1246 The Last Armoured Train, Black Eagle and The Good Cop

Wednesday has been a solid work day with almost all Christmas cards completed, several with (for me brief letters. One trip to post these later afternoon was also used to buy some fruit and some inexpensive still bottled water, some prawns, and fresh veg. Early evening seems to be a good time for although it is the week before Christmas there is no indication of the customary rush which used to be experienced in greater London and Sunderland Morrison's. The task should be completed in the morning followed by an important afternoon trip and then I can try and relax. There have been two Myspace new friends whose profile and work merits relaxed attention and the ending of seasonal greetings. There are also all those missed birthdays. My equilibrium has been disrupted but do I need want equilibrium any more?

Part of the reason for believing there will be a relaxed few days is the confidence that both the matter which has lasted five years and the more recent concerns re the bank appear to be addressed in such a way that progress has and will continue to be made, hopefully with at least the bank situation being sorted by New Year. I dare not become hopefully about an early resolution of the actual circumstances of the misadventure of the premature and preventable death of my aunt. What is of different concern is the issue of attempted cover up and involving who and at what level?

I have stayed up, half watching cold war meets kung fu nonsense because it was set in Malta, the land of my fathers, so to speak, It is called Black Eagle, after a form of Kung Fu and a vehicle for its exponent Ken Tami. It is a familiar tail of F1 spy plane secret electronics coming down in neutral waters and both sides risking all in clandestine operations to recover the equipment with the Russians, mob handed, and the USA only a magnificent trio involving a priest and multilingual female specialist operator who has to also become a child minder for the sons of the Japanese Kung fu multi talented assassin and recovery man. There is a kind of pretend relationship between the two which is never taken beyond a hint.

Slightly better was a re-showing of the Good Cop in which in keeping with the American mythology of the genre there are two levels of Mafia murdering thieving and gangster, the ones who have codes of honour and gangster integrity recognise that police are only doing their job that is those who cannot be bribed along with the majority of the US justice system from Judges to prison guards and then there are the really bad guards who do the same but have no honour and in this instance it is the brother of the traditional Mafia terrorist. There is also a Marta Hari high class whore who has a soft spot for the good op who gets himself in prison for contempt in order to find out which the various levels of villains is responsible for shooting up his hi fi system. May have the title wrong as research to find out how critics reacted produced One Good Cop and Copland and Good Cop Bad Cop all with different storylines.

I did not expect to find out anything out about what was presented as true story the Russian film The Last Armoured Train. There have been the last Train Home films, Across Canada From Madrid, From Gun Hill and simply the Last Train, also El Ultimo Tren, which does not need to be translated However I was soon on the trail and discovered that the film was originally shown in 2006 as four part series each of 52 mins and is regarded by those interested in Russian cinema as part of the recent new wave with new interest in World War 2 much as in the US and UK we have flocked to Saving Private Ryan or the series Band of Brothers. The core of this film are the characters who successfully and against all manner of odds get the train through to where German army has encircle a Russian army during the first month of the war and the group, with help, enable an honourable retreat. Each of the principal characters has a back story which makes them unlikely to become heroes and heroines Given that this is a film from contemporary Russia it had all the hall marks of the kind of one sided heroic struggle of the people against everyone else which used to be the feature of Stalin culture, in which individual lives are recognised as indispensable for the great good and in the great scheme of things, however having said this the film does not attempt to portray the commanders as soulless and ruthless and the principal characters do not give their lives up willingly, but have a mature understanding of the reality of a war which has only commenced. The leader of the group reacts to the embrace of his new lover at the end of the film, you are alive, with well for the next few days.

I also discovered that there was such a train called the Hurbran used in the Slovakian uprising against the German army in 1944 and as in this film it had too take refuge for a time . The Polish Army also had such a last train at the commencement of World War 2 which had been used in the Polish Soviet War of 1919/21 when they had built 15 new ones after losing 8. This famous survivor was captured when Germany invasion of Poland, and was inspected by Hitler and much photographed. Another armoured train features in a site by Henry Louis Gomez set on "uncovering the truth from the propaganda and dimming memories" of an incident during the last days of the Baptista regime in Cuba. This is the armoured train of Santa Clara. Another article claimed that the Soviet Armoured Trains used in the Great War were used as rear guard weapons because the Germans were better trained. Had I not been so busy I might well have decided to pursue the role of armoured train in World War Two, or its importance in World War 1, something which I cannot recall has ever been a feature of films or documentaries before now. I thought the correct spelling was armoured and then changed when the articles were all under armoured and then changed back when using spell checker,

Wikipedia lists all the armoured train information known for Poland, Russia, Japan Slovakia, Iran, Croatia and France, In 1942 GB used an armoured train for an advance into Siam in an attempt to resist the Japanese advance in Malaya and closer to home an armoured train was used on the Romney Hythe railway as part of coastal defences in WW2.

1186 Bergman's Personna and When did you last see your father

To-day took the plunge and saw two films which I knew would affect me greatly. The first is a new British made film, When did you last see you father, which I believe is intended to be taken both in the physical sense and as he really is or was. This is a true story based on the Memoir of Blake Morrison, an unknown writer and poet to me, who became Professor of Creative and Life writing at Goldsmith College, and of double interest because I was granted an interview at the college for teacher training in 1960 which arrived when I was serving the six month sentence as a civil prisoner. My mother sent the invitation to the prison governor who tried to persuade me accept the recognisance and take what appeared to be a great opportunity. I have always wondered what would have been the reaction of Goldsmiths if I had agreed to the recognisance and attended for interview. Would they have accepted in such circumstances?. It is of interest that the college, now part of London University emphasises on the first page of its internet site that, "Goldsmiths is all about the freedom to experiment and to be an individual. They may well have gambled on me as did Ruskin College a year later.

What is exciting about the authority of the book which led to the film, but also of concern because he appears to have already travelled the route I am about to take for in relation to his mother whose background he had to research, he wrote an autobiographical novel, Things My mother never taught me. However it is at this point the similarities end as he grew up with two professional parents (physicians) and progressed through a conventional academic education at Nottingham University and University College London. Not having read any of his work I cannot comment but if the film is any indication there is a qualitative truth which suggests a major English writer.

The film has three outstanding character actors, the amazing Jim Broadbent who manages to portray the father as a complex cranky overbearing creative but also a man with sensitivity and insight. A second star in my eyes is Sarah Lancashire who made her public name as Curly's wife in Coronation Street and who has since had a string of performances of subtly and depth. In this film she is not allowed to reveal the reality of the character's life until after the father has died and the son confronts her with the demand for the truth. Juliet Stevenson is another top notch actor who in the films plays the long suffering tolerant wife of "the father" who lays along side her deceased husband until the undertaker arrives and then bursts into tears with the reality that she will never lay alongside him again, despite the betrayals and having to nurse him during the days of a bowel cancer, something which the grand father is said to have also died from Colin Firth is continues to be great in roles which require characters to communicate smouldering emotions until they are allowed to erupt. I especially liked the honesty in which he finds the former girl who provided his first sexual experience and then cannot go back to the same point the had reached with his wife, played by Gina Mckee, whose performance in Our Friends in the North TV series I missed from the stage performance of last week and which reminds that as long as England are not playing their next match on Wednesday night I will be able to watch the fourth match in the one day series with Sri Lanka during the day on Wednesday, then attend an interesting Northern stage event in the evening and stay over for after show talk event for Our Friends in the North, and then go to see Don Mclean on Thursday evening at the Civic Hall, and then depending when the performance ends catch the after show talk for 118 People show event back at the Playhouse which is only a couple of hundred yards away.

When did you last see your father switches between how the child and the young man viewed his father and built up a justified sense of grievance about how he was treated and unappreciated and what he discovered as the betrayal of his mother, and the successful writer and poet forced to confront his mixture of feelings when he decides to join his mother and sister as they accompany his father on his end of days. The film suggests that it is only with the death of the parent that he is able to resolve his relationship and move forward, freed to be what he wishes. As children have discovered throughout time, he then wishes that he had achieved this resolution and understanding before although true to most situations the parents is unwilling for them to talk when the son gives the opportunity.

The parallel with my relationship with my mother is there as she was unable to take up the opportunities I gave her to talk about my father and our relationship, although I also realised that she feared what my reaction might be. Why I did not weep with regret when she died is that I had those three years of constant contact and whether it was because the illness had wiped her memory of what happened to her and to us, or she found peace with herself through my presence I will never know, but it is what happened over those last three years which I hope will make our story of value to others just as When did you see has been to me.

Earlier I watched and partly experienced Personna, what some regarded as one of the most important of the Bergman films. I had viewed part before on DVD when is then crashed and have waited for the replacement which arrived as my mother died. The significance of the film for me is that the opening sequence of harsh black and white images focuses on what become evident is the bark of trees but this transforms into what become a face and the dead faces and limbs of an old man and old women. Just over a week ago I sat with the body of my mother and later in the evening I watch a film about the days before a death, and a wife stayed the night by her husband until the undertaker arrived. In the opening sequence there is also the image of a crucified hand. It was the experience of this part of the film which decided me to go and see When did you last see your father.

Personna had and perhaps still has its controversial aspects. In the opening sequence the image of an erect penis was censored in 1966 but was reinstated for the DVD collection and later there is a vivid account when the nurse meets another young woman, visiting an island, and they lay naked together when they are observed by two young boys, who the other girl seduces but is joined by the nurse, who describes then as terribly young, and continues to tell of a day in which she goes to bed with her lover, a married man, and becomes pregnant which she then has aborted. But is this a real event and is it an event which she or Mrs Vogler experienced?

However both these aspects can be considered diversions from a film about the difficulties of communication especially when people have a physical intimacy and it also about the egocentric nature of being an artist. Mrs Vogler has the same name as the Magician As with When did you see your father, and my own main work, it also about a search for truth and the hold which the drive can have over some more than others. I also feel it is about the fragility of our being against the solidness of nature with lots of images of rocks, trees and seascape

The central character, Mrs Vogler, an important actress suddenly stops, takes to her bed and becomes immobile and without speech. This is the first film of Liv Ulman, chosen I understand because she is similar looking to Bibi Anderson who plays the nurse. There is no medical reason for condition of Mrs Vogler and the doctor suggests it is an hysterical reaction and later accuses the woman of acting out the role until she has not need of it. The nurse is appointed to exclusively care for her and this is why in all therapeutic and analytical relationships it is essential for the helper to have a control, and a mentor to prevent the symbiotic relationship which is the core of the film. The nurse having looked into the eyes of the woman fears for her own being. While Mrs Vogler continues not to talk we learn something of the pain she endures from her reaction to a newscast in which someone sets fire to themselves.

The two go together to a summer residence in a countryside setting by the sea, part much of Bergman's work. Mrs Vogler comes out of her apathy but not her silence, so the nurse compensates by an endless stream of talk and self revelation. Or is it revelation about Mrs Vogler. Has she become her voice? At one point the nurse appears to meet Mr Vogler and has a physical relationship with him.

I cannot help but return to my own recent experience of silent communication with my mother and also talking for both of us and to the time now over four years ago when I was in the same situation with the aunt who provided mothering in childhood. She died according to her worst nightmare and I was helpless to prevent and save although with the help of others I was able to bring her to a state of readiness in which she was also prepared to depart, but I continued to feel regret and anxiety about what was to happen to her sister and to me, something which I did not feel with my mother.

Back to the film the nurse has become Mrs Vogler and speaks of her feelings about becoming regnant and her feelings and inability to communicate with her son who she had previously tried to abort. The film ends after violent clashes between the two woman with the nurse catching a bus. In his film notes attached to the DVD Philip Strickland raises whether the whole film is based on the inability of a boy who appears in the opening image to communicate with a woman who appears to be part of a screen. The boy has a book and is that a phantasm of the boy from a story in the book? Strickland speculates about the overall structure of the film which Bergman has admitted was the most difficult he had to write, He also asks the question that the first part of the film is the Personna, the mask and the second half the soul, the alma, given that the nurse is called Alma with the Mask and the Alma according to Jung, the completion of a being, but if so there is no sense of completion in this film. I previously wrote and then deleted that I thought this was a film about the nature of being and life and was interested to read in the notes that the spider which also appears in the opening montage also appeared in Through a Glass Darkly to represent God although it can just as well be interpreted a the initiator of a web to entrap and imprison. The concluding note is a quote from Bergman about his endless never satisfied questing which fails to leave him in peace. I confess I like my experience of art to have a simpler structure, with levels that I can engage emotionally as well as intellectually. I therefore cannot rate this a great film, among many of his others, or other films in general. But in the way that I believe we and events are all connected with meanings and values which can be unravelled. It is interesting that When did you last see your father was released this of all weeks and Personna arrived just as my mother faced her end of days.

1182 Billy Bob Thornton Films

Bill Bob Thornton, Who? I asked myself when I read that he was the subject of the latest in the Actors Studio production on MainStreet and I decide to watch and at first believe I have discovered a new hero. Why I ask myself over a cup of tea having decided to stay up beyond the permitted hour in order to maintain the regime necessary for the time given to being at the hospital. I liked his openness and honesty and his understanding of the nature of happiness and sadness being part of the same experience as love and hate and all other emotions usually considered to be, and for advocating that everyone should write and its cathartic value and bringing of new insight and for being dyslexic and finding reading difficult.

Billy Bob has titled his published biographical notes A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Southerner which is a good way of communicating his creativity against the background of a poor rural based family of a white father and part native American Italian mother who is a psychic, living in the segregated Arkansas in the 50's and 60's, but although his background and way of life, where his grandfather a forest ranger shot the family food for his early years, he is able to looks back with warmth at his childhood and the close relationship with developed with his younger brother of a year and half. Despite an attention reading and understanding difficulty he started to write stories at an early age and was sufficiently self confident to take part in school theatricals. His reading including William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell whose work did not influence me until much later. His music influence were of the era of Presley, Jim Reeves, the Beatles and other British bands. His self confidence was such that he directed a grade school production of Dracula. He was also an active sportsman achieving local success in baseball. The background to this point appears part of the American Dream, Poor Kid, unpromising background, begins to make by success at school. He even got a try out for the Kansas City Royals but a freak accident broke his collarbone and ended this route.

During the 1970's two events commenced a process which changed the direction and nature of his future life. His father died of cancer in 1973 at the age of 44 shortly after his graduation at the of 18 years and then four years later after a variety of local manual work jobs and then with an aspiring novelist they decided to try their fortune first in New York and then on the West Coast, He returned home married a local girl with whom he had a daughter, and but this did not last.

It is then the published biography reveals something which the Lipton interview did not, or if it did I missed it because he commenced a study of psychology at Henderson State University, although it does not state why he left except that in part because of a home town connection with then Governor Bill Clinton he got a manual job in the state highways department. And then he also got a job in a residential facility for the elderly with psychiatric and behavioural problems which is a third link, the caring of his father as the eldest son, the study of psychology and the working with sufferers of mind and feeling which revealed the sensitive and insightful soul that was emerging. The hard working life was balanced with performing in a rock band doing covers and trying to find acting work.

In 1984 as he approached his 30th birthday Bill Bob decided to move back to California with his friend Tom Epperson where he struggled and starved, marrying for a short time to a future ceramicist and sculpture, but also getting small part jobs in TV shows, with perhaps Knots landing being one which reached UK screens that vaguely remember. The Bill Clinton connection continued with the Governor keeping in contact with his mother to find out her eldest lad was doing and she said to him that she was confident of her boys eventual success predicting he would an Oscar which she would attend with him.

In the Actor's studio Bill Bob emphasised the significance of the death of his younger brother from a heart attack at the age of 20 while working as a chef at a Hard Rock café but also a talented musician. Bill Bob as many actors and artists do also had spells as a manager of a Pizza Parlour and as a waiter at Hollywood social functions. While the image of a southern hard living boy could to be projected with tattoos and drugs and no doubt alcohol as well as two failed marriages, it is the impact of his brother's death along with that of his father that help to understand th insight and depth of understanding of human behaviour which has subsequently brought to his screen performances as a character actor rather than a screen personality which is why I did not know his name, but knew some of his work well.

The work which I liked without taking in the main character was played by Billy Bob is the 200 Cohen Brothers The Man who was not there and who wife has an affair with Soprano James Gandolfini. The Cohen brothers are niot everyone's cup of tea and when I think of them I think to the ultimate joke of someone saying it is raining cats and dogs and you have guessed it the sky is full of falling cats and dogs, The Man who was not there is a more serious "Hitchockian" film, or is it.

I also enjoyed Pushing Tin which does more to reduce the inclination to travel in airplanes than most environmental campaigning. This was the filly where Billy Bob met the stated "love of his life", Angelina Jolie. The film which brought Bill Bob International recognition, alas except by me was Slingblade which Billy Bob wrote and directed and played the central character who has been locked away in an institution from the criminally insane since the age of nine because he has murdered his mother and her lover, and is released because he is believed to have been cured and sets out on a pathway to redemption or is he. This much I gleaned from the show and a review of the film but it is not a film I immediately want to add to the must see list, I have seen at least six of the other forty films where he has had a involvement, possibly half a dozen and where I have no image of a performance by him without reading reviews and seeing some of the listed films, so why does he immediate rank as a hero and then become eliminated after I read what he had written or agreed to be written about his life. I recognise the darkness within which has made him the great character actor that he has become.