Miss Jean Louise, stand up....

Golden Anniversary

During Lockdown Three Point Zero, you take your celebrations where you can. So, if The Harry Potter Film Club has to meet on Zoom, then so be it. The group started as a prelude to watching The Cursed Child at the the theatre (in the olden days of theatre-going) because one person had limited knowledge of the Wizarding World. But then it continued, fuelled by a love of wine and cake and sociable bonhomie. And we decided to mark the 50th film with dressing up as characters from films we’d already watched, thus, above:

• No-Face from Spirited Away
• Sadness from Inside Out
• Idgie Threadgoode from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café 
• Mr Perks from The Railway Children and
• Lina Lamont from Singin’ in the Rain

Hey, Boo, fifty films and counting

There have been

• 10 Fantasies
• 7 Comedies
• 5 Animations
• 5 Documentaries
• 4 Dramas
• 3 Historical Films
• 3 Crime Thrillers
• 3 Musicals
• 2 Biopics
• 2 Family Films
• 2 Literary Adaptations
• 2 SciFi Movies
• 1 Disaster Movie and
• 1 Satire.

Over half were made since the Millennium and the earliest so far was 1940's Pinocchio. The 50th anniversary film choice was Robert Mulligan’s 1962 movie of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird with landmark performances by Gregory Peck (as Atticus Finch), Estelle Evans (as Calpurnia), Mary Badham, Phillip Alford and John Megna (as Scout, Jem and Dill), Brock Peters (as Tom Robinson), and Robert Duvall (as Arthur (Boo) Radley.) With mood-perfect rhythms and music by Elmer Bernstein and a miraculously faithful adaptation by Horton Foote, the movie captures the spirit of the novel without simplifying any of the moral and legal complexities. The film remains light touch in the way a modern version, I think, would be far more heavy-handed.

Three Resolutions

The weasel in the garden

And 2021 has begun. I resolve to Keep Walking and Keep Creatively Visualising images like the one above and the one at the end of this post. And I Resolve to only check on the news once a day. Walk. Love. Limit the News. Walk. Love. Limit the News. Winter sun. Flurries of snow. Wintery frost. Lockdown Three Point Zero. Rising Covid cases, hospital admissions and deaths. As Reignier says in Henry VI Part One

Defer no time, delays have dangerous ends.

This is a Shakespearian line that should be tattooed onto the UK government’s eyeballs. For the best part of the last year, life-saving decisions have been slow, many have been contradictory and, from the week of Cummings-gate, have been interpreted to suit everyone’s own circumstances because that was the lesson learned from BoJo’s support of the weasel in the Rose Garden. Hopefully the newest campaign to take Covid seriously will make an impact and bring down cases. Time will tell.

The coward on the hill

The President of America, in the dying days of his reign of misinformation, vulgar speechifying and inconsistently perverse decision-making, has incited a crowd of his supporters to invade and riot in the Capitol building leaving (to date) 5 dead bodies, broken glass, stolen goods, vandalised furtniture, and a (future) string of court appearances and prison sentences Although Trump shouted “We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue…. I know everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building…” he only meant a “royal we” and “everyone” didn’t include his own bloated orange self, so he sent his supporters into notoriety and infamy as he returned, I imagine, to put his feet up on a padded cushion in the White House and eat a cheeseburger and pretend he was innocent.

Cartoon by John Shakespeare for The Age

The rebel without a plan

As ever, something in Shakespeare nagged at me and I realised it was Jack Cade in Henry VI Part Two inveterately boasting and inciting a mob. Even though his promises to the angry and starving peasants are impossible, the promises are still effective at rabble-rousing the mob to march and, of course, many are killed.

Valiant I am…. I fear neither sword nor fire…. When I am king, as king I shall be…. I thank you good people…. I will make myself a knight…. Burn all the records of the realm…. My mouth shall be the parliament…. I must sweep the court clean of such filth as thou art…. Thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb…. Away with him – he speaks Latin!.... Take him away and behead him…. I’ll defy them all…. (Jack Cade in Henry VI Part Two)

Jack Cade's rebellion

The gardener with a pruning sword 

But Jack Cade’s life becomes (like Trump’s is likely to be), not a bang but a sad whimper away from the crowds. The witness to Cade’s death (indeed his unwitting executioner) realises who Jack Cade is as he dies and calls him “monstrous traitor” and ends the scene with a grim final action:

Hence I will drag thee headlong by the heels

Unto a dunghill which shall be thy grave….

Leaving thy trunk for crows to feed upon.

The identity of Jack Cade’s nemesis is – future High Sheriff of Kent in history, working class gardener in Shakespeare’s play – Alexander Iden – an English spelling of Eden…. Let’s hope 2021 becomes more of an Eden than 2020. Walk. Love. Limit the News. Walk. Love. Limit the News.

An Edenic Future Visualisation using snapshots of the past