Tom Roper's Weblog

Bird on the wire

In my role as cultural commentator, I have noticed that there seems to be a vogue for films which use Leonard Cohen songs for their titles, witness Take This Waltz and A Thousand Kisses Deep. I mean to exploit this trend before audiences move on to something else, so I have been casting around for possibilities. Even in these relaxed times, I doubt if I could get away with Don't Go Home With Your Hard-on, so I've been thinking of Bird on the Wire. The problem is it's been used, once by Cohen himself, and once, as Bird on a Wire, I was astonished to see, in what looks like a very mediocre vehicle for Mel Gibson and Goldie Hawn.

My Bird on the Wire will be very different, a sensitive portrayal of a young woman funambuliste, who plans to find fame by walking a tightrope from the Gherkin to the Shard at the 2012 London Olympics . The villainous Mayor of London, on the orders of an oriental gambling syndicate, tries to sabotage this by tampering with the wire. Will the bird on the wire succeed, or will she fall to her death on the deck of the royal barge, moored underneath? 

Atonement

I am possibly the last man in the country to see Atonement, which I enjoyed greatly on DVD recently.

There are scenes shot at Cuckmere Haven, a spot where I run quite freqently. Yet the location credits don't mention it at all; they mention Redcar, whose beach deos duty for Dunkrk, St John's Smith Square, nicknamed Queen Anne's footstool, where Paul and Lola are married, and some others, but not Cuckmere. I wonder why.

atonement, cuckmerehaven, sevensisters

Hollywood Librarian

The British premiere of the Hollywood Librarian passed off very well. Over sixty people came from all over the south-east to the University of Sussex for Monday evening's showing, in the company of the film's director Ann Seidl.

The film contrasts the portrayal of librarians in cinema with he realities of the modern information profession. So sequences from films such as the 1957 Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn vehicle Desk Set are cut with interviews with modern librarians of all types. We follow the struggle in Salinas, John Steinbeck's home town, to keep libraries open; a group of convicts in San Quentin, who benefit from the library's prison service, raise funds for the threatened libraries. The destruction and looting of Iraq's National Library and the fire at Alexandria are compared.

This is a brief account, so brief as to traduce a very rich film. I wondered how well a film about American librarians would be received by a British audience. But while some of the detail, for example the political processes that the Salinas campaign goes through, are specific to the USA, the problems they face, of closures, of a lack of understanding of what it is we do, of trying to run libraries as if they were supermarkets or fast food outlets, are universal.

I was disappointed to spot no reference to Peter Sellers' performance as a young librarian involved in an affair with one of his readers in Only Two Can Play, a film version of Kingsley Amis's That Uncertain Feeling, which owed a great deal to his friend Philip Larkin's experiences as a public librarian.

The audience last night were mostly librarians; but the film ought to be seen by those who use libraries and, most importantly, by those who fund them, or fail to.

European première of Hollywood Librarian

I see that the European première of Hollywood Librarian is to take place in Athlone at the Irish Health Science Libraries Group conference. I believe a UK showing, organised by CILIP, is not far off.
See the trailer on YouTube

Stalin/Iron Curtain/Passport/Sexual Promiscuity/Swimming

Lorcan Dempsey comments on the Internet Movie Database's new look and functionality.  I spend a great deal of time on IMDB at the moment, as I  and a colleague retrospectively catalogue  a video collection.
IMDB keywords are fascinating, and have inspired a new parlour game.
Which film has the following keywords on IMDB: Stalin/Iron Curtain/Passport/Sexual Promiscuity/ Swimming?
And which film has these: Aquarium/Classroom/Copy Machine/Cow/Crying?
For the answers, see  below

Flea pit

I tried to book some seats at the local branch of a chain of cinemas through their web site. It wouldn't work, at least not in Firefox. I tried Safari too, with no greater success.
I fired off an e-mail, and received the following reply about 24 hours later, the interpolated comments being mine:
"Please accept my apologies for any lack of functionality you have encountered whilst using the xxx Website. I can appreciate your frustration as an Internet user that you would like to use your browser of choice. However I'm sure you can appreciate from our point of view that we want to make our website as readily available to the general public as possible. [And we don't want the money or patronage of anti-social misfits who refuse to worship at Bill Gates' altar-TR]
As a result it made sense to invest heavily into our web site to ensure immediate functionality with the world's most popular and well used [they forgot to say most insecure-TR] Web Browser "Microsoft Internet Explorer" [why the quotation marks?-TR]. A significant majority of the world's internet users have IE installed on their machine even if it is not their first choice of browser so the option to access the xxx Website through this medium is always on offer to the customer. [Microsoft announced back in 2003 that they would no longer develop IE for the Mac, the page on their site now saying "....as of January 31st, 2006, Internet Explorer for the Mac is no longer available for download from Microsoft. It is recommended that Macintosh users migrate to more recent web browsing technologies such as Apple's Safari"-TR]
However I am happy to inform you that xxx is investing time and effort into ensuring functionality across the many Web Browsers available to
Internet Users, hopefully including Netscape Navigator and other Gecko based Web Browsers such as Opera and MoZilla. [Why the bizarre capitalisation of nouns...was this written by a German speaker? And the illiterate use of hopefully...?-TR]"

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