Available Light

Perhaps it was the result of a long and fraught few months. Perhaps I was just tired. But I came home from Sam Mendes' movie, 1917 ,  hardly able to speak or to articulate my feelings about it. But a week later, and some time to think and I'm a little more cogent, at least to myself. I know something about the First World War, or at least, I am as conversant as a lifetime of books and films and documentaries would allow me to be. I had a few relatives who served, but none who ever talked much about it, so my imagination of what it might be like - on a personal level - for the millions of Tommies and Jerries who suffered through it was, I now realise,  limited. Sam Mendes rectified that. The movie tells a fairly simple, linear story. Lance Corporal Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) is serving in the trenches of France in April, 1917 when, because all communication lines have been cut,  he is ordered to take a message to the commanding officer of another regiment, i...

Vodafone, who supply my internet connection, gave me a little present the other day: a year's free subscription to Neon. In the unlikely event that I ever decide I want to watch Bob the Builder or   Game of Thrones after all, then all the episodes, every single one of them, are sitting there waiting for me. Also sitting there is a not bad supply of movies including a few I've always been meaning to see but somehow never got around to viewing. The 2008 film Doubt is one such. I saw it last night and I'm very pleased I did. Technically it's a tour de force with superb cinematography in a suitable limited but highly contrasted pallete, intelligent editing, certain direction,  brilliant casting and some outstanding performances. The central roles of an embittered nun, Sister Aloysius Beauvier, a young and naïve history teacher, Sister James and a popular parish priest, Father Flynn, played by Meryl Streep, Amy Adams and Phillip Seymour Hoffman respective...

The origins of the title of this book by Justin Lewis-Anthony will be known to the film buffs amongst you; it is taken from Monty Python's The Life of Brian and in the long section of the book dealing with film, the author explains why, but more of that later. This profound little book happened across my path, in the way that books do, just when I needed to see it. I have been, quite understandably I think, somewhat exercised of questions of leadership of late and many books, articles,videos, well meaning conversations, and not very well meaning admonitions have splattergunned in my general direction a range of views on the subject. Just this week, for example, someone from the North Island somewhere has written a very long letter to all us bishops helpfully pointing out our joint and several lack of anything resembling leadership and telling us to do something about it. He was not clear on exactly what why or how we were to do this, but that's not something he has on his ...

I went to see Jane Eyre a few nights ago. I've never much liked the book, but obviously some people do as there seems to be a new and improved version of it on TV about every other month. So, I was a reluctant attender, but I didn't stay reluctant for long. The film is superb, with everything in place that the Brits usually do so well: casting, cinematography, editing, costumes, lighting, production values. Mia Waskowska was a tour de force as Jane:believably repressed and timorous and magnetically enthralling all at the same time. It was in fact, so gripping that I was prepared to reconsider my long standing prejudice against the book. I came home, downloaded a (free) copy onto my shiny new Kindle and reread the thing for the first time since (I think) 1971. I found it hadn't improved much as a novel in the intervening 40 years; the sifty, devious, manipulative Mr. Rochester was never someone who appealed, and neither, for that matter, was stoical, unsmiling little plain...