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Just finished watching the film starring Richard Gere called Hachi: A Dog’s Tale. I cried. And I plan to watch the original Japanese version as well. I have a feeling that it will be better. Originals tend to always be better than remakes – that’s why they remake them.

After watching the film, like many people who were touched by the true story of a loyal dog, I wanted a one of those Samurai dogs.

Yeah, I know, it’s sad that it takes just one film to get me feeling like that about a dog.

But really what is it that touched me?

In a society where thoughts and feelings expressed in an email are instantly sent and instantly forgotten and everything seems so fleeting, the notion or act of loyalty seems, to me, dead. Amongst people anyway.

And I miss it. Have I ever had it?

I don’t think so.

Why do I think that? Because in this modern society, everything and everyone is dispensable. Everything can be upgraded and a newer version can be found. It’s the same with consumables and sadly, it’s the same when it comes to people.

It seems in a society where friends could be someone you’ve met once and then they’re a friend on Facebook and anything you say on the internet has a shelf life of one second or so, the story of a faithful dog who manages to wait for his master at a railway station to return even after the master has died, makes me miss what I’ve never had. Perhaps the closest would be my family but they have no choice. I sound like a cynic.

In a society when it it’s so easy to ‘friend’ someone and the next second to ‘unfriend’ them; to marry someone and within 24 hours divorce the same person…I think it’s sad and wonder if this type of loyalty can only exist between man and dog and the rare minority of couples who stick with each other through thick and thin.

If, and the possibility is high, I end up on my own, I think I’d end up an animal person. I won’t go crazy and have seven cats but perhaps a couple of fish tanks, a cat and – go on, shake your head, I don’t care – one of these dogs. I don’t want a dog to fetch a ball for me, all I want is a loyal dog – a lot to ask for. It’s selfish but if I had a dog like that, that after my death still misses me, still waits for me, it would give my life more meaning than I can ever imagine. It’s sad but I wish I had that type of loyalty in my life. And if I ever felt it, I’d be given the opportunity to give it back. Because it is a gift given to you. The devotion. It’s a gift. A massive gift. And I used to think belonged only to fairy tales. But this film is based on a true story and to continue to live, I must hope that it could be a reality too.

In the end it’s not what you have achieved in life, the millions you make, the number of degrees you have or what you have in terms of materials things – in the end, I believe it’s the people or pets you leave behind that cared about you that matters. That’s what really matters most. Call me overly sentimental, I don’t care. Death brings equality to all – everyone is in the end reduced to bone or dust – the only thing not equal is how you are remembered by those who loved you.

I wonder if I could ever inspire that sort of loyalty.

What about you?

Have you ever felt that type of loyalty?

Never Let Me Go is a film directed by Mark Romanek and based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel of the same name. The screenplay was written by Alex Garland the British novelist who wrote the book The Beach.

It is a good but depressing film that makes you think about life and the human desire to live as long as possible.

The film follows the lives of three donors, played by Keira Knightly, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield, who are basically clones.  The focus of the film is on their relationships with each other – a love triangle – as they grow up together and later, how they cope as donors.

As donors they are perceived as soulless and purely potential body parts for an ever increasing older population and their only respite from being put through surgery after surgery donating their organs is to become a carer first.

The carer’s job is to look after a donor until they die, usually after undergoing surgery.  The clones are seen as not ‘human’ by those who know of them.

The three main characters discover the secret behind their existence at a special school for donors. Though the secret that the children are donors may have been a secret to the children; it seems that the society they lived in had got used to or accepted the fact that these clone children existed for the sole benefit of others. And even if those in society didn’t like the idea, it was obvious from the film that there wasn’t much they could do about it.

It was hard to see the positive from the film Never Let Me Go but there was; that it doesn’t matter how long you live and what defined you while you lived, the most important things are love, friendship and hope. I think. I found it hard to keep a grasp of that tiny hint of positivity though.

Is it better if the body parts were incubated in a tube? Is it better that they don’t have a a name or is from a whole human body? Is it better that what donors are at the moment, anonymous and just a body part, and most importantly, consensual?

Ironically, the word donor suggests a transaction that is consensual; dictionary.com defines it as ‘to present as a gift’. But the donors in the film are not donors but more like human cattle – to be reared, to used and to be disposed of and there is  nothing consensual about it.

Why didn’t the donors try to escape like those in The Island (another film about cloning)? Was the system so ingrained in them that it was a conditioned response? The boundaries from clone closure and the real world didn’t seem strong enough. Couldn’t they just ‘disappear’?

It would be interesting to read the book – something on my to-do list.

Have you seen the film or read the book?

What do you think?

You look good. Thanks for coming back. It’s because it’s Friday isn’t it? You smile but say nothing. You sip the hot tea I’ve given you. I won’t tax you by rambling on too much today I promise.

I watched the film Tamara Drewe a week ago and was surprised to find that I enjoyed it. During the film I found myself laughing out loud a few times. It was mostly because of how it represented writers in the film. It alluded to the writing process and how writers work.

Adapted from the original Posy Simmonds comic strip series, the film was directed by Stephen Frears and the screenplay written by Moira Buffini.

Tamara Drewe is a very funny film, an adroitly observed satire on sexual mores, the pretensions of literary folk and country life that combines rural rumpy-pumpy with an ending of grand-guignol horror that gives lie to the notion of the countryside as tranquil arcadia. Read more…

Posh Tamara Drewe (Gemma Arterton) returns to her hometown set in rural middle-class Dorset countryside and stirs up drama at the nearby farm that functions as a writer’s retreat.

The farm is run by Beth (Tamsin Greig) who tirelessly caters for her best-selling author husband Nicholas (Roger Allam) who prides himself of churning out ten pages every day. In the film he says ‘The real secret to being a writer is knowing how to lie.’ In the film he is both a liar and a cheat.

It is the character Glen (Bill Camp), an American writer, that made me chuckle when he complains about having writer’s block comparing it to being constipated. Later when his writing is flowing he gets excited and compares it to having just passed a big massive stool. I can’t remember the exact words he used but it was funny. At one point, Glen says ‘my kind of books aren’t about sales’ and you get a table full of writers chatting about self-publishing. And of course, Glen is writing about Thomas Hardy alluding to the fact that Simmonds’ comic strip series is based on Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd.

Whatever the merits or flaws of the film, there were some really good lines in it.

The film ends with Nicholas’s view that all writers are thieves and liars. That’s a bit harsh. As writers, we do steal from life and we do make things up. But don’t all artists? Doesn’t everyone?

What did I think of the film?

I enjoyed it mostly because of the references to writers and writing. The most likeable character I found was Glen – though by the end of the film I wasn’t sure. Tamara Drewe has been compared to Bridget Jones and I’m sorry but you can’t compare the two. Bridget Jones was an extremely likeable character – Tamara Drewe not so much.

Have a great weekend.

Have you seen the film?

What did you think of how it represented writers and the writing process?

Leave a comment. It’s good to know.

Last but not least, I’ve been following the recent discussions on the banning of Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson and the uproar that came from this. If you have not come across it yet, here are some posts that explain it better:

The Power of Speaking Loudly (via Laurie Halse Anderson’s blog)

Why You Should Read Soft Pornography (via Huffington Post)

All of which have inspired others to #speakloudly:

Speak Loudly – In Defense of Laurie Halse Anderson (via Myra McEntire)

Suffer the Children (via Patty Blount’s blog)

“Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us.”

Stephen R. Covey – Author and Speaker

CURRENT STATUS: Reminder, Motivator and Review Meeting (Read on if you want to join me in my Corporation of One meeting)

What l have learnt:

• Literary Agency Must Change (via Huffington Post).
• No, all interns aren’t idiots, in fact most of them are anything but (via Janet Reid’s blog).
• What do you need in an agent? (via agent Chip MacGregor’s blog).
• My Personal Opinion on Query Updates (via Neverending Page Turner).
• 7 Things I’ve Learned So Far, by Jacqueline West. Find people who believe in you she says. And I’ll add, stay away from people who don’t.

What I have done:

• Catching up with reading blog posts.
• Read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and reading Charlotte Gray.
  

WORD COUNT: Night Walker 159,000 words. Finished. Leaving to marinate. Having a break before getting into editing mode for Insomniac Foetus.

So good to see you. We survived the garden gnome attack. I was pretty impressed with those moves of yours. Wearing purple didn’t help. But you surprised me. Where did you learn those moves? It was hilarious. No, not you. The way they scampered. You and me against hundreds of gnomes. I bet Chuck was surprised.

Hey, thanks for saving my life.

You’re my best friend.

I see you blushing.

Okay, I’ll shut up now. *Big hug*

Oosters is with us today and feeling a little experimental – and I’m liking it. Here’s a film review and a bit more on Sylvester Stallone’s film career.

Enjoy and I’ll see you soon.

THE EXPENDABLES ****4 Stars

Directed by Sylvester Stallone
Starring Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Steve Austin, Terry Crews, Mickey Rourke and Bruce Willis

~ Film and actor reviewed by Oosters ~

Sylvester Stallone’s recent career resurgence has been something of a surprise. After a string of awful, deserved box office failures (his ill-advised remake of Get Carter followed by the expensive flop Driven saw both D-Tox and Avenging Angelo go to straight to DVD in the UK, and there was also the possible career nadir of playing the villain in Spy Kids 3), he presumably sat down and thought about what was going wrong, coming to the conclusion that he had strayed too far from what made him popular in the first place.

As interesting and laudable as his efforts to stretch himself may have been (as in the flawed but interesting Cop Land for example), people don’t really want to pay to see Stallone tortured by inner demons – they would rather see him torture some foreigner or a terrorist perhaps.

Rather than wrestling with inner turmoil, audiences are more keen to see him wrestle other similarly muscular men, followed by a violent demise and an even more wince-inducing quip. So he did what all steroid-infuse men approaching pensioner age do – went back to his roots.

The only films Stallone made that ever saw any kind of critical respect were the original iterations of Rocky and Rambo (the latter in fact called First Blood but now referred to by most as Rambo 1 for reasons of clarity that will soon become perfectly understandable).

Rocky in fact was his breakout hit, in which he not only starred but wrote the screenplay (and was even Oscar-nominated for both). It has stood the test of time very well, a spirited and oddly moving underdog tale that has the strength of being far more interesting than any of its increasingly inferior sequels by virtue of the fact that Rocky loses at the end.

The franchise had been dead and buried for sixteen years (after the dreadful nail in the coffin that was Rocky V, easily the worst in the series) when he elected to return to the role that had served him so well with Rocky Balboa.

With Stallone behind the camera himself, much to most people’s surprise it was a success, not only with critics who warmed to the mature and poignant tone he opted to use but with audiences, who seemed to have reserves of affection for the character.

While not quite as accomplished as the original, it’s easily better than any of the other sequels and is a fitting finale – he loses at the end again, bringing things to a satisfying full circle.

Deciding to attempt the same trick with a different character, he tried his hand at another Rambo film next (simply titled “Rambo”, itself the title to the sequel to First Blood, which can be differentiated by the subtitle “First Blood Part II”, although that doesn’t explain the third film being called “Rambo III” – you know what, fuck it, let’s just call them Rambo 1-4 for crying out loud).

Although never as critically respected as Mr Balboa, John Rambo was an interesting enough character in the original film, and had experienced a similar cinematic life with a decent original, each sequel being less interesting than its predecessor, and culminating in a final instalment so mind-blowingly stupid it effectively killed the franchise (Rambo III is so bad it’s hard to watch it now and not view it as some sort of parody).

While Rambo 4 may not have enjoyed the critical respect of Rocky Balboa (in fairness, as a series it was never well-received in that quarter, even First Blood – sorry, Rambo 1 – was given short shrift), and it wasn’t as much of a commercial success (still turned a tidy profit though), it’s a pretty impressive piece of lunk-headed entertainment, utterly stupid and unsubtle but a fun throwback to the sort of stuff Stallone used to churn out on a regular basis in his heyday.

Critics may scoff and its artistic merit might be debatable, but it’s in the same ballpark as Demolition Man, Cliffhanger and Rockys 2, 3 and 4 – testosterone-fuelled nonsense that only the churlish would fail to get some entertainment from.

It is to that arena he has returned with The Expendables, a macho men-on-a-mission movie with an all-star cast of action film actors, and it suffers from all the same flaws critics have been complaining about throughout Stallone’s career. It’s dumb, simplistically-plotted, low on character development and high on explosions.

But it’s fun, easy to watch and instantly forgettable.

It’s Stallone, back doing what he does best, while his no-doubt aching biceps can still manage it – making us put Citizen Kane aside for a while, and indulge ourselves in the heady likes of Assassins, Lock Up and Tango & Cash.

Have you seen the film?

What did you think of it?

Leave a comment. It’s good to know.

Piranha 3D – Film Review

Splice: Film Review

Toy Story 2 – Film Review

Inception – Film Review

Predators – Film Review

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse – Film Review

Whatever Works – Film Review

Shrek Forever After – Film Review

“People who soar, are those who refuse to sit back and wish things would change.”

Charles R. Swindoll – Author and Pastor

CURRENT STATUS: Reminder, Motivator and Review Meeting (Read on if you want to join me in my Corporation of One meeting)

What l have learnt:

• Sometimes it’s good to stop and have a good old daydream.

What I have done:

• Got to learn lines for a shoot so nothing much on the writing front.
  

WORD COUNT: Night Walker 159,000 words. Finished. Leaving to marinate.