More films watched

I'm not completely vegging out here but I have been watching a few more films. Not such a  good selection this time, perhaps. They were

 

1. 1962 To kill a mockingbird

2. 1968 If …

3. 1985 Cocoon

4. 1993 Journey to the centre of the earth

5. 1995 Bradybunch movie

6. 2006 Touch the top of the world

 

I watched the Bradybunch movie out of curiosity. The Bradys were a composite family with six kids who had a show in the seventies. In the 1995 film they are just as cheesily nice and seventies as in the series, it seems. It's a feel good movie I guess but decidedly weird. I recognised Shelley Long but not Gary Cole or any of the other actors. Gregory Peck took the lead in the award winning monochrome To Kill a Mockingbord, a good aide memoir after reading the book. Very good. If ... was nothing to do with the Kipling poem but an increasingly surreal take on rebellion by pupils at an old-fashioned English public school. Very much of its time, it was Malcolm MacDowell's first feature film and understandably had an 'X' certificate at the time. Curiously, the film switches from polychrome to monochrome at certain points. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to this. Touch the top of the world was a biopic about Erik Weihenmeyer, the first blind man to climb Everest. Footage of the climb is interlaced with the backstory in this made for TV story of inspiration. Sadly, those words 2made for TV" will tell you all you need to know.

The other two films were sci-fi, perhaps my least favourite genre (after musicals and action films). The Jules Verne novel Journey to the centre of the earth gets remade every few years. This was a "made for TV" effort. Enough said. Cocoon, on the other hand, although the whole thing is, of course, hokum, was an opportunity to explore some interesting themes such as ageing and eternal life. When the grandfather tells his grandson of a wonderful world of no pain or death one immediately thought of heaven. However, the two would never be together there. Not a great message. I recognised some of the actors including Steve Guttenberg.

To kill a mockingbird Harper Lee

In my ongoing project of catching up on books I've missed I have just read Harper Lee's To kill a mockingbird. I was on the Southbank the other week and just over the millennium bridge a man was selling battered paperbacks and a picked up a copy for £2.50. I started reading it the other week and since my unforeseen circumstances kicked in have been able to complete it already. Its reputation as a fine novel is deserved. Because it is written through a child's eyes it is understandably a GCSE favourite. Set in the thirties in the southern states it first appeared in 1963. I had assumed it would be tackling the whole race question head on but is much more powerful for being very oblique. Perhaps the most powerful moment is when a racist woman denounces Hitler. The mockingbird theme is done very lightly and the Boo Radley theme keeps interest while at the same time giving the treatment of the subject breadth. A Shakespeare moment indeed.