best of the Bond movies. Now, I haven't seen "Skyfall", nor have I seen any of the Craig performances so I'm not really in a position to offer an opinion. My feeling is that Craig is more than acceptable as James Bond and I am interested in seeing him in the role.
   Acceptable as Craig might be, for me, there will always be a soft spot for Connery. They say that your favourite Bond is your first Bond. Sean Connery was the actor who laid out the Bond template and he is who I visualized as I was reading Fleming's books. In the interim, I have appreciated Pierce Brosnan and Timothy Dalton and, to a lesser extent, Roger Moore--all of whom have played Bond more than once. I hesitate to even mention George Lazenby.
   What they are currently saying about "Skyfall" is that it has not only the wild action you've come to expect from a Bond film but also extremely strong, three-dimensional performances by the principal actors. This has not always been true of Bond films. It also takes the theatrical Bond back closer to the Bond depicted by Ian Fleming.

Ian Fleming, James Bond's originator

   If you have read the books, you know James Bond as a very conflicted individual. He is not superhuman, he falls in love sometimes when he shouldn't, and he can be brainwashed. He is an assassin who occasionally develops soft spots for his targets. He makes copious mistakes. The James Bond of the movies has not always been the James Bond of the books. It appears as though Sam Mendes, "Skyfall's" director, has gone above and beyond in humanizing the main characters and this is why the film works.
   It's hard to imagine the Bond series of films ending. It may not end any time soon. If this is true, then, at some point, they will be looking for a replacement for Daniel Craig. Already this week, there was an article in the paper as to who Craig's successor might be. Sometime in the future, there may be a major controversy as to who was the best Bond--Craig or the new guy? Until I learn otherwise, though, I'm sticking with Connery... 
     

Poetry

   In a recent blog, I mentioned that one of my all-time favourite movies is "Four Weddings and a Funeral". I then went on to list some of the qualities about it I liked best. One of the reasons I like it is that it contains poetry.
   In his eulogy to his partner, Gareth (Simon Callow), Matthew (John Hannah) reads a poem to the mourners who are gathered. It was W.H. Auden's "Funeral Blues". I had never heard this poem before and, up to that point in the movie, it was nothing I'd been expecting. It seemed I'd even forgotten the actual title of the movie and was not prepared for either one of its larger-than-life characters to pass away or this poem's recitation to move me the way it did. It took the general tone of the movie and turned it a full one hundred and eighty degrees.
   The following is a clip of the movie wherein John Hannah recites the poem: 

   This is what I love about poetry. It does have the power to at least momentarily grab hold of you and re-arrange the way you view or think about something. In "Funeral Blues", Auden manages to take the demise of one single person and and stop the world with it. It's not one of those "death" poems that's trying to be uplifting either, the last line clearly shows a depth and length of despair which appears to be almost interminable.
   My love of poetry began back in the sixties. As I became interested in popular music, I found myself drifting towards artists such as Simon and Garfunkel and Leonard Cohen. Cohen, in particular, bridged the gap between poet and musical artist demonstratively. We studied Cohen in high school, both his music and his written work. For me, it was the perfect blend of words and music I'd never heard the like of before. I imagine it also appealed to the introspective and analytical part of whoever I thought I was at the time.
   It is tempting to include one of his pieces of music here but I'm saving that for another post somewhere down the road. I would like to include, though, one of his poems that has resonated with me the last forty years or so. It is from a book of poetry entitled "The Spice Box of Earth".

 I wonder how many people in this city 

I wonder how many people in this city
live in furnished rooms.
Late at night when I look out at the buildings
I swear I see a face in every window
looking back at me
and when I turn away
I wonder how many go back to their desks
and write this down.

  

                        
                                             


     
   
   When I went to retrieve the words to this poem, I was amazed at how many other bloggers had taken the time to write about it. It clearly had struck a chord with many other people, not just myself. I think if you are a writer of any kind then you tend to look a little more closely at the things unfolding all around you. Writing is also a bit of a lonely thing to do and nowhere is this demonstrated better than in this poem by Cohen. How much more alone can you be than to be in an apartment by yourself where the furniture is not even your own, looking out over a world of anonymous strangers? But the poet in Cohen has seen through to the universality of this and wondered if maybe we are all in the same boat together. When you realize this, the potential of us all being together in our loneliness arises. This will not stop you from being isolated but once you realize you are not alone in your isolation it's not quite as terrifying. When I read this poem the first time the imagery hit me like a tiny little thunderbolt. This, then, is one of the things I love about poetry.

Bronwen Wallace

   Speaking about thunderbolts, I once read a book called "The Stubborn Particulars of Grace", by Bronwen Wallace. I had attended a reading she did here in London, admired her poetry greatly, and bought this book afterwards. Just a few short months later she was dead of cancer, sadly. My signed copy of her book is now one of my prized possessions.
   Wallace, more than any other poet I'd read up to that time, pointed out the potential for poetry in everyday life. She essentially looked at the everyday goings-on in her life and saw the significance beyond their surfaces. Occasionally, I will read a poem and go holy crap at the end of it. Just about every single poem in "The Stubborn Particulars of Grace" evoked that response and I read the book over and over. It greatly affected the type of poetry I was writing at the time simply because it made me realize that almost anything can be a poem. It was then I really started looking at the world in a new light.
   In a "Fifty Shades of Grey" kind of world, you don't see a lot of people sitting there, reading poetry, anymore. As I remember, back in high school we were more or less forced to read the little bit of poetry we did. I took a little less forcing than most of the rest of us and I'm kind of happy for this. I get back to the books of poetry I still have every now and then. Besides Cohen and Wallace, I could also recommend Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood, Bill Bissett, Lorna Crozier, Colleen Thibaudeau, James Reaney, Anne Michaels and Michael Ondaatje. Canadians, all of them, and a pretty small selection out of all the great Canadian poets there are. In my life, I have gravitated to the Canadian poets but the world is full of marvelous writers of poetry, Auden included.

   So give poetry a try. Go to a reading the next time there is one. Join a poetry group. Download a song but maybe read the lyrics at the same time. Sit with a kid and do rhymes. Take a song you enjoy and give it your own words. Look at the world around you and try to figure out what one thing means to the next. None of this will be nearly as painful as it may seem to you now. Poetry is worth it, in whatever dose you choose!   
                                                                    

              

  

Classic Movies I Have Not Seen

   I hate to admit it but I have not seen "Citizen Kane". It is generally regarded to be on or near the top of the all-time greats list. I couldn't argue this with anyone as I have not seen the movie. I have seen the "Rosebud" scene over and over but never the whole movie or even large chunks of it.
   I also need to add "On The Waterfront" and "From Here To Eternity", although, once again, I have seen the most famous scenes from them. I have only seen bits and pieces of "Raging Bull". "Casablanca" seems to have eluded me as well, somehow or other. It pains me to say I have not seen "To Kill A Mockingbird"either. Being a Canadian, I would like to say that I have seen "Goin' Down The Road", but I haven't, nor have I seen "The Rowdyman".
   In light of all this,  guess I am somewhat illiterate when it comes to the great movies. I have seen lots of great movies though. In my previous blog I refer to many of my favourite British movies. Not on that list would be movies such as "The Graduate", "Jurassic Park", "The Wizard of Oz", "Bonnie and Clyde", "Raiders of the Lost Ark", "Star Wars", "The Godfather" and many, many more. In retrospect, another film which should have been near the top of my British list is "The King's Speech". This film could easily have been near the top of both lists.

   So somehow or other, there are still films for me to see. How to go about doing this is tricky as not all the classics are that easy to find. I will do my best, though it occurs to me that I may soon run out of people to compare notes with who have also seen some of the classics. Doralyn is 15 years younger than me and has had even less opportunity to see some of these movies than I have. It could very well be that someday soon I will have to trundle on down to the nearest retirement home if I want to sit and talk to someone about the great oldies, if they can even remember them. And that's if I don't already live there... 

British Movies

    Last night, Doralyn and I went to see the movie "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel". It was a wonderful British movie about a group of middle-aged Britons who all end up as the first "guests" of a retirement home in India. It has been advertised on the internet as a luxury hotel but such is not the case. The story revolves around how the new guests adapt to the hotel and life in India, in general.
   While watching the movie, I couldn't help but think of other British movies I have enjoyed in the past. Many of them are the ones I am the most fond of, probably for a variety of reasons.
   I remember being home sick from school one afternoon when I was a young boy. I ended up watching a movie called "Lord of the Flies" about a group of young British schoolboys who were stranded on an island as the result of a plane crash. As I watched, the boys set up their own little society and did a pretty good job of coping. Soon, though, things began to break down, factions formed, and enemies were made. The movie ended but it was difficult to say whether it was a happy ending or not. A couple of the children in it are killed by other children as the blood lust has risen. Before this happened I had started to identify with one of the boys, Piggy. He wore glasses and was overweight. I wore glasses and was overweight. He is one of the boys who dies near the end and this had a profound effect on me. At that point in my life, I simply was not prepared for children to die in a movie I was watching. It was a gut-wrenching kind of moment that has stayed with me since.
   Not too long after this, I saw a movie called "Blow Up". This was about a disenchanted fashion photographer who inadvertently, while filming a couple in a park, takes pictures of a murder scene. He does not realize this until he is back in his studio, developing the film and blowing up the pictures. He sees what he thinks is a gun barrel and then feet sticking out from the bushes. The premise of the movie was interesting enough to a young person and the fact that there was partial nudity and the "swinging sixties" backdrop made it memorable to a young lad such as myself.

   What made "Educating Rita" a movie worth seeing more than once for me was a couple of things--the fact that its two principal stars, Michael Caine and Julie Walters, had wonderful chemistry in the film and that the film centred on writing and the writing process. Essentially, he helps her learn about literature and how to write and she helps him dig himself out of the alcoholic depression which has kept him from writing himself. Though somewhat formulaic, it is well-written and watching these two actors interact is irresistible.

   "The Dresser" is a movie about a travelling Shakespearean theatre troupe in England during the Second World War. Its title character, played by Tom Courtenay, is charged with the task of "dressing" and tending to the ailing leader of the troupe, as played by Albert Finney. Finney is tyrannical but, at the same time, is barely able to function coherently. Courtenay, for all intents and purposes, runs the company because he is the only one who can support its leader. The acting performances are wonderful and the writing is superb.

   One of my all-time favourite movies is "Four Weddings and a Funeral". I think it is one of my favourites because it has a little bit of everything--humour, pathos, love, death and poetry. It features Hugh Grant at his muddled best and the rest of the cast all give magnificent performances. It follows a group of friends as they attend a series of weddings together. Much of the movie centers on their individual searches for love and happiness. Commitment seems to be an issue, particularly with Grant. In the end, they all are happy but not without some loss along the way (remember, there is a funeral in the title...) This is one of those movies I could watch over and over again.

   Battling "Four Weddings..." on my all-time list of favourite British movies is "A Clockwork Orange". It was a pure assault on all the senses. It contained rampant sexuality and violence (quite often combined), classical music, visually stunning and imaginative imagery, bizarre costuming, humour and thought provocation. Alex and his gang of teen aged hoodlums cut a wide swath through a near-future England. The government, in an attempt to crack down on the violence permeating the country, adopt a sort of brainwashing technique which robs evildoers of their free will. Alex falls prey to this technique but, in the end, returns to his old ways. The film was directed by Stanley Kubrick and is the best, I think, of an excellent body of work.
   It is a little difficult to pin down exactly why I like British films so much. The common denominator of all the above films is the excellence of the writing. There is wit (some of it quite dry), understatement, clever use of language, humour, pathos, and much of it is thought-provoking. And the above is not even particularly the definitive list--I have left off such films as "My Left Foot", "Billy Elliot", the early James Bond movies, "Georgy Girl", "Far From The Madding Crowd", "Lawrence of Arabia", "Gandhi" and "The Bridge on the River Kwai" and on and on. There is intimacy and there is grandeur in these films. There is subtle and clever humour and there is violence with a purpose. There is nothing that is "in your face" and much that will require an unmuddied thought process. As much as I have enjoyed all these movies, though, none of them are even in the top ten in a recent poll of the 100 Best British Movies. I guess this means I have my work cut out for me!