Phil Peel's Blog

I remember buying The Lorax , the book that is, way back in the 1970s I think it was. Though it was a kids book and I was an adult the Lorax made a big impression on me.

I think it was one of the first kids books to deal with environmental issues and for some reason it struck a chord with me.

Years later I read it to my children and my wife, who was a teacher, took it into school to read to  her classes. One day sadly it got left there, so I no longer have the 30 year old copy.  (I’ve subsequently discovered that first edition copies can reach over £1000 )

So I was keen to see the new version ( with added 3D!) yesterday  I saw it in a press screening at the Edinburgh Film Festival.   So how had it survived the journey from short book to major feature film?

Not too bad. Ok it has been Disneyfied and cutened ( is that word?) I’m not sure about all the songs. Particularly toward the end, it all became a bit evangelical. and Hapy Happy ending, which creates the impression that the world has all been put to rights, when of course it hasn’t. There was a young romance which I’m not sure was in the original story, but they did need to fill 90 + minutes, so a romance is an easy option.

The young hero sets out to save the planet (sorry trees) not out of any altruistic intentions, but to impress the girl.   Apart from that  I think it stuck pretty much to Dr Seuss’s theme.

NOTE: I’ve now check out the original story, which begins and ends with the environment as a wasteland, though the ending has a glimpse of hope, when the young lad is given the last live seed. So yes the story in the film has been changed.

The ancient computer I’m typing this on at the delegates centre is really slow, so I’m going to leave it there, before I get too frustrated

But I think I’ll go and buy the book again.

A beautifully paced film directed with great assurance by Ryan Redford, about a lonely war veteran,  who 7 years after the war arrives at the family home of a fellow soldier. He’s been brain damaged, still carries his bayonet, has the crude behaviour of the the squaddie   and has still not recovered from the experience of killing. The  juxtaposition of this with  the family home life and the innocence of the sleeping children and caring mother creates an almost unbearable tension as you expect the worst to happen.  The acting is superb.

Through I feared this would all turn into extreme violence, but this accomplished feature does not go where you expect.    One to watch

Early morning breakfast on the first day of the Edinburgh festival for Ken, Graham and myself was a croissant and a coffee, gulped down en route to the delegates centre in order to catch the first film at 9am. This was the delightful Borrower Arriety, which was a beautiful Japanese animation adaptation of the English classic The Borrowers. Though I thought the music was overpoweringly sentimental at times, it was beautifully crafted, with excellent sound design. One scene had a contrived conversation on endangered species which spoilt the otherwise tight narrative

Ishiguro’s film forces us to consider the inevitabilty of our mortality and how we chose to pass the time before completion.

I saw two film recently over two days. One was the preview of Never Let me Go and the other was The Way Back, based on the book “the Long Walk”

During Never Let me Go I was wondering why the children didn’t try to escape. I was expecting this to happen, but they never did. It seemed unlikely and abnormal for the characters not to at least try.

But during the questions after  the film Ishiguro explained that he believed the majority of people accept their fate and live their lives acording to what the norm is .

I could understand this, but it wasn’t till I compared it with the The Way Back that I realised how Hollywood has conditioned us to accept that we will try to escape and usually succeed.

Having grown up on  thrillers such as The Great Escape, Escape from Alkatraz,  Shawshank Redemption,  Papillon etc. I have come to accept that the norm was that we would always try to escape or die in the attempt.

The Way Back is in this way typical, but we see at the beginning of the film, the thousands  …millions?  of other prisioners, who chose not to try to escape from Stalin’s labour camps

So once you think about about it, escapes are not the norm. The vast majority of prisoners do not try to escape . The children in Never Let me Go are prisioners by their conditioning and they have no knowledge of any outside worlds. So, like the vast majority of prisioners, they stay with what is familiar. Even if it is unpleasant or life threatening.

Interestingly Never Let me Go is listed in the top 10 escape movies.

http://www.flickchart.com/Charts.aspx?genre=Escape+Film

Just saw this on a preview.

A film about a couple who’ve lost their son.  This sounds like it could be a cue for a maudlin over-the-top emotional tearjerker.  …and it is a Hollywood movie, so the signs aren’t good.

But  this is a actually a hopeful positive film. OK I must admit there was the occasional tear (from me that is), but  the acting is so restrained and the the script feels so genuine that I wondered if the writer David Lindsay-Abaire had suffered a similar loss.  But no .. it is a fiction …thought the director John Cameron Mitchell had lost a brother so maybe that provided an empathetic insight.

Go see it as a beautiful example of how fictional drama can teach us something about ourselves and our relationships.