Deborah Meyler's Blog

I know it isn't a book, but I am reviewing the film I saw last night. I should be writing, so this will be quick. I should also say that my friends LIKE this film, so it could be that I am just a curmudgeon.

Magic in the Moonlight.

Audiences, by and large, can tell when they’re being spoon-fed a film that someone somewhere thinks they will like, that will make a nice ker-ching noise at the box office. Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris was so much fun that we didn’t care – though if you try watching it a second time, its magic is much muted. In Magic in the Moonlight, I think we’re being spoon-fed, and it’s a nice, slightly tart apple sauce. Colin Firth and Emma Stone provide the love interest, the South of France provides the scenery, and nobody really provides the comedy.

The curiously leaden acting from Firth, and the dialogue in general, do pick up after the first twenty minutes or so. Emma Stone is pretty sparkly and interesting to watch, and the scenes with Aunt Vanessa, played by Eileen Atkins, are just out-and-out fine. When Atkins is on screen, you feel as if you are in the presence of someone who is in control of the situation to her fingertips; you feel instant respect.

The direction is very hasty; lines are spoken as soon as a new scene comes, with no time to stop and look. Think of a French film, where the camera lingers – it’s as if Allen is terrified that he will be labeled boring, so everything has to be kept at a nice, clipping pace. Actors – particularly Firth - deliver their lines at breakneck speed, as if they have been learned and then repeated, rather than thought of. It makes you remember that you are watching a film.

So - Firth's acting is curiously leaden, and Allen's direction is curiously bad. Isn't it then possible that this is all on purpose, as Firth and Allen are both prettty unassailably excellent in general? Is there a kind of modernist determination to show that everyone assumes roles, that everything is fake, including the hero’s arrogant cynicism and including the fact that the hero is just a projection of light on a screen? Is Sophie's use of the word "ironic" when she and Stanley are in the observatory, a nicely positioned clue that, if Stanley were smarter, would make him understand things a lot faster? If this is the case, then it's too subtle for me. It just looks badly directed, Woody Allen or no.

Allen's breathless direction also doesn’t particularly suit the look of the film, either, which is very beautiful. One would like to linger. It is pleasant to cycle through rainy Cambridge to get to to the ivory frocks and sun-drenched gardens of 1920's France, even if it is the extra-gleamy France of Hollywood.

The Big Point, made once every thirty or forty seconds, is that Colin Firth/aka Darcy/aka Stanley, is a CYNIC, and does not believe in the spiritual world, or, by extension, in love. He is, one can safely assume, in for a Big Surprise. Oh look, there he is, being surprised. Oh, and look again, another old male director casting the male romantic lead at 54, while the leading lady (who is really great) is just 25. The boy her own age is funny, of course, as a handsome air-head who plays the ukulele and promises her great riches, but we all know that she should choose the cynical, world-weary aging intellectual who discovers finally that he can love.

I don’t have any problem with Allen, in case it seems like it. I love Manhattan, Blue Jasmine, Annie Hall, Take the Money and Run, lots of them – and the cinematography here was really very lovely, but I almost wish I had stayed at home last night. If you want to see something excellent, go and see the Philip Seymour Hoffman film, A Most Wanted Man. It’s much, much better than staying at home.

It is on my mind that children and teenagers don't know anything about what is happening in the world - NOTHING!!! When I was little, we sometimes watched John Craven's Newsround and then the six o'clock news would come on. Now, we don't have a TV, and this is supposed to be a good thing, promoting greater inclination to read Donne's sonnets and imagine new imaginary numbers. But my children - and the children around me - hardly even knew about Gaza. A beheading - this terrible beheading of James Foley - just about makes it. The downing of the Malaysian airliner, for instance? Nothing. I keep having to check that they have heard of things - the answer is almost always no, and then there is the indignation (the ordinary kind, the kind that we have) at what is actually going on.

Is it because of the new "personal" nature of gadgets, promoting ever-increasing isolation? Is it because their spare time is spent anxiously clicking "like" on each other's Instagram pictures? I am not just moaning about this: I think we should lobby for a 45-minute session in school each week - primary and secondary - where a teacher just talks to the kids about current affairs. It could be a different teacher each time, it could be a forum where the children are encouraged to ask questions, and argue. It might promote a greater inclination to watch or listen to or read the news. The teacher doesn't have to know everything; the teacher just has to want to talk to the kids and help them explore.

The apathy that we see about politics is partly because to them it seems something that has nothing to do with them, or that they can have no influence, but a lot of it is more straightforward - they don't even hear about it. Of course you are not going to care about Gaza if you haven't heard anything about it. So many violations of human freedom, both domestically and abroad, so many infringements on what our predecessors fought for so hard, are slipping along without comment or protest not because young people are more apathetic, but because the structures have changed to make ignorance the default, because Instagram and the like are standing in the way of the news. Right now, "each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom", and there is no freedom unless we are all aware of all the other cells. There is no freedom in boring self-regard.

Painting is something to do with love. It's an act of love to the world. I am trying to sort out some of the images on my computer, and it is the little, two-minute sketches that I had forgotten, from years back, that make me realise that I have heartstrings, and that they can be tugged. I have an ink and wash sketch called "preparing sunday lunch", with little rounds of carrot chopped up on a board, and the peeler by their side, and three potatoes lolling near the board, and a photograph of this would not have made me catch my breath. It is the memory of the love that prompted it - the love towards the world, towards the quiddity of things in the world - that made that happen. When a person draws something, they stop for long enough to notice the curves of it, the tones in it, its placing, the shadows it casts and that are cast on it. Your whole being is concentrated outside of itself, on an intent and eager focus on something that is almost always just provisional. Even if you are sketching the pyramids, you are doing it on a particular day, from a particular place, in a particular light. And so every sketch says, "Look! We are alive! We are in the world! And what a world!"

There is ego caught up in publishing art - in publishing novels or poems or sketches of carrots, but that thought can get in the way of the good impulse to share something. And the sharing doesn't have to be impressive: it is enough just to share an experience or an overheard line, or a funny moment caught on an iPhone camera.

That's why I love Facebook - and Twitter, and Goodreads-except-for-the-bad-reviews, and Ravelry, and, and, and...And that's why I get irritated when people deride Facebook. It is a whole network of people sharing things. I want to see a picture of a baby, and of the hat my friend has crocheted, and the pie someone else has baked, and I want to post the sketch I did today, because I think that we are all in relationship with each other, and sharing these things strengthens the relationships, even makes the relationships, to some extent. I have a suspicion deep down inside that Samuel Beckett, just to pluck Beckett out for special mention, wasn't as miserable as he made out, because I would imagine that real misery - or at least Ebenezer Scrooge paucity of spirit - stops you from writing plays or drawing carrots or composing a song. There is an iota of hope in the knitting of a mitten.

Hello - I have started a group called Ask Deborah Meyler about The Bookstore - I am not doing too well here as I don't know how to direct people to it. It is from today until Wednesday at 6pm GMT.

I was sitting on the floor of Heffers Bookshop today in Cambridge, reading Learning to Curse, when a book called Sweet Violence fell (or leapt) off the shelf and hit me on the head.

As I had recently mentioned this book on Goodreads as one I wanted to read, I did feel that the book and I were destined to get in touch.

My author profile has a section for quotes by Deborah Meyler, so I clicked on it in order to quote myself. In the guidelines it says, "Only enter quotes from notable people." Hmm. I am not notable. So I have clicked the back arrow and gone away.