The Other Boleyn Girl

Sometimes showing historical events and people as the young hip culture of their time works, as it did in A Knight’s Tale. That worked because clever direction, credible acting and a great lively modern film score got the audience in Olympic mode, cheering on their sporting heroes.

Other times it just doesn’t work. This movie, based on a dodgy novel by Philippa Gregory, who styles herself as an historical novelist, but seems to prefer rewriting historical facts to suit her plots, is perfect film fodder for the clueless generation. Are you ready for Tudor England 90210? It goes like this:

OK, there was, like, these two sisters, you know? And one was just so lush, with blonde hair and blue eyes. Her name was Mary and she was really sweet and shy and innocent – kinda like Miley before Hannah Montana.

The other was called Anne, and she wasn’t as cute but she had a brain, and she was more of a girl power type. Her uncle and her Dad wanted her to get it on with the King of England, which wasn’t so bad because it was Eric Bana, but it was still like child abuse. But when the King turned up with his entourage, it was Mary he got the hots for – and that was fair, because she was the hot one.

Basically, Anne and Mary Boleyn are rivals for the lust of King Henry VIII, while their male relations scheme in the background and their mother wrings her hands in shame. Whatever.

The reason it sounds like some trashy daytime soap is because it is so wildly historically inaccurate. These are certainly not the people who plotted the length and breadth of England to reform the church and help the king outwit his own laws. These are people who only lack blackberries, and not the kind you pick off bramble bushes.

It would have been much more fun if they’d stuck to the truth. Mary was no shy violet, she lost her innocence at the French court long before the events of this movie took place and showed no signs of ever regretting it. She had a penchant for Kings, for not only was she the mistress of Henry VIII but also of the King of France. It would have amused Henry to dally with his style rival’s leftovers, but he would never have considered marrying her. Yet when we are introduced to Mary Boleyn in this movie, she is a country mouse who has never left her English home or set eyes on a naked man.

It is Anne who is presented as more worldly wise and the movie wants us to believe she is the sexually savvy one. Actually it seems pretty clear that Anne was not impressed with her sister’s behavior and, when it came her turn to romance the throne, held out until she got that bling.

Scarlett Johansson plays Mary with promenade deck thrusting out and blue eyes blinking pathetically. Mostly she looks like a blonde stunned mullet. Natalie Portman plays Anne – well, actually she doesn’t bother to act at all, she just stalks around in her tight bodices and talks a lot.

As the source of all this feminine frisson, Eric Bana isn’t half bad as Henry VIII. He shows a rarely human side of the wife killer, and looks great when he gets those puffy sleeves off. But he is poorly served by the script. Mostly he is just a floating log, pushed hither and yon by hormonal tides and palace plotting, overburdened with shoulder pads, hormones and a poor script. In fact, according to this movie, if Anne hadn’t sat in on every royal committee and made a fuss he would never have thought of reforming the Church or divorcing his wife Katherine or any of that radical stuff.

The script is not merely inappropriate to the time and characters, it is banal beyond belief. The actors throw around lines like “How dare you!” and “I have torn this country apart for you!” with all the passion and conviction these words inspire. God help us, Anne even says, “You are my only hope!” to her brother George when trying to seduce him into fathering a son for Henry – which, considering it’s Natalie Portman of Star Wars fame, is just too much for anyone to cope with, and inspires nervous giggles.

Then there’s the look of the thing. Cate Blanchett looked absolutely fabulous in her gorgeous gowns in Elizabeth, but perhaps that was just Cate Blanchett. Director Justin Chadwick tries too hard for the Vermeer look here, with artfully placed beams of grey English sunlight falling though medieval windows, but only succeeds in making the whole movie look dark and gloomy, and the people so unattractive in dull ‘Tudor’ colors that you wonder why the English didn’t just die out at that point through lack of interest in each other.

A useful historical lesson it is not. If you know anyone who is studying the Tudor period for whatever reason, steer them away from this film. It does, however, serve as a useful lesson in film making. It really doesn’t matter if you have normally personable and talented stars, lots of money and genuine historical sets, if your source material comes from a Mills and Boon style novel by an author who either ignored the facts or didn’t bother to do research, don’t think a bit of hip talk will cover it up.

After the flood

The Queensland floods left devastation in many ares – in Stanthorpe, we were luckier, in that the flooding was pretty much confined to the creek, and we were not hit by an ‘inland tsunmani’ as was Toowoomba. But the force of the water did change the look of familiar places, and left a huge clean up job.

A sizable chunk of the creek bank was carved out near the bridge, taking the path in one place, which was restored. That tree on the left before the bridge is now teetering on the ban k.

Across the creek, on the town side, the park is barely recognisable. The beautiful stand of trees that once stood on the curbside has gone, and the toilets and picnic shelters have gone.

There used to be a footbridge crossing the creek here.

This…

and this, is all that’s left.

In the bramchs of this tree, on the right, you can see a bunch of debris still caught – this shows the height of the flood was well over our heads.

The bridge lower down is till chockful of debris.

Plenty of firewood there for some enterprising soul.

The trees along the bank took a real battering.

The force of the water is shown very elequently by these almost vertical trees.

What triggers your memories?

Image via Wikipedia

Every time I taste Coca-Cola in a glass, over ice, I am suddenly taken back , on board a cruise liner in the 1960s.

I never tasted Coke much as a teenager. It was kind of exotic. The first place I ever tasted it was at an American Naval Base in Spain. The navy invited a party of us to spend an evening with them. We saw a movie, then we were invited to the Officer’s mess. American marines get very good food – slabs of ham, steak, ice cream – and Coca-cola in huge 2 litre cans. I was given one of these by a young marine who liked me. I was suitably impressed.

But a glass of Coke with ice doesn’t remind me of that. There was no ice in the can. I know some people say it’s rubbish, but Coke really does taste different out of a glass with ice in it. It’s fresher, sharper, it stays in the palate of the mind.

The glasses on board the cruise ship that was bringing me to Australia were very tall and thick, like milkshake glasses. The ice came up halfway and the Coke poured over it in a dark, glistening stream. It stung the mouth, it shocked the tongue, it tasted of hot sunny days and nights when you could smell the ocean and walk the deck under a black sky coated with stars.

Being on  board ship, with nothing outside but sky and ocean, was a liberating experience for me. Here there were no borders,. No landlocked miles between me and the sea –[ on land there is always land, even on the edge of the sea, but on board a ship there is always sea. It is ever present, visible from every porthole. There are no roads, no buildings, no cars – you live every moment with what is at hand.

Funny how a simple glass of Coke with ice can bring all that back.

Leapy Lee, Little Arrows, and a Summer of Love

Image by Leo Reynolds via Flickr

1968 – I was 22, and life was golden. Skirts were short, Jimi Hendrix was high, and the song everyone was listening to was Leapy Lee’s Little Arrows.

It didn’t get to number one because the Beatles had also released Hey Jude, and that haunting ballad would have stopped a veritable avalanche of one hit wonders. But Hey Jude wasn’t as easy to whistle as you were going about your daily chores.

No one had a clue who Leapy Lee was, but we all loved his song. In fact, he was a comedian and his real name was Lee Graham. A Sussex lad, he was well known to the top groups of the day, and was good friends with Ray Davies of the Kinks – so good, in fact, that Davies offered him the chance to record Sunny Afternoon. Wisely, though, he changed his mind and the Kinks recorded it, coming up with another hit.

In spite of Davies’ attempts to get his mate into the charts (he produced a record for Lee called King of The Whole Wide World, which sank quicker than the Titanic), it was record producer Gordon Mills who gave Lee his one big hit. Little Arrows was so catchy that you couldn’t stop singing along with it.  I sang it to my tall, blonde and handsome heartthrob, pretending to pick little arrows out of my hair and clothes.  He still turned up for our next date, which is a testament to the song’s appeal,  rather than mine.

But record buyers weren’t than impressed with Lee’s next release, called Good Morning, and life in the pop music fast lane soon caught up with him. His career was derailed completely when he received a jail sentence for being involved in a pub fight with Alan Lake , the husband of starlet Diana Dors. He ended up moving to Majorca , and making a good life for himself, as shown in the popular BBC series Passport to the  Sun.

As for me – my romance fizzled out and I moved to Australia .  But I still love that song.

Family Fun Day

Spring has arrived early in our mountain town, and the weather is perfect. Still cool enough at night to snuggle into blankets, and warm enough during the day to get out and about. The loveliest thing about living in a community like this is the unexpected treats like Family Fun Day at the park, with home made cakes, fun activities for the kids and a general atmosphere of relaxation.

Family Fun Day was held at Weeroona Park, and as you can see here it was a very relaxed occasion:

The musicians were a boy and his dad, and they were excellent. In the background is the cake stall, which did brisk business, and the Rub a Tree activity was very popular. Kids really enjoyed messing with paint:

Signs of Spring were everywhere – even the goldfish in the pond were enjoying it:

The narcissi made it feel as if Spring has truly arrived:

My daughter was one of the lucky prizewinners at the raffle stall:

The art tree in all its final glory:

At the end of a good day, there is always someone to clean up the crumbs:

Birthday

Today was my 63rd birthday and I’m happy to say I still get Happy 21st Birthday cards from my eldest daughter. She understands me so well!

I had a lovely day, did some retail therapy with my youngest daughter and she cooked and her partner Mani the Chef cooked a delicious dinner and Kat made a wonderful birthday cake. I love blueberry muffins (blueberries are the reason God made muffins) so she baked a big heartshaped one and served it with strawberries and cream.

Sooo delicious!

Such a great day – the grandkids sang happy birthday although little Jubei wondered why my cake had no candles.
I told him the house would burn down!

Our Mini-Flood

Recent heavy rains, which caused devastating floods along the Queensland and NSW coasts, barely touched us on our granite mountain. It did rain heavily for almost a week, but most of it just ran away from us – except the creek.

Ths was the sight that greeted residents heading for the centre of town after the rains – barriers up and the bridge closed because it was under water. Luckily, another bridge a block away was still high and dry, so it wasn’t a great inconvenience.

Actually it had gone down a bit by the time I was able to get my camera and take some pics, but this pile of debris shows how how high it got.

The creek was still running pretty fast over the bridge though, so driving or walking across it was impossible.

Definitely not swimming weather!

Sadly, our lovely park just disappeared under the floodwaters. A day or so of dry weather saw the creek back under the bridge again, although still running high, and we were barely inconvenienced, although some houses along the creek were affected. But it was nothing compared to the devastation and tragedy that coastal dwellers endured.

What I’ve Been Doing

I’ve been trying to catch up on some outstanding projects. I had the idea for this one some time ago, but was finally lucky enough to score a piece of silk in the perfect midnight blue shade so I could actually make it.

The idea was to embroider my natal chart on a cushion cover. I used silver and gold thread (which had an annoying habit of fraying while you are using it, so the whole thing took longer than I thought). First I laid out the silk flat and traced round a large plate to get the circle, then ruled the lines. I used a silver gel pen to do that.

Then I drew in the signs and planet glyphs, and drew lines between to two maot aspects, the Sun-Neptune Square, and the Nodes-Jupiter-Uranus trine.

I used backstitch to embroider the circle, and running stitch in silver thread for the house divisions. I use gold thread for the glyphs, and red thread in running stitch for the square (challenging aspect!) and green for the trine – both silk embroidery floss.

The result has pleased me – I like it very much. I am looking for something to put in the centre to repesent the earth – something blue and green obviously. I’ll share it when I find it.

This actually isn’t too hard to do (apart from the gold and silver thread fraying) and if you want to try it you can get a chart made up for yourself at astro.

To Be a Writer…

To be a writer to begin a journey of romance, adventure, incredible highs and earth shattering lows. It is all there at your fingertips – the power to move, to inspire, or to bore dreckless. To be a writer is to fall in love with words – and to grow sick of them, utterly hating the blank page that refuses to reveal them. It is to burn manuscripts in a passion of of thwarted creativity, and to bitterly regret their loss later on – but mostly, it is to write and write, until your eyes are burning, your throat is dry, your fingers numb.

It’s easy to be a writer, sportswriter Red Smith said, “All you have to do is sit at the typewriter and open a vein.” That’s if you want to be a great writer, the kind of writer that people clutch to their hearts, repeating quotes as if they were the mantra of life.

Then there’s the rest of us. We catch fire on occasion, get decent gigs because we have worked hard and paid our dues, now and then someone says, “I wish I had written that,” and we glow with pride. Greatness may be beyond us, but we all have a story to tell, and a unique way of telling it. And that is also what it means to be a writer.

In my cultural tradition, storytelling is an essential activity, and good storytellers are revered. Whenever family and friends gathered together, the stories would flow, and I grew up listening to them, as some listen to mythic legends of ancient worlds. To be a storyteller, it seemed to me, was the highest of aspirations.

True storytellers carry their stories in their heads. Writers, I discovered, live in a paper world. Yes, even in the computer age, there are piles of clippings, hard copies, editorial correspondence, copy paper, notebooks, jotting scribbled on odd scraps like the backs of business cards, and yellowing old print outs. “Yup,” a colleague once said, observing the bulging file boxes, “you’re a writer.”

These days you can add computer add ons, disks and hard drive folders. Paper or virtual paper, it’s all the same. Writers are packrats, saving words like some people save candy wrappers or beanie toys. They might not be worth much to anyone else, but they are precious to us.

To be a writer, you need to know words. You need a good dictionary and a Roget’s Thesaurus, because the right word is not always on the tip of your tongue. You can get them online, but there is something about seeing on them on your bookshelf that is so comforting. For most of us, they are old friends. If you write – or hope to write – journalistic pieces, you need the Associated Press (AP) stylebook. You need to know how to write the way journalists write.

You need a notebook with you at all times, whether it is electronic or paper and pen, because ideas strike in the coffee aisle of the supermarket or while you are waiting in line at the drugstore. Ideas strike when you are driving, while you are in the shower, while you are watching the kids at their school sports day – Mom? She’s the one scribbling in her notebook.

Sometimes there is nothing nicer than to take your notebook to the nearest Shopping Mall and record what you see and hear as life goes on all around you. Other times you need solitude – go away! I’m writing! To be a writer is to crave experience, but also to need quiet time to sit down, digest it, and write about it.

To be a writer is often to be labelled `weird’, or just plain nuts. Now and then, people get wild eyed around you – “Are you going to put me in a story? Will I get paid?” to which the only honest answer is, “No, you’re too boring.”

To be a writer is to have weird experiences though – stories that come true, stories that seem to drop on your out of nowhere (as Harry Potter dropped into JK Rowling’s head while she was travelling on a train), and stories that defy everything you ever thought you believed. Cynics write incredibly heart warming sentimental pieces, to their own amazement – practical souls suddenly find themselves weaving complex imaginary worlds. Writing gets more out of you than you ever knew you had.

Yes, to be a writer is to go on an amazing journey, it is an incredible adventure. And if it isn’t, then maybe you should try something else.

Adria’s Abstracts

I am a great proponent of taking your own pictures for use in graphic artwork or blogging. It’s so easy to do with a digital camera and it solves copyright issues. I love my digital and take it everywhere.

A while back I was thinking about taking my camera out and getting some interesting shadows, textures and shapes. But no matter what I did my abstract images never seemed to inspire me. What was my problem, I wondered?

I have a four-year-old grand daughter called Adria, who loves to borrow my camera and take picures. She is careful with it, usually taking snaps of her parents and siblings that turn out quite well. But often she just takes snaps of anything that takes her fancy, and while some of it is hard to identify, the results have been amazing.

This ghostly image is one of her Aunties – already it has me thinking stories.

I now have a file called Adria’s Abstracts, where I dig around for story ideas and graphic art components. For example, this one would make a great background:

And this one suggests a space story – it looks like a wormhole:

So what is Adria doing right that I was doing wrong? I think I was just too conscious of `being artistic’ and trying too hard. Adria is utterly unselfconscious, and just snaps away for the love of it. So her abstract images have an uninhibited sense of joy about them, they are not studied in any way. I’ll be sharing our collaborations in future blogs.