Paul Sheldon (James Caan) is a writer who longs to be taken seriously but has fallen into the rut of writing a series of florid but marketable novels set in the 1870s featuring the central character Misery Chastain. To free himself from the shackles of Misery, Sheldon writes a serious and worthy autobiographical novel about life in a slum (which sounds just as dreary as his other books, but that’s by the by), his completion of which coincides with the publication of the final Misery book, Misery’s Child, in which Sheldon has killed off his heroine. As he travels home from the remote Colorado retreat where he traditionally goes to finish each book, his car comes off the road. He is rescued by Liberace-loving nurse Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates).

Rescued isn’t exactly the right term, it turns out, since Wilkes turns out to be his ‘Number One Fan’. Her initial hero worship of Sheldon quickly becomes something more sinister, and when her discovery of Misery’s fate prompts a violent reaction he realises his life may be in danger. From this point, the film is a battle of wits between the two characters, as the incapacitated Sheldon plots his escape and the increasingly deranged Wilkes foils him at every turn. She also has to contend with the local police’s efforts to track down Sheldon after the discovery of his car. The film’s climax is gratifyingly gruesome.

If so much of the film is apparently unremarkable, what is it that makes it special? Primarily, I think, the character of Annie Wilkes and the performance of Kathy Bates, for which she won the Best Actress Oscar. Wilkes’ simple-mindedness, her puritanism and abhorrence of profanity, her stomach-churningly twee quirks of speech, all make her quite delightful to watch. She is giddily excited as she starts to read the latest Misery book. ‘What’s the ceiling that dago painted?’ she asks Sheldon. ‘The Sistine Chapel?’ he tentatively suggests. ‘Yeah! That and Misery’s Child – those are the only two divine things ever in this world!’ There is a dry vein of humour running through the film. Wilkes later complains, ‘People just don’t respect the institution of marriage any more,’ while she punctuates the air emphatically with the bottle of urine in her hand. The moments when she turns from harmless to menacing, when the eyes go dead, have the capacity to chill, provided you’re not laughing too much.

There are nice supporting turns from Richard Farnsworth, Frances Sternhagen and Lauren Bacall, but the film’s essentially a two-hander. Caan is perfect as Sheldon, tolerantly amused at Wilkes’ kookiness to begin with, and becoming more rebellious as he realises the fate she has planned for him. The end sees the liberated Sheldon (spoiler, I suppose, but the grammar of the genre permits no other possible outcome) reunited with his agent – but there is still a final little twist in store which is creepy and inspiredly comical in equal measure.

So there you have it. A black comedy, I’d say, with a lot of cheap thrills along the way – but there’s nothing wrong with cheap thrills. Like cheap music, they have their potency.

IMDb | Buy from Amazon.co.uk

Her outrage, melodramatic though it may seem, is at least comprehensible. If you don’t think Vertigo is one of the greatest films ever made, then presumably you haven’t seen it. Its score may be the finest of Bernard Herrmann’s dazzling career, and that is not a claim that can be made lightly when one looks at his credits (all those other Hitchcocks, Citizen Kane, Taxi Driver and so on – and also Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs Muir, a film somewhat neglected nowadays containing a Herrmann score that is one of my personal favourites, and was one of his own, I believe).

The score of The Artist consists almost entirely of original material. I noticed two obvious exceptions when I saw it last Friday: the song ‘Pennies from Heaven’, which is sung around the mid-point of the film; and, towards the end, the music from the ‘Scène d’Amour’ in Vertigo, which is stated in its entirety over the course of one of the later sequences.

I think the idea of some kind of rape is easily dismissed. If it’s legal for Hazanavicius to use Herrmann’s music, then it’s fair game. It’s not the first time the music of Vertigo has been used elsewhere, and it won’t be the last. And it’s not as if either a) the use of this music in The Artist devalues Vertigo at all (that wouldn’t apply even if The Artist were a bad film, which it isn’t) or b) the music is used at all insensitively in The Artist, let alone violently abused (as Wagner’s Tristan prelude was in Lars von Trier’s recent offering Melancholia, which I have avoided primarily for that reason, convinced that it would render the film intolerable for me – read Alex Ross on the subject). On the contrary, the music complements the visual aspect pleasingly, and the combination of the two creates a mood of great tension that is resolved brilliantly.

But in spite of the moral validity of using Herrmann’s music, there may still be a problem; and if there is a problem, then it is this: that anyone who is familiar with Vertigo will already associate the music with that film. When the music started in The Artist, I identified it in a split second, from the very first note. It sent a shiver of excitement running through my body. What a masterstroke it may turn out to be, I thought, after all of the original music that has gone before, suddenly to invoke Vertigo. Then, after a few moments, I began to have doubts. For while I was watching the faces of Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo (and Uggie the dog) on the screen, there were two other faces in my mind, namely those of James Stewart and Kim Novak. Try as I might, I was unable to divorce the film I was watching from the film already in my head, the one I have seen so many times before. As the emotion heightened on screen and that final exciting crescendo began to well, I was thinking in spite of myself of that climactic scene in the bell tower, where Stewart forces Novak up the steps to meet her fate.

At some level, then, the use of the music from Vertigo in The Artist must be considered a failure. I find it hard to imagine that it was chosen simply for its musical quality (though that would have been reason enough); presumably its inclusion was meant to suggest some connection between the two films, though exactly what I can’t say. But ultimately, to those who know Vertigo well enough, the music will inevitably be a distraction. Vertigo is a film of uncommon power, and for The Artist to succeed in breaking the bond between Herrmann’s music and its original application is too much to ask.

The Artist is a film of sufficient quality that the intrusion of Vertigo does not detract too much from its overall impact. The charisma of its stars, Uggie included, is great, and the charm of the film as a snapshot of a vanished golden age considerable. Ludovic Bource, the composer of the rest of the soundtrack, should be mentioned. His music is catchy and memorable (I’m still humming it now) and he is sure to win many awards for it.

How many books read in 2011?
86

Fiction/Non-Fiction ratio?
74.5/11.5 (the split book being Days and Nights in W12 by Jack Robinson, which I couldn’t make my mind up about)

Male/Female authors?
69.5/16.5 (a marginally wider disparity than last year – oops)

Favourite book read?
Buddenbrooks, without a doubt

Least favourite?
Perhaps Ted Hughes’ lame children’s poetry collection Meet My Folks!

Oldest book read?
I almost wrote King Lear (or was that Shakespeare?), but then remembered that last year I also read Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (early 13th century).

Newest book read?
I read Alan Partridge’s autobiography, I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan, immediately on publication. Back of the net.

Longest book title?
Probably Ilana Gershon’s The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting Over New Media, though it’s a close call

Shortest book title?
Ubik (Philip K. Dick)

How many re-reads?
Only two (Tolkien’s disappointing Smith of Wootton Major and Erich Kästner’s enchanting Emil and the Detectives)

Most books read by a single author?
14 (Alexander McCall Smith). His distant retinue is composed of Armistead Maupin (3), and Jane Austen, Susan Tomes, Raymond Chandler, Robert Graves, Stephen King, Philip K. Dick and Joanne Limburg (2 each).

Any in translation?
8, which seems a meagre return. Four German, one Swedish, one French, one Belgian and one Russian. And nothing in a foreign language, which is bad. This year I will at least make an effort to read something in French, which I failed to do in 2011.

How many books were borrowed from the library?
50

Best blog recommendation?
Skippy Dies, which I first read about on the pages of Asylum.

I had no clue what was going on:
The late Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker and the even later Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds stand out in this category.

Favourite character encountered this year:
Such a hard call to make, this. I think I have to say Hanno Buddenbrook, but I give the highest commendations to McCall Smith’s Bertie Pollock, Paul Murray’s Ruprecht Van Doren (Skippy Dies), Philip K. Dick’s Mr Tagomi (The Man in the High Castle) and Jane Gardam’s Bilgewater.

Top 3 books
It was a pretty decent reading year. One book stands out among all the others, and that is Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, which I began reading on holiday, sitting in Cologne Cathedral while I waited for an organ recital by Martin Baker to begin, and finished back in the UK. An utterly engrossing, lovable book. Perhaps I should investigate the family saga further in 2012. John Cheever’s Falconer was another highlight – a short novel about a university professor coping with life in prison. Like nothing I’ve read before, and Cheever is a writer with a magnificent eye for detail. On an arguably less exalted level – but no less wonderful – are Alexander McCall Smith’s 44 Scotland Street books, all seven of which I devoured in the space of a few months in the middle of the year. His humanity and tolerance are infectious.

Top 3 CDs
Of the year’s new releases, I listened to The Prince Consort’s recording of Brahms’ Liebeslieder-Walzer and Stephen Hough’s Other Love Songs a lot. I was fortunate to be at the premiere of the Hough in the summer, and it is a work I have grown to love. Simon Standage’s Mozart violin concerti with the Academy of Ancient Music and Christopher Hogwood have reminded me of the beauty of this music. I also found Christian Bruhn’s Timm Thaler soundtrack tremendous fun.

Top 3 films
I watched a titanic number of films last year (not Titanic; I am not mad). I rarely feel in the mood for watching Bergman, but I found it was his films that impressed me most of all. A genius. The Seventh Seal, Through a Glass Darkly, The Silence, but most of all Winter Light. I’ve been watching Fanny and Alexander over the New Year, for the first time in about ten years, and am enjoying being dazzled by it anew. Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp struck me as a great masterpiece, Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook both quite irresistible, and I’m delighted to hear that there is a new print being released in cinemas in a few months’ time. And I might name any of several others as my third film, but for the sake of variety let’s say Before Sunrise, which is a lovely film if you’re of a romantic disposition. (I saw a handful of brilliant new films at the cinema too, so for an alternative three try The King’s Speech, The Guard and Tomboy.)

Top 3 live music
It was a thrill seeing Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s production of Parsifal at ENO in February. It’s only recently that I’ve started going to see Wagner live, and Parsifal is perhaps my favourite opera. John Tomlinson was a superb Gurnemanz, and I marvelled at the economy of the scoring. It exposes as misguided the popular conception of Wagner as sprawling and overblown. Love Stephen Hough at the Wigmore though I did, I think Marc-André Hamelin provided my piano recital of the year at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, playing Haydn, Schumann, Wolpe, Debussy and, as his barnstorming finale, Liszt’s Reminiscences de Norma in the composer’s bicentenary year. And last of all, Pulp at Wireless. Jarvis has still got it.

Top 3 theatre
I’m including musicals and comedy, so there’s only one echt play, and even that’s not particularly echt – namely Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors, which I saw just before Christmas. A breathtaking thing to behold, and quite the most I’ve enjoyed myself in any theatre, perhaps anywhere ever. A rollercoaster, and wrong to single out individual performances in a production so delicious in every aspect (not least its superb music), but I must say I thought Oliver Chris particularly wonderful, funnier than I’ve ever known him before, not to mention James Corden, Tom Edden, Trevor Laird, Daniel Rigby, etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum. My trip to Chichester to see the new production of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd was a great treat, the cast superb (in spite of some doubts about Michael Ball), and I will make a point of revisiting it in London this year. And thirdly, Jonny Sweet’s lovely solo show, Let’s All Just Have Some Fun (and Learn Something, for Once), which I saw at the Soho Theatre in January. He stands at the front giving the audience bear hugs as they come in; one cannot but love the man.

Lastly, I must add another happy discovery, which has been on the periphery of my consciousness for a while but which I only began to pay attention to this year, John Finnemore’s radio sitcom Cabin Pressure. I think its central cast of four – Finnemore, Benedict Cumberbatch, Roger Allam and Stephanie Cole – must be just about the strongest and most likeable since Rising Damp. A fourth series has just been commissioned. There is no end to Finnemore’s talents, apparently. He also wrote an excellent sketch show for Radio 4, and drew a picture a day on his blog, Forget What Did, as a sort of Advent calendar last month. You owe it to yourself to have a look.

Here’s hoping 2012 is similarly happy, for me and for all of you!

One mint is ‘finished with a strickle of white chocolate’; another is ‘finished with a natural green coloured chocolate strickle’. I’d argue for the hyphenation of ‘green coloured’ or even the omission of ‘coloured’ altogether (Alan Hansen, take note), but my real beef is with ‘strickle’. I can see what’s happened. Some chocolate marketing bod has decided, quite wrongly, that the words already provided by the English language will simply not suffice. What the squiggly bit on top of the chocolate is, he reasons, is a sort of cross between a trickle and a stripe. A portmanteau word is clearly called for. Having vetoed ‘tripe’, he settles on ‘strickle’. And there the word now sits, adorning many thousands of boxes of chocolates.

I’m not against the evolution of language. Those French tosseurs who try and invoke the law to stop their mother tongue from being besmirched, I think they’re boum out of order. I like new words. Tweeple, webinar, laters, cromulent, paedogeddon. Every word has to be invented at some point. Dickens himself came up with ‘boredom’ and ‘dustbin’. The problem is, strickle already is a word — a word that, unless I’m very much mistaken, most of us use every day. OED defines it as:

n.
1.
a. A straight piece of wood with which surplus grain is struck off level with the rim of the measure. Sometimes applied to the amount so measured.
b. Applied to various instruments used for similar purposes in casting or moulding
2. A tool with which a reaper whets or sharpens his scythe. Also a mechanical grinder

v. trans.
To strike off with a strickle (the superfluous sand) in moulding; to shape (a core) or form (a mould) by means of a strickle.

It’s certainly a word that must pop up regularly in societies where grain and casting/moulding still feature heavily. It doesn’t take a genius to foresee the problems the House of Dorchester’s mindbogglingly careless use of language must inevitably create. Yevgeny turns up at his farm or his iron foundry after Christmas, asks ‘Hyend me thyet strieckel,’ and receives a chocolate in return. He can’t fulfil the daily grain quota, his family can only afford one potato a day (plus the chocolate), the Russian economy collapses, and China takes over the world. Thanks a lot, Dorchester.

Trickle is a lovely word. It sounds like what it is, flowing water, a babbling brook. It needs no addendum. If a new word is really needed to describe a stripe atop a chocolate, I would suggest squizzle (squirt/drizzle).

But the chocolates were very nice. Merry Christmas.

Later in the morning, the snow turned into rain. I looked out of a window across the Backs, the snow melting on the lawn, and saw the University Library in the distance. I suddenly had the sensation that I was Leo in The Go-Between, in an unfamiliar house, the grey-brown sky outside, the puddles.

Perhaps if I try hard enough, I will become Leo, I thought. Sometimes when I really want something that my rational mind knows to be impossible (normally invisibility), I can make myself believe, momentarily, that it may happen.

I had to stop being Leo and go back to work, but for a few seconds it was nice to be somewhere else.

Anyway, in the spirit of festivity, here are a few of my favourites.

I’m singing this Villette motet in a concert on Monday, for the first time in nearly ten years. What a fabulous piece. The final phrase should sound ecstatic, and will send shivers down the spine of choir and audience, if sung well (and in a good acoustic). We aspire to be as good as these young singers (age 13-18).

A touching song of a selfless act of charity.

A curiosity. The Wiener Sängerknaben from 1964, and quite an unprepossessing bunch they are, but their performance has charm and evokes something that is missing from Christmas today. Perhaps I have conceived some kind of false nostalgia for a German Christmas I never had. Gemütlichkeit and so on. The carol is originally Sicilian, I believe, and is also the basis of the Eels song ‘Baby Genius’.

A beautiful setting by Michael Praetorius of ‘Quem pastores laudavere’, not quite the same as the tune one usually hears. From one of the best Christmas CDs around, just rereleased at budget price.

Probably the definitive version of this classic.

And something from King’s, of course, featuring the choir of a few years ago. I have fond memories of singing John Joubert’s ‘Torches’ as a teenager when I first started singing in choirs. I hadn’t realised singing could be so exciting, though I don’t think I was ever quite as mad-eyed as the boy in the middle at the climax of this performance.

I’ll be around again before the month is out, I’m sure, but in any case let me take this opportunity to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

These people were mistreated, but they would not have suffered as badly if they had only possessed some instinct for self-preservation. They were the dodos of our school, trusting, credulous and the easiest of prey. Their experience at the hands of bullies appeared to leave them no less ignorant of the threat they faced.

Bespectacled and bookish, and conscious of my vulnerability for these reasons, I kept my head down and avoided trouble. Caution reigned over my adolescence, and I remained safe. It’s an effective solution in the short term, but the danger is that when you grow up, you find that you have forgotten how to live, perhaps never even knew how in the first place, and now it’s too late to learn.

Ce coup de poing en marbre était boule de neige,
Et cela lui étoila le coeur
Et cela étoilait la blouse du vainqueur,
Etoila le vainqueur noir que rien ne protège.

Il restait stupéfait, debout
Dans la guérite de solitude,
Jambes nues sous le gui, les noix d’or, le houx,
Etoilé comme le tableau noir de l’étude.

Ainsi partent souvent du collège
Ces coups de poing faisant cracher le sang,
Ces coups de poing durs des boules de neige,
Que donne la beauté vite au coeur en passant.

This marble punch was a snowball,
And it starred his heart
And it starred the victor’s jacket,
Starred the black victor whom nothing protects.

Stupefied he stood
Barelegged in the lair of solitude,
Beneath the gilded walnuts, mistletoe and holly,
Starred over like the blackboard in the classroom.

Often this begins at school,
These punches that fill the mouth with blood
These hard snowball punches,
That beauty jabs at the heart in passing by.

Jean Cocteau
English translation by Margaret Crosland

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

My transcription:

7. july

dear lydia and mike

greetings from hot + humid
tokyoo! just wanted to say
thanks again for taking
care of milou the fish while
i am away these couple of
weeks – jb + i really appreciate
it!

things here are great – doing
lots of wedding planning!

- anna + jean-baptiste

Hooray for library books! and best wishes to Anna and JB and Milou for a very happy life together.

Curt

1/5:
“Thief”

1/5:
“appauling!”

Presumptuous

1/5:
“This man is either lying dead in his bed or he is a crook. I suspect he is the latter. Thank you Amazon for refunding quickly and without problems. This guy is a rotten apple in Amazon’s fruit basket. People like him are party poopers when trying to have fun on the internet. Allas.”

1/5:
“this person is so desperate for money that he or she has to fraudulently obtain people’s hard earned cash for products they do not provide. I will try to summon up the pity for he or she, very sad case in life that they obviously do not have the brain power or social skills to earn money via legal means. Sleep well you sad waste of earth space. May you return as a space bar. Loser.”

Indulgent

1/5:
“I suspect the seller may have taken ill. Very strange.” [One mark out of five for the bastard's immune system.]

3/5:
“No sign of DVD after three weeks, nor any reply to either of two e-mails, but something disposes me to be merciful. It’s undoubtedly irritating, but it’s hardly the end of the world, and I dare say I may be able to get a refund from Amazon. Perhaps the seller has been prevented from fulfilling orders because of being struck down by swine flu, for instance. I do hope not.”

3/5:
“Perhaps the seller has been physically unable to fulfill orders and reply to Emails because of severe illness, accident or worse as they had good feedback before all these negative comments.”

Moralising

1/5:
“No delivery of item Emailed this person… no response Do not buy from this person… I hope youre conscience speaks to you about your actions… You will have to face your maker one day and give an account of your actions… You need to repent! ”

1/5:
“Is this really the kind of human being you want to be???”

Cockney

1/5:
“what a dip stick this geezer realy is. no replies and no dvds. why does amazon let him sell on here?”

Irate

1/5:
“***BE WARNED***THIS GUY IS A F*****G CROOK.HARD TO KNOW WHETHER TO WANNA RIP HIS HEAD OFF OR FEEL SORRY FOR HIM THAT HE STOOPS SO LOW AS TO ROB PEOPLE ON THE INTERNET FOR A FEW QUID. ANYWAY MY EXPERIENCE IS PRETTY MUCH THE SAME AS NEARLY EVERYONE ELSE,ITEMS DIDNT ARRIVE AND NO RESPONSE TO EMAILS.I GOT REFUNDED BY AMAZON. SO I REPEAT ***BE WARNED***DO NOT TOUCH THIS GUY WITHA BARGEPOLE!!”

1/5:
“DO NOT USE THIS SELLER IF YOU WANT TO BE RIPPED OFF. CROOK AND THEIF. ITEMS NEVER ARRIVE. F*****G D******D”

Contradictory

1/5:
“It was a con. Goods did arrive. No replies. Had to use Amazon Marketplace guarentee to get money back.”

Scatological

1/5:
“What a piece of fecal matter. same as the you guys no goods no replies to emails. Amazon you need to up your game”

1/5:
“another one that they have ripped off, get rid of this excrament from amazon, no sorry, they are the smeggy bacteria that live and suck on excrament, hope you die!”

Bionic

1/5:
“i ordered the bionic woman weeks ago now and i am still waiting for it if you are not going to send it to me could you please refund the cash please i have waited an extra week so could you please let me know what you intend to do thankyou”

1/5:
“Never received Bionic Woman DVD set. Judging by the other feedback for this seller, he’s either very sick (maybe dead) or a thief. Given a choice I”d rather have him die on me then steal from me.”

Immoderate

1/5:
“the lowest life-form on earth .. ”

Eeyore

1/5:
“it goes without saying but its all the better for being said, if something seems too good to be true it proberly is, as in this case, no item has been received and no acknowledgement from seller to my email, I should have read the reviews which sum this seller up”

Oblique

1/5:
“Is there room for one more in this boat before it sinks? Three of three items, 1 week overdue: No response. The rats have fled. Goodbye. Your time is up.”

Part of a bionic woman. Image from Wikimedia Commons

Is it possible, I wonder, to identify some correlation between spelling/literacy and anger level? I confess, I hesitate to give such trash an outlet on my blog (though, as you might justifiably point out, it hasn’t stopped me before). After all, what is more depressing about the internet than the instinct for attacking others that it evidently gives people? But perhaps we can laugh at things like this. It’s almost worth the trouble of setting up a fake Amazon account to watch these people in action.