Romeo + Juliet and the Road To Perdition

I have to be careful not to spend too much time in the hostel's TV rooms. They seem to be perpetually tuned to one or both of the local Sky Movies channels, meaning that I'm constantly catching-up on films that I've always intended to watch, one day...

Well, several of those days seem to be this week.

One such film was Tom Hanks' Road To Perdition.


I remember seeing the trailer for this in the cinema in 2002.

"Every father is a hero to his son.
Every son holds the future for his father."

Frankly, this film was clearly going to be rubbish. With all the rain, dreary music and sour facial expressions, I really had no idea why anyone paid money to watch something that wasn't trying to make them happy.

A few months after that, I was at the cinema again, when the same trailer came on. But there was one difference.

Now my father had died.

"Every father is a hero to his son.
Every son holds the future for his father."

This time I think I sat there with my mouth hanging wide-open.

Those same words hit me with an aim so deadly accurate that I remembered them for years afterwards. Now that he was gone, my father was a hero to me – one who I had never recognised when he had been here. And since he'd gone permanently, I guessed I actually did 'hold the future' for him.

And that was just the trailer. Finally watching the actual film this week was involving, and I missed the sort of father/son relationship that's on show when he's teaching his kid how to drive, but for me I think the film will always be about that trailer.


Another movie this week was the funkily-named 1996 version of Romeo + Juliet, starring Leonardo diCaprio and Clare Danes. This was interesting to watch, but in a modern setting, Shakespeare's dialogue was just weird.

Surreal, in a sinister sort of way.

Keywords

I've just broken into my 2nd #100.00 which, 4 days in, isn't really that good! Sorry, when I typed # I actually meant to type #. They don't have a # key on their computers here. I just tried going into Special Characters, which was an effort as all the on-screen instructions are in Japanese. Basically, I made a real # of it. (1 out of 10, so what are you gonna do about it?!)

Emotionally I'm up and down. Sometimes I feel really positive, but at others I just know it's going to be a long uphill battle ending with me going home poorer.

Joined a fortnightly Bible-study group at church tonight.

Steamboat Bill Jr.

The highlight of this full-length vehicle is undoubtably the huge storm towards the film's end. The blustery environment is quite uncomfortable, making Keaton's most famous stunt perhaps not as funny as it should be. Then again, I've seen that bit re-enacted so many times in the opening credits of The Goodies, that I guess I've become a bit desensitized to it.

That said, the sound effects were out of sync, and the stereo was all over the place. Oh, wait a minute, I forgot, that was the live orchestra.

(first movie of this double bill - One Week - is here)

One Week

With the Auckland Film Festival in town, I'd booked a seat at the Civic Centre on Queen Street to watch a double-bill of silent Buster Keaton movies...with a live orchestral score by the Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra! It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to experience the films as they could have originally been presented.


The first short - One Week - was rather charming. Keaton gets married and is given a DIY house as a wedding gift. (where they had been planning on living until they received this is never explored)


The first half treats us to a good spread of Keaton's slapstick portfolio, but it's the second half when the creativity really kicks in. Events become increasingly surreal, as his jalopy of a house opens-up like a giant puzzle, becomes a merry-go-round in a storm, and even gets given a tow by his car.

In one scene when his wife's taking a bath, she drops the soap on the floor and has to stand-up to get it, at which point a stage-manager's hand covers the camera lens!

It's good fun all round, and was a great introduction to a cinematic icon, whose reputation I've heard of often, but never until today actually seen.

(second movie - Steamboat Bill Jr. - is here)

The Edge Of Church

Join a church. Done!

Well, I suppose I exaggerate. There seem to be two plans of attack here. Either try out lots of churches every Sunday to find one that I like. Or just stick with the first one in order to lay down some roots and make some friends.

Either way, church #1 (which was recommended to me by a lady I met on a Christian writing weekend in Northampton about a month ago) seemed quite creative.

As I was a newcomer, a guy called Anthony welcomed me with a free lollipop. I like that childlike generosity in a modern church.

I also saw that they had a mean-looking band, which made me cringe in despair at modern churches.

Someone stood-up at one point and presented a pop-video that they'd just made. He was quite a friendly chap, although the video had lots of fake film-dirt on it, which rarely makes sense to me in any context.

The sermon was brilliant, what I saw of it. The pastor was presenting clips from a movie called The Castle, which I made a mental note of to find and watch in its entirety later. I missed the second half of the sermon because, ironically, I was going to the cinema again...

As I headed away to the Auckland Film Festival though, there was one thing that really warmed my heart about this place. In amongst the church's stated goals was the line "To build whanau."

I felt really comforted to have found a church where they'd recognised that.

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective

The first movie role I ever saw Jim Carey in was The Truman Show, so catching Ace Ventura on one of the Sky Movies channels at the youth hostel was a welcome chance to catch-up with the rest of the world's impressions of him.


And Ventura's extreme weirdness actually does his character a bit of a disservice. He's funny and entertaining – there's no doubt about it – but despite the film's title, he's surprisingly lacking in animal-jokes.

There's good stuff throughout this movie's throwaway story though, and I look forward to serendipitously finding the sequel on sometime.

Spider-Man 2

Having given myself the whole weekend off in order to shake my jet lag, tonight I treated myself to a film at Sky City Metro cinema, and saw Spider-Man 2.


It really was fantastic, for so many reasons. I think the thing I loved most is that it really was a Peter Parker flick. My favourite scenes were the ones when he kept missing getting a drink, and that whole Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head routine! This was a story in which, just like real life, the characters had the freedom to go anywhere and do anything. I can't believe MacGuire doesn't want to do a third one. He will never do anything of this calibre again.

I really, really enjoyed it. I could write about how good I thought that was for hours. As always, though, the presence of a Super-Villain kinda weighed heavy.

All this and yet more Stan Lee™...


Highly recommended, even if you missed the first one, it's really well recapped!

9 out of 10. You read it - 9!

(Available here)
Review of Spider-Man here.
Review of Spider-Man 3 here.

Goodbye Banoffee Pie

It was an impossible thing.

I was sitting on a bench back in Auckland Viaduct again, drinking what could be my last ever banoffee-pie flavoured Frijj drink, as the Sky Tower loomed over me like a futuristic sentinel.

I like Frijjes, but I particularly like the banoffee ones. They're only a limited edition, but I've drunk that flavour in New Zealand, the UK and Crete. They all have a picture of my best friend Herschel on the front, who tells me he endorses them heartily.

Herschel... today's his birthday. I hope he likes the Han Solo figure I got him back in tram-filled Croydon.

Auckland Airport had fought real hard to prevent me from sitting there enjoying that drink though.

After the plastic-gloved official had searched all the way through my luggage (only my luggage mind), he'd stood there looking utterly dishevelled.

"You don't have enough clothes," he'd protested. "I was going to do you for illegally emigrating here, but... you don't have enough clothes."

I'm still mystified as to how he had thought that so many clothes could be fitted into my rucksack and Jessops carrier. The thing is, he also looked mystified as to where he'd got that idea from.

When I left, he wished me good luck.

Then, following my friend Perry's advice, I asked at the information desk where the cheapest backpackers in town was. I reserved a bed by phone, and after slouching about the airport for a bit, I eventually caught the bus back to Queen Street.

That had been a fairground ride. Watching Auckland town swishing past both windows again as Sting's uplifting Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic danced a jive out of the radio.

Climbing out at Darby Street, I carried my stuff into the lift and checked-in at the third floor of Auckland Central Backpackers. (ACB) The girl on the desk expressed surprise at seeing me, because my phone call had been so long ago now.

Up on the sixth floor, outside room 610, I inserted the key, turned the lock, opened the door, and three things hit me immediately.

1. The first was the darkness inside.

2. The second was the smell. The wet, heavy, languid smell of dirty people.

3. The third was something large scurrying around on the floor, almost invisible in the darkness, and almost silent too - surrounded as it was by an unknown number of unconscious bodies. It took me several seconds to discover and unlock the presumption that was leading me to wonder what a girl was doing in a male dormitory.

At that moment, these were the exact words that ran through my head:

"Well I'm not staying here long."

Outside on Queen Street again, I was delighted to find that the hostel was barely a minute's walk around the corner from where we'd stayed last time in Elliott Street.


Fig. 1: Elliott Street Apartments on the left edge, ACB the large white building on the right.

Great – so I already knew where everything was, not least the all-important Star Mart.

Reacquainting myself with ANZ across the road, I opened a bank account. The assistant was pregnant, and I was her final customer before she began her maternity leave.

Like the customs official earlier, I wished her well.

And so back to Auckland Viaduct, to pray and reflect on the four tasks ahead of me, with which I hoped to catch-up with everyone who had left home at 18. To join a church, to find somewhere to live, to get a driver's licence, (a tough one since I'm such a bad driver) and to land a job I believe in. (which will also require a permit)

Those are four more impossible things. Well, they always have been to me. With God however, anything's possible. Everything is therefore 100% up to him to do.

Finishing my banoffee-pie flavoured Frijj, I realised that it was drive-time on a Friday. I was now watching the masses of people milling around me, going home, or out at the end of their week.

I supposed that, a month from now, I ought to have become one of them.

New Suit

You always read about Hollywood executives bogging themselves down with trying to make everything relevant and accessible to as many potential paying viewers as possible. Yet, paradoxically, they do like making a lot of shoppy films about themselves, too.


New Suit is about a non-existent movie script getting green-lit, purely on the basis of all the hype surrounding it.

This is a great premise, opening itself up to all sorts of clever schemes and misdirection, but which sadly isn't really plundered for that. For example, the scene in which, fearing for his job, the proof-reader who started the rumour actually rings-up an executive and pretends to be the author. Since no-one else has the script, that really makes him the bona fide author. So he's only really lying about his name. Not so genius really.

You have to wonder how authentic the film's own hype appeared.

Starsky & Hutch

Unless a flight is under-booked, I never seem to get a good seat for watching a communal in-flight movie. One TV set is always too near, and other too far away, transforming each movie into 90-minutes of sheer frustrated ambivalence.

Fortunately, amongst Jonathan Creek and Poirot: Death On The Nile was another film that I was mildly interested in seeing - Starsky & Hutch. (you can tell I was keen)


I had been expecting something quite condescending towards the original 70s TV series, but was pleased to discover that the movie actually played things quite straight. There were elements of the original in here, such as the drug-overdose one of them suffers, but the most encouraging thing was that it actually appeared to be a prequel to the original, chronicling the two lead characters' first meeting. (I hate reboots)

There's also a very odd scene at the end, which seemed to have the original two actors cameoing, but it's just not clear what's going on from the dialogue, and as mentioned above, the airline's distant TV set wasn't giving me too many clues either.

Letting Go

The aeroplane's wheels let-go of the runway at Heathrow, sealing the next 24 hours of my life, and I knew there was no going back.

My last minutes at home had been... odd.

Posing for photos in the back garden with Seven and Pompey, our 'new' cats.

Walking out of the front door for the last time, I suddenly stopped. "I've forgotten something," I said to my mum.

I headed back in again, up the stairs, and found what I was looking for – my pocket Good News Bible. When my mum saw what I'd returned for, she said, "That's the most important thing to take."

She also took-off the watch she was wearing, and gave it to me. This was the same watch that my father had worn. In the moments after his death, I had found my eyes constantly alighting upon it, because the second-hand was still moving along normally, unaware of the attention it was now drawing to itself.

Anyway, my mum gave me the watch, explaining that I should really take something of Father's with me.

Heathrow Airport, saying goodbye, trying to fit everything into my bags, checking-in, and revisiting the duty-free area. Ah yes, this place. Last time I'd come through here, in February, also on my way to New Zealand, I'd bumped into my old mate Matthew, who I hadn't really seen since the 1980s when we'd met taking a radio training course together. All that time without seeing each other – wow.

The weird thing is, I actually saw him again yesterday, in Twickenham. That's the sort of coincidence that, statistically, must occur occasionally in most people's lives, but all the same you can't help wondering if God's indicating something.

Finally I boarded Air New Zealand flight NZ1 to Auckland, made friends with the chair which I would be sitting-upon for the next 24 hours, and then suddenly felt my heart sink through the floor and into the hold, as I realised with horror that there were no TVs in the backs of the seats.

The next 24 hours might just be the longest day of my 3-month trip.

Doctor Who: The Enemy Of The World

At breakfast this morning, before embarking on my huge journey, I had a bit of unfinished business to clear-up.

My mum and I have been watching a reconstruction of the 1967-8 Doctor Who story The Enemy Of The World, and only had one more episode to go.

Watching a 'reconstruction' is the closest thing to watching the original episodes. As the BBC destroyed many of the tapes and films after transmission, today several groups of fans have acquired off-air recordings of the soundtracks, and synced them up with all the surviving photos and/or clips of each episode. The result can be a bit difficult to get into, but it's an absolute joy to view and listen to the library of media in the best possible context.

And The Enemy Of The World is a curiosity for several reasons.

Mid-way through production, the show switched from the old 405-line TV system, to the new 625-line one. (a big improvement in picture-quality, lost in the recon)

The actor playing the Doctor – Patrick Troughton – also plays the villain in this. As is usual with doppelgänger films, the only explanation in the narrative is one of coincidence, while the similarity in both characters' voices is simply never addressed. Well, we all know what the Doctor winds up having to do.


(Thanks to www.shillpages.com for this screencap)

Conversely, the actor playing the Guard Captain actually changes between episodes three and four. This really hit home for me, because the first actor later became one of my teachers back at college!


(I'm still using what he taught me today!)

I've no idea why he wasn't available to complete the story, but on this reconstruction they've got mixed-up, and used the wrong actor's photo! Hilarious.

The Enemy Of The World is not just a doppelgänger tale though. The evil Salamander is also effectively in control of two worlds, both unaware of the other's existence, and the political scheming involved to play them both off of each other is excellent material on its own.

It's always fantastic to watch these recons, and I'm extremely grateful to the hard-working fans who put these things together.

If only more of it had survived.

Leaving Home

It had been a beautiful, perfect moment, but two and a half years later I was crying.

The 4th of February 2001 had been my 31st birthday. That year, everyone had really made the effort. A day or so later, at about one o'clock in the morning, I had found myself sitting alone in my living-room, just gazing-up at all the cards on the mantle-piece...


The cards might all look fairly ordinary to you, but to me, they were touching because of how personal they all were. One was of my favourite TV show - Doctor Who - containing a CD-story. Opposite it sat a silly Button Moon one, drawn-in by my best friend Herschel. Below that was a Bagpuss card which my mum had made. My dad and the rest of my family, they never failed either. On the right of the top shelf you can also see a photo of our white cat Phantom.

Around me in other rooms of the house, the rest of my family were hopefully sleeping. Well, maybe not my dad, he got a lot of insomnia, but he was there. Just a minute down the road was Herschel. And somewhere around about, potentially further away than anyone else, was Phantom. Probably stealing another cat's food, and growling at their owner. He was that sort of a cat – a rottweiler.

Very occasionally in life, a huge inexplicable peace seems to descend. As I looked up at the cards, this was one of those beautiful moments. I had no idea why.

A few days later, I got in from work. No-one else was in the living-room to greet me, but I knew where they each were. My dad, for instance, was in the front room as usual. My mum would be busying away upstairs. Phantom was probably terrorising a neighbour somewhere.

Presently, my mum came downstairs. She told me about all the hassle that she and my dad had had at the hospital that morning. You know the sort of thing – tests, queuing, waiting around, general disorganisation. When my mum got to the end of the story, and told me that my dad's insomnia was actually because he had a heart condition he'd known nothing about, it was a bit of a scare.

But my jaw really hit the ground when she told me that they'd decided to keep him there. I mean, they hadn't, because he was in the next room, wasn't he? Surely he was just on the other side of this wall, like he always was.

No, he wasn't. He was across town in a bed attached to a heart-monitor. The twenty-seven years that we had lived there had caused me to just assume.

Very shortly we were all in the ward visiting him. He was his usual self, and remained so for about two weeks, barring the side-effects of treatment for this heart-condition which he had suddenly had for a while.

I knew that he wanted to go on the London Eye – so did I – and so I agreed with him that after he'd been discharged, we would.

One night, the phone rang. At half-past eleven. It was the hospital.

Every nerve in my body suddenly registered cold. There's no way they ring at that time with good news. I thought, "If I'm incredibly lucky, then he's alive, but really, really ill." I remember pressing the lightswitch, and registering that the split-second delay before the bulb came on seemed to take longer than usual – that's how tense I was.

It turned-out that the hospital had just admitted a new patient to my father's ward, so to free up a bed they had transferred the healthiest patient there to another room. My dad was the healthiest patient there. They were just ringing to let us know.

Of course they were - Father would have told them to, because he knew how late I always stayed-up.

That was a very shaking moment. I thought to myself afterwards, "If I live to be a hundred, I will never be that lucky again."

Know what? Father got better. After his fortnight in hospital, he did come home. With a few pills regularly, all was well again. He was even getting some sleep at nights.

Except that now Phantom was ill, and needed the ends of his ears amputated. His two weeks of incarceration were spent in one of the upstairs bedrooms, with one of those lampshade-type collars to stop him scratching his wounds open. As I stood in the back garden looking up through the window at him, and he back down at me, I knew he was having a very odd year.

So were we all.


Come summer, Mum, Father and I went on that trip to the London Eye. It was a very simple afternoon, but quite special to me. We got the train there, we went on the wheel for half-an-hour, we had a snack and a drink afterwards, looked around the souvenir shop, and made our way back to Waterloo station, my father pausing every couple of minutes. It was becoming harder for him to walk. Such a lovely afternoon, but one with a gnawing sense that something was silently wrong.

Phantom became ill again. On Christmas Eve, he died on my bed.

None of us felt like opening presents, so I spent Christmas Day digging a very deep hole in the back garden, far too deep for the foxes to burrow down through. Then my shovel broke, so I had to borrow one off of Herschel down the road. On Boxing Day, I rigged-up one of my film-making lights, and in the cold we all stood there saying goodbye to our much-loved family pet.

Phantom had come to represent 'family' to me, perhaps partly because he was always so bad-tempered, but we all forgave him unconditionally.

That was the last time we all went out and did something together as a family.

A day or so later, Father found that he could no longer stand-up. A few months passed. He went back into hospital again. Then one evening we all stood around, holding his cooling hands, thanking him, and saying goodbye.

...

It was a beautiful death.

In the first few days that followed, I found it was a cover-version by the Pet Shop Boys that kept on rotating round and round in my head...

Maybe I didn't treat you,
Quite as well as I could,
Maybe I didn't love you,
Quite as often as I should,
Little things I should have said and done,
Somehow I never found the time.
You are always on my mind...
You are always on my.
Miy-yind.

(I said it was the Pets Shop Boys' version)


After the funeral, slowly, without rushing anything, we picked-up the pieces of our home and began to take the unthinkable steps toward redefining the word 'family' as meaning 'three' people, instead of 'four'. I never cried. I'm thankful to God for letting me off lightly.

Without Phantom either, the house was now quite empty, so two new cats came to live with us, who were far more docile than Phantom, and less interested in us with it. What a trade-off!

The following year, (last year) via a Christian travel company, I took a long-overdue holiday in Crete:


(that's me on the left, with my hands on my hips)

Shortly afterwards, my job in London came to an end, after seven years.

So this year, unemployed, I took advantage of the pause in my professional life, and took a longer holiday...


... this time three weeks in New Zealand. I had wanted to stay, and it really looked like God wanted me to, but some things scared me, and so it only took one sentence to talk me out of it.

Once back in London, I was actually invited back to Crete to help run a walking holiday, if that's not a contradiction in terms.


God seemed to be lining things up for me to do.

Sitting there on the Evita Bay Beach again, eating a Moro bar I'd been posted from New Zealand, and drinking a banoffee-pie flavoured Frijj drink from the UK, (my favourite) I prayed.

I had the opportunity to remain in Crete and continue working for the rest of the summer season. That sounded like fun, but with the Christian holiday company taking care of meals and accommodation, it didn't sound like much of a challenge.

Returning to New Zealand seemed much more like striking out on my own, facing my fears, and relying on only myself and/or God. Well, God really. And I was getting a lot more encouragement to return there.

But what if that wasn't his plan? There was really only one way to find out.

So, after much soul-searching, I booked a ticket back to Auckland with Air New Zealand. I have an appointment in London that I can't miss in three months time, so if things haven't worked-out by then, I'm coming home again.

Tonight, I said goodbye to my best friend Herschel.

While packing for my flight back to Auckland tomorrow, I put-on an old radio-show from Christmas 1993 that I'd presented. I was making a copy of it to take with me, partly for my own pleasure, but also to help me find work within radio.

I said goodnight to my mum and the rest of my family. I carried on packing.

On the cassette, one of the songs finished and segued into a comedy-sketch I'd done. We were pretending to argue with each other on air. It was fun, my sort of sense of humour. Then the timecheck reached for 3:30 and the slot for the show's regular Elvis track.

The king of rock'n'roll's familiar deep powerful voice began to boom his ballad...

Maybe I... didn't treat you...
...quite as well as I should have...

I stopped packing, my mind overwhelmed by a memory from 1977 – when I had been six years old...

It had been hot that summer. All summer. Six weeks of school holidays had seemed like a very long time indeed. My mum had been at work at an old folks' home around the corner, while my dad had been working in a shop. We weren't allowed out of the house – only down to the front gate. That meant that we couldn't play with the other kids in our road, and they were having water-fights, tons of them. So all that summer, all the other kids in our street had come round to our house. They weren't allowed to come in, but they were allowed in the front garden. So we spent all summer long just having all these stupid water-fights in our front garden. It was so hot, it was so fun, it was so much like being a child in the hot summer of 1977, back when Elvis was still a current artist.

As his voice on the tape crooned respectfully away, I leant on my bed and wept tears so thick, and cried and cried and cried, muttering over and over out loud, "I love you Dad, I love you so much."

Finally, the song ended, I heard myself in 1993 outro the track and intro the next one, and the show continued as normal. I wiped my tears from my face, and wondered why on Earth I had just spent the last three minutes blubbering about my father, whilst immersed in a memory that hadn't even been of him.

Oh yeah, that was why. I was just reaching the end of a process that had begun two-and-a-half years ago, just after I had looked at those birthday cards on the mantelpiece. Since then, the family cat had died, my dad had died, my job had ended, and now of my own free will I was packing my bag to leave home and begin a new life, as far away from my remaining family as it is possible to travel.

At 33½, on some subconscious level, I realised that my childhood had just spent the last two-and-a-half years closing-down.