I wonder if anybody in the government has sat down and questioned this absurd urge placed upon us to drive 5 miles less every day to save the planet. The logistics alone are impossible, and at what point does one make a decision not to go somewhere, because it is more than 5 miles longer than you have allowed for the day. Who’s going to sit down and map out their mileage to achieve this? I know that it is a ruse to make a point, but it is so pettifogging and muddled, I believe the point is lost.
Reality in filmmaking
So many of the films that are produced these days are divorced from reality, not because the story is unreal, but because its interpretation by the director includes bizarre, impossible features. Okay, if you want a fairy story then it should be couched in that environment, not in an everyday one. These martial art pictures are fair enough, you know the hero is going to be able to, not only leap vast distances, but is also going to be able to nail half a dozen of his own kind in a matter of minutes.
The other day I was looking at Notting Hill, and in particular at that section in the story where the hero has parted from his truelove, and is walking down the street to the tune of a song which says, that it snows when she has gone. To my simple mind this was one of the greatest piece of filming I have ever witnessed, because the hero not only walked full-length of the road, he started in sunlight went through all the stages of rain hail and snow, with barely a break, surrounded by a very lively street market. When I thought about it I realised that it must have taken days to choreograph so that it was so seamless, which in turn made it so very effective.
When you are, as I am, responsible for somebody’s health, you have long hours a night to watch old films you have seen before, and very often it is the duplication which causes you to see things that you would have missed the first or second time. The opening sequence of, ‘ Once upon a time in the West’. Where there is a thug sitting waiting for a train, in order to kill one of the passengers descending from it. The sequence follows the route of a fly creeping across this man’s face slowly and aggravating him, until at last he catches it in the barrel of his 6-gun. To me that was pure genius, what with the time that it took to choreograph and film, and the incredible delay in the viewing of what one knew was going to be a stand-off, slowly built up the suspense.
A lot of our lives today are governed by economy rather than skill, and the quality of the goods, the choices we have, and the speed with which we now rush, doesn’t allow the sort of quality of expression and product that I have mentioned above. You have to be as old as I am to be able to draw comparisons; they say comparisons are odious, believe me, if more time was given to the aesthetic rather than the throughput, I think the quality would rise rapidly