Commonplace Book

I saw RED (Retired,ExtremelyDangerous, not the color) today, with Bruce Willis leading as a retired CIA operative who’s been targeted for assassination.

It’s seriously predictable and way over the top. As long as you can go with that and can suspend belief for a couple of hours, I have to say that it’s really not bad. It’s certainly appears to have been superior to the crop of similar movies (Knight and Day, The Killers, The Expendables…) from this past summer. But still, the less said about the plot, the better. The reason to see it (if see it you do) is for the cast.

I’m not ordinarily a Bruce Willis fan, but I did like him in this. I was less taken with Mary-Louise Parker’s Sarah: she threw herself into the spirit of things a little too easily, but that seems to be a hallmark of movies of this kind. I came out of the movie wishing that they had cast for the role someone closer to Willis’s age.

As for Morgan Freeman, I’d like to see him (and Michael Caine, too, as far as that goes) get out of this sidekick rut he’s in. And I’d like to see John Malkovich play sane every once in a while. Is that too much to ask? I wasn’t way keen on Brian Cox, and I have serious doubts about the plausibility of his character’s involvement in the activities of the film.

The other roles were nicely cast and well played. I enjoyed both Helen Mirren and Karl Urban in this, and generally, it looked as though everyone involved had had a great time making the movie.

As guilty pleasures go, this gets four stars (out of a possible five).

P.S. Anyone else have a "Oh my God, he‘s still alive"? moment when Ernest Borgnine came on screen?

Another book that I just finished is Troublesome Young Men. The subtitle sums up the entire story: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England.

I had never given much thought to how Churchill came to power in World War II. I knew about Neville Chamberlain (he of appeasement, Munich and "peace in our time" fame), but it had never really occurred to me to wonder how England got from Chamberlain to Churchill. If you had asked me, I probably would have speculated that there had been an election, without ever realizing that I was thinking in American terms.

As I said, the subtitle gives the whole story: Chamberlain and Churchill were both members of the same party, and Chamberlain was ousted by rebels within that party who were dissatisfied with his appeasement policy and later lackadaisical approach to prosecuting the war. For all that the outcome is known, the author manages a real nailbiter here.

The author doesn’t have much fondness for Churchill, whom she depicts as being ungrateful and even hostile to the Conservatives who broke party ranks to bring him to power and stubbornly loyal to Chamberlain even after becoming Prime Minister. She brings into the light names I had previously not known, or known only in different contexts: Harold Macmillan (who would be Prime Minister in the 60s), Leo Amery, Alfred Duff Cooper, Robert Boothby, Lady Violet Bonham Carter, Harold Nicholson, and the author’s particular hero, Ronald Cartland.

And while the author doesn’t particular like Churchill, she reserves her greatest scorn for Chamberlain. He rejected any opposition to his policies as "disloyalty" (gee, where have we heard that one recently), punished party members who disagreed with him, and criminally failed to defend Britain’s interests.

Olson brilliantly violates Philip Roth’s dictum that "History is where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable" and makes it clear just how far from inevitable were Churchill’s rise to power and Hitler’s subsequent defeat.

I made the mistake a couple of months ago of watching the new film version of Brideshead Revisited. It was perfectly dreadful. Now I have to admit that it was very lush and beautifully (and expensively) filmed, and the performances weren’t bad.

But the story! It was as though they were filming not the book, but a Cliff’s Notes version of the book written by someone who hadn’t actually read the book and didn’t understand what it was about. If it hadn’t pretended to be Brideshead Revisited, I probably wouldn’t have hated it as much as I did. I still wouldn’t have liked it: the story didn’t hang together well.

The only good thing to come out of watching that dreadful movie was that it prompted me to go back and read the book, since the movie had left me all confused about what was and wasn’t in the book.

The book was, I found, even better than I had remembered. When I read it the first time, I was in my early 20s, like the protaganists at the start of the book; now I’m older than they are at the end. The first time, I was mainly entranced by the romance and luxury; this time, I noticed more the melancholy and even pain. I hadn’t been sensitive to how very Catholic it was that first time either; I think perhaps I just took Catholicism for granted. (I frequently have trouble even now discerning what others describe as "Catholic" themes, since they just seem so very ordinary to me.)

It’s an amazingly graceful book (and I use "graceful" in both senses of the word).

So, I saw the new Star Trek, not without some trepidation, and I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. Obligatory disclaimer: there may be spoilers ahead. (I don’t really think so, but at least you can’t say that I didn’t warn you.)

It does make me feel very old to realize that the crew are now all younger (much, much younger) than I am, and I thought the whole time travel bit was overly convoluted. It does make it easier, though, to account for departures from the canon, so in that sense I suppose it makes sense. Trying to keep track of who was when, though, was giving me a headache. And even with the time travel bit thrown in, some things are not satisfactorily explained. Chekov, for instance, isn’t supposed to join the crew until later. (And his accent is too thick to be funny.) Nor is it explained just how, within moments of coming aboard, Scotty is in charge of Engineering?

I’m puzzled by the inclusion of that scene (that features in the trailer) of the young Jim Kirk sending a car over a cliff before announcing to the police officer that “My name is James Tiberius Kirk”. Aside from giving us his full name, which could have been done elsewhere, all it really establishes is that he was a snot-nosed brat who grew up in Iowa (and that, too, we could have gotten later).

On the plus side, the movie has a great look and feel (although, as so often happens with these special effects extravaganzas, they’re overly enamored with lingering lovingly over sets and effects), and the opening ten minutes are very intense, and do a good job of setting the tone for the rest of the movie. The performances are solid: for the most part, I could easily envision these characters growing up to be their past and future counterparts.

I think this will prove a successful reboot, and I’m looking forward to future installments. I’ll be particularly interested in seeing how they handle the Spock/Uhura relationship.

I’ve recently finished reading this account of John Cooke, the lawyer who prosecuted the case against Charles I, leading to the King’s execution.

All I really knew about the English Civil War was the description from 1066 and All That of it as an "utterly memorable Struggle between the Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right and Repulsive)". I had a vague notion that Charles I had been executed for denying Parliament its perogatives, but nothing more specific than that, and I was always a little unclear on how Charles II had managed to restore the monarchy. And while I knew that anti-Catholic sentiment had been strong in England in this era, I never really appreciated just how deep the religious divide had gone between Protestants.

The author, Geoffrey Robertson, tries to make the case that the execution of Charles I was entirely justified, while the execution of John Cooke, his prosecuting attorney, was procedurely flawed and therefore unjustified. However, the flaws he admits to in the case against the King are, to my mind at any rate, at least as serious as the problems in Cooke’s case. I came away from the book holding the opinion that the two executions were equally unjustified.

Nonetheless Robertson does succeed in painting a portrait of an intelligent, courageous and God-fearing man who made admirable efforts to improve the practice of law in Great Britain, and I do recommend it.