It is winter solstice again; the long night.
I went to my little sister's place for dinner and to play cards and it was good to see them and catch up on their news. Time is moving faster for them now that she's going to have a baby. There's a very finite and concrete sense of 'time left before the baby comes' and 'everything after'. I can see what shape it is giving to weekends and plans and of course their relationship. All the natural winter urges are heightened for them.
I was thinking earlier today - what is the most beautiful thing that you can think of? Or perhaps it is a place or a person or a sound... feel the joy and the beauty it brings you. How precious and wonderful that is.
Now unless you naturally think of the Eagle Nebula, the Sun's corona or the rings of Saturn, chances are very very good that what you thought of - even your top ten - are all here on earth. Everything is here. So why is it that being a 'greenie' or someone concerned about the well being and survival of the planet is still considered such a social crime? I just don't understand how anyone can be so obstinately ignorant of the peril we're in. It isn't even that "if we break this one we don't have a spare" because we know this one is already broken and the question on every body's heart and mind should really be more like "how much can we mend it if we all pitch in?"
All those extinct species won't come back, but maybe we won't all have to genetically merge with salamanders to survive.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Sunday, June 14, 2009
At Home
I staked up the rogue tomato plants this morning and discovered that they're not just flowering but have set fruit, in June! That was a cute surprise adding to the fact they they're growing over the top of the sweet potatoes. I've got one square meter of garden where every thing's happening. The cauliflowers I tried are all dead and gone. Apart from that one very cold morning last week (about -30 I think it was here, which I thought would kill off the tommies) it is a mild winter so far.
I'm back in touch with the yard because this month I've borrowed a half-remembered part of an English tradition and have decided I am "at home" for my weekends this month. Which means to me that I am by default at home or that I won't be going anywhere simply because of obligation, habit or to fill in time. I've reclaimed the sleep-in! (and the afternoon nap!)
Two weekends in and I'm caught up with myself a little. I have realised how many projects of every kind I've started over the last year or so but left scattered around the house. I'm a full set behind in my subscriptions reading, but that now is back to feeling like a treat in store rather than a task to be completed. I went to two stores today and found it easy to zip in and grab the items on the list and nip back out with just the things I needed and not another armful of stuff. I got some drill bits to put holes in my button blanks and some elastic and batting to make a night-cap (my head is cold when I go to bed. How Dickensian I shall look!).
Yesterday I finished a book (Thursday's Child by Sonya Hartnett. The play is coming to the client's venue in August and as I'll be promoting it heavily, thought is would be good to have a clue what I'm talking about as the material the touring company sent us is heavy on how awesome they are and very light on plot/character details. As usual. It's great too, so I can happily throw my shoulder to the harness for this one.) and then read Twilight (by Stephanie Meyer). I'm possibly in the last 20% of the human population to read this, so I won't say much about it. I think it's more a thriller style than a romance, and that's about as much as I'll venture for now, and yes I'll read the next one.
So with some sleep back behind my eyes and clean sheets on the bed my sense of goodwill-toward-human-kind-O-meter has drifted back into the realm of the positive and I can bid my fellows a good morrow with nary a sneer nor a sardonic riposte in my mind. Hoo-Ray!
Also, Kerryn gifted me owl patterned flannelet jammies! All is right in the world!
I'm back in touch with the yard because this month I've borrowed a half-remembered part of an English tradition and have decided I am "at home" for my weekends this month. Which means to me that I am by default at home or that I won't be going anywhere simply because of obligation, habit or to fill in time. I've reclaimed the sleep-in! (and the afternoon nap!)
Two weekends in and I'm caught up with myself a little. I have realised how many projects of every kind I've started over the last year or so but left scattered around the house. I'm a full set behind in my subscriptions reading, but that now is back to feeling like a treat in store rather than a task to be completed. I went to two stores today and found it easy to zip in and grab the items on the list and nip back out with just the things I needed and not another armful of stuff. I got some drill bits to put holes in my button blanks and some elastic and batting to make a night-cap (my head is cold when I go to bed. How Dickensian I shall look!).
Yesterday I finished a book (Thursday's Child by Sonya Hartnett. The play is coming to the client's venue in August and as I'll be promoting it heavily, thought is would be good to have a clue what I'm talking about as the material the touring company sent us is heavy on how awesome they are and very light on plot/character details. As usual. It's great too, so I can happily throw my shoulder to the harness for this one.) and then read Twilight (by Stephanie Meyer). I'm possibly in the last 20% of the human population to read this, so I won't say much about it. I think it's more a thriller style than a romance, and that's about as much as I'll venture for now, and yes I'll read the next one.
So with some sleep back behind my eyes and clean sheets on the bed my sense of goodwill-toward-human-kind-O-meter has drifted back into the realm of the positive and I can bid my fellows a good morrow with nary a sneer nor a sardonic riposte in my mind. Hoo-Ray!
Also, Kerryn gifted me owl patterned flannelet jammies! All is right in the world!
Friday, June 12, 2009
The Winter Refrain
Overheard in the mall on my way to work (and you'll have to imagine the nasal bogan whine that this is said in):
"Gee it's cold. I can't believe how cold it is!"
So I surreptitiously glance behind me in order to appraise this captain of the obvious and spot a cluster of idiots who are in thongs, shorts and T-shirts and one of them, in concession to the change in seasons, has thrown on a cotton hoodie. They are all hunched over and attempting to gain warmth from lit cigarettes.
It was minus 3oC overnight. Winter, albeit a late (and probably brief one) has arrived. I do not understand the stubborn reticence of locals against putting on warm clothes. This cold weather happens every year. Surely it is not beyond any one's means to have one woolen jumper and a pair of socks bundled into the back of a drawer? That's all it takes, and you can get a decent jumper these days for what it costs to buy two packs of smokes. Then by 9 or 10 in the morning it is back up to a sunny and warm 18oC or so, and then people, you can take the jumper off! A simple, but effective, system that has been serving humans for millenia called "clothing". I recommend it.
Also worth mentioning this week is that the World Health Organisation has officially declared Swine Flu (H1N1) to be a pandemic. Congrats Swiney on your new status. I'm sure no readers of this blog need any delineation made between pandemic and epidemic, but you will appreciate the irony in this being the week that on one hand the Sheltered Workshop has made buckets and buckets of hand sanitiser available to curb to possible spread of Swiney, and on the other (perhaps inevitable and very very bureaucratic) hand, decided that far far too many dollars are spent on tissues and so has cut off their supply. No worries, sneeze into your hand - there's plenty of hand sanitiser!
*shakes head*
"Gee it's cold. I can't believe how cold it is!"
So I surreptitiously glance behind me in order to appraise this captain of the obvious and spot a cluster of idiots who are in thongs, shorts and T-shirts and one of them, in concession to the change in seasons, has thrown on a cotton hoodie. They are all hunched over and attempting to gain warmth from lit cigarettes.
It was minus 3oC overnight. Winter, albeit a late (and probably brief one) has arrived. I do not understand the stubborn reticence of locals against putting on warm clothes. This cold weather happens every year. Surely it is not beyond any one's means to have one woolen jumper and a pair of socks bundled into the back of a drawer? That's all it takes, and you can get a decent jumper these days for what it costs to buy two packs of smokes. Then by 9 or 10 in the morning it is back up to a sunny and warm 18oC or so, and then people, you can take the jumper off! A simple, but effective, system that has been serving humans for millenia called "clothing". I recommend it.
Also worth mentioning this week is that the World Health Organisation has officially declared Swine Flu (H1N1) to be a pandemic. Congrats Swiney on your new status. I'm sure no readers of this blog need any delineation made between pandemic and epidemic, but you will appreciate the irony in this being the week that on one hand the Sheltered Workshop has made buckets and buckets of hand sanitiser available to curb to possible spread of Swiney, and on the other (perhaps inevitable and very very bureaucratic) hand, decided that far far too many dollars are spent on tissues and so has cut off their supply. No worries, sneeze into your hand - there's plenty of hand sanitiser!
*shakes head*
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Terminator: Salvation
(Spoiler Alert! Yes, again. Don't read this if you're seriously looking forward to the latest Terminator film. But really - who is?).
I swear to you, this blog is not going to devolve solely into me bagging the shit out of popular culture. I aim to bag the shit out of high-brow stuff occasionally as well.
Over the long weekend I went along to see Terminator: Salvation at my local cinema. There were many members of the public in attendance which I do not like. It is not (just) that I am anti-social, they are simply not fit to be in the public arena. Case in point: the 'gentleman' seated next to me wore thongs presumably so that when the urge came over him, he could pick his toes during the film without the irritation of having to remove any shoes. Charming.
But I digress.
Firstly, this film is badly misnamed (why do they think that dropping the numbers helps? Oh, that's right, because we're now scraping the prequel barrel and it confuses people to have non-linear sequences. An argument, perhaps, for using the Dewy system for films. But that's a subject for discussion at another time). Anyway. "Salvation" is a misnomer. This film should rightly have been subtitled "Survival" or even something like "have you ever seen a more gritty dystopian future prequel than this?! Holy Shit we're really all going to DIE!!! RUN - RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!" but as a marketing person I wouldn't really recommend that - it's hard to make puns with for the actor profiles during promos.
I guess "Survival" was taken, but it is a shame, they should have saved Salvation for when they win the freakin war I would have thought. Not for a film where the resistance takes massive casualties, loses their entire command structure and basically get their arses kicked at every single point.
That leads me to my second point. I don't know a lot about war. Actually, I know very little about war on any level. I've made effort to avoid it personally. From what I have seen and heard it is a deeply unpleasant experience, and something not to be undertaken lightly. Which is why I would have suggested that someone in the Resistance who does know about war ought to read a little book by an old guy call Sun. In this book, which is kind of like a "War for Dummies1" he suggests that you should know everything you can about your enemy. In this film, that could be as simple as remembering that the machines you're fighting are very very smart. Maybe not the ones directly in front of you, but the ones that built them are. I reckon that odds are good that machines that have made themselves self-aware are going to be pretty bright. Hence, one ought to think things through as if you're playing a game of Chess or Go in which your opponent has a higher rank than you. That is to say, they're likely to set traps for you. I would, if I was clever.
Not being clever brings me to my third, and final point. American action films have made a fruitful industry out of not worrying too much about clever if you can be very strong. This almost completely defines the action genre. It is about guys (usually) chasing each other, thumping each other and blowing shit up. This is where T:S comes home and delivers. It's got all the things you look for in an action flick: big guns (tick), attack helicopters (tick), funky secret commando hand signal stuff (tick), blowing shit up (tick, tick, tick), and best of all, big tough guys taking an absolute flogging (sadly I don't mean an actual flogging on a rack. I think the only SF film to deliver that particular delicacy must be Starship Troopers. If you know of any others please, please tell me). In this instance I mean fisty-cuffs to the snoz stuff.
This is what kept me going. I really liked seeing Sam Worthington2 get killed, take a nude mud bath, be beaten, shot at, beaten again, killed again, resurrected, beaten again, and then suicide. Not only is that a thrashing and a half, but it is also one heck of a character arc! And, he just eats it up. I want the next film to be about Marcus Wright stirring things up in the afterlife. OOOHHH - Marcus Wright Vs The Mummy!! I would so totally go and see that. The human equivalent of the bear vs shark question. Brilliant.
But I digress. Again.
On the way home I thought of a great drinking game for this film. It goes like this - first of all you need to get all resistance (shame they skipped the Steampunk possibilities - but one can't have everything) and build (or borrow if you're not well suited to experimental conditions) an alcohol distillation set up ("a still")and make some moonshine (Please remember to cut the juice you get!) then you and your mates all take a swig and settle down to watch this film. Once it starts, every time Marcus Wright does something brutal or has something brutal done to him you have another shot. I leave it up to you to decide if kissing Helena should count. In this way, if you are by some miracle still conscious by the end of the film, you really don't really care that most of the film made no sense and that John Connor is a total arse.
Everybody Wins!3
1. There is both a "Vietnam War for Dummies" and a "War on Terrorism for Dummies" actually published. I thought I was being funny, but it turns out satire is too easily just being inaccurate.
2. Who, BTW, was awesome as Macbeth. Man, I love that version. Even better than Polanski's. Really.
3. Except the humans. And Sam Worthington.
I swear to you, this blog is not going to devolve solely into me bagging the shit out of popular culture. I aim to bag the shit out of high-brow stuff occasionally as well.
Over the long weekend I went along to see Terminator: Salvation at my local cinema. There were many members of the public in attendance which I do not like. It is not (just) that I am anti-social, they are simply not fit to be in the public arena. Case in point: the 'gentleman' seated next to me wore thongs presumably so that when the urge came over him, he could pick his toes during the film without the irritation of having to remove any shoes. Charming.
But I digress.
Firstly, this film is badly misnamed (why do they think that dropping the numbers helps? Oh, that's right, because we're now scraping the prequel barrel and it confuses people to have non-linear sequences. An argument, perhaps, for using the Dewy system for films. But that's a subject for discussion at another time). Anyway. "Salvation" is a misnomer. This film should rightly have been subtitled "Survival" or even something like "have you ever seen a more gritty dystopian future prequel than this?! Holy Shit we're really all going to DIE!!! RUN - RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!" but as a marketing person I wouldn't really recommend that - it's hard to make puns with for the actor profiles during promos.
I guess "Survival" was taken, but it is a shame, they should have saved Salvation for when they win the freakin war I would have thought. Not for a film where the resistance takes massive casualties, loses their entire command structure and basically get their arses kicked at every single point.
That leads me to my second point. I don't know a lot about war. Actually, I know very little about war on any level. I've made effort to avoid it personally. From what I have seen and heard it is a deeply unpleasant experience, and something not to be undertaken lightly. Which is why I would have suggested that someone in the Resistance who does know about war ought to read a little book by an old guy call Sun. In this book, which is kind of like a "War for Dummies1" he suggests that you should know everything you can about your enemy. In this film, that could be as simple as remembering that the machines you're fighting are very very smart. Maybe not the ones directly in front of you, but the ones that built them are. I reckon that odds are good that machines that have made themselves self-aware are going to be pretty bright. Hence, one ought to think things through as if you're playing a game of Chess or Go in which your opponent has a higher rank than you. That is to say, they're likely to set traps for you. I would, if I was clever.
Not being clever brings me to my third, and final point. American action films have made a fruitful industry out of not worrying too much about clever if you can be very strong. This almost completely defines the action genre. It is about guys (usually) chasing each other, thumping each other and blowing shit up. This is where T:S comes home and delivers. It's got all the things you look for in an action flick: big guns (tick), attack helicopters (tick), funky secret commando hand signal stuff (tick), blowing shit up (tick, tick, tick), and best of all, big tough guys taking an absolute flogging (sadly I don't mean an actual flogging on a rack. I think the only SF film to deliver that particular delicacy must be Starship Troopers. If you know of any others please, please tell me). In this instance I mean fisty-cuffs to the snoz stuff.
This is what kept me going. I really liked seeing Sam Worthington2 get killed, take a nude mud bath, be beaten, shot at, beaten again, killed again, resurrected, beaten again, and then suicide. Not only is that a thrashing and a half, but it is also one heck of a character arc! And, he just eats it up. I want the next film to be about Marcus Wright stirring things up in the afterlife. OOOHHH - Marcus Wright Vs The Mummy!! I would so totally go and see that. The human equivalent of the bear vs shark question. Brilliant.
But I digress. Again.
On the way home I thought of a great drinking game for this film. It goes like this - first of all you need to get all resistance (shame they skipped the Steampunk possibilities - but one can't have everything) and build (or borrow if you're not well suited to experimental conditions) an alcohol distillation set up ("a still")and make some moonshine (Please remember to cut the juice you get!) then you and your mates all take a swig and settle down to watch this film. Once it starts, every time Marcus Wright does something brutal or has something brutal done to him you have another shot. I leave it up to you to decide if kissing Helena should count. In this way, if you are by some miracle still conscious by the end of the film, you really don't really care that most of the film made no sense and that John Connor is a total arse.
Everybody Wins!3
1. There is both a "Vietnam War for Dummies" and a "War on Terrorism for Dummies" actually published. I thought I was being funny, but it turns out satire is too easily just being inaccurate.
2. Who, BTW, was awesome as Macbeth. Man, I love that version. Even better than Polanski's. Really.
3. Except the humans. And Sam Worthington.
Saturday, June 06, 2009
BSG_S4: WTF?!
(SPOILER ALERT - If you're a Battlestar Galactica Fan and haven't watched all of Season 4, don't read this. Really.)
I can't be the only person who has seen the final episodes of season 4 of BSG and checked under the couch for the missing plot. There's at least two episodes that should exist that seem to have gotten lost as far as I can tell. I went to the pilot of Caprica to see if they're there, but no - just more problems there (if the centurions are created by the combination of a grief-crazed father, a dodgy military contract and a punk genius happy-clapper accidentally dead daughter then how did the Cylons we know as the Final 5 know to spend those thousands of years travelling at sub-light speeds to travel to the 12 colonies and warn of the uprising she would create? See my dilemma? But I digress).
Ok. At least they didn't just fly into the sun (apart from Anders, sorry Anders, someone had to do it, and now that you're a weird-arse brain-in-a-bucket its gunna be you. There's no datastream for you to be zen with on New Earth). I liked the Kara Thrace music psychosis and culmination, I thought that tied a lot of incidental things together very very well. On the other hand, it is always hard to end a long and arduous journey, narratively speaking. We don't like settling for "they rode happily off into the sunset" which is how the wagon-train genre used to settle it. This is one of the difficulties of taking the Western genre into space. It all tracks well until you get to the sunset. Having said that, Serenity had a great sunset ending. Ends got tied, some emotional closure, an uncertain future. All good. So why the frack is the BSG ending so shite?
Firstly, because I think it tries to be cute about tying the story into our Earth (as opposed to Ancient Earth) and that feels kinda patronising. We're SF fans, you don't need to start putting big red YouAreHere arrows around the place (especially at the end. Idiots).
Secondly, because the 7 might have been denied resurrection technology, but the centurions had no mortality issues whatsoever. They're machines who can make more machines, and what happens at the end of the series? The machines who rebelled against the humans and launched the largest genocide program ever then got turned into the followers of the Seven Cylons, fought the big war for 4 years, participated in the civil war, and then... what?! Watched the last of the human-siding cylons ride off into the sunset with the humans leaving them in space with the sad-fuck Cavills and all those other numbers we don't really care about? And what? They made a cup of tea and took up tapestry? I'm not buying it, and I don't think you are either.
Thirdly, the idea that a space going population is going to walk away from their ships carrying *nothing* (look again at those lines of people, they aren't even wearing hats for frack's sake) and survive more than a week against mega-fauna? C'mon. Even I can't suspend that much disbelief.
Fourthly, we spend four years with this community, with the rousing "so say we all!" speeches of the Admiral, and then he goes and build a cairn on a clifftop to die alone with? No. I'm not saying that it might not really happen that way. People might well say "No i'm happy to give up all (ALL) of the comforts, medicines and technologies (including roofs) I've lived my whole life with and go off to compete with Cro Magnons to survive, and if we're all lucky our kids will interbreed with them and the centurions will forget that they hate our guts and that we've given up guns and we'll have a lovely time. But I simply do not believe that they would do that without at least one more speech on the ground from the old man, and a state funeral for you-know-who. (Point was possibly going to be about the raiders and other ships that landed them and the fossil record, but on reflection I think that the psychology is more important).
I'm weighing up how much of my annoyance is purely because the story has finished. I had a childish wish that it just wouldn't end and that these poor people, many of whom I have come to love, respect, and desire would remain trapped in a state of war, or fugitive guerrilla struggles for survival with their numbers slowly decreasing faster than they could ever grow, all just for my entertainment. I can't wish that on anybody. No, it had to end. In endings though, I am more selfish than I like. It doesn't have to be happy, and I'm not such a nihilist that I won't let it be happy. It is just that this ending seems like a nothing ending, and the epilogue feels like I've been watching a "Fall of the Roman Empire" lecture. Just not good enough from the crew who've taught us to expect more.
Grade: FF Fracking Fail - RESUBMIT.
I can't be the only person who has seen the final episodes of season 4 of BSG and checked under the couch for the missing plot. There's at least two episodes that should exist that seem to have gotten lost as far as I can tell. I went to the pilot of Caprica to see if they're there, but no - just more problems there (if the centurions are created by the combination of a grief-crazed father, a dodgy military contract and a punk genius happy-clapper accidentally dead daughter then how did the Cylons we know as the Final 5 know to spend those thousands of years travelling at sub-light speeds to travel to the 12 colonies and warn of the uprising she would create? See my dilemma? But I digress).
Ok. At least they didn't just fly into the sun (apart from Anders, sorry Anders, someone had to do it, and now that you're a weird-arse brain-in-a-bucket its gunna be you. There's no datastream for you to be zen with on New Earth). I liked the Kara Thrace music psychosis and culmination, I thought that tied a lot of incidental things together very very well. On the other hand, it is always hard to end a long and arduous journey, narratively speaking. We don't like settling for "they rode happily off into the sunset" which is how the wagon-train genre used to settle it. This is one of the difficulties of taking the Western genre into space. It all tracks well until you get to the sunset. Having said that, Serenity had a great sunset ending. Ends got tied, some emotional closure, an uncertain future. All good. So why the frack is the BSG ending so shite?
Firstly, because I think it tries to be cute about tying the story into our Earth (as opposed to Ancient Earth) and that feels kinda patronising. We're SF fans, you don't need to start putting big red YouAreHere arrows around the place (especially at the end. Idiots).
Secondly, because the 7 might have been denied resurrection technology, but the centurions had no mortality issues whatsoever. They're machines who can make more machines, and what happens at the end of the series? The machines who rebelled against the humans and launched the largest genocide program ever then got turned into the followers of the Seven Cylons, fought the big war for 4 years, participated in the civil war, and then... what?! Watched the last of the human-siding cylons ride off into the sunset with the humans leaving them in space with the sad-fuck Cavills and all those other numbers we don't really care about? And what? They made a cup of tea and took up tapestry? I'm not buying it, and I don't think you are either.
Thirdly, the idea that a space going population is going to walk away from their ships carrying *nothing* (look again at those lines of people, they aren't even wearing hats for frack's sake) and survive more than a week against mega-fauna? C'mon. Even I can't suspend that much disbelief.
Fourthly, we spend four years with this community, with the rousing "so say we all!" speeches of the Admiral, and then he goes and build a cairn on a clifftop to die alone with? No. I'm not saying that it might not really happen that way. People might well say "No i'm happy to give up all (ALL) of the comforts, medicines and technologies (including roofs) I've lived my whole life with and go off to compete with Cro Magnons to survive, and if we're all lucky our kids will interbreed with them and the centurions will forget that they hate our guts and that we've given up guns and we'll have a lovely time. But I simply do not believe that they would do that without at least one more speech on the ground from the old man, and a state funeral for you-know-who. (Point was possibly going to be about the raiders and other ships that landed them and the fossil record, but on reflection I think that the psychology is more important).
I'm weighing up how much of my annoyance is purely because the story has finished. I had a childish wish that it just wouldn't end and that these poor people, many of whom I have come to love, respect, and desire would remain trapped in a state of war, or fugitive guerrilla struggles for survival with their numbers slowly decreasing faster than they could ever grow, all just for my entertainment. I can't wish that on anybody. No, it had to end. In endings though, I am more selfish than I like. It doesn't have to be happy, and I'm not such a nihilist that I won't let it be happy. It is just that this ending seems like a nothing ending, and the epilogue feels like I've been watching a "Fall of the Roman Empire" lecture. Just not good enough from the crew who've taught us to expect more.
Grade: FF Fracking Fail - RESUBMIT.
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Westward Ho!
I never met a Western I didn’t like until I watched this film. Occasionally films have poor production values, or stilted acting, or a plot that just is too implausible, but not usually all at once.
Released in 1935 (originally in B&W) starring a young John Wayne as John Wyatt, this is the story of two brothers and their paths in life after the brutal murder of their parents on the trail (and the theft of all their cattle). The elder brother (Wayne) is left for dead while the youngest is taken as a protégé of the bad guys. As soon as he can swagger and wear a gun, John Wyatt commences his personal vendetta of tracking down and killing the men who murdered his family. The film is dedicated to a group called “The Vigilantes” active in the 1860s, and that’s exactly what happens, Wyatt can’t get funding for an actual police force so he assembles a posse of likewise wronged, angry and gun-wielding men to bring ‘justice’ to the area.
I wanted to start at the beginning of the genre, and here it is. The “good guys” (ie Wyatt’s Vigilantes) all ride white horses (I kid you not!) and most of them sing (yes, this verges on being a musical). The bad guys all have poor personal hygiene and frankly are not that bright. With the focus on vigilante justice and a moral code that makes it ok to shoot some men but not others, I found myself seeing parallels to the Batman origins stories. Batman doesn’t kill, that’s his personal line over which he will not knowingly cross, in Westerns it seems that the willingness to make that decision to shoot to kill and move on with life is what constitutes a man and it is just whether you use your power for good (killing bad men, men in your way, or anyone who cheats at cards) or for stealing cattle.
When watching older films it is useful if one has some personal sense of the period from which they spawn. This is not really a film about the 1860s so much as it is about the 1930s idea of the 1860s and possibly also about something that was topical in the 30s that the director thought might be discussed well by analogy through this story. I have enough understanding of most periods of the 1800s in Europe and North America to be comfortable getting half-way towards the mindset the filmmakers were aiming for. This film made me realise how alienated I am from the 1930s. I don’t really know what was going on, and I certainly don’t understand what was being said in this film implicitly.
The best things for me in this film is that many of the horses are part-Arabs and so are very easy on the eyes, and that it is only 60 minutes long. I had borrowed my Brother-in-Law’s 2 volume set of John Wayne Westerns to watch this film, I skipped the other 11 hours of films. Westward Ho! is sometimes listed in the top Westerns of all time. It might be a great film in the history of the genre, but it didn’t tickle my fancy.
Released in 1935 (originally in B&W) starring a young John Wayne as John Wyatt, this is the story of two brothers and their paths in life after the brutal murder of their parents on the trail (and the theft of all their cattle). The elder brother (Wayne) is left for dead while the youngest is taken as a protégé of the bad guys. As soon as he can swagger and wear a gun, John Wyatt commences his personal vendetta of tracking down and killing the men who murdered his family. The film is dedicated to a group called “The Vigilantes” active in the 1860s, and that’s exactly what happens, Wyatt can’t get funding for an actual police force so he assembles a posse of likewise wronged, angry and gun-wielding men to bring ‘justice’ to the area.
I wanted to start at the beginning of the genre, and here it is. The “good guys” (ie Wyatt’s Vigilantes) all ride white horses (I kid you not!) and most of them sing (yes, this verges on being a musical). The bad guys all have poor personal hygiene and frankly are not that bright. With the focus on vigilante justice and a moral code that makes it ok to shoot some men but not others, I found myself seeing parallels to the Batman origins stories. Batman doesn’t kill, that’s his personal line over which he will not knowingly cross, in Westerns it seems that the willingness to make that decision to shoot to kill and move on with life is what constitutes a man and it is just whether you use your power for good (killing bad men, men in your way, or anyone who cheats at cards) or for stealing cattle.
When watching older films it is useful if one has some personal sense of the period from which they spawn. This is not really a film about the 1860s so much as it is about the 1930s idea of the 1860s and possibly also about something that was topical in the 30s that the director thought might be discussed well by analogy through this story. I have enough understanding of most periods of the 1800s in Europe and North America to be comfortable getting half-way towards the mindset the filmmakers were aiming for. This film made me realise how alienated I am from the 1930s. I don’t really know what was going on, and I certainly don’t understand what was being said in this film implicitly.
The best things for me in this film is that many of the horses are part-Arabs and so are very easy on the eyes, and that it is only 60 minutes long. I had borrowed my Brother-in-Law’s 2 volume set of John Wayne Westerns to watch this film, I skipped the other 11 hours of films. Westward Ho! is sometimes listed in the top Westerns of all time. It might be a great film in the history of the genre, but it didn’t tickle my fancy.
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