Let's sit down to good film

Ian McKellen in wonderful form

In between recent trips to the cinema, I’ve also managed to see a few films at home, both on television channels or discs, and it seemed too good an opportunity not to do a brief round up.

First up comes Mr Holmes, last year’s take on Sherlock – this time, with Ian McKellen as an aging and long-retired version of the iconic consulting detective.

It’s the late 1940s – a world changed utterly by the atomic bomb – and, worried that he’s losing his mind, Holmes is trying to piece together the final case that led to his retirement.

At the same time, he becomes the idol of the young, precocious son of the housekeeper who looks after him in his retirement home on England’s south coast.

Beautifully filmed and wonderfully acted – McKellen is simply a joy to watch – this gentle UK-made piece is full of hidden depths and philosophical ruminations.

Well worth a watch.

Messers Karloff, Lorre and Price

Rather different – but no less entertaining (albeit for very different reasons) is Roger Corman’s The Raven, which I caught up with a couple of weeks ago.

It’s less a case of being based on Edgar Allan Poe’s poem of the same name than having been inspired by it, in the loosest sense.

In this 1963 outing, we have three sorcerers vying against each other for magical supremacy, with Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff as the trio, engaged at various points throughout in finger-pointy duels.

It’s deliciously camp, which is possibly not the first thing that one might expect from writer Richard Matheson, who penned the zombie horror classic, I Am Legend, while a young Jack Nicholson spend most of his on-screen time looking pretty much lost in such company.

Enormous fun – Price in particular had such a wonderful voice for this sort of film – and the blu ray comes with extras that includes a German documentary about Lorre.

It’s surprisingly serious in tone given the nature of the main feature, but very definitely worth watching, providing a reminder of just what a fine actor he was, and covering his relationship with Brecht as well as offering a detailed look at his breakthrough film role as the murderer in Fritz Lang’s classic of German Expressionist cinema, M (1931).

One reviewer on Amazon decided to be snotty about Lorre  ‘wasting his talent’ because of drink. It’s the point at which you decide to respond by suggesting they inform themselves better about the German exiles in the US and the problems that many of them suffered.

Doris Day and Rock Hudson suffering misunderstandings

On a completely different note, last weekend saw me slumped in front of the gogglebox, on cat cuddling duty, when up popped Send Me No Flowers, a 1964 rom-com that I haven’t seen in decades.

Starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson – with Tony Randall in the sort of friend-of-the-leading-man character that he made his own – it’s a typical farce spun out after Hudson’s hypochondriac suburbanite overhears his doctor discussing a terminal case and soon-to-be-deceased individual is himself.

Directed by Norman Jewison, this was the final of a trio of Day-Hudson-Randall outings and while it’s pleasing enough fodder, it doesn’t have anything like the zip of Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back.

Still, it was nice enough to see again one of the sort of films I feel as though I grew up with – and Day is always wonderful.

Last in this little round-up comes Paul, a 2011 sci-fi comedy road movie that I’d managed to see bits of before, but never the whole thing.

Nick Frost and Simon Pegg with Paul

Starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, it’s about two British geeks who go on their dream holiday to San Diego for Comic-Con, followed by a road trip across the US to visit various sites of importance in UFO lore.

However, their plans go awry when they find themselves on the run with Paul, a fugitive alien who is running away from plans to dissect him.

Really good fun, with a very enjoyable supporting cast that includes Blythe Danner, Seth Rogan (as the voice of Paul) and Sigourney Weaver, who subsequently described it to Graham Norton as a “love letter to sci-fi fans” (I think she said the same of the equally enjoyable Galaxy Quest).

Very good fun, pacey, with good characters – including an alien that is far from a film stereotype – plus loads of nods to other films and pop culture, what’s not to enjoy? It was the perfect way to follow a stack of the equally geek-oriented The Big Bang Theory.

Sunlight and geekiness

Belis

If not quite the uninterrupted sun that, until the early hours of the morning, the BBC had been consistently forecasting for several days, but nonetheless, Monday turned out to be the best bank holiday in ... well, for quite some time.

And one nurses a hope that the weather itself realises just how much we need a proper, sustained period of good weather.

Windows were pushed open even before people had seriously decanted themselves from slumber; wood creaking and spraying around the accumulated dust and grime of some eight months of being closed against the gloom and damp and cold.

Sunday had seen a bout of serious tidying in the garden, with bedding plants packed in around the lemon tree, whose surrounding soil, naked against the forgotten heat, was drying out too quickly.

Ever-reliable violas, purple with a yellow face; sweet William, yet to flower, and belis, in delicate strawberry and cream garb.

The tidying produced a number of small snails, all instantly crushed and disposed of. The campaign starts early this year and with some knowledge to begin this struggle.

Dying tulip.

Frankly, much of the rest of the weekend has been spent in sitting outside, writing. Which is partly what a garden should be for.

And yesterday, The Other Half cooked springbok steaks and boervors over a fire, to be served simply with a bread roll and good mustard.

The first braai of the year was consumed with relish. Otto rushed back through the gate the moment it was ready: she may have a smaller appetite than the other cats, but her ears are perfectly attuned to the sound of food being served and what she lacks in appetite, she more than makes up for in the gourmand stakes.

All three of the cats relished a day when they could potter around, in and out of the flat as they pleased, for the best part of eight hours.

Belis.

If you get your hands on any springbok, then like deer, it’s very lean and needs handling with a little care.

The Other Half rubbed olive oil into these and left them between plates, at room temperature, for some time before cooking.

And then, as always, you don’t cook over actual flames, thus reducing the chances of the Great British Uncooked Sausage Syndrome.

It’s actually difficult to get your head around just how quickly the weather has changed.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the nights were still dipping close to or below freezing, and bed was a place to snuggle down into.

Now, as if somehow we’ve had the whole of a conventional spring wedged into that intervening two or three weeks, the temperatures are well up and, at night, it’s almost a question of throwing back the covers to keep from getting over hot.

Violas.

Has there really ever been a winter-spring like it?

And almost as suddenly, everything is in – or coming into – flower and leaf.

One week out of the country and the silver birches in the carpark were suddenly green – and even the planes, always late to turn green, are now close to it.

And even the dying flowers have their own beauty – something that I tried to capture in a brief photographic safari around the garden.

In such conditions, surely spring cleaning is inevitable?

Purple.

I did some – well, sort of: assuming you can call attempting to tidy my iPod and iTunes ‘tidying’ and don't expect something more akin to Mole's efforts in Wind in the Willows.

It was mostly a question of trying to impose some order onto the rather grotty new version, which seems determined to create chaos, particularly in my large (and growing) classical music section.

This, geeky as it sounds, also brought about my ranting moment of the weekend, as I tried to change details and import cover art, which the present system seems remarkably reluctant to do all by itself.

And when you’re scrolling through an iPod, having cover art is a nice, helpful way of identifying what you have and what you want.

And, oh goodness – more of it this evening.

Okay, it's not just the software developers' problem – it is quite astonishing just how many albums appear to have a choice of four or more lots of data when you're importing them.

Then, of course, there is no consistency in the basic labels are arranged: for instance, some stuff comes in as R Strauss, while others come in as Strauss (R). But this rather screws with any hopes of an ordered list.

The solution, then, is to change the data, but the new version of iTines seems intent on making it more difficult to find and then fully highlight the required album. And this is a long-term project to digitise and organise the whole of a rather large collection.

Technology – wonderful when it works, and a complete pain in the proverbial when you find yourself struggling with it!

A model kind of woman

Yesterday's Craft Day, even if I was unable to actively participate, has left the office with a wide variety of, errr, additional decorations.

It's not that I'm anti craft. Indeed, I've always had quite a crafty bent myself.

Later in the afternoon, a little delivery arrived for me at the office. It consisted of three model kits – two resin and one metal. They're all for figures – two Prussian soldiers from 1870 and Brunhilda, the character from Germanic legend, most well known to those outside Germany from Wagner's epic Ring Cycle.

Assorted colleagues looked at the delivered boxes with wary or bemused expressions – particularly at the soldiers. Apparently, I'm "bonkers". Yet these were the same colleagues who, hours earlier, had been constructing a Christmas tree from an old, rigid board map that was now no longer needed, and knitting tiny scarves for decorative card birds that were to hang on the tree.

And I'm bonkers?

I used to knit at one time. The Other Half even has a traditional black and yellow scarf I knitted him for his role as a fan of the mighty Castleford Tigers.

I have been known to do a bit of needlepoint too. There's a rather complex one of a cat that's framed and hanging in the bedroom.

And I have put together and painted models since childhood, when my parents allowed me to have the old Airfix historical figures, but not the longed-for Spitfire.

The Spock at the top of this post was painted a few years ago and still stands, very happily, on the DVD shelves.

The Prussian soldiers are simply extensions – and quite logical ones, given that modeling background – of my abiding fascination in Prussian history (which started at school – a girls' school, note).

It seems extraordinary that there should be such a gender-based attitude toward something as simple as craft-based hobbies – that as a female, other females were bemused by my interest areas. Not by my interest in a form of craft, but by the direction in which that takes me.

I happen to work in an environment that is highly politicised – and with the majority of the staff being female: in other words, I know, work and socialise with a lot of politicised females. How odd that, while knitting seems to be almost a new form of feminist statement, a woman who prefers to do other kinds of craft as a hobby is – well, not derided, but treated with confusion. It's almost like a new version of my parents saying: 'No, you can't build a Spitfire'.

This, though, does seem to conform to something of a pattern.

Even last night, when there was a bit of Stargate Atlantis on telly in the background, I recognised an ever-so-topical reference to the Hadron Collider, described only by its initials. Isn't that an indication of geekette status if ever there was one?

And while I wasn't paying great attention to the aforementioned programme, I am not averse to sci-fi, either on screen or the page. Indeed, I have a confession: at one time I even maintained a website about one of the characters in Babylon 5, which I adored. And I once attended a B5 convention – in a hotel next to Heathrow airport: although in the interests of making male (and possibly female) readers of this blog jealous, I have to point out that Claudia Christian gave me a full on kiss at that event.

In another recent development, however, I became the one woman in our office (at present) to take delivery of an iPhone. It's logical: I work with Macs at home and in the office. I can synch it with all sorts of things. But yet again, I seem to be part of a 'male' club.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not particularly worried. But it's interesting that feminism – even in people who are very politically educated – would not seem to have really made a great deal of difference to ideas of traditional female pastimes and interests.

Of course, it's complicated further because I don't fall into just one obvious stereotypical category – 'tom boy', for instance. The same woman who loves Prussian history and paints model soldiers also likes handbags and chocolate, and as much as I'm currently reading a vast history of the Thirty Year's War, I've also got my well-worn copy of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice on the go as deliciously enjoyable light reading. I might love football – but I also enjoy Sex in the City. I might have collections of sci-fi trading cards – but I also collect cat ornaments.

So is an interest in history per se what's considered unusual for a female of the species? Or just certain kinds of history? Is it modeling per se that is considered odd for a bird – or just certain subjects for modeling?

And am I really so unusual – "bonkers", even?

It seems, as Spock might say, to be thoroughly "illogical".