So Long, Bombadillo

Vacillus pointed out that my last post felt incomplete. Very astute of him. I did not manage to communicate everything that I felt like communicating. The truth is, I was half asleep when I wrote last night. If I had watched a lesser film than Pan's Labyrinth, I would not have bothered to write at all.

So let me make another attempt to explain why I love fantasy. I'm going to try to explain with the help of Tom Bombadil, one of the most engaging literary characters I have ever met. Tolkien created Tom, but he never found his way into Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies.

At first, Tom Bombadil appears to have a perfect existence. He lives in a house on a hill with his beautiful wife. They simultaneously live in harmony with nature, and in control of it. Tom is above evil, and it cannot touch him. Yet his invincibility is what makes his story tragic.

All over Middle-Earth, the Dark Lord Sauron's agents sow terror through open conquest and secret murder. Yet Tom's idyll is unaffected. He lives in an oasis of peace. Which he cannot leave. Because just as evil cannot lay a finger on him, he cannot fight it either. All he can do is watch while all that is worth fighting for draws deeper and deepr under a shadow of forbidding evil. He has no choice to do otherwise; he is a prisoner of his own utopia. So his strength becomes his weakness. Eventually the Dark Lord is defeated, but that defeat changes the balance of forces in the world and leads to Tom himself fading away into legend.

In the end, all the reader is left with is a wistful image of pastoral bliss so intense that it's mortality was inevitable.

Tom is just one of the reasons why fantasy is special. One of these days, Vacillus, I'll introduce you to Lyra. Then you'll discover a new level of bittersweet.

Underneath Your Horns, You're Just Like Me

I've had two weekends of intensive movie-watching. Last weekend it was Apocalypto and Borat. This weekend it was Pan's Labyrinth and Brotherhood of the Wolf. So that's Mayan, English, Spanish and French language films, all in nine days. I admit that this makes me feel very superior and arty.

Though, to be honest, the only one of these films that can justifiably claim to be art is Pan's Labyrinth. The others are very good movies but in the end rather predictable. Okay, Borat is never predictable, but it does have a formula that isn't too hard to deduce. Pan, on the other hand is the sort of movie you just want to relax and experience, without trying to out-think the script or outsmart the director. So predictability never becomes an issue.

I especially loved the dark treatment of the fantasy elements of the movie. If you've only seen Hollywood executions of fantasy (think The Chronicles of Narnia), you could easily believe that fantasy literature is all about black & white characterizations and the predictable triumph of (good) elves over (evil) orcs. But as we fantasy geeks know, the real pleasure of reading great fantasy is that it tells complex, morally challenging stories. Behind the breathless heroics and magic spells, behind the strange races and exotic names, there are characters with deep passions and swirling conflicts. No matter how good they are, they sometimes do evil. Mythology is simple, but fantasy is not.

So it was a pleasure to see Guillermo del Toro's interpretation of Pan. He was as gnarly and sinister as a woodland god should be. From the moment he first entered the story, you had to wonder whether the little girl Ofelia was right to trust him. Him with his short temper, secretive ways and instructions to complete strange tasks. And his mis-shapen body. Many scholars believe that the devil's horns and hooves are references to Pan, an attempt by the early church to induce people to give up pagan beliefs.

Be that as it may, what is certain is that a good fantasy story is a rich mix of scary, sad, brave and occasionally funny. A lot like real people are in the real world. I guess that's what makes it so powerful as an art form.

Monster Is As Monster Does

When I was a child one of my favorite TV characters was the Cookie Monster, from Sesame Street. He was scary chiefly for the rapaciousness with which he would wipe out baked goods. Ever since then I've thought that the word 'monster' has connotations of cuteness rather than terror.

Years later I had a colleague who had nicknamed his son 'monster'. This seemed odd, because young K did not seem monstrous at all. He was rather quiet, and on the whole quite unobtrusive for a little boy. Much as I loathed children then (and they still set my nerves on edge today) he seemed a rather tolerable creature. His greatest vice was a secret hunger for ice cream. Well, it was a secret from his mother. She was trying to protect him from sucrose by denying him access to it. He subverted the ban by begging for dessert from strangers at dinner parties when his mummy was looking the other way. What she did not know did not hurt her until she had to deal with his sugar high. Then all hell broke loose.

She would glare accusingly at us while we looked back over our dessert bowls with inscrutable expressions and an air of complete innocence. Not only would butter not have melted in our mouths, it would have probably spouted a layer of icing with cherries on top.

And now, many moons later, I have a monster of my own. This beast is a neatness monster. Which is really cool because I am a neat-freak myself (that's what I call it; the clinical term is obsessive-compulsive). The first observable sign of his deviant nature is visible when you watch TV in front of him. He makes a grab for the remote control and carefully tucks it away in the remote control pocket. I won’t bother explaining what sort of device a remote control pocket is. Suffice it to say that he has a desperate need to put stuff back where it belongs.

Sometimes it reaches ridiculous heights. I've watched dumbfounded as he emptied the contents of a drawer, just so that he could put everything back in the drawer where it was meant to be.

Weirdo.

Who am I kidding? I'm quite proud of the little tyke. He’s headstrong, hedonistic, attention-seeking, overactive, slightly addled and smells odd sometimes. But he has that one trait which he holds in common with me, and that exempts him from the general disdain in which I regard other children.

Monster.

Mine.

Enough said.

Diamonds are forever, but videogames will make you happy

The downside of listening to current events programmes on the radio is that you get to hear some pretty depressing stuff most of the time. Today was an exception.

I heard the most delightful story about a psychiatrist who started a football team for his patients. It worked so well that others followed his example. Now they have a league for their teams to compete in. Many patients got better, got jobs, even got married. And rediscovered their sense of humor. Take Bernadetto for example. He was dribbling down the right wing while teammate Mario was yelling at him to pass the ball. Bernadetto laughed and reminded him that he already heard plenty of voices in his head; Mario was not helping by adding one more.

The story reminded me of a friend who suffered from a stroke a few months ago. He's been making a remarkable recovery, and I firmly believe that his passion for cricket has made a world of difference to how fast he's been getting better.

There's an interesting connection with a recent article in the Economist on the nature of happiness. It makes the point that as economists are turning more attention to what makes people happy (rather than merely rich), they're finding that people derive the most pleasure from doing things that absorb their interest, much more than they do from owning objects. Which, bringing the story back to football, would explain why Jose Mourinho seems to have much more fun as Chelsea's manager than Roman Abramovich does as the club's owner.

It does seem intuitive that happy people would generally be healthy people. And I am even more convinced than ever before that happy people are people who have the opportunity to feed their passions. Certainly among the people whom I know, the ones who are the most upbeat live multi-dimesional lives. (There are one or two who are so multi-dimensional I sometimes wonder if they spend part of their life in a parallel universe where time slows and energy is infinite).

So what did I learn today? Don't bother to save money, spend it all on videogames. Stay away from people who don't like football - they're just crazy. And if you hear voices in your head, don't ever pass the ball to them.

I Was Here a Thousand Years Ago

Chinese film-makers seem to have mastered the art of making lavish costume dramas. I recently watched Curse Of The Golden Flower, a film set in 10th century Beijing. It's a wonderfully opulent film at many levels. The plot has more layers than a piece of Bebinca (aside - that's a delicious dessert). The costumes are gorgeously regal, as befits a palace drama. Most of all, the sets are spectacular.

I think I enjoyed the sets most of all. I recently went to Beijing on a holiday and was swept away by the Forbidden City. So it was a special treat to see Zhang Yimou's reconstruction of what it would have looked like in it's heyday. I have no idea whether it was an authentic reconstruction; if anything the one newspaper review I read suggested that Zhang had taken a few liberties with historical accuracy. If so, the result was completely worth any artistic license that he exercised.

Here's a picture I took at the Forbidden City...


And here's how Zhang imagined it to be a thousand years ago...


From start to finish he created a panorama of imperial splendour. The carpets, the tapestries, the screens, the cushions, they were all a kaleidoscope of silken reds and greens and blues and gold. In almost every scene I could recognize the section in the palace where it took place, and recall what it looks like today. It was like having a thoroughly enjoyable deja vu experience (without having to worry about the fact that deja vu is sometimes an early symptom of schizophrenia).

You could criticize the film for having an over-the-top story, some rather credulity-stretching action, and a collection of really twisted characters but that would be missing the point. It was clearly meant to be a spectacle, and as a spectacle it is truly spectacular.

An Eye for an Eye and a Toe for a Toe

Wow. It's been three weeks since I last wrote. I was on holiday for a few days, and it seemed easy to just let a couple of days pass without posting. Then a couple of days more went by, then some more, and before I knew it a new year was upon me.

I'm quite curious to see how this new year is going to turn out. I've got a feeling it will be fairly full of activity.

One of the best things about 2006 for me was that I got physically active again. I fully intend to continue with that. Especially the running; I've not run in the last couple of weeks for the rather embarassing reason that I walked into a wall and stubbed my toe rather badly. I was watching my nephew instead of where I was going. This was an inexplicable thing to do since he was not actually doing anything at all. I may never forgive him for the injury he caused me.

Another thing I'd started last year, then stopped and would now like to resume, is editing my home videos. Ever since I bought a video camera a few years ago, I've been accumulating videos that seemed like a good idea to shoot at the time, but in hindsight are mostly deadly boring. Last year I finally got around to doing a bit of post-production on my first home movie. I surprised myself by creating a half-decent holiday video. At the time I was so stupefied by my success that I never got around to touching any more of my tapes, but I think now the time to do so is at hand.