Time has rushed on since I last posted. Most of my regular commitments faded away as the Christmas holiday season approached but they've just been replaced by a greater consumption of radio, TV and internet based couch potatoism. No long healthy walks to speak of but occasional forays to local beauty spots such as Princes Street Gardens, Lochend Park, Leith Links and Porty Promenade,
But I'm happy to report that some of the slack has been taken up by The Antiquary which together with other books purchased earlier in the year has been sorely neglected. I find Scott a bit heavy going (not quite as heavy as Dickens) but sticking at it I should finish it within the next few days. His stories are excellent but tend to be overlaid with meanderings that suited the tastes of a 19th century audience (understandably) but nor mine.
I'm surprised that unlike Dickens and Austen, Scott has not attracted the attentions of film and TV adaptors to any great extent in recent years.
I haven't seen much theatre worth writing home about but I have enjoyed some excellent films. Most recently Some Like it Hot and Calamity Jane which featured amongst the BBC's festive offerings. The tale of two musicians fleeing from Chigago gangsters by disguising themselves as women and taking off for Florida in a female band is surely one of the most entertaining films ever made with stellar performances by Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe.
The Deadwood Stage, My Secret Love and The Black Hills of Dakota are songs I was very familiar with but I'm not sure that I knew they came from Calamity Jane, which I don't remember having seen before. Doris Day is brilliant as the deerskin clad, pistol toting, tall tale telling cowgirl in love with the wrong man who sets out to save the local saloon keeper's skin by bringing a famous stage performer whose cigarette card picture has set the men of Deadwood's pulses racing, to sing and dance in their very own town. She gets the maid rather than the madam but everything turns out fine in the end.
There seem to be several films called Adoration. The one I've recently seen thanks to my Bfi Player free trial is about a teenage couple. He lives with his mum in the grounds of a mental institution. He becomes obsessed with a girl patient. They run off together and bad things happen since, despite her claims that the world is plotting against her she's obviously nutty. I thought the film was nutty.
From the same source came two excellent Japanese films. In Departures a young cellist is forced to return to his childhood home town to look for work when his orchestra goes bust. He gets a job whose nature he conceals from his wife and which causes his best chum from the old days to cut him. As an encoffiner he finds himself preparing bodies for burial. As shown in the film this is a beautiful and tender ritual and his wife, who has shot the craw when she discovered what he does, is reconciled when she sees him at work on his own father who had also shot the craw from the family home when the cellist was a child. It is a beautufil, delicate, tender and moving film though as the Japan Times makes clear fiction and real life don't always coincide.
Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian says of Still Walking " this gentle, lovely film is impossible to watch without a lump in the throat." I entirely agree so I'll let you read what else he has to say rather than stumble through a description of mine.
I'm going to pass over the German film festival with this screenshot of the films I watched.
They were mostly OK though I'd give Naked Animals a bodyswerve if it ever comes your way. An intriguing aspect of the festival was that the two films that I had to pay for, the others being free, I had to book via Ayr Film Society. It was something of a revelation to read that they've been going for almost 50 years and to skim through their programme.
Diana Rigg died this year so a number of TV programmes have marked that by repeating interviews and showing things she was in. In Mother Love she played a woman whose anger at the break-up of her marriage became an obsessive need to keep her son away from all contact with his father. He sees him in secret and when he marries persuades his wife to go along with the deception. Of course it all unravels and chilling consequences arise. Flashbacks helpfully show us that Diana's character was not very nice even when she was a little girl.
Scottish Ballet produced a film that melded parts of their Nutcracker and The Snow Queen productions together and fixed the blend by the device of having a young boy wander into a theatre and come across characters from those ballets.
Dancing of an entirely different sort came from a BBC Alba programme about the Moulin Rouge. This was a 2019 programme that followed the activities of three Scots girl who dance there during the celebration of the institution's 130th anniversary. A fascinating programme.
In his day he was the highest paid entertainer on the planet and would surely have applauded the enterprise and spirit of our girls at the Moulin. Radio Scotland celebrated the 150th anniversary of Harry Lauder's birth in Portobello with an absorbing look at the man's life and work. The closing moments of the programme in which we heard an orchestrated version of one of his most famous songs contained a message for these Covid times.
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