You stick a black-and-white filter on a bog-standard snap and it almost elevates the scene into something other than an iPhone image taken from the back of a freezing cold bus interior at 7:00 a.m.
Life hobbies.
York Place, Edinburgh.
Category Archives: Britain
Gilmore Place, Edinburgh.
Not trying to blow my own Harold Bishop, but this has to be the most flattering photograph ever taken of Gilmore Place.
Always scenes here.
This place and I go way back. It’s gone through so many transformations over the years that I wish I had taken a yearly snap just to document the evolution. Highlight? I once saw a bloke in scuba gear doing backstrokes … in February.
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) on the small screen.
I’ve never seen it in the cinema, which is a personal and public tragedy considering the following have been witnessed to a munching of popcorn and the intake of a sneaked-in batch of Blue WKDs: a Transformers movie, a crime-against-humanity Predator crapper, Cuba Gooding Jr. looking after kids, the list goes on and on.
The weirdest protagonist to ever feature in a movie of this kind. For 1962 it’s crazy the stuff on display – his sadomasochism and homosexual leanings, the rampant ego for a hero, his being a conduit for others’ ambitions, a conflicted symbol of British Imperialism, a puppet and a master. You have to read a bit about the context of the depicted period and ’60s Britain to understand the movie beyond its sheer scope and spectacle, the beauty of every frame. It’s also one of the few examples of the great man theory of history actually being given the full treatment. This bloke was certainly someone special yet David Lean in no way kowtows to the legend.
There is not a single female character because there simply weren’t any in the story. These days you’d have a token love interest or a signposted lesbian (or whatever) operating field artillery from the back of a camel. It’s what separates then from now. The insertion of silly politics into storytelling will be the death knell of this genre. I also imagine today we’d be subjected to a CGI bonanza replete with a script dumber than ….Wait a minute, Peter O’Toole was in Troy (2004) and that horrible film pretty much defines the post-Gladiator (2000) historical epic barren landscape.
This one-of-a-kind experience, though, can’t even be emulated. It’s a journey, a narrative about a hundred different things, even stuff you project onto by convincing yourself that’s what that scene means. For me, it’s always been about losing your marbles in an unfamiliar land and taking it back home with you for the banter and the scrapbook.
My favourite scene: the wondrous Claude Rains running his pinky across the table to inspect the dust on it. It’s so subtle and hilarious and just incredible. I am praying for a cinema release. The intermission, that bonkers sequence of black with Maurice Jarre’s bombastic score from the outer regions of audacity, that’s where I’ll sip my Blue WKD.
The best movie.
Spartacus (1960) still works.
It’s still relevant because the story is universal and it’s by far the best directed and scripted of the historical epics, most of which are hackneyed affairs and wholly painful to watch. Aside from the Anthony Mann opening sequence, you can see the emergence of Kubrick’s style all over the picture despite the official record that he was constantly bickering with Kirk Douglas and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. It also features perhaps the best ensemble of British acting talent from that era, Olivier, Ustinov, and Laughton showing the Americans how it’s done. Indeed, it’s almost a bit embarrassing viewing Douglas and Tony Curtis try and hold their own with the peerless Laurence Olivier; they appear awed by his presence.
His Crassus is a nasty fucker, but as always with Olivier he injects the ‘bad guy’ with layers and you can see where he’s coming from in what he does. His rivalry with Charles Laughton’s Senator Gracchus perfectly parallels the rebellion, and there’s a simple but historical truth to the outcome: order and dictatorship over anarchy every time. Special mention to Peter Ustinov who provides a chuckle in every scene, an obsequious slave-trader character usually bemused by proceedings.
Not bad battle stuff, either.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 