A great film - 'Gran Torino'

Gran Torino
A movie with a message – to make you think about life and death, living and dying, ‘Gran Torino’ (116 minutes) does all that.

Walt Kowalski (Eastwood), a retired car worker/Korean War veteran has just buried his wife, and sees the indifference of his family and the shallowness of her eulogy. Arriving home in a run- down quarter of Detroit, and still sore, he’s met by the folks next door, a Vietnam family.

Walt doesn’t take kindly to foreigners, kids – anybody, pretty much, but he acts to protect them from a gang of young thugs, even though it’s really just his own peace he’s looking out for. The family lavishes unwanted gifts of food and flowers on him – still he doesn’t like them.

Showing how immigrant kids can go wrong, the film has rival gangs doing the dozens and mouthing off before trying to get the young Thao (Bee Vang) on side, forcing him to steal or vandalize the Gran Torino in Walt’s garage.

Walt thwarts the attempt, and sounds off at the boy. Later, when the boy is assigned to do chores for a week as atonement, the old man teaches him about life – about how men talk to men, and how things work generally.

He’s invited into the house to eat with the family and is sort of adopted by Thao’s sister, Ahney Her (Sue Lor). The gangs get rougher and rougher on the two kids until hard man Walt roughs it up and the gang retaliate – shooting at the family home, beating up Thao and raping his sister.

Here you might have expected Walt/Clint to wade in with guns blazing, but instead he locks the boy in the garage and goes off to confront the gang alone. Surrounded by the silence of frightened neighbors, producer and director Eastwood makes the film end on an entirely unexpected and ultimately more meaningful note.

Eastwood’s performance as a vet that has lived with the horror of killing since the 50s and finds redemption and (for the padre at any rate) salvation is masterful and totally convincing.

Notable too are all the main characters – villains, grandmother, barber, and all. This film works primarily because it rings true, not because it uses graphics to great effect or goes the whole nine yards with action. It is precisely its lack of shoot-outs and car chases that makes it more of a drama, less of a spectacle.

I came out thinking about what I had learned about living and dying, about some of the roots of our social ills, which is always better than coming out deafened and partly blinded by cinematography.
Robert L. Fielding

Dad's Army - 40 years young this week

Still as popular as it soon became in 1968, everybody's favourite sit-com, 'Dad's Army' is 40 years old this week and still going strong, even though most of the senior citizens of its wonderful cast have passed away to that Home Guard platoon in the sky.

Its popularity has hardly lessened with avid fans eagerly watching repeated episodes on the box or buying up the DVDs and videos of the show.

Showing what the British people were made of back in the dark years of the 2nd World War is what 'Dad's Army' did best. At Warmington-on-sea, on the south coast of England, the threat from Hitler would have been at its greatest to those left on our mainland.

Younger, fitter men were elsewhere - fighting in Europe, leaving older and younger men and women to defend our treasure - Britain. These men and women did it all with a smile on their lips - the appeal of Dad's Army is made more so because it rings true, and because, of course, it is hilarious.

Robert L. Fielding

Review of a classic film - 'Birdman of Alcatraz'

Birdman of Alcatraz (1962)
(TCM) Burt Lancaster, Karl Malden, Telly Savalas

The re-showing on TCM of what is now almost a classic film showed Lancaster at his best – playing a man capable of extreme violence, changed by an abiding interest.

The true story of Robert Stroud, interned in Levenworth penitentiary, where he conducted tests and experiments on canaries to discover remedies for the ills that afflict them, began with a dangerous man indicted for murder.

Finding a fledgling sparrow in the exercise yard one day, Stroud nurses it back to health, teaches it a few tricks – hopping onto his finger and flying, and his interest in all things avian begins.

Called ‘Birdman of Alcatraz’ by Hollywood, Stroud actually conducted most of his research at Levenworth, although he was transferred to the infamous island later.

Supported by his mother and then by a benefactor, Stella Johnson, whom he later married, Stroud became the leading authority on avian illnesses and their treatment, writing in the journals of the day on his findings.

Karl Malden (Harvey Shoemaker) played Stroud’s Nemesis governor, later to become a more understanding governor of the prison in which Stroud spent some of his early years, while a young Telly Savalas played Stroud’s cellmate as he nursed the birds to health, or to their death, until he started to cure them.

Science sometimes progresses accidentally, as Lister found with his discovery of penicillin. Stroud merely hit on remedies at first, but then became more systematic as his knowledge increased. The interest sustained him through his 50 odd years in prison.-
Robert L. Fielding

The 8th Al Ain Classical Musical Festival

With ten concerts - ten great performances resulting in ten standing ovations – the 8th Al Ain Classical Music Festival, under the patronage of H.H. Sheikh Abdulah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Minister of Foreign Affairs was a huge success.

The programme of impressive and ambitious concerts began on March 6 with Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni’, sung in Arabic, and ended with arias from Verdi and Puccini in Abu Dhabi.

Four guest orchestras, including our own UAE Philharmonic Orchestra, accompanied 12 soloists in arias from well known operas including Tosca, The Barber of Seville and Madame Butterfly, and several symphonies and overtures, including Mozart 41, Beethoven’s Fifth, and Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’, narrated in Arabic by Adel Bakri.

The venues were the impressively splendid Municipality Theatre, and the atmospheric Al Jahili Fort, and the Auditorium in the Emirates Palace Hotel in the nation’s capital. Concertgoers at all three were greeted by representatives of our hosts, and the evening air was beautiful as were the settings.

For those with a more involved interest in classical music, several workshops were given in Abu Dhabi.

Admission was mostly free and all the concerts were well attended, making it very likely that we can look forward to the 9th Festival next Spring.
Robert L. Fielding

English Concert Tour of the UAE

Al Ain, 31st January 2008

Sheikh Khalifa Auditorium, in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Tawam Medical Campus was packed on Thursday night – the English Concert were in town, ending their tour of the country.

In his welcoming opening remarks, HE Sheikh Mohammed Khalaf al-Mazroui, the Director General of Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage, said he hoped the English Concert had saved the best until last – they duly obliged with an excellent evening’s music.

The concert began with the work of an ‘adopted Englishman’, George Frederick Handel – his Concerto Grosso in A op.6 no.11, which, the copious programme notes informed us, was actually the last of a set of 12 to be written by a then ailing Handel.

J.S. Bach’s Cantata ‘Weichet nur, betrubte schatten’ – the ‘Wedding Cantata’ came next and was delightfully suggestive of a special occasion in Springtime. The Soprano, Lucy Crowe gave us a hint of her great range.

In the time honoured tradition of concerts in London, New York or Berlin, the conductor, Harry Bickert, treated the audience to an amusing anecdote; this one from Handel’s life. During the hectic rehearsal of one of his difficult operas, Handel, infuriated by the antics of his petulant prima donna, the Italian singer, Cuzzoni, actually threatened to throw her out of one of the upper windows of his Brook Street home.

Harry Bickert got things underway after the brief interval, with three arias for Cleopatra from the opera, ‘Giulio Cesare in Egitto’. It was in this fine music that we were truly entertained by Lucy Crowe’s amazing vocal range, poise and verbal dexterity, I know not what to call it.

Finishing with Geminiani’s Concerto in D Minor ‘La Folio’, before leaving to great applause from a very appreciative audience in which only a very few took pictures on their mobile phones in mid-concert, Harry Bickert gesticulated to his players that an encore was appropriate.

The treat was a great one; Handel’s ‘Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’ – epitomizing his vast output, composed at his famous home of 36 years, 25 Brook Street, where he lived until his death in 1759, and which now houses The Handel Museum.

The evening was courtesy of HH Sheikh Tahnoun bin Mohammed Al Nahyan, the Ruler’s Representative in the Eastern District of the Abu Dhabi Emirate, and the British Embassy, represented on this lovely evening by Edward Oakden, the British Ambassador to the UAE.

Sweeney Todd – the Demon Barber of Fleet Street

(116 minutes) – directed by Tim Burton

Instead of financiers in the city of London turning the handle of an ‘immense pecuniary mangle’, as Dickens once described the goings on there, Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp) and his pale-faced accomplice, Mrs Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) turn the handle of a far more gruesome contraption in this odd musical version of the cautionary tale of the legendary 19th century serial killer.

Set in a London Dickens would have been at home in, full of rats, some two-legged ones, and all sorts and grades of filth, Benjamin Barker, later using the alias of Todd, returns from years of exile, fitted up for a crime he didn’t commit, and vows to avenge the great wrong done to him by Judge Turpin (Alan Wickman).

In his absence, wife and daughter left in dire penury, are taken in by Turpin, and later, the Judge decides the time has come to wed the daughter, now his ward, Johanna (Jane Wisener).

Meanwhile, Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower), a sailor who alighted with Todd, falls for the Lady of Shallot-like Joanna and treats the audience to one of the best songs in the whole production whilst trying to extricate her from an asylum.

The rest, as they say, is history; Sweeney develops what almost amounts to a production line of ingredients for pies devoured by customers of a newly prospering pie shop. Throats are slit, blood squirts a yard as a line of horrified men meet a grizzly end in Todd’s barber’s chair.

I won’t spoil the ending for you, but you should see it, for the acting, the singing, the appallingly dark sets, the great performances and the music.

Two things I may never do ever again after seeing this film: eat a meat pie, or be shaved by a barber who uses a cut-throat razor.
Robert L. Fielding

Dubai metamorphoses

Next time you have a minute to spare, sit down and count everything around you – impossible – probably! Let’s limit it to the fixtures and fittings – everything that comes with the flat: floor tiles, skirting boards, doors, window frames, panes of glass, light switches – it’s going to be a big list. Right, now multiply that number by 100,000 – that’s the stuff on its way along Emirates Road to Dubai Marina and the building sites around Dubai.

Bumper to bumper lorries, rivers of steel, slow moving some of the time, stationary most of the time, or just winding around the roundabouts on the way.

Now add to that, the thousands and thousands of people traveling by car and bus and you have an idea what is happening in Dubai. – the rapid building of what amounts to another city, no less. Hundreds and hundreds of tower blocks – steel and glass constructions that are springing up almost daily.

If you don’t go down that way much, you’ll be amazed next time you do, and the next after that, on for a year or two, probably for the next ten or twenty.

Step back, if you have the time, the parking space and the inclination of your neck to look at the virtual forest – except this is no computer model, no virtual reality, but the reality of what Dubai is – the mushrooming of an ultra modern, state of the art metropolis.

Next come the inhabitants, tourists, homeowners, prospective homeowners and their attendant agents, financiers. The guys putting the place up are already there – you can see them like so many ants moving up and down the walls, along the floors and driving the machinery preparing ground for new sites.

I don’t know the statistics, but just taking a look at it, I would say they are of the astronomical sort – something approaching the billions of dollars poured in to get it all moving skyward.

Burj Dubai towers over all, its progress upwards slowing as it nears that magic number that makes it the tallest building on the planet – until the next one – in Dubai!

Catering for the families that will people this verticality are the massive malls: Dubai Mall, the Mall of the Emirates, Mall of Arabia – the mind reels with it all.

Let’s not dwell on cars – enough of them already, but how many thousands more are bound to arrive, and where will they all fit in?

The authorities have thought of that; the Metro snakes alongside Sheikh Zayed Road, a serpent of concrete and steel. The trains – unmanned ones, are arriving early next year. Speaking personally, I can’t wait until they begin to flash up to Ibn Battuta Mall. What sort of futuristic sound will they make – will it be heard above the noise from all those cars?

The future is now in Dubai, and elsewhere – the Guggenheim and Louvre in Abu Dhabi, Dubailand – pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, and it will soon be right here, on our doorsteps.
Robert L. Fielding

Why we live together: our need to hear noise

Next time you go camping up in the mountains or in the desert, listen to the silence. Listen to what it’s like to be alone in the world.

After the routine noise of your working days, it probably sounds beautiful; you can hear your pulse, your breathing, regular and even; silence is indeed golden, but what if that was all there was – silence!

It’s difficult to imagine what that would be like, isn’t it – we live in a world full of noise – the obvious noise made by traffic and people generally – the noises we try to get away from but usually can’t – and the sometimes desired noise that we call music. Noise is ubiquitous –it’s all around us, all of the day and most of the night too.

We all sleep through the constant, dull sound of our air-conditioning, through the noise of the cars still going by at three in the morning sometimes, and the noise from those asleep in the same room.

But what would our lives be like without noise – ask the deaf! Noise tells us that we are not alone, and although there’s usually too much of it for our liking, if there was none we would feel lonely.

Jean-Paul Sartre said that hell is other people, but in a world where few people existed, other people that could be trusted would have made life bearable. In a world of dog-eat-dog, of lawlessness, being surrounded by people you knew and liked was probably vital.

To choose to live as a hermit (from the Greek ἔρημος erēmos, signifying "desert", "uninhabited", hence "desert-dweller"; adjective: "eremitic") - a person who lives to some greater or lesser degree in seclusion and/or isolation from society, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermit) would be an odd choice in a world of danger, and only the strong or the insane would contemplate it.

Living in communities arose, it has been said, more from the need to cooperate to manage common land than out of the need for defence. Nevertheless, people would most certainly have felt safer with others close by, and the history of our planet and its people is the history of the community – of the rise of walled cities, of treaties between communities, and of conflicts between them.

‘Eidgenossenschaft’ – German for confederation, the term literally translates means "oath fellowship"; a confederacy of equal partners, which can be individuals or groups such as states, formed by a pact sealed by a solemn oath, and is quite different from the hierarchies that grew out of feudalism - pacts between unequal partners.

Both were most probably concerted attempts to fend off interlopers as well as live off the land. Now that both mean less than they used to, why do we want to live together – in cities that have outgrown their usefulness to us – cities in which living is harder than it has ever been? The answer is because the alternative is probably too dreadful to contemplate – living alone, with all that silence!
Robert L. Fielding