{"id":15229,"date":"2015-09-14T11:38:00","date_gmt":"2015-09-14T15:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/hameblog\/2015\/09\/14\/cutting-the-gibbon\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T07:50:35","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T10:50:35","slug":"cutting-the-gibbon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/2015\/09\/14\/cutting-the-gibbon\/","title":{"rendered":"Cutting the Gibbon"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Craig and I went to see Sunset Song<\/em> last night at the Toronto International Film Festival. Craig loves, loves that book, and was crestfallen to be disappointed by the movie.<\/p>\n

Wrong accents, for starters, really get under his skin, and this was full of a flagrant absence (or mis-fire) of the Doric. And, he said, the movie only presented\u00a0a fraction of the story in the book, chopping off the 1\/3 that constitutes the ending.<\/p>\n

The staging was wooden, and the actors, who were top-notch and really couldn’t be faulted (except for the aforementioned\u00a0accents), emoted all over the place, like this was trying hard <\/em>to be an epic film, and, just like they taught us in theatre school, when people are chewing the scenery like that, there’s no room left\u00a0for the audience to feel anything; all the emotion is happening over there, rather than being evoked in the watcher.<\/p>\n

All of this is exceeding strange, as Terence Davies’s other films are master-works of cinema. The Long Day Closes<\/em> is one of my favourite films ever (yes, it’s boring, but much of childhood is boring because the world is not built for children, so they’re\u00a0left to be observers, and life moves slowly for them). And Distant Voices, Still Lives<\/em> feels like having deeply felt\u00a0memories implanted into your soul.<\/p>\n

Is\u00a0the problem\u00a0that Davies isn’t Scottish? That he’s not good with handling a big, set story, as opposed to evoking his own recollections?<\/p>\n

I dunno, but it was awkward to see him and the actors\u00a0on stage afterward,\u00a0Q&A-ing about this “life-changing” experience, knowing it doesn’t work for much of the audience. (Many film festivals are passing it over as a potential selection.)<\/p>\n

We went to the movie\u00a0with friends from Scotland, one of whom is a reviewer and runs a film festival. They ran off immediately after so the reviewer could write, but we’re having them over for dinner tonight, and I’m looking forward to hearing what he made of the experience. (I couldn’t help wondering what he was scribbling in the darkness.)<\/p>\n

Still, I’m glad we went, and it tugged at my heart to get immersed in Scottish culture for two hours. Well, sort of; it didn’t feel<\/em> like something made by a Scot, and there were place and location mismatches, like a schoolteacher’s modern block lettering on a chalkboard, where surely he would have used a\u00a0very practised Spencerian script, or the scenes of people walking through wind-swept\u00a0fields of (New Zealand) wheat, when actual farmers would walk around <\/em>their cash crop.<\/p>\n

Och well, art is a movable feast.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Craig and I went to see Sunset Song last night at the Toronto International Film Festival. Craig loves, loves that book, and was crestfallen to be disappointed by the movie. Wrong accents, for starters, really get under his skin, and this was full of a flagrant absence (or mis-fire) of the Doric. And, he said, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15229\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}