The Sopranos

Have decided to stop watching the Sopranos after six episodes, which was enough to show me that Tony Soprano ( and Uncle Junior and the mad henchmen and the bad henchmen) were just evil  violent fucks, end of story. How can there be any story once you have that laid out in front of you?  Yes there is some minor interest in how his children will take to the idea that he is Mafia, some interest in whether he will develop any self knowledge whatsoever in his therapy, some interest in the therapist herself, but it's not that much. Essentially the plots are going to be rehashes of every gangster film you've ever seen. 

On a personal level it makes me feel uncomfortable, as much screen violence does, but there's no existential shield here - you're not watching the crime,(as you do necessarily for the plot - that's the excuse in the most violent and nasty of crime / thriller plots, that the nastiness will in the end be redeemed or punished) , so that the good guys can win, you're just watching the plot. It's not more violent than say Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad, it just focuses one big fat lump of self satisfied  greedy bad , with nor redeeming features (he loves his children you say - c'mon who gives a fuck who he loves.  He's just one of the figures that used to haunt me in my nightmares, until I learnt to be conscious that I was fighting dream villains and began to beat the shit out of them in return until I woke up. 

Le Weekend

How many films have you seen about fifty something men recharging their lives and their libidos by having affairs with younger women?  Lots - even if you discount Woody Allen. This film turns the lost searchings of older men and women on their head - Jim Broadbent is entirely convincing as Nick,  the self defined under achieving husband of Lindsay Duncan's Meg, a teacher who is also looking for a new direction.  Hanef Kureshi's script is sharp, humorously incisive, bitter-sweet romantic comedy which holds on to both the comedy and the romance without ever getting cloying, but still managing to take the romance and turn it upside down and shake it a little.

Every long term couple will recognise the exchanges - " Have you got the Euro's", "Yes I Have" "Where are they then?".  What makes this film stand out is that is the way it builds up a such a coherent picture of a couple who stayed with the feminist concept of having a supportive male in a relationship,and Nickdisplays the agony of someone who's been that husband, but now finds that he has been metaphorically debollocked, he feels powerless and nowhere more hurtfully than in the scenes where he begs for sex, but she really isn't interested - they lost the spark. She tells him he is just a dependent.  There's plenty going on though in their 30th anniversary trip to Paris - you never lose interest - and it isn't all bad. 

The plot development where they meet the smarmy, confident and very successful academic, Morgan, played by Jeff Goldblum pitches up against all those films where... well, lets just say that  Morgan has ditched his (second) wife and married a younger woman who adores him - say no more, is very powerfully done. The dinner party they go to brings all the good and bad in their relationship to a head.  It's a great climax, thoughtful and affecting, to a thoughtful and affecting film. 

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera, day 3ish

Tereza loves books - they are her escape. So books do change people - or greet people with what they thirst for, even if they don't change worlds and societies. I would hate not to be able to read, because I read all the time, inhabiting other imagined worlds that enrich mine. I could imagine, though, being a carpenter who knew wood and its working inside out, with a great love for the sheen and touch and smell of it, and an ability to work with it and transform, and he might not read because there is enough in his craft. Or of a farmer or gardener so intimately and intelligently connected to the plants and the beasts around them that they derived complete satisfaction from the rich complexity of the things wrote therein. So maybe books are for the rest of us, who don't have a huge and great skill which we inhabit as in a different world that holds us up and subsumes us, we depend on books and reading for this enlightening other worldly transport. And, as dictatorial regimes all over the world know, if it does one thing, it makes us less biddable and more questioning.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

Quaintly reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being in a real paper edition, so fo course can't easily copy the quotes into this blog - though I'm guessing that someone somewhere has quoted the passages that struck me hard as well.  Let's Google and see. 

"Now what was tiring had disappeared and only the beauty had remained"

No one else has thought to quote it. It's a perfect summary of the feeling that remains when a loved one has gone away.

Oh and I was a bit unfair to Breaking Bad - in that the Ambiguous Last Redeeming Act was the only possible way of ending the series with any kind of closure. Not quite just the beauty remaining, but a sense that we had got away with it even if Walt hadn't.

Thursbitch, Boneland Alan Garner, Breaking Bad (warning: SPOILER if you haven't seen the last episode)

It's sad reading the shrill cries of disappointment of people who read Boneland wanting, expecting the same safe/frightening/comfortable swords and sorcery of the first two books, The Weirdstone of Brisingaman and Elidor, but it's entirely understandable. Alan Garner's moved on, and the medium through which he was trying to show/write his first books is long lost to him, just like my childhood readings of the books. All his books became bitterer and harder up to Red Shift, then sighed and sat in the poetic with the Stone Book Quartet. After that the books just scream of things nearly said, but unsayable.  There is a deep pain that tries to articulate itself in Thursbitch and Boneland, and set against the venal knowing psychoanalyst it feels more real, though harsher, more present, though inexpressible. Both books have an intense struggle in them, sometimes just local name after local name reverberating in the text, saying this is the land we lived in and its still there, weatherbeaten and mysterious, sometimes pages of spare dialogue that doesn't quite work in its hint of inexpressible forces unspoken and hinted at only in the tone or rhythm that the reader can give in the reading of it.

And then there was the last episode of Breaking Bad, with the expected (by me anyway) and obligatory (why I expected it) Ambiguous Last Redeeming Act.  Did Walt call for Jesse to be present so that he could kill him too, then, seeing the state he was in dive on him to save him from the hail of automated bullets. All far too simple, in its way.