Les Miserables

I started to read the book, but Victor Hugo goes on a bit for 21st century tastes.  I think the film covered the chapters I've read in about ten minutes.

Not impressed though - too sentimental for my tastes, too dark and dismal in colouring, and I can't remember any of the songs - they sounded the same to me.

Some pretty people, and a bit of comic relief with the landlord and his lady, but all in all, I'm glad I have seen it, and even gladder that it's over.

Drop Dead Fred (1991)

A quote from the Wikipedia entry:
It was savaged by critics; Leonard Maltin stated that "Phoebe Cates' appealing performance can't salvage this putrid mess ... recommended only for people who think nose-picking is funny."  

Well - I guess I think nose-picking is funny! A light-hearted film with serious undertones about a poltergeist-like imaginary friend, who returns to help Lizzie when her marriage breaks down.  An entertaining film to while away an evening. Main characters played by Phoebe Cates and Rik Mayall.  Now, how come an American kid has an English imaginary friend?

The Help (2012)

An engaging, too good-to-be-true, movie about racial attitudes to black maids in Mississippi in the 1960s.
Very watchable, and some lovely performances, particularly from the two main black characters,  Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minnie (Octavia Spencer),  the white ultra-racist, Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard) , and the white-trash Celia Foote (Jessica Chastain). Skeeter (Emma Stone) is a young writer who initiates the plot.  She  persuades the black maids to  tell their side of the story. From this slightly improbably, but inspiring premise flows the comedy and the seriousness of the film.
In the end I found it a bit lightweight.

Jane Eyre (1940 version)

Very rushed through and a lot of the essential story line and development omitted. With a young  Elizabeth Taylor as Helen, the girl who dies of TB in Lowick Hall. Screen play partly by Aldous Huxley.

Verlaine and Rimbaud set to music

Wigmore Hall, Feb 18th 2012.

mf

Dominion - CJ Sansom

The book follows members of the British Resistance in an alternate reality where Britain has surrendered to Germany, and is now a satellite state. The prime Minister is Beaverbrook. Churchill heads the Resistance.

As usual with Sansom's books we have strong sympathetic characters: David, a civil servant with marital problems, exacerbated by the accidental death of his two-year-old son; his wife Sarah;Günther Hoth, a German SS officer skilled in hunting down and capturing Jews, also with a broken marriage, and a genuine love for his adult son; Syme, a sycophantic pro-German Special Branch Englishman; Natalia, the Slovakian leader of the resistance cell.  There is a clear mission - to keep a scientist with a secret out of German hands, and arrange his escape to the USA.

Interestingly, at the end of the book Sansom explains his political views - from a conservative family, he became more left-wing.  His particular beef is the growth of nationalism in its many forms, which he considers to be the parent of "monster children: fascism, based on organised worship of the nation and Nazism, which worshipped not just nationality but race."  He fears that it is raising its head once more "in its rawest form: all across Europe, in France, Hungary, Greece, Finland, even Holland, and most worryingly perhaps in Russia, fiercely nationalist, anti-immigrant, and sometimes openly Fascist nationalist parties are significant forces in politics again."

He fears UKIP and the SNP are aspects of this, and lays out his evidence.

But aside from the politics, the book is well-written, and a very good story.

Stamford Shakespeare Company in Twelfth Night

Entertaining, easy to follow, and the twins were alike enough for suspension of disbelief to work. Usual magical setting, and good weather.  Excellent Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek, but why would Viola ever fall in love with a drippy duke Orsino - the character, not the actor!