Quicunque

I watched Alatriste this evening - and for its entire duration of two-and-a-half hours I marvelled how much the lead looked exactly like Viggo Mortensen (for whom I do carry a wee bit of a crush). As the credits rolled, I realised it WAS Viggo Mortensen. Epic fail! I badly need new glasses, How could I be so thick? My only excuse is that my attention must have wandered as much as the plot.

Moving on....

The film was visually superb, bringing to vivid life the squalor and the splendour of the times, and the plentiful fight scenes are authentically brutal in a way that Hollywood never dares manage. But plot-wise, it was a fragmented mess, mainly through having tried to condense episodes from five novels into one film. However, the characters and the of the period (Hapsburg Spain) were fascinating enough to make me curious about the actual novels by Arturo Pérez-Revete. I read his The Fencing Master several years ago and remember it as an interesting and elegant historical thriller - an Alexandre Dumas for the modern age.

Talking of Dumas, it's interesting to compare Alatriste's brutal moral ambiguity with the Three Musketeers' relatively merry swashbuckling. Alatriste is a better hero for our times than d'Artagnan, I think, we prefer the anti-hero nowadays.

While I was buying a pint of milk in the Supermarket from Hell earlier today, I spotted a display stand of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides DVDs. I realised that not only was it the first PotC film I hadn’t seen in the cinema then promptly preordered my own copy and awaited eagerly, but I hadn’t even realised it was out on DVD already. Even having spotted it, I didn’t buy it, and I haven’t even added it to my rental list yet. That’s how interested I am in it.

I think my love affair with Captain Jack Sparrow and his brand of whimsical piratical farce is over, without me ever noticing it.

Part of the reason is that while PotC 1 was fresh, funny and charming, PotC 2 was merely okay and PotC 3 was frankly a bore (except for Chow Yun-fat, but they killed his character off). Even the presence of Penelope Cruz, whom I adore, and the absence of Lollipop Knightley and Woodentop Bloom wasn’t enough to stir any enthusiasm in my jaded little soul for another dance round the same old merry-go-round. I am dismayed to hear that Depp is eager for a PotC 5… and 6… and 101.

Actually, I think I may be tired of pirates in general. I do love a good rogue, but anything that become ubiquitous and over-popularised and copied ad nauseam quickly gets tired, and I think that’s what’s happened for me here. It was just the same with vampires. I couldn’t stand the undead little fuckers even before Twilight and its plethora of teen fodder imitators blighted our cultural lives*.

I’m already looking ahead for something new and unexplored, for the next archetype that will set my pulse racing. I need a hero! He’s gotta be strong, and he’s gotta be fast, and he’s gotta be fresh from the fight. It would help if he was gay, and rich, and liked cats.

*Apologies to certain awesome vampires of my acquaintance, who are lively, inventive and complex enough to be worthy exceptions to my rule. They also have short tempers and a very painful bite.

Meet the real star of Cannes: Midge the one-eyed cat from Yorkshire with a passion for sprinting

Amidst all the daily news of fraudulent and corrupt politicians, recession and redundancies, the collapse of the global economy and a swine flu pandemic, it's so warming to come across a story like that above. A Yorkshire parish councillor named Martin Humphreys who races his one-eyed rescue cat Midge back from the shop each day, has made a short children's film featuring himself and Midge competing in one of their races. Made on a budget of just £1,000, The Great Race will be debuting before judges in the Short Film Corner at the Cannes Film Festival.

Mr Humphreys is reported to be hoping The Great Race will be taken up by a movie company: "I truly believe this could be one of the greatest children's films of all time," he says.

Well, as one ex-runner to another, I for one have no intention of even trying to resist Midge's charm! Go cat!

There's another video here too from the BBC

(Reposted from the Halloween page of one of my characters at Panhistoria now I've removed it from there.)

According to Japanese legend, it is believed that if a cat's owner is killed and it licks its blood, the creature will become a cat monster - kaibyo or bakeneko that would revenge the wrongful death. Bakeneko mono, as ghost-cat stories are called, can be found in traditional folk stories and kabuki plays, and during the 30s to 60s there was a number of Japanese ghost-cat horror films made (see the essays Ghost Cats & Blind Masseurs and A Few Bakeneko-mono Ghost-Cat Movies)

One of the best was Kuroneko (藪の中の黒猫, Yabu no Naka no Kuroneko, literally "Black Cat of the Bamboo Grove"), a sparse but magnificently eerie horror story loosely based on the traditional Japanese folktale The Cat’s Return, which came out in 1968 and was written and directly by the highly respected Kaneto Shindo.

The plot...

In a time of civil war, in the 11th Century, a group of mercenary samurai brutally rape and kill a mother and daughter-in-law and cover their crime by setting their hut ablaze. When the ashes have cooled, a black cat is seen lapping blood from the charred corpses. Some while later the samurai who led the assault encounters a young noblewoman who requests he see her safely to her home, where she toys with him before biting him and sucking out his blood. He is discovered at dawn dead among the ashes of a burnt hut.

As other samurai returning from the war through that area are also killed in similar circumstances, the issue is brought to the attention of the local governor who orders Gintoki, an ex-farmer who rose to the status of a samurai vassal during the civil wars, to kill the ghosts or else he will be killed. Gintoki encounters the two beautiful women in an eerie, beautiful scene and discovers that the ghost-cats are the revenge-spirits of his own mother and wife, killed while he was off at the war. Emotional drama abounds as the older, vengeful spirit seeks to kill her son, the younger ghost makes a bargain in order to be temporarily reunited with her husband, and Gintoki is ultimately unable to reconcile his love and his duty.

Ah, but you knew it was all going to end badly for everyone, didn't you? *chuckle*

Here's a good essay on the film: Shindo’s Kuroneko, and if you need more encouragement to dash out and rent or buy it, here's a trailer to whet your appetite: