I did something today I've been meaning to do ever since I got my notebook computer with a DVD player, and that is watch one on the bullet train from Kyoto to Toyko. I wouldn't go as far as to say it was surreal, but it was getting there. We've all seen films on long-haul flights, but being in a darkened aluminium tube is not so different from sitting in a cinema. Here though (I'm writing this on the train) I have rural and urban Japan speeding past outside my window, and wartime London on my screen. I think it was the music of the melancholy love story I was watching that really fuddled my brain though. It seemed to match the melancholy mood of the inclement weather enveloping Japan today, but wartime London and peacetime Japan are two very different sets. That's where films have it over books. They both have the power to transport you to places, but flims do it quicker. As for The End of the Affair, it was passable. The main character is a writer and while at the cinema watching the dramatization of a book he wrote, he complains "I didn't write that". I wonder if Graham Greene would have said the same? They certainly didn't mention the line I remember best from the reading the book over 20 years ago about not wishing to have children for fear of passing on mediocrity. Or something like that. Still haunts me now.
Posted by Joe at October 14, 2003 03:38 PM