Thursday 10th January – The virility of films and potting sheds

Oscar has been at nursery this morning.  Jason is downstairs watching the manly, all action film; ‘The Rock’, starring Nicholas Cage.  It makes him feel more virile while he is coughing up lumps of ulcerated tonsil in a dish apparently.  He has been watching a lot of films like this in the last few days.  It grows his chest hair exponentially.  I am not a fan of this kind of film (I already have enough chest hair), although I do go and see them, mainly so that I have ammunition for the odd film I want to see that I know will not meet with total masculine approval. When I am able to roll off a list of six Vin Diesel films I have seen recently with only minimal snorts of derision I am sometimes allowed to watch Love Actually without Jason being sick down the back of my neck. 

I have not tried him on my extensive collection of World Cinema yet, as I feel subtitles might be a bridge too far.  Those films are for the nights he goes out role playing and the children are bolted into their rooms with no chance of escape.  An illicit pleasure, rarely achieved, rather like pornography, but without all the huffing and puffing.  I’m too old for huffing and puffing now.  I get winded when I read The Three Little Pigs.

I do confess to loving a good chick flick every now and again, or as a Brazilian friend once explained to our boyfriends at the time: ‘You cannot come with us.  We are going to watch a chicken film.’  It’s the equivalent of the Saturday matinee double bill they used to show on BBC Two.  It’s kind of like a big celluloid hug that just makes you feel better about life in general.  My friend Justine used to feel this way about Westerns.  She had a massive crush on Gary Cooper for years.  I did try but I couldn’t see the appeal myself.  My mother once confessed to being quite partial to James Garner in his Maverick days.  I can’t see it myself.  I just can’t warm to a man in chaps, much to Jason’s relief.

There aren’t that many modern chick flick type films that I like, although I still watch them, mostly with eyebrows raised.  I have watched many things with Jennifer Lopez in, and I still fail to see the appeal.  She may be Jenny From The Block, but that doesn’t cut the mustard here in Glenfield.  I also recently watched the terrible: ‘The Holiday’ starring Kate Winslet and Jude Law.  The problem with romantic films is that they rely on a certain chemistry between the lead characters, and while I could just about bring myself to imagine that Jude might have the horn for Cameron Diaz, I found it hard to suspend disbelief about the romantic entanglement of Kate and Jack Black.  He is quite amusing, but not that amusing.  Having said that, I am quite baffled as to why I found and still find it entirely believable that Andy McDowell and Gerard Depardieu could get jiggy with it in Green Card.  It might be because he is so very French.  He also looks quite naughty, in a rude sort of way!

I do have a huge fondness for older romantic comedies though.  I love Cary Grant, Rock Hudson and Doris Day in almost any combination you care to mention.  Even the knowledge that Rock Hudson was batting for the other side does not in any way detract from his total brilliance at being romantic with our Doris.  The thing about Doris was that despite her dodgy name, she always had the best outfits, and could make a hat that looked like a plant pot look amazing in almost any situation you care to mention.  That’s a skill that Ray Mears would be hard pushed to teach you.  I believe it’s called ‘Star Quality’.  It’s all about the hats.  Ray is, as we have previously discussed, my first choice for leader of Britain when the monarchy finally collapses and we enter our post-apocalyptic days, but it has to be said that he often looks like a bit of a fool in head gear.  Mind you, so does the Queen, so perhaps all is as it should be.

I also have a huge soft spot for old Ealing comedies and Hitchcock films.  I forced Jason to watch The Lavender Hill Mob with me the other day.  He watched it to the end in bemused silence and only because it had Obi Wan Kenobi in it (disappointingly there were no prototype light sabres in it).  I also made him watch North By Northwest, which he quite enjoyed, but couldn’t help but comment on how much of a total idiot Cary Grant was, every thirty seconds.  I pointed out that this was part of its rustic charm and that he was meant to be a fool, but he wasn’t convinced.  When we first went out together I forced him to watch two of my favourite films of all time; ‘Some Like it Hot’, which he thought was terrible, and ‘The Great Race’, (I also have a thing about Jack Lemmon) which he thought was even worse.  I’m amazed we got past the first date really.

It has been a week of watching films due to ill health and terrible weather.  We have found two films that we agree on, which is both surprising and unusual.  We watched ‘Touching The Void’, which is technically a documentary, but which I went to see at the cinema, so I think it counts as film.  It’s brilliant.  For those of you who don’t know, it tells the story of two British mountain climbers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates.  In the Eighties they decided to climb a killer mountain in Peru because nobody had done it before.  They had ambled about on several mountains in the Alps previously to this, and I believe one of them had walked the Pennine way when they were twelve.  In terms of preparation they were about as prepared as I would be, which is woeful.  Actually I expect their footwear was marginally more practical than mine would be, but only marginally.  Just for the record I would like to point out that they didn’t even have any Kendall Mint Cake.  No wonder it all went horribly wrong.

The film tells the story of the horrors of their climb, in which about everything that can go wrong, did go wrong and in which they were convinced one or both of them were going to die a horrible death.  What makes the film so amazing is that the footage of the climb, which is re-enacted for the purposes of the cinema going audience, is intercut with interviews with Simpson and Yates telling the story.  You know that they survive, you know that from the very first moment, yet at the same time it is still one of the most gripping and terrifyingly tense things I’ve ever seen.  It’s a testament to the skill of Kevin McDonald the film maker, and the way the story is told that it has you literally on the edge of your seat from beginning to end.

We watched it, and despite the fact that this is the fourth time I’ve seen it, I was still sitting on the edge of the sofa, chewing my knuckles and twisting my hanky into tense little pretzels.  As you may know from my previous blog entries about the joys of physical education, I am the last person to endorse any kind of exercise and make a fuss about climbing out of bed, let alone climbing up a mountain.  When my ex-husband suggested that we waste two hours of our life watching a film about mountain climbers who had been idiotic enough to fall off a mountain I thought he was insane.  So it is a glowing endorsement, and you should definitely watch it.

The other thing we watched was, ‘Human Traffic’, which is a film about a weekend in the lives of a load of Cardiff clubbers starring the ever wonderful John Simm (Sam in Life on Mars), as the up for it, ‘avin it large, Gyp.  It’s what I watch when I think about the fact that I might quite like to go out clubbing.  It fulfils a threefold purpose; 1) It scratches the itch without me having to pay for a babysitter, 2) It reminds me of parts of my youth, which gives me cheer in the long dark night of the soul that is middle age, and 3) it reminds me how lucky I am to be able to sit in front of the telly wearing comfy socks, clutching a cup of tea without having to get wasted or spend three years of my life worrying about my disastrous love life. 

It’s nice to be nostalgic, but even in those days I was hard pressed to party for long without either losing my job or my mind, and I was young, fit and much stupider then.  I was also able to cram myself into miniscule amounts of lycra and feathers without looking like a mallard that’s been shot in the aerobics department of Fenwick.  Even when I had a smooth, taut stomach and had my belly button pierced it still managed to get infected and had to be cut out with bolt cutters in the local hospital’s broom cupboard.  Nowadays they’d be hard pushed to find any piercing in amongst the rolls of lard, and I’d probably be arrested for gross indecency.

We both agreed that we were glad we went, but more than glad that we didn’t have to go there any more.  We will pass the baton of irresponsible, lagered up partying on to our children when the time comes.  In the meantime we will be happy with a sausage roll and a lie down.

I have spent most of the morning in bed, and the rest of it trying to work out something useful to say about an installation by Tracey Emin which looks like a potting shed.  Andrea texted me to ask me how I was getting on.  The best I could come up with was the pithy and yet highly articulate insight: ‘It looks like a potting shed.’  I feel that if this is the level of my artistic endeavours that the phrase: ‘Could do better if tried harder,’ will be in heavy rotation when I speak to my tutor in the next few weeks.

We have many paintings and art works to look at during the duration of this section of my studies.  There are quite a few in the resources book that I actually like, and several that I feel I might be able to comment semi-intelligently on.  I was hoping against hope that these might come up for discussion.  Unfortunately none of these have been picked, probably because they look far too easy.

Instead, we are looking in depth at a very disturbing painting called ‘The Maids’ by Paula Rego, which has a worryingly dangerous looking wild pig in one corner.  Having studied it for a while I am now convinced that the pig’s eye (it is in profile) is following me around the room.  I am not leaving the book open on that page any more because it’s giving me the creeps and if I get savaged by a wild boar on the way home from school tomorrow you will know my fears were well grounded.

We have an artwork which looks like a beach towel by Chris Ofili (the dung man), called; ‘No Woman No Cry’, which does have dung in it, which at least gives me something to think about.  He has given his already quite distressed looking woman in the painting, a necklace with a large lump of varnished dung hanging round her neck.  I have yet to reach the exercise where it says; ‘Why do you think the woman is crying?’, but I feel the obvious answer, i.e. ‘That she has pooh hanging off her neck’, might not be the wisest despite the fact that it would make me cry.

Then we have the potting shed thing by Tracey called, ‘The Perfect Place to Grow’.  I am floundering dear reader, I am floundering.  I shall soldier on and hope for enlightenment and another possible epiphany.  After all, I have had one already this year, so it’s not beyond the realms of possiblity that there may be another one in the offing.  I have not looked at the rules regarding the number of epiphanies a person is entitled to in any given year, but I think they’re fairly flexible about such matters.

In the mean time I’m going to go and google art works with dung in them and dig out some information on botany by watching repeats of The Herbs on Boomerang, in the vain hope that this might shed some light on the murky world that is modern art today.