Deux Mille Onze

This week's email from Grammar Girl, my weekly source of grammar tips, had the subject line, "How Do You Pronounce 2011?" Bearing in mind my sort-of New Year's resolution to pronounce the year "twenty eleven" and not "two-thousand-and-eleven," I thought this mailing was perfect for me. On opening the email, however, I soon realised that GG was resolving the issue of whether to pronounce it "two-thousand-and-eleven" or "two-thousand-eleven." She says either way is correct, incidentally, although the former is much more common in Britain and the latter in the US (I'd say the former is near ubiquitous in the UK).

It seems she tackled the issue that interests me last year and goes on to say:

Last year people argued about how to pronounce 2010, and I expect the controversy to continue in 2011. One linguist thinks the difficulty of pronouncing "and eleven" will drive people to say "twenty eleven."

Indeed, I also hoped that the additional syllables in "eleven" would encourage me to stick to the "twenty eleven" pronunciation but I'm glad I'm not alone. So far, I haven't had many opportunities to say 2011 but I think I've managed to make most of them syllable-lite. Hopefully, I'll have it nailed by the end of the year; bring on twenty twelve. At the moment it's so much easier in France where they say, "deux mille onze"; not so much in 1999, where the year was pronounced, "mille-neuf-cent-quatre-vingt-dix-neuf."

Whose Hell Are We Going into, Exactly?

Iain M. Banks's new book, Surface Detail, is a bit like Inception meets Dante's Inferno; oh, with a bit of 127 Hours thrown in for good measure. The crux of the subject matter deals with virtual reality worlds that some civilisations in Banks's universe are able to create. In some, you can back up your personality (and soul) on a regular basis, which means you can be "revented" or brought back to life should you die or undergo other unfortunate events. In others, after you die, you can live on in a nice virtual afterlife (although often the inhabitants of these afterlife-worlds end up demanding a second death to relieve their ennui). In others still, virtual hells have been created, where people can be sent for an infinity of torture and pain. In effect, religion has been created in post-god (or perhaps pre-god) societies.

The Hells are causing most problems because some civilisations (including the Culture, of course) think they are horrible, terrible places that should be abolished immediately. Others don't see the harm and don't like to have self-righteous interference in their running of their own affairs. As such, there is a war going on between the pro-Hell and the anti-Hell contingents. The war is being conducted in virtual worlds, at least at first.

Two lovers, sort of anthropologists, have agreed to visit one of the Hells so that they can report back how, er, hellish it is. They've been given one cleverly disguised piece of code each that will allow them to escape but only one of them makes it back to the "Real," while Hell's demons try to ramp up the torture of the remaining lover, attempting to raise and then dash hopes over a prolonged period (more than a lifetime of Hell years). To put it mildly, those who enter are strongly advised to abandon all hope on entering as it makes them harder to punish. The anthropologist becomes like the pilgrim in Dante and has to descend deeper and deeper to truly know Hell so that when she emerges, she reaches true enlightenment.

The description of this Hell made me wince a lot more than 127 Hours, although the punishment in the latter was very Dantean (or Aquinan)--for Aron Ralston, the perfect contrapasso for his self-centred life is putting him in a situation where he can't get out alive without the help of others. L'enfer, c'est les autres. Meanwhile, another Surface Detail character has experienced quite a different hell at the hands of others in real life. She is the slave of the richest man of her civilisation and, like all indentured servants, has skin (and teeth and organs) that are patterned with a beautiful tattoo. Her master has raped her repeatedly and after he goes one step too far, she is seeking revenge.

I often find Iain M. Banks novels tricky to get into, mainly because the names of the characters are so complicated and do encode the gender or race of the character. Surface Detail was particularly tricky what with the virtual worlds and reincarnations; like in Inception, you often have to ask exactly whose subconscious/Hell you are in (and whether an individual's death is actually a final death or just a temporary obstacle to overcome). I was gripped even by the first fifty pages, though, and persevered on. Unusually for me, I'm writing this post two thirds of the way through the book. This is partly because I think it might result in  philosophy/theology overload and partly because I'm worried that by the end, I might have overthought it all so much that I understand it less. Good stuff, though.

A Farewell to Arm

This post's title may be a pun too far but a) the title of the autobiography, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, on which Danny Boyle's new film 127 Hours is based is also playful and b) the arm amputation scene seems to have been the main talking point of the film. The movie is topped and tailed with bright, colouful, loud scenes of frenetic crowds rushing through subways and cheering in stadia. The hyper-reality of it all contrasts dramatically with much of the rest of the film, which is spent in a mostly dark, monochromatic canyon in Colorado.

Aron Ralston (played by James Franco) is a cocky, carefree adrenaline junkie. He doesn't really have time for people in his life because he's too busy getting his kicks from rock climbing, mountain biking and other high-energy pursuits. At the beginning of 127 Hours, he meets a couple of cute girl hikers, who are lost, and shows them a short-cut--and a good time. The "short-cut" entails the three of them edging their way through a very tight crevasse in the rock and then letting go and plummeting into an underground plunge pool, a hundred feet below. Before they drop, one of the hiker chicks says, "But these rocks would never move." Ralston replies, "Well, actually sometimes they do. Let's just hope not today." This would be prophetic if everyone who went to see this film didn't already know what was going to happen.

Later, Ralston bids farewell to the girls, who invite him to a party the following night, although they figure he'll never turn up. Later still, while Aron is scaling his way through another narrow crevasse, the camera focuses on a boulder--much smaller than I expected but clearly heavy enough--which he tests to see if it can hold his weight (affirmative). Of course, this is the boulder that ends up trapping his right arm for the eponymous 127 hours. After exhausting all possible ways of moving the boulder, his food, water and much of his sanity, he eventually comes to the conclusion he will have to cut his arm off if he is to escape. Actually, he tried this a few days earlier but because he couldn't find his Swiss Army knife (we see his fingers not quite manage to grasp it in his cupboard), he only has some crappy, blunt old knife, which barely scratches the surface of his arm. When he first seizes this tool, he starts chipping at the boulder--I assumed he was trying to sharpen the knife (which might have been a good idea) but he was trying to erode it enough to free himself.

During the time in which he is trapped, Ralston records messages on his camera for his family and an ex girlfriend. He apologises for being a shit. He hallucinates and daydreams about experiences past and potential. He regrets all the things about his life that have brought him to this point ("this rock's been waiting for me my whole life," he says). Franco is, of course, very, very good. His facial expressions are exquisitely painful and he does a great job of creating sympathy for a character who, in the opening scenes, hasn't been particularly likable.

Eventually, though, the arm scene arrives and it's not as gruesome as I was anticipating. Maybe it's because after years of Casualty and 999 as a kid (I can just imagine Michael Buerk's grave voiceover, "Aron didn't tell anyone what his plans for the weekend were..."), I've become somewhat immune to such gore. That said, I am particularly squeamish about knees and feet and had Ralston got his leg trapped instead, I might have joined many of the audience members who were covering their face. After the amputation, the rest of the film is a bit of an exhalation even though Ralston still had to get out of the crevasse, abseil down a cliff and walk until he found some other people who could get help before he was safe. And then we see the colourful crowd scenes again, interspersed with Ralston swimming, climbing and hanging out with his wife (who he met three years later) and their child.

Yes, 127 Hours is a good film but I suspect that when the Oscar nominations come out, I won't be backing it as my choice for "best film."

Wicked Whispers

It's Audrey season at the BFI at the moment and I thought I ought to see at least one new (to me) film of hers so I picked The Children's Hour. I hadn't even heard of it until recently when I read that it would be Keira Knightley's next West End role, alongside Elisabeth Moss (Peggy from Mad Men). The news story doesn't say but I'm fairly certain Knightley will be playing Audrey's character and Moss that of Shirley MacLaine (how could it be otherwise?).

The programme notes from the BFI include Arthur Knight's Saturday Review for the film on its original release in 1962 and include the comment, "[w]hat was considered too daring for 1936 is almost too tame for 1962." It will therefore be interesting to see how the 2011 stage production fares--and in which year it is set. I can't see that it would work with a contemporary setting, unless they made some serious changes to the script, but perhaps they will shift it back to 1934, when it first appeared in Broadway.

Karen Wright (Hepburn) and Martha Dobie (MacLaine) are teachers at the small boarding school they run for nice (rich) young girls. They enjoy their work, are the best of friends and everything is great. Well, apart from the fact that Karen's charismatic fiancé Joe has a habit of hanging around and killing Martha's buzz. One of their charges is the odious Mary who scweams and scweams until she's sick (or, at least, until she "faints" or "has a heart attack"). Mary is a spoiled little madam, raised by her stern grandmother, who is perhaps having issues because of her absent (dead?) parents. She deals with this by blackmailing and threatening her fellow pupils to make them go along with her wicked ways and when Karen tries to tell her off for stealing a bunch of flowers and for not owning up, it's clear that Mary wants revenge.

Luckily for Mary, some of her minions overhear an argument between Martha and Martha's aunt, which hints that there might be something "unnatural" about the relationship between Karen and Martha. Mary runs away, tells granny, who is, at first, disbelieving but when Mary whispers in granny's ear some of the things she says she's heard, where else could Mary have found out about such "awful things" (the contraband books she reads, mainly)? Granny removes Mary from the school and encourages the other parents to do the same and soon the school is empty, despite Karen and Martha's attempts to try to convince people that nothing has happened between them. Karen can't even be sure that Joe (who is also Mary's cousin or uncle) really believes them. Things then take a tragic turn; hopefully, Mary receives more than the much-needed slap she gets from Joe earlier in the film as punishment for what she started.

MacLaine's performance is very moving--a number of people in the cinema were in tears at the end, although you kind of see the ending coming--and Hepburn is good at looking very sad and very beautiful. Certainly, it will be interesting to see Elisabeth Moss, now an expert on the position of women in the 1960s, will make of the role of Martha. Perhaps, though, the play won't have so much resonance with a 2011 audience (I'm sure that Ms Knightley's presence will ensure there are plenty of bums on seats nonetheless).

"If You Can Spell, You Can't Possibly Be 'Creative'"

As a linguist and pedant, who, as a child who used to read the OED for fun, I've often considered that I would be well suited to a career in sub-editing. In my current job, my writing is run past our sub-editors and it always makes me very happy when my text doesn't need any edits but I have never been sure whether I would take pleasure from perfecting (or, at least, standardising) other people's language or whether it would be torture to see so many mistakes and inconsistencies in the spelling and grammar.

Recently, I discovered a blog written by a sub-editor who likes to rant and while cruising through the archives, I read about a play called Subs, which is, funnily enough, about a team of three sub-editors at the magazine Gentlemen Prefer... As the play was on last summer and in a small theatre in Kilburn, I assumed I had missed out but coincidentally, it re-opened this week for a second run and I trekked up the Bakerloo Line this evening to see it.

Although the sub-editors at Gentlemen Prefer... ("the only magazine with a three-point ellipsis in its title") don't exactly exist in perfect harmony, they get along OK. There's the chief sub, Derek, who likes putting his deputy, Finch, in his place. Derek is smug and cocky but feels his manic-depressive wife and their children are holding him back from being promoted. Finch, meanwhile, is an obnoxious, self-deprecating Welshman, who is jealous of James--the bright young junior sub, who is favoured by Derek and loved by everyone else. In anticipation of his potential promotion, Derek hires Anna, a young, pretty freelancer, who may become permanent if Derek gets his way. Even Finch cheers up after Anna's arrival, although he's sure she'll never be interested in him. But men's magazine publishing is a dog-eat-dog world and we're left to wonder who is betraying whom.

I expected a lot of in-jokes but Subs is as much a play about the state of the publishing industry in general as about sub-editors. Some of the things that happen at Gentlemen Prefer... wouldn't be out of place in my office, although I work for quite a different publication. But there were some good lines ("What's the house style on G string?" is the opener) and Michael Cusick was particularly good as the irascible Finch. Whoever was in charge of props should have kitted out the subs with Macs, though; they would never use such crappy-looking PCs at Gentlemen Prefer...

The Same Three Days

I had to rush back to the Big Smoke from the Shire this morning to get to a preview screening of a film called The Next Three Days, a thriller in which Russell Crowe plays a college teacher, John, who has the perfect life with his wife Lara and their young son--until Lara is arrested for the murder of her boss, that is. Things, understandably go downhill for them after that, with their son refusing to talk to his mother on his prison visits, until it gets to the point where Lara attempts suicide. Having exhausted the appeals process, John decides that the only option is to bust Lara out of prison. He solicits the advice of a guy who has written a book about how he managed to escape from jail seven times (as you do), and begins to work on the world's most meticulous plan to get Lara out of prison, but we all know what happens to the best-laid plans...

Now, this film was a perfectly acceptable thriller but it didn't need to be made at all as it was pretty much a take-by-take remake of a French film I saw last year called Pour Elle (Anything for Her), with Vincent Lindon and Diane Kruger playing the lead roles. I knew The Next Three Days was a remake but I'd hoped that with Paul Haggis at the helm, it might be a little more interesting. Instead, most of the dialogue felt like a direct translation of the French script and while I quite like Russell Crowe in thriller mode, he and Elizabeth Banks, who plays Lara, were both out-acted by their counterparts in the French film. The constant Apple product placements were irritating too, although you'd think Apple might be less than happy that its iPhone apps and Macs were often shown to facilitate the attempted prison break.

On the plus side, I did really like the soundtrack with a score by Danny Elfman and a couple of cool tracks by Moby (including Mistake). It's not that The Next Three Days was boring; on the contrary, it was still very gripping, even though I knew what was going to happen at pretty much every point. However, it has been 18 months since I saw Pour Elle and I think that if I'd seen the original more recently, I might not have tolerated the remake so much. I'd recommend the film to people who want to see a solid thriller--but only if they really want to see it in the cinema; otherwise, buy the DVD of Pour Elle.

Leap Year

It isn't really a leap year this year, of course, but in some senses, every year is a leap year for me. I managed to get another year of leaps off to a good start yesterday when on a walk through some of the Oxford colleges, I spotted some cloisters that would make a great backdrop for a leap. Fortunately, as we were a group of ten, Papa managed to capture the leap perfectly in one take.

Here's hoping for plenty more leaping opportunities in 2011!