And...inaction!

January - a time for staying indoors, reading and watching films. The recent snow and cold weather has provided me with even more of an excuse for my antisocial tendencies to flourish (and what's the point of going out when I have to wear so may layers to do it that I can't even bend my arms? As it is, I've got five layers on right now, two of them thermal, I'm in a centrally-heated room, and I'm still cold. Being raised in a house so cold it had frost flowers on the inside of the windows did NOTHING to toughen me up, I'm telling you.). I take the winter very personally.

 Anyway, the sofa's been seeing a lot of my behind. And here are a few selected highlights of my recent viewing, some of which you may already have seen, and others of which may attract your interest if you haven't. Last night's viewing was 'Notorious', one of the weaker Hitchcock thrillers in my opinion; hugely stylish, but with a weak and porous plot. Moreover, goddess Ingrid Bergman's electrically-charged performance as the gutsy, fragile, love-seeking missile who's required to 'put out for Uncle Sam' seems wasted on the balsawood Cary Grant who (inexplicably) awakens her capacity for genuine love. Actually, for all its flaws the whole thing's worth watching for the sight of Ingrid alone...what a woman.

I also watched 'Saving Private Ryan' for the first time ever. I'd given it a wide berth for years, feeling that my father's decision to sit me down when I was ten and gently force me to watch every episode of "The World at War" (seminal UK TV series from 1973, narrated expertly by Larry Olivier and unflinchingly documenting the events of WW2) had given me more insight into and awareness of the horrors of war than Mr Spielberg, with his bangs, crashes and emotional manipulation, could ever hope to do. I mistrusted the corny-sounding premise of a platoon of soldiers being dispatched into ravaged France to rescue the last surviving son of a luckless mother, whose other three had been killed elsewhere in the fighting. For me though the plot device turned out to be the least important thing about the film, which I was forced to admit is something of a masterpiece in its famously visceral and unadorned portrayal of the slaughter of combat. The emotional punch of the famed opening thirty minutes is unequalled by any other film I've ever seen. But beyond that, it faded for me into a patchwork of amiable but fairly one-dimensional characters - decent, introspective platoon leader,  incompetent cowardly intellectual, cocky New Yorker, emotional Italian-American, and then Matt Damon, who as Private Ryan himself displays a curious lack of distinctive qualities either good or bad. And I know I'm not the first kvetching European to make this point, but ahem, lads, there WERE a few British troops on active service in Northern France in 1943, you know? AND a few Canadians, Poles, (whisper - even French)! Anyway, I'm glad to have finally seen it, but I didn't learn anything from it - nothing about World War 2 anyway.

More disturbing and compelling in an entirely different way was 'Project Nim', a real-life post-war horror story from the makers of 'Man on Wire'. "Nim"'s last name was 'Chimpsky', which if you're a sucker for very weak puns should have you rolling in the aisle. "Nim Chimpsky", geddit? Sounds a bit like Noam Chomsky, the renowned linguist and cognitive scientist! So what better name could you give a chimp you're going to raise as - literally - a human child, and teach how to talk?

This was the brainchild of Columbia Prof Herbert Terrace, an unlikely love-god with a classic 70s combover, and a penchant for safari suits and female 'grad students'. Among his ex-lovers was a spectacularly narcissistic East Coast psychotherapist (oh dear...) who having collected a succession of rich hippy husbands and a brood of unboundaried children, now set her mind to nabbing a baby chimp that she might raise as a child. A lady needs a hobby, and Zumba hadn't been invented yet. Luckily Prof Terrace was on hand to oblige, and the tiny Nim was wrenched away from 'chimp Mom' and handed over to 'bitch-solipsist Mom'. Her latest rich hippy husband sulked a bit in the background as she bonded in the most physical sense possible with little Nim, dressing him in fetching lemon knitwear and encouraging him to explore her body in a disturbingly non-filial way. Nim seems to have been widely adored until ugly adolescence kicked in (as with male babies, really), whereupon he began to explode in a cascade of chimpy hormones, and the limited human sign language he had "learned" (or learned to imitate almost randomly) proved an inadequate medium for expressing his inner turmoil. He began to act out, smash things up, nip, gouge, destroy (as in male babies, really). This proved so distasteful to Bitch-solipsist Mom that she did the only thing she could, and packed him off to a research facility where he could have a good think about things while sitting in a small cage with a concrete floor. And that was only the start of Nim's problems.

If you're looking for a redemptive ending where Dr Doolittle parachutes in and whisks Nim off to Happy Chimp Land, you may be disappointed. This is a bleak distressing tale of human arrogance, selfishness and vanity, with the hapless Nim as stooge. For all that, it is truly compelling filmmaking, with the production team standing back and letting the (mainly) ghastly protagonists tell their own tales. And despite the very limited 'progress' made by Nim in his sign language classes, his own descent into neurosis, depression and eventual psychosis is no less eloquently expressed.

So, there's a heartening selection of feel-good winter entertainment for you. Maybe I ought to vary my selection with a little Frank Capra next time...