Film Studies

At work I got to place the order for some organ donation posters to go to the BBC. They are going to appear on Holby City! It's very exciting - I hope I get a mention in the credits. Watching the credits to Bruno Dumont's film Hadewijch the other night, I saw so many names flying past that it didn't seem entirely impossible that my name wouldn't be among them. I'd turned up to watch the thing, hadn't I? Twice, in fact - the only film I've seen more than once at the cinema except for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (an interesting double-bill there).

Hadewijch is about a nun who becomes a suicide-bomber. That makes it sound like it might be another Grindhouse offshoot directed by Robert 'Machete' Rodriguez - either that or the latest Angelina Jolie vehicle. But no, it's even more perverse than that - in Dumont's film, our nun survives her suicide-bombing. Or seems to. There are lots of 'explanations' for the ending on imdb, some of them quite ingenious. But they miss the point. The truth is, Dumont is simply testing our faith in him. It isn't enough just to watch his films, you have to bow down to him as to a god. Which is fine by me. And by the way I was very pleased to see Hadewijch in John Waters' top ten of last year, just under the Justin Bieber documentary.

I also saw The Woman In Black, with a popcorn-munching mainstream audience, which I'm not used to. They were OK I suppose, once they'd settled down, but I wasn't so sure about the film, which seemed like a succession of well-mounted scary moments attempting to distract us from a void (played by Daniel Radcliffe). The film seems largely to consist of Radcliffe wandering around a spooky mansion being startled by things. I don't know why the Woman In Black is so interested in him when she only kills children - oh wait, maybe I do. Except Radcliffe is definitely an adult in this, and just to prove the point they've given him a dead wife and a young son who looks a bit like Boris Johnson. He isn't wearing those little round glasses either. No, must be a grown-up. Whatever those sinister whispering voices say...

Marketing Made Simple

I watched the BAFTA's. Meryl preening like the cat who got the cream, even after losing a shoe. I still think Su Pollard would have made a better Iron Lady. She'd have brought a real urgency to the role. Accurate impersonation is all very well, but how do we know that behind the scenes Thatcher wasn't going: 'Ooh 'eck Dennis, I've gone and abolished free school milk! They'll never let me be PM now!'?

Instead, Meryl gets her award, and Su's last gig - I am reliably informed - was turning the Christmas lights on in Malvern, yelling 'Hi de hi!' to a crowd of uncomprehending kids. If you'd seen her Lady Macbeth, you'd know what a terrible injustice that is.

Jeremy Vine was talking about spitting in the street, Enfield having outlawed it. A man rang in to say that vomiting on the streets was a far more serious health hazard, and that they should have people patrolling the streets to enforce a ban. I'm not sure how these 'vomit wardens' would actually stop people throwing up, which as far as I am aware is not a wholly voluntary affair. But it might be interesting to see them try.

The next day he was talking about David Cameron's crackdown on binge drinking. As a listener, I felt that what would really have improved the debate was if at least one of the participants had been drunk, perhaps violently so. It would have given the discussion much-needed balance.

Meanwhile, doctors have come up with a few suggestions re: organ donation. One is to keep brain-dead patients 'alive' indefinitely (with their permission, of course) so that they can fish out organs from them at their leisure. From a marketing point of view, this is something of a tough sell. They are calling it 'elective ventilation'. Hmm, not sure that name's going to pull the punters in. How about, just off the top of my head, 'organic farming'? People like that, don't they?

not being funny

The human brain was on Jeremy Vine. Apparently, scientists have found a way to make thoughts audible. You could hear the brain talking on the radio and the voice they had given it made it sound alarmingly like Scooby Doo. Scooby Doo drowning. They were getting it to repeat words, and I longed for them to make it say 'Shaggy' so that I could confirm this resemblance - 'Raggy?' - but no. And they weren't taking requests.

I went to see Stewart Lee, who was also talking about Scooby Doo because he said he had only seen two films recently - Archipelago (an art film 'about a middle-class family on a disappointing holiday') and Scooby Doo On Zombie Island, which he had had to watch with his son about 800 times. He did not say whether these films had anything in common, but, having already noted the promising geophysical 'synergy' in their titles, I'm sure that I can find something. Watch this space.

What I like about Lee is that, whereas most comedians are content with just getting a laugh, he is not afraid to demand more and better quality laughter from his audience. He identified sections of the audience that weren't performing well, and told them to 'up their game'. He was right to be concerned, if the person next to me was anything to go by. He laughed only once, and spent most of the second half asleep. But then he was young, and insufficiently embittered.

The other act I saw this week - although, strictly speaking I never did see him - was 'Brian the Cockney Sovereign' playing at the Green Man's Cockney Night. Somewhere at the other end of the pub he was belting out such East End classics as, er, When I'm Cleaning Windows and, um, Ring Of Fire. When I tried to imagine 'The Cockney Sovereign' all I got was some kind of grotesque Mighty Boosh-style character. Or, even more terrifying, something from Noel Fielding's new Luxury Comedy series. Very aptly named, this programme - well, apart from the 'comedy' bit anyway. 'Luxury' implies a degree of self-indulgence, which - or so the bits I have seen indicate - is not too far off the mark. Indeed, so relentlessly 'out there' is it that at first I wondered if Fielding, without his comedy partner to restrain him, had actively gone insane.

But perhaps - and Stewart Lee is something of a pioneer in this respect - the ultimate goal of comedy is to go beyond laughter. In which case, Fielding's show may yet be hailed as a classic - along with The Royal Bodyguard, of course.

Great Expectations

At work we continue the job of filleting old job bags, scanning the contents if necessary. It's a living, and gives us a great opportunity to learn how they did things in the old days. Lorraine happened upon a reference to 'recruitment bags'. What were they used for?, we wondered. 'Perhaps they put them over people's heads', I suggested. In those dark days (2005-6), the only model they had for blood marketing was the press gang.

Alternatively, maybe the recruitment bags were a lot bigger than I had initially suspected, and could accommodate several entire donors, who would then be dragged off for (as it was then known) 'squeezing'.

Someone in the department is 'stepping down', so there has been quite a lot of excitement as to who will replace them. Working on the theory that it is always the last person you suspect, I eventually settled on the spider plant on the filing cabinet next to my desk. You may think this silly, but there is such a thing as diversity, you know. The real question is not: 'Why would a pot plant be offered this managerial post?' but: 'Why would it NOT?'

But in the end it went to the person who I initially expected would, all things considered, get it. Which was unexpected.

Not as unexpected as the snow though. This was so massively over-hyped that I never thought it would actually arrive. Then I looked out on Sunday morning and white stuff had been dumped all over the landscape, as though by the authorities themselves as a way of saying: 'So there!' We said it would happen and now - behold! But the night before there had seemed something a little desperate about all the pre-snow coverage of 'amber alerts' and already-cancelled flights at Heathrow. I was particularly struck by the Channel 4 News reporter standing next to a gritter and rather wildly advising viewers to 'wrap pensioners in blankets'. She didn't actually say 'whether they like it or not', but the implication was there, I think. Well, it should keep them quiet until the thaw.