Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness.
When I was a kid who got into watching films very early, the actors I’d see in movies had somehow always been there. A large part of this was that 99.9% of what I’d watch was on TV, so early on already I’d see all those films with the likes of James Stewart, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn (or indeed Audrey Hepburn), Shirley MacLaine, Steve McQueen, and so on. When it came to newer films that came out in the late 1970s or 1980s, it may have been a different set of stars – Sigourney Weaver, Dustin Hoffman, Bruce Willis, Kathleen Turner, Harrison Ford, and many, many more – but somehow it still felt to me at the time that these had always been around.
Because, for someone born in 1975, they kinda had.
The story goes that Bruce Springsteen recorded his darkest album Nebraska (1982) in his bedroom, most of it in one day. There are absolutely no adornments, no frills, just his voice and his guitar, sometimes a short bit from his harmonica, not much more. He intended those recordings as demo versions, but they just wouldn’t fly when he played them together with his E-Street Band. So the demo version it was for the album for almost all of the songs. Because the Boss is strumming away on his guitar, the effect is one of being there listening, as if it was a live album in a more unusual sense of the word. The same is true for the Cowboy Junkies’ debut album The Trinity Sessions (1988), which was recorded live in Toronto’s Church of the Holy Trinity, and the band gathered around the only microphone. Like with Springsteen’s album, there is an immediateness that would be hard to replicate in any studio.
… but that doesn’t necessarily mean that good blog posts do.
I wanted to write about Happy Go Lucky, the Mike Leigh film that in some ways feels like the flipside to his Naked. Put the film’s main character Poppy together with Naked‘s Johnny (played to horrific perfection by David Thewlis) and you’ll get one of those matter/antimatter explosions obliterating half of London.
However, I didn’t want to write about the film immediately. I wanted my impression of it to settle. I needed some time to think about it.
About a month down the line I realise: I don’t remember the film all that well. That’s not quite true, mind you: there are scenes I remember extremely well, mostly the ones including Poppy (Sally Hawkins is pitch-perfect, and as a result veers sharply between endearing and irritating as hell) and her driving teacher Scott (Eddie Marsan deserves to have more of a career – he’s obviously no Brad Pitt, no hit with producers, but the guy has impressive acting chops). But the film has settled in my mind, a bit like soggy Weetabix. (Weetabixes? Weetabixi? Weetabixae?) And writing about it now, even if I were to highlight how compelling the relationship between Poppy and Scott is and how it develops subtly, suddenly becoming something very different… Well, I don’t think I would be doing the film or the actors all that much justice.
So, what do I learn from this? Mainly not to wait for weeks before doing a blog entry. Not to start up whatever game I’m playing at that time before I’ve done my writing. Not to be lazy and complacent. For now, though, I’ll leave you with one of the aforementioned scenes from Happy Go Lucky:
P.S.: For the record, whether my impression of the film has turned to milk-sodden mush or not: Mike Leigh, man, you need to find someone else to compose the music for your films, because the score for this one is twee and feels like reheated music for one of the more soporiphic Brit sitcoms from the ’60s. If I ever bump into you, I may just go off on a Johnny-esque rant about how insultingly bad the music in Happy Go Lucky is. So, if you wish to prevent that from happening, however unlikely it is, dump your composer. You’ll thank me.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 