nice cheese, shame about the biscuits

We watched Silent Running with our cheese fest.  This is a 1972 sci-fi minor classic, or at least Dr Mark Kermode keeps recommending it on the R5 Live film programme, and the Systems Administrator was very keen for us to see it.  It is about an astronaut working in a fleet of space ships carrying biospheres containing all that is left of plant and animal life, after a catastrophe on earth has sent the surface temperature to 75 degrees C.  As a chronic biophile and pet lover I found the whole thing very upsetting, especially what happened to the plants and the robots.

The robots were waddling boxes about the size of an old fashioned TV, and according to IMDb they were played by actors without legs, walking on their hands in lightweight costumes.  These were remarkable performances, deserving more credit than they got.  I was reminded of an interview I'd heard on R4 with David Hockney earlier in the day, who recounted how he took his mother to an exhibition that included a work by Barry Flanagan, a rope snaked and coiled across the floor.  Mrs Hockney looked at this and asked 'Did he make the rope?'

The Carr's water biscuits bought to go with the cheese fest had a strong and insistent peppery taste that competed with and detracted from the flavour of the cheese.  On close inspection they had little black bits in, and the box said, in mauve letters 3mm high*, with roasted garlic and herbs.  I think manufacturers should put a large yellow exclamation mark on the packaging when they have introduced a fresh twist to an established brand, so that we could check we really do want the new version with added whatever, instead of the normal flavour we were expecting.  I suppose they're hoping that I'll like water biscuits with roasted garlic and herbs and buy lots more biscuits, but I don't, so the only effect is to devalue the Carr's brand slightly in my eyes as being unreliable.

If you want to sleep well and soundly then I don't think watching a disturbing film before bed while eating too much cheese is probably the best way to go about it, and I was rather slow to get going this morning.  Tidying the daffodil lawn, that was supposed to be a quick job just finishing it off, seems to be taking forever.  I badly underestimated how much there was still to do.  There are endless straggly bits of hedge to trim, and creeping tufts of grass that ducked under the power scythe in the autumn cut, and have now gone yellow and look unsightly.  The old dead leaves from the eleagnus take a small eternity to rot down, and in the meantime have worked their way down among the straggly grass and embedded themselves in the surface of the lawn.  The oak leaves would be very useful on the leaf compost pile, if I could get them out without carrying away half a bin load of weedy grass and rot resistant eleagnus leaves at the same time.  I was reduced to using the leaf vacuum machine.

There were honey bees foraging on the Mahonia x media 'Winter Sun'.  I don't know if this is a good or a bad thing.  Honey bees don't hibernate, but they undergo metabolic changes for the winter, laying down extra fat stores, and ceasing to produce the bee milk they feed to their young, while the queen stops laying eggs.  In this winter state they can live for six months, instead of the six weeks which is all that workers manage in the height of summer.  If the weather is unseasonably warm does the colony remain in its winter state, or will the workers change metabolically to short lived summer bees too early, before the queen starts laying and it is warm enough for them to raise young?  And are they eating their stored food too quickly, if they are active when they should be resting?  I really don't know.

*Literally.  I retrieved the packaging from the recycling and measured the typeface with a ruler.  I find that vaguely disturbing.

tuesday night was film night

When I switched on my computer this morning I found a dubious e-mail in my inbox.  The headline said that it concerned the non-delivery of my parcel, which I could collect from my nearest USPS depot, and there was a word document for me to print my delivery label.  I didn't open the document.  Despite the fact that it had made it into my in-box, and not even my spam box, the e-mail didn't look quite right.  For starters, I am not expecting a parcel at the moment.  I often am, as I do much of my shopping over the net, but the only things I'm currently expecting are some Whichford flowerpots, which will probably come in Whichford's own van, and certainly won't be left in a depot somewhere.  And the wording was not quite right.  It said that my parcel had been at the post office since 3 November, and that I could collect if from the USPS office.  Post offices and delivery company offices are quite different things.  And it didn't apologise for their failure to deliver, which a genuine service company would almost certainly do. And generally such communications include all the information you need in the body of the e-mail, including the identity of the sender and a tracking number, and don't require you to open an attachment.  And they had sent the e-mail twice, which made me look at it twice.  And like I said, I'm not expecting a parcel.  But if I had been, I might have clicked without thinking, first thing in the morning, if I was pushed for time and about to rush out.

We watched Get Carter last night.  It was released in 1971, so 2011 is its 40th anniversary.  I saw it once before, a long time ago, and knew that it featured the brutalist car park, because there was a lot of furore recently about that being demolished, plus I remembered a beach, and that was about it.  Watching it again I realised what a superlatively good film it is.  The structure would be daring and unusual now.  It is a film with no scene setting or explanations at all, beyond the sequence ahead of the credits where Michael Caine's character says that he is going north to find out why somebody died.  We don't find out who is dead, or how, or what they have to do with Michael Caine.  Then there is a long sequence of Michael Caine sitting on an intercity train, reading a book (The Long Goodbye), looking at his fellow passengers, and eating a meal in the restaurant, until he gets to Newcastle.  Nothing happens on the train.  I'm not sure you could get away with such a long non-action sequence at the beginning of an action movie nowadays.

Once in Newcastle events unfold (don't worry, no plot spoilers to follow).  Somebody called Margaret hasn't met him in a pub, and he is annoyed.  Who is Margaret?  Why hasn't she come?  He goes to a shabby house.  Whose house is it?  He views a body, presumably that of the person whose death has brought him north, but we don't find out who they are, yet.  And so on through the entire film.  As the audience we gradually piece together who the characters are, how they are connected, and what is going on, and the tension builds.  When I started watching The Sopranos (which I love) it took the whole of a feature length first episode just to introduce the characters.  Get Carter throws the characters at your head and leaves you to sort it out.

Wikipedia and the IMDb site are great inventions.  After watching the film, having not looked it up before to avoid finding out what happened, we were able to see what else the actors had been in, and how the film reviewed at the time.  The answer is, very badly.  Most critics disliked the violence, the sex, and the atmosphere of ruthless cruelty.  Soulless and nastily erotic...virtuoso viciousness, one would rather wash one's mouth out with soap than recommend it, according to Wikipedia.  By 2004 Total Film magazine acclaimed it as the greatest UK film in any genre.  It is a nasty film.  Quite a few people get killed, and none of the sex takes place within the context of a loving, committed relationship.  Gangsterism is a nasty business.  Which makes Get Carter a more moral film than the cuddly, semi-comic gangsters of the Guy Ritchie genre.  Though there are some moments of farcical comedy in Get Carter.

Besides Michael Caine, who made some very good films at that stage of his career (Alfie, The Italian Job), the other star of Get Carter is the scenery.  Filmed on location in Newcastle and Gateshead, it is set largely among scenes of urban decay, slum housing, bridges, the docks, and of course the famous car park, and the coal stained, ravaged beach.  I can't think of many other films that convey such a strong sense of place, and where the place seems so irrevocably linked with the action.  In 2000 the Americans remade it, starring Sylvester Stallone. Goodness knows why.  It bombed.  I regret to report that Michael Caine took a part in the remake.  Though as he himself admits in interviews, he is a working actor and if he isn't doing anything else at the time he'll accept all sorts of scripts, meaning that as well as being in some of our best films he has been in some real turkeys.