PETER PAN and Passion

[flyingskull]

Right, am definitely back from my travels, succeeded in creating tourist packages which I like a lot and sent my associates with clients to enjoy them as well. But that's a tale for another time because I'm still REELING from seeing Peter Pan directed by P. J. Hogan. Am going to rave and rant about it, so be warned.

But first I must explain a thing. Yes, baeraad, I play the 'Cripple Mister Onion' game that is life with my cards right close to me chest so I don't say things about me unless I feel they are necessary to understand what I'm going to rant and/or rave about. This is necessary. I hate going to a cinema, actually I never go. I can't jump up and down and scream there; I can't smoke or drink there; I can't - I know I could, but that's just not me - weep me eyes out there: in brief, I can't be ME in a cinema and I so want to do all of the above not to mention stop seeing something that's boring without disturbing a lot of people. So I always see films ages after they're out in cinemas.

Mummy - who never agrees with me on films, but who always knows when some film may be interesting for me - gave me this Peter Pan and WOW!

WOW!

The sheer intensity of it floored me. I mean, apart from the fact that it happens to BE Barrie's Peter Pan and not Disney ot any other eejit's view of the thing. It's a fucking tragedy! You feel youth slipping away from you and you bloody well know it's never ever ever coming back. It's a very funny feeling because I'm thirty, not eighty, but the point is not getting old, the point is losing the richness and wondewrfulness of childhood.

Which made me suddenly understand, right in the middle of pausing the film to sob like a Niagara, that that is what Howl's Moving Castle is all about. Howl is actually a Peter Pan who can't keep his grip on childhood and Sophie is a very laid back Wendy. The difference being that DWJ is accepting and understanding of the whole 'growing up' business and Barrie wasn't.

It hit me lots because I've ALWAYS been Wendy, in a sense, the Wendy in this film, mind you, not some mindless Disney clone. I remember, when dada read the book AND the play to me, identifying totally with Wendy because, by some miracle, Barrie caught a real female view of things ignoring his contemporary cliché. I was also Peter, but then I think all children who read or hear the story are Peter: he's not called Pan in vain, no siree.

Another odd thing about this film - to me, of course, this is really personal in a sense - is that I watched all the 'deleted scenes/alternative end/behind the scenes' drivel and - apart from Fergie fucking commentary which I ignored - they gave depth and even more intensity/passion to the whole. I don't want to know how tricks work, generally, I work enough tricks on my clients every day to really care about the mechanics of things, but this 'additional thingies' thing in this DVD somehow works so well it makes you want to re-watch the film over and over again. Which I did. AND wept at the same scenes because they are so BLOODY INTENSE you have to react some way.

I am NOT a weeper. Well, alright, I'm not generally a weeper, but I was gulping and sniffing throughout the sodding thing!

On a side note, I'd never known that Jason Isaacs could be so very wonderfully eatable while playing a stiff-backed and repressed bank clerk. Hat off to a GREAT actor, I mean Hook is easy to act, but Mr Darling? WOW! Also I've reserved Jeremy Sumpter for the year 2017. He's MINE! DO YOU HEAR?

MINE!!!

And now I feel like the slimiest paedo, but... GAAAAH! He'll become one of the sexiest man ever! Alright, not proud of that, but why lie to friends?

I suppose one of the factors is that I've finally read DWJ's Deep Secret which earns another WOW on the wow scale of books. How could have I missed such a terribly intense novel? I was tense a violin string from first word to the last. Lovely. Which brings me to confess I love passion/intensity more than anything else in books, films, comics, whatever. It doesn't have to be art, but it sure as death must strive to be.

I also finished Game of Thrones and I liked it a lot - bar the really useless prologue - but, though real glad I've read it; though I've ordered the other ones by Martin because I really like his style; it's not passionate. It's not intense one whit. Beautiful interesting chronicle - there are people in there, not all of them but enough of them - but... but... BUT...

You see, Daniel, m'luv, I'm a bit like Keats in that he wanted to see something he could get passionate about when looking at paintings. I want to read something I can get passionate about when I read books, and politics - though utterly fascinating to me - is not a thing I can get passionate about. I don't have a religious mind, you see? Politics, sports, religions are not things I can get passionate about. I love to analyse them, to study them at times, but... coldly, if you wish: an intellectual excercise. OTOH, I get extremely het up and passionate about science and people so put what I'm writing down to a quirk of mine. DWJ, Pterry, Hill, Rankin (both), Gaiman, Chaucer, Shakespeare Austen, Fielding... lots of others actually, are/were all passionate/intense authors, not all the time, of course, I mean human being can't sustain that level of intenstity all their life, but enough time that you can feel their fury while reading. I want that. I want to feel the fury like a dangerous undercurrent to the apparent text, the anger, the passion, the intensity. Which is why I liked Martin a lot, but was never impassioned about his world - a thousand points for worldbuilding, though, influences or not - and could stop reading and start again two days later with no feeling of losing contact with something vital and alive.

To end this really long and pointless rant. Do see P. J. Hogan's Peter Pan. It's a life changing/enhancing experience.

ETA to edit - too late alas! - and add Lj cut. SORRY!

Comments

[baeraad.livejournal.com]

I consider you a friend too, obviously. :)

Hmm. The thing is, I tend to understand the best by studying examples. I do get plenty of chances to see how you think - but what does it all mean, in practice? I have only a very limited idea, because "in practice" is all about how you deal with everyday life. Now, I have some idea about how you deal with everyday life, because you do let things slip... ;) but all in all, I'm relying on guesswork.

We're back to science and technology again, I guess. You want things abstract, and I want to know the implications. =]

Still, if abstract discussion is all you desire from me, then I will deliver, and be happy to! :D I like to think that I accept people on their own terms. :)

I don't want to know how special effects work in a film, I should have written, I now realise.

Ohhhhhhh. Yes, I should of course have realised that you'd not be averse to finding out literary tricks, since that's what we've spent so much time discussing, for heaven's sake. I'm sorry, school has made me stupid. ^_^;

And here I agree with you. :) I don't really care about special effects. I mean, I'm sure it's very clever and all, but who cares? It's the story I care about, and I'll happily edit my memories of bad special effects into memories of good special effects. =]

are you sure you aren't a tiny bit scared of chaos?

Scared of chaos? Let's put it like this - the only thing that's more scary than uncertainty is the certainty of something awful. =]

But in this context, I'd say it's more like I detest not being able to understand. Something I can't wrap my mind around deeply annoys me. And in fiction, there are no excuses for creating a world which can not be understood, or at least theorised about.

And while I agree with you that fiction is a conforting thing exactly because it lies about reality in that everything in it should happen for a purpose; and while I sure am one for escapist - in the above sense - literature

You misunderstand. :) It's not comfort. It's just clarity. Everything happens for a reason in real life, too - it's just that we so often never find out what the reason was, because we don't get the whole picture. What's great about fiction is that you can isolate an event, explore exactly why and how it happened and what its implications were.

in the sense of brutally making you face your own humanity in all its... GAH words fail me, perhaps vunerability, perhaps imperfection, but also and at the same time potential. We, the living, are a lot like Schroedinger's cat, after all. We haven't the slightest idea if we'll turn out alive or dead, decent or scrotes etc. etc. etc.

I don't think that's in contradiction to wanting books to be well-ordered, though. :) Just because things happen for a reason it doesn't mean they're under anyone's control. I mean, I agree with you, I like books where the characters are small and struggling to survive and remain true to themselves in an unfeeling universe, I just want the unfeeling universe to operate on some kind of rules. Think of it as the difference between determinism and fatalism. =]

I'm really not sure we're disagreeing about anything very much, since all the authors you take up as examples of passionate writers, I consider to write like I prefer them to... though I also don't consider them very passionate. Which is actually the thing that does confuse me - while I admit that Martin is not terribly passionate, how is he less passionate than Hill and Rankin and so forth?

HENRY Fielding

Ahhhh. So not one of the two I've read, both of which kinda sucked, then. :D