Movies I didn't finish

A few years ago I walked out of the ballet movie Black Swan, because I found the whole thing rather unpleasant.  It's the sort of thing where ballerina Natalie Portman finds the word "whore" written on her mirror in lipstick.  When I finished my popcorn, I was out.

More recently, I couldn't sit through A Most Violent Year.  It's about a New York businessman dealing with the Mafia, and it's one of those movies where things get bad, then they get worse, then they get even worse...

Some years back I saw the Batman movie The Dark Knight, and it was very effective at giving the audience a sense of dread--so effective that I had to leave.  And I can't sit through movies involving gambling because they scare me.  I tried to watch the pool shark movie The Hustler, but the opening sequence with Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason in a never-ending match got to me and I couldn't watch any more.

When I was little my parents mostly kept me away from scary movies.  But once they took me to see Oliver Twist and the scene where the crowd is chasing him and yelling "Stop, thief!" made me freak out.

When I saw Dead Ringers, with Jeremy Irons as twin gynaecologists in a downward spiral, I managed to sit through it, but I had to close my eyes in the final scene!

Gardens

Flower gardens don't interest me much.  But vegetable gardens do! Back when I lived in Sackville, N.B., we had space for a big organic vegetable garden in our back yard.  We even got some seaweed from near our cottage to fertilize it.  Today I still dream of preparing the garden for planting in the spring.

One thing we grew there was peas.  In season we'd go out and gather tons of pods, then take them in and unshell them one at a time.  A single pod usually had up to eight peas, but on occasion I'd find one with nine or even ten!

We'd maintain a big pile of compost.  I have a way of viewing things in which a garden's primary function is to produce compost to put back into it, and vegetables and stuff are just a by-product!

Today I still have a garden in our Toronto back yard, but it's a lot smaller.  We just removed a pair of big trees that limited its sunlight, so this year we got a ton of Yukon Gold potatoes.  I've expanded its area, and next year we'll be more ambitious, with peas and head crops like cabbage. (Peas are good for the soil.) Maybe we'll grow beans sometime.

School textbooks

I remember the French textbook we were given in Grade 5.  The first dialogue started with the line, "Tu connais Marcel Martin?" Then in Grade 6 we got the same textbook, and again in Grade 7.  So we were basically learning the same thing year after year! 

This was the time of "natural learning," of course. (They only got serious about conjugation in Grade 8.) The same thing happened with our geography textbook This Land of Ours, which we used in Grades 5 through 8.  But at least it was Canadian geography.

On the other hand, we also had the older textbook Geography Has Made Us Neighbors, which definitely had an American viewpoint!  In every section they'd have a bar graph visual comparing the average income of an American to what a Canadian or Russian or Asian earned.  The American always earned more. (This must have been from the time of McCarthyism.) I recall some generalizations about Canada as a land of hunters and trappers.

I also remember how all the schools had maps of Canada furnished by a candy bar company, which displayed their product in the map's four corners. (I think Crispy Crunch was over Greenland.)

Movies I want to see someday

Over the years, I've seen a lot of movies.  There aren't that many I haven't seen that I particularly want to.  But I can think of a few.

There's a famous Italian director called Roberto Rossellini (who got married actress Ingrid Bergman pregnant, causing a big scandal). He made Paisan, about American soldiers in Italy in World War II, which I still haven't seen.  He also made Germany:  Year Zero, about a German boy after the war, I think.  The movies I've seen by him are great!

I haven't seen any movies by the French director Robert Breton.  My sister Moira really likes him, and the critic Roger Ebert wrote that every cinema lover discovers him sooner or later.  He made the King Arthur movie Lancelot of the Lake, in which the knights' armor keeps making clanking noises.

I'm a fan of Terry-Thomas, the gap-toothed British comic actor who often played cads.  Back in the '50s he made the heist comedy Too Many Crooks, which I'd like to see eventually. (I think Sidney James of the Carry On movies is in it too.)

There's the Chinese satirical comedy Keep Cool, directed by Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern).  Moira saw it at the Toronto film festival and said it's really runny, but it didn't even get released in Canada!  Neither did Madadoyo, the last movie by the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.  I hope I can find them on video someday.

Boats and ships

When I was young we had a red boat.  She was a Mirror brand dinghy that we assembled at home.  We built her in my room, and there was quite a smell from the paint and resin.  When she was finished, we had to temporarily remove the baseboard from my window to take her out.

We used the boat at our cottage near Northumberland Strait.  You could use it as a rowboat, or add a mast and spars to make it a sailboat.  It had a mainsail and a jib, but no spinnaker.  We never gave her a name.

When I was about four my academic father went on sabbatical for a year and we went to Brighton, England, on the Greek Line ocean liner the Arkadia.  I vaguely remember swarthy Greek waiters serving tomato juice.  When we returned it was the ship's last voyage before being scrapped.  This was 1966, when the jumbo jet was about to take over.

If I won a lottery and became rich, I think I'd travel the world on an ocean liner.

People I do NOT admire

If I had just a short time to live and could kill one person without consequences, I guess I'd kill Vladimir Putin.  I'd be tempted to kill Rupert Murdoch, but he'd probably just be replaced by another guy like him.

My least favourite Prime Minister is Jean Chretien.  One thing that angers me is the 1997 Kyoto Accord to tackle climate change.  Chretien could have moved to ratify it right away, but instead he dithered for five years. (Pearson or Trudeau Sr. would at least have appointed a federal commission to study the matter!) He eventually did decide to ratify it just before leaving office, but by then it was too late to put it into practice:  the Liberals soon lost their Parliamentary majority, then lost power.  We're running out of time to slow down global warming. (Meanwhile, President Clinton ignored the pact for his last three years in office.)

As someone with a scholarly background, I'm particularly disturbed by the case of Henry Kissinger, a scholar who went over to the dark side, supplanted the Secretary of State in American foreign policy, and connived in war crimes.

Among dead people, Ronald Reagan made me believe in hell.  He was the most appalling example of the "rhetoric as policy" tendency in American politics, doing long-term harm to the United States as great as any other president in the nation's history. (He had his enablers, of course.) And Margaret Thatcher was an unimaginative destroyer.

PEYTON PLACE

A few years ago I rented some DVDs of the TV version of Peyton Place. (That was back when we subscribed to zip.ca, ordering DVDs online and getting them in the mail.) That version had Mia Farrow and Ryan O'Neal.  Canadian actor Henry Beckman, who was in a lot of commercials in the '70s, had a good role as a guy who wrongly suspected his boss of cuckolding him.  My mother had never watched the show when it was originally on, but now she greatly enjoyed it. (We'd lived in a university town which was a bit like Peyton Place.)

We also had a copy of Grace Metalloids' book, which caused a big scandal and sold like hotcakes in the '50s. (Back then small town America was a bit of a sacred cow.) I never read it, but maybe I should someday.  And there's also the movie, one of Lana Turner's better vehicles.  If you ask me it would be a good choice for remaking.

There's a great moment in the movie where Lana's daughter Diane Varsi exclaims "Why, if any man seriously asked me I'd run away with him and become his mistress!" causing her mother to slap her face.  Back in the '50s parents slapped their teenagers. (And just using the word "mistress" was daring.)

What I miss doing with my late mother

My mother was a great listener.  I liked talking to her about everything. (Sometimes, I admit, I must have taxed her patience.) She was on the bookish side, and I talked to her about most of the books I read.  To this day whenever I read something particularly interesting I wish I could tell her about it.

Back in the 1990s when I was a student at York I'd read the British magazine The Spectator at the university library, and tell her what was in it when I got home.  In particular, I'd talk about three regular columns.

"High Life" was written by Taki Theodorocopoolous (he understandably just went by the name Taki), son of a Greek shipping millionaire, and a shameless womanizer, gambler and cocaine user. (Of all the Takis in the world, he's the tackiest.) He once appeared on Oprah Winfrey's talk show as a man who preferred younger women.  But he's often a funny writer. (He recently got in trouble for speaking well of Greece's neo-fascist political party.)

"Low Life" was a column by Jeffrey Bernard, drinker and racetrack regular, who'd talk about things like how he had to find a new apartment because his boiler had been condemned so he no longer had hot water.  And "Long Life" was by Nigel Nicholson, son of writers Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville-West, who'd been an MP and a book publisher. (His house published Nabokov's Lolita.) He had lots of stories about the old days, his family and people he'd known.  Mother liked hearing about all this.

Flying

I don't fly too much.  It's mostly when I visit London, England.  On my way there I take the redeye flight overnight.  I always hope to sleep on the plane, but I never seem to do it much.  With the flight back I'll leave in the morning and arrive in the afternoon, except that it feels like evening by then. (But jet lag is less severe flying westward than eastward.)

While I've flown in airliners, I've never been up in a helicopter or a balloon.  That sounds fun.  So do blimps, except that I've read they're very noisy.  I have a feeling that blimps could have a bright future if we get serious about conserving fuel and reducing emissions.

Some people have a phobia about flying, because it involves entrusting your fate to the total control of people you don't know.  I've never felt such fears, but I do recall a time when I was flying over the Pacific Ocean and the plane ran into some major turbulence.  Now that scared me!  It got me wondering what keeps an airplane in the sky at all.

I don't dream about flying so much, but I often dream of being on a ship or train.  Several times I've dreamed of being on the Titanic!