idea for a comedy sequel to ‘the time traveller’s wife’

Idea for a comedy sequel to The Time Traveller’s Wife, to be called The Time Traveller’s Toilet.

This film is about the man who, once he visits any toilet, may emerge from any other toilet across space and time – it could be a posh WC at the Dorchester Hotel during the roaring twenties, it could be a brick privy in the Gorbals during World War Two, it could even be a dunny in the Australian outback in the post-apocalyptic future. Of course, he tries to keep the door fractionally open and to make use of incontinence products in order to avoid this outcome, but sooner or later the inevitable occurs.

Alan Davies, quizzical but in a relatable way, to star – as this film must not, repeat must not, degenerate into slapstick. Also to feature Mikhail Gorbachev in a cameo role as himself, for gravitas.

twenty-seven words following the river of death downstream - and some other films i've watched recently

Cosh Boy; also known as The Slasher in USA (1953, dir.  Lewis Gilbert, starring James Kenney, Joan Collins; feat. Hermione Gingold as Queenie). Bomb damage; table tennis; youth crime; postwar masculinity crisis. You wonder at first whether charismatic anti-hero will win but actually – spoilers – the implied denouement is brutally old-school.

Village of the Damned (1960, dir. Wolf Rilla; starring George Sanders, Barbara Shelley, Michael Gwynn, Laurence Naismith). Stoicism, pluck, mental reserve; when headteacher Mr K. summarised this for us in 1982, what was he thinking? Glad I finally caught up with his mid-life crisis.

Night Caller from Outer Space, also known as Blood Beast from Outer Space (1965, dir. John Gilling; starring John Saxon, Maurice Denham, Patricia Haines; feat. Warren Mitchell, Audley Morris). Not Britain’s best ‘interplanetary sex tourism’ movie – that’s Devil Girl From Mars - still, Audley ‘Wicker Man landlord’ Morris as creepy Soho shopkeeper’s superb; deserves own film.

The Chairman (1969, dir. J. Lee 'Guns of Navarone' Thompson, starring Gregory Peck, Anne Heywood; feat. Conrad Yama as Chairman Mao, Burt Kwouk as Chang Shou). British, American and Soviet deep states jointly consider but decide against assassinating Mao Tse-Tung using an explosive device implanted in Gregory Peck’s head... oh, surely you remember?

The Final Programme (1973, dir. Robert Fuest, adapted from Michael Moorcock's 'Jerry Cornelius' novel; starring Jon Finch, Jenny Runacre; hair by Leonard's of London). Studied amoralism does date, rather. Intermittently watchable (sadly Hawkwind-less) curiosity, referencing 2001, Alice in Wonderland, lifestyle supplements. If only they'd filmed (the equally unfilmable) 'An Alien Heat'.

*Watership Down (1978, dir. Martin Rosen; starring John Hurt, Richard Briers, Ralph Richardson, Denham Elliott, Zero Mostel). Comparative theology: trickster species-hero tussles with interventionist God (freedom and authenticity), or a captive, fatalistic theology/ poetics (sometimes ‘high culture’= not knowing where your food comes from)?

The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy (TV series, 2002- ; dir. William Cran, Greg Barker, from the 1998 book by Daniel Yergin, Joseph Stanislaw). Thatcher, Solidarnosc, Bolivian hyperinflation, USSR’s fall; details (Keynes, von Hayek share WWII air raid duty). Corporate sponsored; unashamedly neoliberal, this DVD box-set’s a historical artefact in itself.

Moana (2016, dir. Ron Clements, John Musker, Don Hall, Chris Williams; starring Auli'l Cravalho, Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, Rachel House). Plucky heroine (born to rule) pursues pantheistic quest narrative with hero’s journey detailing, only for Flight-of-Concords Jemaine to steal show with best Bowie pastiche since Velvet Goldmine. 

A Wrinkle in Time (2018, dir. Ava DuVernay, starring Storm Reid, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon). Daughter and I’ve both loved Madeleine L’Engle’s classic. This looks beautiful, great casting, a film we need maybe - but I was willing it to be better.

Ready Player One (2018, dir. Steven Spielberg, starring Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke,  Lena Waithe, Simon Pegg, Mark Rylance). A sugar-rush of a film with a 1970s/ 1980s mix-tape soundtrack, blink-and-you’d-miss-it in-jokes and plenty to say about our virtual-reality-addicted near future. 

*Pub quiz fact: Art Garfunkel’s Bright Eyes, the song from Watership Down, was the UK no. 1 as Margaret Thatcher first took office as Prime Minister (4th May 1979); once you learn that, it becomes hard not to hear it as a kind of elegy for the postwar consensus. “A fog along the horizon, a strange glow in the sky-y…”

  

twenty-seven words about lawns, putin, the lake district, computronium etc

Did you arrive here through my suggestion on twitter that you take Yuval Noah Harari away with you on holiday (so to speak)? If so, welcome - I read him while on holiday with S. near Slanchev Bryag, the Blackpool of the Black Sea (if Blackpool had been built by the communist authorities during the 1960s); also near Nesebar, of course - don't think we were just there for the sun and the cheap booze, it was an educational trip too, I learned the Bulgarian word for ashtray (it's пепелник = pepelnik, sounds more like a small bird that sings in the forest, no?).

Talking of holiday reads, I read Sarah Bakewell's superb group biography of the Sartre/ de Beauvoir circle while staying (for the third time) at the Three Cliffs Bay campsite near Swansea a couple of years ago; this led to me meeting the elderly Jean-Paul Sartre in a dream. I took my wife and daughter along as well but they weren't that into it.

Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. Amazed me twenty years back. Would this Jesuit adventure story stand a re-read? Yes: so much I missed first time around. Sex, spirit, language, calling, redemption, jokes.

Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano. Read opinion piece (forget whose) suggesting literary league tables down-rank intentionally comic writers (“yeah? try also being female,” you interject). This rise-of-robots novel outclasses Asimov and 1984.

Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus. It’s about the past and future of humanity; inter alia, lawns, pigs, the Black Death, animism etc. The relaxed, conversational style belies this book’s depth, breadth, originality.

Max Tegmark's Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. AI futures. Same-but-different teleology as readable climate-"sceptic", peer Matt Ridley.  This tour-de-force talks about turning all the universe’s matter into computronium like that'd be a good thing.

Peter Pomerantsev's Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia. How Putinism operates, propagandises; not your grandparents’ Soviet propaganda (as today’s Republican moment isn’t William Buckley’s). Prostitution (overt, covert, metaphorical); gangster sentimentality, bad faith. Funny, horrible, sinister. (See also 'To Russia With Love')

Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise. Author remembered, if remembered for writing about what does/ doesn’t last (paradox); cites contemporaries we still read (Orwell, Woolf), others. Lucid investigation of mandarin versus demotic prose. [See also.]

Petruska Clarkson's Gestalt Counselling in Action (updated by Simon Cavicchia). Thought I had her on Fritjof Capra- then, aha, intellectualisation= modification to contact (“lose your mind and…” – Perls). Reading= gestalt process; more/ less than; professional recap, recalibration.

William Wordsworth's The Prelude. Milton looks over Wordsworth’s shoulder, I overlook my own, re-engaging with canonical text I failed to read properly at uni (because older then than now). Multivalent; fluid; illuminative.

John Betjeman's Summoned By Bells. ‘Anxiety of Influence’ again; verse autobiography inevitably recalls Wordsworth, though Betjeman explicitly disdains thought, commitment, preferring sensibility, music (bathos-music of suburban placenames). Betjeman is ‘catchy’ (ambiguous praise).

twenty-seven word review of my favourite 1960s b-movie which i watched for, perhaps, the fifth time, plus some other films i watched during november, december, january and february

X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes (1963, dir. Roger Corman, starring Ray Milland, Diane Van der Vlis). This Kennedy-era thriller – creepy, hilarious, theremin-enriched – set, by turns, in clinic, fairground, Las Vegas, revival meeting is resonant for our own moment, which fetishes (also weaponises) ‘transparency’. 

Time Traveller’s Wife (2009, dir. Robert Schwentke, starring Eric Bana, Rachel McAdams).  He keeps vanishing from marital home, arriving naked elsewhere. She’s super-accepting about it. Genetic defect, yeah right. I dozed, sorry (busy week) – form of time-travel in itself. 

Equals (2015, dir. Drake Doremus, starring Nicholas Hoult, Kristen Stewart).  Well-realised, -acted, -designed emotion-phobic dystopia; this film dares to be quiet (minimal soundtrack). Equal but opposite ‘Jeremy Kyle World’ dystopia also possible (where emotional grandstanding is obligatory*).

Space Between Us (2017, dir. Peter Chelsom, starring Asa Butterfield, Britt Robertson). With this title, we shouldn’t get real-time Earth-Mars communication (where’s the average twelve-minute lightspeed delay? come on!); this passable, somewhat linear coming-of-age drama makes other unforced errors. 

I haven't watched many films during the last few months - granted, it's been Christmas, so I must've watched both Big (1988, dir. Penny Marshall, starring Tom Hanks) and Elf (2003, dir. Jon Favreau, starring Will Ferrell, Zooey Deschanel) at some point; also we saw The Greatest Showman (2017, dir. Michael Gracey) at the cinema on December 27th (twenty-seven word review: I mostly slept**, in a fortysomething dad style – not convinced I’d have gained a dramatically greater insight into P.T. Barnum’s life and times if I’d stayed awake... but, actually, this seems churlish; daughter loved the songs, knows them by heart, has them on repeat play. To be a parent is to be - as a wise person once said - no longer the picture, but the frame; likewise it's to be, if all is well, no longer the target demographic but the funding stream; on seeing the Greatest Showman again in May 2019, like life in reincarnation-based theologies it keeps on coming around, I felt I'd definitely been churlish, there's a lot to like: the songs, the spectacle, the expressionistic backdrops, the empathically pro-diversity messaging).

Mainly, instead of films as such, daughter and I have mostly watched Doctor Who; wife and I are mostly on box sets, also First Dates Hotel (those waiters/ waitresses are actually actors, though, did you know? gutted to find that out) and, don't tell me you haven't seen it, Say Yes To The Dress. 


*Are we nearly there yet?

**Second mention of sleeping through something. I could say, well, I work hard, I give; if something doesn't wholly engage my attention and I'm on a comfy sofa or in a darkened movie theater... or you could say, well, it just sounds a bit passive aggressive. Would one perspective be right and another wrong, or are they complementary, partial aspects of a totality (cf, light as wave/ particle)? Let's not even get started on transactional analysis and game-playing.

twenty-seven word reviews of films seen during august, september and october

The Raven (1935, dir. Louis Friedlander, aka Lew Landers, starring Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff) - If your consultant’s other specialisms include DIY and “the torture and murder devices of Edgar Allan Poe”, exercise patient choice. Do not attend said doctor’s house party.

Airplane! (1980, dir. David & Jerry Zucker, Jim Abraham, starring Robert Hays, Julie Hegarty, Leslie Nielsen, Lloyd Bridges) - No other PG-rated film (*really*, BBFC?) gets so many laughs from sex, abortion, glue-sniffing... Daughter commented, “seriously?” at one sexist gag; otherwise loved, esp. ‘shit hits fan’.

Blade Runner (1982, dir. Ridley Scott, starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Daryl Hannah, Sean Young) - “A hundred baby spiders…”; hard to imagine cyberpunk or postmodernity without the eggs, eyes, mothers, Cartesian doubt and memory movie that almost made William Gibson quit pre-Neuromancer.

Forrest Gump (1994, dir. Robert Zemeckis, starring Tom Hanks) - There’s an American route to success through single-mindedness, grit, family values, luck and being mildly learning-disabled. And that’s just about all I’ve got to say about that.

Tank Girl (1995, dir. Rachel Talalay, starring Lori Petty, Naomi Watts, Ice-T, Malcolm McDowell) -  Dystopia-causing cometary impact =off-the-shelf; grunge-era stylings =carefully hand-stitched in this film of the comic book. Vivienne Westwood costumes; Courtney Love-Cobain curates 1995 time-capsule soundtrack: Bjork, Ice-T, Hole, L7. 

Red Road (2006, dir. Andrea Arnold, starring Kate Dickie, Tony Curran, Martin Compston, Natalie Press) - Involving, edgy: CCTV operator, Glasgow, sees someone from her past on camera, becomes involved. Viewer as detective: what happened? Not what you first thought. Ending: redemptive (just). 

Happy Go Lucky. (2008, dir. Mike Leigh, starring Sally Hawkins, Eddie Marsan) - Abigail’s Party, High Hopes? Priceless. This? Liked swerve from expected rom-com narrative (he’s not just grumpy, he’s….); disliked annoying MPDG-ish protagonist, woefully under-researched social work portrayal. Pity.    

The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009, dir. Chris Weitz, writer: Melissa Rosenberg, starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner) - Build-up: dream sequences, great soundtrack, ‘Romeo and Juliet’ as intertext, relatable sixthform problems. The undead, yeah? Can’t live with ‘em…  Denouement: ambiguous at plot junction. (Just me?).

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010, dir. David Slade, writer: Melissa Rosenberg, starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner) - Vampires 90% white, favour Scandi-style interiors; werewolves forest-dwelling Native Americans bikers. (No - really?). Something here for Freudians, Jungians, gestaltists, admirers of the well-developed male chest. Great trilogy.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part I (2011, dir. Bill Condon, writer: Melissa Rosenberg, starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner) - Jacob rips shirt off thirty seconds in – female-gaze in-joke, surely? (Never wear best stuff if werewolf). Uncomfortable watch (for this male): inward struggle referencing pregnancy, also (?)anorexia.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part II (2012, dir. Bill Condon, writer: Melissa Rosenberg, starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner : Interesting finale. Final battle only imagined = M.A.D. for telepaths and vampires. Have seen Twilight sequence on ‘worst movie of all time list’ - so not fair.

Best of Enemies (2015, dir. Robert Gordon & Morgan Neville, 'starring' Gore Vidal, William F. Buckley Jr) - Fascinating portrayal of American civil strife, world disorder during 1960s through lens of famously rancorous set-piece TV debates between two public intellectuals. Something feline about both men.

Had intended to see new Blade Runner movie last weekend; didn't; long story.

twenty-seven word reviews of books read during august, september and october

Nnedi Okrafor’s Binti. Some great aliens in YA novella about Himba girl (Namibia) leaving home (in various senses) for offworld uni. A fiction about being tough enough to wage peace. 

Ken MacLeod's Corporation Wars: Dissidence. Emergent sentience, exo-mining, simulated simulations, political mistrust, relatable robots; the alt-right “fancying themselves elite while… outstripped economically by the Chinese and intellectually by their own phones.” Enjoyed.

Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right. Field-guide: ‘alt-lite’ (nasties, contrarian outrage-merchants), hard ‘alt-right’ (extreme racists, fascists), 4Chan, Pepe. Some ultra-left trends – Situationism, Yippies, valuation of ‘transgression’ for own sake – may’ve fed the beast.

Juliet Jacques' Trans: A Memoir. Narrates author’s trans journey, reflecting on school, family, literature, art/ LGBT cinema, theory, journalism, fear, violence, student debt, admin jobs, football (Norwich supporter, “someone has to be”).

Tessa Hadley, London Train Two stories; main character in one =incidental character in second; otherwise, links are geographical, thematic:  London, Wales, climate fear, love affairs, passage of time, cups of coffee.

John Williams' My Son’s Not Rainman: One Man, One Autistic Boy, A Million Adventures.   Writer’s gift for telling observations, funny lines (he does stand-up) mediates the intimacy of this readable account of autism (son) and nervous breakdown (dad). Myth-busting, tough, hopeful.

Daniel Siegel & Tina Payne Brayson's The Whole-Brain Child, 12 Proven Strategies to Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind.   Like Gottman, a ‘grower’ for me; the more I reflect on the hand model and other metaphors and strategies here, the more depth and applicability I find. 

twenty-seven word reviews of films seen since April

The Way Ahead (1945, dir. Carol Reed, starring David Niven, Stanley Holloway, William Hartnell).   Romanticised but open-ended portrait of a range of conscripts – training, then into action: North Africa. Prompts reflections on, inter alia, stories that we told ourselves in 1945.

Passionate Friends (1949, dir. David Lean, starring Ann Todd, Trevor Howard). Less of a chamber piece than Brief Encounter (longer time-frames; Switzerland); same emotional acuity and restraint (WW2 represented as a cold wind through an open window); spell-binding.

Robocop (1987, dir. Paul Verhoeven). Hadn’t seen; overdue. Enjoyed; popcorn movie; special effects still credible; satire broad but sharp (war risks; corporate ethics; privatisation; identity vs machine). Also, Leland Palmer’s in it. 

Factotum (2005, dir. Bent Hamer, starring Matt Dillon, Lili Taylor). Bar-dwelling old-timer to hard-drinking protagonist: “I’ve probably been asleep for longer than you’ve been alive.” Watchable, funny, necessarily downbeat biopic of writer, drunk, occasional misogynist Charles Bukowski.

Twilight (2008, dir. Catherine Hardwicke, starring  Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson). Bella: How old are you? Edward: Seventeen. Bella: How long have you been seventeen? Edward: A while. Daughter understands she shouldn’t date vampires in high school. Fun.

Potiche (2010, dir. Francois Ozon, starring  Catherine Deneuve, Gérard Depardieu). Brightly-coloured movie starring Depardieu and Deneuve in a sitcom-like plot involving an umbrella factory, la guerre des sexes, strike action, and disco. What more do you need?

Hunger Games (2012, dir. Gary Ross, starring Jennifer Lawrence). Wife and daughter both into the Hunger Games series. Meant to be the dystopia de nos jours, but I dozed partly; didn’t connect; unthrilled. Is that terrible?

London: The Modern Babylon (2012, dir. Julien Temple). Interesting, unexpected about, e.g. Battle of Cable Street but some sections glib, overfamiliar, music choices disrespectful (e.g. Fall’s Leave the Capitol vs WW2 evacuees). Not his best.

Saving Mr Banks (2013, dir. John Lee Hancock, starring Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks). Platonic romcom (film rights =consummation); Travers (‘Mary Poppins’ author), Disney as protagonists. Nice, bright-looking film, uninvolving though. Just say no, Mrs T; Julie Andrews’ll still get work.

twenty-seven word reviews of books read since March

Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon.  Liked incursion of Nigerian folktale into Lagos-set SF; wanted to like more; found ‘putdownable’; polyphonic, magic-realist approach versus narrative drive, perhaps. Keen to read more by author.

C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. Theologically, philosophically well-grounded ‘core Christianity’ explication in clear-sighted, plain prose. Helps me recommit. Good. BUT race, gender, LGBT attitudes range from dated through jaw-dropping to WTF. Hmmm.

Tim Keller’s The Meaning of Marriage: Facing The Complexities of Marriage with the Wisdom of God. Sane, non-liberal (e.g. "headship") Christian thought and insight re-presented in full awareness of today’s context (so no WTF moments). Not scintillating but pragmatic. Religion speaks to culture.

H.G. Wells’ Ann Veronica.   Ann, adrift in London, stalked, mistaken for a prostitute, in same existential predicament as Wells’ Time Traveller in 802,701. Clammy horror good but quasi-Nietzschean sexual politics bad.

Karl-Ove Knausgaard’s A Death in the Family: My Struggle Book 1 (tr. Don Bartlett).   Had to get around to; compulsory (for a certain middle-aged male ‘literary’ demographic). Boring and intensely absorbing by turns (like life – good mimesis). Alcoholism, girls, father-son stuff.

John Gottman & Joan DeClaire’s Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child: The Heart of Parenting. Useful if working with families (or in one); categorisation of parenting styles as dismissing, emotion-coaching etc. is illuminating without being – as with some parenting texts - reductive.  

  

Mark O’Connell’s To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death. Literary sensibilities and experience of fatherhood inform author’s (i) researches into transhumanism (ii) road trip across America with Zoltan Istvar, running for President in a coffin-shaped bus.

Alex Evans’ The Myth Gap: What Happens when Evidence and Arguments aren’t Enough?. We must reconnect with our various religious/ cultural myths, esp. atonement, coming of age, to reach both inwards and outwards on climate. Mindfulness is non-trivial. Brief, recommended.

twenty-seven word reviews of books read during January and February 2017

Ursula Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea. “Not many girls,” say daughter. True – wizards are all boys, girls do housework. “Female author though; strong feminist by repute.” Discussion ensues. Both enjoyed but daughter preferred...

Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle. Bit chatty sometimes IMHO; daughter and I loved unexpected breakthrough from fantasy world into contemporary (1980s) Wales = ‘Wizard of Oz’ b&w to colour moment. Calcifer rocks.

Tessa Hadley’s Married Love. Short stories. Mutedness; unspoken conversations, unacted desires. One story: female undergraduate, 20 marries composer, 60; has babies. Choices cannot be unchosen; families comment, react; things work out.

Ashlee Vance’s Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future. Early torment in South Africa, braininess, 1980s tech, mobile phones, solar power, electric cars, moral compass. Bit driven; cold fish sometimes. Like Tony Stark but not. Enjoyed.

Viv Albertine's Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. Eventful narrative: childhood, punk (the Slits), cancer, suburban ‘afterwards’, comeback. Told through vignettes – like a concept album or song cycle.  Researching novella; protagonist= musician; bit stuck though.

John Piper, Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist. Book-length elaboration of C.S. Lewis quote, “God finds our desires too weak...”; willed emotionlessness is Stoic, not Christian. Thought-provoking; ‘conservative’ (so you know); must read Pascal now.