Saturday, 21 January 2012

A black cloud on the blue horizon. You wake up at noon, stinking of whiskey and trying to decide which shirt to wear. It's a cold day but your dedication keeps you warm. Presently you come to a T-junction, like in a Fighting Fantasy gamebook. Will you go left or right, little soldier?

I tried coffee again recently. I still don't like it.

Friday, 20 January 2012

Green Belt Syndrome: A set of behaviour often exhibited by martial arts students after, typically, about 18 months of training (around "green belt" level in many styles) where the student, having reached a certain level of confidence (but being still a very long way from the fabled "fighting without fighting" mindset), becomes quite eager to prove him or herself in combat, and looks (whether consciously or unconsciously) for opportunities to brawl. In the former days of classical martial arts, Green Belt Syndrome is thought to explain many students who proved their devotion to the art and willingness to stick with it, but mysteriously never made it to black belt level...

Thursday, 19 January 2012

No fire. In time, I believe the cosmos will lay its inner workings before us, though not in the way Stephen Hawking (for example) might predict. Rather, we shall see, for instance, whether Kurtz himself is the heart of darkness, or merely an old maniac lost among a darkness that has no heart. In much the same way that Scarecrow enters in the second half of the film to embody the theme of fear that dominates the first half, and Two-Face enters in the second half to embody the theme of duality (light vs. dark, legitimate vs. illegitimate justice) that dominates the first half, I believe we shall see an "embodiment" (though whether he/she/it will have a "body" to speak of remains open to debate) of the dominant forms of strife that have dogged humanity during its life to date. Milton, and to a lesser extent Blake, would undoubtedly approve of such tangential meanderings, although the chirping of mobile phones on the 176 between Waterloo and Dulwich might suggest otherwise.

Wednesday, 18 January 2012

The people who used to tell us the best thing we could possibly do would be to go to university, study hard and get a degree, are the people now calling us entitled for expecting a degree to give us an edge in the job market. There is an edge in the job market, but we are on the wrong end of it. John had not had time to investigate.

Tueday 17 January, 2012

A white eye behind a curtain, it's been cold and dark lately. Occasionally I wonder what it must be like to live in a hot country. I've been writing quite a lot, squeezing words through my brain like Play-Doh (TM) through a mincer. I find myself worrying about copyright issues on a semi-regular basis. This will not become streams of consciousness unless I let it. I can't remember the last time my toes were warm.

An Introduction

My third blog. This one's a little different, and will hopefully last longer.

It will be, essentially, a journal. Not a very coherent journal, probably, but certainly a record of each day as it passes.

It will contain, each day, a photograph taken that day and a piece of text. The photograph might be of anything, absolutely anything within reason. I lack the skill set and equipment of a photographer, so I apologise in advance if the photos are not up to much. The text might be prose fiction, prose non-fiction, some kind of poem, someone else's words cut up and re-arranged, my own words cut up and re-arranged, or some other form I haven't thought of yet.

I will try to keep it interesting and I will try not to lose interest. I might miss a day here and there, but they will be nothing compared to the number of days I have already missed through not deciding to start the blog until today. Perhaps I'll give up altogether and this rather ambitious introduction will end up looking a bit silly. Who knows?

Thus begins a blog.

Inglourious Basterds: Re-writing History for Fun

Another film re-watched. The second time just strengthened what I had concluded the first time: for me, the most important thing this film has to offer is not the snappy dialogue, over-the-top dramatic style, brilliant performances, whacky assortment of characters or anything else the director is famous for. It's the fact that Hitler dies.

Before Inglourious Basterds I was, although I never noticed, labouring under the delusion that a historical film should accurately represent actual historical events. In fact, I held onto this belief right up until the very shot where one of the "basterds" fills Hitler with bullets. At that moment, watching his face disappear and thinking "wait a minute, I may have dropped out of a-level history but I'm pretty sure that's not what happened", it suddenly dawned on me that, not only was this film not concerned with historical accuracy, but there was no particular reason why any film should be. Unless the film claims to be historically accurate, why should we expect it to be?

In fact, Tarantino put me through a similar experience some years ago when I first watched his early films and found myself wondering why on earth I should expect a film to tell its story in chronological order. Later, David Lynch took me to the next level and made me wonder what reason there is for a film to make any kind of logical sense at all. This, for me, is one of the most exciting things a film (or any piece of fiction in any form) can do: ask why something is a certain way, ask if it has to be that way, challenge your assumptions. Perhaps this is where art and science intersect.

Of course, I'm not suggesting every historical film should throw fact out of the window. For instance, staying with the same subject matter, the film Valkyrie is all about what really happened; the whole point is that the plot to assassinate Hitler failed. So it's all a question of what the film wants to achieve. And I suspect that the real motive behind inglourious Basterds - aside from to tell a damn good yarn and to tell it well - was revenge. No need to be all serious and analytical about it; let's watch a film about the biggest badguy of the 20th century getting what he deserves. Simple, violent moral gratification. And why the hell not?

Now, can anyone recommend another good film that gleefully re-writes historical fact?